again? we're having this debate again?
Jun. 22nd, 2009 07:41 pm![[personal profile]](http://s.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thingswithwingsI made a post about warnings a while ago, and then locked it because it had some personal information on it; I'm unlocking it now, to save some time, and will be linking to some discussion threads from that post throughout this one. The original post is here. Both that post and this one contain some general discussion of rape and other triggers in relation to the warnings debate.
some other things I have to say about warnings, or feel like I have to say again:
how many times do we have to have the warnings debate before we all stop arguing for our privilege to intentionally hurt people? here is just one random comment that infuriates me - a comment by someone whose writing and personality I like, on the journal of someone else whose writing and personality I like, and it really upsets me. This post discusses one statement made in that comment, briefly, and then goes on to address (in the form of a numbered list because it's how I roll) several other arguments I've seen in multiple places over the last few days.
according to that comment, people who read stories when they're not sure if they have warnings are knowingly engaging in risky behaviour. And here I thought we'd just had a huuuuuge conversation that was in part about how women who knowingly walk through dark alleys wearing short skirts aren't doing anything wrong, and should be able to walk through dark alleys wearing whatever the hell they please. And here I thought that just because I'm queer and lots of queers get beaten and killed in the country where I live, I'm not responsible if someone beats me up. The thing is, adding warnings to stories isn't like stamping out masculine rape-culture, or preventing queer-phobic and trans-phobic violence. It's relatively simple. Saying that "that would be an ideal world, but since we can't have an ideal world, just deal with it" is not only dismissive, but wrong; community standards count for a lot in fandom, and it wouldn't take much to start shifting community standards towards more warnings. It certainly takes less effort for me, as a writer, to offer warnings (in a way that protects both survivors and spoilerphobes, even, as if the needs of those two groups should be considered equally), than it does for me, as a writer, to deal with my own privileges in relation to race, class, etc. (which is something else I am trying to do but that is much more difficult). Here are some things that need to be said:
1) I think that talk about character death warnings, or Blair-cuts-his-hair warnings, or a-kitten-dies warnings, are derailing. Those are ambiguous subjects, and if you're not warned for character death and then end up reading a different story than you wanted to read, well, that's less of a problem than survivors of rape or torture having violent flashbacks. Talk about "warnings creep" - the tendency for people to want warnings for more and more things - is derailing. To say that no one should get any warnings ever because one time someone told you they want kitten-death warnings is a way of brushing off other people's pain; as if it's as silly to be triggered by rape as it is to be upset by a story where Blair cuts his hair.
2) Warnings for noncon, dubcon, incest, and chan are almost always nonspoiling. On the rare occasions where one of those things forms the basis for the TWIST, an author can just say in the story header that they don't warn for noncon, dubcon, incest, or chan. A really interesting thing about the warnings debate is that it's talking about a very, very, VERY small percentage of stories: people say, "at least warn for noncon, dubon, incest, and chan" and people who never ever ever write any of those things jump in to say, "but what if underage noncon is the TWIST!" The stories that are "at stake" - the stories where being warned for one of those four things would spoil the ending or otherwise diminish the story - are very few. So there is something else at stake, something that we apparently care about very much. Personally, I think that it's about a certain defensiveness that is well-earned; that authors feel defensive because they are so used to being told that writing porn is wrong, or their rape-fantasies or incest-fantasies or whatever are wrong - and hey, they/we get told that all the time, so I get it, I do. But: see (6), further down. And, for more on the myth of the all-important twist ending, you may want to read this comment thread.
3) Saying that there's a huge "safe" part of fandom where warnings are required (like, they totally ask you to do it on this community I belong to) is misleading, and comes from a position of privilege. Plenty of authors ignore bits and pieces of community standards - this is in fact the problem that is being addressed. Spaces that pretend to be safe, or that think they are safe, but aren't. Telling someone to just "ask their friends" or "check delicious" if they don't see a warning on a story is demeaning and ablist and puts the burden on the survivor, which is so much bullshit I can't even tell you how much bullshit it is. What if my friends don't know my triggers, or no one's tagged it noncon on delicious, or I don't know anyone who's read it? What if I am exhausted by having to always be on my guard, because fic writers can't do me the small kindness of sometimes watching my back for me, and therefore give up on trying to find safe fic altogether? Anyone who spouts this "just ask your friends/check delicious" theory should try, for a week, asking five people and doing fifteen minutes of internet research for every story they read before they read it, and see how they feel, even without asking/researching topics that are personally disturbing to them. Perhaps it helps to put this ablist argument into an analogous relationship with another kind of ablism, though of course these things aren't exactly the same: "well, if the restaurant isn't wheelchair-accessible, why don't you just eat somewhere else?" or "If your school doesn't have support services for schizophrenic students, why did you go there knowing that?"
4) Pretending like someone saying "I want to be warned for noncon so that I don't have violent flashbacks or other serious mental health issues" is the same as saying "I want to craft a certain kind of fandom experience" is bullshit. The idea that this debate is about two different ways of conceptualizing fandom is HIGHLY problematic.
5) The author's right to have Artistic Vision is of less importance than making fandom a safe(r), more accessible place. Remember how we sometimes talked about this during the last couple of Racefails? That analogy is really problematic, I realise, but generally speaking: if Patricia Wrede doesn't get to cause people pain for the sake of her interesting megafauna, then why the hell do you get to cause people pain for the sake of your authorial control of extratextual elements? I mean, honestly. Authorial control! I am going to go back and read Elizabeth Bear's defense of Patricia Wrede, the bits where she talks about how SOME people think they're writing social propaganda and have political agendas and have given in to the will of the masses, but SHE'S writing art, and if I ever catch myself sounding like that I will shut up immediately. You may want to also read this previous thread on the problem of staging this debate in terms of entitled Authorial Vision.
6) Calming down a bit, okay, this is really important, guys. Asking for warnings is not the same as saying "the thing that gives you pleasure is wrong, bad, immoral, shouldn't be written, shameful, and hurts me by existing." Rather, it is the same as saying, "I would prefer not to read it for the sake of my health." It seems like, every time the warnings debate comes up, anyone defending warnings gets accused of being anti-pleasure, or of telling other people what to do or how to write or what's acceptable to write. This is not the case. No one is telling you to stop writing X, or that X is shameful, or that you should be ashamed of writing X or getting off on X. They're just saying, please stop causing people pain. Also: asking for warnings does not equal being anti-disturbing content. I actually quite like some dubcon, but I don't feel like I'm being publicly shamed or diminishing my own pleasure by warning others for it when I write it.
7) Aseruthros pointed out to me some time ago, warnings can be a way of shutting down readerly interpretation - i.e., the warning says "plays with consent, but is not rape," and then if I read it and think it was rape, well, I guess I'm wrong and my reaction wasn't valid. This is a problem. It doesn't mean we shouldn't all try, in good faith, to provide warnings anyway. And if we can bring ourselves to write "I think it's just potentially-dubcon, but could be interpreted as rape," or even the broader "contains sexual violence and consent issues," so much the better. here is a commenter explaining that nicely.
8) There are few problems with warnings that cannot be compromisingly solved by "click/highlight to read warnings" or even a warning that says "I don't warn for anything." So, as I said before, perhaps there is something else underlying this debate.
9) Offering warnings, or warning for the lack of warnings, may or may not be a responsibility, but it is at the least a kindness, a gift easily given. here is a thread where I try to explain that.
As a result of thinking about this, I've decided to put a general warnings-policy on my main fic page, and from now on I'm going to link to it with every story I write. That way, anyone reading can be instantly and easily reassured/warned away, and I don't have to type the whole policy out every time I write something. That was easy!
And, in case you're wondering, here's the official![[community profile]](http://s.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
kink_bingo policy on warnings.
eta: for those who want to do highlight-to-read warnings, but don't know how,lim has done the work for you: check out this comment thread for the html you'll need.
some other things I have to say about warnings, or feel like I have to say again:
how many times do we have to have the warnings debate before we all stop arguing for our privilege to intentionally hurt people? here is just one random comment that infuriates me - a comment by someone whose writing and personality I like, on the journal of someone else whose writing and personality I like, and it really upsets me. This post discusses one statement made in that comment, briefly, and then goes on to address (in the form of a numbered list because it's how I roll) several other arguments I've seen in multiple places over the last few days.
according to that comment, people who read stories when they're not sure if they have warnings are knowingly engaging in risky behaviour. And here I thought we'd just had a huuuuuge conversation that was in part about how women who knowingly walk through dark alleys wearing short skirts aren't doing anything wrong, and should be able to walk through dark alleys wearing whatever the hell they please. And here I thought that just because I'm queer and lots of queers get beaten and killed in the country where I live, I'm not responsible if someone beats me up. The thing is, adding warnings to stories isn't like stamping out masculine rape-culture, or preventing queer-phobic and trans-phobic violence. It's relatively simple. Saying that "that would be an ideal world, but since we can't have an ideal world, just deal with it" is not only dismissive, but wrong; community standards count for a lot in fandom, and it wouldn't take much to start shifting community standards towards more warnings. It certainly takes less effort for me, as a writer, to offer warnings (in a way that protects both survivors and spoilerphobes, even, as if the needs of those two groups should be considered equally), than it does for me, as a writer, to deal with my own privileges in relation to race, class, etc. (which is something else I am trying to do but that is much more difficult). Here are some things that need to be said:
1) I think that talk about character death warnings, or Blair-cuts-his-hair warnings, or a-kitten-dies warnings, are derailing. Those are ambiguous subjects, and if you're not warned for character death and then end up reading a different story than you wanted to read, well, that's less of a problem than survivors of rape or torture having violent flashbacks. Talk about "warnings creep" - the tendency for people to want warnings for more and more things - is derailing. To say that no one should get any warnings ever because one time someone told you they want kitten-death warnings is a way of brushing off other people's pain; as if it's as silly to be triggered by rape as it is to be upset by a story where Blair cuts his hair.
2) Warnings for noncon, dubcon, incest, and chan are almost always nonspoiling. On the rare occasions where one of those things forms the basis for the TWIST, an author can just say in the story header that they don't warn for noncon, dubcon, incest, or chan. A really interesting thing about the warnings debate is that it's talking about a very, very, VERY small percentage of stories: people say, "at least warn for noncon, dubon, incest, and chan" and people who never ever ever write any of those things jump in to say, "but what if underage noncon is the TWIST!" The stories that are "at stake" - the stories where being warned for one of those four things would spoil the ending or otherwise diminish the story - are very few. So there is something else at stake, something that we apparently care about very much. Personally, I think that it's about a certain defensiveness that is well-earned; that authors feel defensive because they are so used to being told that writing porn is wrong, or their rape-fantasies or incest-fantasies or whatever are wrong - and hey, they/we get told that all the time, so I get it, I do. But: see (6), further down. And, for more on the myth of the all-important twist ending, you may want to read this comment thread.
3) Saying that there's a huge "safe" part of fandom where warnings are required (like, they totally ask you to do it on this community I belong to) is misleading, and comes from a position of privilege. Plenty of authors ignore bits and pieces of community standards - this is in fact the problem that is being addressed. Spaces that pretend to be safe, or that think they are safe, but aren't. Telling someone to just "ask their friends" or "check delicious" if they don't see a warning on a story is demeaning and ablist and puts the burden on the survivor, which is so much bullshit I can't even tell you how much bullshit it is. What if my friends don't know my triggers, or no one's tagged it noncon on delicious, or I don't know anyone who's read it? What if I am exhausted by having to always be on my guard, because fic writers can't do me the small kindness of sometimes watching my back for me, and therefore give up on trying to find safe fic altogether? Anyone who spouts this "just ask your friends/check delicious" theory should try, for a week, asking five people and doing fifteen minutes of internet research for every story they read before they read it, and see how they feel, even without asking/researching topics that are personally disturbing to them. Perhaps it helps to put this ablist argument into an analogous relationship with another kind of ablism, though of course these things aren't exactly the same: "well, if the restaurant isn't wheelchair-accessible, why don't you just eat somewhere else?" or "If your school doesn't have support services for schizophrenic students, why did you go there knowing that?"
4) Pretending like someone saying "I want to be warned for noncon so that I don't have violent flashbacks or other serious mental health issues" is the same as saying "I want to craft a certain kind of fandom experience" is bullshit. The idea that this debate is about two different ways of conceptualizing fandom is HIGHLY problematic.
5) The author's right to have Artistic Vision is of less importance than making fandom a safe(r), more accessible place. Remember how we sometimes talked about this during the last couple of Racefails? That analogy is really problematic, I realise, but generally speaking: if Patricia Wrede doesn't get to cause people pain for the sake of her interesting megafauna, then why the hell do you get to cause people pain for the sake of your authorial control of extratextual elements? I mean, honestly. Authorial control! I am going to go back and read Elizabeth Bear's defense of Patricia Wrede, the bits where she talks about how SOME people think they're writing social propaganda and have political agendas and have given in to the will of the masses, but SHE'S writing art, and if I ever catch myself sounding like that I will shut up immediately. You may want to also read this previous thread on the problem of staging this debate in terms of entitled Authorial Vision.
6) Calming down a bit, okay, this is really important, guys. Asking for warnings is not the same as saying "the thing that gives you pleasure is wrong, bad, immoral, shouldn't be written, shameful, and hurts me by existing." Rather, it is the same as saying, "I would prefer not to read it for the sake of my health." It seems like, every time the warnings debate comes up, anyone defending warnings gets accused of being anti-pleasure, or of telling other people what to do or how to write or what's acceptable to write. This is not the case. No one is telling you to stop writing X, or that X is shameful, or that you should be ashamed of writing X or getting off on X. They're just saying, please stop causing people pain. Also: asking for warnings does not equal being anti-disturbing content. I actually quite like some dubcon, but I don't feel like I'm being publicly shamed or diminishing my own pleasure by warning others for it when I write it.
7) As
eruthros pointed out to me some time ago, warnings can be a way of shutting down readerly interpretation - i.e., the warning says "plays with consent, but is not rape," and then if I read it and think it was rape, well, I guess I'm wrong and my reaction wasn't valid. This is a problem. It doesn't mean we shouldn't all try, in good faith, to provide warnings anyway. And if we can bring ourselves to write "I think it's just potentially-dubcon, but could be interpreted as rape," or even the broader "contains sexual violence and consent issues," so much the better. here is a commenter explaining that nicely. 8) There are few problems with warnings that cannot be compromisingly solved by "click/highlight to read warnings" or even a warning that says "I don't warn for anything." So, as I said before, perhaps there is something else underlying this debate.
9) Offering warnings, or warning for the lack of warnings, may or may not be a responsibility, but it is at the least a kindness, a gift easily given. here is a thread where I try to explain that.
As a result of thinking about this, I've decided to put a general warnings-policy on my main fic page, and from now on I'm going to link to it with every story I write. That way, anyone reading can be instantly and easily reassured/warned away, and I don't have to type the whole policy out every time I write something. That was easy!
And, in case you're wondering, here's the official
kink_bingo policy on warnings.eta: for those who want to do highlight-to-read warnings, but don't know how,
lim has done the work for you: check out this comment thread for the html you'll need.
people who read stories when they're not sure if they have warnings are knowingly engaging in risky behaviour. And here I thought we'd just had a huuuuuge conversation that was in part about how women who knowingly walk through dark alleys wearing short skirts aren't doing anything wrong, and should be able to walk through dark alleys wearing whatever the hell they please. And here I thought that just because I'm queer and lots of queers get beaten and killed in the country where I live, I'm not responsible if someone beats me up.
Because, seriously, the whole "stay where you're safe and don't venture outside that safe place unless you want to get hurt" thing is making my head explode. And of course if you can't find some
strong manfriend towalk you to your carread the story first for you, well, you'd better just not venture out at night.So, yes. I agree with pretty much every single thing you said. Great post.
strong manfriend towalk you to your carread the story first for you, well, you'd better just not venture out at night.Yes, exactly, exactly, that's just what I wanted to get at; thank you for phrasing it so concisely and pointedly. <3
I feel like I have definitely committed Fail at a lot of points in that discussion.
Anyone that knows me knows I have a serious problem with "can't stop arguing," and in this case I have, no doubt about it, argued to the point where I have hurt people, including people that I care about and people that I admire, and I am sorry about that.
There are things in your post I would argue with, but I'm not going to.
I disagree. Character death is almost always on the list of "things you have to warn for." I've seen people complain about a lack of warnings for partner betrayal, because for them, it's a real trigger. Self-injury and suicide are also on the list--that never would have occurred to me before today.
The thing is that I do warn, but I feel like I'm being told I'm a horrible bitch if I don't warn for something that other people think is self-evident.
Asking for warnings is not the same as saying "the thing that gives you pleasure is wrong, bad, immoral, shouldn't be written, shameful, and hurts me by existing."
I'm a little raw right now, but for me--yeah, sometimes it is the same. When you're telling me that I have to warn for BDSM--and I have been told that I do in some fandoms--I go back to the place where I'm arguing with my therapist and trying to convince her that my sexuality is not inherently pathological despite what the DSM says.
About the only thing that seems unambiguous to me is rape, coerced consent and other forms of abuse. I don't mind warning for that. What I mind is feeling like I have to detail every possible element of my story that could conceivably be a trigger--and that if I don't, then it's obviously intentional. It's not about trying not to hurt people for me, but about the assumption of bad faith if I do.
Character death and partner betrayal are, I think, the ambiguous categories where people often get hung up in the warnings debate, because each one is potentially triggery, but are also traditionally disliked genres in fanfiction, so the issue gets confused. But I think discussion of them can be derailing when folks want to establish a "look, can we at least agree to warn for noncon?" baseline. I didn't see any posts, though, where character death or partner betrayal were discussed as triggers in the mental-health sense of the word; more often, I saw them portrayed as things the poster didn't want to read for genre preference reasons. Is there a post you saw that discussed them as triggers? I'd like to think about that more.
I'm a little raw right now, but for me--yeah, sometimes it is the same. When you're telling me that I have to warn for BDSM--and I have been told that I do in some fandoms--I go back to the place where I'm arguing with my therapist and trying to convince her that my sexuality is not inherently pathological despite what the DSM says.
I am really, really sympathetic to this problem, and respect why this would be a difficult topic for you. I feel similarly, that it can lead so, so quickly to pathologizing of kink, as well as the separation of (for example) BDSM fic from non-BDSM fic, as if it's some sort of pariah. I really worry about this, too. And sometimes I think about how, not so very long ago (or even sometimes today) you see people warning for "slash content" or "m/m content" or writing things like "nc-17 for m/m content."
I went back today and reread a story of mine that does consensual domination/submission, humiliation, that kind of thing, and tried to read it imagining what might be triggery to someone who's been assaulted or molested or made to feel sexual humiliation in a nonconsensual context. Of course part of the problem is that a lot of peoples' kinks tend to be hand-in-hand with cultural sites of pain - so, women who want to be submissive, people of colour who want to do slave-roleplay, rape fantasies in general: these things are difficult enough to disentangle if they're your own sexuality, and when you add in the problem of posting the things you want to reclaim as your own space of pleasure into a public place where your reclamation could be someone else's nightmare . . . this is difficult.
(I saw one commenter who said, instead of writing "warnings," I write "enticements" - which is problematic, but could be modified to something better, like, "contains." I already write on some fics, "contains humiliation," and then whether that's a warning or an enticement is up to the reader. I don't know if this is potentially helpful or just facile.)
What I mind is feeling like I have to detail every possible element of my story that could conceivably be a trigger--and that if I don't, then it's obviously intentional. It's not about trying not to hurt people for me, but about the assumption of bad faith if I do.
I agree that the assumption of bad faith is demoralizing, and that sometimes accusations can get out of hand, or move from accusations of triggering to accusations of squicking (and drown out other voices). I wasn't aiming my post at people who try to warn and sometimes someone triggers anyway, but rather the people who argue vehemently that no one deserves any warnings for anything and it's their own fault if something happens. I understand your exhaustion at trying to be responsible, but not wanting to betray the pleasures you've worked for. Thank you very much for your comment. I'm sorry I've rambled on at you, and if you're tired of this talk please feel free not to reply to it.
You've made me think again about how reasons for reading published fiction and fanfiction differ and how my expectations going in also differ and the point you make that in published fiction the reader is put into a much more passive position rings very true to me and also gave me the idea what WOULD it be like to have warnings in published fiction (possibly on a page in the back, so that they're skippable)?
(And now I was going on about something totally not relevant to the discussion, so I'll stop here.)
I think for me it ends with: Do you really want to be responsible for triggering somebody? Not for making your average reader/watcher think about something that makes them feel uncomfortable (and there's another discussion to be had over this: Whether the reader should know about the kind of feeling the story will evoke because it's their right to choose, which I do find limiting in some instanced, but can also understand when you just want "comfort food" for example) but to truly and decisively ruin somebody's day. Somebody who probably already has more than their share of hard days.
In that instance I truly feel that it IS our resposibility as human beings to step up and say: I care about the people I share this world with and that includes NOT making them miserable.
Saying "This causes me great pain when I stumble upon it unexpectedly; please warn for it" isn't the same thing as asking someone to warn for haircuts, for god's sake.
I think a lot of people are just talking at absolute cross purposes. I think your point six is what is especially galling some people: they see requiring warnings as some sort of implicit moral judgment, edging into the whole "your kink is not okay" territory, and there's plenty of reasons why fandom gets upset about that.
Anyway, yes, thank you for articulating a lot of what I've found so problematic in this whole debate. It's nice to know I'm not just being thick or missing the point or something.
...anyway. Basically: yes, and thank you.
(This is a description of the fic, which may be triggery)
The fic (which was written a year and a half ago when bandom first had this wank, and got drudged up again) was a frat AU where the main character, an awkward, nervous freshman with no friends, pledged a fraternity and was made to feel welcome before, as part of his hazing, he gets drugged, kidnapped and anally raped by two other characters. The rape was neither warned for in the header or foreshadowed in the text, aside from a character commenting on how difficult hell week would be.
The author, even after she was asked politely, refused to warn for noncon, saying (yes, actually saying) that the whole point is for the reader to feel the same way as Brendon when he got raped. Eventually she posted something like, "This story has warnings. Have a friend read it if you're concerned." So bandom at large is responding to this incident which is, I think, an extreme example of an author being thoughtless.
As for the rest, I agree with all of your points. You explained things much more eloquently than I could have.
I don't want to get too deeply into what is looking to develop into a huge brawl, but these are not the same thing. Patricia Wrede's story appears to be perpetuating hurtful ideas--that is, the very existence of the story seems to be harmful. I don't understand you to be arguing that, say, rape stories shouldn't exist, that the very existence of rape stories is harmful (though honestly I think you don't quite appreciate the historical ways in which the warnings debate has been used to police anything outside the safe cozy middle-class narrative in fandom). Rather, what you object to is people with triggers encountering this material without advance notice.
This is a very real harm and not one I wish to minimize. However, it is also a harm that does not require the elimination of stories without warnings to be avoided. In fact, it can be avoided in more than one way. It can be avoided by everyone using warnings. It can also be avoided by people with such sensitivities not reading stories that don't have warnings in them (or that aren't in communities that have explicit rules mandating warnings).
Viewed in this way, rather than as one group claiming the right to inflict harm on another--because I don't see anyone here demanding that people read their stories regardless of their triggers--I do not think it is so obvious that the pro-warnings side must prevail. The argument pits two goods against each other: people with pronounced sensitivities being able to enjoy the maximum availability of fic in fandom that is consonant with their avoiding their triggers and people working in their own space being able to present their own works of art the way they choose to.
These are both valuable things. But in the end, we are talking about hedonic preferences. Let me make this very explicit. I am not saying that the desire to avoid being triggered is just a matter of leisure and pleasure. But the desire to be able to read every fanfic it's at all possible to without having to take any precautions and not run the risk of being triggered is. The anti-mandatory-warnings crowd are not asking people to subject themselves to triggering, which would be wrong and cruel. They are saying that they do not get the privilege of assuming that fandom will order itself so that every story without a label is safe for them. Conversely, the right to present your story in the way that you think will make it most effective is something quite valuable to me personally, but not one of the ultimate liberties I would get shot defending. It's an aesthetic refinement, and I take my aesthetic pleasures seriously, but when I am looking at what norms I would like to have in my community, I do not think they should be enshrined as the absolute highest good.
Really, neither of these values is so compelling as to obviously trump the other. Not being able to read any story you please in fandom without doing some research first is not a fundamental liberty. It is not the equivalent of being able to go into a bar, wear a short skirt, or walk down a dark alley without the threat of sexual violence. It is not the equivalent of being able to physically transport yourself into a government building or perform your job. I really don't feel comparing it to either of those scenarios does it any justice. Neither is not being able to dispense with warnings as an author the same as being in Soviet Russia or being asked to assume your readers are children.
Ultimately, the pro-warnings crowd is asking at least some people to sacrifice something of value to them and to curtail their own liberty to give those with pronounced sensitivities some more potential enjoyment in fandom. I don't think it's inappropriate to make that request. It's part of the process of trying to live together, as it were. But casting it as an intensely vulnerable group being deliberately tortured by the lazy and heartless is just wrong. No one ever has to be hurt by another person's story, because no one ever has to read a story without a warning label. Once that is accepted, this becomes not about a right to hurt, but about sometimes-competing preferences for enjoyment in fandom, and that doesn't require one side to be fragile entitled flowers or the other to be cruel and inhuman.
I'm revising my policy on this after reading the various discussions here and linked. It's given me a lot to think about.
Oh god, yes. If I never have to hear about Blair's goddamn hair again in one of these discussions it will be too soon.
I'd really appreciate it if people would argue against the things people are saying now, not against some hypothetical thing that may have been argued in the past. I say hypothetical not because I don't believe these arguments have been used, but because I have never seen anyone, when asked, actually willing to direct people to where they can read the specifics of that incident (and no, "it was on this one list, or maybe this other list, at some point, I can't remember when" doesn't count). Which means I, as a participant in this debate am just expected to take other people's word for what happened, since I was not in fandom at that time.
according to that comment, people who read stories when they're not sure if they have warnings are knowingly engaging in risky behaviour. And here I thought we'd just had a huuuuuge conversation that was in part about how women who knowingly walk through dark alleys wearing short skirts aren't doing anything wrong, and should be able to walk through dark alleys wearing whatever the hell they please.
This has been seriously driving me batshit. That a survivor daring to not double and triple check every link before they click it is seen as "risky behavior". This is fandom, surely we can at least strive to be better than that.
Me too, yes, definitely. I think we can definitely strive to do better. It doesn't mean we'll all get it right all the time, or that there aren't other problems to watch out for, but I know there's an immediate option for us that is better than that.
When I contacted the mod, she argued with me. Told me I was wrong. That it wasn't non-con at all. That I was misreading it. It triggered me. I had nightmares. But I was totally disregarded. It turned out the mod and writer were friends. And it turned into a very nasty experience for me.
The warnings said "skirted dub-con" and we obviously have a different pov . Though, apparently, mine didn't matter.
If it's any consolation, I've seen very similar situations happen at least three times in the last year - where someone complains or critiques the warnings given or a potentially triggering issue, and the author/author's friends/people not really even connected to the author step in to say that a) there's nothing to warn for and b) if there was, it was adequately warned for and c) it's your own fault for being a victim and triggering. These situations, taken together, have made me feel less and less inclined to take such defenses at face-value, just because of the sheer pileon venom that accumulates immediately every time.
Pragmatically, for the warnings thing, it might be useful to memeify your request. Maybe post the code you want people to use and say pass it on. Make a banner and post it in your userinfo, like those old colourbars.
WARNING:
<span style="color:black; background:black;" title="highlight to read warnings" >rape, non-con, dub-con, incest, self-harm</span>gives you
WARNING: rape, non-con, dub-con, incest, self-harm
(I prefer blackout because I can't read the whiteout even when it's selected.) IME it's more effective in fandom to give people the solution you're after. A lot of fen prefer concrete...I keep seeing people asking questions that are not being answered! Like: what do you want from me? The response "consideration" is often less effective than "I want you to warn for rape, non-con, dub-con, incest, and self-harm, either in tags or by pasting in this code." And then give them the code.
I'm not saying this would end the warnings debate. I'm saying, past the discussion part, maybe this might be helpful. I know that personally I am better at understanding and effectively responding to specific and concrete requests than the other stuff.
(In Trek we used "codes", instead of "warnings". Maybe we should move to "tags". They can function as warnings or advertisements. If you call them tags, people are more likely to add them as tags in their delicious.)
Offering warnings, or warning for the lack of warnings, may or may not be a responsibility, but it is at the least a kindness, a gift easily given.
But haven't you heard? You're infringing on people's rights if you ask them to be kind to one another. You're stifling creativity and encouraging the spread of athlete's foot.
Seriously, though, how g.d. hard is it to put a warning at the end of a story and direct those who want warnings to go there? Or put the warning in white text so that anyone who wants warnings can read by highlighting and those who don't can skip it? THIS IS NOT ROCKET SCIENCE, PEOPLE.
People who refuse to be kind because it's not their responsibility as they see it - they don't HAVE to - really, really bother me. There are some anti-warning arguments to which I am sympathetic, but I have read commenters who intentionally and pointedly ignore the idea of kindness. This is horrifying.
Like someone said in comments, it would be bad though if people thought that their kink is not okay, because it's been labelled as a "warning". But using "content" instead makes that line in the header work both as warnings and enticement/advertising depending on the reader. I've always "warned" for things in my stories, including specifying the kinks in them, but perhaps "content" is what I'll use in the future.