so the history of warnings 101, continued

This is an update to my last post on the history of warnings.

Specifically: legionseagle posts here about the ongoing use of warnings as social control in some book fandoms and is still a realistic and pressing concern for writers.

I wrote the attached story in April this year inspired by the April fanfic challenge of the Lord Peter yahoogroup dealing with the detective stories of Dorothy L. Sayers, but in the end did not post it to the list because of the then rule that all fic featuring a same-sex pairing (even if it otherwise fell within the PG guidelines of the challenge as a whole) could not be posted on-list but only linked, and if it were linked the title bar had to prominently include the work "SLASH" so that list members who objected could avoid it. I decided I didn't feel comfortable complying with that restriction, so didn't make it available to the list.

On a Harry Potter yahoogroup when Half-Blood Prince came out (2006?), someone who tried to analyse the Tonks/Lupin relationship in terms of Queer Theory was told that doing so without posting a warning in the subject line was equivalent to breaking into other list members' living rooms and fornicating there.

Furthermore, there's a (current) warnings policy posted by an individual describing her own policy which some people are promoting as a sort of aspirational gold standard in the current debate, which, among a lot of other stuff I don't agree with, suggests that the policy's author considers "dialog concerning abortion" is too much of a hot potato to be including in fic even when warned for.

So in some of the corners of fandom in which I am active (book fandoms, you'll note) there is an active and on-going use of warnings as a mechanism of conservative social control, which shapes my response to warning discussions rather profoundly.
edited at (to clarify status of warnings policy quoted) 2010-07-07 03:42 am (local)

ratcreature links to her comment in the last warning debate regarding the history of warnings in Sentinel in this comment. Direct link to the warning comment in zvi's journal here.

ETA: spiletta42 would like this to be added as a clarification of her warnings policy, link is here. Her specific complaint can be found in comments.

Added:

facetofcathy here links to a comment in her LJ regarding slash warnings by an anonymous user here.

ranalore here talks about her negative experiences with warnings as social control. She also covers some ground on the difference between labeling for content and labeling for physical accessibility. There was a lot of conflation of the two and they have very different requirements as well as challenges to implement.

ithiliana here posts some of her recollections.

feanna here shares some of her experiences with warnings.

allegraconbrio here shares very recent warning discussions in the Glee fandom.

tazlet here states she did a warnings panel at at one of the last Z-cons.

aivilo_18 here brings her views as a moderator for SVUfiction.com, which is brilliant. Knowing in concrete LJ is very multifannish doesn't change the fact I keep forgetting we're working in a structure of many fandom traditions. That fandom is one I could see being very sensitive to content advisories since the context of the fanfic and source would require it both for advertising and warning purposes. I wonder what kind of difference it makes if you went from a fandom with warnings used for social control and one that needs them because of the nature of the source.

ineptshieldmaid here talks about warnings in context with Narnia and other fandoms and their uses.

If anyone else wants to share personal experience on warnings either historically or in their current form, please feel free to add a link and I'll organize these. I am going to go out on a limb and say that this topic is far from dead and I'd like to have a reference post to consult later.

I'm going to say this in case it needs saying; the new (and much better) reasons for warnings are not incompatible with avoiding the historical (and in some fandoms, current) use of warnings as social control. We can do both, and from what I'm reading, we can do it in a way that satisfies vidders that warnings will not be used for specific institutional exclusionary purposes, only personal use.



Level with me - at what point do the words "specific institutional exclusionary purposes" become something that reads like, IDK, normal, when I'm pretty sure they were never meant to meet and is there a double negative in there? Someone, for the love of God, give me a phrase that doesn't sound like a drunk grad student playing cultural anthropology scrabble.

I am going back to porn today.

Comments

[ithiliana]

Joining in on thanking you for these posts.

I have a couple of personal anecdotes: I came into LOTR fandom in 2003 with a lust for Frodo and Faramir which turned out to be a controversial pairing in the fandom: some people declared that the "warning" for interspecies (which meant Man/Hobbit only, not Elf/Dwarf, not Elf/Man for the most part) should be applied. The few interspecies folks I quickly met told stories of being driven off listservs pre-LJ for writing slash, especially pedophilic slash which many people saw Frodo/Faramir or other hobbit/men pairings as (I supposed it might have applied to Hobbit/Elf slash but I don't recall much of that, although as time went on Frodo had a bit of a thing with just about everybody including the Witch King, happy sigh).

So the Frodo/Faramir or Frodo/Men slashers were thrilled to get into LJ and have their own communities--If you look at the interspecies LJ community there's still a warning in the profile about 'if you don't like it, don't read it' so definitely yes, their experience was one of being shut down, censored, told to shut up because of the pedophilia factor.

A few years later, reading some very good post about rape and triggers, I realized that I should shift my non-con label or warning to rape in the cases where the fic involve non consensual sex....

I do remember talk of people being told to warn for slash and the idea of labelling as a more appropriate term, i.e. many people seeking out the type of stories that fit that category.

Interspecies Info

[ithiliana]

community formed in 11/02, and I joined LJ in 2003, March, and quickly found them (my first published story was an RPF of David Wenham and Elijah Wood - but then David discovered he loved Frodo more than Elijah, and then Viggo and Sean arrived, and I sort of kept a bit of a toe in the Interspecies Group (Frodo and Faramir OTP!), and in the Men of Gondor group, which focussed on the men and not so much interspecies (though, again, that changed over time.


http://community.livejournal.com/interspecies/profile

WARNING: ads on the community, so here is text

[info]interspecies is a community for those fans (and writers) of LOTR slash that prefer, or even just enjoy interspecies slash, particularly that which involves hobbit/big people.

This area of the fandom is often looked down on by others, so please - consider this community a safe haven for those of you who love it!

No flames - if you don't like interspecies, what are you doing here? Feel free to post fics (behind lj cuts), pictures, gossip, thoughts... anything relevant to the topic.

and remember: Have fun!

[terrio]

Sidetrack alert! -- The few interspecies folks I quickly met told stories of being driven off listservs pre-LJ for writing slash, especially pedophilic slash which many people saw Frodo/Faramir or other hobbit/men pairings as

Hey, Faramir wasn't that young. :-)

(In the books, the Birthday Party happens when Frodo turns 33, the age of official adulthood for hobbits. He does not leave on the quest until he is 50. So, yeah, some serious cradle-robbing going on there. :-)

[ithiliana]

*sporfles* Trust me, I made that point again and again and again not only in discussions but in my "Roads" fic where Boromir is shocked SHOCKED to learn that Frodo is 50! (This is an AU).

But the reason people saw it as pedophilia was that hobbits are "the size of a child" (Canon). I also made a lot of grumpy points that if one wrote a real people fic with one of the doubles who played the hobbits in some shots who were all clearly legal age, would that be pedophilia?

There were huge debates over the relative size of the characters, and even my comments about women I know who married very tall men didn't make much sense (the debates were: if hobbits are three feet tall, and men are six feet tall, EEK pedophilia).

It was....bizarre. (Bringing up the historical fact that men during the Middle Ages were rarely six feet tall, LOOK at the armor that survives, also didn't help).

Earth logic did not apply@

[terrio]

Earth logic did not apply@

I think I'm gonna go with that. Otherwise, I'm going to end up wanting to smack people around for the whole "treating short-statured adults like children" thing.

(But I will give them a pass on the Middle Ages height comparison thing; Middle Earth =/= the Middle Ages.)

[ithiliana]

Exactly--since Entwife who is 5 feet tall has a series of stories about being treated like a child, she and I are very aware of the short=child problem.

Re the Middle Ages. No, it's not, BUT Tolkien adapted a good deal of material from the Middle Ages (that's why I teach with a medieval historian), and since he did not give a clear breakdown of height in terms of feet and inches most of the time, but talked about relative heights (ie Aragorn taller than most men), it makes no more sense to define "tall" in terms of contemporary 20th century heights as some did than to look back at Middle ages heights! In any case, hobbits are not children!

[seperis]

There is nothing about this post and your follow up that isn't fascinating.

A few years later, reading some very good post about rape and triggers, I realized that I should shift my non-con label or warning to rape in the cases where the fic involve non consensual sex....

Without denying the purpose for doing that, I still wonder if that was a good idea overall with the number of lighthearted pollen-related, AMTDI, and pon-farr related stories. Anecdote; when I wrote You'll Get There in the End, I didn't angst over it or anything, but the key moment of decision for me in the fic between non-con and con was explicit consent given that for me overruled pon-farr duress.

Thinking about it now, I'd still label it the same because there was explicit consent (that was the point of the entire story, in a weird way), but I was thinking if I hadn't had that moment, if the correct label would be rape, and--I'm not sure how to put this, but in fiction only, rape more often is about absolutely no consent, instead of consent under pollen/biological/magical drug duress and again, only in fiction can this distinction be made, in intent of both parties. And in tone. Again, we have AMTDI.

I don't think IRL any of this applies, but in fiction, for labeling purposes, it's a lot more complicated. It's also the reason a lot of people won't use rape up to something that's appropriate for an SVU episode; a sexpollen story labeled non-con or duress or something does not look or feel as threatening as a sexpollen labeled rape. And they could be identical, but semantically speaking, if you're looking for lighthearted sexpollen, you will drift away from the rape label. And if you do read it assuming they're just being strict for content, you may end up with dark scary sexpollen--does that make sense?

I don't know how to realistically object to this, but I keep thinking it would help a lot of we could work within fiction-only content advisories without reference to IRL issues so more people would and could accurately label consistently without, y'know, feeling like their lighthearted tentacle sexpollen is the equivalent of watching Law and Order:SVU. I miss non-con not becuase it was rape-light, but because it was a fairly good way to make a reading distinction when rape was used for a very specific category of fic.

[ithiliana]

This whole discussion is fascinating--thank you for starting it.

And I see I should have been clearer: all my stories, and the ones I read in LOTR, were dark, very much rape, not at all in the mode you describe (in fact, the alien space pollen which I so loved in the original Star Trek and which I gather is now a fairly common trope!, doesn't have an equivalent in LOTR that I know of -- caveat that I am not widely read because I read for my very specific kinks).

In fact, if I understand you correctly, that sort of story is the reason for non-con especially if, as I gather can happen, both characters are affected by it (now I'm thinking of the Kirk/Uhura kiss, forced upon both by those pesky aliens -- so many alien species seem to be kinky voyeurs! -- which could be described as equally non-con--both characters forced).

In my fics, one of the characters having taken the Ring, the story turns very dark, and is not non-con in that other sense (since one character's consent is not sought or considered). (There's also a subset of Dark Bree stories, spinning off the film, where Frodo is attacked in Bree.)

I am now wondering very hard where I picked up the term 'non-con'.....and why I was using it instead of rape.

And while I completely agree with you about the way fiction operates compared to life, that also is completely dependent upon readers. My parents had a very nasty divorce in the mid 70s and to this day, I do not watch, cannot watch without emotional distress, any film or television in which divorce is a major plot point, esp. if it's a comic one. Books, not so much, and I think that's key as well--we process visual texts differently than print texts, and the fact that this round of debate is over vids has to take that into account.

Now trying to think if there's any middle-earth equivalent to sex pollen!