What’s your take on a fic tagged with exhibitionism and public sex needing to be tagged with dubious consent too?
My friend says I should tag dubcon no matter what so people can filter it out because it’s sexual assault for the other people who didn’t consent to being involved as voyeurs in the scene.
I think that if people know that dubious consent in a situation like exhibitionism will upset/trigger them I don’t need to tag dubcon. Don’t like don’t read and all that.
My friend thinks don’t like don’t read doesn’t apply because ppl can’t see dubcon in the tags to know it’s dubious but I think the fact it’s public sex at all is an acknowledgment that it is dubious.
this is exactly why I say “you cannot use real-world ethics and morality on fiction”.
by your friend’s logic, they should always use non-con. not dubcon. because dubcon is actually non-con in real life. since in real life there’s no “the consent is dubious uwu”, it’s either consensual or an assault.
but on ao3 — aka a space for fiction — dubcon and non-con are not the same thing, because real-life’s moral compass does not apply to fiction.
exhibitionism / public sex alone has nothing to do with whether the fic is non-con, dubcon or consensual. because it. is. fiction.
exhibitionism / public sex can be non-con if written as such.
exhibitionism / public sex can be dubcon if written as such.
exhibitionism / public sex can be completely consensual (which warrants neither non-con nor dubcon tag) if written as such.
tagging a fic about exhibitionism / public sex as dubcon or non-con when it’s actually consensual would be considered mistagging / misleading, which is always in poor taste.
“but people who have to witness the sex didn’t consent to —” your friend is either talking about
other characters in the fic, characters who are the author’s imagination and are not real. these characters cannot “consent”, they cannot “not consent” because they are. not. real. they do not exist
your readers / real people who read your fic. and here’s the thing: your readers can decide for themselves whether or not they want to read a fic with exhibitionism / public sex. because by choosing to read a fic with exhibitionism / public sex, they already consent to reading about exhibitionism / public sex.
hypothetically, even if there’s no exhibitionism / public sex tag, if the author uses “creator chose not to use archive warnings” then readers already consent to reading a fic where they don’t know what’s inside, they already consent to proceeding at their own risk.
unless you force or coerce your readers into reading your fic, it always is consensual.
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