Non-consent feedback

I wrote a vignette about a woman divulging a fantasy of forced sex. What she tells is couched as possibly being a dream even within the fantasy itself. I meant it for a female audience, but I got a lot of favorites from male readers, which freaked me out a little. It's one thing to talk about surrendering control, if readers understand that's what it is - a woman's fantasy about getting exactly what she wants without asking or even having any say in it. It's another if the reader is reading it literally and identifying with the male character she's invented. That's not what I intended.

Curious to get others' opinions, since the story got zero comments. Does it come off as a female fantasy or a male fantasy?

https://www.literotica.com/s/i-trust-you-1

Oooo, I can answer that without reading it. The answer is: Yes.

You can't control what others' fantasies will be.

crisdixon said:

I wrote a vignette about a woman divulging a fantasy of forced sex. What she tells is couched as possibly being a dream even within the fantasy itself. I meant it for a female audience, but I got a lot of favorites from male readers, which freaked me out a little. It's one thing to talk about surrendering control, if readers understand that's what it is - a woman's fantasy about getting exactly what she wants without asking or even having any say in it. It's another if the reader is reading it literally and identifying with the male character she's invented. That's not what I intended.

Curious to get others' opinions, since the story got zero comments. Does it come off as a female fantasy or a male fantasy?

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Both. I don't think there's a broad line of demarcation between the two. Of course, that's just a less elegant way of saying what SR71pilot said.

I don't think the men who liked the story were struggling with separating fictional fantasy from fictional reality, and most of the guys turned on by the woman's fantasy of being controlled wouldn't actually want that much control in a sexual encounter, though they do like the idea of turning a woman on so much that she loses control. I personally like stories of consensual (perhaps reluctant) female submission, but I would never picture myself as the Dom.

I think you have the sensual description and the lazily-paced sex down. That aspect of the story is very solid.

crisdixon said:

I wrote a vignette about a woman divulging a fantasy of forced sex. What she tells is couched as possibly being a dream even within the fantasy itself. I meant it for a female audience, but I got a lot of favorites from male readers, which freaked me out a little.

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1. Don't sweat it. Readers are readers. You can't control who shows up and as Pilot notes, you can't control the reasons they get off to your story.

2. I'm... not really sure why this is in NC/R or why it would freak you out to have men identify with the male character in her fantasy. The sex is basically consensual. Sure, the fantasy is improbable in that it involves a stranger in a balaclava showing up out of nowhere and getting nookie without a fuss, but aside from those trappings she's really just not describing a non-con or reluctance fantasy.

3. In fact the absence of tension in the fantasy sequence is kind of problematic. It doesn't need to go into actual rape territory, but there could at least be some sense of threat or uncertainty or internal conflict or actual reluctance. The mental aspect of reluctance fantasy is just missing here... and this is the sense in which it simply doesn't convince as a woman's "darkest" fantasy about this topic. There is literally (and I say this without exaggeration) riskier and spicier fare to be had in romance novels.

4. The thing about bringing the mental dynamic into play, though, is that you need characters to bring it alive. Nobody here even has names. "She" is an intern with a stressful underpaid job, "he" likes to give massages, and the other "he" just reads like the first "he" in a mask. A little flesh on these characters, a little more context to her fantasy, would make a big difference. (Just as an example of one possible hook: make the fantasy about a specific someone who isn't necessarily her boyfriend. Right there you can add a measure of potential tension and inner conflict into the framing scene as her boyfriend struggles with his own reactions to her fantasy... is he aroused? Jealous? Puritanically guilty? All three? How do his feelings translate into physical action; if jealous, does he get a little more vigorous in his treatment of her than he otherwise would? And so on.)

So what I would say overall is that this would be much hotter and much more interesting if you made the decision to really engage with conflict and reluctance and stopped worrying about whether jollies are being afforded to people you don't "intend." Hope that's some help.

Thanks for taking the time to reply and put together so much feedback.

It was a vignette, so relatively short on character development, although I'd argue you got quite a bit about the characters' background - a lot more than you'd get from many another story - and what you picked up on was spot on. I thought your inference that the stranger could be the man who's giving her a massage was interesting.

As for why I worry about who's getting their jollies off the story and why - I got this note from someone in my inbox after I posted here:

"is it okay to ask a question? as a female is it wierd to read story about being forced?"

You may not have thought the story was particularly dark - to the point of not even belonging in NC/R, but anytime a woman fantasizes about being forced, there's a risk it gets badly misunderstood. That's why I was curious to get people's perspectives. I was really hoping to hear from a female reader. Maybe I still will. Who knows?

Further to your point about character, I'm thinking about stitching a bunch of my vignettes into a longer piece with the challenge of making a cohesive story emerge from the pieces, in which case there could be a lot more depth; but your point is well taken about this particular piece in isolation. It reads thin, and the focus, as you said, is on the sensual and lazily paced sex. I'm asking readers to enjoy it for what it is: two characters who are obviously close, and one - under duress in her professional life and under a kind of orgasmic duress - sharing something she normally wouldn't.

Don't get me wrong, for what it is the vignette is perfectly fine. I just wanted to speak to the question of whether it was convincing as a woman's fantasy. It is in fact not entirely uncommon for women to write and formulate noncon fantasy, but what makes it recognizable as such is that it contains some internal or external conflict or tension over consent. You have a guy in a balaclava breaking in to supposedly ravish the heroine (though he doesn't, really), but otherwise there is no such conflict or tension here. There just isn't. (I can't directly give you the woman's POV on this but I have benefited from reading and knowing some excellent female writers who do NC/R fiction, most of whom I suspect would tell you pretty much what I'm telling you.)

OTOH maybe your vignette might be a safe gateway if you're getting messages from people just exploring the possibility of this sort of fantasy. If you're satisfied with that, then that's cool. But yeah, as female-POV NC/R fantasy goes you are nowhere remotely near the deep end of the pool or in territory where you should be plausibly worried about male readers "getting ideas" (to whatever extent that is worth worrying about at all) especially since the story in question contains no actual NC/R content.

I just wanted to say that I enjoyed reading this story. I took it how you intended it. It was well done and well written. It seemed soft and gentle, but still forced, if that is possible or makes sense.

It does make sense, and it was exactly the experience I hoped people would have when they read it. Thanks for commenting - you made my day. Maybe my entire month.

crisdixon said:

It does make sense, and it was exactly the experience I hoped people would have when they read it. Thanks for commenting - you made my day. Maybe my entire month.

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I am glad!

Hi, I'm a female reader and I thought your story was pretty good, well written. I really liked the bit of background info in the beginning, although I don't know how relevant it was to the story. I thought it was leading to a bit more character development, but I guess it did explain why she was so tense...which lead to the massage...which lead to the rest. So, it worked. I definitely wouldn't consider it nonconsenual...more like a fantasy of having sex with a stranger. There was no 'resistance' in any way, physically or mentally. And I probably would have enjoyed it even more if there had been breaks in the 'dreamtelling' where the husband/boyfriend/whatever played to her fantasy a little more. Still a good story though.

I'll tell you this, I've come to absolutely love women who have rape fetishes. When I read a nonconsent story, I don't so much put myself in the rapist's shoes so much as I think of how much these women would enjoy being in the victim's shoes. I want to give them all the rape they can handle, because being a suffering woman is what they enjoy.

Probably there are guys out there that do look at it more from the angle of wanting women and women characters to suffer, truly suffer without any kink enjoyment there. I prefer not to think about them too much.

I've got a non-con story of my own, similarly based around the rape fantasies of the female protagonist, though it's rather more hard core than yours. Yeah, I wrote mainly it as something to be enjoyed by all those rape fetish women out there, but of course it's fine that men read and enjoy it too.

I don't know how much you can really separate a rape scene as far as if the male readers and the female readers will experience it as their own fantasy. Though the POV definitely does lean things towards one or the other. If it's the female victim's POV, the female readers will think "I want to feel like that" and the male readers will think "I want to make her feel like that". Vice-versa for a scene from the male rapist's POV, which I suspect ends up being much, much creepier. (I plan on tackling that someday but I'm kind of not looking forward to it.)

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I find a lot to agree with in what you said PervOtaku. When I write any type of non-con it is for those who enjoy fantasizing about it, generally women. I'm not usually writing it from the pov of the rapist but mostly in third person. Like in any story where there is an inner mental conflict, (whether sexual - like in enjoying non-consent sex or even someone contemplating cheating on a spouse - or having nothing to do with sex) it is preferable to illustrate some of the thought process the person is going through so the reader can understand where character is coming from.

I do suspect many women writers would go into more detail and depth using this approach, as women in general are more adept at talking about, explaining, and living their emotions in comparison to men. It's not that we don't have emotions but just saying I'm angry or sad or confused is often enough for us where it is just a starting point for the fairer sex.

And I understand the subject of non-con stories upsets a lot of people but even the worst, most vile misogynist story is just that - a story. But as long as that's all it is one should just not read if it will offend you. I admit I do find what some female non-con fans like to be puzzling to me. Some have commented about what I'll call Lit non-con stories i.e. where the victim enjoys the non-con sex to a degree and they've said that such stories are sweet. I wrote a story for someone (which I couldn't post here as it doesn't pass the Lit test) and while I knew she would like it for she likes extreme stories I was surprised at many comments that came from other women saying they were turned on by a story that I don't consider sexy or arousing and where the female character was most certainly not enjoying herself. But as many have said you can't help what you like or what turns you on and in a lot of cases you can't even understand or explain why it does.

It does raise the question, which is better? The kind of rape story where her body betrays her and starts enjoying it, followed by her mind being pushed to the breaking point where it enjoys it too, and she ends up as an eager/obedient sex slave/pain slut/etc. Or the kind of rape story where she ends up lying in the dirt, bruised and crying, having hated every moment of what he or they just did to her.

And the answer is yes.

rutger5 said:

And I understand the subject of non-con stories upsets a lot of people but even the worst, most vile misogynist story is just that - a story. But as long as that's all it is one should just not read if it will offend you. I admit I do find what some female non-con fans like to be puzzling to me. Some have commented about what I'll call Lit non-con stories i.e. where the victim enjoys the non-con sex to a degree and they've said that such stories are sweet. I wrote a story for someone (which I couldn't post here as it doesn't pass the Lit test) and while I knew she would like it for she likes extreme stories I was surprised at many comments that came from other women saying they were turned on by a story that I don't consider sexy or arousing and where the female character was most certainly not enjoying herself. But as many have said you can't help what you like or what turns you on and in a lot of cases you can't even understand or explain why it does.

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Yeah, I've found the dichotomy of this strange too as a nearly exclusive non-con writer. For me a lot of it is about the release of my fantasies, and my own fantasies get into the realm of being used/degraded/humiliated/not enjoying it. For me it's about something that I can exorcise via writing and reading that I wouldn't want to experience in real life but still have fantasies about for some reason, in a way it helps me process many of those feelings.