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I really wish RL books came with warnings. I'm really getting tired of unexpected rape scenes within the first 10 pages of a book :(

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There are 31 comments on this entry. (Reply.)

... which one? *gets pen to make notes*

I'm finding the reviews on Amazon, if I lick on the LOW ones, will give me interesting insights into a book. I've managed to discard many that would have pissed me Right Off, if I'd stumbled onto the bothersome parts without warning.

Stasia

*ahem*

CLICK on, not lick on. Sheesh.

Stasia

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Hominids by Robert J. Sawyer is the worst example I've ever come across - apparently he does this in most of his books.

Today's example is White as Snow by Tanith Lee. She came *highly* recommended but so far the book isn't really doing anything for me, even beyond the rape scene.

lol one of the characters is named Draco and I keep picturing this is an AU of sorts.

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Oh, and there's a scene in The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi that I skipped over (but then, I skipped a lot of that book).

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O.o

I would be horrified, too.

RL would be better if it was more like fandom :)

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UNCOOL. This is the second time in the last few weeks that I've heard of someone being surprised by a rape scene. The other one was somnophilia rape, too. *RAEGS AT THE WORLD*

I met someone a few months ago who started an erotica/fetish publishing company that includes ALL warnings on a page in everything they print. I thought that was pretty cool.

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That is VERY cool of her/him! There have been a few books that I've stopped reading in my life because I didn't like where it was going and was getting squicked (I don't remember them now, it was mostly when I was in middle school and high school) and it'd be so helpful if more books had warnings that'd help readers avoid that. Non-con and even dub-con turns me right off, and it seems to be a fairly common trope. :|

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Hmm. Maybe it's because I have no serious trauma in my life, but I've always actually been surprised at the stringent attitude fandom has towards warning for possibly triggery material, because movies & books don't have those warnings. Not that I'm saying you're wrong, of course.

I actually don't mind not having warnings when it comes to character death in published books (fanfic is different), especially since most of what I enjoy reading are murder mysteries. But I've never come across rape in a book until the past year. To be honest, I'm a bit surprised at my own reaction to it (I never expected to be so bothered by it).

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Come to think about it, I've never come across graphic rape in a book without expecting it. So maybe I would mind a lot if that happened. Hmm.

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Maybe it's a genre thing - I've only recently been reading a lot of scifi and fantasy, where before I'd either read YA or murder mysteries or classics.

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Maybe...but fantasy (and to a much lesser extent scifi) has been my main genre since I was a kid. And I just remembered there WAS one time I stumbled across a rather graphic rape (committed by the so-called 'hero' of the series, no less); I promptly stopped reading. I'll mention the author/series if you want to know, but don't want to spoil you without it being invited. I remember now that the event in question made me reject utterly any notion of the character as a sympathetic character, so I decided not to read the author any more.

I think, though, that was the only remotely graphic rape I've read. But now you've got me wondering how many others I've forgotten about.....

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Fandom Is Different, sure, but I think there's two more specific factors at work. One, victims of trauma have more social capital to push for trigger warnings, and a pre-existing mechanism with which to express them (since warnings for spoilers and squicks are already well-established and supported by an even wider segment of the fandom). In contrast, real-world media aimed at a wider audience--well, there's no ratings system for books at all, and movie and TV ratings are vague, so there's no mechanism for it, and campaigning for one would be a zillion times harder.

There's also differences in terms of what, in the wider culture, we warn for/censor, depending on the medium. What's acceptable in a book is a no-no on film, movies can get away with more than TV (with a very vague rating off a single scale), a cable channel can show stuff that would never air on broadcast TV (but in the US, at least, TV has a richer rating system), etc. etc. How we as a culture relate to different media seems to dictate how tightly it's controlled, and fanfic seems to be in the same category as broadcast TV or radio--something that somebody could stumble into uninformed (or underinformed) and be surprised. Which is technically true of books and movies, of course, but we don't seem to find that fact as salient for those media--in fact, people tend to gravitate to the opposite assumption, that by making a choice to read/watch something you take a certain amount of responsibility for what you end up reading/seeing, so caveat lector. Does that say more about the nature of the medium or its place in the culture? I dunno.

Wow. Um, that was probably brainier than you wanted. Sorry.

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Not at all! And it's very true that I don't expect to be warned for anything that isn't fandom. But, I also tend to steer away from certain types of dramas, for example, because they're likely to contain certain content that I don't necessarily want to watch.

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Right, and fanfic is simultaneously more constrained (since it's within the 'verse of a particular text) and less constrained (because there's really no censorship in fandom, just our self-policed warning culture). Because I like Fandom X, I can usually be reasonably sure that fic for that fandom is something I'll like...unless I'm warned off it. (Same logic applies to characters/pairing tags, I guess.) Whereas just because I like Genre Y, it doesn't follow that I'll like everything that's in Genre Y, so there's not the assumption that I'm going to read everything unless warned away from it. This is similar to how television is often characterized: there's this assumption that the TV is just on, and viewers are passively consuming whatever's broadcast, and so we have to be very careful with what we allow on the air (especially in times where children might possibly see, omg.)

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depending on the medium

Oh, that's for sure! I've sweated over this a lot when trying to figure out how to rate fics, and I know I haven't managed to be consistent when it comes to where I draw the line between PG-13 and R, and where I draw the line between R and NC-17. It's difficult. And of course there's also the way people talk about men being more visually inclined than women, and I suspect that also plays into how ratings are established. *cough*

I will definitely say that being part of fandom and learning the conventions of fic warnings, and the reasons for those conventions, has definitely educated me in a lot of ways. Of course, one of the other things fandom has educated me about is the vast edges of the realm of sexuality, both consensual and non-consensual (if you would even call that sexuality as opposed to...well, I don't know a better term, but there must be one). Until the Harry Potter fandom, I always thought golden showers would be, like, sunshine and blessings. :D

But in all seriousness, not at ALL brainier than I wanted. This is an interesting discussion, and for all that my default approach was from the other direction than Dru's, I also find a LOT of merit in the idea of warnings. I confess that I often dislike having to warn for things that I think will "spoil" the plot for people, but I also hate the idea of springing something on people who aren't prepared for it, so I think (I hope) I tend to err on the side of spoiling rather than surprising.

In any event, this is a very interesting discussion.

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There is ZERO consistency in how lines are drawn. The 1999 South Park movie was, on some level, a meta-commentary on just how vile a movie had to be to get an NC-17 rating without including any graphic sex. You're probably doing better than the MPAA. :-)

I think HTML is a gift for spoilery warnings--lets you set some parts of your header to black-on-black or white-on-white so that it's up to the readers--which goes back to the caveat-lector philosophy, that you're taking responsibility for reading something without looking at the header first.

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The only things that really upset me are this:

- Gratuitous death of a helpless animal. I once stopped reading an otherwise enjoyable mystery after a sweet, elderly cat was killed for no reason other than to torture the protagonist. Pets should be off limits for such things.

- Gratuitous death of the protagonist on the last page. I once read a book that ended with the death of the main character and his girlfriend in the last sentence of the last paragraph of the very last page.

This is why I skip to the ending of every single genre book by an author I don't know to make sure that at least #2 doesn't happen. Juvenile, perhaps, but y'know, life is too damn short for me to invest several hours of my life with a character who's going to end up dead at the end for no good reason.

I think the keyword is gratuitous (although I recently read a post-apocalyptic biopunk book that had a lot of animal violence in it and although it wasn't necessarily gratuitous it wasn't pleasant to read either).

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LOL oh my god this has happened to me, except it was a lesbian sex scene within the first 10 pages. which is fine, except for the fact that THEY WERE BOTH 80 YEARS OLD AND IT WAS DESCRIBED IN VERY, VERY GRAPHIC DETAIL

Um, was it a nice lesbian sex scene? idk >.

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*headdesk* that was supposed to be >.< at the end.

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I feel your pain. I've only had a few books that have done that, since almost everything I read is first looked up on tvtropes or Amazon and then run through my friends. But every single time I decide to try it out without a background, something traumatic happens in the first few pages. I should learn from this...

That's a good idea - I need to start doing that...

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Wanna go egg Sawyer's house? He lives in town here.

LOL

I've heard (from some author friends who are invited to his parties) that his wife is a sweetheart and it's the only reason he's invited out for authorly social engagements. Also, their bedroom is full of pictures of him >.

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I'm actually pretty amazed that for all the hand-wringing over warnings in fandom, no one seems to have stepped up to create a Wiki-style resource where people can submit warnings for mainstream books/movies/tv/etc.

(I support warnings 100% and think they're absolutely necessary; not just in fandom, either. I suppose I am just feeling cynical about many people's real intentions when they participate in online debate/discourse. >.>)

Enforced content warnings on books would be a spectacularly bad idea because of the huge potential for censorship (plus, spoilers), but a socially driven online database editable by anyone would be pretty great, IMO, since it could also warn for spoilers. I personally care about not feeling like I've been hit by a train than I do about some author's ~intricately crafted plot~, so. >.>

This is very sane. I approve of this earth logic.

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I've thought about starting a wiki for this - similar to TV Tropes where you can search a book and then see only the warnings you want to see (e.g. if you're ok with character death you won't be spoiled, but if you want to know if the dog dies, you can check it out).

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August