Content note: comparison of writing to BDSM, mild BDSM mentions, including spanking, reference to sensitivity reading and impact on marginalised readers.

Lately, I’ve come to understand that there isn’t a great difference between the process I choose to go through putting a fic up on ao3 or publishing/performing under my other name and the process of negotiating a BDSM scene. As the writer, I’m holding all the cards; I’m effectively the Dom in this scenario.

Within fandom, the reader’s expected to be quite astonishingly passive/submissive, other than to make noises of appreciation – on ao3 we’ve even created community norms where the reader can’t easily say ouch or no or you’re not being careful enough with me and people like me or this isn’t what we negotiated without being punished, shamed or condemned.

That in itself adds to our power as writers.

From the perspective of a writer who’s also an ADHDer with bad RSD, I sometimes love that about ao3. That I know by and large the comments are going to be friendly, that I won’t be given a hard time. But it means there’s a lot of responsibility on me to consider how I might impact my reader without them feeling they can say so. To further the BDSM analogy, I have a non-verbal sub who I can do anything to in subspace.

This is where negotiating the scene becomes critical. If once we’re in the fic I can do anything, then the reader needs to know going in what’s ahead. And it would be awesome if I could just write 2000 words of smut, put it onto the internet without thinking about its impact, but the reality is, it’s very easy to miss a problem with consent, or fall into a racist or transmisogynistic (etc) trope that might unwittingly hurt someone.

Asking my beta readers to keep an eye out for missed tags, consent issues, and do a sensitivity reading is a part of what I do to make sure I prepared the space well enough so it’s truly safe, sane and consensual.

And I sit on fics for a while, so I can go back and look with a critical eye, hoping to get that negotiation right – my tags, my author notes, my carefully letting the reader know what I’m planning to lead them through.

This isn’t really about what’s happening to the characters in the story. It’s about what’s happening interpersonally between me and the reader. It’s about whether I took the time to gain their informed consent before taking them into a space that is intended to impact them. Whether I considered them and cared about them. Whether I took the time to ensure marginalised readers had as safe and good a time as everyone else.

If I didn’t want to impact the reader, I wouldn’t be writing. I want the impact to be positive, but I don’t want them unmoved and unchanged.

I can put my character through terrible things against their will and it will still be consensual if I asked myself for consent to write and share this fantasy and my reader for their consent to witness it.

For many readers this is not about “I don’t want to read that stuff” it’s about “I need to feel trust in the person holding the space before I proceed”.

So often we talk about content warnings as if they are purely there to help us decide whether or not to read on, but that’s only half their job. Today, a poet in one of my more literary spaces shared a poem about grief. Their content warning didn’t stop me reading the poem, but it did help me prepare myself for the emotions it inevitably brought up.

It’s like the difference between how pain feels if someone tells you “I’m going to spank you now” or does it without warning. And without warning is a perfectly valid option if you pre-negotiated it, of course.

The thing is, you can take a BDSM relationship far deeper with good communication and negotiation, and this is also true of writing. People can mentally check out if they’re jarred by a poorly negotiated space – they’re not really present or connecting with your words. When it comes to erotic fiction, that also might mean they’re less able to check in with themselves about self-consent. And that can mean the difference between enjoying the moment and feeling good afterwards (or thoughtful, or wrung out, etc., depending what the writer intended), or feeling the wrong kind of uncomfortable later.

Equally, it’s no surprise that the edgelords of this world create such a narrow and limited worldview – it’s impossible to go deep simply by shocking people, it takes a bit more care and finesse than that.

It’s possible to find responsible writers who can hold their reader well. I believe writers who do that can take them safely to very interesting and complicated places.