# Surprise Kiss: Yay or Nay?



## Paranormal Kitty (Jun 13, 2017)

https://mythcreants.com/blog/why-the-surprise-kiss-must-go/

Do you agree with the author of this blog post or do you think a surprise kiss is fine? Does it make a difference whether it's in romance or in some other genre where it's not being idealized?


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

Agree. I'm all abouts the explicit consent. I don't necessarily agree that consent to the first kiss has to be verbal, although I do make it verbal sometimes, where there's a reason for it. I think it can't be a surprise. If the parties are holding hands, for example, touching, leaning into each other, and somebody is slowwwwly going for a kiss, watching the other person to make sure it's OK, I think that's fine. (In most cases, like I said. In any case where one partner is wary for any reason or there's been misunderstanding on some level before, I do the explicit verbal consent for everything.) 

Consent can still be really, really hot and feed into all kinds of sexy stuff, including roleplaying-type stuff. In fact, the kinkier the sex, the more explicit and direct the communication and consent should be, IMHO, so that's how I write it. I don't like to get a squicky vibe from fiction, and I don't want to give anybody one. I remember how it felt to get that panicked feeling.

I noticed and loved the message of the explicit verbal consent in "Frozen," by the way. Perfect example--and great example to send the movie's audience, too.


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

Here's a great article that was helpful to me when I was on book ... I can't remember. Five or so. It gave me some reassurance that I'd been intuitively doing it right, and helped me be more conscious about doing it better. "It" being building sexual tension, and doing it in a non-icky way, having the romance develop organically and naturally.

We sense that things are "off" because that (whatever the "off" thing is) is not how humans advance in physical/sexual intimacy. However quickly or slowly we go through the stages, we DO tend to go through them. When a stage is skipped, it feels forced--in all senses of the word.

https://jennyhansenauthor.wordpress.com/2011/11/08/using-the-12-stages-of-physical-intimacy-to-build-tension-in-your-novel/


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## Tabitha Levin (Nov 1, 2011)

I like this article and agree.

I do have surprise kisses in some of my books, and have never really thought about it until now. Going forward I plan on being a lot more mindful of that. 

My issue is that I tend to rush my characters into a sexual situation too quickly. I've been thinking a lot about pulling that back to a slow burn so the article posted by Usedtoposthere has been very helpful. Thanks!


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## Paranormal Kitty (Jun 13, 2017)

Do you guys think this only applies to romance, or to any portrayal of a romantic pairing? What if the "surprise kiss" is not portrayed as positive, or what if the character who instigated it later apologized?


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## PermaStudent (Apr 21, 2015)

Very interesting article!  I, too, had never really thought about this much.  Which is interesting because I was the real-life target of a surprise kiss.  It was creepy and friendship-ending. I couldn't be around the guy afterward.  (There's a longer story here, but that's the short of it.)

I think I've only used the surprise kiss in one of my books. It was deliberately used as a product of misinterpreted signals and it resulted in a lot of awkwardness.


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

paranormal_kitty said:


> Do you guys think this only applies to romance, or to any portrayal of a romantic pairing? What if the "surprise kiss" is not portrayed as positive, or what if the character who instigated it later apologized?


If it's not presented as romantic and sexy, it's a completely different thing. It's like any other "wrong step" or "bad step" taken in a book.

I have date rape in books. Just not as part of the romance.



PermaStudent said:


> Very interesting article! I, too, had never really thought about this much. Which is interesting because I was the real-life target of a surprise kiss. It was creepy and friendship-ending. I couldn't be around the guy afterward.


And yeah, I'll bet. Tells you something about the guy, and it ain't good.


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## amdonehere (May 1, 2015)

Just seeing the question in the subject and that blog title gives me a headache.

You guys must be Millennials, right?

I guess this is where generation gap comes in. Ok so things weren't perfect in my days. In fact, we definitely had a lot of problems in my days and a lot had changed for the better. But still, all I can say is, I'm glad I was young and single at a time when I was young and single, when spontaneity from someone CLEARLY a romantic interest simply makes you smile.

I'll just go back to my cave and continue my fossilization. The world is yours now. Carry on.


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

AlexaKang said:


> Just seeing the question in the subject and that blog title gives me a headache.
> 
> You guys must be Millennials, right?
> 
> ...


I'm 58 and married 33 years, but thanks? I guess?


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## Going Incognito (Oct 13, 2013)

AlexaKang said:


> Just seeing the question in the subject and that blog title gives me a headache.
> 
> You guys must be Millennials, right?
> 
> ...


Yeah, I feel ya. (If you don't mind, of course.)
These discussions always remind me of the "sex" scene in Demolition Man, lol. 
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=67DN3uvwXkE


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

Many readers, younger and older, like the newfangled consent thing. They like respect along with their steamy sex. So there's that. Of course, there's the opposite, too. Authors can choose to aim for whatever group of readers they want, and to find this sort of idea meaningful or not. Clearly, there are markets for all sorts of things.


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## KathyWren (Jul 18, 2017)

Huh. I think past experience may be skewing me on this one, because I don't think I've ever had a relationship that *didn't* start with a surprise kiss. I'm nature's dullest animal-- my husband still likes to remind me that I didn't know he was into me even after he asked me if there was even room for a bra under my tiny top. I just said 'yes!' and pulled down the top to show the lace. (Why, past me? _Why?_)

That said, I rarely read one that occurs with absolutely no mutual buildup. The variant I see most often is where the author has his eyes lingering on her lips, her dazed and distracted by the feel of his hand on her face, the surprise she feels in the moment the kiss lands being 'I can't believe he feels that way too' rather than 'why is this man suddenly attached to my face', and so on. The character may not know that it's coming or that it's mutual, but the readers certainly do. Does that make a difference? I'm not sure.

Either way, I suspect this thread is going to make me think twice the next time I read or write one, which is probably a good thing.


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## David VanDyke (Jan 3, 2014)

Yea. Or nay.


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## Going Incognito (Oct 13, 2013)

After further consideration, I think there's a distinction missing. I think people are taking one of two sides on a three option discussion.
A forced, unwelcomed 'surprise' kiss is an entirely different animal than a wanted, welcomed 'surprise' kiss.
I'd hate a forced, unwelcomed kiss. But I'm not a fan of 'can I kiss you?' either. Ruins the moment for me. My thinking there is- if you really feel that you have to ask, we've got signals crossing somewhere, big time. But a welcome kiss you just know/hope is coming at some point, if things keep going well, that finally  comes at a surprising moment, is sublime.


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## amdonehere (May 1, 2015)

Going Incognito said:


> Yeah, I feel ya. (If you don't mind, of course.)
> These discussions always remind me of the "sex" scene in Demolition Man, lol.
> https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=67DN3uvwXkE


We're talking about a surprise kiss from a romantic interest, right? Not a stranger, or a boss, platonic co-worker, the cashier at the local shop, or a rapist, or a serial killer, right?

There's no way to agree or disagree since this all depends on the individual person. I can only speak for me and if I'm on a date, I do hope the guy I'm interested in would feel me enough to know when it's ok to go for a spontaneous kiss. If I like him I won't find it disrespectful. I'd be flattered. And I know one thing for sure. If he actually asks me, I will say no. I will end the date right there and then, and never see him again. I'm sure he means well but I can't deal with a guy like that. It's no fun and I can't imagine having a relationship where two people are walking around on eggshells.

I apologize if this isn't acceptable or kosher in today's PC world. I'm not taking a stand for or against anything. It's just how I'd feel if I were in the situation. Anyhow, I'm sure my kind is dying out so the world won't have to put up with people who think like me much longer.

As for the blogger calling for this trope to die? If it does, I guess they'll lose me as a reader. But I don't think the market cares what I like. I really miss old fashion rom-com movies and they don't make those anymore either. Now in what they call rom-com it's just cynical people too cool or too jaded with issues or something.


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## amdonehere (May 1, 2015)

Going Incognito said:


> After further consideration, I think there's a distinction missing. I think people are taking one of two sides on a three option discussion.
> A forced, unwelcomed 'surprise' kiss is an entirely different animal than a wanted, welcomed 'surprise' kiss.
> I'd hate a forced, unwelcomed kiss. But I'm not a fan of 'can I kiss you?' either. Ruins the moment for me. My thinking there is- if you really feel that you have to ask, we've got signals crossing somewhere, big time. But a welcome kiss you just know/hope is coming at some point, if things keep going well, that finally comes at a surprising moment, is sublime.


Thank you. My sentiment exactly.


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## tvnopenope (Sep 14, 2015)

A complete stranger tried to kiss me once at a party. He came at me out of nowhere, and I was lucky I lifted my arm in time to block his attempt. I didn't even get to see his face properly, and it was just creepy.  I don't find that kind of behavior attractive or acceptable. I think that in most cases the kisses in fiction aren't true surprise kisses because everyone can see them coming, even the characters. I like a lot of things in fiction, even a surprise kiss, but in real life, not so much. I'd expect any guy to either ask for permission first or go slowly to give me a chance to say no. Otherwise, he's likely to get an elbow in the face or I'd be really mad that he was so disrespectful. In fiction, I'm fine with not asking and even with forced kisses, but asking can be really sexy too, just like slowly leaning in, with a lot of tension and looks between the characters right before the kiss.


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

AlexaKang said:


> We're talking about a surprise kiss from a romantic interest, right? Not a stranger, or a boss, platonic co-worker, the cashier at the local shop, or a rapist, or a serial killer, right?
> 
> There's no way to agree or disagree since this all depends on the individual person. I can only speak for me and if I'm on a date, I do hope the guy I'm interested in would feel me enough to know when it's ok to go for a spontaneous kiss. If I like him I won't find it disrespectful. I'd be flattered. And I know one thing for sure. If he actually asks me, I will say no. I will end the date right there and then, and never see him again. I'm sure he means well but I can't deal with a guy like that. It's no fun and I can't imagine having a relationship where two people are walking around on eggshells.
> 
> ...


That's why I posted the article about the stages. If you go through the normal stages of physical intimacy, whether that happens over an evening or a year, a kiss won't be a "surprise" in the sense that you're talking, thinking about something else, when all of a sudden this person who hasn't kissed you before, with whom you aren't in a romantic relationship yet, grabs you and kisses you. Or when you're 17 and you're walking home with a guy and he grabs you and sticks his tongue down your throat. Those things aren't romantic. They feel like an invasion, because they are. It's not a case of two people reading each others' signals, making eye contact, touching an arm, lowering a voice, giving all of the information we give in the 90% or whatever it is of our information we give OUTSIDE of words.

That's how I interpreted this article. When I think "surprise kiss," I think the "grabbing and kissing" thing that still happens in some movies and novels, and that used to be prevalent. That's not sexy. I've been on the receiving end of that.

When I put explicit verbal consent into a book (for a kiss--I ALWAYS put it into a book for sex), it's because a heroine is inexperienced, traumatized . . . whatever it is where a decent guy, a regular guy, in real life would know he had to go slowly, because he didn't just want to get laid, possibly by "overcoming her objections." (Also not real sexy, personally, being as how it's not really consensual and all.) Instead, he's not just in lust, he's also falling in love, and he sees her and cares about her.

To me, that's romance. It's love, it's trust, and it's sexy as hell. (Not sure if I can say hell, but I just said it again.) I do tend to write the slow burn even in my most erotic romance, though, because I personally need the romance to feel the eroticism in any satisfying way.

I hope that explains it better. As I said, I'm squarely a Baby Boomer, and a long-married one. But one way of writing romance successfully (money-wise) is to think about WHAT feelings it is that you're trying to elicit--in yourself with your daydreams, perhaps, and in your writing. What gives ME that romantic glow as well as the sexual rush? What makes me sigh in all ways when I read a book or see a movie? Sure, there are times when you want the throwdown, when you love and trust your partner deeply and he knows you do. Which means that you know that if if you say "stop," he'll stop. If a woman thinks she knows some random guy she's out with to that extent--well, hopefully she's right. I'm too much of a logical brain, perhaps. I can't find something sexy and romantic that in real life I'd find scary and awful. Others differ.

Go for the audience that's like you, that you understand, is my advice. But think about what you're trying to evoke and how to signal it. Think about all the nonverbal ways we signal to each other, and make sure your reader sees that too. Make sure she sees, if you're in your hero's point of view, the heroine's pupils dilating, her body swaying toward him, her mouth softening. Make sure your reader knows your hero knows it's a "yes" for sure.

Unless, you know, you're writing a different kind of book. Then I got nothing.


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## Going Incognito (Oct 13, 2013)

AlexaKang said:


> Thank you. My sentiment exactly.


(Apparently we were all typing at the same time, cause it's been said, lol, but I'm leaving it anyway

I still don't think I said it right tho, cause I think we're gonna get nudged into the 'nonverbal permission isn't a surprise' camp. And maybe we should be. Put more precisely for myself- I don't enjoy being asked for verbal consent for a first kiss. I don't need the long slow lean in, I'm great with the quick tug til we're an inch apart, two heartbeat pause for consent surprise kiss, but that's your nonverbal consent right there. So I think, to clarify, yes consent is best as I don't want to be pinned down with an extra tongue in my mouth by some stranger on an elevator, but I also don't want to sign a contract with mediators first either. Maybe I'm a consent person but not a discussion person. And as far as the 'mid talking shut up' surprise kiss? I like those too, from the right person, not so much from say my car insurance agent while I'm explaining my front end damage. 
Right person, right context, hell yeah. 
But do I want the surprise kisses to be done away with in books/tv/movies? Please no. Cause in fiction, whether they go really right or really wrong, either way is your drama/twist/entertainment. Do I want them to stop happening cause 'that's not how it should be in real life, cause reasons?' No! I love a lot of fictional things I wouldn't want to happen in real life.

So, for the tldr version- in real life it's a grey area. But darn it, I love it as a fiction trope. Leave it alone! Not everything needs to be analyzed under the public service announcement microscope.


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## amdonehere (May 1, 2015)

> That's why I posted the article about the stages. If you go through the normal stages of physical intimacy, whether that happens over an evening or a year, a kiss won't be a "surprise" in the sense that you're talking, thinking about something else, when all of a sudden this person who hasn't kissed you before, with whom you aren't in a romantic relationship yet, grabs you and kisses you. Or when you're 17 and you're walking home with a guy and he grabs you and sticks his tongue down your throat. Those things aren't romantic. They feel like an invasion, because they are. It's not a case of two people reading each others' signals, making eye contact, touching an arm, lowering a voice, giving all of the information we give in the 90% or whatever it is of our information we give OUTSIDE of words.


We'll have to agree to disagree because in my world, real or fiction, relationships aren't that clear cut.

Of course it's offensive if the kiss comes from a total stranger or someone to whom the person feels no attraction to.

But people often feel mutual attraction but they aren't yet dating. It could be two people started out as friends. Or two people not too sure if the other person feels the same way, or until one of them finally takes the plunge and makes the first move and then they both realize how they really feel about each other. For me, a rule book or official permission isn't necessary. Sometimes, it's just the right, magical moment. You just feel the moment and you just know it's right.

And if the protagonists are young, sometimes they might also not know their own true feelings or able to have the nerves to admit it or able to express it or articulate even to themselves that they in fact very much are attracted to the other person until the kiss. Growing up is about experimenting. There are lot of gray and most things are not clear cut. Also, not everyone is so sure of themselves to want to have to answer yes or no. Each person needs to find out what's comfortable for him/her.

And while I agree in most cases being kissed uninvited by a stranger is not right, even that has exceptions. Who can forget that iconic photo on VE Day during WWIi when the sailor grabbed a nurse and spontaneously kissed her ar Times Square? It was a moment of elation for both of them as they had admitted in interviews, and an image of hope and victory for the world. When the Allies liberated towns in Europe, a lot of girls and women spontaneously ran up to soldiers and kissed them on the mouths. Everyone were happy. It's not always about rules and respect or disrespect. The human experience is much wider in scope than that.

ETA: Adrien Brody spontaneouly kissed Halle Berry when he accepted the Oscar. Not that I'm gorgeous like Halle Berry but in that moment I too would've understood the moment of joy and I doubt I'd feel invaded or assaulted if I were in her place. She talked about it afterward and wasn't offended in the least.


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## Anarchist (Apr 22, 2015)

I'm so glad my dating days are over.


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## JRTomlin (Jan 18, 2011)

If consent isn't present, it's sexual assault and that is a problem. It is simply a big problem. The second in a 'romance' that consent isn't there, as a reader, I'm gone whether it's kissing or other sexual activity. I prefer verbal consent or at least some verbal communication if not in question form with a pause for a 'no'. "I really want to kiss you..." Pause. That works for me. But someone just slamming his mouth down even on a date? Have you never been on a date where you decided you SURE didn't want this person kissing you? I sure have. Just ugh. 

Consent isn't something that is just 'nice'. It is essential.


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## Going Incognito (Oct 13, 2013)

Anarchist said:


> I'm so glad my dating days are over.


Oh, amen. Ive got good memories and bad, but I'm glad they're all memories.


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## liveswithbirds (Jun 14, 2016)

Usedtoposthere said:


> Here's a great article that was helpful to me when I was on book ... I can't remember. Five or so. It gave me some reassurance that I'd been intuitively doing it right, and helped me be more conscious about doing it better. "It" being building sexual tension, and doing it in a non-icky way, having the romance develop organically and naturally.
> 
> https://jennyhansenauthor.wordpress.com/2011/11/08/using-the-12-stages-of-physical-intimacy-to-build-tension-in-your-novel/


Thanks for the link. Very helpful article. I got most of them -- skipped a few of the early ones in my current WIP, but I think I'll go back and put them in. Details, details!


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## amdonehere (May 1, 2015)

JRTomlin said:


> If consent isn't present, it's sexual assault and that is a problem. It is simply a big problem. The second in a 'romance' that consent isn't there, as a reader, I'm gone whether it's kissing or other sexual activity. I prefer verbal consent or at least some verbal communication if not in question form with a pause for a 'no'. "I really want to kiss you..." Pause. That works for me. But someone just slamming his mouth down even on a date? Have you never been on a date where you decided you SURE didn't want this person kissing you? I sure have. Just ugh.
> 
> Consent isn't something that is just 'nice'. It is essential.


How do you even get to the point when you are on a date where you let someone you don't want to kiss you give you a kiss? Assuming it's a normal date and not date rape we're talking about here, I would've ended the date long before it gets to the "will there be a kiss" moment. I'd also be acting and conversing as someone not interested so, yes, if the date then slams his mouth down, it would be assault. My point is though I would've done enough to make it clear I'm not interested so this would never happen in the first place, so consent is irrelevant.


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## amdonehere (May 1, 2015)

Going Incognito said:


> Oh, amen. Ive got good memories and bad, but I'm glad they're all memories.


Me three.


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## Nic (Nov 17, 2013)

First things first, THIS










is absolutely not a sexual activity. Nor is this sexual activity:










Anyone blithely stating that "mouth-on-mouth kisses are a sexual activity" needs a shrink!

I'm of Alexa Kang's opinion there. A surprise kiss by a romantic partner within the frame of mutual interest is a lovely thing to happen. A short pause for consent should come in naturally, but otherwise I really also am reminded of the Demolition Man or certain neuroses and where they seem to flock together.


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

I don't believe the article is talking about a romantic partner (people aleeady in a physical relationship). That may be a source of some of the difference of opinion. 

To me, "surprise" of necessity means "grab and kiss. I don't ask, just kiss." Wait, why does that sound familiar? We may have a difference of perception of what it is we are discussing, though. 

I'm also always looking at things in the context of writing--communicating with my reader. Selling the romance (figuratively and literally) is easier if my reader sees the romance, sees those stages, I've found. 

I've got a passage in a book that's been highlighted a ton. It's two people who had sex in the past. The heroine has told the hero about her reservations about getting involved with him again. She's obviously nervous saying it. The hero is exasperated by her nervousness  and tells her how much he desires her, and what he'd do if she said the word. Then he says, "But I'm not doing it, am I? Because you haven't said the word." Oddly to me at the time, those two sentences got highlighted something like 50 times. So it works for my segment of the romance market, anyway.


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## Going Incognito (Oct 13, 2013)

Re-reading the article, which covers the author's opinions on "why the surprise kiss should not feature in our stories," and the previous article that this article came from, which was basically what popular tropes he thinks are creepy, and the OP's question asking if we agree, I still have to say that I don't agree.

I don't think the surprise kiss shouldn't ever be in a romance cause I like the surprise kiss. 

His opinion is basically- it's always creepy because "A couple's first kiss requires clear, unambiguous permission. By far the best way to get it is for one of them to outright ask the other, "May I kiss you?""

He thinks that is romantic. I do not. He thinks it's a requirement. I do not. Any time someone tries to tell someone else what they should require I get my hackles up. He can require it in his relationships and his fiction all he wants. What he can't do is require me to require his opinions in either my relationships or my choice in fiction.

A comment on the original article held this opinion, "The problem with showing those behaviours as romantic is that quite some people do not make a difference between the fairy-tale ...(and)... real-life..."

Sounds to me like yet another PC let's not  p*ss  anyone off or challenge anyone to work through the differences between fiction vs real life, or allow anyone of a different belief their own opinions on whether they think it's sexy or not, just force everyone to romanticize explicit consent because "we haven't romanticized it yet" and "Enough stories like those, and this question will have as much romantic significance as "Will you marry me?"" maybe forgetting, or not caring, that not everyone wants 100% pc reality in their escapism romantic fiction. Maybe some of us can tell the difference between fiction and reality and maybe some of us are getting tired of being told what we should like to read and what romance tropes are in our best interest not to be reading.


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## dianapersaud (Sep 26, 2013)

Going Incognito said:


> After further consideration, I think there's a distinction missing. I think people are taking one of two sides on a three option discussion.
> A forced, unwelcomed 'surprise' kiss is an entirely different animal than a wanted, welcomed 'surprise' kiss.
> I'd hate a forced, unwelcomed kiss. *But I'm not a fan of 'can I kiss you?' either. Ruins the moment for me. *My thinking there is- if you really feel that you have to ask, we've got signals crossing somewhere, big time. But a welcome kiss you just know/hope is coming at some point, if things keep going well, that finally comes at a surprising moment, is sublime.


On our very first official date, there was a movie like moment when I thought we were going to share our first kiss. I was sitting there thinking _is he going to kiss me?_ I was nervous and self conscious. And my husband-then-first-date looked at me square in the eye and asked if he could kiss me.

I was so shocked. I said you're not supposed to ask, just do it! Yea, I know. Sounds bad, doesn't it? But he said in college they told him it was important to get consent. And you know what, he was right. In retrospect, I was such a bundle of nerves that he probably wasn't sure whether I wanted to or not. But by asking, it released that nervous tension and I was actually able to enjoy our first kiss.

Usedtoposthere is right. Body language is very important and how a guy acts says a lot about his morals.


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## Going Incognito (Oct 13, 2013)

dianapersaud said:


> On our very first official date, there was a movie like moment when I thought we were going to share our first kiss. I was sitting there thinking _is he going to kiss me?_ I was nervous and self conscious. And my husband-then-first-date looked at me square in the eye and asked if he could kiss me.
> 
> I was so shocked. I said you're not supposed to ask, just do it! Yea, I know. Sounds bad, doesn't it? But he said in college they told him it was important to get consent. And you know what, he was right. In retrospect, I was such a bundle of nerves that he probably wasn't sure whether I wanted to or not. But by asking, it released that nervous tension and I was actually able to enjoy our first kiss.
> 
> Usedtoposthere is right. Body language is very important and how a guy acts says a lot about his morals.


Lol, yeah, my husband asked as well. But I'll also add that one of the very last things he could be accused of is being romantic, then or now.


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## Going Incognito (Oct 13, 2013)

Although I'm not personally a fan of dark romance this thread does generally remind me of a certain other recent thread and the slippery slope mentioned there. If the surprise kiss is ruled as sexual assault how long til this trope that I do like gets centered in someone's crosshairs beyond a mere fun debate such as this?


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## PearlEarringLady (Feb 28, 2014)

Going Incognito said:


> Although I'm not personally a fan of dark romance this thread does generally remind me of a certain other recent thread and the slippery slope mentioned there. If the surprise kiss is ruled as sexual assault how long til this trope that I do like gets centered in someone's crosshairs beyond a mere fun debate such as this?


I noted the similarities between the threads, too. It's a little concerning to me the extent of black-and-white absolutism applied to an area which (in my view) is all shades of grey.

Whether a surprise kiss is acceptable or not surely depends on so many variables that it would be impossible to say definitively. The ages and characters of the participants, the state of their current relationship, the setting and everything that's led up to the moment - all of these affect the outcome, and I'd hesitate to draw a line, myself. I've written both surprise kisses and heroes who ask, and in each case I felt that was appropriate for that specific situation. And I'm comfortable reading about both, too. It would be only if there were a power issue, or the threat of the surprise kiss leading to a worse surprise that I would get twitchy about it.


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## Doglover (Sep 19, 2013)

I think if a bloke asked first, it would kill the mood stone dead. If a girl or woman doesn't want the kiss, she is perfectly capable of shoving him off. My first kiss was at a party at my parents' house, given by my brother (the party, not the kiss). It was from one of his friends who leaned forward and kissed me. I was amazed, shocked, shivery. He was eighteen so that's as far as it would have gone, but it meant a lot to me and now 56 years later, I still remember it clearly. If he'd asked first, I would have been scared off and missed something precious.

I know this sort of age gap seems creepy today, but we were in my parents' house, in a room with lots of other people.


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## Nic (Nov 17, 2013)

Doglover said:


> I think if a bloke asked first, it would kill the mood stone dead. If a girl or woman doesn't want the kiss, she is perfectly capable of shoving him off. My first kiss was at a party at my parents' house, given by my brother (the party, not the kiss). It was from one of his friends who leaned forward and kissed me. I was amazed, shocked, shivery. He was eighteen so that's as far as it would have gone, but it meant a lot to me and now 56 years later, I still remember it clearly. If he'd asked first, I would have been scared off and missed something precious.
> 
> I know this sort of age gap seems creepy today, but we were in my parents' house, in a room with lots of other people.


Age gap? How old were you?


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## Nic (Nov 17, 2013)

PaulineMRoss said:


> Whether a surprise kiss is acceptable or not surely depends on so many variables that it would be impossible to say definitively. The ages and characters of the participants, the state of their current relationship, the setting and everything that's led up to the moment - all of these affect the outcome, and I'd hesitate to draw a line, myself. I've written both surprise kisses and heroes who ask, and in each case I felt that was appropriate for that specific situation. And I'm comfortable reading about both, too. It would be only if there were a power issue, or the threat of the surprise kiss leading to a worse surprise that I would get twitchy about it.


This sums it up perfectly. I've given and I received surprise kisses, and I never found this to be rocket science. In reality it is easy to tell or do in such circumstances. The good writer has no problem showing them. Or shouldn't, at least.


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## Doglover (Sep 19, 2013)

Nic said:


> Age gap? How old were you?


Sorry, I thought I said; I was thirteen. I was a well developed thirteen, I might add.


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## amdonehere (May 1, 2015)

I'm glad it worked out for a previous poster but I for one am sad to hear that schools are now teaching boys they have to ask for permission to kiss a girl. I won't judge what they next generation thinks is or isn't right. I'm just glad my dating days are over and I'm glad in my days boys didn't feel they are required to ask, or that they are bad people if they didn't, but instead, had learned to watch and understand what signals the girls were sending. 

I don't remember Cho asking if Harry was ok with her kissing him, or Hermione or Ron asking each other either. So I guess now both the right and the left would want to ban Harry Potter. Well, good to see the two sides might finally want the same thing.


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## Decon (Feb 16, 2011)

Some people need to get a life. Yes it can be assault, and it can get the instigator a slap, or a bad-mouthing, but it can also be a surprise and welcome, then end up consensual. It's all down to so many factors. How many people remember back to their dating days long after that first kiss, whoever instigated it, when a partner can't contain themselves and blurts out "I love you" and you didn't feel the same. Is that an assault of the mind. I remember it being a paniful experience. But I can also remember it being mutual and thinking, thank, God.


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## Doglover (Sep 19, 2013)

AlexaKang said:


> I'm glad it worked out for a previous poster but I for one and sad to hear that schools are now teaching boys they have to ask for permission to kiss a girl. I won't judge what they next generation thinks is or isn't right. I'm just glad my dating days are over and I'm glad in my days boys didn't feel they are required to ask, or that thry are bad people if they didn't, but instead, had learned to watch and understand what signals the girls were sending.
> 
> I don't remember Cho asking if Harry was ok with her kissing him, or Hermione or Ron asking each other either. So I guess now both the right and the left would want to ban Harry Potter. Well, good to see the two side might finally want the same thing.


I wonder if they are also teaching girls that they should ask before kissing a boy? It seems that nowadays everything is sexist, racist, homophobic or somesuch, so why should it only be boys who would ask?


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## amdonehere (May 1, 2015)

Doglover said:


> I wonder if they are also teaching girls that they should ask before kissing a boy? It seems that nowadays everything is sexist, racist, homophobic or somesuch, so why should it only be boys who would ask?


Of course, once the girl starts asking, next it'll get into "she asked for it" if they boy reacts by going further than whatever kind of kiss she wanted, and there'll be all the same problems of he said/she said and the same bunch of possible miscommunications. And now we'll end up with "Demonlition Man".


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

Know your audience. If you're flying to conferences first class on your romance earnings, clearly your way of selling the sexiness and romance is working for your audience, even if I or any other writer wouldn't love your hero's actions in the context of real life. If you go all the way to romanticizing sexual assault and readers love your books and buy them in huge numbers, you probably don't care about how others might judge that. We're all entitled to our opinion about this subject and about others' work and the relationship between fiction and reality in general. And as long as your work meets the vendor's TOS, you're entitled to sell it. 

If you're not selling as well as you'd like, maybe take a look at that article I posted on the stages of intimacy. It's not about PC culture. It's about biology and social anthropology and verbal and nonverbal communication. There are lots of ways to get verbal agreement, if that's what you are going for, besides saying, "May I kiss you."  I use all sorts of things. I don't think, "What would make this PC." I think, "The heroine just told the hero about a terrible episode from her past because he can see that there was some history in that confrontation back there. But she still desires him like crazy. What does she say verbally to shift the focus, and how does he respond verbally and nonverbally?"

I get that not everybody wants total realism in their romance. (I do, and my readers do, but lots of tastes out there.) But any dialogue and action still has to "feel" real within the story. It has to feel emotionally genuine and appropriate to the characters, or you have wooden characters, puppets being moved around by the author.


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## Elizabeth Barone (May 6, 2013)

As a survivor of rape, consent is super important to me. I never realized how important until I was reading a romance novel and there was a non-verbal consent moment and it was _so_ swoony.

Consent doesn't have to be a long, show-stopping conversation. It can be as simple as a look in the eyes communicating that yes, we both want this. I've been with my partner for 11 years this month and he asks my permission every time within milliseconds. There's no conversation, just eye contact, a slight lean-in, lips puckered. And vice versa. We have this flirty kiss game going on, and to this day I still find him sexy. Consent has never ruined any moments between us. It just proves to me time and again that I found someone who respects me.

Wanting consent isn't a "millennial" or "PC" thing. It's about respect. How is respect not sexy in a romance? In real life?



> ...where you let someone you don't want to kiss you give you a kiss...


I don't think some of you understand what consent is and isn't. You aren't letting someone kiss you when you don't want them to. *sigh* They're kissing you without your permission. That's not okay!

I applaud writers becoming more mindful of this. I know I have, and my readers appreciate it. And I applaud schools teaching kids about consent (though I definitely agree that boys _and_ girls should be taught, not just one or the other). These are small steps toward dismantling rape culture, and I am _all_ for that.

If anyone's interested, I wrote a thread about this on Twitter earlier this summer: https://twitter.com/i/moments/875428508046168064


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

elizabethbarone said:


> As a survivor of rape, consent is super important to me. I never realized how important until I was reading a romance novel and there was a non-verbal consent moment and it was _so_ swoony.
> 
> Consent doesn't have to be a long, show-stopping conversation. It can be as simple as a look in the eyes communicating that yes, we both want this. I've been with my partner for 11 years this month and he asks my permission every time within milliseconds. There's no conversation, just eye contact, a slight lean-in, lips puckered. And vice versa. We have this flirty kiss game going on, and to this day I still find him sexy. Consent has never ruined any moments between us. It just proves to me time and again that I found someone who respects me.
> 
> ...


I loved your Twitter thread. Love the way you explain the subtleties. People are attributing some kind of heavy handed one size fits all attribute to the concept of consent. That isn't it.

If my husband of three-plus decades puts his hand on me and I jump, he might ask, "Hey. You OK?" And I might say something to indicate that I'm feeling jumpy, and he might touch me gently or hug me. More likely, he'd have sensed that and put a hand on my back in the first place to help me. And we read each others' signals every night when we go to bed. He's never pushed me when I didn't want to have sex, and I've never pushed him. We're married, but we each have the right to our own bodies. Nobody's entitled to have sex with me or to kiss me just because he wants it, and vice versa. To say, "She can always shove him away or slap him if she didn't want him to grab and kiss her" is mind-bogglingly Not OK to me.

I'd say, "clearly things have changed," but I'm probably as old as anybody here. So again, I'll just say, write to your audience. If you like the "grab, kiss, own" type of romance, make sure you're writing for the audience that likes that. Don't write in a genre or niche where the bestsellers feature more current attitudes toward consent. Because there are very real preferences on this topic, and readers divide themselves along these lines, not necessarily consciously.


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

Doglover said:


> I think if a bloke asked first, it would kill the mood stone dead. If a girl or woman doesn't want the kiss, she is perfectly capable of shoving him off. My first kiss was at a party at my parents' house, given by my brother (the party, not the kiss). It was from one of his friends who leaned forward and kissed me. I was amazed, shocked, shivery. He was eighteen so that's as far as it would have gone, but it meant a lot to me and now 56 years later, I still remember it clearly. If he'd asked first, I would have been scared off and missed something precious.
> 
> I know this sort of age gap seems creepy today, but we were in my parents' house, in a room with lots of other people.


If my nephews had been in the room and had seen one of their 18-year-old friends suddenly kissing their 13-year-old sister on the lips, I guarantee that guy would have been carried out of the house minus a couple teeth.

Sure a young teenage girl thinks it's exciting and romantic when a grown man pays her romantic attention. That's why we have laws and mores around it. I thought it was romantic too at age 16 when a 30-year-old got close to me, gave me alcohol, told me I was pretty, and kissed me. Didn't work out so well for me. Glad your experience stayed at the "so exciting and romantic" stage. But a lot of child sexual assault occurs or begins in the child's home with a trusted adult or older teenager. That's why another adult would normally step in there and make it clear to the child (and especially to the person grabbing her) that it was unacceptable--so she didn't get the feeling it was supposed to be fine and everybody else thought it was romantic also.


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## Guest (Aug 14, 2017)

AlexaKang said:


> I'd also be acting and conversing as someone not interested so, yes, if the date then slams his mouth down, it would be assault. My point is though I would've done enough to make it clear I'm not interested so this would never happen in the first place, so consent is irrelevant.


Some men are dense. They think you are "playing hard to get." Some men simply can't fathom that A woman they want doesn't want them, and all the signals in the world don't compute. Some men just assume that if you allow one man to do or say certain things, that means he can do and say the same things. Because as a woman you don't have the "right" to deny any man of something you allowed a different man to do.

I met my husband in a gaming group. I was the only woman in the group. When Mike and I started to flirt because there was a mutual attraction, another guy in the group took that as me "being into" certain conversations. I never sent any signals or acted in any way to invite the behavior. When one day I told him a comment was inappropriate, he got offended because I "let" Mike say certain things but not him. He genuinely felt entitled to the same treatment that Mike got from me, despite me having no interest in anyone other than Mike.

So it is highly possible for a woman to send all the "correct" signals and still get an unwanted kiss or unwanted advances. And that is way depictions of what real consent looks like are so important.


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

Bards and Sages (Julie) said:


> Some men are dense. They think you are "playing hard to get." Some men simply can't fathom that A woman they want doesn't want them, and all the signals in the world don't compute. Some men just assume that if you allow one man to do or say certain things, that means he can do and say the same things. Because as a woman you don't have the "right" to deny any man of something you allowed a different man to do.
> 
> I met my husband in a gaming group. I was the only woman in the group. When Mike and I started to flirt because there was a mutual attraction, another guy in the group took that as me "being into" certain conversations. I never sent any signals or acted in any way to invite the behavior. When one day I told him a comment was inappropriate, he got offended because I "let" Mike say certain things but not him. He genuinely felt entitled to the same treatment that Mike got from me, despite me having no interest in anyone other than Mike.
> 
> So it is highly possible for a woman to send all the "correct" signals and still get an unwanted kiss or unwanted advances. And that is way depictions of what real consent looks like are so important.


This. If you think that sexual assault (which definition can and does include a kiss or a grope) can't happen unless a woman signals interest, I'm not sure what planet you would have been living on. Not this one. The obvious next step is to say that if assault does happen, the woman must have signaled interest.

It's clearly time for the "Tea Consent" video! Can't really say it any more clearly than this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQbei5JGiT8


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## Paranormal Kitty (Jun 13, 2017)

Do readers/writers of romance generally feel like books in that genre should depict relationships in an idealized way, and is it assumed that any depiction of bad behavior is idealizing that behavior? I'm back and forth on whether to categorize my book in paranormal romance as well as urban fantasy (since Amazon gives you two categories). The relationship between the MC and her love interest isn't an "ideal" relationship, and I wouldn't want to be accused of idealizing some of the things that happen between them. However, a healthy, functional relationship wouldn't even make sense given their back stories and the situation they are in. There is a surprise kiss (which is why I started this thread after reading the article I posted). It's depicted as sort of violent because he gets jealous of her flirting with another guy and grabs her out of her chair. She shoves him away and yells at him, then he pins her against the wall and kisses her. She's conflicted in how she feels about it, and he apologizes later. The build-up to this scene is them trying to fight their feelings for each other while under the stress of working together on a high-stakes mission. I know some people will make "relationship goals" out of anything (like Joker and Harley Quinn), but the intent is to say "this is how it is" not "this is how it should be."


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

Wouldn't work one bit for me--as a reader, every alarm bell would go off, and I'd quit reading--but I'm not every romance reader, as I think has been made clear. That's why I've been at pains to say--if the way you write around consent (or non) is working for you (which I measure by $$$), and you don't care if some readers put "rapey" in a review--go for it.


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## amdonehere (May 1, 2015)

> I don't think some of you understand what consent is and isn't. You aren't letting someone kiss you when you don't want them to. *sigh* They're kissing you without your permission. That's not okay!


I feel like this whole thread is going around and around in circle and somehow this point is the source of contention here.

At no point did anyone here condoned bodily contact of any kind without consent.

Some of us don't like the whole verbal asking for permission thing. We just don't. We don't find it romantic no matter how much you all try to convince us that is it is. Human interactions are a kaleidoscope with many shades of gray and some of us don't want to be dictated to by a PC way of how a kiss must be done.

Again, for fiction, we're talking about the love interest here, not some random character who the FMC is not attracted to. In real life, we're talking about the person we're already attracted to. Fiction or reality, we're not talking about someone who you don't want to kiss you.

A kiss to me by someone who is a LOVE INTEREST, whether in real life or ficiton, does not amount to sexual assault. The kiss itself is a form of comminication. Sometimes, expressions are not said, but shown. I don't know how people convey interest in these days of Tinder. But from what I can remember, when two people are attracted to each other, usually they know. Even if they weren't dating before, there is unspoken chemistry. The guy doesn't need to ask me. If he didn't have my permission, he'd never have gotten to the moment where I'd allow it to happen in the first place. And even if it is entirely spontaneous out of the blue, if I do decide no or am not ready, I'm perfectly capable of pushing him away and telling him no, assuming again, we're talking about someone who got some vibe from me that we've got something going on, or in the case of fiction, a love interst. We're talking not some random gross dude trying to take advantage of you.

We're talking about the situation where the woman WANTS to be kissed by that person. In the case of fiction, the story would have set it up that this is a love interest or potential love interest. Where we disagree is simply whether the man must stop and ask "Can I kiss you?" Those of you who find it romantic, great. Others like me don't. I agree with usedtoposthere about this. Write for your audience. And don't dictate how other should want a kiss or write a kiss.

Just my 2 cents, I don't like it that a surprise kiss is classified as sexual assault. A spontaneous kiss can happen in very innocent manners for many reasons not just romance. I'd already given examples above. Sexual assault is a very serious matter and I feel equating that to what might be an innocent kiss simply because the guy didn't ask for permission to kiss, to be undermining the seriousness of what real rape and sexual assault is. I can't imagine someone who was spontaneously kissed telling a rape victim that she understands what a rape victim had gone through, or that they share the same experience.


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## Paranormal Kitty (Jun 13, 2017)

Usedtoposthere said:


> Wouldn't work one bit for me--as a reader, every alarm bell would go off, and I'd quit reading--but I'm not every romance reader, as I think has been made clear. That's why I've been at pains to say--if the way you write around consent (or non) is working for you (which I measure by $$$), and you don't care if some readers put "rapey" in a review--go for it.


So, would you say that when people pick up something that's in the romance category, they are looking for the type of relationship they would want, rather than just reading the characters' relationship for how it is whether it's healthy/desirable or not? I've gotten a lot of mixed advice about shelving in that category or not. There is a love story (for better or for worse) between a witch and a vampire, but that's not the main plot and theoretically it could be changed to a platonic relationship without changing the main plot. It seems to me like a straight-up urban fantasy and it doesn't belong in romance, but I've also been told I'm missing out on potential audience by not putting it there. So I'm weighing the potential readers vs. bad reviews I might get for not filling all the strict expectations that romance readers seem to have.

Also I forgot to mention, but it's not like she falls for him because he surprise kissed her. It actually sets their relationship backward and he has to do a lot to earn her trust because of that and because of other things that he's done. I'm also not really sure if the ending would qualify as a HFN (there are two more books to come in the series). I don't want to give it away on the forum, but if you think you could help me with this decision you can send me a message and I'll give more details.


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## Crystal_ (Aug 13, 2014)

Doglover said:


> I think if a bloke asked first, it would kill the mood stone dead. If a girl or woman doesn't want the kiss, she is perfectly capable of shoving him off. My first kiss was at a party at my parents' house, given by my brother (the party, not the kiss). It was from one of his friends who leaned forward and kissed me. I was amazed, shocked, shivery. He was eighteen so that's as far as it would have gone, but it meant a lot to me and now 56 years later, I still remember it clearly. If he'd asked first, I would have been scared off and missed something precious.
> 
> I know this sort of age gap seems creepy today, but we were in my parents' house, in a room with lots of other people.


Nah, it depends on the guy. My now husband asked if he could kiss me and it was adorable and sweet. He's very much the "adorkable" type.

I really can't see a lot of romance heroes asking "Can I kiss you," because heroes usually have a good read on social cues. In fact, I'm not sure I've ever read a surprise kiss in a romance. There are usually many, many non-verbal cues leading up to a first kiss. We romance authors usually drag out the first kiss, so most first kiss moments are littered with non verbal cues. Here's the one from my WIP:



> "It is." *I move towards her. **Until my hands are skimming her hips.
> She looks up at me with those doe eyes.
> Her lips part.
> She nods.
> ...


I bolded all the non-verbal cues. Neither of them say "I want to kiss you," but it's clear they're both more than ready to kiss.

I don't see many surprise kisses in entertainment featuring adults. It's more common in YA and content aimed at teens. They fit there, because first kisses are weird and awkward, and teenagers generally feel weird and awkward about dating and romance. I don't think we need to get rid of the surprise kiss, because it is a thing that happens, but I do think we need more instances where it's played off as awkward and/or unwanted (which I think happens in _Avatar: The Last Airbender_ at first, but don't get me started on Ang x Katara and anime's insistence on pairing up characters that have no chemistry).


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

I think I've said a number of times here that there are all different audiences for romance who enjoy all different types of things, including straight-up rape and child abuse. If I were really worried about it, I'd read some of the darker stuff in your subgenre. Odds are it'll read pretty nonconsensual (that's what dark romance is all about), and not like something most women would want in real life.

PERSONALLY--this is my PERSONAL opinion and nothing I'm prescribing for others, not sure how much more clearly I can say that--I like my fiction realistic in the sense of realistic reactions and being able to identify with the people. I can't get excited about a "hero" who'd be an abuser in real life, especially as I know that abusive men rarely change. Millions of women can make that disconnect just fine. Look for your audience. Signal your audience in cover and blurb. Make sure the tone of your story is attractive to your audience.


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## amdonehere (May 1, 2015)

Usedtoposthere said:


> This. If you think that sexual assault (which definition can and does include a kiss or a grope) can't happen unless a woman signals interest, I'm not sure what planet you would have been living on. Not this one. The obvious next step is to say that if assault does happen, the woman must have signaled interest.
> 
> It's clearly time for the "Tea Consent" video! Can't really say it any more clearly than this.
> 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQbei5JGiT8


I don't disagree here, but I'm not talking about the stalker or some guy who didn't get it. I was speaking in response to JT Tomlin's specific example of when you're on a date and you decided you are not into that person and don't want to kiss that person. On a normal date, I would've been sending all the "not interested" signals. Believe or not, most guys would get it. Possibly there'll be the loopy odd one who is dense and socially inept and doesn't get it, but in that case, I wouldn't even have left the restaurant alone with him. I'd have left with some bogus excuse, or called a friend to come join us, whatever. In a normal date situation, you don't invite someone you aren't into, to come inside for a drink, or into any situation where you create the "time for a kiss" atmosphere, so the issue of consent would never have come up in the first place.


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## Paranormal Kitty (Jun 13, 2017)

Usedtoposthere said:


> I think I've said a number of times here that there are all different audiences for romance who enjoy all different types of things, including straight-up rape and child abuse. If I were really worried about it, I'd read some of the darker stuff in your subgenre. Odds are it'll read pretty nonconsensual (that's what dark romance is all about), and not like something most women would want in real life.
> 
> PERSONALLY--this is my PERSONAL opinion and nothing I'm prescribing for others, not sure how much more clearly I can say that--I like my fiction realistic in the sense of realistic reactions and being able to identify with the people. I can't get excited about a "hero" who'd be an abuser in real life, especially as I know that abusive men rarely change. Millions of women can make that disconnect just fine. Look for your audience. Signal your audience in cover and blurb. Make sure the tone of your story is attractive to your audience.


The thing, though, is that I don't want to seem like I'm saying this behavior is sexy or desirable, or play into people who want get off on that kind of thing. I doubt people who like dark romance would be into my book since the sex is all implied or behind closed doors. I definitely wouldn't call the MC's love interest a hero. He's a very grey character who complicates her life in many ways. I'm just trying to figure out if putting this in the romance category is going to add a connotation to the story that I don't want it to have, and if utilizing that category would be more helpful or hurtful in terms of sales and reputation. It seems to me like it really doesn't belong there, but I keep getting told that I'll be missing out on readers.


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## amdonehere (May 1, 2015)

I can totally see myself writing a scene in a light hearted rom com love story, where the MC and FMC bicker and bicker and in truth they totally have the hots for each other, but due to both their egos and pride neither would admit it, and then in a heat of argument about something ridiculous, he grabs and kisses her instead. 

But I guess this kind of romance is now supposed to be buried.


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## Going Incognito (Oct 13, 2013)

AlexaKang said:


> I can totally see myself writing a scene in a light hearted rom com love story, where the MC and FMC bicker and bicker and in truth they totally have the hots for each other, but due to both their egos and pride neither would admit it, and then in a heat of argument about something ridiculous, he grabs and kisses her instead.
> 
> But I guess this kind of romance is now supposed to be buried.


Id buy that.


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

AlexaKang said:


> I can totally see myself writing a scene in a light hearted rom com love story, where the MC and FMC bicker and bicker and in truth they totally have the hots for each other, but due to both their egos and pride neither would admit it, and then in a heat of argument about something ridiculous, he grabs and kisses her instead.
> 
> But I guess this kind of romance is now supposed to be buried.


Anyone can write whatever they want. Anyone can like whatever they want, and anyone can not like it and say so. All that's being said is that there are some readers who will not like that scene, and they may well call it out in a review. Some readers will love it, I'm sure. Do what you want.


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## amdonehere (May 1, 2015)

paranormal_kitty said:


> Do readers/writers of romance generally feel like books in that genre should depict relationships in an idealized way, and is it assumed that any depiction of bad behavior is idealizing that behavior? I'm back and forth on whether to categorize my book in paranormal romance as well as urban fantasy (since Amazon gives you two categories). The relationship between the MC and her love interest isn't an "ideal" relationship, and I wouldn't want to be accused of idealizing some of the things that happen between them. However, a healthy, functional relationship wouldn't even make sense given their back stories and the situation they are in. There is a surprise kiss (which is why I started this thread after reading the article I posted). It's depicted as sort of violent because he gets jealous of her flirting with another guy and grabs her out of her chair. She shoves him away and yells at him, then he pins her against the wall and kisses her. She's conflicted in how she feels about it, and he apologizes later. The build-up to this scene is them trying to fight their feelings for each other while under the stress of working together on a high-stakes mission. I know some people will make "relationship goals" out of anything (like Joker and Harley Quinn), but the intent is to say "this is how it is" not "this is how it should be."


I can only speak for myself. If I were reading your story, I'd say I'm ok with the first kiss. But when he pins her against the wall and kisses her again, that's a turn off for me because she already made it clear she didn't want it. I would be ok with her conflicted how she feels about the first kiss. The second kiss...that makes me feel uncomfortable because it's like saying he just needs to force her more to convince her. And no, that's not true and not cool.

But I do like the kind of romance where the 2 people seemingly can't stand each other but that's actually because they are crazy hot for each other and they don't even know it themselves. And then the sexual tension just caused one of them to spontaneously act on it. I don't think humans are logical all the time. People don't always think before they act and love & emotions can drive certain actions and this is something I think is totally plausible.


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## Paranormal Kitty (Jun 13, 2017)

^Oh, he didn't kiss her when he first grabbed her. He grabbed her to get her to leave the bar and get away from the guy she was flirting with. Then she yelled at him for telling her what to do and shoved him. He stared at her for awhile and then pinned her to the wall and kissed her. It's also well established that she could have beat him up if she wanted to. It's told from her POV and she even says that she thought about shoving him away, but chose not to. Their actual first kiss was at the beginning when they first met and they almost had sex. Then a bunch of stuff got in the way, they ended up having to work together and tried to put aside their feelings. He's also a little violent because he's new to being a vampire and hasn't learned to control himself yet.


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## amdonehere (May 1, 2015)

paranormal_kitty said:


> ^Oh, he didn't kiss her when he first grabbed her. He grabbed her to get her to leave the bar and get away from the guy she was flirting with. Then she yelled at him for telling her what to do and shoved him. He stared at her for awhile and then pinned her to the wall and kissed her. It's also well established that she could have beat him up if she wanted to. It's told from her POV and she even says that she thought about shoving him away, but chose not to. Their actual first kiss was at the beginning when they first met and they almost had sex. Then a bunch of stuff got in the way, they ended up having to work together and tried to put aside their feelings. He's also a little violent because he's new to being a vampire and hasn't learned to control himself yet.


Ok I see. It's sounding kind of Edward Cullen & Christian Grey. Well, those books sold millions so my guess is you'll be ok.

ETA: I do think in real life, especially in matters of love and relationships, people are often conflicted or unsure. That's why for me, it's not possible to say a verbal consent is the only way to go. There are many paths to how 2 people discover how they feel about each other. (Again, emphasizing here we're talking about people who are love interests, not Anthony Weiner.)


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## Gone 9/21/18 (Dec 11, 2008)

Going Incognito said:


> Any time someone tries to tell someone else what they should require I get my hackles up. He can require it in his relationships and his fiction all he wants. What he can't do is require me to require his opinions in either my relationships or my choice in fiction.





PaulineMRoss said:


> I noted the similarities between the threads, too. It's a little concerning to me the extent of black-and-white absolutism applied to an area which (in my view) is all shades of grey.


Since I write historical romance, some of the points made in this thread don't apply as much as for contemporary, but I agree with the above. However, all sorts of things happen in romances I either don't like or very much dislike. I don't read those. It's the main reason I can't say there are so many romances out there I'd like to read I'll never get through them all. There are very few romances out there I like.



Lorri Moulton said:


> A surprise kiss would seem to have a lot of different levels. I think a major/tongue involved kiss is not acceptable. I think a sweet kiss that the other character responds to would be entirely different.


I also agree with this.

That said I also have to admit one of the things I find off-putting about many romances is that behavior that would be unwanted by any female with a brain is acceptable if done by someone handsome enough and rich enough. It's just part of the genre, but not a part I like. But then I also have a problem with mysteries and thrillers where the protag is always so attractive every member of the opposite sex throws a pass. And in those genres it happens even when the guy is old and overweight. He's just so darn _attractive _ women from 20 to 80 can't resist.

As to that quote from Crystal where the guy's hands are skimming her hips - if some guy had his hands on my hips, he'd already be at the point of getting a hard shove if a kiss would be too much.


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## Nic (Nov 17, 2013)

AlexaKang said:


> I can totally see myself writing a scene in a light hearted rom com love story, where the MC and FMC bicker and bicker and in truth they totally have the hots for each other, but due to both their egos and pride neither would admit it, and then in a heat of argument about something ridiculous, he grabs and kisses her instead.
> 
> But I guess this kind of romance is now supposed to be buried.


I've written such scenes. The books sell well, and I never received a complaint.


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## Becca Mills (Apr 27, 2012)

AlexaKang said:


> I don't disagree here, but I'm not talking about the stalker or some guy who didn't get it. I was speaking in response to JT Tomlin's specific example of when you're on a date and you decided you are not into that person and don't want to kiss that person. On a normal date, I would've been sending all the "not interested" signals. Believe or not, most guys would get it. Possibly there'll be the loopy odd one who is dense and socially inept and doesn't get it, but in that case, I wouldn't even have left the restaurant alone with him. I'd have left with some bogus excuse, or called a friend to come join us, whatever. In a normal date situation, you don't invite someone you aren't into, to come inside for a drink, or into any situation where you create the "time for a kiss" atmosphere, so the issue of consent would never have come up in the first place.


The problem with expecting non-verbal signals to stave off an unwanted kiss is that quite a few people seem not to pick up those cues very well. For one thing, due to neurological variety, not everyone is equally skilled at noticing and interpreting those cues. For another, everyone interprets from the position of their past experiences. For instance, you're sitting across from a woman at a restaurant. It's your first date with her. You notice she's repeatedly meeting your gaze and then glancing away. You interpret this as sending a coy/come-hither message because that's what that body language meant with someone you dated previously. In actuality, for this new woman, it means she's uncomfortable and eager for the date to end. Misinterpretations like that seem pretty common, and even good guys/gals are capable of misinterpreting cues. If you teach every person that verbal consent should be the default choice, it at least gets them thinking about consent as an important issue instead of sending a message more like, "Oh, don't worry, you'll be able to tell what he/she wants, no problem!" Teaching people to rethink/moderate their _of-course-I-couldn't-misunderstand!!_ hubris is always a good idea, IMO. Even if they don't ask verbally, maybe they'll at least pause briefly during the lean-in to check the other person's response/expression or start a kiss slowly to see how eagerly the other person responds.

All that said, this is an area where what appears in my novels and how I talk to my daughters diverges. I would never have an admirable character stick their tongue down someone else's throat as a total surprise, because I think that's grossly invasive, but I don't insist on explicit verbal consent either.



AlexaKang said:


> But I do like the kind of romance where the 2 people seemingly can't stand each other but that's actually because they are crazy hot for each other and they don't even know it themselves. And then the sexual tension just caused one of them to spontaneously act on it. I don't think humans are logical all the time. People don't always think before they act and love & emotions can drive certain actions and this is something I think is totally plausible.


I like that too, so long as their mutual but unadmitted attraction has been well established. 



paranormal_kitty said:


> ^Oh, he didn't kiss her when he first grabbed her. He grabbed her to get her to leave the bar and get away from the guy she was flirting with. Then she yelled at him for telling her what to do and shoved him. He stared at her for awhile and then pinned her to the wall and kissed her. It's also well established that she could have beat him up if she wanted to. It's told from her POV and she even says that she thought about shoving him away, but chose not to. Their actual first kiss was at the beginning when they first met and they almost had sex. Then a bunch of stuff got in the way, they ended up having to work together and tried to put aside their feelings. He's also a little violent because he's new to being a vampire and hasn't learned to control himself yet.


Depending on how skillfully everything is handled across the entire book, I could be okay with the above. The dragging her out of the bar thing is actually more questionable for me than the kiss, as described above. Maybe she's sending clear non-verbal messages to him during the staring before he kisses her, but pulling her out of a bar because she's flirting with another guy ... that's just a jealous, controlling asshole move, you know? Not much other way to spin it. I'd want that jealous possessiveness to be well established as a symptom of his new vampirism and would expect him to get past it as the book/series progresses.

One added wrinkle in fantasy is that characters may be on a much more level playing field, in terms of ability to defend themselves, than two real-life people would be. A tall, muscular man could, in most cases, easily physically control petite woman IRL, but in fantasy, she might have awesome psychic powers and be capable of killing him with a thought. Also, in a lot of fantasy, the characters are way more violent than the run of the mill people I know in real life. I mean, I haven't thrown a punch at someone since I was nine or so, but many UF heroines aren't so restrained. So all that context may come into play in how characters relate to one another.


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## Going Incognito (Oct 13, 2013)

Becca Mills said:


> All that said, this is an area where what appears in my novels and how I talk to my daughters diverges.


Ah, but that's the whole point to the article, isn't it? 'Should' you be writing things that diverge from how you'd talk to your daughters?


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## Guest (Aug 14, 2017)

Wonderful! One more politically correct writing rule to suck the joy out of writing (nevermind the fact that 50 shades of Grey is basically one non-stop celebration of sexual violence) This is how we can do it from now on:

Jane looked at John and whispered, "I've been thinking about you everyday and I have so many conflicting emotions...it's as if I don't know what I'm feeling any more...one moment I want you and the next..."

John knew that their relationship was going nowhere and that it was time for him to act. "Jane," he said, "I'm about to surprise kiss you but I need to do this in such a way that some old drip doesn't describe my actions as sexual assault in a blog somewhere, so:
1. Do you find me attractive?
2. If yes, does your attraction extend to a level which might reasonably be interpreted as sexual attraction?
3. Do you consider a kiss to be a form of sexual intimacy?
4. If your answer is yes (or no) or 'what the hell' to any of these questions: Would you mind if I surprise kissed you?

Jane looked at John with an expression of slight bewilderment. "Sure you can kiss me...although it won't exactly be a surprise any more..."


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## amdonehere (May 1, 2015)

> The problem with expecting non-verbal signals to stave off an unwanted kiss is that quite a few people seem not to pick up those cues very well. For one thing, due to neurological variety, not everyone is equally skilled at noticing and interpreting those cues. For another, everyone interprets from the position of their past experiences. For instance, you're sitting across from a woman at a restaurant. It's your first date with her. You notice she's repeatedly meeting your gaze and then glancing away. You interpret this as sending a coy/come-hither message because that's what that body language meant with someone you dated previously. In actuality, for this new woman, it means she's uncomfortable and eager for the date to end. Misinterpretations like that seem pretty common, and even good guys/gals are capable of misinterpreting cues. If you teach every person that verbal consent should be the default choice, it at least gets them thinking about consent as an important issue instead of sending a message more like, "Oh, don't worry, you'll be able to tell what he/she wants, no problem!"


No doubt, non-verbal cues can be misinterpreted. What I'm saying is that it's the whole package. Sending not interested signals is one of the elements. In the entire scenario, (again about the specific instance of a normal date here and not the weirdo/stalker who somehow decided to target you) why would you get to the point during the date where the atmosphere might be to get closer and get intimate? I'm just not sure how, in a normal date scenariou, how someone would end up even being asked by someone she doesn't like if she could be kissed. If the guy is not the one and you're sure, you don't want to spend more time with him. You'd call it a night and go your separate ways. And most women would instinctively be guarding her personal space. (This would be a signal but the motivation would not be to signal. It's just an instinctive thing one would do.)

I'm trying to understand why one would be on a date with a person who you've come to the conclusion that you're not interested in, and somehow that person is now in the position of being close enough to you to have to ask your permission to kiss you. Usually on a bad date, people just want to find any excuse to get the hell out of there.

The only scenario I can think of is that this person is a stalker, or someone who meant to do you bodily harm, someone intending to force you against your will and won't let you leave or followed you home. In that case, yes, it's definitely on the way to assault, and I don't think he's gonna ask in that case either. And you should call the police.


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

Going Incognito said:


> Ah, but that's the whole point to the article, isn't it? 'Should' you be writing things that diverge from how you'd talk to your daughters?


I think that's an area of personal choice. Readers differ in what they want to read about, and writers differ in what they want to write about.

People are entitled to judge what somebody writes and/or reads, not to be comfortable with it (or to find it boringly realistic and wonder what sort of staid women prefer that). We all judge, all the time. I find it strange to tell you the truth that so many romance readers don't want to get any sexy feelings from romance. They have an absolute right not to like that and to say so and to read what they like, of course, but am I going to wonder whether they simply don't like sexy feelings or are uncomfortable with anything but the most conventional sex? Yes, I probably am. I'm also judgy about people who want to read or write rape/abuse fiction. I'm also judgy about people who want to read inspirational romance where the hero doesn't have any sexy thoughts, because I think it's sex-negative, pleasure-negative, and unrealistic. I'm judgy both ways. Due to my own history and my own exposure to abuse in real life, it's hard for me to separate enjoyment of abuse in fiction from reality.

I bought my new house from a lady who I'm sure would be absolutely horrified by what I write. She'd go way past judging. I'm sure she'd prohibit it if she could. That's my own personal line. To me, as long as somebody's work isn't breaking the law or a vendor's TOS, they have the right to write it and publish it. And I have the right to think it's disgusting, boring, or whatever adjective such a topic/book brings up for me.


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## Guest (Aug 14, 2017)

Sensibilities change. We hope for the better. This is one point that often gets missed.

Decades ago, General Hospital built an entire romantic storyline around a rape and by the end, the rapist was a "hero" on the soap. You'd be hard pressed to pull that off today (Amazon wouldn't even let you sell that book as a romance...). In fact, there are a whole lot of dubious consent story lines that Amazon buries these days in the adult dungeon that were once commonplace in the romance genre. While fiction is escapism, it is also a reflection of what a society values. A movement to encourage the concept of explicit consent is a GOOD thing, just like the movement to encourage stories including minority characters.  

The fact is, there are still too many young girls who don't understand that not only do they have the right to say no, they have the right to expect that a guy will wait for them to say yes.


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

AlexaKang said:


> No doubt, non-verbal cues can be misinterpreted. What I'm saying is that it's the whole package. Sending not interested signals is one of the elements. In the entire scenario, (again about the specific instance of a normal date here and not the weirdo/stalker who somehow decided to target you) why would you get to the point during the date where the atmosphere might be to get closer and get intimate? I'm just not sure how, in a normal date scenariou, how someone would end up even being asked by someone she doesn't like if she could be kissed. If the guy is not the one and you're sure, you don't want to spend more time with him. You'd call it a night and go your separate ways.
> 
> I'm trying to understand why one would be on a date with a person who you've come to the conclusion that you're not interested in, and somehow that person is now in the position of being close enough to you to have to ask your permission to kiss you. Usually on a bad date, people just want to find any excuse to get the hell out of there.
> 
> The only scenario I can think of is that this person is a stalker, or someone who meant to do you bodily harm, someone intending to force you against your will and won't let you leave or followed you home. In that case, yes, it's definitely on the way to assault, and I don't think he's gonna ask in that case either. And you should call the police.


I don't know how old you are, but these statements frankly kinda boggle my mind. If you want to understand, I suggest you do some research into date rape and sexual assault. Google "Stanford rape case," or "date rape statistics" or "date rape case studies." (Although as one (male) rape researcher says, "date rape" is a minimizing term and a misnomer. "Rape is rape," he says, and giving it another name suggests that "convincing" a woman to have sex with you by preventing her from leaving, taking advantage of her having had too much to drink, holding her down in a "playful" way, etc., is another way rapists convince themselves that they're not "really" rapists. They're just guys looking for "20 minutes of action.") And young people don't necessarily go out on one-on-one "dates" together. They go to parties. They go to casual get-togethers. They go running through a park and a guy comes up and starts trying to talk to them and gets mad when they don't respond, because (a) they aren't required to respond to a stranger trying to pick them up, and (b) they don't feel safe. Or the guy talked to them in the college class they have together, and when he sees her on the beach, he thinks she owes him her company and her attention. A lot of it stems from a sense of entitlement to a woman's attention. Many men think a woman owes them at least a kiss if he bought her dinner, as if he paid for physical access to her.

Rapists and sexual assaulters mostly don't wear dark clothes and lurk in alleys, and they don't wear signs. You find out who they are when you say "no" to the kiss or to going further than the kiss, when you push them away, and *they don't accept your "no."*

Now? I feel like I'd know what to do and how to act. And I don't feel like I owe a man my attention. When I was 15, 16, 21--I didn't have nearly as clear a sense of my boundaries and that* I had a right to set them.* Why? Well, for me, because my dad died when I was 14, my mom was absent, and from the time I turned 16, I was literally on my own. But every woman has her own story. All sorts of reasons out there.


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

Bards and Sages (Julie) said:


> Sensibilities change. We hope for the better. This is one point that often gets missed.
> 
> Decades ago, General Hospital built an entire romantic storyline around a rape and by the end, the rapist was a "hero" on the soap. You'd be hard pressed to pull that off today (Amazon wouldn't even let you sell that book as a romance...). In fact, there are a whole lot of dubious consent story lines that Amazon buries these days in the adult dungeon that were once commonplace in the romance genre. While fiction is escapism, it is also a reflection of what a society values. A movement to encourage the concept of explicit consent is a GOOD thing, just like the movement to encourage stories including minority characters.
> 
> The fact is, there are still too many young girls who don't understand that not only do they have the right to say no, they have the right to expect that a guy will wait for them to say yes.


I can't like your last sentence enough.


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## amdonehere (May 1, 2015)

Usedtoposthere said:


> I don't know how old you are, but these statements frankly kinda boggle my mind. If you want to understand, I suggest you do some research into date rape and sexual assault. Google "Stanford rape case," or "date rape statistics" or "date rape case studies." (Although as one (male) rape researcher says, "date rape" is a minimizing term and a misnomer. "Rape is rape," he says, and giving it another name suggests that "convincing" a woman to have sex with you by preventing her from leaving, taking advantage of her having had too much to drink, holding her down in a "playful" way, etc., is another way rapists convince themselves that they're not "really" rapists. They're just guys looking for "20 minutes of action.")


Seriously?? I'm not talking about rape or date rape. We're talking about a surprised kiss.

Date rapes happen because there is some kind of mutual interest, but the woman did not consent to sex. I'm NOT in disagreement with you here. Where I was talking about was a date where the woman clearly is not interested in even kissing the guy. In a date rape scenario, the date starts off well, and there is interest on both parts, but at a point, the guy crosses the line.

If you don't like the guy, and I mean you have NO interest or desire to be alone with him. It's a bad/boring/annoying date. Please tell me why you end up in a romantic scenario on such a date? Hey, maybe you're being nice or whatever, but an ordinary person don't stay with a date they aren't attracted to. They leave.

This is not about taking advantage of someone drinking/drunk where the person is unable to consent. I'm talking about someone with sound mind on a date and clearly don't want to kiss by that person in any way.

And if the person is drunk, then one can argue she can't consent anyway even if she said yes, so even if he asked for permission, it means nothing.


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

AlexaKang said:


> Seriously?? I'm not talking about rape or date rape. We're talking about a surprised kiss.
> 
> Date rapes happen because there is some kind of mutual interest, but the woman did not consent to sex. I'm NOT in disagreement with you here. Where I was talking about was a date where the woman clearly is not interested in even kissing the guy. In a date rape scenario, the date starts off well, and there is interest on both parts, but at a point, the guy crosses the line.
> 
> ...


You think lots of women walk out on the guy in the middle of the date if they're not interested? Uh ... no. Most of us wouldn't do that unless we got clear "rapey signals" or the guy was absolutely boorish and unacceptable. Getting up and walking out in the middle of the meal or something isn't something most young (or not young) women are going to be comfortable doing just because they're not that interested.

I can think of a million scenarios. Here's the sort of thing that would happen any day. He's going to say, "I'll walk you to your car," she's going to say, "No, really, I'm fine," but short of making a scene in the restaurant, how's she going to say, "Back off?" Pull out her pepper spray? Shout, "Back off, buddy!" What? So he walks her to her car, she's trying to give off "not interested here" signals, and he grabs her and kisses her goodbye anyway, because he figures, "Might as well get a kiss out of it" or "Might as well go for it. You never know." Or he actually misread her.


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## amdonehere (May 1, 2015)

Usedtoposthere said:


> You think lots of women walk out on the guy in the middle of the date if they're not interested? Uh ... no. Most of us wouldn't do that unless we got clear "rapey signals" or the guy was absolutely boorish and unacceptable. Getting up and walking out in the middle of the meal or something isn't something most young (or not young) women are going to be comfortable doing just because they're not that interested.


Not walk out in the middle of the meal. But you extend common courtesy and end the meal/coffee sooner than if you had been interested, and say goodbye, you gotta go. And you don't invite him to go somewhere romantic to be alone with you. I'm NOT saying inviting someone somewhere entitles the guy to do anything. I'm saying if you aren't into him, you wouldn't want to invite him. It'd be, ugh.


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

AlexaKang said:


> Not walk out in the middle of the meal. But you extend common courtesy and end the meal/coffee sooner than if you had been interested. And you don't invite him to go somewhere romantic to be alone with you. I'm NOT saying inviting someone somewhere entitles the guy to do anything. I'm saying if you aren't into him, you wouldn't want to invite him. It'd be, ugh.


You don't have to "invite him to go somewhere romantic." All you have to do is say "Goodbye" and not get your car door open fast enough, or not sprint away through the parking lot fast enough, or wherever it is you're saying, "Show's over."

Man. I didn't date that long--started dating my husband at age 22--but even *I* can remember these scenarios. Have lots of nieces and nephews, too. Comes in handy for writing romance. These are the experiences young women have. This is normal stuff.

I have a sister who's always been very beautiful. This stuff would happen to her ALL the time. For example, she was telling me one day about a time when she was married and had 4 kids. She went to look at a horse a guy was selling--a guy who knew her and her husband. They were walking over to the barn or whatever, talking, she was being beautiful and charming because she is, and he grabbed her and kissed her. When she pulled away and said "no," he sort of shrugged and kept on. He wasn't a rapist. He was a guy who had a thing for her, which lots of guys did, and when he was alone with her, he thought he'd check.

She was probably 40 at the time. But that's pretty much been the story of her life. What was she supposed to do? Dye her hair brown or cut it short? Not smile in social situations in case guys got the wrong idea? Gain 40 pounds?


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## Paranormal Kitty (Jun 13, 2017)

Becca Mills said:


> Depending on how skillfully everything is handled across the entire book, I could be okay with the above. The dragging her out of the bar thing is actually more questionable for me than the kiss, as described above. Maybe she's sending clear non-verbal messages to him during the staring before he kisses her, but pulling her out of a bar because she's flirting with another guy ... that's just a jealous, controlling [expletive] move, you know? Not much other way to spin it. I'd want that jealous possessiveness to be well established as a symptom of his new vampirism and would expect him to get past it as the book/series progresses.
> 
> One added wrinkle in fantasy is that characters may be on a much more level playing field, in terms of ability to defend themselves, than two real-life people would be. A tall, muscular man could, in most cases, easily physically control petite woman IRL, but in fantasy, she might have awesome psychic powers and be capable of killing him with a thought. Also, in a lot of fantasy, the characters are way more violent than the run of the mill people I know in real life. I mean, I haven't thrown a punch at someone since I was nine or so, but many UF heroines aren't so restrained. So all that context may come into play in how characters relate to one another.


Yeah, his behavior isn't meant to be seen in a positive light. Like I said, he's no hero and very morally grey. Sometimes he seems to be more of a villain than the MC's love interest. For example, the thing that came between them in the first place is that she learned he came to town for the purpose of killing one of her loved ones. It's not a black and white, good and evil type of story by any means. It is UF with lots of black magic, fights and gunfire. That's why I'm unsure about cross-listing in paranormal romance even though I'm being told that would get me more readers and more visibility.


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## amdonehere (May 1, 2015)

Usedtoposthere said:


> You don't have to "invite him to go somewhere romantic." All you have to do is say "Goodbye" and not get your car door open fast enough, or sprint away through the parking lot fast enough, or wherever it is you're saying, "Show's over."


You mean he's chasing you down to your car to try to grab and kiss you, even though you already said goodbye and left?

Then that guy is a stalker/rapist/attacker or something. Not a romantic interest who end up in a scenario where he has to get my verbal permission to kiss me. In that case what I need is pepper spray.

ETA: I'm not sure if the asking permission to kiss is relevant here really, because the answer is obviously going to be no. If the guy is chasing you down after you left to ask to kiss you, we really aren't talking about consent anymore. We're talking psycho. This isn't a guy who cares about you consenting or not.


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## Going Incognito (Oct 13, 2013)

Usedtoposthere said:


> I think that's an area of personal choice. Readers differ in what they want to read about, and writers differ in what they want to write about.
> 
> People are entitled to judge what somebody writes and/or reads, not to be comfortable with it (or to find it boringly realistic and wonder what sort of staid women prefer that). We all judge, all the time. I find it strange to tell you the truth that so many romance readers don't want to get any sexy feelings from romance. They have an absolute right not to like that and to say so and to read what they like, of course, but am I going to wonder whether they simply don't like sexy feelings or are uncomfortable with anything but the most conventional sex? Yes, I probably am. I'm also judgy about people who want to read or write rape/abuse fiction. I'm also judgy about people who want to read inspirational romance where the hero doesn't have any sexy thoughts, because I think it's sex-negative, pleasure-negative, and unrealistic. I'm judgy both ways. Due to my own history and my own exposure to abuse in real life, it's hard for me to separate enjoyment of abuse in fiction from reality.
> 
> I bought my new house from a lady who I'm sure would be absolutely horrified by what I write. She'd go way past judging. I'm sure she'd prohibit it if she could. That's my own personal line. To me, as long as somebody's work isn't breaking the law or a vendor's TOS, they have the right to write it and publish it. And I have the right to think it's disgusting, boring, or whatever adjective such a topic/book brings up for me.


Yep, yep, for sure. The whole variety is the spice of life thing, and we definitely all judge. Everyone has to find where on the spectrum they fit, and personal life experiences plays a big part since that's the lense we judge _everything_ thru. Makes for a fun and interesting debate, as well. Tho I'm very glad there are enough readers on my little spread of the spectrum to keep me in those first class seats en route to those conferences, as I enjoy them too, lol.


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

AlexaKang said:


> You mean he's chasing you down to your car to try to grab and kiss you, even though you already said goodbye and left?
> 
> Then that guy is a stalker/rapist/attacker or something. Not a romantic interest who end up in a scenario where he has to get my verbal permission to kiss me. In that case what I need is pepper spray.
> 
> ETA: I'm not sure if the asking permission to kiss is relevant here really, because the answer is obviously going to be no. If the guy is chasing you down after you left to ask to kiss you, we really aren't talking about consent anymore. We're talking psycho. This isn't a guy who cares about you consenting or not.


Oh for heaven's sake. That was hyperbole. I didn't mean you're literally sprinting to the car. I meant you're saying, "Goodbye. It was nice to meet you," and he kisses you. Which is something that happens a LOT. In fact, I'd say "usually," in my experience, unless you literally turn away as you're saying it and start striding toward the car.


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## Guest (Aug 14, 2017)

AlexaKang said:


> Not walk out in the middle of the meal. But you extend common courtesy and end the meal/coffee sooner than if you had been interested, and say goodbye, you gotta go. And you don't invite him to go somewhere romantic to be alone with you. I'm NOT saying inviting someone somewhere entitles the guy to do anything. I'm saying if you aren't into him, you wouldn't want to invite him. It'd be, ugh.


I think part of the problem is that you are equating all male/female social interactions as "dates" and that they can't be platonic. There are plenty of situations where a woman might go somewhere with a man or invite a man to an activity that doesn't involve being into him.

Most of my friends are male. And there have been plenty of times that a male friend and I have gone off on a totally non-romantic activity. Go to lunch with a male co-worker. Go to a movie with a male friend. Because of this, however, I sometimes "forget" that there are men who assume that if a woman asked them to do something...anything...they take it as a "signal." I had a very awkward situation at a convention one year where a guy I was discussing game mechanics with. It was an interesting discussion (as I am a game publisher) but I was getting hungry and I only had so much time before an event. I asked him if he wanted to grab something to eat at the food court because I wanted to discuss the topic more but was on a schedule (me multitasking). What in my mind was an interesting business discussion apparently was a "come on" to him and the next thing I know he got very...clingy. Meanwhile, my male colleagues invite each other to meals all the time and nobody gets groped. But because I am a female, there was this notion of "implied interest" because I invited a guy to eat at the food court.

Men are dense.


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## amdonehere (May 1, 2015)

> I can think of a million scenarios. Here's the sort of thing that would happen any day. He's going to say, "I'll walk you to your car," she's going to say, "No, really, I'm fine," but short of making a scene in the restaurant, how's she going to say, "Back off?" Pull out her pepper spray? Shout, "Back off, buddy!" What? So he walks her to her car, she's trying to give off "not interested here" signals, and he grabs her and kisses her goodbye anyway, because he figures, "Might as well get a kiss out of it" or "Might as well go for it. You never know." Or he actually misread her.


Wait. This is a guy who won't respect your wish when you said you don't want him to walk you to the car, and yet somehow you expect him to ask your permission to kiss you and you think he'll respect that?

Look, I absolutely agree with you that date rape happens and it's a whole different level there. Issues are different in those cases. Consent is required, no room for discussion. But if it's a normal date where we're not talking about violence and force, and it's a matter of a love interest vs. psycho weirdo, I'm still not seeing the asking for permission to kiss to have any bearing. If a love interest, I'm in the camp that he doesn't have to ask and there'll be many things in the entirety that led to the kiss being ok without asking. If it's that psycho/weirdo, it's kind of besides the point to expect him to ask for consent, isn't it? In that case a simple no won't do. You'll need a restraining order.


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## Going Incognito (Oct 13, 2013)

I'm still not of the mindset tho that because real life situations sometimes happen that the surprise kiss should be done away with in fiction.


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

Many men are somewhere between "love interest" and "psycho weirdo." I'd try to count the number of times I've been kissed when it wasn't a date to me or I wasn't interested, but I'm pretty sure I can't remember. Men are taught to be aggressive, to go for it, that women want a man to take the initiative. There's lots of room for misinterpretation and overstepping boundaries in there. That's why the idea of consent, whether verbal or otherwise clearly given, has become a thing. 

I've got to get something done today, though, as interesting as it is to procrastinate. For one thing, I'd better write a book, because I actually do have first-class seats in a few days, LOL. And I need to start paying for them. No surprise kisses will happen.


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## amdonehere (May 1, 2015)

Bards and Sages (Julie) said:


> I think part of the problem is that you are equating all male/female social interactions as "dates" and that they can't be platonic. There are plenty of situations where a woman might go somewhere with a man or invite a man to an activity that doesn't involve being into him.


I'm not equating that. I was talking about the scenario of a real date. But if you are talking about something beyond that, such as platonic interaction, then we're actually changing the subject but that's ok. It's a different discusssion but



> Most of my friends are male. And there have been plenty of times that a male friend and I have gone off on a totally non-romantic activity. Go to lunch with a male co-worker. Go to a movie with a male friend. Because of this, however, I sometimes "forget" that there are men who assume that if a woman asked them to do something...anything...they take it as a "signal." I had a very awkward situation at a convention one year where a guy I was discussing game mechanics with. It was an interesting discussion (as I am a game publisher) but I was getting hungry and I only had so much time before an event. I asked him if he wanted to grab something to eat at the food court because I wanted to discuss the topic more but was on a schedule (me multitasking). What in my mind was an interesting business discussion apparently was a "come on" to him and the next thing I know he got very...clingy. Meanwhile, my male colleagues invite each other to meals all the time and nobody gets groped. But because I am a female, there was this notion of "implied interest" because I invited a guy to eat at the food court.
> 
> Men are dense.


He got clingy and misinterpreted, but certainly when a platonic relationship becomes ones-sided, the uninterested party can have a heart to hear talk and clarify things. Or to let the guy down easy, make it be known that she is interested in someone else. Someone is interested one-side doesn't result in the two people being in a romantic atmostphere where it might be kissing time and he has to debate whether to ask permission to kiss. You guys are bringing up examples that have diverted way far off from what I was originally talking about, which is whether a LOVE INTEREST needs to ask permission to kiss. Someone who you're not interested in, does not qualify as LOVE INTEREST.


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## Guest (Aug 14, 2017)

Typically, unless a woman is throwing herself at you, you shouldn't even want to kiss her.

I just wrote in a surprise kiss into my latest book. It was like watching one character stab another with a knife (but much worse).


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## Guest (Aug 14, 2017)

AlexaKang said:


> I'm not equating that. I was talking about the scenario of a real date. But if you are talking about something beyond that, such as platonic interaction, then we're actually changing the subject but that's ok. It's a different discusssion


Not necessarily. How many romantic comedies, in books, TV, and film, actually have the "friend zone" as a plot device? It is practically a sub-genre: woman who just wants to be friends but guy wants more, so the entire plot is "convincing" her and wearing her down until the "happy ending" where they are a couple? Surprise kiss and lo and behold she was in love with him and didn't even know it! The entire trope teaches women to doubt their own thoughts while encouraging guys to not take no for an answer.


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## Guest (Aug 14, 2017)

Bards and Sages (Julie) said:


> Not necessarily. How many romantic comedies, in books, TV, and film, actually have the "friend zone" as a plot device? It is practically a sub-genre: woman who just wants to be friends but guy wants more, so the entire plot is "convincing" her and wearing her down until the "happy ending" where they are a couple? Surprise kiss and lo and behold she was in love with him and didn't even know it! The entire trope teaches women to doubt their own thoughts while encouraging guys to not take no for an answer.


Yeah that sounds like a bad movie.


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## amdonehere (May 1, 2015)

> I have a sister who's always been very beautiful. This stuff would happen to her ALL the time. For example, she was telling me one day about a time when she was married and had 4 kids. She went to look at a horse a guy was selling--a guy who knew her and her husband. They were walking over to the barn or whatever, talking, she was being beautiful and charming because she is, and he grabbed her and kissed her. When she pulled away and said "no," he sort of shrugged and kept on. He wasn't a rapist. He was a guy who had a thing for her, which lots of guys did, and when he was alone with her, he thought he'd check.


I know you're offline now and really I should be writing too instead of procrastinating here but I can't not respond to this as if I condone this.

This guy was way over the line. If I were your sister I would have slapped him and told him to get the f**k off my property and he is to never come within 50 feet of me again. I'd have told my husband and let him take a frying pan to the jerk. I'm sorry to this happens to your sister and it's horrible that it happened to her too often. I don't personally know guys who behave this way and I don't know why so many guys she knows feel they could do this to any woman. I can't believe he didn't even apologize but an apology would not be enough.

But this is still not the scenario of our original discussion. These guys are NOT Love Interests. There's nothing romantic about a surprised kiss or any kiss by anyone NOT a love interest. Plus, these guys wouldn't have respected consent anyhow. They sound like the kind who, if they'd asked and you said no, they'll say no means yes.


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## Going Incognito (Oct 13, 2013)

ShaneJeffery said:


> Typically, unless a woman is throwing herself at you, you shouldn't even want to kiss her.


Nope, I'm not even touching that as Ive also got work to do today. But...



ShaneJeffery said:


> I just wrote in a surprise kiss into my latest book. It was like watching one character stab another with a knife (but much worse).


Reading that while your book cover glared at me made me literally lol.


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## amdonehere (May 1, 2015)

Bards and Sages (Julie) said:


> Not necessarily. How many romantic comedies, in books, TV, and film, actually have the "friend zone" as a plot device? It is practically a sub-genre: woman who just wants to be friends but guy wants more, so the entire plot is "convincing" her and wearing her down until the "happy ending" where they are a couple? Surprise kiss and lo and behold she was in love with him and didn't even know it! The entire trope teaches women to doubt their own thoughts while encouraging guys to not take no for an answer.


That trope only works if the story is set up where the audience is prepped to know that the guy IS a love interest.

I don't believe in real life women doubt themselves because of some rom-com. Come on, Julie! Give women more credit than that. This is where I feel like the whole protecting women's rights/respect, however well-intended, starts to fall into women are so weak they can't protect themselves or think for themselves, where it all defeats the purpose of self-determination and empowerment.

Preference for a sexual partner/romantic interest is very personal and specific. When you don't desire someone, people don't generally start thinking it's ok for that other person to come on to me because I saw it done on TV/movie/book.

And yeah, it's insulting to the guys too. As if they can't have the good senses to tell what's right and wrong just because they saw something in a fictional rom com.

ETA: Yeah, sounds like a bad movie.


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## Elizabeth Barone (May 6, 2013)

Whether you want to believe it or not, people look to entertainment for their ideas of romance. Not everyone grows up in a family with healthy relationships, for example, so yeah -- they'd look to romance novels and rom coms. You can certainly include surprise kisses in your romance; the takeaway here is being more mindful of consent in your writing. Are you portraying healthy, swoon-worthy relationships? Or are your characters lacking respect of each other?

And men do awful things all the time because they see other men getting away with it in entertainment and in real life. It goes both ways, too -- women are also capable of rape and sexual assault, though statistically it's far more often men committing these vile acts. Sadly our society can't fathom marital rape, nor can they acknowledge rape when there are multiple witnesses and DNA evidence.

I will always include consent in my romance novels because as a survivor, it's important to me. I believe that even small actions can help dismantle rape culture. If that's not important to other romance authors, well, you do you. But it's definitely hurtful when I see authors dismissing consent as something that wayward twenty-somethings made up just to make noise. It's my hope that one day there will be no hot debate, that consent will just be another element of romance -- just like the first view, first kiss, etc, that moment when the heroine realizes "He respects me" will also give readers that warm, fuzzy feeling.


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## PermaStudent (Apr 21, 2015)

Sigh. I finally return to this thread and... yeah. There's all levels of gray and assumption going on here, so I'm going to go ahead and post my story.



Bards and Sages (Julie) said:


> Not necessarily. How many romantic comedies, in books, TV, and film, actually have the "friend zone" as a plot device? It is practically a sub-genre: woman who just wants to be friends but guy wants more, so the entire plot is "convincing" her and wearing her down until the "happy ending" where they are a couple? Surprise kiss and lo and behold she was in love with him and didn't even know it! The entire trope teaches women to doubt their own thoughts while encouraging guys to not take no for an answer.


My experiences are eerily similar to what Julie has posted. Pre-children, I was a gamer, and a lot of my friends were male, and a lot of them were dense. I ended up on some dates without intending to. (Caveat, I may be just as dense as some of my friends.)

One time, I was complaining to a friend (a guy friend) about how planning my wedding was stressing me out. Social events aren't my thing, and social events where I'm in the spotlight are *really* not my thing. So I was complaining. We were walking back from a grad school lecture and he needed a ride to his car (I was parked closer). So we got in the car, continued to chat, I'm venting on the stupid wedding and how much I wanted to call it off. We get to his car, and he suggests that maybe we should get coffee sometime and he'd love to talk about it more. Okay, that sounds great. He full-on kisses me and then gets out of the car and leaves. And I'm sitting there like, WTF? What? What just happened here?

In the movies, this is the part where I realize I've been an idiot, and all the stress surrounding the wedding is actually because I'm with The Wrong Guy. And now that The Right Guy had kissed me, I can see it's him I should be with, and after several angsty scenes, I finally leave my fiance. At the altar. Wearing some crazy enormous dress that gets shut in a cab door as I make a grand escape with Mr. Surprise Kiss guy.

In real life, I went, WTF? That was creeptastic. Then I went home, told my fiance he was never going to believe what happened to me today. He asked if I punched the guy. It still weirds me out today, because that kiss was an incredible betrayal of the friendship. For a while, it made me question everything, from how I was presenting myself and my relationship with my fiance to whether or not I should be alone with male friends and colleagues.

To clarify, I'd known the surprise kisser for four years. He knew me. He knew that I'd been with my fiance for six years at that point. We'd been living together for two years. We'd just bought a house. What was he thinking? Don't know, don't care. Certain movies haven't been the same for me since. I'm not saying surprise kisses are inherently evil and can never be done anywhere ever, but (for me) there are parameters.


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## Guest (Aug 14, 2017)

PermaStudent said:


> Sigh. I finally return to this thread and... yeah. There's all levels of gray and assumption going on here, so I'm going to go ahead and post my story.
> 
> My experiences are eerily similar to what Julie has posted. Pre-children, I was a gamer, and a lot of my friends were male, and a lot of them were dense. I ended up on some dates without intending to. (Caveat, I may be just as dense as some of my friends.)
> 
> ...


Wow, thanks for sharing that story. Amazing example of how you can be friends with someone yet neither of you have any clue how the other one is perceiving your relationship. That guy sounds super yucky.


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## Becca Mills (Apr 27, 2012)

Going Incognito said:


> Ah, but that's the whole point to the article, isn't it? 'Should' you be writing things that diverge from how you'd talk to your daughters?


I think everyone has a different answer to this one. Personally, there are certain areas where I ... let's say, _model the world I want rather than the one we have_. But in most areas, I tend to err toward showing the world we have. That might be because I'm not a strong enough writer to pull off a whole lot of modelling without sounding like a PSA. Modeling a better world only works for me as a reader if it's absolutely seamless and natural as part of the narrative, and it takes a very deft touch on the author's part to pull it off.


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## amdonehere (May 1, 2015)

> I will always include consent in my romance novels because as a survivor, it's important to me. I believe that even small actions can help dismantle rape culture. If that's not important to other romance authors, well, you do you. But it's definitely hurtful when I see authors dismissing consent as something that wayward twenty-somethings made up just to make noise. It's my hope that one day there will be no hot debate, that consent will just be another element of romance -- just like the first view, first kiss, etc, that moment when the heroine realizes "He respects me" will also give readers that warm, fuzzy feeling.


Elizabeth, just so you know, nobody here is dismissing consent.

The debate here is whether consent to a kiss needs to conform the PC dictated way of asking for specific verbal permission. Some of us disagree with that. I can see that for you, asking for permission is important, but it is also true that for many people, a stolen kiss by someone who is a love interest, whose kiss is wanted and desired, does not rise to the level of sexual assault.

That is not to undermine what you went through. But we're being told by the blogger to stop liking what we like because he and some people don't like it or agree with it, and that we're wrong to like it. I disagree with that. And fundamentally, I still disagree with the proposal that all kisses must be preceded by a verbal permission. Every person is different. Every relationship is different. Given your experience, someone you enter a relationship with will need to be more sensitive than someone who enters into a relationship with me. One size does not fit all. If someone has specific sensitivity in a relationship, then perhaps the person has to take precaution to let that be known.

I don't doubt your reason why you feel it's important to write kiss scenes one way. But there are in fact a lot of people today who are looking for reasons to be offended. These days no matter what we say or do, someone out there will be offended by something. When I was growing up, if someone say something offensive, we grow thicker skin and learn to overcome and not let it bother us, and we become stronger because of it. Today, everyone is sensitive about everything and wants the system to protect against every possible perceived slight. But that's a whole different can of worm altogether and I won't go into that. (To be clear, I'm not talking about your reaction. However, your legitimate reason for what you believe does not negate the reality that there are people who do just want to make noise.)


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## Crystal_ (Aug 13, 2014)

AlexaKang said:


> Elizabeth, just so you know, nobody here is dismissing consent.
> 
> The debate here is whether consent to a kiss needs to conform the PC dictated way of asking for specific verbal permission. Some of us disagree with that. I can see that for you, asking for permission is important, but it is also true that for many people, a stolen kiss by someone who is a love interest, whose kiss is wanted and desired, does not rise to the level of sexual assault.


Actually, I don't think anyone is saying the consent needs to be verbal. Most communication is non-verbal. This is a silly strawman that always comes up with issues of consent. No one is saying it has to be verbal. It *can* be verbal and that can be sweet, cute, or even really hot (dirty talk is basically verbal consent). It can also be awkward or weird, but kissing and sex can be really awkward or weird.



Bright Write said:


> Wonderful! One more politically correct writing rule to suck the joy out of writing (nevermind the fact that 50 shades of Grey is basically one non-stop celebration of sexual violence) This is how we can do it from now on:
> 
> Jane looked at John and whispered, "I've been thinking about you everyday and I have so many conflicting emotions...it's as if I don't know what I'm feeling any more...one moment I want you and the next..."
> 
> ...


*eyeroll* I have a strict explicit consent rule in my books and it doesn't remotely limit me. It's really, really easy to make sure every sex scene includes explicit verbal or non-verbal consent (again, dirty talk). If you ask my readers what comes to mind when they think of my books, 99% of them will include "super hot" in the first few attributes.

I do make an exception for BDSM flavored relationships where the couple already has a safe word (or uses red/yellow/green), but I make sure it's clear the submissive partner is comfortable using the safeword in some low stakes situation before the dominant partner really pushes her.


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## Anarchist (Apr 22, 2015)

Bards and Sages (Julie) said:


> Men are dense.


That's not nice.


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## EvanPickering (Mar 8, 2016)

Just randomly chiming in here, but...

I think every time I've ever kissed a girl it was a "surprise kiss." I also was pretty damn sure in every case that they wanted me to. Every girl we had been on 'dates' or 'hung out' one on one. Usually you can tell by a girl's body language and attentiveness to you if they want you to do something.

Also, you can usually tell by their body language and attentiveness if they DON'T want you to do something.

I don't think there's anything wrong with asking "can I kiss you?" to make it fully consensual. But I think the problem more lies in guys who just bulldoze ahead and kiss a girl just because they want to clearly when the girl doesn't want to or isn't sure. I don't think it's necessary to have to ask as long as you're paying attention.

Interestingly, when I was in high school I had a girl "surprise kiss" me and I was pretty upset about it. I didn't really like this girl at all she would just follow me around and start talking to me until one time she just grabbed me and kissed me, and when I didn't kiss back she said "Really, that's it?" and stormed off angrily. I felt sort of objectified, in a way.

So in a strange way, I can sympathize with women who have dealt with very aggressive men. For what it's worth, I am a millenial, and I am very aware of consensuality and I think I've only ever once hooked up with a girl when I wasn't sure she was totally into it. I wasn't even sure I was into it, lol. We were both pretty drunk, unfortunately.

I'm going down the rabbit hole here (no pun intended), but it's an interesting challenge sometimes for guys, because many girls I date when it comes to hooking up and sex want guys to be very dominant/aggressive. I like that, personally, but they also usually don't want to have to talk about it, which to me is just crazy. I'm pretty aware of this stuff and I default on being very respectful, but i'm often led to a place of being more aggressive by the girl. It'd be alot easier (and hotter) if they just said something, lol.

I think the answer clearly isn't "just be aggressive in case they like it" lol. (Louis C.K. has a funny bit about this, saying 'I wasn't going to rape you in the off chance you were into that.')

Dating is weird, sex is complicated, consent is obviously super important I think everyone agrees on that. I personally don't think we need kissing consent per se, but I guess if tons of guys are just kiss-attacking girls who clearly aren't into it then maybe we do lol.

Evan


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## amdonehere (May 1, 2015)

PermaStudent said:


> Sigh. I finally return to this thread and... yeah. There's all levels of gray and assumption going on here, so I'm going to go ahead and post my story.
> 
> My experiences are eerily similar to what Julie has posted. Pre-children, I was a gamer, and a lot of my friends were male, and a lot of them were dense. I ended up on some dates without intending to. (Caveat, I may be just as dense as some of my friends.)
> 
> ...


Wow, that is super creepy. You know something? You were not on a date and he was not a love interest. In fiction, if this kind of things happen, there's a little leeway where the author/script writer would have set it up so audience knows he is THE love interest and the girl would be ready for it and want it. Here, you're talking about real life. You're not on a date because you're giving someone a ride. Agreeing to get coffee later the way you described it is not a situation of romance. It was definitely a betrayal of friendship and trust.

Here's the thing. These guys who forcibly kissed people (the guy buying the horse and your ex-friend) were never even in the position to be asking the question in the first place. Both women were married or committed to another guy. To me, it's like saying, if a random guy at the gas station wants to kiss me, shall he ask me for consent first? That question is irrelevant because, hell, he doesn't have the right to ask in the first place.

My own conclusion here (and no one needs to agree with me) is that romantic relationships are inherently messy sometimes. There are certain clear lines that can be drawn (eg rape, clear cases of sexual harassment by someone in no position to make any romantic gestures). But other times, there are blurred lines and thousands shades of grays. I'd prefer that people figure out their own parameters and each person handles their lives accordingly, rather than everyone being told that only the preference of one segment can be acceptable.

Personally, I'd prefer to sometimes have to confront things unpleasant, to keep alive the possibility of something very pleasant. Life is not perfect. Others may choose to differ.


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## Becca Mills (Apr 27, 2012)

AlexaKang said:


> But there are in fact a lot of people today who are looking for reasons to be offended. These days no matter what we say or do, someone out there will be offended by something. When I was growing up, if someone say something offensive, we grow thicker skin and learn to overcome and not let it bother us, and we become stronger because of it. Today, everyone is sensitive about everything and wants the system to protect against every possible perceived slight. But that's a whole different can of worm altogether and I won't go into that.


Alexa and others, please don't take this (or any thread) into politics in a larger way. (That includes writing four sentences about it before saying you won't get into it. Four sentences = into it.) We try to provide some carefully monitored leeway for writing topics that touch on political issues, as this one obviously does, but KBoards is absolutely not the place to expand those conversations.


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## Kal241 (Jan 11, 2017)

Bards and Sages (Julie) said:


> Men are dense.


Communication is a two-way street, but not all people know what the traffic signals mean, thus leading to accidents. And the fact that there are enough accidents that threads like this come up means that the gender of the driver doesn't mean a thing.

And I say this as someone on the spectrum, who literally can't pick up on social cues and signals because my brain is wired in a weird way.

Not saying you're wrong, just spreading equality on the thread!


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## josielitton (Jul 21, 2014)

AlexaKang said:


> Just seeing the question in the subject and that blog title gives me a headache.
> 
> You guys must be Millennials, right?
> 
> ...


Can I share that cave?


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## Kal241 (Jan 11, 2017)

Lorri Moulton said:


> Am I the only one seeing the ad with women falling out of bathing suits...below this thread?


LOL! I caught that one, too.

Does that mean we have to ask the bathing suits if they got consent to fall off? Or ask the photographer if he/she asked "can I photograph you?"


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## amdonehere (May 1, 2015)

Becca Mills said:


> Alexa and others, please don't take this (or any thread) into politics in a larger way. (That includes writing four sentences about it before saying you won't get into it. Four sentences = into it.) We try to provide some carefully monitored leeway for writing topics that touch on political issues, as this one obviously does, but KBoards is absolutely not the place to expand those conversations.


Yes Ma'am! Got it.


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## Kal241 (Jan 11, 2017)

Usedtoposthere said:


> Ridicule of somebody's perfectly legitimate point of view isn't cool.


Not really ridicule, just pointing out the flaw that occurs if the point of view becomes the norm: if we're asking consent for a kiss now, I'm sure we'll have to ask it for anything sooner or later. I mean, how many of those models on the photos actually signed the waiver to allow net users to use their appearance on ad covers? (which is topical to stock photo users, who also use models)


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

Crystal_ said:


> Actually, I don't think anyone is saying the consent needs to be verbal. Most communication is non-verbal. This is a silly strawman that always comes up with issues of consent. No one is saying it has to be verbal. It *can* be verbal and that can be sweet, cute, or even really hot (dirty talk is basically verbal consent). It can also be awkward or weird, but kissing and sex can be really awkward or weird.
> 
> *eyeroll* I have a strict explicit consent rule in my books and it doesn't remotely limit me. It's really, really easy to make sure every sex scene includes explicit verbal or non-verbal consent (again, dirty talk). If you ask my readers what comes to mind when they think of my books, 99% of them will include "super hot" in the first few attributes.
> 
> I do make an exception for BDSM flavored relationships where the couple already has a safe word (or uses red/yellow/green), but I make sure it's clear the submissive partner is comfortable using the safeword in some low stakes situation before the dominant partner really pushes her.


All of this.


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## Going Incognito (Oct 13, 2013)

Crystal_ said:


> Actually, I don't think anyone is saying the consent needs to be verbal.


The guy who wrote the article is, I believe.

"Consent involves two people talking about kissing each other; it's giving you a head start. If you can't make that romantic, then you should put those romantic plotlines aside and focus on other things for a while. Or simply leave sexual activity out."

"A couple's first kiss requires clear, unambiguous permission. By far the best way to get it is for one of them to outright ask the other, "May I kiss you?" While this might seem like a mood killer, that's only because we haven't romanticized it yet. But we can -Disney's Frozen provides a great example. Enough stories like those, and this question will have as much romantic significance as "Will you marry me?"* Done in the right manner, this question can be as passionate and impulsive as the surprise kiss."

"Regardless of cultural expectations, body language will never be sufficient to communicate consent between people who are hooking up. It's simply too subjective. Nonverbal signals are incredibly easy to misinterpret or exaggerate, even for people with strong social skills. Add in the people with compromised social skills and people who are part of a different culture or subculture, and mistakes are guaranteed.

If we want to reduce the occurrence of rape in our society, we have to get over the idea that romance happens through some magical mental connection. The last time I checked, the human race didn't have telepathy.

This means that in real life or in stories, if anyone wants to kiss someone new, then they should ask. It may seem cumbersome or scary at first, but we'll have to get over that, because it's not fair to put the burden of refusing sexual contact on potential victims. The person initiating contact is responsible for getting a free and informed "yes" before they reach each base on the field."

Edited quote punctuation


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## Kal241 (Jan 11, 2017)

Going Incognito said:


> The guy who wrote the article is, I believe.
> 
> "Consent involves two people talking about kissing each other; its giving you a head start. If you cant make that romantic, then you should put those romantic plotlines aside and focus on other things for a while. Or simply leave sexual activity out."
> 
> ...


See, I find that a slippery slope when it comes to a popular romance trope: the drunken scene. Two characters get drunk, and kiss, maybe leads to more, maybe not...where is the consent? Both individuals are impaired mentally, and shouldn't be making big decisions, but they just did. And commonly, none of the characters can remember it because they blacked out, so who initiated contact? This is a huge problem for anyone writing when it comes to consent. So, in the interests of staying in the consenters category, must this trope die?

On the other hand, this kills a major source of drama, which we writers love and need some of. Do we kill such a great source of drama because we face the threat of being blacklisted for not portraying consent?


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## amdonehere (May 1, 2015)

> Actually, I don't think anyone is saying the consent needs to be verbal. Most communication is non-verbal. This is a silly strawman that always comes up with issues of consent. No one is saying it has to be verbal. It *can* be verbal and that can be sweet, cute, or even really hot (dirty talk is basically verbal consent). It can also be awkward or weird, but kissing and sex can be really awkward or weird


But the blogger is calling for eliminating the surprised kiss. The posts that followed called for requiring explicit consent.

The way I see it, if someone gives a surprised kiss, and the person being kiss accepts it, that's consent. Others more advanced thinkers feel there should be a request for permission first, and without it it's sexual assault. I view a kiss by a love interest as another form of communication to convey interest that doesn't amount to sexual assault. I even view a surprised kiss by a stranger during a celebration of something monumental to be understandable and not tantamout to sexual assault. This is where I guess I'm old school and my way of thinking is today considered "politically incorrect". I often feel that morals and values on dating and such matters have changed and I'm someone who should be banished for having such incorrect thoughts. :/



> Can I share that cave?


You're most welcomed. Just know that you're asking to join someone whose ideas on the matter are fast becoming extinct.


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## Going Incognito (Oct 13, 2013)

Kal241 said:


> See, I find that a slippery slope when it comes to a popular romance trope: the drunken scene. Two characters get drunk, and kiss, maybe leads to more, maybe not...where is the consent? Both individuals are impaired mentally, and shouldn't be making big decisions, but they just did. And commonly, none of the characters can remember it because they blacked out, so who initiated contact? This is a huge problem for anyone writing when it comes to consent. So, in the interests of staying in the consenters category, must this trope die?
> 
> On the other hand, this kills a major source of drama, which we writers love and need some of. Do we kill such a great source of drama because we face the threat of being blacklisted for not portraying consent?


In that case, legally anyway, neither of them _can_ consent.

And how long til verbal isn't even enough? A few times of someone changing their mind after and lying, saying 'I never gave consent,' or 'he never asked,' or then there is he said vs she said. How many of the lovely force kissers mentioned in personal stories in this thread would've later just covered their own ass with a lie? 'I asked. She said yes.' 'Umm, no. Neither of those things happened.' Will consent need to be recorded? Written, signed and notarized? Or is the reader as witness enough? What about the unreliable narrator?


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

Going Incognito said:


> In that case, legally anyway, neither of them _can_ consent.
> 
> And how long til verbal isn't even enough? A few times of someone changing their mind after and lying, saying 'I never gave consent,' or 'he never asked,' or then there is he said vs she said. How many of the lovely force kissers mentioned in personal stories in this thread would've later just covered their own ass with a lie? 'I asked. She said yes.' 'Umm, no. Neither of those things happened.' Will consent need to be recorded? Written, signed and notarized? Or is the reader as witness enough? What about the unreliable narrator?


I love it when people take something to a ridiculous extreme in order to claim it has no merit. Newsflash: it's already incredibly hard to prove sexual assault even when, just as an example, the victim is unconscious in an alley next to a dumpster, her underwear is off, there are two male eyewitnesses who are strangers to both parties, one of whom chases down the perpetrator, and the victim has dirt and leaves ground into her. The perpetrator can still be slapped on the wrist, and the victim can still see her reputation put on trial.

I don't think you need to worry that the world is going to become soooo much harder and more dangerous for almost-kinda-innocent perpetrators who just misunderstood! They thought she wanted it! anytime soon.


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## amdonehere (May 1, 2015)

Usedtoposthere said:


> I had a similar experience to PermaStudent's. My then-boyfriend (now husband) was out of the country, completely cut off. (He was a major mountain climber.) A guy I knew well, a friend who was a friend of said boyfriend asked me if I wanted to get dinner. I thought it was friendly. Evening ended up with a major kiss and grope, which was pretty overwhelming as said guy is 6'6". I stepped back, finally (back against the wall, corner apartment) and said, "I'm with X" (boyfriend). Guy said, "I don't see a ring on your finger." To him, because we weren't engaged, he was going to try. (I was cute when I was young.)
> 
> I didn't tell boyfriend for years. I was ashamed and embarrassed for having misunderstood the situation and gone out with the guy, and I didn't want to create awkwardness. Yeah that's kinda twisted, but I was 22, had been raped when I was 16 and had only started dating again at 19, and was still very uncertain around my boundaries and what was OK for men to do, as I mentioned. I believe plenty of young women though, even without that kind of history, are still pretty flummoxed. There's a strong urge for denial. You don't want to think somebody you knew and trusted did a bad thing. Plus there's reaction and processing time.
> 
> That's why saying, "You should have slapped him!" isn't all that helpful. Plenty of young women have been assaulted and have walked away the next day, maybe after a night they can't remember, unsure of what happened, unsure of what they should do about it and how much culpability they share for it. And comments like "if you let somebody kiss you," or "if you accepted the kiss," both of which were said earlier in this thread, add to that shaming and confusion. How, pray tell, was I supposed to "accept" or "not accept" a kiss from somebody when my back was literally to the wall and the man was 6'6"?


All the examples you guys are bringing up are forced kisses, not surprise kiss by a love interest to whom the woman is clearly attracted to and from whom the woman wants to be kissed by. Again, in my view, this is someone who has no right to ask for consent in the first place. You guys are describing scenarios that are clearly not romantic in nature to make your case. I'm talking about romance scenarios where it's a wanted love interest, so if we keep going in circles like this, we'll never agree so will have to agree to disagree.

It is true that women are not always sure and can be confused in situation. If they're confused, they might be confused and say yes when asked too because pressure, and then regret it anyway. Then what? I don't tink then asking will save her from feeling all the same feelings of shame and regret. Sometimes love is messy. Love is confusion. Not talking about bullies and force kiss or assaults here. Force kisses by a person who has no business kissing the woman isn't romance.

My bottom line is in a romance scenario, I don't want the killjoy of PC question of "May I kiss you now?" To each their own.

ETA: This is a guy who backed you against the wall, disregarded your affirmation that you are with X. You think this guy will give a hoot whether you say yes or no if he'd asked if he could kiss you? I doubt it. This guy is a predator. Not a love interest.


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## Going Incognito (Oct 13, 2013)

Usedtoposthere said:


> I love it when people take something to a ridiculous extreme in order to claim it has no merit. Newsflash: it's already incredibly hard to prove sexual assault even when, just as an example, the victim is unconscious in an alley next to a dumpster, her underwear is off, there are two male eyewitnesses who are strangers to both parties, one of whom chases down the perpetrator, and the victim has dirt and leaves ground into her. The perpetrator can still be slapped on the wrist, and the victim can still see her reputation put on trial.
> 
> I don't think you need to worry that the world is going to become soooo much harder and more dangerous for almost-kinda-innocent perpetrators who just misunderstood! They thought she wanted it! anytime soon.


That's the point I was trying to make by taking it to the extreme. If the article writer got his way and all fictional first kisses touch base with verbal consent first, how is that going to stop real life rapists? If you are that kind of taker in real life, no reader preferences their victim has in her choice of reading material are going to matter. They know it's wrong, for them that's half the fun. I'm not worried that the world will get harder for the perpetrators, I'm worried that it'll get harder for those who like surprise kisses in their fiction because people want to make rules that take things to the ridiculous extreme of requiring fictional kisses to show fictional verbal consent that won't matter to real life law breakers anyway. It doesn't punish rapists, it punishes innocent enjoyers of a fiction trope.


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## Charmaine (Jul 20, 2012)

People are getting caught up on the phrase 'surprise kiss'. 

In a romance, the two leads are romantically interested in each other. Within the story, there is sexual tension, lust, hoping for more, etc. In that sense, there can't be a surprise kiss in romance. Both parties want the kiss. 

This isn't real life. This isn't some random, unprovoked person kissing another. This is the two leads kissing after a battle of wills and flirting. They both want each other and the reader knows that. 

In the context of a romance novel, this article just seems silly and tone-deaf to me.


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## Guest (Aug 15, 2017)

I think the examples above are clearly instances when surprise kiss = sexual assault. Really if you're kissing someone who is taken off guard, surprised then there is no grey area. You didn't have consent. And it shouldn't be depicted in fiction that its acceptable behavior.


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## Guest (Aug 15, 2017)

I reckon I'd rather be surprise-punched in the face by a guy than have him surprise kiss me. Probably the same for a woman surprise kissing me, unless she had a really mean punch.


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## Nic (Nov 17, 2013)

EvanPickering said:


> I'm going down the rabbit hole here (no pun intended), but it's an interesting challenge sometimes for guys, because many girls I date when it comes to hooking up and sex want guys to be very dominant/aggressive. I like that, personally, but they also usually don't want to have to talk about it, which to me is just crazy. I'm pretty aware of this stuff and I default on being very respectful, but i'm often led to a place of being more aggressive by the girl. It'd be alot easier (and hotter) if they just said something, lol.
> 
> I think the answer clearly isn't "just be aggressive in case they like it" lol. (Louis C.K. has a funny bit about this, saying 'I wasn't going to rape you in the off chance you were into that.')
> 
> Dating is weird, sex is complicated, consent is obviously super important I think everyone agrees on that. I personally don't think we need kissing consent per se, but I guess if tons of guys are just kiss-attacking girls who clearly aren't into it then maybe we do lol.


All of this makes me very happy not to be American and even happier to have grown up in a different era.


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## Crystal_ (Aug 13, 2014)

Going Incognito said:


> The guy who wrote the article is, I believe.
> 
> "Consent involves two people talking about kissing each other; it's giving you a head start. If you can't make that romantic, then you should put those romantic plotlines aside and focus on other things for a while. Or simply leave sexual activity out."
> 
> ...


I agree and I disagree (with the original article). I don't think it's saying all consent needs to be verbal, just that you'll probably need to use your words at some point during a sexual escapade. I think people are better at picking up on non-verbal cues than this article gives them credit for, but I'd agree that verbal consent is probably a safer bet than non-verbal. It can be awkward, but dating and sex are awkward. We should get used to awkward and not expect seamless movie sex. That's just... not reality.

Most romances smooth over the clumsiness of sex somewhat, and most romance heroes are very well socially calibrated, so I don't see any problem with non-verbal consent. Non-verbal cues *can* be very, very obvious or blunt. But that wouldn't really be a "surprise kiss." There are all sorts of physical invitations that happen before a kiss in a romance novel. At least most of the time.

The "surprise kiss" is way more of an anime trope than anything. But then anime mostly refuses to have explicit romance (not explicit as in dirty, explicit as in clearly dating) then pairs people up for no good reason. As long as that's the case, all kisses will be surprise kisses in anime. I know I've never read a romance with a surprise kiss. That's sorta... antithetical to the idea of a romance novel.


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## Going Incognito (Oct 13, 2013)

I completely understand people having a preference when it comes to the fiction they want to read. I get that some readers prefer their consent uttered verbally under a flashing neon sign of I CONSENT! I get that others don't need it. We're all free to close any book at any time. Where my issue comes into play (with lots of things like the article) is being told that 'all writers should' whatever, because 'my wants/thoughts/beliefs on what I prefer to read should be every good person's universal wants/thoughts/beliefs on the subject, too.'
I don't need to have verbal consent in my fiction anymore than I need to watch them argue over who has to sleep on the wet spot. I've got enough reality in my actual reality. I don't need it in my entertainment but I understand that others do. My thoughts on the article's title of 'Why The Surprise Kiss Must Go' boils down to: No, It Mustn't


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

I suppose the truth is that I have no idea what a true "surprise kiss" would actually look like in real life. I don't know the guy is going to kiss me or that he's truly romantically interested, and suddenly he plants one on me without leadup, touching, looking at each other? That seems like 1980s-variety romance (not that there still isn't plenty of it around), where "passion" suddenly flares after the woman wanders away from the wagon train, or the man is angry at her for putting herself into danger, or whatever.

If it's mutual and we're into each other, it's not a surprise. If it's a surprise, he clearly isn't reading my signals and responding to them. So yeah, a true "surprise kiss" is going to seem like "I don't ask. Just kiss" to me. It's going to seem like somebody grabbing me.


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## PermaStudent (Apr 21, 2015)

ShaneJeffery said:


> I think the examples above are clearly instances when surprise kiss = sexual assault. Really if you're kissing someone who is taken off guard, surprised then there is no grey area. You didn't have consent. And it shouldn't be depicted in fiction that its acceptable behavior.


Yes, and this is exactly what I wanted to clear up when I posted the expanded story to my short comment earlier in the thread. How surprised is surprised, exactly? The details matter, in real life and in fiction, and I don't think sweeping generalizations do any good. I think that the surprise kiss is very different in real life than in fiction, and what I wrote is the experience I have that colors my opinion of what I read. I respect that it's different in fiction. What makes it different (to me, and context always matters) is that the words on the page can communicate consent *to the reader* even if there isn't explicit spoken dialog between the characters. That's a luxury that most movies don't have.

I've read surprise kisses that I was okay with. I've read some that I thought were done in poor taste. I don't judge anyone for having different experiences and holding different opinions. This discussion has been enlightening, so I thank all who have participated.


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## Doglover (Sep 19, 2013)

Usedtoposthere said:


> If my nephews had been in the room and had seen one of their 18-year-old friends suddenly kissing their 13-year-old sister on the lips, I guarantee that guy would have been carried out of the house minus a couple teeth.
> 
> Sure a young teenage girl thinks it's exciting and romantic when a grown man pays her romantic attention. That's why we have laws and mores around it. I thought it was romantic too at age 16 when a 30-year-old got close to me, gave me alcohol, told me I was pretty, and kissed me. Didn't work out so well for me. Glad your experience stayed at the "so exciting and romantic" stage. But a lot of child sexual assault occurs or begins in the child's home with a trusted adult or older teenager. That's why another adult would normally step in there and make it clear to the child (and especially to the person grabbing her) that it was unacceptable--so she didn't get the feeling it was supposed to be fine and everybody else thought it was romantic also.


Is that what you see in an innocent kiss? Grabbing and groping?

I knew someone would make something nasty out of it. There was no touching at all, just the gentle meeting of lips. I would go so far as to say there was nothing sexual about it; it wasn't a long kiss, it was a short, gentle kiss on the lips. Some people just have dirty little minds.


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## amdonehere (May 1, 2015)

Charmaine said:


> People are getting caught up on the phrase 'surprise kiss'.
> 
> In a romance, the two leads are romantically interested in each other. Within the story, there is sexual tension, lust, hoping for more, etc. In that sense, there can't be a surprise kiss in romance. Both parties want the kiss.
> 
> ...


^This. You made this point much better than I could with so fewer words. In fiction, the surprise is not some consent or non-consent thing because the whole reason why I'm reading the book is to watch these 2 characters fall in love. If she's going to not consent, when that's the whole point of the story, then I must be reading the wrong book. And yes, I'm nostalgic for those 80s sweep me off my feet romances before all the PC stuff.

In real life, the situations of surprise kiss would definitely be less likely. But it can happen. The way that I've known it to happen is this: You like the guy. You REALLY like the guy. You've dropped hints although you couldn't outright be too explicit about it because, well, you're not entirely sure he's as into you as much as you're into him. And you're a teen or young 20something so you feel a bit insecure about yourself and you don't know if the guy likes you the same way. You analyzed every microscopic detail between you and him ad nauseam with your girlfriends and read tea leaves to try to get a clue if he might like you back that way too. You feel like there is something--there has to be something because this and that-- but what if you're wrong? You keep hoping he'll make a move but you don't know that he actually will. And what more can you do? He's the guy. He needs to make the first move. And you want the guy to make the first move because, heck, because biology and basic instinct, and no amount of social progress or enlightenment will ever change that (at least for yours truly here). Then one day, you're doing something together that may or may not mean anything, and the moment happens where, if he wants to make a move, he could. You have no idea if he would. You get pessimistic and you're sure he won't and you don't want to get your hopes up. And then -- Yes! Surprise! He kissed you. He likes you too! You had no idea that was coming. Really you didn't know!

And that moment, is sublime.

On a more serious note, I do note that a few authors had shared that they really want explicit consent because of past history of sexual assault to the level of rape. I can see where you're coming from. And when I think about it, it makes me angry because some a--hat took something away from you, including the possibility of experiencing that incredible feeling that can happen where spontaneity and surprises are with the right person in the right circumstances. But I don't think the answer then is to take that away from everybody else who can derive joy from it (as the blogger suggests). Rather, I think the answer is that through your own writing, you add your voice to how you would have a kiss happen. And if that means explicit spoken or written consent, then so be it. In your story. In your world. There are more than 5 million books on Amazon. There is room for every voice to be heard to share a different POV or experience.

As for others who insist a fictional book has to include explicit consent to be "responsible". No. I don't buy it. I write fiction. I'm not a public service announcement. It's not my job to educate anyone and my opinions are not superior to others so that readers need to be educated by me. My job is to give them the story they want. If you don't like reading stories where the characters don't offer explicit consent, and surprise kisses in a romance plot or subplot bothers you, then all that means is you're not my target audience. It doesn't mean I'm here to educate you.

ETA: As I got older, I realized that it wasn't that easy on the guy either. It takes a lot of nerves to make the first move (again, talking about two people mutually interested in each other, not some predatory or weirdo force kisser). Often they too are fumbling along and part of the joy of the relationship are the trials and errors and discovering. If there's a set of rules that supposed to be "the right way" that everyone has to subscribe to, then a lot of joy of romance would disappear for me.


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## amdonehere (May 1, 2015)

EvanPickering said:


> Just randomly chiming in here, but...
> 
> I think every time I've ever kissed a girl it was a "surprise kiss." I also was pretty damn sure in every case that they wanted me to. Every girl we had been on 'dates' or 'hung out' one on one. Usually you can tell by a girl's body language and attentiveness to you if they want you to do something.
> 
> ...





> I'm going down the rabbit hole here (no pun intended), but it's an interesting challenge sometimes for guys, because many girls I date when it comes to hooking up and sex want guys to be very dominant/aggressive. I like that, personally, but they also usually don't want to have to talk about it, which to me is just crazy. I'm pretty aware of this stuff and I default on being very respectful, but i'm often led to a place of being more aggressive by the girl. It'd be alot easier (and hotter) if they just said something, lol.


I think this is actually where reality lies in most normal cases.

Evan, looks like you got a good grasp of how romances go. If you ever decide to take a break from writing dystopia and churn out a romance story, let me know. I'll tell my subscribers and give you an instant audience.


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## Nic (Nov 17, 2013)

Doglover said:


> Is that what you see in an innocent kiss? Grabbing and groping?
> 
> I knew someone would make something nasty out of it. There was no touching at all, just the gentle meeting of lips. I would go so far as to say there was nothing sexual about it; it wasn't a long kiss, it was a short, gentle kiss on the lips. Some people just have dirty little minds.


This is why I refrained from commenting, when you answered my question. This was clearly harmless, something you obviously cherish, and something which I can't condemn. It happened to me as well in an LGBT version. I also was under 16 and the other boy was over 18. I can remember my utter crush on him now still, and it has been quite a few decades.

And yes, absolutely, not all kisses, not even all kisses out of love are sexual in nature. This is a pretty significant divide I think existing between US and UK cultures. Or at least it used to be so.


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## Doglover (Sep 19, 2013)

Nic said:


> This is why I refrained from commenting, when you answered my question. This was clearly harmless, something you obviously cherish, and something which I can't condemn. It happened to me as well in an LGBT version. I also was under 16 and the other boy was over 18. I can remember my utter crush on him now still, and it has been quite a few decades.
> 
> And yes, absolutely, not all kisses, not even all kisses out of love are sexual in nature. This is a pretty significant divide I think existing between US and UK cultures. Or at least it used to be so.


Thank you


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## Doglover (Sep 19, 2013)

For a good example of a non-sexual, surprise kiss, see my avatar!   The only sort of kiss I'd want nowadays.


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## PearlEarringLady (Feb 28, 2014)

AlexaKang said:


> And that moment, is sublime.


Snipped for brevity, but great post and very well expressed. Agree with every word.


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## Justawriter (Jul 24, 2012)

Interesting thread. The first thing that came to mind for me is something that used to be very common in romance novels, particularly in Harlequins--when you'd have a heroine and hero that were initially super attracted but at odds, even hating each other and the hero decides to 'punish' her with a kiss--which of course morphs from hatred to wonderful in an instant when she realizes how much she enjoys his touch.  I've always found that particular kiss annoying and insulting, but it was very common and popular and I think it feeds into women's fantasies to be swept away by a hero. I'm not a fan of it though. The idea that you could punish someone with a kiss always struck me as idiotic--and it would often be described with the word punish.


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## Guest (Aug 15, 2017)

AlexaKang said:


> I don't believe in real life women doubt themselves because of some rom-com. Come on, *****! Give women more credit than that. This is where I feel like the whole protecting women's rights/respect, however well-intended, starts to fall into women are so weak they can't protect themselves or think for themselves, where it all defeats the purpose of self-determination and empowerment.


Alexa, your belief is not a prerequisite for something to be true. There are actually hundreds of studies on the impact media has on women _and men._ Self-determination is learned behavior. And we know...we KNOW...from scientific studies that when people are exposed to mountains of media that depict things a certain way, they begin to absorb those beliefs. Particularly if they are not coming from an environment that supports self-determination. My mom was a bra-burning hippie. She taught us early what self-determination meant. That inoculated me against a lot of stuff. But in 2017, my niece at the end of the school year had a teacher, a female teacher no less, dismiss her complaint that a boy in class was pulling her hair because "Oh, he just likes you." I am still now sure how my sister-in-law managed to not kill the woman.

How many little girls don't have a mom like my sister-in-law willing to raise hell over that?

It has nothing to do with inherent weakness (victim blaming) and everything to do with learned behavior and societal expectations. The recent Taylor Swift trial is a great example. When she filed that lawsuit, it opened up the floodgates of women sharing their stories about being groped. Most of those women never reported the groping. Were they weak? No. They were bound by learned behavior (nobody will listen/believe you) and societal expectations (don't make a big deal out of it. It isn't like he actually raped you.)

This is why depictions of actual consent are important. It shows both women and men that consent is empowering and good. It creates positive learned behavior and pushes against the negative societal expectations.

Again, society evolves. And that is a good thing. Up until the 1970's, there was no such thing a marital rape. It was believed that a man could not actually rape his wife, because she "owed" him sex. And when people started pushing for laws against it, the opponents of those laws sounded a lot like you. That women weren't that weak and didn't need protecting from their own husbands and she can always just leave him if it was really that bad.


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## Doglover (Sep 19, 2013)

Bards and Sages (Julie) said:


> Up until the 1970's, there was no such thing a marital rape. It was believed that a man could not actually rape his wife, because she "owed" him sex. And when people started pushing for laws against it, the opponents of those laws sounded a lot like you. That women weren't that weak and didn't need protecting from their own husbands and she can always just leave him if it was really that bad.


Hard to believe, but that didn't happen until 1991 here in the UK. I thought it was much earlier, until I was told by someone about her own experiences and I looked it up.


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## Charmaine (Jul 20, 2012)

I think people are really jumping the gun on the importance of a little kiss in a romance novel. 
It's a kiss *in a romance novel.* It has nothing to do with these wide-reaching societal implications.

Take this with the best intent: A small scene in a book is not important in the grand scheme of things. No one's book is that important in the grand scheme of things. No one should be placing this amount of responsibility on a scene in a book within their own work or others' work.

Seeing this amount of condemnation for having a different opinion is scary and uncalled for.


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## Doglover (Sep 19, 2013)

Charmaine said:


> I think people are really jumping the gun on the importance of a little kiss in a romance novel.
> It's a kiss *in a romance novel.* It has nothing to do with these wide-reaching societal implications.
> 
> Take this with the best intent: A small scene in a book is not important in the grand scheme of things. No one's book is that important in the grand scheme of things. No one should be placing this amount of responsibility on a scene in a book within their own work or others' work.
> ...


Condemnation? What condemnation? All I see are different views, some a little extreme, but otherwise still civil. It's an interest topic and shows how far we are heading into the mire, I think.


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## Charmaine (Jul 20, 2012)

Doglover said:


> Condemnation? What condemnation? All I see are different views, some a little extreme, but otherwise still civil. It's an interest topic and shows how far we are heading into the mire, I think.


Condemnation, a little extreme, tomato, tamato. People are basically being called rape apologists for refusing to see a simple kiss in a romance novel as rape.

How are you playing oblivious when you quoted one instance of it? 
Read the third sentence of what you quoted before my comment.


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## NicoleSmith (Apr 11, 2016)

My attitude to discussions like this:

I don't have the answers ... but I'm glad someone is asking the questions.


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## Doglover (Sep 19, 2013)

Charmaine said:


> Condemnation, a little extreme, tomato, tamato. People are basically being called rape apologists for refusing to see a simple kiss in a romance novel as rape.
> 
> How are you playing oblivious when you quoted one instance of it?
> Read what you quoted before my comment.


I have no idea how you see marital rape, or the abolition of it, as having anything to do with a kiss?


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## Charmaine (Jul 20, 2012)

Doglover said:


> I have no idea how you see marital rape, or the abolition of it, as having anything to do with a kiss?


So what you quoted isn't calling someone a rape apologist, huh? Sure.



> Up until the 1970's, there was no such thing a marital rape. It was believed that a man could not actually rape his wife, because she "owed" him sex. *And when people started pushing for laws against it, the opponents of those laws sounded a lot like you.* That women weren't that weak and didn't need protecting from their own husbands and she can always just leave him if it was really that bad.


Either way, this is the last I'll respond to this issue so it doesn't get the thread derailed or shut down and people can continue to discuss.


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## C. Gold (Jun 12, 2017)

PamelaKelley said:


> Interesting thread. The first thing that came to mind for me is something that used to be very common in romance novels, particularly in Harlequins--when you'd have a heroine and hero that were initially super attracted but at odds, even hating each other and the hero decides to 'punish' her with a kiss--which of course morphs from hatred to wonderful in an instant when she realizes how much she enjoys his touch. I've always found that particular kiss annoying and insulting, but it was very common and popular and I think it feeds into women's fantasies to be swept away by a hero. I'm not a fan of it though. The idea that you could punish someone with a kiss always struck me as idiotic--and it would often be described with the word punish.


Oh I hate those too. I do like it when they are arguing and he kisses her as long as they both have the secret longing for one another underneath the 'hate'. I guess in that case it's kind of a surprise for both of them but not the reader since they were seeing the underlying thoughts of each character that led to the moment.

Characters in stories are super good at reading body language and eye expressions. So I can buy into consent without any words being said if the author's prose shows it. I would hope people can separate fantasy from reality. Otherwise, what about writing protagonists as thieves or assassins? It's not like I'd condone those professions, yet they are a staple of fantasy.


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## MClayton (Nov 10, 2010)

This is an interesting question, and I don't think there's an answer. Several years ago, around 2009 or so, when I was first published and discovered the KDP fora, I happened upon a romance thread in which the OP was asking for a recommendation for a book in which the protagonist overpowered the female and she came to love him. I was a psychotherapist for many years, so that (obviously) raised a concern with me, and I posted some sort of psychobabble in response to her request. Upon which I was summarily smacked upside the head by other readers. 

Readers are varied and interesting, and they want what they want, which might be something they'd never admit to in the light of day. Far be it from me (in my enlightened state) to tell readers what they should read.


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## Word Fan (Apr 15, 2015)

MClayton said:


> Readers are varied and interesting, and they want what they want, which might be something they'd never admit to in the light of day. Far be it from me (in my enlightened state) to tell readers what they should read.


Probably the most sensible response of all of them here.


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## MClayton (Nov 10, 2010)

Word Fan said:


> Probably the most sensible response of all of them here.


It was a lesson that stuck. The side of my head still hurts.


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## Guest (Aug 15, 2017)

NicoleSmith said:


> My attitude to discussions like this:
> 
> I don't have the answers ... but I'm glad someone is asking the questions.


For me, it isn't about answers. It really is about asking the questions. We are writers. We should think about how what we write influences our readers. The arts do not exist in a void. They both reflect the world we live in and the world we want. So thinking about concepts of consent, concepts of inclusiveness, have value. I don't think anyone is saying the concept of the surprise kiss should be eradicated from the universe, but making it less prevalent and encouraging more open consent is I think a good thing.

Consider the Bechel test, which emerged in the mid-80's. Plenty of people still get bent out of shape by the concept, but THINKING about it has changed in a positive way how people portray female interactions and has encouraged people to think about media in a new way. Nobody (nobody sane, anyway) expects every single form of media to always meet the Bechel test. But thinking about it improves our work as a whole.


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## Crystal_ (Aug 13, 2014)

Charmaine said:


> I think people are really jumping the gun on the importance of a little kiss in a romance novel.
> It's a kiss *in a romance novel.* It has nothing to do with these wide-reaching societal implications.
> 
> Take this with the best intent: A small scene in a book is not important in the grand scheme of things. No one's book is that important in the grand scheme of things. No one should be placing this amount of responsibility on a scene in a book within their own work or others' work.
> ...


Ah, someone writing off romance as irrelevant and unimportant. That's a new and edgy idea.


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## amdonehere (May 1, 2015)

Crystal_ said:


> Ah, someone writing off romance as irrelevant and unimportant. That's a new and edgy idea.


I don't think Charmaine is dismissing romance stories. She's saying one scene in any one book among millions shouldn't be saddled with sweeping social responsibility, and I agree with that.


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## Charmaine (Jul 20, 2012)

Crystal_ said:


> Ah, someone writing off romance as irrelevant and unimportant. That's a new and edgy idea.


How did you get this from what I wrote? You can go back to every romance thread where this was implied and you'll probably find me in most of them defending romance writers.

I'm saying any work of any genre shouldn't be scrutinized to this degree for such a small scene or detail. No writer should be scared that their work is somehow contributing to societal woes. No writer should feel as if they have this much responsibility on their shoulders.

I keep stressing the romance novel bit because you're reading the book for the couple to get together. The reader knows there are mutual feelings. The characters by the time there's a "surprise kiss" have been sending nonverbal signals of their mutual attaction and interest for about 30-50 pages.


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## amdonehere (May 1, 2015)

Bards and Sages (Julie) said:


> For me, it isn't about answers. It really is about asking the questions. We are writers. We should think about how what we write influences our readers. The arts do not exist in a void. They both reflect the world we live in and the world we want. So thinking about concepts of consent, concepts of inclusiveness, have value. I don't think anyone is saying the concept of the surprise kiss should be eradicated from the universe, but making it less prevalent and encouraging more open consent is I think a good thing.
> 
> Consider the Bechel test, which emerged in the mid-80's. Plenty of people still get bent out of shape by the concept, but THINKING about it has changed in a positive way how people portray female interactions and has encouraged people to think about media in a new way. Nobody (nobody sane, anyway) expects every single form of media to always meet the Bechel test. But thinking about it improves our work as a whole.


While I see your point about the argument that mass media can influence people, and I don't disagree with that argument per se, I happen to always support the flip side of the argument that tells people you are capable of making up your own minds and you need to stop relying on external forces to dictate your actions. I don't think either option is wrong. I just personally don't like it when there's no balance and people are told that XYZ made me do it or I thought I should be this way because of XYZ. I take the position that I trust people to be able to be able to tell what's fantasy and what's reality. To me, that option is more empowering, it places more personal responsibility on people to think for themsleves, and elevates everyone (even acknowledging that there will be dense morons who fall through the crack), instead of pointing at outside forces all the time.

Also, I understand the good intent and the support for what you're saying. It's not a bad thing to raise issues. However, it can (and imo too often) tip over to a point where now we're telling people they can't think for themselves and they aren't in control of their own lives and minds. I don't think what you are saying is wrong. But I don't prefer it because I don't find that position very empowering, too dwelling on being a victim, and it can also do more harm than good in that respect. I'll just leave it at that because I'm not sure if I'm now digressing to beyond the scope of this thread and Becca already asked me not to.

Going back to writing fictional romance plots, where I stand, I prefer stories (heck, I prefer my own life) to be where romance and love can happen and two people can be treating each other right without having to be in constant fear of lawsuits and having to sign contracts or explicitly ask for permission for a kiss where two people are in fact attracted to each other and want to love each other. It is a fact that love and romance can and does happen this way, and I guess I would say it's just as important to show that those of us who have experienced that can share how there are thousands of ways life and love can happen. A code of conduct in relationships cannot govern every possible scenario. There are too many shades of gray when people fall in love.

When all's said and done, the people who intend to harm will do so whether or not a question is asked or not. And a woman whose confused may say yes kiss me and then regret it afterward. My own belief is that I trust two reasonable, well-intended people can work it out for themselves how they want things to be between them, without the world telling them how they should behave in their private relationship. That's the story I want to tell. Asking me to write something else is asking me to write something not genuinely me and something I don't truly buy into. I'll just sound preachy and fail.

On a side note about what happened to your niece -- I hope you won't hate me for saying that I do think it is the case that the boy likes her. I think it's ok and honest to acknowledge that this is what little boys do when they're too young to process their attraction to a girl. The fact that we now see that action through the social expectations of the 21st century does not change the fact that little boys act that way until they're taught not to. (To be clear, I'm definitely not saying if some teenagers or college guys rape a girl it should be dimissed and excused as boys will be boys. I'm talking about little kids here who really are too young and don't know better). I would NOT, however, dismiss it as nothing the way the teacher did. If I was the mom, I would be upset at the teacher and the school too. But I would also try to work it out with the boy's parents in a friendly manner to resolve the situation. I would not immediately demand that the boy be punished either. Further, I would explain to my daughter that probably the boy does like her at the same time I explain to her that he was wrong to pull her hair and hurt her. What both children need is guidance, not adults jumping over each other on who's right.


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## amdonehere (May 1, 2015)

PamelaKelley said:


> Interesting thread. The first thing that came to mind for me is something that used to be very common in romance novels, particularly in Harlequins--when you'd have a heroine and hero that were initially super attracted but at odds, even hating each other and the hero decides to 'punish' her with a kiss--which of course morphs from hatred to wonderful in an instant when she realizes how much she enjoys his touch. I've always found that particular kiss annoying and insulting, but it was very common and popular and I think it feeds into women's fantasies to be swept away by a hero. I'm not a fan of it though. The idea that you could punish someone with a kiss always struck me as idiotic--and it would often be described with the word punish.


I wrote about the this trope earlier but without the "punish". I never read Harlequin romances. The punish bit turns me off too. Now if I were writing a story with this trope, I'd have the guy overcomed with emotions and in the heat of the argument (which is the heat of the sexual tension) kisses her. It would not be a punishment, but more because he's not perfect and he's overwhelmed with the emotions he feels for her at the moment and he totally lost himself. To me, that's very sexy.

Playing armchair psychologist here: I think the "punish" bit is more to give women an excuse to feel lust and sexual desires. Even today, it still happens that women feel pressured to not have sexual desires. Today it's called "slut shaming", right? So in those older stories, the "punished" bit comes in to alleviate the guilt women felt for wanting something sexual. It's saying to her: see, it was a punishment. It's ok because it's a punishment and you don't really have sexual desires, so you don't have to feel bad.


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## EvanPickering (Mar 8, 2016)

AlexaKang said:


> I think this is actually where reality lies in most normal cases.
> 
> Evan, looks like you got a good grasp of how romances go. If you ever decide to take a break from writing dystopia and churn out a romance story, let me know. I'll tell my subscribers and give you an instant audience.


Thanks Alexa you are too kind. I might actually do that. I kind of enjoy writing romance, as long as it's a narrative with it's own story and the romance is just a big part of it. My books have romance in them, I would say. And they're post-apoc.

Believe me, if I decide to foray into writing a romance or romance-heavy story I will absolutely take you up on that. I know how valuable that might be. And I think ladies might like a romance written by a guy every once in awhile 

Evan


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## Guest (Aug 15, 2017)

AlexaKang said:


> On a side note about what happened to your niece -- I hope you won't hate me for saying that I do think it is the case that the boy likes her.


If it is wrong to hit someone or pull someone's hair out of hate, it is also wrong to hit someone or pull someone's hair out of misguided affection. The point is that his REASON for doing it had no bearing on the fact that the school has clear policies about this and they were not followed. Simply because he did this out of "affection" does not, and should not, give him a free pass on the school's discipline policy. THAT is the lesson that needs to be taught. That a man's personal feelings, whether anger or lust, do not give him the right to touch a woman against her will. Not saying the kid should be suspended (that is not the school's policy.) But the school should follow the policy (in school detention for the first offense.).

That said, I completely understand the concern of "mission creep." You start at position A, and then it morphs into something else. But you don't avoid moving toward enlightenment because someone somewhere might go overboard. That is defeatist.

It also isn't about playing the victim. If you don't identify the problem, you can't fix it. Recognizing how the media, both accidentally and deliberately, attempts to control how we think and act is vital to developing self-empowerment, It is how you become a critical consumer of media. _Being able to recognize the manipulation is vital to empowerment_. Critical thinking is a learned skill.


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## amdonehere (May 1, 2015)

Bards and Sages (Julie) said:


> If it is wrong to hit someone or pull someone's hair out of hate, it is also wrong to hit someone or pull someone's hair out of misguided affection. The point is that his REASON for doing it had no bearing on the fact that the school has clear policies about this and they were not followed. Simply because he did this out of "affection" does not, and should not, give him a free pass on the school's discipline policy. THAT is the lesson that needs to be taught. That a man's personal feelings, whether anger or lust, do not give him the right to touch a woman against her will. Not saying the kid should be suspended (that is not the school's policy.) But the school should follow the policy (in school detention for the first offense.).
> 
> That said, I completely understand the concern of "mission creep." You start at position A, and then it morphs into something else. But you don't avoid moving toward enlightenment because someone somewhere might go overboard. That is defeatist.
> 
> It also isn't about playing the victim. If you don't identify the problem, you can't fix it. Recognizing how the media, both accidentally and deliberately, attempts to control how we think and act is vital to developing self-empowerment, It is how you become a critical consumer of media. _Being able to recognize the manipulation is vital to empowerment_. Critical thinking is a learned skill.


Sorry Julie, I didn't mean to imply that the boy's reason was an acceptable excuse or justification. So let me try to clarify.

I think I would explain the reason to my daughter not to excuse the action, but because I want her to understand a wider spectrum of human actions. I wouldn't explain it as an excuse, but I don't want to, in the pursuit of being right, to pretend that we can erase the existence of a human behavior that is innately true (i.e. little boys tease girls to express interest). The existence of it doesn't disappear by us virtually pretending that it can't exist and refusing to acknowledge it. I would just want my daughter to have an even more mature understanding of what was happening, and of course, also why the action itself is not acceptable regardless of motive on the male's part. I would want her to be able to understand boys and men, and grow up being capable of relating to them and their problems. Not just follow a set of PC dictated rules.

Should the boy be punished? Yes according to school rules and that's fine. All kids need to be taught to follow school rules. However, I think we can't treat a confused little boy like an older boy or grown man. It's also situational. If the boy is generally a jerk and a brat, he might need more severe punishment beyond school. If the boy is normally well-behaved and he's picking on a girl because he doesn't know how to process his feelings, I think that some compassion is warranted, instead of just "Here's the rule for respecting women. You breached it and now you must be punished for it." If all that's done is for all the adults to make him feel bad, he won't understand what's happening to him, and I'm not sure the psychological consequences for the boy would be good in the long run. In the long run might make him less capable of relating to girls and women, and ultimately not good for girls and women either. That's what I meant when I said they both are children and need guidance. School punishment aside (which I agree with you should be imposed), I would try to work with his parents to resolve the problem. How to do it would depend on, as I said, what is this boy like on a case by case basis. In cases like this, I don't think simply saying you wronged me and now I demand discipline to feel right, is the solution for both children to grow up to be adults who can relate with and properly respect the opposite gender beyond the surface.


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## amdonehere (May 1, 2015)

EvanPickering said:


> Thanks Alexa you are too kind. I might actually do that. I kind of enjoy writing romance, as long as it's a narrative with it's own story and the romance is just a big part of it. My books have romance in them, I would say. And they're post-apoc.
> 
> Believe me, if I decide to foray into writing a romance or romance-heavy story I will absolutely take you up on that. I know how valuable that might be. And I think ladies might like a romance written by a guy every once in awhile
> 
> Evan


No problem! I've read your writing after listening to Ben's podcast and I like it, so yes, I'd recommend it to others. You just drop me a note when you're ready.


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## Going Incognito (Oct 13, 2013)

AlexaKang said:


> Now if I were writing a story with this trope, I'd have the guy overcomed with emotions and in the heat of the argument (which is the heat of the sexual tension) kisses her. It would not be a punishment, but more because he's not perfect and he's overwhelmed with the emotions he feels for her at the moment and he totally lost himself. To me, that's very sexy.


He pulled her hair, basically. Only the adult version. 
Would that scene have happened if his elementary school 30 years ago treated him differently back then?
I'm wavering on even hitting post, but as I do love a good debate and am gifted/cursed with the ability to see and argue both sides of nearly freaking everything plus I don't take any arrows aimed back at me personally and get offended I probably will. 
I've seen stories in the news where the school does over react, suspending hair pullers, expelling kindergarten surprise kissers for assault. 
I bet those kids grow up to ask verbal permission. Or maybe not. Maybe they go on to be rapists. I don't pretend to have any answers. I understand teaching a kid that pulling hair isn't the best way to communicate. I understand that the overwhelmed kiss described as above would be bad if it came from someone you didn't want it to come from. But I agree that when I see it or read it done well/right, written as Alexa put it above, that it is sexy as hell. 
The poster (I'm on my tiny phone or I'd hunt the post to quote it) who said he's often led to be more aggressive, by the woman, who is making her needs and wants known, that she enjoys that but never comes out and says it is very common. Maybe it's cause we did grow up on bodice rippers, internalizing that Mr. Right or even Mr. Right Now, will just know what we want. I had to purposefully stop reading them cold turkey when I began purposefully looking for a husband because I knew that it was a fantasy that would not serve me well when looking for a real life partner. 
But I understand the enjoyment of that trope. I enjoy that trope. There are times I wish that my ask permission husband would pull my hair, (you can read that metaphorically or not, the point is the same for this post) but he doesn't understand that cause he was raised somewhere in the foggy, changing middle between 'trophies are for winners' and 'trophies are for participation.'
Society is changing, it's changing men and women. (It's working too, cause I'm feeling guilty for not adding all the other gender notations here in case someone gets offended, as I may be old school and I may do it 'wrong' way more often than I get it 'right' but I'm never intentionally offensive) And I'm sure those growing up in it won't know any difference as asking permission will most likely come to be the norm, but I'm with Alexa on pretty much everything. Maybe the evolution will be 'better' for humanity. Maybe moving toward Demolition Man is a 'good' thing. I don't know. But I do think it's sad that so much of the messy, emotional passion will be lost. 
We're centralizing men and women into a similar middle. We're sawing off all the hard edges. Maybe that's best for a population meant to work closely together in space pods as we kill our planet, I really don't know. Im of the dying wide Wild West cowboy times. It's probably good that I'll go with the bodice ripper as soon neither of us will belong here anyway.


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## amdonehere (May 1, 2015)

Going Incognito said:


> He pulled her hair, basically. Only the adult version.
> Would that scene have happened if his elementary school 30 years ago treated him differently back then?
> I'm wavering on even hitting post, but as I do love a good debate and am gifted/cursed with the ability to see and argue both sides of nearly freaking everything plus I don't take any arrows aimed back at me personally and get offended I probably will.
> I've seen stories in the news where the school does over react, suspending hair pullers, expelling kindergarten surprise kissers for assault.
> ...


I cannot find enough words to tell you how much I feel exactly the same way. Especially the bolded part.

When I was growing up, the concept of chivalry was already on the way out. And while there were certainly sexist elements that came with it, there were also very good elements about it as to how a boy or a man should be a gentleman if the bad elements could be stripped from it but the good parts could be preserved. But I guess when you throw out the bad parts then the good parts would have to go too. I guess this is why there are no more rom com movies anymore of the kind I used to watch and love. Seems to me that today the rom-com films the 2 people are pretty much genderless and it's pretty much just 2 people with whatever neuroses.

I believe my generation was the last to even experience whatever good parts that were left of it. Yeah, maybe that's good for humanity and I can only accept it that this is how the younger generation wants things to be, so who am I to tell them otherwise. But really the good elements I did experience were good and I'm sad they're gone, and those in younger generations after me would never know what it was like. It doesn't matter I guess. I've accepted it that I should sit in my cave and continue my fossilization process. There's probably where the world would want me to be now anyway.


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## Gone 9/21/18 (Dec 11, 2008)

Alexa and Icognito, your posts made me laugh because they say a lot of what I'm feeling about the whole thing. Awful as it sounds, I often think, _I'm glad I'll be out of here before some of this stuff goes much further._ Of course I also sometimes think, _I wish I could stick around long enough to see the pendulum swing._


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## EvanPickering (Mar 8, 2016)

AlexaKang said:


> No problem! I've read your writing after listening to Ben's podcast and I like it, so yes, I'd recommend it to others. You just drop me a note when you're ready.


Aw jeez thank you kindly! I will do just that.



Going Incognito said:


> He pulled her hair, basically. Only the adult version.
> Would that scene have happened if his elementary school 30 years ago treated him differently back then?
> I'm wavering on even hitting post, but as I do love a good debate and am gifted/cursed with the ability to see and argue both sides of nearly freaking everything plus I don't take any arrows aimed back at me personally and get offended I probably will.
> I've seen stories in the news where the school does over react, suspending hair pullers, expelling kindergarten surprise kissers for assault.
> ...


I gotta say this and the subsequent responses are very interesting. It doesn't surprise me much, even in my generation it's clear women love men that are more wild and 'powerful' for lack of a better term. But I think in general it is true that we are trending towards men who are far more in touch with their feminine side than ever before. I know for myself and basically everyone one of my male friends that is true. We also have women that are more in touch with their masculine side than ever before.

I sort of wonder about all this though. I can say that there is plenty of classic male dominance in sex these days. But honestly, it is INCREDIBLY confusing even for very aware men like myself. I hear and see so much of feminist movements and female empowerment and equal treatment of genders, but women also seem to want to have sexually/personality dominant or aggressive men. Those two things definitely are not mutually exclusive, but the psychology of it can be challenging for the guy.

Like I said, I'm into being dominant/aggressive when it comes to sex, but I was also raised to be very respectful and considerate to women so it's always a weird double bind in my mind. It's also really hard for the guy sometimes to separate sexual dominance from subconscious ideas of actual dominance/superiority. I consider myself a feminist, but I also believe in being sexually dominant. At what point do those ideas start to conflict in my mind?

I can tell you as a very self-aware dude, there's a war in my head about it often, even if I don't put words to it or if it isn't always conscious. Part of me loves and honors women and thinks they have so much more to offer than our society is willing to accept, and another part of me feels like my girl is mine, and I'm the alpha and I take care of her and she does what I say.

It's a little crazy.

It makes sense, though. The thrill of being with an alpha or a dominant guy makes sense. It's exciting, it's dangerous. It's similar to why guys love crazy girls. Because they fucking love how crazy they are even though they also kinda hate it. It's sexy and exciting and I think many guys like being dominant as much as many girls like being dominated. It's just a very, very slippery slope for guys. In my opinion, anyway.

Evan


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## Going Incognito (Oct 13, 2013)

EvanPickering said:


> Aw jeez thank you kindly! I will do just that.
> 
> I gotta say this and the subsequent responses are very interesting. It doesn't surprise me much, even in my generation it's clear women love men that are more wild and 'powerful' for lack of a better term. But I think in general it is true that we are trending towards men who are far more in touch with their feminine side than ever before. I know for myself and basically everyone one of my male friends that is true. We also have women that are more in touch with their masculine side than ever before.
> 
> ...


I've only got a second as I've got to pick up the teen who teaches me about now. She's my finger on the pulse of today. She's the one who, when I see a stray dog and I say, "Oh, he's so cute!" tells me, "Are you assuming that dog's gender? What have I told you about that?" Of course, that is a very over the top, teasing me statement that acknowledges that in our personal relationship that she is bringing me into the now and she keeps me from screwing it up too bad, and that's not something she'd say to anyone else, but you get the point.

Anyway, I've got really only a second now, but I think the key to the quoted bits above, from my perspective is that we want it all. We want your support in being a women's lib-type, we want the acknowledgement that we are just as good as a man in the working world, etc, we want you to treat all women, hell- all people, with dignity and respect. But- we also want our man to be the protector, the aggressor. The 'my girl is mine' part does thrill us to our toes, as long as you arent pulling that shit in front of our bosses, or our employees, and making us look bad, lol.

I'm sure I didnt say that right and offended a wide swath of people presuming, but I'll have to deal with that when I get back, as the millennial (-ish? I'm not sure her age bracket technically puts her there, I'd have to look it up) I gave birth to and adore needs her mama to come get her.


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## Paranormal Kitty (Jun 13, 2017)

Personally when it comes to fiction I don't like to see the dominant/submissive pairings because one always steamrolls the other. My favorite is two alphas together. That's why I wrote the guy in my current series the way he is. The MC is so strong and she has the upper hand over him, so if he were written as submissive or even just a good, gentlemanly guy she would roll right over him. The clash and conflict between them creates a lot more chemistry. Then I read that blog post and some of the responses and felt like I was betraying feminism.


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## Going Incognito (Oct 13, 2013)

paranormal_kitty said:


> Personally when it comes to fiction I don't like to see the dominant/submissive pairings because one always steamrolls the other. My favorite is two alphas together. That's why I wrote the guy in my current series the way he is. The MC is so strong and she has the upper hand over him, so if he were written as submissive or even just a good, gentlemanly guy she would roll right over him. The clash and conflict between them creates a lot more chemistry. Then I read that blog post and some of the responses and felt like I was betraying feminism.


Posting from out front of my sister's, stealing her wifi and waiting on the kid- the only problem I have with 'feminism' is that what started as an 'if you want' seems to have become 'you have to do it this way.'
From 'you can work outside the house if you want' to 'stay at home moms are crap and betrayers of the cause.' 
From 'embrace YOUR sexuality' to 'don't like the wrong thing or pick a fetish from outside of the pre-approved list or we will turn on you so fast, and don't you dare like something that drags us back to that cave man crap we finally pulled away from.'
Those are extremes of course, but I've only got a minute. 
Reading your quote tho, watching those two in your book sounds fascinating. I'd read it. I'm not big on dom/sub myself. But two equals figuring out where they stand, with moments where each come out on top in their own ways- oh, yeah. I'd read that.

I know you started this thread, and you were asking if you could also put it in romance as well, right? If you do put it in romance I think you'd almost have to have the male character be a second alpha. Most romance readers that read MF don't want to read about a strong female with a submissive male. There's a place for that in erotica, but most MF romance readers want a strong male. The range of strong can go all the way up to alphahole but it doesn't have to. I'm not a reader or writer of the alphahole stuff myself, beyond occasional research, but to not get grated in the reviews they either need to be equals or he needs to be at least a little more alpha than she is, at least sometimes or in certain areas, so their alphaness can be conflict, and even eventually complimentary as they figure each other out.


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## Nic (Nov 17, 2013)

AlexaKang said:


> I think I would explain the reason to my daughter not to excuse the action, but because I want her to understand a wider spectrum of human actions. I wouldn't explain it as an excuse, but I don't want to, in the pursuit of being right, to pretend that we can erase the existence of a human behavior that is innately true (i.e. little boys tease girls to express interest).


I was with you about most things in this thread, but I sit here and am completely blown over by what you say about this. Violence in a child and it gets explained as affection? Really? There's someone who expresses the problem with such thinking much better than I ever could:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqFaiVNuy1k

Violence should never wrongly be identified as affection. It isn't, not even in small children - whether boys or girls.


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## Going Incognito (Oct 13, 2013)

Nic said:


> I was with you about most things in this thread, but I sit here and am completely blown over by what you say about this. Violence in a child and it gets explained as affection? Really? There's someone who expresses the problem with such thinking much better than I ever could:
> 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqFaiVNuy1k
> 
> Violence should never wrongly be identified as affection. It isn't, not even in small children - whether boys or girls.


I'm not Alexa and I do love Patrick Stewart, but I don't get the connection. What does his dad's PTSD have to do with little kids pulling pigtails?


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## PearlEarringLady (Feb 28, 2014)

Nic said:


> I was with you about most things in this thread, but I sit here and am completely blown over by what you say about this. Violence in a child and it gets explained as affection? Really? [...] Violence should never wrongly be identified as affection. It isn't, not even in small children - whether boys or girls.


This response neatly summarises the polarisation of views in this thread. On one side, hair-pulling *always* equals violence. A surprise kiss *always* equals sexual assault. And on the other side, there are those of us who would say: but it depends...

I find it unsettling, frankly.


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## Nic (Nov 17, 2013)

Going Incognito said:


> I'm not Alexa and I do love Patrick Stewart, but I don't get the connection. What does his dad's PTSD have to do with little kids pulling pigtails?


Miscategorising actual violence as loving someone is the connection, regardless of whether it's grown men or small boys.

That little boy did not pull this little girl's hair because he loved her. He pulled it to hurt her and watch her cry. Maybe she secured a toy he wanted, or was praised by the teacher and he wasn't, and he decided to get back at her. Maybe she poked her tongue out at him, and he decided to up the ante a bit and hurt her. He very empathically did not have positive emotions towards or about her, I can assure you. Even as small as that, boys react positively with behaviour positively connotated: a kiss, a hug, a smile, a gift, a caress, a favour.

Stewart's soliloquy shows that already children, and the very small boys we talk about here, have no problem discerning this.


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## Nic (Nov 17, 2013)

PaulineMRoss said:


> This response neatly summarises the polarisation of views in this thread. On one side, hair-pulling *always* equals violence. A surprise kiss *always* equals sexual assault. And on the other side, there are those of us who would say: but it depends...
> 
> I find it unsettling, frankly.


No, it wasn't and isn't. If you read my initial responses to this thread, I stated that most surprise kisses aren't sexual assault. My argument started with that I don't even see all mouth-to-mouth kisses being sexual in the first place, not even among lovers. That, for instance, wasn't acknowledged by anyone here, but it is exemplary of the oversexualisation of the US culture.

Someone, whether boy or girl and above coordinated baby age, pulling someone else's hair for a painful effect is not ever friendly. They pull the hair to cause pain, and everybody older than a baby knows that pain is painful and can't be considered a nice thing to happen to someone.

I am not talking about potential excuses, like people who are mentally ill or disabled or having a disorder barring them from having a normal empathy and normal social responses. Those may be exempt, but they are a) not the norm and b) shouldn't be in the same school anyway. At least not unexplained and unannounced to the rest of the parents and students.


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## Going Incognito (Oct 13, 2013)

Nic said:


> Miscategorising actual violence as loving someone is the connection, regardless of whether it's grown men or small boys.
> 
> That little boy did not pull this little girl's hair because he loved her. He pulled it to hurt her and watch her cry. Maybe she secured a toy he wanted, or was praised by the teacher and he wasn't, and he decided to get back at her. Maybe she poked her tongue out at him, and he decided to up the ante a bit and hurt her. He very empathically did not have positive emotions towards or about her, I can assure you. Even as small as that, boys react positively with behaviour positively connotated: a kiss, a hug, a smile, a gift, a caress, a favour.
> 
> Stewart's soliloquy shows that already children, and the very small boys we talk about here, have no problem discerning this.


I'm guessing that you don't actually have any kids. Especially any of the boy variety?


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## Nic (Nov 17, 2013)

Going Incognito said:


> I'm guessing that you don't actually have any kids. Especially any of the boy variety?


Im not questioning that boys (and girls) do these things. I question the motivation you tender. I was a boy in a family having lots of them, and I am uncle, great-uncle and godfather to several new generations of boys. There are no benign variants of pulling someone's hair.

Even the "I did it to see what happens" is not actually benign. It's an excuse and a fib. That's right on the same level as "I tied a cracker on the kitten's tail and lit it to find out what happens". It's not benign. It comes with the (correct) notion that pain, gore and mayhem will ensue. The "what happens" is strictly reduced to how much of all that gore and what the reactions of the adults are.

Which is the point where Julie is absolutely right. Adults should not try to lighten the burden of being harmed and caused pain by explaining it away to the victim as affection (it wasn't affection), nor should the offenders get off on being allegedly misunderstood. That would show them that misdirection is a successful ploy in such instances. And it would cement victim behaviour in such individuals who are susceptible to it.


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## Going Incognito (Oct 13, 2013)

Nic said:


> Im not questioning that boys (and girls) do these things. I question the motivation you tender. I was a boy in a family having lots of them, and I am uncle, great-uncle and godfather to several new generations of boys. There are no benign variants of pulling someone's hair.
> 
> Even the "I did it to see what happens" is not actually benign. It's an excuse and a fib. That's right on the same level as "I tied a cracker on the kitten's tail and lit it to find out what happens". It's not benign. It comes with the (correct) notion that pain, gore and mayhem will ensue. The "what happens" is strictly reduced to how much of all that gore and what the reactions of the adults are.
> 
> Which is the point where Julie is absolutely right. Adults should not try to lighten the burden of being harmed and caused pain by explaining it away to the victim as affection (it wasn't affection), nor should the offenders get off on being allegedly misunderstood. That would show them that misdirection is a successful ploy in such instances. And it would cement victim behaviour in such individuals who are susceptible to it.


It was the motivation part I meant, too. Forgive me for pinning you down further, I have so many questions as I really am fascinated by the similarities and differences in how people think, view the world and all that. So you really only see conscience, malicious violence any time one kid hurts another? It's never a side effect of being too tired, or hungry, or frustrated or a lashing out as a release from lacking the complex verbal communication skills, or even purely out of boredom or a brain fart cause the kids neural network is growing faster than his emotions can catch up? It's never to get some kind of reaction from a crush, or to see if they get punished just as much for doing it the second time as they did the first, or to see if this kid makes a different screamy noise than that kid did, it's always with the intent to violently cause pain?

If, as you say, "adults should not try to lighten the burden of being harmed and caused pain by explaining it away to the victim as affection (it wasn't affection), nor should the offenders get off on being allegedly misunderstood. That would show them that misdirection is a successful ploy in such instances. And it would cement victim behaviour in such individuals who are susceptible to it," then when this happens on your watch, what do you do to the hair puller? And what do you say to the hair pullee?

And I can only answer for myself, but I personally didnt acknowledge your comment about nonsexual surprise kisses because the article was referring to sexual, romantic surprise kisses, not because I assume that all mouth to mouth kisses are sexual by default from my oversexualized US upbringing. But, speaking of sexual vs non sexual connotations, based on what you said:

"Someone, whether boy or girl and above coordinated baby age, pulling someone else's hair for a painful effect is not ever friendly. They pull the hair to cause pain, and everybody older than a baby knows that pain is painful and can't be considered a nice thing to happen to someone."

How does sexual hair pulling come into play? If hair is pulled during sex, is that by default always a violent act as well? Or was that meant purely in the context of the kid to kid discussion? And in the kid to kid context, what if the hair being pulled isnt meant 'for a painful effect?' What if it's meant for an attention getting effect? For an 'I dont quite know how to interact with you but I want to' effect? Is that not possible? Is it always meant to cause pain, in your eyes?

More specifically addressing this part: "...everybody older than a baby knows that pain is painful and can't be considered a nice thing to happen to someone." That's not true. I've seen young kids above baby age do things that they had no idea hurt. The one that comes most quickly to mind was a biter in the neighborhood. One day his victim had enough and bit back. That kid learned _then_ that biting hurts the one bitten. He never bit again, but before being on the bitten end? He liked how biting felt to do, but he did not like how biting felt on the receiving end. That's when he stopped, which tells me that he didnt know that causing that pain was painful or not a nice thing to do to another, until he had it done to him.

(Obviously you dont have to answer any of these that you dont want to.)


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## Nic (Nov 17, 2013)

Maybe you accept it better coming from someone of your own culture?

https://www.theodysseyonline.com/hurting-not-flirting

Violence is never affection. Not a single time. It always is violence. Whether it is done out of fatigue, or to get a reaction, it's never affection or love. Someone would have to be seriously mishandled and mismanaged to believe it is affection, and that would put that person in need of serious therapy to learn proper social behaviour.

What I would do? I'd certainly not tell someone who was hit out of the blue, that "this boy did it because he loves you". I'd say, and I said it several times in my life, that I'm sorry that he or she was hit and that this wasn't okay to happen. I would tell the violent person, be it a boy or a girl, that no one harms people on my watch just because. I'd ask them what their beef with that other child was and act according to the answer.



> And I can only answer for myself, but I personally didnt acknowledge your comment about nonsexual surprise kisses because the article was referring to sexual, romantic surprise kisses, not because I assume that all mouth to mouth kisses are sexual by default from my oversexualized US upbringing. But, speaking of sexual vs non sexual connotations, based on what you said:


No. It was the author of that article who stated that "all mouth-to-mouth kisses are sexual" and because they are, they are harmful as surprise kisses. The logical fallacy in this starts with the assumption that all kisses to the mouth are perforce sexual. They aren't. It is the first thing in his faulty chain of logic which should have been pointed out and acknowledged. Interestingly very few did.



> How does sexual hair pulling come into play? If hair is pulled during sex, is that by default always a violent act as well? Or was that meant purely in the context of the kid to kid discussion? And in the kid to kid context, what if the hair being pulled isnt meant 'for a painful effect?' What if it's meant for an attention getting effect? For an 'I dont quite know how to interact with you but I want to' effect? Is that not possible? Is it always meant to cause pain, in your eyes?


What do you go on about "sexual hairpulling"? We were and are talking about a small girl whose hair was pulled by a small boy. And the girl was - idiotically - told that the boy pulled her hair because he likes/loves hair. No sex in any of this.



> The one that comes most quickly to mind was a biter in the neighborhood. One day his victim had enough and bit back. That kid learned then that biting hurts the one bitten. He never bit again, but before being on the bitten end? He liked how biting felt to do, but he did not like how biting felt on the receiving end. That's when he stopped, which tells me that he didnt know that causing that pain was painful or not a nice thing to do to another, until he had it done to him.


If this kid was older than 2 years it documents a full failure of the parents. Anyone watching a child biting other children should teach that kid about how painful this is. That's what's called raising children and parenting.


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## Paranormal Kitty (Jun 13, 2017)

Weird question I was thinking about while reading this thread: Is it bad/rapey to turn someone into a vampire without their consent? Does it matter if the person in question is already dead and the vampire biting them is just trying to save their life by making them undead? This whole thing is making me question my identity as a liberal feminist.


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## Guest (Aug 16, 2017)

Going Incognito said:


> I'm guessing that you don't actually have any kids. Especially any of the boy variety?


So "boys will be boys?"

No. My sister-in-law has an autistic son who is six. HE DOESN'T PULL HAIR. Because even with his autism, she has taught him right from wrong. Mike and I have custody of our other nephew, who was horribly abused. Amazingly, since living with us, his outbursts and aggression have subsided, because we have taught him it is not appropriate.Most of my close friends are males. They have male children. They run and they get loud and they roughhouse, but they don't "hit" or pull hair out of affection.

Dismissing someone's opinion under the assumption that they don't have kids, particularly boys, is basically condoning bad behavior (particularly in boys.) And this acceptance of such behavior from boys, reinforced with the notion that it is somehow the victim's job to enlighten them, is fundamentally damaging.

Violence is learned behavior.


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## LadyG (Sep 3, 2015)

Sort of a tangent here .... I'm just starting to date again after a long long time, and I recently asked a friend how I'm supposed to tell if a man is expressing interest or just being polite. "If he chases you around the playground and punches you in the arm, he's interested," she teased me.  We both laughed about it, but another friend overheard her and launched into a tirade about abusive relationships and rape culture and what we teach our children to expect. By the time she was done, I was even more confused! Of course I wouldn't welcome being chased and punched in the arm by a man at my age, so why on earth would we make excuses for that behavior from a child?

Hell, I'm a 51 year-old divorcee who hasn't been on a date in 20+ years; if a man swooped in for a surprise kiss, I'd probably laugh in his face or faint dead away from sheer shock.  Either way, not a particularly romantic response. 

Okay, back to the regularly scheduled discussion.


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## Going Incognito (Oct 13, 2013)

Nic said:


> Maybe you accept it better coming from someone of your own culture?
> 
> https://www.theodysseyonline.com/hurting-not-flirting


Yeah, that's better. It must've been the accent that was the problem, not that I was curious how a man talking about learning later as an adult that the abuse his father doled out may have been caused by a disorder, caused by war trauma, that no one knew much about back then, related to kids now in the classroom learning to use their words.



Nic said:


> Violence is never affection. Not a single time. It always is violence. Whether it is done out of fatigue, or to get a reaction, it's never affection or love. Someone would have to be seriously mishandled and mismanaged to believe it is affection, and that would put that person in need of serious therapy to learn proper social behaviour.
> 
> What I would do? I'd certainly not tell someone who was hit out of the blue, that "this boy did it because he loves you". I'd say, and I said it several times in my life, that I'm sorry that he or she was hit and that this wasn't okay to happen. I would tell the violent person, be it a boy or a girl, that no one harms people on my watch just because. I'd ask them what their beef with that other child was and act according to the answer.


Fair enough. It did seem like it was that black and white for you, was just curious if I read that right.



Nic said:


> No. It was the author of that article who stated that "all mouth-to-mouth kisses are sexual" and because they are, they are harmful as surprise kisses. The logical fallacy in this starts with the assumption that all kisses to the mouth are perforce sexual. They aren't. It is the first thing in his faulty chain of logic which should have been pointed out and acknowledged. Interestingly very few did.


Ah, gotcha. I didnt get 'all mouth to mouth kisses are sexual' from it so I never thought to challenge it. His very first line was "A while back, I made a list of creepy things we oughta stop romanticizing," so since we've got romanticizing right there up front I assumed he meant romantic kisses, cause why else would leaning in slowly make it ok? ("If they lean in slowly, it's not a surprise kiss because the other person has the chance to pull away.") Guessing we just got different things out of the article's assumption. It happens.



Nic said:


> What do you go on about "sexual hairpulling"? We were and are talking about a small girl whose hair was pulled by a small boy. And the girl was - idiotically - told that the boy pulled her hair because he likes/loves hair. No sex in any of this.


I 'go on about it' cause I asked if Alexa's character's angry kiss wasn't a 20-30 years later version of hair pulling on the playground and wondered if that scene wouldve taken place if that character had grown up now when that's viewed as assault, which is why I asked for clarification on if your statement that pulling on someone's hair is never friendly just pertained to the kid to kid issue or if it pertained to the whole arc, cause we have been mixing real life with fiction and kids with adults all throughout this thread.



Nic said:


> If this kid was older than 2 years it documents a full failure of the parents. Anyone watching a child biting other children should teach that kid about how painful this is. That's what's called raising children and parenting.


You can 'teach' some kids til you're blue in the face but sometimes they've got to experience it for themselves to truly understand, apparently. Telling that kid 'that hurts' obviously had nowhere near the effect that experiencing that hurt for himself did. I know adults that this still applies to.



Bards and Sages (Julie) said:


> So "boys will be boys?"
> 
> No. My sister-in-law has an autistic son who is six. HE DOESN'T PULL HAIR. Because even with his autism, she has taught him right from wrong. Mike and I have custody of our other nephew, who was horribly abused. Amazingly, since living with us, his outbursts and aggression have subsided, because we have taught him it is not appropriate.Most of my close friends are males. They have male children. They run and they get loud and they roughhouse, but they don't "hit" or pull hair out of affection.
> 
> ...


No "boys will be boys." Just a question that I appear to have guessed correctly. And I didn't dismiss his opinion, I asked for clarification on his experience, which he gave. Not sure how it condones, accepts or reinforces anything to ask if he's often around kids when he's presenting an opinion on how they 'always' are when it comes to conflict. Coming from a daycare background and having 100+ foster kids of all ages pass through the house I'd have to contradict you and say that non-violence is learned behavior, as I've seen toddlers eyeball the same toy before. Nobody has to teach them to hit each other, it's the how not to hit each other that is taught, actually.


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## amdonehere (May 1, 2015)

This is going to be my last post because I feel like what I'm saying is continously being twisted so whoever is responding can make their point different from what I was talking about and the conversation is going nowhere.

I'm only speaking from my own experience. I have seen it where little boys tease girls because they like the girl. Do all boys act this way? No. Do all boys know better? No. Is it always the case? No. Yet, I won't be brainwashed into saying this is never the case when I have witnessed this to be the case. I think it's crazy to make a sweeping generalization that all little boys acting in one way to all be driven by the same intent. Like Incognito said, kids do things for a wide variety of reasons. In my last post, my point was merely that the way I would handle it would be to find out why the boy acted the way he did, and then respond accordingly. Treat each person on a case by case basis. Is it so bad to try to see what is happening with the boy? If it's truly a case of being too young to know how to properly channel affection, the boy can be taught to channel that affection the right way. Is it really that bad to do that? Must we always be in a situation where it's conflict instead of resolution.

I also said that if it's the case of a boy who's a jerk and a brat, he might need even more severe punishment than what the school gave. If his intent in fact is to hurt, then this boy needs to be disciplined differently as well. Maybe this boy is a future terrorist or rapist in the making, and in that case everyone involve will need different kind of help.

I didn't say pulling hair or hurting the girl is right. I didn't say I would teach my daughter to accept violence as affection. Wanting to understand why another person acted and behave a certain way does not equate condoning or accepting the behavior. If the boy is a jerk and a brat who intended to hurt her, then I would also explain that to her too, because there are violent bad people out there, and I would want her to be aware of that as well.

When I was a little kid, my family bought me a little chick to play with. They thought it was very cute that for days, the little chick followed me around. You know what I did? I picked it up and bit its head off. I have no memory of this either if my family hadn't told me. I asked what happened afterward and my grandmother told me I had blood dripping down my mouth and feather all over my face. Beautiful image, isn't it? I was horrified that I did something like this but this was something I did do when I was a kid. Thank God I wasn't born decades later or else I might have been classified as violent something or another. Did I intend to hurt an animal? I have no idea. I don't think I did. I believe I was a kid who didn't know better and maybe just mistook it was something edible, or maybe I was curious to see what would happen. I have no idea why I did that.

Today, entirely unrelated to that incident, I'm a vegetarian. But if I'd been a child in today's climate, maybe I would've been locked up in some facility or another. I don't know.

Honestly, I find moral absolutism very disturbing. I'm sure it's supposedly "wrong" for me to say this but I find it disturbing when a surprised kiss by a love interest is equated with rape and sexual assualt, or when a little boy pulling a girl's hair is labeled as violence against women. Even in a real criminal court of law, there are levels and degrees. There is murder in first degree, seond degree murder, 1st & 2nd degree manslaughter, and negligent homicide. But it seems that in the matter of relationship between the opposite sexes, there's no sense of scale anymore.

I'm a big fan of Sir Patrick too. So I'll just wrap this up with my own offering of a clip. This is a Star Trek TNG episode titled "Justice."

https://youtu.be/sfqa596xxbc

The episode summary: http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Justice_(episode)



> When the Edo are vindicated, Picard then shouts to the ceiling that such laws as these - without degrees of punishment, and with such severe consequences - cannot be just. He argues that rules should also have exceptions, and that rules with no exceptions can never be just. The transporter works.


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## Fictionista (Sep 14, 2012)

Anarchist said:


> That's not nice.


Imagine if someone had said, "women are dense"...just imagine.


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## MClayton (Nov 10, 2010)

I've read this entire discussion with interest, and had no intention of piping in again, but I do have to come out of the shadows to say that yes, young children often tease, pull hair, chase each other, etc., when they have a crush. I'm not saying that's the _appropriate_ way to behave, but it most certainly does happen. And not just little boys. My younger son was the recipient of a "group" crush when he was in third grade. They chased him, pulled his hair, shoved him, smacked him, etc. (all to a chorus of giggles), to the point that I had to get the teacher involved. Did they think they were being mean? No - I knew them all, as well as their parents. They were good kids who wanted to make him interact with them, and with limited experience at that age, this was their way of doing it.


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## C. Gold (Jun 12, 2017)

paranormal_kitty said:


> Weird question I was thinking about while reading this thread: Is it bad/rapey to turn someone into a vampire without their consent? Does it matter if the person in question is already dead and the vampire biting them is just trying to save their life by making them undead? This whole thing is making me question my identity as a liberal feminist.


There should probably be a heated discussion about it even if her life was saved, it may not be the life she wanted to live. Can be a good point of contention before the forgiveness happens.

I hear you about the feminist thing. After reading this thread, I think I need to have my card revoked because I had a secret desire: in the Keira Knightly version of Pride and Prejudice, when Darcy is dripping wet (looking sexy as sin) and arguing with Elizabeth and at the end of their heated argument he leans forward and my mind instantly screamed, "KISS!!". That would have been so steamy hot for me and I would have written it in if I wrote a story with a scene like that in it.

But guess what? I write about murder which is far worse than a surprise kiss, yet I don't condone it in real life. So I'd say you can keep your feminist identity as long as you keep your reality separate from fantasy, which most adults should be capable of doing. Learning about consent should be done at a young age, taught by the parents and teachers, not by me as a writer of adult fiction.


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## Guest (Aug 16, 2017)

Fictionista said:


> Imagine if someone had said, "women are dense"...just imagine.


When a woman is dense, men tend not to get raped or murdered or attacked or verbally abused or expected to "educate" the woman on why she is wrong to treat him that way. In addition, the entire point of this topic is that societal norms have evolved to create an environment where many men have certain expectations of women that are, in fact, completely unreasonable. Men are dense because they have been allowed to be without any real, significant societal pushback. There is rarely ever any downside to their behavior, and so they often don't have to learn any better.

So I would imagine if someone made that comment, it would be in an attempt to ignore centuries of societal programming in an effort to deflect from the real root issue. Much like when guys jump in to argue "all men aren't rapists" or "all men aren't like that" as a means of shutting down the real world experiences of women.


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## Doglover (Sep 19, 2013)

I think the whole argument of what is or isn't abuse is getting way out of hand, especially when it comes to children. I read a couple of years ago in the newspaper about a little boy, about 5 years old, who wet his bed so climbed into his mum's bed with her. He went to school the next day and told how he had slept with his mum and the next thing he is being taken into care and the mother charged with abuse.

I spent many a night in between my mum and dad and so did my kids, who were all bed wetters. I just think some people should stop seeing abuse where there is none and realise that a child sharing a bed with a parent, or two people of the same sex sharing a bed, is not always sexual.


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## Guest (Aug 16, 2017)

Doglover said:


> I think the whole argument of what is or isn't abuse is getting way out of hand, especially when it comes to children. I read a couple of years ago in the newspaper about a little boy, about 5 years old, who wet his bed so climbed into his mum's bed with her. He went to school the next day and told how he had slept with his mum and the next thing he is being taken into care and the mother charged with abuse.


Having gone through the foster care system and subsequent family court system, I can say there is more to the story. While child services does screw up epically on far too many occasions, the problem is rarely from overreaction, but not enough. Too many children die because child services is often too slow to remove children.

At least in NJ and PA, which is most of my familiarity, when an initial complaint comes in, the first course of action is a home visit. They don't remove the child without a home visit unless there is an imminent threat. In the majority of cases, if the worker finds no evidence of neglect to support the complaint, the case is closed. If they do find evidence and remove the child, they have to go to court and convince a judge that they had just cause. Judges tend to err on the side of parents, so child services needs to be able to show something other than "the teacher said the kid said..."

Child services are not privatized (yet...gods save us). They have no financial incentive to remove children. In most states, they are actually terribly underfunded and understaffed. Child services tend to be one of the first things that suffer cuts in budgets. Our case worker told me that her division gets 100 new complaints A WEEK that they have to act on. They legitimately have no reason to remove kids without a real concern.

I only say this because there are a lot of hearsay stories like yours, but when you actually dig into the real facts you find there is a lot more going on. We need to be mindful of allowing hearsay, unsubstantiated stories create a false narrative.


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## RandomThings (Oct 21, 2016)

Doglover was likely speaking of the childrens services in the UK, a wholly different beast to those of the US. They have removed children for the smallest reason before and they have also left children in abusive situations where a child ends up dying. One tends to follow the other as an overreaction and when all is said and done, they are only human and can overreact as well as anyone else. 

I do work in a semi-adjacent role to the social services, I do have friends and colleagues in the social services and I do deal with families who are in contact with social services here in the UK. These things do happen based on suspicion (usually quickly rectified but shouldn't have happened in the first place.)


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## Paranormal Kitty (Jun 13, 2017)

C. Gold said:


> There should probably be a heated discussion about it even if her life was saved, it may not be the life she wanted to live. Can be a good point of contention before the forgiveness happens.
> 
> I hear you about the feminist thing. After reading this thread, I think I need to have my card revoked because I had a secret desire: in the Keira Knightly version of Pride and Prejudice, when Darcy is dripping wet (looking sexy as sin) and arguing with Elizabeth and at the end of their heated argument he leans forward and my mind instantly screamed, "KISS!!". That would have been so steamy hot for me and I would have written it in if I wrote a story with a scene like that in it.
> 
> But guess what? I write about murder which is far worse than a surprise kiss, yet I don't condone it in real life. So I'd say you can keep your feminist identity as long as you keep your reality separate from fantasy, which most adults should be capable of doing. Learning about consent should be done at a young age, taught by the parents and teachers, not by me as a writer of adult fiction.


It's funny because mentally screaming, "KISS!!" while watching a movie is the spark of inspiration that led to this series I'm working on. I don't want to give away the ending of the first one (which is going out to the world next month), but I'll say if the character who gets turned was a real person, and you knew her, then you'd reasonably conclude that she'd be ok with being a vampire. This thread has just had me questioning everything, but I think if we always tried to make characters that modeled perfect, moral behavior, fiction would be a really boring place. Like you said - murder and killing is all over the place.


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## C. Gold (Jun 12, 2017)

paranormal_kitty said:


> It's funny because mentally screaming, "KISS!!" while watching a movie is the spark of inspiration that led to this series I'm working on. I don't want to give away the ending of the first one (which is going out to the world next month), but I'll say if the character who gets turned was a real person, and you knew her, then you'd reasonably conclude that she'd be ok with being a vampire. This thread has just had me questioning everything, but I think if we always tried to make characters that modeled perfect, moral behavior, fiction would be a really boring place. Like you said - murder and killing is all over the place.


I think I wanna read your book when it comes out!


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

Does anybody but me think it's kinda amusing that the two people in this thread I KNOW are making really great money writing super-sexy and sometimes-kinky romance are the ones saying they always write explicit consent, whether verbal or nonverbal? I would wager a guess that we also both write strong alpha male heroes. I know I do, anyway. 

Maybe the difference is what we see as an alpha. What I learned from my father (a WWII veteran and the strongest man I've ever known, mentally and emotionally) and my husband is that a strong man doesn't need to push anybody around. Joe Nobody was talking in a thread here years ago about "alpha males." He said, from the perspective of a longtime special forces (not sure exactly what branch) member, that in his experience, true leaders, the alpha males whom others turned to instinctively, spoke less and listened more, solicited input from others, and led by example. First into fire. 

My heroes don't push anybody around, male or female (unless somebody is pushing others around, of course). They're strong enough to wait, strong enough to listen. That doesn't mean they don't have kinky sex (and not in the submissive role). It means they make sure the woman wants everything they do, and that she's completely clear that they might be driving, but she's drawing the line. (In fact, I used that phrase in a book.) And who you are in bed is not necessarily who you are out of bed. Plenty of strong women enjoy a more dominant man sexually. That doesn't mean they want to be pushed around in ANY other area of their life. 

There's a market for nonconsensual romance. We all know that. (I'm not going to say "dubious consent" because it's a term that makes me ragey. It's not "yes unless she says no." It's "no unless she says yes." "Dubious consent" is assault. And yes, I get that it's fiction, but THAT is the term/trend I personally wish would die.) But there's a nice big market for fully and explicitly consensual dirty-sex romance, too. If you're aiming for a younger market, there's a big market for it, sure--but I write for an older demographic, and lots of readers explicitly tell me how much they love my sexy, strong, respectful heroes. 

So do what you want. But if you march in a parade where people can see you, literally or figuratively, of course you'll be judged. As "boring," perhaps (that's the one I get). Or as "furthering rape culture." That could be too. We all get to judge for ourselves. Doesn't mean we're censoring you. It just means we're seeing what you do and thinking our own thoughts about it. As do we all, throughout life. Everybody has their own standards. This, in my own work, is a hill I'll die on. I'm proud of that. You do you.


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## RandomThings (Oct 21, 2016)

My work is full of murder and death. The MC is a serial killer (surprisingly popular with fans) and I go into a fair bit of depth about how much he enjoys it and how he feels while doing it. I share that experience with the reader. Does this mean I advocate murder out in the real world? Of course not. 
A surprise kiss between two characters in a romance novel that the reader should be rooting to get together, is not a bad thing. They don't need to stop and say, "can I kiss you?" It pulls you out of the story in much the same way it would if my serial killer asked permission first. 

It's fiction. It's fine and it's what a lot of people want. That spontaneous, impulsive act that you have been screaming at the character to do for that last three chapters. That moment where they put it all on the line and hope that the cues they have been reading in the other character are right. There's nothing wrong with that. 

Some of the examples people have been throwing up are ridiculous. No one is saying they are okay with date rape, a random guy jumping on you and grabbing you or even an acquaintance who got it wrong and read interest where there wasn't any. It's not real life and so long as the non-verbal cues are there, you shouldn't need the verbal.


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

Nobody here is saying (except in the original article) that the consent has to be verbal. We're saying that a "surprise kiss" that the heroine doesn't see coming and can't consent to isn't romantic. Leaning in, stroking a hand down her cheek, and her leaning into you? That's a consensual kiss. Having an argument with somebody, being angry, and then having him "take your mouth in a punishing kiss" (language courtesy of Harlequin) isn't a consensual kiss. Or talking to somebody and having him kiss you, taking you by surprise. Which is the trope I believe the article author was referring to.


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## Paranormal Kitty (Jun 13, 2017)

C. Gold said:


> I think I wanna read your book when it comes out!


Aw, I might actually get a reader


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## Anarchist (Apr 22, 2015)

Bards and Sages (Julie) said:


> When a woman is dense, men tend not to get raped or murdered or attacked or verbally abused or expected to "educate" the woman on why she is wrong to treat him that way. In addition, the entire point of this topic is that societal norms have evolved to create an environment where many men have certain expectations of women that are, in fact, completely unreasonable. Men are dense because they have been allowed to be without any real, significant societal pushback. There is rarely ever any downside to their behavior, and so they often don't have to learn any better.
> 
> So I would imagine if someone made that comment, it would be in an attempt to ignore centuries of societal programming in an effort to deflect from the real root issue. Much like when guys jump in to argue "all men aren't rapists" or "all men aren't like that" as a means of shutting down the real world experiences of women.


If I'm reading this post correctly, you're saying "_Men are stupid. And if someone pushes back and claims that not all men are stupid, that person is just 'shutting down the real world experiences of women.'_"


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

Women tend to be better overall than men at reading body language. (According to studies.) I think that's where "men are dense" comes from.

Here's an interesting study showing that college-age women are, yes, better at reading the sexual responsiveness of a woman than men are. The really interesting thing is that the, for lack of a better word, "rape-ier" a man is, the more likely he is to change his assessment of a woman's interest BASED ON HER ATTRACTIVENESS. In other words, if she's hot, he thinks she wants it DESPITE her cues to the contrary.

The less "rape-y" a man is, the less that influences his judgment.

Makes sense, and pretty interesting to me.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/10/161026135126.htm

ETA: The reason rape and assault are being brought up here, in a conversation about kissing, is because the article and the conversation are about romance novels. In a romance novel, the kiss we're talking about isn't an affectionate one between a parent and child, two friends, whatever. (I won't get into whether parents should be teaching kids that they are required to submit to adults' physical attentions.) We're talking specifically about a first kiss that would be expected to lead to sex. Even if you're writing inspirational romance, it's about moving toward marriage and presumably sex. So it makes sense to discuss a sexual kiss in the context of sexual consent.


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## Fictionista (Sep 14, 2012)

Bards and Sages (Julie) said:


> When a woman is dense, men tend not to get raped or murdered or attacked or verbally abused or expected to "educate" the woman on why she is wrong to treat him that way. In addition, the entire point of this topic is that societal norms have evolved to create an environment where many men have certain expectations of women that are, in fact, completely unreasonable. Men are dense because they have been allowed to be without any real, significant societal pushback. There is rarely ever any downside to their behavior, and so they often don't have to learn any better.
> 
> So I would imagine if someone made that comment, it would be in an attempt to ignore centuries of societal programming in an effort to deflect from the real root issue. Much like when guys jump in to argue "all men aren't rapists" or "all men aren't like that" as a means of shutting down the real world experiences of women.


I disagree. But by all means, think as you will, and I will continue to think as I please.


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## Matt.Banks (May 5, 2016)

Within the narrative itself, it's sometimes required that we ignore or otherwise overlook the real world implications of actions taken by fictional characters. I was originally very disturbed by the actions of Edward in Twilight. Breaking into a girl's room to watch her sleep? Creepy! Of course, that's creepy in real life. But in the context of the book, where we know that Edward is good and safe, it can take on more of a romantic quality because there's an unspoken (unwritten) assumption that his intentions are genuine and he's pure of heart.

It really clicked for me when someone explained it to me that way and I've looked at depictions of romantic gestures differently ever sense.


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

Lynn is a pseud--uh said:


> On the one hand, I very much don't care what other people think of me, but on the other, I do deal with the aftereffects of a religious upbringing that makes me question on a regular basis whether or not there's something wrong with me for liking what I like. So topics like these, where people take such a hard-line stance and start knocking bodice rippers and Harlequin novels and other things I happen to really like in romance, sometimes hit all the wrong buttons with me.
> 
> In the real world, most people would handle these kinds of conversations with a lot more finesse. I certainly don't have to meet up with people who are so bold as to flat out tell me I will be judged for my thoughts. Not even my ex-mother-in-law did that and my god that woman judges!
> 
> ...


Which I've said in almost every post in the thread. Lots of choices, lots of readers for all different things and all different flavors.

I mentioned the judging thing because it came up with the child abuse book recently. People were saying, "I don't judge," and lots of people thought, well, yeah, I'm going to judge somebody writing child abuse and incest as sexy and romantic. We're all judging. Of course we are. We all have an idea about what crosses the line, including how much of a pass fiction gets. That's pretty much the point of this conversation. Probably anybody who reads it can find people they agree and disagree with, as one does. Most people won't have their mind changed, because people usually don't change their mind, but they'll be more aware of the options.


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## Going Incognito (Oct 13, 2013)

RandomThings said:


> ...same way it would if my serial killer asked permission first.


Oh! Plot bunny! And I don't even write serial killers, lol.


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## tvnopenope (Sep 14, 2015)

Usedtoposthere said:


> Maybe the difference is what we see as an alpha.
> 
> My heroes don't push anybody around, male or female (unless somebody is pushing others around, of course). They're strong enough to wait, strong enough to listen. That doesn't mean they don't have kinky sex (and not in the submissive role).


I think everyone has a different and subjective opinion of what an alpha is. Some people would say that if he listens to a woman or waits, he's not an alpha. I prefer my men to be submissive sexually. A weak and insecure man isn't going to submit to a woman. It takes strength to do that and indulge in one's desires, especially when the society still has so many misconceptions about it.


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## Usedtoposthere (Nov 19, 2013)

If he listens to a woman, he's not an alpha? 

Oh-kay. Like I said--lots of flavors out there. To me, that's an abusive man who views a woman as an object and a possession (and an abusive man is by definition not a strong man), but I guess some people find that sexy? (Hasten to add--IN FICTION.)

In the context of this conversation--if you (general-you) think a man who listens to what a woman wants is not a (fictional) alpha, then obviously you would completely NOT feel that consent, verbal or otherwise, is important in a romance novel. Which anybody can think, obviously. Plenty of readers for that, as we know.


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## Going Incognito (Oct 13, 2013)

Lynn is a pseud--uh said:


> Agreed. I can't say I've enjoyed this thread, even though I've had difficulty staying away as a reader of it. I will say this: I'm going to have to take a break from this site, because the last two days, I've found way too many people getting into my head as a writer and reader. Now I feel like people are telling me what a terrible person I am because I happen to really enjoy the old style bodice ripper books. I mean, I love them as a reader and I do have college age kids and I've had a great many talks with both about real life responsibility when it comes to sex and romance. But, my god, I read romance for fun, and no matter how many times it gets said in this thread to write what you want or read what you want, it also gets that "but you will be judged" comment too, and it really upsets me to think I can't even have private, personal, secret fantasies that I explore in *fiction* as a reader and writer that if I ever tell anyone about they're going to say I'm a horrible, terrible person who thinks rape is okay.
> 
> It's just... upsetting and ridiculous.
> 
> ...


I've been meaning to come back to this for three pages now, but kept getting distracted from doing so. Then I finally do and I find myself sitting here, your words quoted, but with no idea what to say or why I keep being pulled to you. I'm guessing it's because I skipped over your crying while chasing the debate, even tho I mentally marked you as a post to return to as I did so.

I agree that sometimes you've got to step away from the noise of others to find yourself. There's lots of gaps in my posting history, for sure, so know that I'm not here to try to talk you out of it, you may even already be gone. I don't know. Maybe I just wanted to acknowledge that your post was seen. I'm sorry you were upset.

I have a tendency to compartmentalize my emotions and pack them away when debating and discussing on forums such as this, so it's easy to forget that others feel deeply when topics get heated even though I didnt personally think this one got all that heated, there wasnt a cattle prod to be found even, minus one reminder to keep the focus focused.

I think for me what was most freeing was something like what you said- conform or be judged, only it's that I realized that you don't escape judgement by conforming, either. It's really more like- conform, don't conform, you're going to be judged either way.

Plus, I also realized that the stronger someone's opinion is the more their judgement has to do with them, not you/me.

Not to make light of abuse at all, but have you noticed that it's the people who've had abuse touch them personally who want consent represented the most? It's the ones who havent been touched by it as pointedly or as personally that feel more free to play in the fantasy of not having express consent. Real world experiences change how you see the real world, and how you see not so real ones as well. So their opinions (on both sides) have to do with their own personal experiences being the lense they view through. It's generally people who've been in a car wreck that are the most skittish at getting back in a car. They know, first hand, that safety is an illusion. Security is an illusion. What happens to us is very often out of our control even as we like to think we have control.

I guess I just wanted to give you a hug. Or maybe it's more like that I wanted to take this time, and use your post, as a place to give all of us a hug. (At least a virtual one, no touching required.) Life is hard, man! Everyone comes at it from a different POV and often those different POV's conflict, but you can't let other people's experiences change you, at least not more than you want to allow it.

Life is messy. Emotions are messy. Experiences are messy. Fiction is often where we get to explore things without having to experience them ourselves, so don't let others stop your personal explorations. Whether you want to explore the dark or the fluffy, the consensual or the non consensual, the logical or the illogical, continue to explore your own path. Wanting to fictionally explore things that you wouldn't want to experience personally, or want your kids to have to experience personally, does not make you a terrible person. In the same vein, wanting to stick to a safer fictional path because you have experienced the darker parts of real life and arent all that interested in exploring those paths any further is not only vaild but also completely understandable. Thats what's so great about each of us having our own free will. No one has to explore the path of another in fiction if we dont want to. Life is hard enough without being forced down another's path.

That's probably why I defend personal choice as often as I can. Either that or I'm the one still stuck in childhood as 'don't tell me what to do, you're not the boss of me!' is a refrain I repeat pretty often, lol. I'm very 'you do you' but Im also very curious as to the why's behind what makes each 'you' so very unique, so I like to ask other 'you's' questions when they'll let me. But I'm under no such delusions that any of it isnt being judged by someone, somewhere. And that's ok! We can't figure out where we stand until we prod and poke at the reasons behind where other's choose to stand.

So, hugs to everyone who wants them. Time away to anyone who needs it. Sword sharpening via debate to anyone who's willing. We're all just doing the best we can with what we've got, really.


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## C. Gold (Jun 12, 2017)

Nice post there. I'm grateful to this thread for bringing up the question and forcing my own evaluation. Now, whatever choice I make, it will be a more informed one. So thanks to all who answered in this thread.


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## PearlEarringLady (Feb 28, 2014)

Going Incognito said:


> So, hugs to everyone who wants them. Time away to anyone who needs it. Sword sharpening via debate to anyone who's willing. We're all just doing the best we can with what we've got, really.


Snipped because I hate posters who quote a great long post just to say great job, but - great job! This said everything I thought and felt but couldn't articulate. Thank you so much.


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## Doglover (Sep 19, 2013)

RandomThings said:


> Doglover was likely speaking of the childrens services in the UK, a wholly different beast to those of the US. They have removed children for the smallest reason before and they have also left children in abusive situations where a child ends up dying. One tends to follow the other as an overreaction and when all is said and done, they are only human and can overreact as well as anyone else.
> 
> I do work in a semi-adjacent role to the social services, I do have friends and colleagues in the social services and I do deal with families who are in contact with social services here in the UK. These things do happen based on suspicion (usually quickly rectified but shouldn't have happened in the first place.)


Yes, I was speaking of the UK. As we in the UK know, years ago there was a huge scandal where social services were swooping in and removing children on the basis of rumours of satanic rituals involving children and subsequent so-called recovered memory. Many innocent parents suffered and took months if not years to get their children back. They often remained under the scrutiny of this bunch of incompetents until the child was 18 as well.

As you say, there have been far too many cases of them failing to follow up on their 'at risk' cases and children suffering horribly. They don't seem to know where to draw the line; it is all or nothing.

When my son was at school, one evening he was playing tug of war with his dad and he let go, fell back and cracked his head on the stone fireplace. There was no skull injury, just a cut and, being the head, a lot of blood. He went to school next day and when asked what had happened to his head, he said his dad did it. Of course, all ears pricked up at that, especially as speech was his major problem and they couldn't get much more information out of him.

When I went to collect him that day, I was asked into the office and asked to explain. Luckily, because they knew him and me well, and he showed no signs of any sort of abuse, they listened, saw the funny side and that was that. However, had that happened when he had only just started at the school and they didn't know us, I am quite sure the SS would have been called in.


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## Evenstar (Jan 26, 2013)

That's a really excellent post by Going Incognito. The recognition that our own experiences will colour the strength of our feelings on certain subjects is definitely an important factor.

I've never experienced any kind of abuse, yet I live in constant paranoia about the safety of my children. I'm ridiculously over-protective and watch them like a hawk in public places. I, basically, don't trust society and I think it is full of predators.

But I totally separate fantasy from that reality. I'm a romantic and my books characters are pretty much always lovely. That's what I like to read and to write. It isn't very real and it isn't to everyone's taste. Lots of people prefer a more gritty true to life drama. I don't. I even prefer my murderers of the cozy mystery variety. But that doesn't mean I think real life murder isn't messy, violent and sickening.

I commented earlier that I had a book set in biblical times where a 15 year old girl has an arranged marriage to a 40 something man. The response was "It's fine because it's historically accurate - so long as you didn't romanticise it." But _of course_ I romanticised it! I write romance. Would it be okay in real life now? No, I'd find it a bit gross tbh, but these were fictional characters and I was glad to help them find lasting love in my book.

I guess the real nub of the issue is whether our books promote certain behaviour as acceptable. Which is an intellectual debate and a very good one to discuss.


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## Doglover (Sep 19, 2013)

Lynn is a pseud--uh said:


> On the one hand, I very much don't care what other people think of me, but on the other, I do deal with the aftereffects of a religious upbringing that makes me question on a regular basis whether or not there's something wrong with me for liking what I like. So topics like these, where people take such a hard-line stance and start knocking bodice rippers and Harlequin novels and other things I happen to really like in romance, sometimes hit all the wrong buttons with me.
> 
> In the real world, most people would handle these kinds of conversations with a lot more finesse. I certainly don't have to meet up with people who are so bold as to flat out tell me I will be judged for my thoughts. Not even my ex-mother-in-law did that and my god that woman judges!
> 
> ...


I think there is a great difference between what people fantasise and what they actually want from a real life relationship. Isn't this why Fifty Shades has been so popular? It certainly isn't for its great writing in the book nor the great acting in the film, which I thought very tame to be honest.


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## Nic (Nov 17, 2013)

Evenstar said:


> I guess the real nub of the issue is whether our books promote certain behaviour as acceptable. Which is an intellectual debate and a very good one to discuss.


Excellent point. Should be framed.


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