First of all, welcome to the club. Take a glass of wine, I’m sure you needed.
Second of all, it’s not over… Probably.
I won’t say which distributor I was publishing through, but when I first tried to post The Easy Life, it was flagged as being mislabeled. According to the distributor, I should have marked the story as at least dubcon, and because I didn’t, my story couldn’t be published.
Worse, if it happened again, my whole account might be deleted.
I get why they thought it should be marked as dubcon. Hypnosis, as a kink, often focuses on feelings of helplessness and being forced to do things you otherwise wouldn’t. But the thing is, in all of my hypnosis stories, the character under hypnosis is explicitly given the option to “wake up” at any time.
Does that sound like dubcon to you?
If anything, the dubcon is that consent is forced.
Well, unfortunately, whatever AI was scanning my story doesn’t understand that kind of nuance, no matter how obvious it is.
So what did I do? Well, I did the natural thing: I emailed customer service in a panic, explaining that I didn’t understand why my story was flagged. Their response was to double down, highlighting a sentence in the story and explaining that it showed murky consent because the character’s body obeyed someone else “before her”.
And lo and behold, I had my out. I took my own screenshot of the consent and sent it back to them.
One flimsy apology later, the issue was resolved, and my story finally posted.
So if you’re in the same predicament, don’t panic. Or do. I did after all. But as long as you know yourself, know the rules, and know your work, you can get it fixed.
It might take a long, frustrating conversation with customer service first, but I guess that’s just the price we pay to avoid getting gaslit by bots.
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