One Direction real person fiction on Wattpad.com: A textual analysis of sexual consent

Abstract

This study focuses on the dominant scripts for sexual consent represented in popular fictional stories of celebrities written by their female fans. A textual analysis was performed on a subset of the most read real person fiction (RPF) stories—a type of fanfiction— about the popular boy band One Direction. Stories were publicly available from an online fiction-writing platform with an extensive user base of teenage girls and young women. Verbal negotiations of sexual consent were frequently featured in these stories. However, several themes emerged to blur clear distinctions between the presence and lack of consent: hesitance or unease for sexual interactions, assumption of a partner’s sexual consent, unclear identification of sexual assault, language of attack or aggression to describe sexual interactions, and normalization of sexual actions that surprise a partner. A number of rape myths were also prevalent throughout the stories. The implications of these scripts for One Direction fans and for sexual scripting theory are discussed.