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Fish cannot live in water that is too pure.
— Japanese proverb
Dubcon is the Universal Human Experience.
If we apply modern standards, historical human sex has been 99.9% dubcon. Once we begin to understand this fact, we see that the obsession with removing dubcon from fiction is simply another type of obsession with purity, no less extreme or monomaniacal than the “purity ring” culture of the American South.
1. According to anthropologists, the human race has existed for 300,000-400,000 years. There are debates about homo erectus and Neanderthals and when they ended and homo sapiens started, but very broadly, that’s the band of possibilities given by carbon dating.
2. We have records on historical societies going back about 4000 years. So we really can speak with authority on about 1% of human history, and even that is subject to interpretation, but…
3. Historical societies have frequently been controlling, with strictly prescribed roles for men and women. There were matriarchies in ancient Asia, featuring both matrilineal descent and female-controlled finances, while there were patriarchies in the West, but whether a matriarch or a patriarch was in charge, that doesn’t change the fact that people were often encouraged to do sexual things they were uncomfortable with: marry a man twice their age for political alliance, get urged by elders to hurry up and have an heir, and so on. The Bible, cornerstone of African and Western literature, includes as a famous example of female heroism the story of Esther, who was literally supposed to honey trap the king so that the Jews could survive. No pressure, right? Could you focus on pleasure in such a context? This is saying very little about non-heroic stories, where the woman simply doesn’t know how to read or write beyond her own name, and the man does. This situation, common in both ancient Rome and ancient China, is still somewhat common in rural Africa and rural India, and in certain societies in the Middle East. This makes for a power imbalance, which is automatic dubcon according to present day theories. There are billions of such stories in the history of humanity: the vast majority of couplings featured some kind of power imbalance, and such couplings were actively sought out as “good matches.”
4. Even in a modern context, when a woman is in charge of the whole thing from start to finish, assertive in her sexuality, and getting what she wants, applying the rules usually results in dubcon. Consider a female college student who wants to sleep with a specific guy at a fraternity. She dresses provocatively and goes to the party intent on seducing him. She has to pry him away from some other interested girl, and they can’t talk in the loud party, so they go up to his room. Once there, he recognizes what she has come for, starts kissing her, and they proceed to sex. There was no explicit and enthusiastic consent, so even though she literally planned to have sex with him, showed up to have sex with him, and got what she wanted, by modern standards, that’s dubcon. Vary any of these details even slightly (i.e. both parties were drinking, the guy wanted access to a different hole and she gave in, the guy wasn't interested initially but she started aggressively sucking and he went along with it) and you go further down the sliding scale of questionable consent. Real relations between human beings are messy, and rulesets like "if she has 14 buttons, you must stop and ask for explicit verbal consent before undoing each button" are made by people who are heavy on theory and light on actual experience with human interaction.
If 99.9% of the time a thing occurs a certain way in the wild (that is, outside artificially controlled environments), then we can fairly say that that is the natural expression of that thing. If 99.9% of rabbits eat vegetables, and not meat, then rabbits are natural herbivores and forcing them to eat meat is an unnatural deviation. If 99.9% of cats eat meat when left to their own devices, and only overzealous vegan owners force them into vegetable diets, then it’s reasonable to say the natural tendency of cats is to be carnivores. Given that 99.9% of human sexuality over time was expressed in situations of dubious consent, then the natural tendency of humanity is to dubcon. How you make peace with this fact is up to you, but that doesn't change that the evidence we have overwhelmingly points to this being a true fact.
Calling someone morally bad for describing things exactly as they were in 99.9% of situations across human history is on the far side of absurd. How dare you describe this rabbit, evolved over millions of years to eat vegetables, as wanting to eat vegetables! How dare you portray this cat, evolved to hunt small rodents, as paying attention to small rodents running around! And how dare human beings, who evolved to respond to sexy situations of dubious consent with desire and arousal, talk about, write about, or otherwise examine dubious consent!
If you read this article, and do your research to verify that the anthropological record is as I have described above, and your response is still, “billions of people across 300,000+ years of human history can’t be right! I’m the one in the right, and humans need to promptly undo their evolution and rewire their brains to appease me!” then I can only ask you to look up the Simpsons “out of touch” meme.