Comments | ratcreature: a labelling question

ratcreature

a labelling question

Jan 26, 2006 22:29

Do you consider stories or art in which a character masturbates without it being clear what/who the object of their fantasy is gen? I don't see this happening very often in stories, but I've been tagging art for the LJ fanart listing for a while now, and try to tag art as gen, het, slash and/or femslash, but I never quite know what to do with ( ( Read more... )

Comments 5

petronelle January 26 2006, 22:01:45 UTC

That's a very interesting question. I think of gen as not being about sex at all, so I don't think of masturbation as gen, but I'm having trouble articulating what it would be. Perhaps it transcends our puny gen-not gen dichotomy.

ratcreature January 26 2006, 22:32:48 UTC

Yeah. Masturbation doesn't really feel like gen to me either, nor pictures that are like pin-up poses or have fetish gear or toys but without partners, because for the audience it's clearly porn. I mean, if it was something like a longer story with one masturbation scene that's not central, and it's otherwise not about sex or romance, then I might call it still gen, but just the masturbation scene isn't "gen" for me. It's things like these that make me dislike the common fan labelling standard.

I wonder whether for practical reasons I just ought to tag them "masturbation" in addition to the character name to make clear from the tags that there's sexual content, not just nudity, because I use the "nws" tag also for pictures of a character that have nudity without explicit sexual acts or gear (like toys or restraints or whatever), though I tag those as "gen" unless they're more suggestive than regular nude poses in art are.

liviapenn January 27 2006, 02:06:17 UTC

Maybe you could tag them Gen(Adult content) or Gen(nws) ?

ratcreature January 27 2006, 08:19:01 UTC

I could go with the "adult content", though that could be taken to mean violence as well (so far the couple of times I've seen something gory or disturbing I tagged as "violence" in addition). My main problem with using just "gen, nws" is that based on how I see NWS used in art communities and what was explained to me when I asked a while back, everything with a significant amount of nudity and/or explicit or even implied sex (like naked cuddling afterwards in bed) is labelled NWS, not just adult content. So it covers far more than just R/NC-17 content, even if you use the weird US standard for "adult" that's hard on full nudity and explicit sex ( ... )

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