a labelling question

[ratcreature]

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 (

Comments

[petronelle]

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]

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]

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

[ratcreature]

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

[liviapenn]

I'm pretty sure, though, most fannish people using your links would figure that in most cases you're using "adult content" to indicate sex. But you have a good point, even movies these days (under the MPAA system) will say "Rated R for violence, language" or "Rated R for sexual content" or "Rated R for disturbing themes." So maybe you could add different tags: (NWS: nudity) (NWS: sexual themes) ? Or something like that.

I don't quite get that, because for me neither things like my Nightwing/Arsenal picture where all you see is them nude, cuddling and kissing in bed (but with no visible genitals nor explicitly sexual positions), nor artistic full nudity without sexual content really warrants any kind of warning, that is in my mind and for rating standards here both aren't problematic even for younger children, and I don't see how it is more inappropriate to view in the workplace than any other fanart.

Must be an American thing. *G*