How do YOU spell pr0n...?

[vanillafluffy]

Recently, I completed a story, and I asked my beta how she thought I should rate it. To my surprise, she said NC-17. Her stated rule of thumb was, as soon as a cock made an appearance, especially if it was inserted into an orifice, it was automatically NC-17. Which means that I've written a helluva lot more porn than I thought!

It's my understanding that the motion picture has specific criteria for ratings, but fiction is a lot more flexible. For instance, I heard in a director's commentary that saying "fuck" will knock a picture from the PG-13 category up to R...that word is completely absent from the story in question. "Cock" and "prick" both appear as nouns, and there are no roosters present. Fucking happens; penetration occurs...does that automatically upgrade it past R to NC-17?

So I'd like to ask the readers and writers of fan-fic on my f'list, what do you think the cut-offs are? At what point does a story go from suitable for a "young adult/teen" audience, to being off-limits to over 21? Because---and I know this probably makes me sound like a relic of the days when woolly mammoths walked the earth, but kids these days know a helluva lot more than they used to. When I was an adolescent, "Charlie's Angels" was scandalous 'jiggle' TV---today there's "Gossip Girl" teasing us about high-school threesomes and we saw more skin in "Baywatch" than the Angels ever showed. Apples and oranges? Oh hell no: Apples and starfruit.

How about the percentage of sex in a story---say, if the fornication in question is 1,500 words of a 15,000 word saga? Three paragraphs out of three pages? If it's clear they're having sex but none of the major trigger words are being used, IE, if it's soft-focus with two writhing bodies and a keening cry of ecstacy?

Is it descriptiveness of body part and/or actions that disqualifies a story from a friendly rating? Namely, if your hero climaxes, it's PG-13, but if "He blasted hot guysers of foaming man-milk" the story is NC-17 and you're shot at dawn for really bad purple prose.

Maybe it's the vocabulary, and how do we quantify that? Number and severity of cuss words? If your hero says "Shit!", it's PG-13, and he can say hell or damn all he wants---but if he busts out a "Motherfucker!", it's an R and if he says it twice, it's NC-17? (And on a side note, why it is that A&E bleeps words that aired without a problem on network TV?! Lighten up!) Or does fan-fiction adopt George Carlin's seven words you can't say on TV? (As he pointed out, even Disney movies can get away with saying, "I'm gonna snatch that pussy and put it in a box!")

What if it's kink? No cocks come out, but the protagonist winds up in handcuffs and enjoys it. Or admits he enjoyed wearing his girlfriend's satiny panties. There are (IMO) repressed people who consider slash a kink even when the participants aren't doing anything beyond vanilla sucking and fucking. Even soft-focus would be NC-17 for someone like that.

How about the percentage of sex in a story---say, if the fornication in question is 800 words of a 15,000 word saga? Three short paragraphs out of three thousand words?

It's baffling. To me, at least. Over at omni_fiction, they have a much simpler system: "Green, Yellow, and Red. Green covers gen fic, humorous fic, and straight vanilla sexual encounters, whether M/F, M/M, or F/F. Yellow is for edgier stuff:- angst, deathfics, mild BDSM, multiple entities, consent issues. Save "Red" for the heavy stuff - rape, serious BDSM, and anything involving cephalopods." THAT I can understand! It would be nice if more communities would adopt that logic. My gosh, that story that I reluctantly tagged NC-17 would be green and good to go, no worrying about whether it's achieved def-con: FUCK.

Thoughts, y'all?

Comments

[rivers-bend.livejournal.com]

Just in case this isn't rhetorical...

I actually think that green, yellow, red thing sounds just as if not more confusing! For some people vanilla sex would be much more yellow than angst which is all green all the time for them. etc.

I often use "adult" for anything with sex or more than one or two instances of the word fuck. though if I'm rating with r/nc-17 I tend to use the "can you see it" rule.

Dean kissed him, said, "Can I fuck you? Please--"

Sam pulled him closer, said, "Yes, god, yes."

They fucked until Dean wasn't even sure what state they were in any more, and he barely had the energy to move with Sam to the other bed so neither of them had to sleep in the wet spot.

I would probably class as an R.

If after the "yes" I went into lube and cocks and holes and what happened with the above, then it would be NC-17. Basically if I do not leave up to the imagination what happens with body parts, it's NC-17.

Though sometimes I'll class something that is more porn than plot though isn't necessarily as graphic as it could be an NC-17. If I'm classing something as an R, I usually add "(sexual situations)" because I want readers, and R could equally mean extreme violence or horror (which I don't write).

[vanillafluffy.livejournal.com]

Now see, that's why I ask, because your example is something I'd shrug off as PG-13. We know what happened, but we never 'see' anybody nekkid and the whole thing is four lines in what's presumably a longer story.

For some people vanilla sex would be much more yellow than angst which is all green all the time for them.

Angst...maybe I'm splitting hairs, but I classify angst as life-or-death, something that's going to make a long-term difference---and what gets called angst a lot of the time is IMO a lot of pretentious emo wank. (Plucking the last petal of the flower, Sam burst into tears. "He loves me not?" he wailed. "How could he do that to me!"

[karaokegal.livejournal.com]

I'm going to track the responses on this and see what folks think, although as you say, the omni system is pretty effective and why anyone would want to muck it up or overthink it is beyond me.

[vanillafluffy.livejournal.com]

What I find interesting is, there's another story similar to mine that's gone up, similar in the sense that the plot exists to get our heroes hooked up. And there is sexing, I'd say of a somewhat more graphic nature than mine. And the writer tagged it as an R. So...it really *is* subjective.

[karaokegal.livejournal.com]

And even in the "real" world the MPPA ratings can be fudged or negotiated. Remember when NC17 was created just for "Henry & June?" which my current standards, might still only be an R? However, I'm still comfortable with my "cock-in-box" rule. :)

[karaokegal.livejournal.com]

Which so help me, I typed before I looked at your icon.

By the way, just to muddy the waters, I pulled an ol skool X rating for my Wilson wank drabble, both because it was graphic and because it was nasty, but that was just a personal thing. It felt "dirty" rather than erotic and I wanted to make the point.

[vanillafluffy.livejournal.com]

Okay, I can respect that difference. My bookshelf has erotica, and it's also got some no-holds-barred feelthy porn. And then there are the Nancy Friday fantasy anthologies, which kind of blur the line.

I'm going to post that story you assisted with under that icon; I created it from a thumbnail over at Snoorg Tees.

[vanillafluffy.livejournal.com]

"cock-in-box"

Oh great. Now I have this image in my head of a box with a crank on the side, and when it finally gets wound tight enough, the lid pops up and woosh! It's Kong Dong! With a ruff around the corona....

[karaokegal.livejournal.com]

The must-have toy for Christmas 2010.

[vanillafluffy.livejournal.com]

And as I was reading this, a commercial for Keiser University came on TV: "All across the country, there are openings waiting to be filled."

Yeah.

[grandiose666.livejournal.com]

from a reader perspective, yes it's confusing and inconsistent. sex-wise the line between r and nc17 in all fandoms seems to be unclear, with the focus or descriptiveness deciding. but spn's main fanon pairing isn't just slash, it's incest, so...huh. i mean a movie featuring that would prob never swing a pg13.
to me, it's a matter of descriptiveness more than focus. a mostly-gen story with an explicit sexual encounter would be r to nc17 depending on how explicit and porny.

[vanillafluffy.livejournal.com]

I've never written real Wincest, so I've never had to thrash that out. The closest I ever came was a comment about circle jerks while watching pron, which in my canon is about as far as it ever goes.

Yeah, I tend to weigh a) How much of the story is sex? b) How explicit are the descriptions? c) What kind of activity is going on. I'm going to rate concent issues higher than a plain vanilla shag.

[grandiose666.livejournal.com]

and yeah, as above, if there's a play-by-play or description of where the participants' body parts are relative to each other, to me that's nc-17 or at least a hard r.

the example above is pg-13 to r to me, not so explicit but at the same time not nothing...dunno, i could go either way and would not be upset finding either rating. pg is too low and nc 17 is false advertising. heh.

[vanillafluffy.livejournal.com]

One of the reasons I write relatively few sex scenes is because I find them technically demanding---especially since the pronoun "he" really gets punished and it can be confusing to tell who's doing what to who. You wind up with something that sounds like Ardeth has three hands and Jonathan is contorted like a pretzel. And then you have to figure out how to rate it.

Usually, it's a nice, soft-focus het scene in the middle of something longer....