Sealherlips wrote:Why is there an age limit on story characters exactly? Legally, there's nothing against literary fiction regarding minors and sexual conduct. Also, what about the fact that different countries have different ages for what is an adult?
You bring up a good point, even though I believe someone else already asked the same question just recently, and I'll try to give a straight answer.
When I began here in 2010, the rules here were indeed very lax on this subject. I myself wrote numerous stories about teenaged boys not only tying up one another but also often having (not always 100% consensual) sexual contacts as well. There were others were wrote stories involving adult captors and young children; also often sexual contacts and/or graphic forms of torment such as breath control or sensory deprivation.
But in recent years there have been a number of real life horror stories involving actual minors being found kept in some captivity and abused / neglected in various way (often by their own parents or guardians). As these became more numerous and widespread in the way such things do over the Internet, there came a steadily growing backlash against stories (even fictional ones) depicting anything that looked even remotely similar. A writer who developed a mostly sweet and innocent set of stories called Niklas and Friends received a huge backlash because a (very) few pictures showed some rear or frontal nudity of prepubescent boys and an occasional tie-up. It was as innocent as the swimming scene in one of the chapters in Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn, but some would-be moral-do-gooders trolled his site so badly that he lost heart and ended his series a number of years ago.
Well,this site not generally being a visual medium wasn't on their radar at the time, but steadily it has come to be one. We've been trolled a few times, and though we've dealt with all of the open ones the trolling was likely only to get worse.
Until about three years ago this site had a foreign server, and so could afford some lax rules about what was or was not allowable. But about three years ago Zanev shifted this site to an American server (you'll have to ask
him why; I have no idea), but American servers have more restrictions than most foreign ones do, and as a result we have had to be stricter about what we allow here in order to not have this entire site shut down on us without warning! It's as simple as that.
We grandfathered older stories (including mine) depicting more explicit actions but cannot allow posting of new ones that violate the new rules. It's not entirely our choice; it's just the way things have to be.
Afaik there are still no rules about sexual contacts between minors; if not described too graphically at least. Otherwise my old stories would likely have had to be purged from here; as is I have had to keep left out most of the drawings I had made for them as a few were a tad explicit; little different from Shota or Yaoi. But stories of sexual contact between minors and adults have had to be banned because of the growing backlash and the very real possibility that such stories miht actually become outlawed. In fact I believe they already are in some places In Europe and elsewhere. And the last thing we want is for anyone to face criminal charges of uploading 'porn' that they got from
this site! In part because the first thing that would happen would be that this site would get shut down no questions asked and all of us helping to run it get hit with some BS charges too.
Times have changed; and not all for the good. Though I of course applaud the moral outrage against real-life forced tie-ups of minors, sometimes the moral Puritans just don't understand where to draw the line. So we have to do it ourselves proactively to keep the howling hate mobs at bay. Remember, TUGs is still a minority taste, and people often equate
Children + TUGs = Child Porn!We don't want people to get that perception. It would spell this entire site's doom if this happened.
Am I being melodramatic? Maybe. I don't write essays with the same skill i like to think I have with writing fiction. But I also think it's true.
Dare to be different... and make a difference.
To boldly go where no one in their right mind has gone before...