Poll: Should underage content be part of the site?

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I’ve been thinking about branching to other sites on and off, but what often stops me is that most websites that cater to niche kinks have terrible rules when it comes to underage content, examples being Nifty and CyoC.

Philosophical questions aside, for me the practical stance is that I don’t want the site to be associated and overrun with underage content (UC). What happened to all those other sites was that loose rules invited more UC, which in turn put pressure on those sites to loosen the rules even more, or even if they didn’t, they simply got overwhelmed with the quanity, especially coupled with people leaving as a result.

I genuinely don’t want this to happen and this has been a bit of a point on occasion (usually on Discord) hence why I’m a little worried.

As for potential arguments and proposals:

  • GSS is already dub-con by nature: Yes, and while the argument could be made that consent between two adults when mind control is involved is dubious, I don’t think such ambiguity exists when minors are involved. You don’t replace one problematic thing with another. You heap something more on top and the combination makes it even worse than the sum of its parts still.
  • Make a new subsite that allows UC, but leave the others as is: I don’t think this would solve anything due to how interconnected the subsites are. Afterall you can publish the same story on multiple subsites. If one of them features UC, the site as a whole does.

So yeah, just trying to get a general feel of where the site is at.

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Please don’t do polls like this without asking the admins first.

This issue is not for debate.

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It’s important to realise that what is allowed and disallowed on the site has actually changed very little during the time Corin has run it. In the same time period, the content and frequency of stories as it pertains to underage content has changed very little. We do not and have never had a major issue, only the occasional minor edge case. Over the last year, however, we as approvers became stricter on this matter than Corin originally intended.

Corin makes it very clear in the rules that prepubescent traits are never allowed and will never be allowed. We run all ambiguous cases by Corin so that he can enforce the rules according to his original intent as outlined in the Site Manifest.

For my part, I don’t anticipate any problems of proliferation of borderline content.

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I’ve removed the numerical poll from this post. Please feel free to post any comments you have on this thread.

That said, this issue has been argued at length in years past. If you want to read about how the site readership responded to this issue 5 years ago, check out Discussion About Rules and Especially the Underage Topic.

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I don’t know about anyone else but if we start allowing underage content I’m out as soon as I find out it’s happening. why is this even being thought to be debatable?

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“Underage” in the sense of “under 18” has always been allowed on the site under specific conditions.

There is no international uniform definition of the term “underage”. Each country has its own laws to define from which age sexual conduct is legal.

Read the site rules for more details.

Also see the Site Manifest for some background on the reasoning for the rules.

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To give specific examples of what Corin’s talking about…

In Germany, from what I understand, pornography is legal, regardless of age, if the work is clearly fictional and does not depict real people in any way (writing, manga/artwork, etc.). So, at least from a legal standpoint, there really is no “underage” when it comes to German fiction. (Real sex is a whole different story.) That differs greatly from North American laws.

Using Canada as an example (since I’m most familiar with it), “underage” here is nominally below 16. With a few close-in-age and power-imbalance exceptions, anyone 16 or over can legally have sex with anyone else 16 or over. But, if you’re caught with written pornography including sex with a completely fictional character who’s under 18 (notice the age difference there), you can be prosecuted as possessing CP, even if the sexual acts depicted are otherwise legal. No, it doesn’t make sense that you can legally have sex with a real 16yo but be arrested if you so much as read about having sex with a fictional 16yo, but that’s what our laws are. I believe there are similar laws in many US states.

Corin can’t realistically be expected to know what all those varying laws are, and he’s under no obligation to abide by them in any event. As far as I can tell, he’s following German law and is abiding by the moral standards that are accepted as normal in his country. It’s up to those of us in other countries to make sure we’re abiding by the laws and/or morals in our countries. And if you’re in a country with draconian laws like Canada’s, be very careful about what stories you open.

That said, my impression is that there are very few stories involving characters under 18 on the site in any event, so I think it’s largely a moot point. (Mods, please correct me if I’m wrong.)

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@RobinHood70 got it right basically, I just want to clarify the “pornography” part.

In Germany, no real person under the age of 18 can be part of a porn movie (or legally be a sex-worker or do any other kind of business to make money using their body).

But fictional content featuring no actual persons is not limited in that way.

However, German law is very strict about children presented in a sexual way (drawings, images, render). But here we’re talking about actual children. Japanese yaoi, which often feature characters looking something like between 14 and 18, are quite common and are legal. As the line is fuzzy, we explicitly ban any images showing persons which are or could appear younger than 18. This way we also avoid any discussion whether a real person is shown or not.

The age of consent in Germany is 16, so for realistic stories we limit the age of the protagonists to 16, too.

For fantastic stories (including mind-control in any way), however, this doesn’t make any sense, because legally these are always non-con and can’t be evaluated using realistic laws. See Star Trek’s Ocampas (which only live 10 years) as an example.

Additionally, we restrict all persons (fantastic or not) involved in sexual conduct to be “sexually mature”, i.e. they must be developed to be physically fit for sex. That’s an additional limit, as we don’t want any descriptions of pre-puberty sex in any way on the site.

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The underage thing is vast area and many people when using the word aren’t even evoking the word in the same way.
i.e., what age it is, and what is it characters that age should or shouldn’t be depicted doing. There is variance in the definition.

There needs to be structure and rules (and currently, there are) to keep dubious content out, but there needs to be exceptions (and currently, there are) to fundamentally allow creativity to remain uncensored.

It is just, absolutely a fact of life that you spend your teenage years developing sexually, often collecting psychological milestones, trauma and lasting memories (good and bad) from those years. Writing stories that self express, will — if you’re drawing from your own life experience — sometimes involve teenage characters discovering or coming to terms with sex. That’s just a fact of human existence.

And the rest is taste, legal obedience, and the avoidance of putting out p##dophile adjacent or p##dophile ‘apologist’ material.

I’ve always viewed the human approvers/admin that GSS/GKS uses as the main drawbridge protecting that, more so than the rules as written. Though both are important.

There’s been maybe two stories I’ve done that I know I can’t publish here; the characters are too young, and however I write it, it would be taken the wrong way even for just being published at all on an erotic fiction webpage. But, that’s life, there’s another maybe three or four I’ve written that definitely breech the rules of GKS ‘as written’, but they adhere to a higher, more fundamental code where, I know they’re not about abusing minors, or being violent (or whatever the as-written rule breech is) they’re not ‘abuse propaganda’, they are self-reflective pieces about sexual development based on both my own life and the human condition generally.

It’s perhaps a circular argument, but if the right stories are getting through and the wrong ones are not, then GKS is operating as it should be.

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I would venture to say for those stories you cannot publish here that GKS is just not the right venue for them. The way you describe them, they are not written for the erotic satisfaction of the reader. A part of the rules here are as they are because of the nature of this site as an erotic fiction site and not a general gay fiction site.

My own story, The Lake, was a mix of both, it was exploring the development of a mind controller when he got his powers at puberty. It was through his eyes and he was the controller. It was rejected here so I decided to make him older when he got his powers, because the “at puberty” thing is just kinda of a superhero trope that was not necessary.

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Great post.

I had such an insightful response to post, but I pressed something weird and it deleted, and now I’m too tired to write it out again :sweat_smile:

I’ll type it in the morning… if I remember.

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Please do. I rather enjoy insightful responses. :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

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I think it was about the “GKS right venue.”

There’s probably several many members of GKS (readers and authors), who push and pull GKS in subjective directions. There are things they assume is a core aspect of GKS., things they assume is a fringe aspect of GKS, and things they wish would be prohibited from GKS (either for moral reasons or for simply it muddying the purity-and-abundance of things they come to GKS for).

There might be hundreds or even thousand of regular users to GKS (between readers and authors) and they all make up this kinda impossible Venn diagram of stuff one person wants on the site and another person specifically wishes was not on the site.

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That’s all very true. I wasn’t talking about that though when talking about “right venue”, I was not thinking in terms of a specific sets of kinks being appropriate for the site and others not. I was thinking about the site being dedicated in a general way to kinks/erotica, “Gay Kinky Stories”. The stories as you described them seemed not to be about kinks or erotica. I would enjoy those stories, but “Gay Kinky Stories” wouldn’t be the first place I look for stories like that. That’s all I meant.

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Oh sure, indeed.
I take full responsibility for taking it elsewhere.

Like (in where I took it) it could be conflicting desires with allowing underage material,

it could be conflicting thoughts on a fetish or kink,

Conflict on wither GKSis a place where the stories published should have strait characters, trans characters, female characters

Opposing stances on if GKS should have AI material at all

Or if GKS should have “Art” pieces (capitol A) or if it should just be straight up porn and erotica.

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