Unfortunately this means most things I’ve tagged adult content are not what you’re imagining. Hopefully you don’t mind the tag @enbyboiwonder, but I was thinking “what would they dislike reading” because we’ve previously discussed there being sex scenes in books which have detail but no “pornographic intent” and I wanted to tag at the level of that. Something can be detailed to the point it’s uncomfortable for those who dislike reading the topic without being titillating in any way.
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Yeah I’d say it’s a common euphemism here. I think renaming it Sexual Content would fit more the international nature of the site as not everyone knows or needs to know our subtle ways of not talking about sex 
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Yes, ultimately it seems to be a question of definitions and people’s expectations. But being in Korea, one would probably first of all have to conform to Korean rules, where I know nothing about. They may lurk some surprises, though, like the only Japanese program rated R-20 that I saw so far was “just” about four girls drinking alcohol during the the whole 12 episodes of the show, speaking about how to do it best.
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That almost sounds like a trigger warning/tag rather than a content tag. To me, there being a (non-pornographic) sex scene doesn’t warrant a tag (and could even be a spoiler in some cases), but I understand that to some people it’s so uncomfortable that they want to block it.
Based on the rest of this conversation, it sounds like “adult content” should be removed in favor of more specific tags.
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I actually added ‘smut’ as a tag for “pornographic intent” sex scenes not realizing that’s how people were treating/possibly treating the Adult Content tag.
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This is the description for the “adult content” tag, so that’s how I’ve been tagging books that contain smut. Especially since it was the only general sexual tag when I started.
I’d definitely be in favor of it being replaced with more specific tags.
Also, sexual content is sexual content, whether it’s meant to be pornographic or not. If it’s just fade-to-black or only gets glanced over, then that probably wouldn’t really count imo (though there could be a fade-to-black tag). Like that one scene early in 海辺のカフカ that’s ultimately what had me dropping it is very much sexual even if it’s not smut (at least, I hope it’s not meant to be titillating or whatever), and it deserves a warning.
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Valid point! I was actually looking for trigger warning tags for the book I am currently reading, and I thought that’s the way to do them here… 
Oh! I would have expected there to be a difference between the two… (or am I mixing up “erotic” and “pornographic” here?)
but then again, I’ve lived most of my life without regard for labels like these, so I might be a bit under-informed here
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Yes, I fully agree with you. I also thought of Murakami as a prototypical author who writes pretty explicit sex scenes that do not have any arousing effect (at least not on me). I would want to be able to tag a book appropriately if it contains such scenes.
But back to my original question, if I may:
Would a scene like this be ok for you, or would you like this to be tagged as well?
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Honestly I think it would be nice to specify percentages, even if it was just in increments of 10 (5 ideal). Have a sliding scale, or something. Sometimes I’ll find myself tagging something and setting it as a minor element, but 25% feels like overrepresenting it, but it’s still not irrelevant. Especially with short story collections. If something’s a minor element in several of the stories, then, okay, 25%, sure. But if it’s a minor element that only shows up in one story, then that would be more like maybe 10%.
One collection I’m reading has a handful of stories about high school athletes, and each story has at least one different sport. The third has fishing and jūdō which are about equal, the second is all track—and the first is mainly volleyball since that’s what the POV character plays but another MC plays tennis and another is a photographer; we may only see a little bit of photography and there’s zero actually playing tennis on the page, but it’s very much a part of who those characters are and they influence the story and various terms from them come up, so they’re definitely not irrelevant. (The fourth story follows the previous characters in turns while the fifth is a super-short volleyball one.)
I have to tag all of them 25%, which makes it seem like they all get equal focus, which they don’t. My only other choice right now would be to tag each story as if they were the whole volume, which is also misrepresentative. (Plus that wouldn’t work with all volumes of 青春サプリ. Most of them, all 5 stories are about different clubs, but there’s one with 3 baseball and 2 soccer. That’s not even.)
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That falls under fade-to-black, and I’m generally okay with that. (Well, it being more glanced over isn’t fade-to-black, but I’m not sure how I’d tag that. Maybe something for inexplicit sexual content [whether the tag is called that exactly or not] that would also include ftb. That would be better than shoehorning non-ftb inexplicit stuff into a fade-to-black tag…)
I mean, I’m ace and sex scenes don’t really do anything for me (at least, not the intended effect [I had no idea people actually like. got off while reading smut until recently. wild. also how do allos live like that]; I care way more about the emotions lmao) (I don’t think I know the difference between pornographic and erotic either, it’s all the same to me), but I do willingly read stories that I know have smut in them (hell, I sometimes try to write some myself), and it’s not always an unpleasant surprise when some turns up when I hadn’t gone in expecting any. Tropes and whatnot aside, what I don’t like is when there’s no lead-up/warning, it’s just suddenly: Bam! Sex, in your face! 海辺のカフカ, yeah, but even when it’s supposed to be sexy. It’s not, it’s just off-putting, if not upsetting.
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That sounds very useful indeed.
Believe it or not, but many people read smut exactly because they want this effect.
Thanks for the explanation, that helps me a lot in understanding why exactly you disliked Kafka that much. 
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I think porn and erotica are basically the same thing, but sexual content doesn’t have to be erotic/pornographic/titillating. As an example from 正欲 (which I think you’ve decided not to read so hopefully won’t mind a spoiler): one of the characters talks about how his wife always starts to cry at the moment of penetration and it hyperfocuses on that as an example of ‘unusual’ turn ons, and then later it revisits the same sex scene from the wife’s perspective and we find out why she does that. It’s reasonably explicit, but not even remotely sexy nor meant to be for the reader. Hopefully that makes sense? 
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Well, per everyone’s suggestions, perhaps we change the ‘Adult Content’ tag to ‘Pornographic’ with erotica & adult content in the description? Pornographic feels like it’s pretty clear in it’s meaning.
We could also have a separate tag for ‘Sex’.
I will say that this Pornographic / Adult Content / Erotica tag will have special handling on the site. Namely, by default it’d be hidden as we’ve chatted about before… similar to many other sites such as AniList. I do generally want to keep the site clean as I find that’s much more welcoming and professional.
As for other types of adult themes, I say we just tag them specifically… like drugs or violence.
What do we all think on that?
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Just to check, you won’t be swapping the tags, right? Like, anything labeled “Adult Content” right now won’t have the pornographic tag applied, right? The adult content tag will just be removed?
Would books/series with a Sex tag be hidden?
No. No special handling for any tag except pornographic.
And I would think we would do a one for one swap, yes
I would prefer the more general ‘Sexually Explicit’ over ‘Pornographic’ for a tag, since as discussed in other posts, explicit material isn’t necessarily meant to be erotic.
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If we then go ahead and block “Sexually Explicit” contents from the general search pages as the default, I think there would be many works of literature that would fall under this ban as well - which is not how other sites handle these things. Therefore I think it makes sense to have a distinction between them, namely a “pornographic” / “erotic” / “smut” tag (that can be blocked by default) and also a “sexually explicit” tag.
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Going back to what I mentioned earlier, I personally would use tags to indicate general themes, not specific scenes. For example, if I’m reading a manga that isn’t about cooking, but in one chapter a character cooks an elaborate meal, I’m not going to tag the manga as “cooking” or “food”. Similarly, I would not tag something for a sex scene if the scene is just there as part of a broader theme or specific story point.
But again, for triggers this is different. I originally though triggers and tags could be consolidated into a single feature (e.g. a user setting to filter out specific tags), but the more we talk about this the more I think they actually should be separate features.
@brandon What’s your opinion on what I’m saying, both regarding whether tags should be used for themes only or also for individual chapters/scenes, plus how it relates to trigger warning/filtering?
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The book/series I’ve marked as Adult Content weren’t marked because they were pornographic, though, and it’d be a shame if they were hidden by default for having a faulty tag. Unfortunately I don’t remember what I’ve marked as what by this point. :\
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Happy to hear ideas, maybe in a different thread. My thinking is that tags should handle it, albeit perhaps with a few tweaks (adding ‘trigger’ tag group? adding a ‘very minor element’ option for 1 scene?).
I do hear you that trigger warnings are a bit different and generally, tags should be elements rather than single scenes… but honestly building a whole separate feature seems too complicated. I think tags will work pretty elegantly, even with a wart or two.
Heh, I wouldn’t worry too much. We can always tell you the ones you’ve marked if you’re worried about it! 
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