Defining Pornography in Literature

But then again pornography is one of our primary concerns.

For one, we are not a restricted access website so people of all ages are welcomed to browse here. I suspect that enough people out there are concerned with the level of nudity, violence and erotic content that we do allow without opening the door to outright pornography.

Secondly, we simply do not want to welcome that sort of content because doing so actually closes off many potential avenues which we might want to pursue in the future, not to mention that I don't think that it would be particularly healthy for the community in general.

So, porn is a problem and we try to be understanding when somebody clicks AGREE to the Submission Agreement, the Terms of Service and completely skips the necessary part where you have to actually read them.

Considering that No Pornography is clearly listed everywhere important a surprising number of people claim ignorance. Some of them get warnings, some get suspended, and others get banned- and just to show how serious we are on certain issues we even have our own contact with the FBI to report the really twisted stuff.

So, a large part of my time is spent educating and talking about the subject, not only to get people to stop submitting smut but also to get people to stop reporting everything with a naked person in it as "pornography" when it isn't officially considered to be such.

Over the last few years, several actually, we've focused at clarifying the Erotica vs Pornography argument in relation to visual imagery. This was primarily because visual imagery catches your attention immediately and it is therefore a higher priority to get that sort of thing squared away.

Perfecting the policy to deal with it was a long, drawn out process where we see-sawed back and forth over certain themes but the intention of the policy remained unchanged throughout all of those changes in wording.

Literature on the other hand gave me a problem.

Early on we realized that literature can't be treated exactly the same as visual art and photography; a restriction which works for the one and become a stranglehold for the other if it's applied too enthusiastically.

I also made the assumption early on that any reasonably intelligent person could infer the policy for literature by seeing what we prohibited for visual arts but that turned out to be incorrect as the reasonably intelligent people decided instead to take a firm stance and refuse to infer anything and insist on being specifically told so they wouldn't unnecessarily restrict themselves.

So it was long overdue by the time GeneratingHype contacted me in the middle of May to fill me in on the discussion which was going on between the various volunteers over in Artist Relations. It was a long note and it served to show me how badly we needed to have an official word on the subject.

So after much thought and deliberation we have a News Article addressing the matter.

No doubt that people will be confused on the matter, either honestly or purposefully in the hope that it'll be changed or pulled completely but that's just all part of the educational process and the fact of the matter is that not everyone can be pleased simultaneously and the purpose of the policy isn't supposed to do that in the first place.

Wander over there and read it and open a dialog here if you'd like.