Kicking myself

[boytoyjoy]

The tech side of literotica seems ok to me. I like the old fashioned interface, from the era when stuff actually worked. The word "enshittification" was invented basically to describe the "modern" web.

As for the need for premoderation, I'd defer to Laurel, but I do know that the two main fanfiction sites (fanfiction.net and ao3) have no premoderation and no big money backing them, and don't seem to have major problems as a result. I'd guess (don't know for sure) that both have more content and more traffic than Lit does, though it is mostly not erotica. They do have a lot of crap stories, but there is good stuff there too.

 

[ShelbyDawn57]

No actually, only 1% should be in the lowest percentile.

Would be interesting to see sitewide. Metrics on a bell curve.

 

[Bramblethorn]

To the best of my knowledge, no. Someone above mentioned a couple names of people that got in trouble with the law and I looked them up and it appears it's because of "visual material" they were in possession of, not any stories they wrote.

You may not have read closely enough. Yes, McCoy and Arthur both had convictions related to visual material, but they ALSO had convictions specifically for text stories. (Not written by them, AFAIK, but hosted on websites which they operated; at the point where an FBI agent downloaded those stories, they were up for "transporting obscene material across state lines".)

In McCoy's case, the conviction for text stories came first. While he was on probation pending appeal for that conviction, his probation officers found visual child-abuse material on his computers, but that's a separate matter from the conviction for text stories. Here's the appeal judgement for the former case; if you read it, you can see that it's very clearly about text stories.

https://cases.justia.com/federal/appellate-courts/ca11/13-14350/1118331399/0.pdf

And here's the latter case, which acknowledges his earlier conviction: https://casetext.com/case/united-states-v-mccoy-124.

Arthur ran a website that hosted both stories and images. He was charged and convicted for both those activities in the same case.

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/texas-man-sentenced-40-years-prison-running-child-obscenity-website
https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-5th-circuit/1951018.html

Note mention in the former of "five counts of trafficking in obscene text stories", and in the latter that "Counts 1, 8, and 9 were premised on drawings used as profile pictures by three authors on Arthur's website, while Counts 2-6 were premised on five separate stories posted on the site..."

But I don't know for certain, it could be part of it. Certainly there has to be a difference between writing a story about a couple sixteen year olds losing their virginity and something way worse and younger. I mean look at AO3 as an example. They have all kinds of questionable stuff. Just yesterday I published a story there and right above mine in the new stories list, someone had posted a sex story about cannibalism or something.

Reading the details of the McCoy case might shed some light on the considerations involved. (Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, and anybody planning on operating an adult-content website should get professional legal advice.)

One point that comes up in that trial is that the evaluation of "obscenity" depended on whether the site content when taken as a whole (a) appealed to prurient interest, and (b) lacked serious literary/artistic/political/scientific value.

I suspect it would be easier to defend Ao3 than Literotica, on both those grounds:

- Literotica brands itself as an erotica site; it's right there in the name. That seems like a major disadvantage if you're trying to argue that the site isn't specifically about "appealing to prurient interest". By contrast, although Ao3 has a lot of explicit content (probably more than there is on Literotica), it doesn't define itself on that, and the non-erotic content isn't treated as an afterthought the way it does here.

- If I were a lawyer trying to argue that Ao3 has "serious literary/artistic value", I could point at several award-winning professional authors who've posted stories on that site (mostly non-explicit), and I can point to the site itself winning a "Best Related Work" Hugo award. If I were trying to do the same for Literotica, I'd be harder pressed to find supporting evidence.

(For the avoidance of doubt: I am not saying that Literotica stories lack serious literary/artistic value! I think there's as much of that to be found here as there is on Ao3. But if I were trying to convince a judge or jury who weren't familiar with those sites, it's a lot harder to argue with "here are highly-awarded pros who contribute to the site, and here's a major genre award that it won" than with "here are some stories that I, personally, think are great.)

I only read the summary. No thanks. But again, I'm not advocating for any of the legally questionable/reprehensible stuff to be acceptable, I'm just arguing there might be a better way everyone to can get their stuff published faster, by moderating after the fact.
Maybe setup some kind of system where if a certain number of registered members flag a story in a short period of time, it gets locked down until moderators can either approve or delete it. Allow the community to work the problem and self-police. Especially if it's only one or two people approving stories right now.

Whether this kind of thing works depends very much on the culture of the site.

Flagging systems can go unused, if people have a "snitches get stitches" mindset; Literotica already does have an option for reporting stories that break the rules, and not infrequently we have discussions here where people complain about such stories but haven't reported them for whatever reason. (Disclaimer: I've been one of those people.) It can also go the other way, with brigading used as a harassment tactic. With some categories getting much more readership than others, it might be tricky to set that "certain number" low enough to catch problem stories in low-readership categories but high enough to prevent malicious reporting from being a problem in high-readership categories.

I'm not necessarily against it. I don't think the current single-moderator system is a sustainable solution - no shade on Laurel's moderation, any human-run system is going to be imperfect, I just hate having any system that depends on a single specific person showing up day after day without ever taking a long break. I don't say it wouldn't work, just that I don't know whether it would work here, and I doubt anybody does.

There's a lot I like about the way Ao3 works, some of it better than I like the Literotica systems. But I'm not sure how much of that could be transplanted here and work here, because systems aren't independent from the people who use them, and Lit is a very different culture to Ao3.

All of that said, I know Lit is a very old website. And I know that either one or two of the owners skim all the new work before approval. But that makes me wonder, how much traffic is Lit really getting?

Going by the rate of stories on the New Stories section, it's on the order of 100-200 stories a day. It's not as many as Ao3, but it's probably near the limit of what a single moderator can handle.

 

[Bramblethorn]

We already have that. I am not being the slightest bit sarcastic nor facetious when I saw that more than half the stories posted to lit are - in a literary sense (story telling, characters, setting, motive/plot, style/voice, theme, flow, etc) - absolutely horrible.

OTOH, there's always room to get worse.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Would be interesting to see sitewide. Metrics on a bell curve.

I always get mixed up between median and average, and have to check the difference.

The site bell curve would be skewed to the right, I reckon, centred around 4, not 3 - but it would still be a bell curve.

 

[gunhilltrain]

My first submission was rejected for poor format and punctuation and it was a lot better than that.

Yes, he ignores any attempt to have quotations done correctly. (I assume it's a male, but I could be wrong.) Also, cervinx? I also wonder if it was intended as a parody of porn. Or maybe it's just terrible writing.

 

[MelissaBaby]

Yes, he ignores any attempt to have quotations done correctly. (I assume it's a male, but I could be wrong.) Also, cervinx? I also wonder if it was intended as a parody of porn. Or maybe it's just terrible writing.

Uh...I wrote it as a parody.

 

[NatalieDePlume]

You may not have read closely enough. Yes, McCoy and Arthur both had convictions related to visual material, but they ALSO had convictions specifically for text stories. (Not written by them, AFAIK, but hosted on websites which they operated; at the point where an FBI agent downloaded those stories, they were up for "transporting obscene material across state lines".)

In McCoy's case, the conviction for text stories came first. While he was on probation pending appeal for that conviction, his probation officers found visual child-abuse material on his computers, but that's a separate matter from the conviction for text stories. Here's the appeal judgement for the former case; if you read it, you can see that it's very clearly about text stories.

https://cases.justia.com/federal/appellate-courts/ca11/13-14350/1118331399/0.pdf

And here's the latter case, which acknowledges his earlier conviction: https://casetext.com/case/united-states-v-mccoy-124.

Arthur ran a website that hosted both stories and images. He was charged and convicted for both those activities in the same case.

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/texas-man-sentenced-40-years-prison-running-child-obscenity-website
https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-5th-circuit/1951018.html

Note mention in the former of "five counts of trafficking in obscene text stories", and in the latter that "Counts 1, 8, and 9 were premised on drawings used as profile pictures by three authors on Arthur's website, while Counts 2-6 were premised on five separate stories posted on the site..."



Reading the details of the McCoy case might shed some light on the considerations involved. (Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, and anybody planning on operating an adult-content website should get professional legal advice.)

One point that comes up in that trial is that the evaluation of "obscenity" depended on whether the site content when taken as a whole (a) appealed to prurient interest, and (b) lacked serious literary/artistic/political/scientific value.

I suspect it would be easier to defend Ao3 than Literotica, on both those grounds:

- Literotica brands itself as an erotica site; it's right there in the name. That seems like a major disadvantage if you're trying to argue that the site isn't specifically about "appealing to prurient interest". By contrast, although Ao3 has a lot of explicit content (probably more than there is on Literotica), it doesn't define itself on that, and the non-erotic content isn't treated as an afterthought the way it does here.

- If I were a lawyer trying to argue that Ao3 has "serious literary/artistic value", I could point at several award-winning professional authors who've posted stories on that site (mostly non-explicit), and I can point to the site itself winning a "Best Related Work" Hugo award. If I were trying to do the same for Literotica, I'd be harder pressed to find supporting evidence.

(For the avoidance of doubt: I am not saying that Literotica stories lack serious literary/artistic value! I think there's as much of that to be found here as there is on Ao3. But if I were trying to convince a judge or jury who weren't familiar with those sites, it's a lot harder to argue with "here are highly-awarded pros who contribute to the site, and here's a major genre award that it won" than with "here are some stories that I, personally, think are great.)

Fair enough. Although I wonder when the law changed regarding that. I had read a story about a guy back in 1995 who wrote "fictional" stories about wanting to torture and kill a real life woman on his college campus. Even sending emails to another guy in Canada about how they were going to do it, and the judge ultimately let him off because it was fictional. Personally I think that was the wrong call. So many lines being crossed there it's scary. I wouldn't call that fictional. The dude even went so far as to say in one of his emails that writing stories just wasn't satisfying enough for him anymore, he had to actually do it. But he was still let off. I think the judge was smoking something.
So obviously the law changed since then. But it does seem strange to me that people would be convicted for not just writing but hosting stories about fictional people doing things to other fictional people not related to real life folks. The law is supposed to protect real life people, but that sounds more like convicting people for thought crimes at that point. I guess it depends on how it's written maybe? I don't know. I've never read these kind of stories, so maybe they are far worse than I imagine.

But either way I can understand what you're saying about Lit vs AO3 and the total package view of things. That makes sense. I think if I were to start a website for erotic fiction, it wouldn't be just that. Even if it had a dedicated landing page for that section of the website. But that's also because I'm interested in more than erotic fiction, even though I think that is the most fun and liberating category to write in. But it also sounds like it would be a nightmare in regards to legality.

Someone above mentioned the interface for Lit, and I agree I like it way better than A03, which I think is a mess.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Fair enough. Although I wonder when the law changed regarding that. I had read a story about a guy back in 1995 who wrote "fictional" stories about wanting to torture and kill a real life woman on his college campus. Even sending emails to another guy in Canada about how they were going to do it, and the judge ultimately let him off because it was fictional.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Alkhabaz

As far as I can tell, he was charged with making threats, not with distributing obscene material, so a different offense to the McCoy/Arthur cases. The threats charges were eventually dismissed for lack of evidence of intent.

Had he been charged under the same law as McCoy and Arthur, I have no idea how it might've turned out.

 

[SimonDoom]

Fair enough. Although I wonder when the law changed regarding that. I had read a story about a guy back in 1995 who wrote "fictional" stories about wanting to torture and kill a real life woman on his college campus. Even sending emails to another guy in Canada about how they were going to do it, and the judge ultimately let him off because it was fictional. Personally I think that was the wrong call. So many lines being crossed there it's scary. I wouldn't call that fictional. The dude even went so far as to say in one of his emails that writing stories just wasn't satisfying enough for him anymore, he had to actually do it. But he was still let off. I think the judge was smoking something.
So obviously the law changed since then. But it does seem strange to me that people would be convicted for not just writing but hosting stories about fictional people doing things to other fictional people not related to real life folks. The law is supposed to protect real life people, but that sounds more like convicting people for thought crimes at that point. I guess it depends on how it's written maybe? I don't know. I've never read these kind of stories, so maybe they are far worse than I imagine.

The law hasn't changed. It's more accurate to say that the law of obscenity in the USA is unclear, and even to the extent that it IS clear it allows different jurisdictions to interpret obscenity differently based on "community standards," which may vary from community to community. Obscenity law is governed by California v. Miller, a Supreme Court case dating back to 1973, over 50 years ago and issued in the very early days of legal, widely distributed pornography. The Supreme Court has not changed this standard. I suspect there's a practical reason for that: it doesn't want to touch it with a 10 foot pole. The reality in America is that pornograpy is widespread and, practically speaking, accepted, but our culture is so weird on this subject that it's not politically acceptable to say that.

I personally believe that no fictional textual content should be illegal. I suspect there are many federal judges, including, probably, Supreme Court justices, who agree with me, but none of them are going to go out of their way to say so. The Supreme Court has the discretion to choose which cases to accept review of, and there's no sign that it's going to revisit Miller anytime soon. So I would predict this area will remain somewhat in legal limbo.

 

[KeithD]

There is another site with sixteen as the minimum, and I've never heard of them having denial of service incidents. They've been that way for the last five years that I've been a member.

Ditto with SOL, which as a 14-year-old minimum.

 

[gunhilltrain]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Alkhabaz

As far as I can tell, he was charged with making threats, not with distributing obscene material, so a different offense to the McCoy/Arthur cases. The threats charges were eventually dismissed for lack of evidence of intent.

Had he been charged under the same law as McCoy and Arthur, I have no idea how it might've turned out.

That guy was obviously foolish for using the real name of the classmate. Yet it brings up a notable question: how did she or the University find the story on the Usenet group in the first place? Not that this justifies anything, but did it happen that she was a regular reader of that group?

There is a certain paranoia that shows up on AH about who may be reading Lit and if they can identify who we are. Is it just unfounded fretting or should some caution be used when approaching real life situations? I don't know, it probably varies depending on the situation. I mentioned once that I might be more cautious if I was an undergraduate (there was no Internet in my day) versus being the relatively unknown geezer that I am today.

 

[gunhilltrain]

Ditto with SOL, which as a 14-year-old minimum.

I have a coming-of-age series on SOL about a fifteen-year-old guy. I'd feel guilty about it if Phillip Roth, Nabokov, Erica Jong, and others hadn't published stories with characters that age or younger.

 

[Bramblethorn]

That guy was obviously foolish for using the real name of the classmate. Yet it brings up a notable question: how did she or the University find the story on the Usenet group in the first place? Not that this justifies anything, but did it happen that she was a regular reader of that group?

IIRC, one of the university's alumni was reading the group and alerted university staff. I don't know whether he knew her and recognised her name, or if there was enough info in the story for him to realise that this was about a real person at UM.

 

[lovecraft68]

You may not have read closely enough. Yes, McCoy and Arthur both had convictions related to visual material, but they ALSO had convictions specifically for text stories. (Not written by them, AFAIK, but hosted on websites which they operated; at the point where an FBI agent downloaded those stories, they were up for "transporting obscene material across state lines".)

In McCoy's case, the conviction for text stories came first. While he was on probation pending appeal for that conviction, his probation officers found visual child-abuse material on his computers, but that's a separate matter from the conviction for text stories. Here's the appeal judgement for the former case; if you read it, you can see that it's very clearly about text stories.

https://cases.justia.com/federal/appellate-courts/ca11/13-14350/1118331399/0.pdf

And here's the latter case, which acknowledges his earlier conviction: https://casetext.com/case/united-states-v-mccoy-124.

Arthur ran a website that hosted both stories and images. He was charged and convicted for both those activities in the same case.

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/texas-man-sentenced-40-years-prison-running-child-obscenity-website
https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-5th-circuit/1951018.html

Note mention in the former of "five counts of trafficking in obscene text stories", and in the latter that "Counts 1, 8, and 9 were premised on drawings used as profile pictures by three authors on Arthur's website, while Counts 2-6 were premised on five separate stories posted on the site..."



Reading the details of the McCoy case might shed some light on the considerations involved. (Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, and anybody planning on operating an adult-content website should get professional legal advice.)

One point that comes up in that trial is that the evaluation of "obscenity" depended on whether the site content when taken as a whole (a) appealed to prurient interest, and (b) lacked serious literary/artistic/political/scientific value.

I suspect it would be easier to defend Ao3 than Literotica, on both those grounds:

- Literotica brands itself as an erotica site; it's right there in the name. That seems like a major disadvantage if you're trying to argue that the site isn't specifically about "appealing to prurient interest". By contrast, although Ao3 has a lot of explicit content (probably more than there is on Literotica), it doesn't define itself on that, and the non-erotic content isn't treated as an afterthought the way it does here.

- If I were a lawyer trying to argue that Ao3 has "serious literary/artistic value", I could point at several award-winning professional authors who've posted stories on that site (mostly non-explicit), and I can point to the site itself winning a "Best Related Work" Hugo award. If I were trying to do the same for Literotica, I'd be harder pressed to find supporting evidence.

(For the avoidance of doubt: I am not saying that Literotica stories lack serious literary/artistic value! I think there's as much of that to be found here as there is on Ao3. But if I were trying to convince a judge or jury who weren't familiar with those sites, it's a lot harder to argue with "here are highly-awarded pros who contribute to the site, and here's a major genre award that it won" than with "here are some stories that I, personally, think are great.)



Whether this kind of thing works depends very much on the culture of the site.

Flagging systems can go unused, if people have a "snitches get stitches" mindset; Literotica already does have an option for reporting stories that break the rules, and not infrequently we have discussions here where people complain about such stories but haven't reported them for whatever reason. (Disclaimer: I've been one of those people.) It can also go the other way, with brigading used as a harassment tactic. With some categories getting much more readership than others, it might be tricky to set that "certain number" low enough to catch problem stories in low-readership categories but high enough to prevent malicious reporting from being a problem in high-readership categories.

I'm not necessarily against it. I don't think the current single-moderator system is a sustainable solution - no shade on Laurel's moderation, any human-run system is going to be imperfect, I just hate having any system that depends on a single specific person showing up day after day without ever taking a long break. I don't say it wouldn't work, just that I don't know whether it would work here, and I doubt anybody does.

There's a lot I like about the way Ao3 works, some of it better than I like the Literotica systems. But I'm not sure how much of that could be transplanted here and work here, because systems aren't independent from the people who use them, and Lit is a very different culture to Ao3.



Going by the rate of stories on the New Stories section, it's on the order of 100-200 stories a day. It's not as many as Ao3, but it's probably near the limit of what a single moderator can handle.

But I believe the reason for arrest on the text stories wasn't underage sex, which is legal to write, but the nature of the stories were not erotic but sexual abuse.

This is another example of what I discussed on that "I want a female author for my slave story" thread last night. There is erotica/fetish and the right to write it, but when the material is pushed beyond erotic limits to portray hate, abuse, and good old fashioned racism, there is a difference. The law sees that. This site, and many people on it stuck in the "freedom of speech" philosophy can't or won't, understand the difference.

 

[lovecraft68]

Considering that there are people out there who write hardcore gore/snuff stories that feature minors having all sorts of horrendous acts performed on them, the site has to have a filtering system. Letting anything get published and then hoping users report the shit that violates the rules would be monumentally stupid. And likely get the site shutdown. Literotica is run by two people. YouTube is run by one of the single biggest, most influential, ubiquitous tech companies on the planet. You're basically comparing an elderly couple running a garage sale to Amazon.

EDIT: ElectricBlue typed their comment faster than me, but I fully concur with them.

Its been proven many times reporting that material gets you no where. Only way for it to go away is a public shaming thread of "how is this here." and lately even that doesn't work.

 

[lovecraft68]

This was simply speculation as to what could happen, and what Lit's thinking might be.

Laurel's answer, back when she'd deign to respond to us, was that if she lowered the age limit to 16, people would want 14, and so on.

But the "coughs" rule is theirs for their site and has nothing to do with Law or LE.

Revenge porn and porn pic threads are what could get them in trouble with the law, but they seem to think it doesn't apply to them.

 

[gunhilltrain]

IIRC, one of the university's alumni was reading the group and alerted university staff. I don't know whether he knew her and recognised her name, or if there was enough info in the story for him to realise that this was about a real person at UM.

So I assume that the author himself was using his real name, also a bad idea.

"Baker's story was brought to the attention of University of Michigan authorities and he was arrested, determined to be a threat to the subject of his story as well as the rest of the student population."

An interesting quandary, which I can't fully answer. Is a reader of porn obligated to drop a dime on somebody like Baker? In this case, I'd say probably yes. He crossed a line by using her real name.

 

[Kelliezgirl]

The law hasn't changed. It's more accurate to say that the law of obscenity in the USA is unclear, and even to the extent that it IS clear it allows different jurisdictions to interpret obscenity differently based on "community standards," which may vary from community to community. Obscenity law is governed by California v. Miller, a Supreme Court case dating back to 1973, over 50 years ago and issued in the very early days of legal, widely distributed pornography. The Supreme Court has not changed this standard. I suspect there's a practical reason for that: it doesn't want to touch it with a 10 foot pole. The reality in America is that pornograpy is widespread and, practically speaking, accepted, but our culture is so weird on this subject that it's not politically acceptable to say that.

I personally believe that no fictional textual content should be illegal. I suspect there are many federal judges, including, probably, Supreme Court justices, who agree with me, but none of them are going to go out of their way to say so. The Supreme Court has the discretion to choose which cases to accept review of, and there's no sign that it's going to revisit Miller anytime soon. So I would predict this area will remain somewhat in legal limbo.

Have there even been any major obscenity cases recently? I can't think of any, but I'll admit that it's not something I look for. Seems like something society has mostly moved on from. From the Judiciary's standpoint it seem like a case of letting sleeping dogs lay. Absent a two major cases and a split between the circuits there just isn't a reason to bother. The number of people who are actually worried about this stuff is probably vanishingly small.

 

[lovecraft68]

I see the literary erotica elitists are on their horse again.

Its a free site and the great thing about lit is anyone can write here. The bad thing is...anyone can write here.

True some people are lazy and don't try, but for some it may be the best they can do, either ESL, or maybe not much formal education, could have some type of issue-dyslexia for example-but they're trying and worked hard and are proud of their story. Not everyone takes it that seriously, and not everyone is created equal is what I'm getting at. But if you don't know if someone is just making no effort, or its the best they can do, maybe you should drop the snark.

In other words how about you grammar snots give it a rest? Or maybe take your Pulitzer prize winning material to market if its so good?

 

[SimonDoom]

Have there even been any major obscenity cases recently? I can't think of any, but I'll admit that it's not something I look for. Seems like something society has mostly moved on from. From the Judiciary's standpoint it seem like a case of letting sleeping dogs lay. Absent a two major cases and a split between the circuits there just isn't a reason to bother. The number of people who are actually worried about this stuff is probably vanishingly small.

The McCoy case, cited by Bramblethorn, is an 11th Circuit appellate court decision from 2015, which upheld a conviction against the defendant under federal "transportation of obscene material" laws for posting stories that he authored or edited on his own website that described the "sexual rape, torture, and abuse of young children." The 11th Circuit comprises most of the southeastern states in the United States, so it's probably the most conservative federal appellate jurisdiction in the USA on this issue. The court specifically considered the Constitutional question of obscenity under Miller, and it found that the stories were properly found to be "obscene" and therefore not protected by the First Amendment. See https://cases.justia.com/federal/appellate-courts/ca11/13-14350/1118331399/0.pdf.

2015 is fairly recent. It took place about 20 years after the widespread dissemination of sexually explicit stories on the Internet, and nothing especially new has happened since then, so I think it's fair to suppose the 11th Circuit would rule the same way today.

There are 13 circuits, however, and some or all of the rest might NOT rule the same way. If one of them ruled contrary to the McCoy case, then it might create a split among the circuits that would convince the Supreme Court to take up the case to resolve the conflict. But I wouldn't hold my breath on that one.

Based upon the extreme facts of the McCoy case, the state of the law, and the infrequency of the prosecution of obscenity cases based on text-only material, I think we can say with some, but not perfect, confidence, that:

1. As a practical matter, it appears only the most hard-core textual material is likely to be prosecuted as obscenity.
2. Textual and visual material are not the same and are not likely to be seen the same way by the law. Of course, there's a huge difference between images of real children and fictional stories about fictional people.
3. Literotica does not publish anything that would qualify as obscene in the sense that the McCoy material does. Its under-18 rule sees to that, and even if some seemingly inappropriate stories slip through the cracks, I have NEVER read a story anything like what McCoy describes at Literotica.
4. There are plenty of sites that publish far more hard core content than Literotica, and for the most part they seem to get away with it without being prosecuted.
5. There's some possibility that if the Supreme Court were to take up a case it might overrule McCoy and find that no purely textual material is obscene. But that's speculative. We don't know.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

This is another example of what I discussed on that "I want a female author for my slave story" thread last night. There is erotica/fetish and the right to write it, but when the material is pushed beyond erotic limits to portray hate, abuse, and good old fashioned racism, there is a difference. The law sees that. This site, and many people on it stuck in the "freedom of speech" philosophy can't or won't, understand the difference.

Oh, I see the difference. I just still say that it's okay to write it. Hate abuse and racism are real things that our art needs to reflect so that our society can understand and deal with it better. I understand that certain folks feel the need to hold the hand of readers by telling them what they're not allowed to see (censorship), but I can decide that for myself thanks. The dark side of it is though, that once you create that power to ban what wee can see, it is so powerful that it will be abused. Throughout history, censorship has never been good for the common people. It is probably the most effective tool of oppression, propaganda and all that. Knowledge is power and all that censorship does is deny knowledge. I won't speak for you lc68, but I'd guess that with your level of skepticism and outright mistrust of corruption in our society that you would at least understand this point as a more than valid concern.

The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood is a brilliant novel about three women with paralleling stories, weaknesses and motives. There is a particular scene where one of the women recounts her sexual abuse by her uncle at age 10. It is wonderfully written. It is graphic. I would not say that it is eroticized but I'm sure that many of the more prudish in our society would argue that it is, just to get it banned and prove their own morals superior to everyone else's. Some of them might actually even believe the argument.

You'd like it lc, the men in it are all bad. : P

 

[lovecraft68]

Oh, I see the difference. I just still say that it's okay to write it. Hate abuse and racism are real things that our art needs to reflect so that our society can understand and deal with it better. I understand that certain folks feel the need to hold the hand of readers by telling them what they're not allowed to see (censorship), but I can decide that for myself thanks. The dark side of it is though, that once you create that power to ban what wee can see, it is so powerful that it will be abused. Throughout history, censorship has never been good for the common people. It is probably the most effective tool of oppression, propaganda and all that. Knowledge is power and all that censorship does is deny knowledge. I won't speak for you lc68, but I'd guess that with your level of skepticism and outright mistrust of corruption in our society that you would at least understand this point as a more than valid concern.

The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood is a brilliant novel about three women with paralleling stories, weaknesses and motives. There is a particular scene where one of the women recounts her sexual abuse by her uncle at age 10. It is wonderfully written. It is graphic. I would not say that it is eroticized but I'm sure that many of the more prudish in our society would argue that it is, just to get it banned and prove their own morals superior to everyone else's. Some of them might actually even believe the argument.

You'd like it lc, the men in it are all bad. : P

Where you're wrong is the platform.

This is an erotica site meaning all these things are being sexually glorified. There's a difference between nastiness in a mainstream novel where the reaction is generally "That's awful" and a place where someone is reading about a vicious rape or beating of a woman with their dick in their hand.

This is not just my opinion. Why do you think sites like amazon will allow incest, rape, and under age sex etc in mainstream novels like Game of Thrones, Flowers in the attic etc, but have rules against those things in the erotic category? One is meant solely as a plot device the other for titillation.

Good example is Girl with the dragon tattoo, there is a graphic rape scene in that book designed to leave people disgusted, sympathetic, understanding why the female lead is how she is etc. Write that here, guys are blowing loads to it.

Get it? If not, you're just being dense and argumentative.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

This is an erotica site meaning all these things are being sexually glorified.

Oh, limited to the site rules, yes I agree with you. The site is private and is free to make it's own rules. If that is the limit of your argument, then that's fine. We all disagree with site rules to some extent, and even more to their inconsistent application, but we all also understand that the site needs some sort of rules and for the most part we respect that.

This is not just my opinion. Why do you think sites like amazon will allow incest, rape, and under age sex etc in mainstream novels like Game of Thrones, Flowers in the attic etc, but have rules against those things in the erotic category? One is meant solely as a plot device the other for titillation.

We can leave Amazon out of this. Amazon has no morals whatsoever. The only reason that they ban anything is that they don't want the black eye from the complaints. They don't ban anything based on what is eroticized or not. If they could get away with it, they'd sell your mom. We all know how they operate. They sell pretty much anything knowing that it violates their rules, wait for the backlash, then retro ban to make themselves look like heroes and guardians of society while they take the profits of what has sold already to the bank.

 

[Bramblethorn]

But I believe the reason for arrest on the text stories wasn't underage sex, which is legal to write, but the nature of the stories were not erotic but sexual abuse.

This is another example of what I discussed on that "I want a female author for my slave story" thread last night. There is erotica/fetish and the right to write it, but when the material is pushed beyond erotic limits to portray hate, abuse, and good old fashioned racism, there is a difference. The law sees that. This site, and many people on it stuck in the "freedom of speech" philosophy can't or won't, understand the difference.

I think the under-age and abusive nature of the stories both played a role. There is no specific law that says "it's illegal to publish stories about sex with minors" and as we've discussed before, plenty of authors have published mainstream books that involve under-age sex.

But if it crosses the line into "obscenity" then it loses First Amendment protection and it can be prosecuted, as happened in those two cases. Part of the test for "obscenity" is that it has to violate community standards. There's no legal definition of exactly what "community standards" are, but the more of those elements one throws in - under-age, extreme under-age, rape, torture, snuff - and the more concentrated they are, probably the easier it gets for a prosecutor to convince a judge/jury that it's over the line.