What is Adult?

Hey all, Matt here 🙂

I just got back from the theater with my wife and my mailbox is flooded with the fun Steve has been having, so I thought i’d toss my quart of petrol onto the fire 🙂

What is Adult Material?

This question cannot be answered black and white. I’ve tried to get an answer from various online child protection groups and I’ve tried to get answers from parents. The answers range from any single use of any bad words (the list of bad words also varies wildly), any use of words in places where it is clear a bad word was intended (oh fudging heck), all the way up to “everyone swears, its a fact of life”.

MiracleWhip said it quite nicely in a comment she left on this diary, I hope she doesn’t mind me borrowing her words:

This really isn’t all that confusing.

Don Quixote has a rape scene in it and it’s not X-rated. Domestic abuse is described in Dickens without his needing to be racy.

X-rated material is written with a clear intent to sexually arouse its readers.

Nobody who’s smart enough to write that way should be confused about what is and isn’t adult writing.

The bottom line is that we’re not going to dictate what is adult and what is not beforehand because it’s entirely subjective. If we receive a complaint (or if a diarist openly comes to us and asks for our thoughts) then we’ll simply look at that diary and talk to the diarist. If you have to ask us then it probably isn’t an Adult diary – but be honest with yourself.

Can you talk about having sex? I don’t see why not, it’s a part of life on this planet. Can you discuss in detail what you did? I would suggest not! If you are writing to arouse (yourself and/or your readers) then that’s probably Adult.

There’s a lot more to Adult than just Erotica or describing your sexual encounters in detail.

Use your judgement and if you aren’t sure by all means get our opinion, if we receive a complaint then we will contact you to discuss whether or not you want to simply make your adult entries private, or move your diary into the adult area.

If people ask for the service, we could also investigate adding the capability of flagging individual entries as adult so that you don’t have to move your entire diary into the Adult area, just the entries that should not be read by kids or those that simply don’t want to fall on to this.

As Steve said, this is all now negotiable – within limits. We need to help protect the kids on the site (as well as those who don’t want to read Adult material) but we also don’t want to force anyone to go into the Adult area just because of one Adult entry.

I believe Steve has already commented on this but i’ll re-iterate just to make sure… To read any Adult diaries, as many times as you like for a year you get one account with AdultVerifier and that’s it. You don’t have to pay each time and not for each diary.

We have a support address and we have comments here, we’re very interested to hear what people say. We’ve had a couple of people email support just saying “please cancel my diary”, we’d really like to know what it is specifically that you dislike about this that makes you just want to cancel?

On a personal note, a big pat on the back to Steve, he’s been working damn hard to get this in and it’s cost him a bit of that mop on his head in stress 😉 Great stuff!

Goodnight all, it’s 1.30am and I’m a tad bit tired after repairing my server at home an hour ago 🙂

Matt.