Regarding site wide degeneracy

[Tonyrolo]

This is by far the best site out there functionally for creating good erotica. But there's a disconnect in that we don't attract enough readers, and the really good authors (present company excluded of course choose to publish on sites like Literotica even though I know they would like and use the extra function offered here.

Just a quick list off the top of my head of why this site is superior: You can embed images, change chapters after you publish and notice a typo, do a linear story or branching (easy alternative endings), use variables, do markdown text, easily drive traffic (what little we have) with frequent new chapters, etc. Those are huge wins.

Yes, we've become overly fetishized it appears. You need tentacles or gender-swapping incest to get a large share of readers already here. The key detail is people already here.

So we can accept the way things are, which is totally fine by me, or think of new ways to attract those authors and readers.

I wonder if it might be less a case of attracting and more of not repelling potential readers/authors. This site places a huge value on the freedom to write basically anything that isn't illegal, which I respect and which is in many ways laudable. The flip side of that is it naturally attracts fans of some of the more extreme fetishes. I have found plenty of content I like on here, but when I first started using the site the very fact that I could look on the front page and see stories listed that were clearly fetishising violent rape or racial abuse, made me seriously reconsider if this was somewhere I wanted to post my own content.

In the end, I have learned to live with it. I can pretty much ignore those stories and publishing my own stuff on here doesn't mean I approve of them. Others I am sure will quit the whole site in outrage. It's the price of pure freedom, I suppose, when that kind of unrestrained lack of censorship, even regarding things most people might find highly offensive or disgusting, creates more niche markets and drives a lot of people away. I'm not even sure those stories are that popular, but they are there, they are very visible and that alone may be enough to cause a significant number of people to conclude the site isn't for them. I'm not approving or disapproving of anything here, just calling it as I see it, and I think it's something you probably have to accept is not going to change much.

I agree the site functionality is wonderful, and that's the main reason why, despite those issues, I still really like it here.

 

[TheLowKing]

I think you're overstating just how "unrestrained" the censorship is on CHYOA. The list of things that are banned is not all that different from what you'd be disallowed to do in real life in most liberal democracies: don't fuck kids, don't fuck animals, don't injure, don't murder. I'm not aware of any erotic story site with significantly tighter no-go lists, and I know of several with significantly fewer restrictions (like sexstories.com) or even none at all (like aforementioned AO3).

 

[Tonyrolo]

I think you're overstating just how "unrestrained" the censorship is on CHYOA. The list of things that are banned is not all that different from what you'd be disallowed to do in real life in most liberal democracies: don't fuck kids, don't fuck animals, don't injure, don't murder. I'm not aware of any erotic story site with significantly tighter no-go lists, and I know of several with significantly fewer restrictions (like sexstories.com) or even none at all (like aforementioned AO3).

If I type 'rape' into the search engine I get over 1200 stories, including 'Rape Party'. 'The Rape of Mila Kunis', 'Rape Your Mother' and 'RAPING EMMA WATSON!' within the first few pages. On racism I can quickly find stories like 'Women Exist to Serve White Men' (sample dialogie"Cheap and dumb, Latinas are the best for pumping and dumping. And while they are easy to come by, Latinas are annoying") and Women of Color "A collection of tales where various non-white (or mixed race) women are cruelly used, with a focus on raceplay as a part of the backdrop of their degradation".

As previously stated, I am not trying to judge anyone here, but I can't imagine those stories won't put some people off using the site, especially women and POC. It may be an uncomfortable conversation to have, but most sites would not allow the N word to be used as a search tag. Yes, that is fairly unrestrained in terms of lacking censorship. If other erotica sites are the same then fair enough, I haven't had enough experience on them to comment. Just giving my perspective here as someone who is probably quite 'vanilla' in their tastes and who nearly left the site because of this.

 

[TheLowKing]

Upon further consideration, "if you're allowed to do it on CHYOA, you're allowed to do it in real life" was an incorrect characterization, even if we include the implicit "sexually" in there. One very obvious counter-example: rape is illegal in real life, but allowed on CHYOA.

However, I maintain that in the sphere of erotic story sites, CHYOA is fairly middle of the road when it comes to content guidelines.

Literotica is the biggest and most well-known erotic story site on the web, so let's use it to test your examples. For the N-word, CHYOA returns 8 results, Literotica a whopping 2286. Even taking into account that Literotica is much a larger site (26.5x more stories), that makes it over 10 times more commonly used there than on here. 'Rape' returns 0 results on Literotica, because 'hard rape' (in which the victim derives no enjoyment from the act at all) is disallowed there, so I assume the search term is blacklisted. But 'rapist' returns 7652 stories, whereas CHYOA returns just 30. Again, taking into account the site size difference, that makes that word almost 10 times more common there than here.

Sexstories.com contains just 1.6 times more stories than CHYOA. Searching for the N-word there returns 307 stories, a way higher number than on either Literoticao or CHYOA (again, compensating for size). Rapist returns 971, which is somewhat fewer than on CHYOA and way fewer than on Literotica. CHYOA returns exactly 1000 results for 'rape', which is probably an upper limit, so the real number is higher. How much higher is impossible to say, but Sexstories.com returns 1904, though, so they may still well be in the same ballpark.

AO3 is not a pure erotic story site, so I don't think numeric comparisons will be useful. But given its reputation of being a no-holds-barred, everything-is-allowed site, it's probably safe to assume the overall picture will be pretty similar.

I'm not quoting all of these numbers at you to prove you wrong. You (and OP) don't like it, and that's fine. But the erotic story site ecosystem is what it is, and within it, CHYOA is not an outlier.

 

[Tonyrolo]

Upon further consideration, "if you're allowed to do it on CHYOA, you're allowed to do it in real life" was an incorrect characterization, even if we include the implicit "sexually" in there. One very obvious counter-example: rape is illegal in real life, but allowed on CHYOA.

However, I maintain that in the sphere of erotic story sites, CHYOA is fairly middle of the road when it comes to content guidelines.

Literotica is the biggest and most well-known erotic story site on the web, so let's use it to test your examples. For the N-word, CHYOA returns 8 results, Literotica a whopping 2286. Even taking into account that Literotica is much a larger site (26.5x more stories), that makes it over 10 times more commonly used there than on here. 'Rape' returns 0 results on Literotica, because 'hard rape' (in which the victim derives no enjoyment from the act at all) is disallowed there, so I assume the search term is blacklisted. But 'rapist' returns 7652 stories, whereas CHYOA returns just 30. Again, taking into account the site size difference, that makes that word almost 10 times more common there than here.

Sexstories.com contains just 1.6 times more stories than CHYOA. Searching for the N-word there returns 307 stories, a way higher number than on either Literoticao or CHYOA (again, compensating for size). Rapist returns 971, which is somewhat fewer than on CHYOA and way fewer than on Literotica. CHYOA returns exactly 1000 results for 'rape', which is probably an upper limit, so the real number is higher. How much higher is impossible to say, but Sexstories.com returns 1904, though, so they may still well be in the same ballpark.

AO3 is not a pure erotic story site, so I don't think numeric comparisons will be useful. But given its reputation of being a no-holds-barred, everything-is-allowed site, it's probably safe to assume the overall picture will be pretty similar.

I'm not quoting all of these numbers at you to prove you wrong. You (and OP) don't like it, and that's fine. But the erotic story site ecosystem is what it is, and within it, CHYOA is not an outlier.

Thanks, that is useful context to have. I have no issue being wrong on this, as previously mentioned I have next to no experience of other erotica sites, and your stats clearly demonstrate CHYOA is middle of the road as far as they go. Whether we believe stories that effectively celebrate violent rape (including of real life, living people) and the dehumanisation of ethnic minorities, using well worn racial slurs and stereotypes, is ever acceptable is another conversation.

My own personal opinion (because it makes me angry even thinking about it) is that if you get off writing about violently assaulting women or abusing ethnic minorities, that is something you should be working on, not indulging. If someone wrote a story about fucking kids and began with "Disclaimer: I don't like the idea of fucking kids in real life" whether or not we believed them (I wouldn't) we wouldn't accept it, so I can't fathom why those other stories are allowed, here or anywhere else. I say that as someone who is generally very liberal - scat, tentacles, incest whatever. They may not be my thing but they don't offend me in any way in story form.

Once again this is no judgement on the people running the site. The decision taken to allow whatever it is legal to write about in the US seems a fair one and avoids a lot of difficult line drawing. I guess for someone like me, the laws need to change. Clearly it is not just a CHYOA issue, but I stand by my assertion those are the stories that will make 'vanilla' authors run a mile, and why you probably get a lack of the kind of stories OP was looking for here. The fact the issue is more widespread doesn't really change that.

 

[TheLowKing]

real life, living people

Honestly, this creeps me out too. There's a big difference between stories that include only fictional characters and those that feature real people, especially if they are clearly identified. The former I can find distasteful, but I don't think it should ever be illegal. The latter can(!) cross over into real harrassment and thus cause real harm, not unlike how yelling "fire!" in a crowded theater can lead to real harm.

If someone wrote a story about fucking kids and began with "Disclaimer: I don't like the idea of fucking kids in real life" whether or not we believed them (I wouldn't) we wouldn't accept it, so I can't fathom why those other stories are allowed, here or anywhere else.

There is a not-unreasonable line of thinking that goes something like this: if pedophiles read a lot of sex stories featuring minors, they might start believing that having sex with minors is OK, and they'll become more likely to abuse minors in real life; and therefore, such stories should be illegal or repressed to ensure that doesn't happen.

But there's actually surprisingly little overlap between "pedophiles" and "child sexual abusers", way less than you'd expect. The vast majority of pedophiles are perfectly aware that acting out their sexual preferences is illegal, immoral, and harmful, and so most never act on them: research shows that something like 80-90% of pedophiles never assault a minor. And conversely, on the order of 50-75% of child sexual abuse acts are committed by people who are not diagnosed (before or after!) as pedophiles. They're 'just' rapists who happen to also attack minors, just like how some rapists attack 90 year old women: not because they're hot for old women, they just like to rape, and old women are easy targets. The underlying mechanism that leads to people raping minors has more to do with other character traits (like low impulse control) or outright mental illnesses (like sociopathy); which makes sense, because we know they also lead to other kinds of violent behaviour, and we also know rape is primarily a violent act, not a sexual one.

On top of that, there is substantial (but not conclusive) evidence that the opposite is true: that by letting people get their jollies off with fiction, you actually reduce the chance they'll feel the need to commit such offenses in real life. And if that's true, then stories featuring pedophilia actually prevent harm to real children. That doesn't sound like something we should ban, even if it does make us uncomfortable or angry.

And in fact, we treat the disconnect between fiction and reality as a given in other areas. We don't believe GRRM dreams of commiting mass murder just because he wrote the Red Wedding, we don't villify Josh Brolin for playing Thanos, and we know there is no causal link between violent video games and real life violence, no matter how badly some people have wanted to believe that it does. So why would we expect fictional sex, no matter how offensive or distasteful, to work any differently?

the dehumanisation of ethnic minorities, using well worn racial slurs and stereotypes

This is a whole second debate, but this post is too long as is. I acknowledge there are Issues here, but otherwise I'll skip over it.

The decision taken to allow whatever it is legal to write about in the US seems a fair one and avoids a lot of difficult line drawing.

As I understand it, CHYOA's content policy is not based on what is legal and illegal under US law (or any law), but on what payment processors allow to be monetized. Other controversial industries like sex work or the cannabis industry face the same issue, even where they're legal.

Clearly it is not just a CHYOA issue, but I stand by my assertion those are the stories that will make 'vanilla' authors run a mile, and why you probably get a lack of the kind of stories OP was looking for here. The fact the issue is more widespread doesn't really change that.

I agree. And there do exist other spaces that cater to more vanilla tastes. My impression is that there is a pretty sharp dividing line between the online erotic story space in which stories are posted, and the "romance" fiction space in which books are published. When you move from the former to the latter, a bunch of different things change all at once: stories become longer, money starts changing hands, the market becomes much bigger (Amazon dwarfs even Literotica), your audience becomes more female, and content becomes more vanilla (but don't over-correct, romance novels can be absolutely filthy!). And all of those changes are interconnected. For example, Amazon has a stricter content policy, so they'll simply refuse your business if you feature certain subjects.

 

[Tonyrolo]

I appreciate such a thoughtful response, and there isn't much of it I would disagree with. It's not actually stories about or including rape that I take issue with, it is a certain type of story that you get on here sometimes. If we were to use Game of Thrones as an example, Ramsay's rape of Sansi is deeply unpleasant, but that is exactly how it is portrayed. Ramsay is a monster, Sansi is an innocent victim and we are clearly guided into feeling revulsion towards the former and sympathy for the latter. There are stories on here where the rapist (often serial rapist) is portrayed as a hero we should be rooting for, while the women he graphically assaults are dumb bitches who had it coming. It all feels a bit incel like, and we know where that line of thinking has led in the past.

I also wonder if we should prioritise those authors writing whatever they want over more women and POC feeling like this is somewhere they are welcome and not a place for white men to fantasise about abusing and dehumanising them.

The racial stuff I can find no excuse for, but I totally accept that is another discussion.

I also accept these things will have been thought about deeply before decisions were made, and me not agreeing with some of them doesn't make those decisions wrong. It is what it is.

 

[TheLowKing]

It's not actually stories about or including rape that I take issue with, it is a certain type of story that you get on here sometimes. If we were to use Game of Thrones as an example, Ramsay's rape of Sansi is deeply unpleasant, but that is exactly how it is portrayed. Ramsay is a monster, Sansi is an innocent victim and we are clearly guided into feeling revulsion towards the former and sympathy for the latter. There are stories on here where the rapist (often serial rapist) is portrayed as a hero we should be rooting for, while the women he graphically assaults are dumb bitches who had it coming. It all feels a bit incel like, and we know where that line of thinking has led in the past.

Fair point!

 

[MissHolvard]

As far as Non-con stories go, I think keeping anything with a strong focus on the subject stuck within the Power Play category is a start.

I do not really get the feeling that there is a substantial increase in the number of stories with these topics over the years. I think there's somewhat of a rise of Mind Control as a fetish, but I would be interested in seeing some "monthly new stories, by Category". There are only about 3 Power Play stories per month, and they do not get much sustained effort or interest.

Literotica has a strict "victim must derive pleasure from the sex in each individual chapter" for cnc/forced/reluctant content, which CHYOA does not. CHYOA makes it difficult to balance between dark branches and lighter branches, and it can vary more from author to author with a story. That makes it hard to judge overall tone and trends for the extreme fetishes. I totally understand that my content is on the borders of CHYOA, outside of what Literotica allows, nowhere near the limits of what AO3 allows, but is I think fairly close to what is put out by JAV studios like Attackers or GIGA that just sounds worse than trying to describe a scene in words.

 

[HeirAscendant]

I appreciate such a thoughtful response, and there isn't much of it I would disagree with. It's not actually stories about or including rape that I take issue with, it is a certain type of story that you get on here sometimes. If we were to use Game of Thrones as an example, Ramsay's rape of Sansi is deeply unpleasant, but that is exactly how it is portrayed. Ramsay is a monster, Sansi is an innocent victim and we are clearly guided into feeling revulsion towards the former and sympathy for the latter. There are stories on here where the rapist (often serial rapist) is portrayed as a hero we should be rooting for, while the women he graphically assaults are dumb bitches who had it coming. It all feels a bit incel like, and we know where that line of thinking has led in the past.

I also wonder if we should prioritise those authors writing whatever they want over more women and POC feeling like this is somewhere they are welcome and not a place for white men to fantasise about abusing and dehumanising them.

The racial stuff I can find no excuse for, but I totally accept that is another discussion.

I also accept these things will have been thought about deeply before decisions were made, and me not agreeing with some of them doesn't make those decisions wrong. It is what it is.

I think the thing about depictions of these contentious topics is that they are erotic fantasies. It is hard to draw conclusions about the nonerotic opinions of people if you go by what gets them off. If you do, you might assume many women actually want to be in toxic relationships with mafia bosses, or that many men genuinely want to mind control an entire planet of women. The amount of incest stories on this site would cause very serious concerns if we took all of them at face value in regards to authorial desires. Humans often crave the taboo when it comes to arousal, but I personally don't think that means they want to break that taboo in reality.

When it comes to raceplay in particular, I must preface this by saying that I stumbled across it, but ultimately felt too uncomfortable to make it a part of my erotica fare. I think the appeal of raceplay comes not from the racial context that acts as aesthetic, but actually the power dynamic. You can see this in a wide variety of similar fetishes, like mind control or maledom, where you have someone in control and another to be controlled. A "superior" and "inferior," or "master" and "slave," or "dominant" and "submissive." With that in mind, while the racial element to raceplay can certainly be problematic - particularly when you encounter raceplay-dedicated spaces and realize for many of those who partake in it, it is not just a kink - but in many cases, it is just another variation of the erotic power fantasy.

 

[Tonyrolo]

I agree with you, up to a point. However, I have noticed a dividing line between the different race play stories on here. Most, I think are broadly okay and just leaning into a kink and the kind of dynamic you are talking about (e.g. the BBC/BWC stuff). However, there is a less common type of story which I will never find acceptable and I will call out an example here that made me so angry I nearly quit the site: https://chyoa.com/story/Women-Exist-to-Serve-White-Men.62150

Even the premise of the title I can live with, it could be a form of power play as you suggest. What I can't tolerate is the relentless racism that is celebrated throughout the story and isn't even needed to establish the dynamic. A story where white men have all the power and use it to go around fucking minorities - as uncomfortable as that makes me feel, I can see it isn't that different in nature from the highly popular 'man gets godlike power and uses it to fuck all women' trope you see in abundance on here. However, when someone writes "Lazy Latina whores are annoyingly useless but will happily open up all their holes to avoid doing any amount of work, so feel free to use their deplorable bodies to pass time, relieve stress, or release anger." I feel we are crossing the line into something else. I think this is probably where you are getting into the space you allude to where this is not just a kink. Nobody should be thinking it is okay to publish stuff like that in a space where Latina women might read it, whether it gets them off or not.

So I suppose for me it is the dividing line between race play/power fantasies and actual out and out racism. On the former, I can agree with you for the most part. the latter is not okay under any circumstances, in my view.

 

[HeirAscendant]

Yeah, I definitely agree with you. I have this experience with maledom, where I feel like it can veer into pure violent misogyny with frankly very little erotic about it anymore.

 

[TheLowKing]

For me, the dividing line between what I like and dislike is pretty close to the allowed/disallowed line Literotica draws for non-consent: it's hottest when the sub at least kind of enjoys it, if not at the beginning, then definitely at the end, with all the psychological turmoil that entails. If they're purely a victim and they only cry or fight or suffer for the entire story, then it's no longer sexy, it's just sad. I don't think that necessarily needs banning, but I won't be reading it.

I need to see that the author understands that they're writing a sexual fantasy to turn people on rather than something that could've been part of Generalplan Ost.

 

[Hvast]

I appreciate such a thoughtful response, and there isn't much of it I would disagree with. It's not actually stories about or including rape that I take issue with, it is a certain type of story that you get on here sometimes. If we were to use Game of Thrones as an example, Ramsay's rape of Sansi is deeply unpleasant, but that is exactly how it is portrayed. Ramsay is a monster, Sansi is an innocent victim and we are clearly guided into feeling revulsion towards the former and sympathy for the latter. There are stories on here where the rapist (often serial rapist) is portrayed as a hero we should be rooting for, while the women he graphically assaults are dumb bitches who had it coming. It all feels a bit incel like, and we know where that line of thinking has led in the past.

We are on an erotica\porn site with the goal of the stories to arouse people, not give them moral lessons. If one is aroused by Ramsay and Sansi as depicted... they do have a problem. To make non-con enjoyable, you strip away the real horror of the rape. Just like you play down the reality of murder in violent content. When you watch a superhero and a supervillain trashing a city in a combat, you don't think about the tragedy of thousands dying in the process; you enjoy the action scene.


_______________
IMO "they secretly want and enjoy it" kind of stories are no better or softer. If anything, they distort reality more. To be honest, my suspension of disbelief collapses when the first part of a chapter writes how a troll rips a female elf apart, and the second part writes about her unwanted orgasm without any believable reason.

 

[Tonyrolo]

That isn't the point I was making. I was talking about stories of graphic, violent rape where the horror, violence and suffering has been very much left in - just presented as something to be enjoyed and even celebrated. That is very different to whitewashing over something and not considering the moral implications, which I have no issue with on an erotica site.

 

[xmare]

As a former author, just want to say that there were some truly disgusting things on the site which has put me off for long periods. I think this is really symptomatic of authors who put more effort into narrative and character development leaving the site after the pandemic wrapped up. But there were a few points raised which are important to me.

Erotica doesn't exist to teach morality any more or less than anything else in everyday life -- this doesn't mean that it's amoral. Participating in this site and contributing to it as a corpus as-is is an endorsement (conscious or not). I don't think you can make an absolute definition of degeneracy. I could make a long list of things that make me gag and close my browser (and, personally that includes incest) but that is entirely personal.

That said, you can definitely make an absolute definition of what is reprehensible - gore, suffering, violence, non-consent with minors or named persons is evil and there should without doubt be better moderation. The community should distance itself from that stuff as a matter of survival.

As for being in the Warehouse 13/Charmed generation there is a moral element here too. I am acutely aware that making content that plays to these kinks can reinforce and desensitize myself and readers to these unrealistic and unhealthy ideas. Having done some soul searching and research I am positive that I would be healthier if I hadn't found this content. Enjoying dissociation, omnipotency and mind control is dehumanizing. We all have to take responsibility for our kinks and how we explore them because they are all on a sliding scale of morality and if we stop normalizing and enabling them we might realise that we're way closer to the dark end of the spectrum than we realise. I think it's completely unacceptable to externalize our kinks and say "it's just a part of me" and then thoughtlessly indulge without asking why watching those shows in your formative years manifested sexually as an adult.