cimorene

Browsing bookmarks from 2011 and it's both hilarious and a breath of fresh air that the tags are like "modern AU, television, chess" and "fake dating, politics, architect" and don't all include a 15-item list of ludicrously specific sex acts including stuff like "face touching while kissing" and "anal fingering (two fingers)" and "shower foreplay". A novella with a total of three additional tags?! 😂

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From:

buddleia

I think there has been some weird … expectations leakage from p*rnhub?

From:

cimorene

It does seem that way, although every now and then I run across one that couldn't possibly function as a filter, either in or out, for someone's sexual preferences because like, it still has to be something someone could HAVE a preference about one way or the other.

Although some of these are probably just conversational tags not meant for filtering but just because they'd rather put it there than in the author's note. But even then, the p*rnhub ideas have surely led here, because I can't really imagine a rambling author's note back in the day detailing minutiae of the sex acts in advance either...

From:

buddleia

Exactly - I find Tumblr style tags a little frustrating but I can see where they come from and they’re often fun or informative but seeing ‘anal fingering’ or similar as a tag makes me close the browser and go think about my life choices.

From:

buddleia

(Nothing against porn!)

From:

cimorene

Yes, same. Conversational tags aren't what I prefer to find at the top of a fic but it's an understandable mode of interaction. Unfortunately their preponderance has led to a proliferaton of just... apparently thoughtlessly long tags that contain a lot of information that does nothing more than take up space and occasionally make me laugh out loud when I'm browsing.

Although anal fingering might be someone's kink, so as a filtering tag it WOULD have made sense... as it now stands, if someone wants to use the tag for that, then I just feel sad for them, because the tag is mostly full of people who just went "Oh we're just listing literally everything now" without comprehending, or evidently considering, what the tags would be for. The vast majority of the tag "anal fingering" will be on fic where it's just prep and much of it won't even be more detailed than the whole one finger, two fingers, three fingers, COCK! cliche. People are tagging not just themes, but like... casual mentions and brief appearances, even of things that nobody could possibly want warnings or heads-ups for.

From:

james

omg those sex act tags are ridiculous sometimes. Like tagging for "vaginal sex" when the two paired characters include at least one canonical female. I think this new crop of authors doesn't understand that people use tags to select for - like if I want only stories with fisting then I need fisting to be a tag.

From:

krait

As someone who would quite like to read fics about female characters not having PIV sex, I appreciate those who do tag it for filtering purposes. The assumption that there's only one way for a female character to have sex has given me a lot of backbuttoning practice, over the years.

(I do, however, get annoyed with the authors who tag for it when it's a case of "character thinks about it for five minutes" or "side character makes a joke about it somewhere in Chapter 17." Now THAT's overtagging!)

Edited Date: 15 Jun 2021 01:36 pm (UTC)

From:

cimorene

Yeah, I can understand PIV from the point of view of filtering it out or searching for it specifically. Same with, like, 'anal sex' or 'deep throating' or plenty of other sex acts that people obviously could have kinks or preferences for, even if fics that include a bunch of them are going to potentially look overwhelming with the whole list of them up there.

The overtagging you mention is a pretty big problem though, from the point of view of anyone who wanted to filter those things in or out. You could exclude a story that you PROBABLY wouldn't have disliked if it was a mention or a completely ungraphic scene, or you could get quite annoyed if whatever it was you were trying to look for specifically keeps not actually showing up in any significant way in the fic even though you were filtering for it. And this kind of overly generous tag use is extremely widespread.

From:

krait

Oh, yeah, the overtagging with incredibly minor details is such a nuisance! Some fandoms seem to have more of it than others, which is probably a (fan-)cultural thing; I suspect fandoms that are primarily active on Tumblr or Twitter tend toward heavier freeform tagging, though since I'm not on either platform I'm only guessing based on some of the tags.

Overtagging is annoying from both directions - people looking for
"blowjob"-tagged fics aren't going to be happy with two lines of blowjob out of 10K words, and people avoiding "blowjob"-tagged fic might miss a fic that they could have enjoyed by skimming one paragraph.

Edited Date: 15 Jun 2021 08:39 pm (UTC)

From:

cimorene

Actually PIV isn't necessarily that universal even to a PWP these days. I remember noticing that in Good Omens fandom, that even out of fic that is pwp and has given one character a vagina and one a penis there's a good chunk of fic that sticks to frottage, fingering, and oral.

From:

resonant

I have such a struggle with stories that tag every sex act, because on the one hand I get that people have squicks, and that a person really might sit down at the search page one day and go, "I'm just in the mood for something where nobody entirely manages to get their clothes off" (or even "what was that amazing story where they never got their clothes off?") - but I don't want to read a finger-by-finger accounting of every touch in the story.

I've developed a habit of sort of skimming the tags with my eyes half shut - enough to spot kinks I don't care for and telltale signs that I'm not going to like the author, but bailing out before the crass anatomical detail.

From:

cimorene

Yeah, and I've even filtered things in or out of a search on the basis of some specific sex act before... usually because I was trying to find a fic again and not because of squicks, but it can be handy. On the other hand, as you point out, sometimes this level of tagging sort of ruins the reading experience, particularly if the fic isn't that long and the tagging is exhaustive!

And then there's the problem

krait mentioned above with tags for things that don't have a very significant appearance in the fic. Of course tagging for things that the main character thinks about a bit or someone jokes about DOES make sense when you're trying to warn for triggers, but tagging for fingering because you go through 1-2-3 fingers with no elaboration, or for kissing when there's not a kissing scene just because the text informs you that they kissed briefly before they move on to something else, doesn't seem very useful from that point of view (surely nobody could be trying to filter out any mention of kissing to avoid being triggered: too many fics don't tag it at all for that to work). Plus the sex act tags frequently get so specific that they couldn't possibly be useful for filtering... it really seems the authors have shifted into regarding it as writing up an ingredients label.

Edited Date: 15 Jun 2021 02:14 pm (UTC)

From:

laurenthemself

I appreciate specific kink tagging for filtering's sake, but too many bumper-sticker tags and I get grouchy.

Specifying the number of fingers used is... well, I mean, maybe it's someone's specific kink, but it seems like a less filterable tag than, to borrow

james's example, fisting.

From:

lobelia321

Ah, but there was such an art to Headers back in the day. I remember once challening Demelza to a contest of who could write the longest Header. We ended up with a tiny short fic and a Header that was a Work of Prolix Art. ;-p

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multi-fannish American queer cat & bunny owner in Finland

It's possible the original purpose of sex act tagging has gotten away from fandom a little

It's possible the original purpose of sex act tagging has gotten away from fandom a little

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