Hi! I'm asking for clarification because this subject is touchy and different places have different rules. I do not write any sort of erotica, no graphic sex scenes, or things of that nature. I'm writing a story about a bunch of teenagers, and teenagers do not always make the best decisions. Can we talk about the fact that two teens canoodled with each other off-screen, or does all that have to be implied only? It's fine either way. I just want to make sure I know the rules before I make a mistake.
Speaking as a mod... I guess it depends on how you want to "talk" about it. If it's not graphic and it's not explicitly stated, there wouldn't seem to be anything to talk about. If it's about the fact that it happened, there's no harm in that. Teenagers have sex constantly if they're lucky, and damn near the entire canon of 80s comedy and most coming of each is built around teenagers having sex, so there's nothing particularly salacious about that so long as the discussion is presented maturely with some literary application. Obviously anything about adults having sex with underaged kids or anything remotely pedophiliac is no good. And less obviously, anything that starts as a mature sex discussion with a literary application but reveals itself to be a way for a member to get their rocks off or solicit other members for whatever perversion would be a different story. The fact that you mention different places have different rules leads me to believe that you've started this discussion elsewhere and been rebuffed, which is neither here nor there but does raise a red flag if I'm being honest. That's no fault of your own or something we'd be inclined to hold against you... I'm just being honest after we've dealt with our fair share of Internet perverts in the past. End of the day, this is a writing forum that welcomes all discussions of all topics related to writing so long as we believe the discussion has the writing core of it at heart so long as it's mature and tasteful. Anything else will be shut down in a hurry. So I guess it would ask what you want to talk about regarding this topic? That will go a long way toward answering your broader question.
I definitely wouldn't recommend giving a blow-by-blow account, if it is outside the realm of erotica.
Good morning! Wow. I screwed that up. Okay, I think better in lists, so I'm going to list it out. If my stupid brain doesn't put it down correctly, please let me know! I will fix it! 1. I am on a writing Discord server. 2. In Real Life, in the 1970s, my dad married my mom when he was 39 and she was 19. 3. I modeled my protagonist's parents off of my parents. The protagonist's mother is 36 and the father is 56 in the story. The protagonist (their child) is turning 15. 4. This freaked a couple of people out because it implied that the father was having sex with the character's mother when she was a teenager. 5. I was basically told we couldn't imply sex regarding teenagers. 6. The impression I got was that I'm not allowed to imply sex regarding teenagers, even if the story is involving teens who sometimes canoodle because teens are teens. 7. Since that's not anything important to my story, I removed all mention of the parents' ages, and I removed a line where one teen complains that her ex-boyfriend was bad in bed. 8. Nobody has seemed upset at me since I made those changes. That's it, and if the rules apply here, too, I'll do the same. I should have specified better. Oy vey. I don't have a problem with making changes as needed. I just don't want to upset anybody, and I wanted to make sure that what I wrote didn't break any rules.
I wouldn't know how to write it! I don't WANT to write anything explicit. I just want to know what implications were okay and what weren't.
Another simple way to fix this would be mention the mother's age when they met. This isn't any different than what we see out of Hollywood all the time. How many celebrities do we see now dating someone who could be their child in terms of age?
