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RE: Sex is normal - so why do we shield our teens from it?
Absolutely this should be in y our guidelines, if it is a guideline.
You seem to be inferring I made it up. It's been in our submission form for a while. Now, thanks to this post, it's front and center, just so there is no misunderstanding going forward.
I find it astounding that the author of this post should be allowed to post what she wants where she wants, but we as a community cannot choose to accept it in our workflow. Our editors don't want to touch erotica. Should we have to force them? Do they not have a choice? Do the parents of teens who use our community not have the choice what their children see, or should we force their kids to see it? As a parent to 4 children, I know which I'd prefer.
It's definitely all one-sided with people like this. Rights of others don't matter. Only their rights to throw tantrums and tell tales and harm other people. This is the opposite of feminism. True feminists (and a few have seen this post and these comments) are appalled by the attitudes here that feel quite like a reverse misogyny. I predict a very short, troubled run for this little sect of psychological terrorists.
I was certainly not inferring that you made it up. I was just saying, yes, absolutely, this should have been in your guidelines the whole time. I personally do think it is very strange that parents are fine with kids being exposed to violence and not sex. But yes, everyone can make up their own mind about this issue and as a writing community of course you are welcome to set guidelines. Note the word "guidelines" :) No offense intended @gmuxx and I don't see that you are being offensive here. I cannot say the same for @rhondak. I would urge an internal discussion among Writer's Block members on if you truly want to associate with someone who very obviously cannot comport herself in a manner befitting a public representative of an organization.
Guess who founded The Writers' Block, @carlgnash? And guess whose leadership grew it into the success that it is? LOL! My take-no-shit approach to keeping troublemakers OUT of our community and keeping it safe for all our hard-working members is exactly why it's as close-knit and productive as it is. And by the way--if you read carefully, you'll see that GMuxx clearly said that our stance on erotica has always been in our guidelines. And it has. We just moved it closer to the beginning of the document so that people who have a challenge reading can see it before they TLDR.
Furthermore, nobody ever said we don't deal with sex in novels we submit to the queue. Some of us can write some pretty racy stuff. But there's a difference between sex that moves the plot forward and sex that is the entire plot. We don't deal with erotica as a genre because for the most part, our folks don't like it. Our editors don't like working with it because in order to bring it up to the standards we can get behind, a story needs an arc and character development, not just pages of word porn. If your problem is that you think we're censoring it, you might ought to take up a complaint with Steemit because the community guidelines call for such writing, photos, and videos to be labeled NSFW. I'm surprised the arrows haven't started flying toward that concession to propriety as well.