Should questions about sex and other adult activities be off-topic?

Question

I'm finding this question highly offensive. Previously this has been unresolved due to a fortunate lack of such questions but thanks to this latest question for bringing it to the fore.

Should questions about sexual activity or other adult only activity be off topic for this site?

Allowing adult only content would, in my opinion, open a floodgate for the users who game the system for reputation as there is an endless supply of dreadful adult questions. I was going to illustrate with a few examples but frankly I don't have the stomach for it.

Answer 1

What makes it "adult-only" material, rather than just "adult"? Lots of things are adult material. Murder is adult material depending on who you ask.

I think the Stack Exchange population is generally expected to have a decent enough level of maturity and professionalism to be able to handle adult material. We are not a community of immature people - hopefully. We're expected to be able to conduct ourselves in a civil and mature manner. We should be able to discuss and mentally handle mature topics.

If you're particularly offended by a question, is it actually a bad question? If so, downvote it, vote to close it, or flag it as offensive (if it is truly offensive, and does not simply offend your sensibilities).

If, however, it's not a bad question, and you just find it offensive, the ball may be in your court. Something being offensive is not 100% the writer's responsibility to deal with. Many things offend many people - many are offended by the existence of the Twilight saga, for instance, or by That Recent Horror Movie, but that's their thing to deal with, and doesn't place its author under an obligation to change her work. If you're not comfortable engaging in a topic, that means you should exit discussions about it rather than trying to close it down.

Answer 2

So long as the question is written with a reasonable level of maturity and lack of vulgarity,

No. Absolutely not.

Generally speaking, the Internet is a PG-Rated environment - on a good day. The most innocuous search will bring you results that would leave an average person silently sobbing and rocking themselves in the corner. If you have children that you're that concerned with reading about the possibility of characters having sex, you need to be more actively monitoring/guiding their surfing.

From the Stack Exchange Terms of Service (note that "Subscriber" is defined earlier as a synonym of "Subscriber" or "You"):

Subscriber certifies to Stack Exchange that Subscriber is an individual (i.e., not a corporate entity) at least 13 years of age. No one under the age of 13 may provide any personal information to or on Stack Exchange (including, for example, a name, address, telephone number or email address). Subscriber also certifies that they are legally permitted to use the Services and access the Network, and takes full responsibility for the selection and use of the Services and access of the Network.

So, technically, those young'ins shouldn't be surfing StackExchange by themselves anyways (Yes, I know that's unrealistic - but they're the ones technically breaking the rules here - not us).

We've had other questions in the past about characters having sex. Human-Human, Human-Alien, Android-Human, Possessed-Human, Vampire-Human, the list goes on.

Some examples which would be blanketly closed by this change:

• Data being intimate with Tasha Yar - why was Data built with this capability?
• Do different species in Star Wars find each other sexually attractive?
• Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex?
• Did the gatekeeper and the keymaster get intimate in Ghostbusters?
• Did the Doctor and Jabe ever have intimate relations?
• How is Jackie still alive after another intimate encounter?
• Why doesn't Finn just use a Flame Shield spell to be more intimate with Flame Princess?
• Did Captain Kirk take advantage of Drusilla? - especially poignant as this is essentially a Star Trek version of the question that started this whole thing.
• How many alien women has Capt/Admiral Kirk slept with?
• With how many women did Kirk have an affair? - closed as duplicate, but on-topic otherwise.

Also check out the sexuality tag.

Based on all existing rules, they appear to be on-topic. They are about sci-fi/fantasy; They are reasonably scoped; They are not open-ended/list questions; They are not subjective or encouraging discussion; They are written reasonably maturely and avoid vulgarities and obscenities.

I hate using the slippery-slope argument - but it really is an important subject. What other questions are we going to have to start banning to "protect the children"? Anything discussing violence? Anything discussing religion? Anything discussing evolution? Anything discussing witchcraft or demons?

Simply saying "adult content" is way too vague, and nobody is stepping up to offer any sort of definition of what that should include.

I'm not disagreeing that the question is kind of tasteless. But it's a valid question about a valid topic, and it's written with a acceptable level of maturity. Unless these questions cross the line of common decency, they should remain open.

Allowing adult only content would, in my opinion, open a floodgate for the users who game the system for reputation as there is an endless supply of dreadful adult questions.

This is demonstrably false. Searching questions for...

• Sex: 36 results
• Sexual: 32 results (the search engine does not seem to do partial searches correctly)
• Intimate: 15 results

Many of these could not even be considered "adult" - others definitely could, but they mention one of those keywords. Even if we count these as all being unique (they're not, there's a bit of overlap), that's a total of 83 questions out of 9800 existing questions at this moment. That's .8% of the questions. Even if we widen our search parameters within reason, we're still not going to hit anything remotely concerning.

Despite the existence and non-closure of many of these questions, there has been no flood of users trying to game the system for reputation.

Answer 3

I don't think any topic should be banned carte blanche. I have noticed that people get all up in arms about sexual-based topics in particular, and I find this to be extremely silly. If you feel the question is a bad question, downvote it. If it meets any of the closing criteria, then do a vote-to-close. It's really that simple. Just ignore questions you personally find offensive, but that are on topic and of interest to other SE members. Sexuality is a valid topic; that one or two people can't just downvote and move on is not reflective of a problem witin the SFF.SE community as a whole. It's indicative of a handful of people who have a low threshold for controversy, and who think banning topics will solve the (non)problem. Downvote, downvote, downvote! Calling for an outright ban on a topic is completely jumping the shark. My $0.02 anyway. I rarely even downvote such questions, tbh. I just scroll by questions that don't interest me. I'm confident the site will survive such questions with its reputation intact.

Answer 4

The way I see it, there are three elements to this matter:

• Is the original question offensive (which can be more usefully generalized to "where do we draw the line when defining 'offensive'"?)
• Is it appropriate to close it, if so?
• How does this fit into the broader remit of the SE network?

For the first element I vote "no". The blanket rule that subscribers must be at least 13 covers this, and the OP may be surprised at just exactly what the average 13-year old knows about sex. Take the US, for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_education_in_the_United_States

Most adolescents in the United States receive some form of sex education at school at least once between grades 7 and 12

Which http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080903091418AAHC781 translates for me as between the ages of 12 and 17, the lower-bound of which is within the 13-year old limit and not exposing 13+ year-olds to anything they haven't already been made aware of (in some parts of Europe the age is even lower, e.g Sweden begins at age 7-10).

That negates element 2, so on to the third and here it's instructive to look at how other SE sites handle questions relating to sexual matters. Here's three examples:

• From English SE: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/70892/does-bloodripe-actually-exist-as-a-word
• From Movies SE: https://movies.stackexchange.com/questions/4479/water-as-a-symbol-in-fatal-attraction
• From Bible Hermeneutics SE: https://hermeneutics.stackexchange.com/questions/2304/are-we-to-consider-texts-such-as-song-of-songs-23-to-be-euphemistically-sexual

OK, it should now be quite clear that making questions about sexual matters off-topic is not in accord with other SE sites. If it's on-topic it's on-topic, and this doesn't seem a valid reason to make it not so.

Regarding the question itself, the worst that could be said about it seems to be that it's mildly gross in the sense that it's something that might come up on Beavis and Butthead, but no more. If it's valid for asking in the context of the source material, it should stay open.

Answer 5

Protecting children from questionable content is the responsibility of that child's parent.
It is highly offensive to me, a Doctoral English candidate, that anything on topic should be banned or restricted merely for fear of exposure to an immature audience. Should we also then say no one can post questions about Heinlein's "All You Zombies" because it is, at least, full of the implication of weird sex? I feel entirely justified in saying this is a ridiculous proposition.

edit
After looking at the 'robot sex' question. I think it is entirely fair to close a discussion for objective reasons. Sexual squeamishness is entirely subjective.

Answer 6

I'm going to take a stab at running through some of the issues this question has, that I can see. Personally, I don't know where I stand on the issue, but discussing specific issues people have with the question would be useful, I think. The first is the start of the question body:

I know this question is a bit out there... but for the record, I guess. I need to know.

Stating that you're just randomly curious about a question comes off as pretty lazy to me. It's similar to homework questions on Stack Overflow. Without any discussion of context for why you want to know, or your expertise, or your research, it looks like a 'do this research for me, please' sort of thing. In general these get received poorly here, with fewer upvotes, but on its own this isn't much of a reason to vote to close.

Now for the rest of the body:

So Did Jabba the Hutt perform sexual activities of any matter with Princess Leia whilst she was enslaved?

There are a couple of issues here. The first is that Jabba and Leia wouldn't have 'performed sexual activities' (which is a super weird phrasing), Jabba would have raped/sexually-assaulted Leia. She was a captive, there's zero indication that she would have consented to anything. Glossing over this detail, makes it look like the gravity of what's being discussed is being ignored. Note that the odd phrasing and grammar in the question mean this is probably unintentional.

Second is that in light of that, this question is asking something that clashes pretty heavily with the tone and subject matter of the film it's talking about. Return of the Jedi is a rated PG film, but discussions of rape are not PG material. The Star Wars films are largely light-hearted adventures, and rape is a pretty significant divergence from that.

To non-US users, here in the USA, we rate films on a scale of 4 ratings, each with the expectation that a higher rating means the viewers should be older/more mature. G is the lowest rating, which means the film is appropriate for any age. Think a light-hearted Disney film. PG is the next rating, it brings the expectation of a little more maturity. The youngest kids might not understand the film, but most middle/older kids will be cool. PG-13 is the next one, the 13 stands for the rough age that kids should be before watching these films. R is the highest rating, which is meant for adults. R films tend to have plenty of explicit violence, swearing, adult themes/concepts, etc.

Did I miss something, are there other issues with the original question? I'd love to get this fleshed out more, so we can all understand the issues people have with the question.

Answer 7

I agree with Slytherincess that a blanket ban might be a bad idea, I do think there should be some reasonable restrictions, at the least at a PG-13 level. In doing so, I would say that topics somewhat related to sexuality in general would be allowed, but there reaches a level where it becomes explicit to a degree where it should not be allowed on the site. Relationships, behaviors, morality, and post-intercourse actions (Involving sex, but not directly related to it) would be on topic, mechanics not. Given that, I've found a list of a few questions, and grouped them in to my interpretation of "Allowable" and "Not Allowable", per my criteria

Allowable:

• Do different species in Star Wars find each other sexually attractive?
• Why did T'Pol act like a human woman with Trip?
• Why didn't Zoidberg die after having sex with the professor when Fry and Leela were in their bodies?
• Did Captain Kirk take advantage of Drusilla?

Not Allowable

• How does human-robot sex work?

As to the question in reference, it is very much a borderline question, but I believe it should be closed, for the following reasons.

• There is no original research done in to the question.
• This question seems to be purely put out there to push the boundaries, and doesn't seem to be particularly useful. In fact, the line "I know this question is a bit out there... but for the record, I guess, I need to know." seems to indicate to me that this is the case.
• It seems evident to me that the answers being given to it are of an explicit nature, and thus the question should either be re-worded such that it does not ask for such things (In which case, the answers might "Yes or "No", with a brief description), or closed.
• It implies things which are quite unnatural.

Bottom line is, it either needs to be drastically edited, or else closed.

Answer 8

I've really struggled with this issue. I finally thought it through like this: If my 13 year old wanted to buy a paper resource that contained discussions about sex and relationships, would I let him? Yes, if it was written in partnership with child experts in the field, who could approach the issues realistically, responsibly and sensitively for his age. As it happens, a friend's 13 year old son is very into SF, but at the moment I won't recommend Stack Exchange, because of some of the content. Given that most minors probably stumble upon the site by themselves, public responsibility persuades me to exclude adult content. I certainly wouldn't be happy about it, as most questions are perfectly interesting and valid for adults to consider. At the same time, for me, protecting children comes ahead of my freedom of discussion on this particular site.

Answer 9

There's a substantial difference between 13 (parental guidance) and 18 (X-rated). I wouldn't ask a 13 year old to read this question and I doubt many others would either.

The question is essentially about bestiality - did a human have intercourse with a creature - and as such should be strictly out of bounds.

Answer 10

Yes.

I think that any reasonable parent who found their children reading that question or its answers would find it offensive.

This is not an adult-only site and as such it should not discuss adult-only activities.

Questions like this bring the site into disrepute and should be closed and deleted as soon as possible. That this question is still open and garnering upvotes shows a deep lack of responsibility by the community and moderators of this site.