We've had tons of issues with tagging these in the past and it has always been a pain to enforce tagging of these since the name (and it's connotations) have always thrown people off ("solo + male masturbation must be gay..." and
"Female/female is obviously straight" and my favorite "the character is gay, so suck it *changes tag*") and other obvious issues. What I am suggesting is to just finish up and be consistent with the rest of the *_on_* tags.

The only drawbacks I can see is that it is a little bit less friendly of a tag (even if it is more obvious what it is for) which might discourage people actually tagging them.

So let's talk about this.

Another problem is "x on y" seems to imply sex, while gay might be tagged just for kissing. I'm sure this has been discussed before, but I don't know where the thread is.

At this moment it doesn't literally imply sex, but I know we have this issue with feral_on_feral on safe pictures in particular (usually with cuddling) so I definitely see your point.

Discussion on this topic from 9 months ago: https://e621.net/forum/show/127764?page=1

Deh-tiger said:
Discussion on this topic from 9 months ago: https://e621.net/forum/show/127764?page=1

Nice find. It looks like most people there were generally supportive of the idea but the discussion kind of fizzled out.

I still think the benefits would be better than the drawbacks of our current system, but I'd love to hear everyone's opinion on this.

Long time user, occasional tagger, mostly lurker here. First time in the forums. I'm personally a fan of male anal masturbation, tentacles, and herm on male. However, not male on male. Out of curiosity, I took my blacklist off and searched "gay solo", and found lots of images of creampied guys. Given the prevalence of intersex, should images that don't sport another male immediately in frame (more than just a penis or ambiguous gender hand) be dropped of the gay tag? Most image boards I've been to have a "tag what you see, not what you know" policy.

Out of the pictures I saw, I think only one or two on each page deserved the tag, based on pornography near the character or fact that there was dialogue implicating another male.

As I understand it, I think the following examples would serve as guides:

Tag it gay-
- If a male creampied character has dialogue or body writing implicating another male.

- If pornography that is not the focal point of the picture features other males.

- If a presenting / submissive male (clean or not) is being approached / loomed over by another clearly male character.

Don't tag it gay-
- If a male is creampied without anyone else in frame or any implications of males. (Justification - Herms are prevalent too.)

- If a male is masturbating anally without any dialogue or porn framing other males.

- If a male is creampied and another figure is around, but is ambiguous and / or mostly out of frame, such as just seeing the penis or an effeminate hand of the supposed giver.

- If a male is being accosted by a tentacle creature. (Justification - mostly considered genderless, and technically any who'd lay eggs would be female.)

Are these fair assumptions? If not, feel free to delete the bullet points of my post so people who may skim this thread don't misread it as authority.

Genjar said:
Based on the admin decisions, both of these are currently tagged as gay. Basically, someone else's cum in ass = gay.

I disagree with the decision but I understand it's purpose.

However if we continue tagging this way, in order to be consistent we would have to tag any solo female posts with cum on them anywhere as straight, which unfortunately would tag them with male as well.

Might it be possible to have an admin revisit the decision? There are plenty of people I know who aren't bothered by guys post-use, just guys on guys specifically. It's a good chunk of material out of the target of anyone who, like me, just blacklists gay and still searches for "male -female anus". M'not going to start a petition or anything, would just like someone in charge to think about it from this angle in the interest of not keeping images from people who'd like to see them. If it still ends up being a no-go, I'll just have to pick a quiet night where I'm not in the mood anyway and try to science some fancy blacklisting that'll still keep away what I don't want to see.

Yeah, I brought this up a while back(as was linked earlier in the thread).
I still think it's a good idea, but will involve agreement of and work by admin(s) to accomplish it.

parasprite said:
I disagree with the decision but I understand it's purpose.

However if we continue tagging this way, in order to be consistent we would have to tag any solo female posts with cum on them anywhere as straight, which unfortunately would tag them with male as well.

Which would be incorrect no matter how you squint, since it could just as well be a herm or dickgirl. Or tentacles, or a particular type of sex toy. Just as for males. IMO you've quite clearly demonstrated that the current setup is broken.

savageorange said:
Which would be incorrect no matter how you squint, since it could just as well be a herm or dickgirl. Or tentacles. Just as for males. IMO you've quite clearly demonstrated that the current setup is broken.

Technically disembodied_penises do count as male (despite it being possible that it's herm/dickgirl/etc., but at least when there's a disembodied penis, there's actually something in the picture.

Ok, so two decisions here:

1, solo images should no longer be tagged with "gay" or "straight" just because there's cum. That wasn't really consistent with twys anyways, and it made things inconsistant for doing it for solo males but not solo females, and threw a wrench in certain kinds of searches. It just wasn't working, and this thread has already done an extremely good job of covering all of the reasons why. So, from now on that ruling is changed. And the pairing tag can only be added if there's a second character of the required gender for it in the image. And for those people who find that 'solo male cum' images not their cup of tea, then they can put that combination on their blacklist easily enough without needing this anyways.

-----

This second point has collided with forum #152013 as well, so linking it for easy reference.

2, I think this idea of aliasing gay to become male_on_male, etc is a good plan. It solves a lot of the common confusions with the "gay" not really meaning lame, not really meaning girly, not really meaning an orientation, etc etc. And it makes these three tags more consistant with the existing structure we have for intersex tags.

The only thing that really needs solved is whether *_on_* means only for sex. It mostly means for sex, but if we limit to exclusively to sex, then how would we tag kissing, cuddling, holding_hands, couples, etc? But truth to be told, this needs clarified anyways, since tags like interspecies sometimes run into the same grey zone, so having it settled and clear would probably be important to get settled anyways.

furrypickle said:
solo images should no longer be tagged with "gay" or "straight" just because there's cum.

That simplifies matters, but leaves a lot to clean up.
Welp. I'll get started.

furrypickle said:
Ok, so two decisions here:

1, solo images should no longer be tagged with "gay" or "straight" just because there's cum. That wasn't really consistent with twys anyways, and it made things inconsistant for doing it for solo males but not solo females, and threw a wrench in certain kinds of searches. It just wasn't working, and this thread has already done an extremely good job of covering all of the reasons why. So, from now on that ruling is changed. And the pairing tag can only be added if there's a second character of the required gender for it in the image. And for those people who find that 'solo male cum' images not their cup of tea, then they can put that combination on their blacklist easily enough without needing this anyways.

I highly approve of this. I'm going through the oldest posts currently for my "primarily solo/duo/group, but also fixing/adding straight/gay/bisexual/anthro/feral/etc. as I see them" and I see those tagged the most often the older you go back (I've seen Arcturus tag it this way, but I have no idea if it was actually official at that point). I'll tack this on as a secondary project while I'm at it.

It solves a lot of the common confusions with the "gay" not really meaning lame

The only thing that really needs solved is whether *_on_* means only for sex. It mostly means for sex, but if we limit to exclusively to sex, then how would we tag kissing, cuddling, holding_hands, couples, etc? But truth to be told, this needs clarified anyways, since tags like interspecies sometimes run into the same grey zone, so having it settled and clear would probably be important to get settled anyways.

Well, we really have the same issue for *_on_* as we do for straight/gay/etc. but it sure would be nice to be able to define it ourselves without definitional baggage. I definitely support the alias itself.

furrypickle said:
2, I think this idea of aliasing gay to become male_on_male, etc is a good plan. It solves a lot of the common confusions with the "gay" not really meaning lame, not really meaning girly, not really meaning an orientation, etc etc. And it makes these three tags more consistant with the existing structure we have for intersex tags.

The only thing that really needs solved is whether *_on_* means only for sex. It mostly means for sex, but if we limit to exclusively to sex, then how would we tag kissing, cuddling, holding_hands, couples, etc?

#1: I've been tagging solo males with cum in their asses as gay ever since that discussion was brought up those months ago, guess it's time to stop now.

#2: While I generally don't like the sound of any of the x_on_y tags, it would indeed benefit the tagging system to make that change, the points pickle brings up makes that pretty clear.

As for the wording on it, there's always alternatives - male/male, male_and_male etc.

'*_and_*' might get tagged for images where there's two characters who don't even interact.

But maybe */* would be better than *_on_*? With tags such female_on_male, there's always some users wondering why it's not male_on_female (for images with dominant males)...

Genjar said:
'*_and_*' might get tagged for images where there's two characters who don't even interact.

But maybe */* would be better than *_on_*? With tags such female_on_male, there's always some users wondering why it's not male_on_female (for images with dominant males)...

I like that idea actually. Though I could see either "male/male" or "male_on_male" working fairly well. We just need to pick one. So do people have a preference?

So, I'm actually leaning towards male/male, male/female, male/dickgirl, etc. But I honestly think either of these two format options would work. What I need to know (and why I haven't implemented it yet) is whether or not people have a strong preference between these two options (which format makes the most sense to the most people). Once I know that, I can get them all moved over and standardized to that format.

The only problem I can see is proactively making sure people don't create a headache getting too creative with it (as in male/male/dickgirl/herm, male/female/herm m/d/h/?, female/bustiboi, etc.). I would think this may be slightly less of a problem with the other format since by the time someone types out male_on_male_on_female_on_dickgirl they would probably start second-guessing themselves. ;)

Other notes: What do we do with bisexual? I'm almost leaning towards scrapping the tag myself, but that's just me. It seems like it doesn't quite fit very well with this new tag format.

Other other notes: It would be great if we could get these in too as tagging shortcuts: g/f -> female, b/m -> male, h -> herm, mh -> maleherm, d -> dickgirl, c -> cuntboy, ag -> ambiguous_gender (personal request). If not anything else I'd love the last one at least. :) (I know some of these as single gender tags are already aliased, but I more meant things like d/m and m/d -> male_on_dickgirl. (hopefully that made sense)

Other other notes: It would be great if we could get these in too as tagging shortcuts: g/f -> female, b/m -> male, h -> herm, mh -> maleherm, d -> dickgirl, c -> cuntboy, ag -> ambiguous_gender (personal request).

Those could be useful, but I recommend software for heavy-duty tagging. AutoHotkey has worked well for me; I use macro shortcuts for most tags.

furrypickle said:
What I need to know (and why I haven't implemented it yet) is whether or not people have a strong preference between these two options (which format makes the most sense to the most people).

I'd prefer x/x, but would be okay with either.

Genjar said:
Those could be useful, but I recommend software for heavy-duty tagging. AutoHotkey has worked well for me; I use macro shortcuts for most tags.

Haven't heard that name for a long time...around when v3 of AutoIt was released I think. Glad to see they are still going, their fork looked promising.

Unfortunately it doesn't help much with tagging for me since I do most of it on a tablet these days (also I use OS X). I've been using text replacement for certain projects (acghp -> "anthro comic group humanoid_penis" as a fake example) but it is a bit clunky to work with. I do have a VM with Win 8.1 on it, so I might still play with it at some point.

furrypickle said:
I honestly think either of these two format options would work. What I need to know (and why I haven't implemented it yet) is whether or not people have a strong preference between these two options (which format makes the most sense to the most people). Once I know that, I can get them all moved over and standardized to that format.

I could get behind having x/x being the new thing on here.
+1 for that one.

x/x gets my vote too.
+1

Provided we aliased the older tag formats to match, dickgirl_on_male, herm_on_female, etc.
That seems reasonable.

Gay = romance or sex between two people with penises:
male+male, male+dickgirl, dickgirl+dickgirl

Lesbian = romance or sex between two people with vaginas:
female+female, female+cuntboy, cuntboy+cuntboy

Straight = romance or sex between one penis and one vagina:
female+male, female+dickgirl, cuntboy+male, cuntboy+dickgirl

bisexual = romance or sex between one person and two other genders simultaneously
(a female being spitroasted by two males or dickgirls wouldn't be bisexual, but a male being penetrated by a male while eating out a female would be)

pansexual = romance or sex between one person and many genders simultaneously
(group sex involving genders outside the binary spectrum)

There, problem solved. Questions?

Catachan said:
Gay = romance or sex between two people with penises:
male+male, male+dickgirl, dickgirl+dickgirl

Lesbian = romance or sex between two people with vaginas:
female+female, female+cuntboy, cuntboy+cuntboy

Straight = romance or sex between one penis and one vagina:
female+male, female+dickgirl, cuntboy+male, cuntboy+dickgirl

Bisexual = romance or sex between one person and multiple other genders
(a female being spitroasted by two males or dickgirls wouldn't be bisexual, but a male being penetrated by a male while eating out a female would be)

what's the big deal?

That's not how it works, at all.

Halite said:
That's not how it works, at all.

It kind of is, unless you believe that there are only allowed to be two genders.

Catachan said:
It kind of is, unless you believe that there are only allowed to be two genders.

On the contrary, since gay means homosexual, which is defined as sexual attraction to the same gender, you're the one arguing for only 2 genders.
By stating that male+dickgirl = gay you're declaring that dickgirls are male, otherwise it wouldn't be homosexual because they're not the same gender.

And since dickgirls are clearly not just males with breasts, it's not an accurate label.

Halite said:
On the contrary, since gay means homosexual, which is defined as sexual attraction to the same gender, you're the one arguing for only 2 genders.
By stating that male+dickgirl = gay you're declaring that dickgirls are male, otherwise it wouldn't be homosexual because they're not the same gender.

And since dickgirls are clearly not just males with breasts, it's not an accurate label.

Nobody here is saying that dickgirls are dudes. My argument is that since males have a penis, dickgirls have a penis (thus 'dick'girl), and "gay" means "two people with penises doin' it", a dickgirl doing a male is definitely gay.

So under this tagging system, if you like gay sex, but don't like dickgirls, you can blacklist the dickgirl tag, and then the 'gay' tag will only show men. Likewise, if you enjoy dickgirls, but you don't want to see penises touching, you can blacklist 'gay', and then you'll only see dickgirls with females.

Under the current tagging system, if you search "dickgirl", you might end up seeing a dickgirl doing a dude. Since "dickgirl+male" is not considered 'gay', there is no way to avoid seeing this without searching "dickgirl -male", and then you'll miss out on, say, threesomes involving both dickgirls and men.

So, yeah, what's the big deal?

Catachan said:
Nobody here is saying that dickgirls are dudes. My argument is that since males have a penis, dickgirls have a penis (thus 'dick'girl), and "gay" means "two people with penises doin' it", a dickgirl doing a male is definitely gay.

So under this tagging system, if you like gay sex, but don't like dickgirls, you can blacklist the dickgirl tag, and then the 'gay' tag will only show men. Likewise, if you enjoy dickgirls, but you don't want to see penises touching, you can blacklist 'gay', and then you'll only see dickgirls with females.

Under the current tagging system, if you search "dickgirl", you might end up seeing a dickgirl doing a dude. Since "dickgirl+male" is not considered 'gay', there is no way to avoid seeing this without searching "dickgirl -male", and then you'll miss out on, say, threesomes involving both dickgirls and men.

So, yeah, what's the big deal?

No, gay means homosexual which is 2 of the same gender, and since dickgirl isn't the same thing as male, they're not the same gender, and it's not homosexual, so it isn't gay.

Halite said:
No, gay means homosexual which is 2 of the same gender, and since dickgirl isn't the same thing as male, they're not the same gender, and it's not homosexual, so it isn't gay.

So if 'gay' exclusively means 'homosexual', then why isn't every single female+female, herm+herm, dickgirl+dickgirl, cuntboy+cuntboy, and (samegender)+(samegender) picture tagged 'gay' too? As it stands, the 'gay' tag on this website exclusively refers to men having sex with men, and the 'lesbian' tag exclusively refers to women having sex with women.

So, we use the 'gay' tag to mean 'penis on penis', lesbian to mean "vagina on vagina", and if you don't like dickgirls or cuntboys you can blacklist them. You're really only getting worked up over your subjective definition of the word, which is totally irrelevant to the purpose of the tag.

In summary,

expanding gay/lesbian to include non-binary genders would vastly improve search efficiency and quality of life;

making use the blacklist would solve every single imaginable problem that would arise from this;

any argument to the contrary is inevitably going to be grounded in personal opinion on gender identity instead of anything actually relevant to a tagging system.

Catachan said:
As it stands, the 'gay' tag on this website exclusively refers to men having sex with men, and the 'lesbian' tag exclusively refers to women having sex with women.

Correct.

Catachan said:
So, we use the 'gay' tag to mean 'penis on penis', lesbian to mean "vagina on vagina"

Not correct. "male" means more than just one anatomical body part, female means more than just one anatomical body part. Intersex are a mixture of anatomy, so they get their own separate tags. That way anyone can find any combination that makes them happy, while being able to block any combination that doesn't make them happy.

You can use the ~ symbol attached to the front of a tag in order to search for any that have that tag. Using that search feature, you can easily search for both male/male and male/dickgirl in the same search get all the images with either tag at the same time. But trying to tag them all as "gay" would make things less specific, less easy to search or blacklist, etc. It also is not a universal interpretation: to some people dickgirls are just "females with a little extra" so if they see a dickgirl with a male they think it should be tagged "straight". This is why we don't pick either their viewpoint or yours. We just tag them separately and let people search for/blacklist exactly what they want regardless how they personally feel about it.

furrypickle said:
It also is not a universal interpretation: to some people dickgirls are just "females with a little extra" so if they see a dickgirl with a male they think it should be tagged "straight".

...well, dickgirls don't have a vagina, so they're less 'a little extra' and more 'complete replacement'. You're probably thinking of 'herm'.

-

Anyway, OP's idea works well enough in absence of that one. Instead of having "gay" and "lesbian" and other terms people tend to fight over, you would have...

male, female, neuter, ambiguous
cuntboy, maleherm, dickgirl, herm,

and 36 total combinations out of this.

To simplify things, if there's a threesome where a male is with a male and a female for example, that'd be tagged as "male/male" AND "male/female". If it's two males with a female, it'd just be "male/female", since (for example) double penetration of a female by two males doesn't have to involve any sexual acts between the males.

Catachan said:
...well, dickgirls don't have a vagina, so they're less 'a little extra' and more 'complete replacement'. You're probably thinking of 'herm'.

-

Anyway, OP's idea works well enough in absence of that one. Instead of having "gay" and "lesbian" and other terms people tend to fight over, you would have...

male, female, neuter, ambiguous
cuntboy, maleherm, dickgirl, herm,

and 36 total combinations out of this.

To simplify things, if there's a threesome where a male is with a male and a female for example, that'd be tagged as "male/male" AND "male/female". If it's two males with a female, it'd just be "male/female", since (for example) double penetration of a female by two males doesn't have to involve any sexual acts between the males.

Correct. Except we don't use neuter anymore partially because of confusion with "neutering" (castration) and partially because it overlaps with ambiguous_gender enough that it doesn't make sense to have both.

Although with the male/female/female combinations it's a bit tricky because those should also have female/female or male/male as applicable so that everyone can find what they looking for. Currently those are a bit shoved into bisexual and mean a combination of straight + gay and/or lesbian, which is kind of annoying tbh.

Related, we also have nullo (a character with all genitals removed), eunuch (a character with balls removed), penectomy (just the penis removed), and featureless_crotch. The first 3 are related to bodymod kinks and aren't genders by themselves, the last one is probably the closest to "neuter" that we have except one with a male body would still get tagged male.

I counted 15 tags based on the current system:

• male/male, male/female, male/cuntboy, male/herm. male/dickgirl
• female/female, female/cuntboy, female/herm. female/dickgirl
• cuntboy/cuntboy, cuntboy/herm. cuntboy/dickgirl
• herm/herm. herm/dickgirl
• dickgirl/dickgirl
• intersex/intersex, intersex/male, intersex/female

It's a little bit messy but I excluded the duplicates for readability. If we added ambiguous_gender to that, it would be another 21, but I'm not sure if that's necessary or not. I purposely excluded maleherm because they are already covered under herm and are fairly rare anyways, but we could include those as well. Note that none of those are tagged under maleherm_on_x right now. I'm going to go through those right now to ensure they are tagged properly and then we can decide what to do with them since it will inevitably come up at some point (there's only ~150 or so not under maleherm -solo so it should be pretty easy).

Related: Maleherm_on_maleherm and similar tags should imply maleherm, herm_on_herm, etc. if we decide to keep them.

I don't see any real need to add ambiguous into things.

Halite said:
I don't see any real need to add ambiguous into things.

Thanks to the "tag what you see" rule which forbids people from tagging a post with the actual gender of the subject, we do have to have an "ambiguous gender" tag, and it is for all intents and purposes on e621 a gender.

parasprite said: I purposely excluded maleherm because they are already covered under herm and are fairly rare anyways, but we could include those as well. Note that none of those are tagged under maleherm_on_x right now. I'm going to go through those right now to ensure they are tagged properly and then we can decide what to do with them since it will inevitably come up at some point (there's only ~150 or so not under maleherm -solo so it should be pretty easy).

Related: Maleherm_on_maleherm and similar tags should imply maleherm, herm_on_herm, etc. if we decide to keep them.

There's currently a separation between maleherms and herms -- the former being masculine body with a penis and vagina (and possibly breasts), the latter being a feminine body with a penis and vagina. Maleherm is to herm as dickgirl/cuntboy is to male/female -- same genitalia, different body type.

I'd imagine that the big reason why there aren't a lot of tagged maleherms is because due to TWYS they just outwardly appear male (you'd be hard-pressed to see a vagina unless the artist draws a separate camera angle.) It's why a lot of 'true herms' are tagged 'dickgirls', because they're at an angle where you see the dick on the girl, but not the vagina underneath.

Also, there absolutely should be a gender tag for characters that have no physical sexual characteristics. "Genderless", maybe. 'Eunuch' and 'nullo' are just variants of that.

Catachan said:
Thanks to the "tag what you see" rule which forbids people from tagging a post with the actual gender of the subject, we do have to have an "ambiguous gender" tag, and it is for all intents and purposes on e621 a gender.

I'm pretty sure Halite meant that we don't need a slew of ambiguous_on_male, ambiguous_on_dickgirl, etc. tags. Not that we don't need the ambiguous_gender tag.

There's currently a separation between maleherms and herms -- the former being masculine body with a penis and vagina (and possibly breasts), the latter being a feminine body with a penis and vagina. Maleherm is to herm as dickgirl/cuntboy is to male/female -- same genitalia, different body type.

There isn't a separation, maleherm is implicated to herm.

I'd imagine that the big reason why there aren't a lot of tagged maleherms is because due to TWYS they just outwardly appear male (you'd be hard-pressed to see a vagina unless the artist draws a separate camera angle.) It's why a lot of 'true herms' are tagged 'dickgirls', because they're at an angle where you see the dick on the girl, but not the vagina underneath.

It's not that popular is most of it. I've spent a lot of time looking at and tagging genders (and Halite can definitely confirm this) and regardless of the angles, herm/maleherm (with pussy) is definitively not as popular as dickgirl (without pussy). Note that the tag counts for herm right now are a bit inflated since the oldest posts still need to be sorted through (I've been doing this a little at a time). Granted we don't have a "maledickgirl" tag, but I've only seen maybe 1 comic where that seemed to be an issue.

Also, there absolutely should be a gender tag for characters that have no physical sexual characteristics. "Genderless", maybe. 'Eunuch' and 'nullo' are just variants of that.

We have that, it's called ambiguous_gender.

parasprite said:
We have that, it's called ambiguous_gender.

I'm not talking about characters with indeterminate gender; I'm talking no gender. For example, synx are genderless. Their gender isn't ambiguous because they don't have one, just like if someone doesn't have hair you don't bother asking what color it is.

Catachan said:
I'm not talking about characters with indeterminate gender; I'm talking no gender. For example, synx are genderless. Their gender isn't ambiguous because they don't have one, just like if someone doesn't have hair you don't bother asking what color it is.

They are a character, therefore they have a gender. Under TWYS, that gender is ambiguous_gender because that is precisely what that tag is designed to handle. The artist defining them as having no gender doesn't apply to TWYS because they can certainly be depicted with gender in mind.

parasprite said:
They are a character, therefore they have a gender.

But... some characters have no gender?

Under TWYS, that gender is ambiguous_gender because that is precisely what that tag is designed to handle.

"This is not the same thing as ... featureless_crotch (a character which has no sex organs at all."

"genderless" would be more appropriate of a term, here.

The artist defining them as having no gender doesn't apply to TWYS because they can certainly be depicted with gender in mind.

I really don't understand this fascination with assigning a tag to a character that visibly does not utilize that tag. You wouldn't tag a scalie as having fur, unless they visibly have fur. Why tag a synx as having a gender if they visibly have no gender?

Catachan said:

I really don't understand this fascination with assigning a tag to a character that visibly does not utilize that tag. You wouldn't tag a scalie as having fur, unless they visibly have fur. Why tag a synx as having a gender if they visibly have no gender?

Using outside knowledge to tag gender doesn't work.

Looking a a synx you can't tell what gender it is, that's the definition of of ambiguous. Just because they're described in the artists text as being genderless doesn't matter.

Real life Example: Look at this kitten. Despite being able to see its crotch it visibly has no gender. It wouldn't be tagged as genderless though, because common knowledge dictates that most animals have a gender. Instead, we don't know what gender it is. If you don't know what something is, that's called being ambiguous. That's how the TWYS rules work, based off of observable details not intuited ones,and using common knowledge not technical knowledge.

Catachan said:
I really don't understand this fascination with assigning a tag to a character that visibly does not utilize that tag.

You can certainly also tag those with featureless_crotch if it helps, but that's irrespective of gender.

You wouldn't tag a scalie as having fur, unless they visibly have fur. Why tag a synx as having a gender if they visibly have no gender?

The equivalent here would be if you can't tell whether it's fur, scales, feathers, skin, etc. because the artist didn't draw anything to resemble those. For example, in post #306051 has none of these visible and gets tagged green_body. The *_body tags are essentially the "ambiguous" ones of that group.

Tokaido said:
Using outside knowledge to tag gender doesn't work.

Looking a a synx you can't tell what gender it is, that's the definition of of ambiguous. Just because they're described in the artists text as being genderless doesn't matter.

You can't tell what hair colour a bald human has. Would you tag them as "ambiguous_hair_color"? Because, of course, all humans have hair, but this one's hair just isn't visible, right?

Tokaido said:
Real life Example: Look at this kitten. Despite being able to see its crotch it visibly has no gender. It wouldn't be tagged as genderless though, because common knowledge dictates that most animals have a gender.

Common knowledge is that synx have no gender -- in fact, if you even know the name 'synx', you'd know that it's genderless.

Tokaido said:
Instead, we don't know what gender it is. If you don't know what something is, that's called being ambiguous. That's how the TWYS rules work, based off of observable details not intuited ones,and using common knowledge not technical knowledge.

What about character tags, species tags, and artist tags? If an artist doesn't sign their artwork, why tag their name? Why not just tag it with "unknown_artist," even if you know the artist's name from their other pictures?

If a character's name isn't on the picture, why not tag "unknown_character" because the identity of the character is not visible? If a character has an original species, why not tag that as "ambiguous_species" because you can't visibly tell what species it is?

So, you have a problem with TWYS.
Good for you.

No one here cares.

Halite said:
So, you have a problem with TWYS.
Good for you.

No one here cares.

I have a problem with the idea that there is no such thing as 'not having a gender'. I look at a character with a clearly defined lack of genitals and an androgynous appearance and see "this character has no gender", so they would be tagged as "genderless", simple as. The 'ambiguous gender' tag is designed for a completely separate circumstance.

That being said, saying "no one cares" doesn't make you look cool, unless you're trying to impress a bunch of 12 year olds.

I'm not trying to look cool.
Anyone who has been on the forums fairly regularly for more than a few months has already seen a variety of people raging about TWYS, and how it "doesn't work".
At this point, most of us just don't care anymore about people whose complaint turns out to simply be "I don't like something about TWYS".
The fact that you're trying to frame your complaint as something else doesn't change that it's a complaint about TWYS, and how it works.
It's still easy to Identify, because of things like:

Catachan said:
...
Common knowledge is that synx have no gender -- in fact, if you even know the name 'synx', you'd know that it's genderless.
...

Which isn't how TWYS works, at all.

So in reality, you're argument is with the TWYS method of tagging as it is applied on this website.
It's not going to change just to make you happy, it really only changes when something is wrong with it and it can be tweaked for the benefit of the website a s a whole (no adding a genderless tag doesn't fall under that heading, nor does allowing "common knowledge" about someone's made up species).

I agree with Haltie

Catachan said:
Common knowledge is that synx have no gender -- in fact, if you even know the name 'synx', you'd know that it's genderless.

What about character tags, species tags, and artist tags?

Your definition of common knowledge is incorrect. That's specific knowledge about a character/species, not common knowledge. But I'm sure you disagree, so there's no point arguing. Regardless, the admins agree with this view of TWYS, so this isn't going to change any time soon.

Character and artist tags are exceptions to the rule. It even says so in the guidelines :/ many species are exceptions as well, again, this is stated in the TWYS guidelines.

Halite said:
Which isn't how TWYS works, at all.

Tokaido said:
That's specific knowledge about a character/species, not common knowledge.

Yes, that's exactly the point. TWYS doesn't work off 'common knowledge', it works off what you see on the image. If you see a character that has clearly no genitals, then it's genderless. If you see a character that clearly looks like it's supposed to have a gender, but it's just not visible, then it's ambiguous.

This really shouldn't be an argument.

Catachan said:
Yes, that's exactly the point. TWYS doesn't work off 'common knowledge', it works off what you see on the image. If you see a character that has clearly no genitals, then it's genderless. If you see a character that clearly looks like it's supposed to have a gender, but it's just not visible, then it's ambiguous.

This really shouldn't be an argument.

You're the one making it an argument.
No one else has agreed with you.

Halite said:
You're the one making it an argument.
No one else has agreed with you.

Well, now you're arguing that I'm the one arguing. How silly is that?

Let me tell you a story.

Back in medieval times, there were two different advisors to the king. The "wise men" and the "fool". These two titles were completely irrelevant to their purpose in the king's court. The title "wise men" could easily be replaced with the contemporary term "yes men". Shall we raise taxes? Oh yes, my king. Shall we declare war on the French for laughs? Oh, how wise, my king. Do you think I should rub my naked body in tar and feathers and run naked through the streets? Why, of course, my king.

The kings were inbreeding much of the time and were only elected through blood heritage, so in result we have people who have the combined leadership, cunning, and intelligence of two gnats running powerful nations. If the "wise men" were the only advisors to the king, some countries might not have been as successful as they have become now.

Luckily, there was the fool.

It was the job of the fool to chastise, criticize, heckle and generally make life difficult for any suggestion made. Through this, the king could see both sides of the issues, as well as sides that he didn't even consider before. And through this method, better decisions on action could be made.

This story, surprisingly enough, holds some relevancy to the point I am trying to make.

The modern world needs fools. It needs jesters, hecklers, buffoons and cynics to show people the sides of the issues and even hopefully how to laugh about these issues. We need to make each other look like idiots in order to see other points of view.

So, it's good that nobody agrees with me, and I'm glad you seem to be getting a kick out of it. Maybe it'll make you think.

Catachan said:
Yes, that's exactly the point. TWYS doesn't work off 'common knowledge', it works off what you see on the image. If you see a character that has clearly no genitals, then it's genderless. If you see a character that clearly looks like it's supposed to have a gender, but it's just not visible, then it's ambiguous.

This really shouldn't be an argument.

So all rating:safe posts should be retagged with ambiguous_gender.

I'll get right on that.

parasprite said:
So all rating:safe posts should be retagged with ambiguous_gender.

I'll get right on that.

Sure, why not? You can't be certain what gender they are, right? Just because they look like a dude doesn't mean anything in a fandom where dudes commonly have vaginas. So, you know, it's truly ambiguous.

How do you know that a MLP character is male or female when their genitals aren't showing (or aren't drawn?) To me, all of these cartoon horses look the same. I wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a male and a female one at a glance. I've seen very colorful cartoon horses that have ended up having dicks, and bland-looking ones that are female. Implicating masculine or feminine appearance based on their coloring or hairstyle wouldn't be acceptable under TWYS, since you're using special knowledge about the species and the fandom to determine something that isn't readily visible.

So why aren't all pony characters tagged ambiguous_gender? The obvious reason is that it's okay to tag the gender using common information about the species itself. A pony that looks like a girl according to the traits of ponies is tagged female, and a pony that looks like a dude according to the traits of ponies is tagged as a dude. It's only when it comes to sexually explicit posts that the gender tag becomes relevant, and that's why ponies are tagged ambiguous when it's a cartoon porn picture.

That's why TWYS exists, so that people don't check out this cute image of a female cat person and then get grossed out over the "herm" tag. The ambiguous_gender tag exists because it lets people decide for themselves what type of genitalia belongs to that wad of fur being torn a new set of lungs with a ten-foot spiked dragon dick.

There's no reason to enforce it in a situation where it isn't relevant. A species with the primary defining trait of having no gender should not be tagged ambiguous_gender unless they specifically have sexual characteristics (like that one artist that keeps drawing the boob synx.)

Catachan said:
[snip]

Regardless of any of this, there is no way to differentiate between "genderless" and "ambiguous_gender" just by looking at the picture. That is there is no practical reason to have both tags as any time genderless would apply, ambiguous_gender would also apply. We could switch completely to "genderless" instead, but ambiguous_gender covers additional meaning that "genderless" does not.

Implicating it might work (in theory), but having 328000 posts tagged ambiguous_gender and 327000 pictures tagged genderless doesn't really accomplish anything other than being maybe slightly more technically correct. At one point there was a push for "genderless"/"neuter" but after a while most people started to realize that all it does is cause confusion and tagging disputes, and that it is easier in practice to assume every character has a gender.

Which is why ambiguous_gender covers both meanings.

Catachan said:
Well, now you're arguing that I'm the one arguing. How silly is that?
...

Much less silly than arguing that it shouldn't be an argument, when you're the only one on the side you're arguing for.

parasprite said:
it is easier in practice to assume every character has a gender.

This is a particularly backwards and ignorant way of thinking. Some people don't want to identify as having a gender. Not everyone has a gender. This applies especially to fictional characters where they can literally have no biological sexual characteristics or genitalia. There are posts where the lack of gender is flat-out stated in the image itself] and yet they still get misgendered as "ambiguous_gender". What sense does that make?Even the help page for ambiguous_gender states that it's not the same as not having a gender, but nobody seems to care because they'd rather arbitrarily assign everything a gender.

Catachan said:

Even the help page for ambiguous_gender states that it's not the same as not having a gender

No it doesn't. The last time it was written anything like that was before TWYS, which was several years ago.

Used when the gender of a character in the image is not apparent from the image (no genitals or other clues are visible), and/or when there are mixed signs as to whether the character is male or female (wide hips plus broad shoulders, etc.)

This is not the same thing as hermaphrodite (a character whose physical gender is a combination of male and female), or featureless_crotch (a character which has no sex organs at all).

Catachan said:
This is a particularly backwards and ignorant way of thinking. Some people don't want to identify as having a gender. Not everyone has a gender. This applies especially to fictional characters where they can literally have no biological sexual characteristics or genitalia. There are posts where the lack of gender is flat-out stated in the image itself] and yet they still get misgendered as "ambiguous_gender". What sense does that make?Even the help page for ambiguous_gender states that it's not the same as not having a gender, but nobody seems to care because they'd rather arbitrarily assign everything a gender.

Again, your entire post here is just problems you have with TWYS.
All things that have been brought up in the past, and won't be changing this time either.

Halite said:
Again, your entire post here is just problems you have with TWYS.
All things that have been brought up in the past, and won't be changing this time either.

The problem is with people not tagging what they see. Like the people who see a character that explicitly has no gender, and tag "ambiguous gender".

Featureless_crotch is not the same thing as not having a gender. Gender isn't determined exclusively by what genitals are present and afaik it never has been ruled by the admins that way. It just happens that the majority of tagging wars have to do with rating:q and rating:e so that's what the guidelines are geared towards clarifying. That and it's a lot easier to write clear, straightforward guidelines for "they have a penis and no pussy or breasts" rather than "if they are anthro they must have a shoulder width that is more than x% larger than their own head width".

And we aren't saying that characters can't be genderless, we're saying that for tagging purposes we don't care. Does it fit into male/female/intersex at all? If no -> ambiguous_gender.

y is gender theory a thing also TWYS is good b/c i don't want dude on dude gay sex showing up but it's tagged as straight sex and female b/c one of the dudes has female gender pronouns but looks like a dude and has a dick

parasprite said:

It's a little bit messy but I excluded the duplicates for readability. If we added ambiguous_gender to that, it would be another 21, but I'm not sure if that's necessary or not. I purposely excluded maleherm because they are already covered under herm and are fairly rare anyways, but we could include those as well. Note that none of those are tagged under maleherm_on_x right now. I'm going to go through those right now to ensure they are tagged properly and then we can decide what to do with them since it will inevitably come up at some point (there's only ~150 or so not under maleherm -solo so it should be pretty easy).

Related: Maleherm_on_maleherm and similar tags should imply maleherm, herm_on_herm, etc. if we decide to keep them.

Alright done. Here's the spread if anyone was curious:

229	maleherm 

86	maleherm_on_male

12	maleherm_on_female

7	maleherm_on_dickgirl

6	maleherm_on_cuntboy

3	maleherm_on_maleherm	

1	maleherm_on_herm

I don't know if they are all worth keeping or not, but damn maleherm/male is popular. :P

So male/male is a thing now.

Looks weird. =/

Though that must be because I'm not used to seeing it. I actually assumed it was a mistag the first time I saw it (not helped by the counter currently showing '3' instead of some very high number), but gay appears to be aliased to it.

Seems it also buggered the search option for the time being. Searching for a thread of tags with -straight as one of em' still gives you posts with straight sex in it.

By the way, why didn't it become male_on_male as was suggested? It's the same, but IMO looks a lot less messy than a tag with a slash in it.

Jugofthat said:
By the way, why didn't it become male_on_male as was suggested? It's the same, but IMO looks a lot less messy than a tag with a slash in it.

yeah the slash always bugs the hell out of me. it makes e621 look more an more like a booru, messy and chaotic.
next we will have tags for interactions... like m/m/f, m/f/f, m/f/m.

i mean really what the hell, the longer tags where better.. if where gona do abreviations lets just turn all the tags into unreadable gibberish.
My little pony -> MLP
Mass Effect (as i found out) -> ME (hey blacklisters anyone wana blacklist ME? XD)
ect ect so on so fourth..

Edit, looks like Pickle already started, great.
http://i.imgur.com/HBeJlMF.jpg

Yeah, I mean, it just looks like a typo or something.

wonder if i should start a complaint thread...

https://e621.net/tag?name=*%2F*&type=&order=date

Male/male isn't really an abbreviation as much as a shorthand. You can figure out what male/male means fairly intuitively.

Either way I'd hold off on discussion regarding male/male vs male_on_male until we've gotten used to it a bit more. It's already a huge enough change that I don't expect anyone (including myself) to be judging things clearly. After we try it out for a while we will likely be at a better place to decide if changing it again is worth considering.

Jugofthat said:
Yeah, I mean, it just looks like a typo or something.

Agreed. I thought it actually was at first tbh. It's probably because we've never had a tag with a slash in it for the most part (predator/prey_relations is all I can think of off the top of my head) so it feels somewhat foreign.

Jugofthat said:
By the way, why didn't it become male_on_male as was suggested?

The reasons were listed on the first page, but among other things... because the usage is not limited to sex, unlike the *_on_* tags.

Whoop, missed that part!

@ Parasprite: You're right, it's probably best to let it sink in for a while. Mind you, this was just my first impression, I'm not saying it's definitely a bad thing and should GTFO as soon as possible.

One big plus is that it makes it easier to find content with herms and dickgirl in it.
Previously there were no sexuality tags to use in order to find, lets say a man, banging a dickgirl - Now we can simply use male/dickgirl. Easy as that.

The #1 positive in my opinion: no more complaining about "gay" tag, or lack thereof on any images.
We can now simply state, unequivocally, that we don't tag sexuality, we just tag the visible interaction between the characters.

I just wish there was a simple way to do the same with gender tags.

Peekaboo said:
One big plus is that it makes it easier to find content with herms and dickgirl in it.
Previously there were no sexuality tags to use in order to find, lets say a man, banging a dickgirl - Now we can simply use male/dickgirl. Easy as that.

There was (and still is since it's not aliased yet) dickgirl_on_male tag. And other tags like that. Only straight lesbian and gay didn't have *_on_* form.

I am on the side of not changing this, for the record. This is only going to confuse things further. How does it work with more than two characters? What if it's two guys and a girl? I certainly hope we're not going to have a different combination for every possible threeway, too. And if you're keeping the "bisexual" tag, then it's not exactly equal that the others had to change. This is only going to make tagging an absolutely nightmare and no one is going to do it when they upload images. In my opinion, if you're too stupid to understand that the gay tag meant the act itself and not the character's orientation, then you shouldn't be allowed to tag, period.