Hey there. It seems that art featuring characters engaging in masturbation should not be tagged sex:

For the purposes of tagging, masturbation is not sex. A character also cannot masturbate another character. (src)

In some cases, there are posts featuring characters using penetrable toys and breeding mounts that are tagged erroneously with sex due to implications coupled with position tags.

Here are some examples of implications found on the wiki: click, click, and click. These example choices were made with both traditional penetrable toys (sleeves) and others (mounts) in mind, along with their position relative to the user.

Here are some examples of posts with the sex implication from position tagging: post #3343139 ... post #1791386 ... post #2575422 ...

What is best practice for these scenarios? Should position not be tagged? (There's an argument to be made both for and against this.) Should the implicated sex tag be tolerated? (This seems messy.) Removing the implications from position tags doesn't seem like an easy, nor necessarily good, decision either. Guidance and discussion is appreciated.

Apologies for any formatting problems.

The reason why sex is implied with most of the sex position tags is because it is inherently a "sex" position, i.e., a position used in sex.
The idea is that if active sex is not involved in the scene, then it should be substituted with carrying or a mix of tags from the pose/stance/position tag group.

For your question on using sex position in cases of masturbation, it has been raised before in the past (see topic #22983 & topic #30208) but no in-depth discussion ever came from it.
On another note, I did argue that sex positions should not imply sex on another thread purely on the basis that there can be virtually no difference in the posing of sex positions in imminent_sex, sex, and after_sex posts, but nothing came from that as well.

thegreatwolfgang said:
The reason why sex is implied with most of the sex position tags is because it is inherently a "sex" position, i.e., a position used in sex.
The idea is that if active sex is not involved in the scene, then it should be substituted with carrying or a mix of tags from the pose/stance/position tag group.

For your question on using sex position in cases of masturbation, it has been raised before in the past (see topic #22983 & topic #30208) but no in-depth discussion ever came from it.
On another note, I did argue that sex positions should not imply sex on another thread purely on the basis that there can be virtually no difference in the posing of sex positions in imminent_sex, sex, and after_sex posts, but nothing came from that as well.

Thank you for providing past threads on and around this issue. In preparing this post, I made a search for previous discussion and didn't find anything quickly. So for the redundancy, I apologize. Plushies were not a conscious inclusion in the original post, but it makes the positioning tag potentially more pertinent.

Thank you as well for the alternative of positioning and holding objects. Unfortunately, it gets a bit confusing or wordy where a searcher might have a preferred (maybe treading on niche and negligible) way of interacting with penetrable objects.

This seems like somewhat grey territory. Maybe some more ideas and alternatives can pop up this time around.

Being able to remove implicated tags by hand after initial posting/implication might be a workaround, but this could add what might seem like a needless extra step. (One more thing to keep track of.) Or: adding in persistent exclusionary operators that are visible in post editors, but not on posts themselves (eg. input tag1, tag2, -tag3). In practice, these are whole new feature requests though - not a real suggestion from me at the moment due to the work involved. Just imagining alternatives.