Does it always have to be 18+?

I know on this site for legality reasons everything is 18+, but is that a thing that has to be followed in general?

I ask because I'm in the middle of a big Sci Fi erotica story I've been working on and in the beginning my two main characters are 15 and 17 (by the end of the story they are in their late 20s, and most of the story takes place in their early 20s). In the beginning though I make no point to comment on how young they are I even say in the story that the guy thought she was older when they met, and none of their romance scenes do I even elude to them being 'young'.

In short this may sound like a dumb question but is it illegal to write about underage characters having sex? (No I have not googled this, just asking in general)

Thank you!
-J

Not illegal, but not allowed on Lit.

You can have characters younger than 18 in stories, but any character within a light year of anything sexual ( which includes nudity ) must be 18 when it happens.

If it's erotica for the market, you're going to have to check the publisher/distributor to see what their restrictions are.

It's pretty much off to describe them actually having sex under 18. And voyeurism and sex thoughts are sex.

You can get away with, "she lost her virginity at fifteen," but that's it. As soon as you expand the sexual description (however mild) you'll bump up against Lit's No Sex Under Eighteen rule.

Up age your characters to at least eighteen, solves your problem.

JaneRamsey said:

I know on this site for legality reasons everything is 18+, but is that a thing that has to be followed in general?

I ask because I'm in the middle of a big Sci Fi erotica story I've been working on and in the beginning my two main characters are 15 and 17 (by the end of the story they are in their late 20s, and most of the story takes place in their early 20s). In the begging though I make no point to comment on how young they are I even say in the story that the guy thought she was older when they met, and none of their romance scenes do I even elude to them being 'young'.

In short this may sound like a dumb question but is it illegal to write about underage characters having sex? (No I have not googled this, just asking in general)

Thank you!
-J

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You could possibly have the younger years section as a prologue and put it in the non-erotic section. But the guys above me have it right.

However if as you said you haven't given them and age outright or mentioned they are young how would anyone know they were under 18? As much as many anon commenters claim to be able to read minds unless you explicitly tell the reader the couple was underage when they met and started fooling around who would know?

If its a case of people working out the math, then trust me there are enough geeks and nerds on this site to call you out on that and have the story pulled.

Much better to keep anything under 18 totally G-rated if you want it to be published. Including thoughts, wet dreams and general pubescent exploration.

For posting/publishing elsewhere

xelliebabex said:

You could possibly have the younger years section as a prologue and put it in the non-erotic section. But the guys above me have it right.

However if as you said you haven't given them and age outright or mentioned they are young how would anyone know they were under 18? As much as many anon commenters claim to be able to read minds unless you explicitly tell the reader the couple was underage when they met and started fooling around who would know?

If its a case of people working out the math, then trust me there are enough geeks and nerds on this site to call you out on that and have the story pulled.

Much better to keep anything under 18 totally G-rated if you want it to be published. Including thoughts, wet dreams and general pubescent exploration.

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I was asking more on general, I do specify their ages, and I knew I couldn't post it here, I just didn't know if that meant I couldn't post it or get it published anywhere when I was done.
Guess either way I may have to completely revamp the beginning. Lol. Oh well.

The general rule: underage sex can be reported but not described. No details. And 'underage' means "don't appear to be a human under 18". No 2000-year-old nymphets.

JaneRamsey said:

I was asking more on general, I do specify their ages, and I knew I couldn't post it here, I just didn't know if that meant I couldn't post it or get it published anywhere when I was done.
Guess either way I may have to completely revamp the beginning. Lol. Oh well.

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There is a lot of Young adult fiction books that deal with underage sex out there, A fault in our stars and Paper Towns being a good example of underage characters having sex. Also many more in the sci-fi genre like Maria M. Shriver's Sand series of books Even the Divergent books were an originally young adult and while not explicit erotica the characters still give in to their base urges lol.


As RR said it depends on the publisher and how you go about discussing the said dirty deed.

Good to know

Maybe I'll just write an alternative beginning where they're 18+ and keep it in my back pocket just in case.
Thank you!

I think the OP is not asking about what's allowed on Lit, but what's legal in general, beyond Lit.

The answer is that this is not 100% clear, because the application of obscenity laws to stories, as opposed to images, is not entirely clear.

There are many other erotic story sites that feature stories about explicit sex with underage characters. To my knowledge, these stories and their authors and the sites that host them are not typically subject to prosecution under the law. It's not clear, if they were prosecuted, and if the matter were taken up to a court on appeal, what the result would be. A good argument could be made that stories about underage sex are protected by the First Amendment. In Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition, the US Supreme Court held that "virtual" child pornography -- images that did not include actual children -- were protected by the First Amendment. Presumably, that logic would apply to stories about children involved in sex acts as well, because stories don't involve real children. But that hasn't stopped some zealous prosecutors from prosecuting and getting convictions against writers of stories about sex with children. There are a few cases like that, although not that many.

My own view is that fiction should have no legal limits, but that's not necessarily how the local D.A. is going to see things.

I should add that what I wrote above applies only to American law. In general, free speech protections under the First Amendment are more robust in this country than in others, such as the UK, Australia, or Canada.

Write as a present day memoir up until the point they’re all 18. Exclude all sex and concentrate on the story and character development. Once the firelight scene has been achieved, bring it into the present and choose a character to follow and give the story a direction. What’s the damn problem?

SimonDoom said:

I think the OP is not asking about what's allowed on Lit, but what's legal in general, beyond Lit.

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Ah, if so, then the answer is "no" in the United States. The mainstream (distributing in all fifty states) regularly churns out books with sex happening by those under eighteen.

One of the last books I read, taking it off the bestsellers list, was Death in Florence, by Marco Vichi, which was about an Italian case of a gang rape/murder of a fourteen-year-old boy and included an older man bedding a seventeen-year-old girl. I didn't select it for either of those two elements but because it was a mystery on the bestsellers list, but there they were.

If it’s sci-fi, make legal age in sci-fi land 25 and bump your characters up to above 18. Problem solved. You still have the erotic underage crap and beat the rules here.

Sir_Maveric said:

Write as a present day memoir up until the point they’re all 18. Exclude all sex and concentrate on the story and character development. Once the firelight scene has been achieved, bring it into the present and choose a character to follow and give the story a direction. What’s the damn problem?

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Sci-Fi erotica crossed with personal memoir is possibly not quite what the OP has in mind .

The main point here is that the Lit no under eighteen sex rule is the site owner's publishing policy, and not representative of any legal restraint or any other publisher's policy. The OP would need to check with any other publisher and/or law in countries of interest.

Certainly in Oz one can publish erotic content with participant ages younger than eighteen. We have a rather untidy publishing "scandal" (and I use the word loosely) which involves two recently published books (both poetry I think, certainly one is) written by the daughters of a famous (now dead) Australian writer, who had shall we say a very enlightened home life with said daughters in the 1970s, when they were both young teenagers. Messy and immoral, maybe, but write about it, and publicity follows.

electricblue66 said:

Sci-Fi erotica crossed with personal memoir is possibly not quite what the OP has in mind .

The main point here is that the Lit no under eighteen sex rule is the site owner's publishing policy, and not representative of any legal restraint or any other publisher's policy. The OP would need to check with any other publisher and/or law in countries of interest.

Certainly in Oz one can publish erotic content with participant ages younger than eighteen. We have a rather untidy publishing "scandal" (and I use the word loosely) which involves two recently published books (both poetry I think, certainly one is) written by the daughters of a famous (now dead) Australian writer, who had shall we say a very enlightened home life with said daughters in the 1970s, when they were both young teenagers. Messy and immoral, maybe, but write about it, and publicity follows.

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And giving the op the option was wrong.... how? I needed to be called out for it why?

Eb66 you’ve been added to my ignore list. Done.

Sir_Maveric said:

Eb66 you’ve been added to my ignore list. Done.

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You do realise a smiley face means a light hearted response? A bit sensitive there, mate (and I use the term "mate" in its easy-going Oz sense) - I wasn't calling anyone out.

I think I've solved it.

Thank you everyone for the feedback!

I think if I just bump the characters age up a few years it won't really effect the plot, AND then they'll both be over 18 when they do get together so that should probably smooth over any of those issues, since their specific ages aren't plot imperative, they just needed to be younger rather than 30+ at the start of the book.

JaneRamsey said:

Thank you everyone for the feedback!

I think if I just bump the characters age up a few years it won't really effect the plot, AND then they'll both be over 18 when they do get together so that should probably smooth over any of those issues, since their specific ages aren't plot imperative, they just needed to be younger rather than 30+ at the start of the book.

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Many writers give us their First Time stories with just a little bending of the truth, gently upwards. I think I added a summer holiday "extension" to our ages, to have us both turn eighteen in Lit time .

Welcome aboard, by the way!

LIT isn't the place for coming-of-age stories unless the MC has been comatose from puberty to age 18. Then their First Time is legal and LIT-okay.

I read of cultures where puberty marks one's initiation into sex by older neighbors. Their training can't be detailed here. We know youths fuck. The details aren't for LIT. I've read fiction of a pre-pubescent immortal surviving as a child prostitute for millennia. That story isn't for LIT.

As mentioned, legality varies with jurisdiction. Write at your own risk.

In the UK, consensual sex is legal for those of age 16 and older. They can even marry at age 16 if they have parental consent. One of my cousins married on her 16th birthday.

But for Literotica? The site rules is 'no sex before 18th birthday' so I write stories in which no one even thinks about sex until then.

That doesn't stop me from including children in my stories but they are kept well away from the sex.

First Time in Literotica is a category for late bloomers.

I respect the site owners' right to do things their own way, but it is kind of funny that Literotica bans things you can see on TV or check out in the young adult section of your local library. Under Lit's rules Stephen King's It, Nabokov's Lolita, and Judy Blume's Forever wouldn't pass muster.

Sir_Maveric said:

Eb66 you’ve been added to my ignore list. Done.

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EB is not the calling out type. You mistook his meaning.

SimonDoom said:

There are many other erotic story sites that feature stories about explicit sex with underage characters. To my knowledge, these stories and their authors and the sites that host them are not typically subject to prosecution under the law. It's not clear, if they were prosecuted, and if the matter were taken up to a court on appeal, what the result would be.

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Well, in Frank McCoy's case, it led to him doing eighteen months in prison for posting stories on ASSTR with underage sex, despite having an English professor testify that he believed the stories had literary merit. The 11th Circuit upheld the decision.

(To be fair, the decision states that this wasn't just underaged sex, but child abuse, rape and snuff, so I'm presuming that this was pretty extreme by any standard.)

SimonDoom said:

In Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition, the US Supreme Court held that "virtual" child pornography -- images that did not include actual children -- were protected by the First Amendment.

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Eh, there's a common mistaken belief on the Internet that artwork depicted underaged characters can't be prosecuted as child porn after the Supreme Court struck down the CPPA in 2002. This, however, ignores that that decision led almost immediately to the Protect Act of 2003, which was crafted to fix the problems with the CPPA.

Yes, in the U.S., you can go to jail for possessing pornographic Simpsons' cartoons.

SimonDoom said:

I respect the site owners' right to do things their own way, but it is kind of funny that Literotica bans things you can see on TV or check out in the young adult section of your local library. Under Lit's rules Stephen King's It, Nabokov's Lolita, and Judy Blume's Forever wouldn't pass muster.

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Sure. Personally, the policy on other sites of 14+ makes more sense to me. 18+ cuts out a lot of good possibilities for coming-of-age stories.

However, I'm not the one who would have to deal with a lawsuit if some prosecutor in Georgia decided he wanted to get some headlines, and there's a big difference between "you're safe from any realistic threat of going to jail over this" and "you're safe from having to spend three years of your life being stressed, and tens of thousands of dollars in attorneys' fees, to deal with an overzealous prosecutor", so I can't really blame the site owners from erring on the side of safety.

Valint said:

Well, in Frank McCoy's case, it led to him doing eighteen months in prison for posting stories on ASSTR with underage sex, despite having an English professor testify that he believed the stories had literary merit. The 11th Circuit upheld the decision.

(To be fair, the decision states that this wasn't just underaged sex, but child abuse, rape and snuff, so I'm presuming that this was pretty extreme by any standard.)



Eh, there's a common mistaken belief on the Internet that artwork depicted underaged characters can't be prosecuted as child porn after the Supreme Court struck down the CPPA in 2002. This, however, ignores that that decision led almost immediately to the Protect Act of 2003, which was crafted to fix the problems with the CPPA.

Yes, in the U.S., you can go to jail for possessing pornographic Simpsons' cartoons.



Sure. Personally, the policy on other sites of 14+ makes more sense to me. 18+ cuts out a lot of good possibilities for coming-of-age stories.

However, I'm not the one who would have to deal with a lawsuit if some prosecutor in Georgia decided he wanted to get some headlines, and there's a big difference between "you're safe from any realistic threat of going to jail over this" and "you're safe from having to spend three years of your life being stressed, and tens of thousands of dollars in attorneys' fees, to deal with an overzealous prosecutor", so I can't really blame the site owners from erring on the side of safety.

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Good points.

I suspect that if the issue of fiction involving underage characters ever gets to the Supreme Court, the Court may hold that such fiction is protected by the First Amendment. But that's just a guess. And in the meantime, lower courts have to follow the Miller case, which is a very poor guide about what is "obscene." So you are right that people who maintain sites like this have reason to be cautious.