I got curious and looked over Wattpad’s posting guidelines. They allow “explicit sex scenes” as long as you mark it as mature content, but don’t allow content considered “pornographic content”. I can’t find any explanation of the difference between the two other than “Wattpad considers content to be pornographic when it exists solely for the purpose of sexual stimulation.” That could easily cover literally all sexually explicit fiction.Also, scenes of sexual violence are allowed, but anything that glorifies it isn’t, and again, there’s no clear description of where the line is drawn. I can’t imagine any author who includes smut or dark themes looking at this and going “yes, this is a reasonable place to post my work” (but I’ll be honest, I’m a little tempted to crosspost a few of my fanfics to Wattpad just to see what’ll happen)
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Yeah, their guidelines are a hot mess.
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