Ratings for non-sex sex acts

blindVigil said:

No, evazion said he would lean towards Q. That doesn't make it the baseline, or it would just be listed in Q to begin with. We do not need to make this another "admin said this so it's now site policy" incident like happens everytime they give an opinion on something.

The gist of his entire comment was that, like I said before, breast sucking doesn't cleanly fit into Q or E. Maybe the majority will be Q, maybe not. It's going to depend on the image.

In my personal opinion, lactation should be the point where we draw the line, regardless if the characters are completely nude or not. It counts as a body fluid, and we have rules about that in the Rating Guideline. While the breast sucking act may not entirely fit cleanly like you said, in the Q or E rating, I think the milk produced by the breasts is enough to, at least superficially, fit with the E rating due to the implications of corporal fluids that aren't saliva.

Of course, this is my opinion. I can agree with the fact that breast sucking without any other sexual implications can fit in the Q rating, but the lactation should be relevant for the aforementioned reasons.

Provence said:

Evazion has said that breast sucking on its own is to be considered as foreplay and only additional stuff make an image depicting breast sucking e.
That means breast sucking on its own CAN'T make an image being rated e. That's all.

While I disagree with your hard-line interpretation of evazion's words, I do agree with your conclusion. I was undecided before, but I believe both post #7843571 and post #7963905 should be rated Q. I have seen plenty of french kiss posts that looked much more lewd than these, yet they would still only be rated Q. Because of this, I don't believe the apparent level of lewdness should be used to decide between Q and E except for nudity (this is already detailed in howto:rate). However, I do think it can sometimes be used to decide between Q and S.

This will depend on what act is being shown. For example, even though "heavy kissing" is listed under Q, I think it's reasonable to put subtle french kisses (no close-ups, no saliva, little to no tongue visible) in S. But it's not reasonable to rate breast sucking as S unless it's a mother discretely feeding her child, in which case it's no longer a sex act (in those cases, a bit of lactation would probably bump it up to Q instead of E). Covered nipples and cameltoe are more examples of maybe S, maybe Q, but those are already explicitly mentioned in howto:rate.

Blank_User said:

But it's not reasonable to rate breast sucking as S unless it's a mother discretely feeding her child, in which case it's no longer a sex act (in those cases, a bit of lactation would probably bump it up to Q instead of E).

That would be breastfeeding, not breast sucking.

blindVigil said:

That would be breastfeeding, not breast sucking.

Right, sorry. I knew about the tag, but I was thinking about the concept in general and forgot to specify.

Come to think of it, that would make it pretty useful for filtering Q posts since non-sexual breastfeeding with lactation would probably be Q, as would breast sucking without milk. Breastfeeding would then be elevated to E when depicted as a sex act (since we'd actually see the milk).

evazion said:

Breast sucking isn't covered in howto:rate because frankly I'm not sure where to put it myself. If you define sex act as "stimulation of the genitals" then it doesn't count. If you define it as "any form of sexual stimulation" then it would count. But so would nipple stimulation and groping and many other things too, which probably would make rating:e too broad.

For that reason I lean towards saying it should be Q. There's a difference in degree between breast sucking and things like cunnilingus or fingering. The division between Q and E is meant to capture that difference. On a practical level, it's useful to be able to search breast_sucking rating:e and breast_sucking rating:q to separate "real sex" from foreplay.

So, I think this is a useful "starting point" for the ratings, I just have one minor question remaining.

Going by what you said, I can see how post #7843571 and post #7963905 fall under Q. But I don't feel something like post #7949415 would fall under the separation laid out here. In this image it happens to be a form of masturbation, and the way it's portrayed doesn't look like it's exactly "foreplay" or anything. So would making this post E still be fine?