Deviantart and NSFW part 2

This is a continuation of sorts from a previous posting, the link to which will be in the description. In short, in the previous posting, I talked about some of the reasons why BDSM and fetish material are so prevalent in NSFW content submitted to deviantart. However, there is a second part that I didn't address in that post, that I feel is probably worth discussing.

For those who don't post content, or haven't taken the time to completely read deviantarts posting rules, there is a certain section that's of particular note. Im referring to the anti pornography section. Long story short, deviantart has rules stating that content creators are not allowed to post pornographic material to the site. Of course, if this is your first time learning about this, I would not be in any way surprised, considering that under many people's descriptions, many NSFW posts seem fairly pornographic.

So the obvious question then becomes, is the rule being enforced? The answer, which might be a surprise to some at this point, is yes.

Here’s the compressed version: In order to encourage art, you usually need to reduce censorship. The more censoring, the less expressive people/art can be. Because of this, deviantart is forced to be fairly lenient, so as to still encourage art, without the site being considered a porn site.

Because of this desire to remain lenient, there exist a couple of content types that, while some will automatically consider it to be pornography, deviantart says otherwise. In particular, three specific examples are nude photography, NSFW art, and BDSM. While many people will consider these to all be porn, there is also strong justification to the contrary.

Let's start with nude photography. At the most basic level, any form of nude photo can be considered a mix of both. Here's the basic way that deviantart looks at it. If a picture of a naked person gets posted, the automatic question is “how are they posing?”. If the person in the photo is in a less provocative pose, that swings things in arts favour. Similarly, if it's a person doing a pose set, or in a highly revealing cosplay costume, things still are in arts favor. Since a lack of clothing often assists in reference photos, again, it's in arts favour. Of particular note is that just because something is not labeled a reference photo, doesn't mean it can't be used for that purpose.

The NSFW art section gets a lot of criticism. At best, its a posting showing either original or someone else's character in slightly revealing clothes. At worst, it borders on hentai comics. The important thing to note of course, is that it's still art. Deviantart also does places limits on this sort of posting, mostly revolving around the nature of the content.

As for the BDSM section, it's important to take a step back and ignore all the pornographic connotations that it comes with. At its core, BDSM can be considered rope art, especially in more intricate examples. So while most would categorize it as porn, technically speaking, it isn't. While a lot of people will look at this reasoning and call BS, it’s the only reason that makes logical sense, and it's the reasoning that deviantart uses as well.



To finish off this post, I want to talk briefly about NSFW literature. While literature means that there are no physical images present, good writing allows people to create a mental image based on whats being said. Generally speaking, literature gets a bit more freedom in terms of restrictions then art does. I feel its worth noting that so long as a literature piece contains an actual physical story, and the story is of similar importance to the NSFW material, it gets basically a free pass. This also usually applies to comics as well.