I am sorry if this is a repost, I could not find anything explaining this 'problem' searching the forums.

Just wondering: when tagging with the TWYS system, when do you tag herm?

I have noticed that herm is being used as a go-to tag for any time a character has breasts and a cock. But using TWYS, this should not be the case right?

Is it only when you see all images like this:
post #662514

When you only see parts of specific parts of the character, do you tag those parts and omit the herm tag? IE
post #670008

Since there is no vagina seen, should this only have 'shemale' and 'anal' tag?

Thank you for advice on clearing this concept up for me.

Herm is tagged when the character in the image have both a cunt and a cock.
If the individual is very masculine and lacking breasts then maleherm might also be appropriate.

Simplified version of rules:

Herm = pussy + penis + breasts
Dickgirl = no pussy + penis + breasts

Edit:
I looked closer at second picture and noticed that you probably meant something else. It should either have anal + dickgirl, or vaginal + herm. It looks more like the latter to me.

Edited the OP to have the images link properly.

As for the question, if the image has enough other clues to hint at the existence of an obstructed pussy (for example in the one you linked the place where the penis penetrates her body is not where it would go for anal) then we do allow herm.
If the same image had anal penetration (eg. with the penis enters the body farther back) we'd still only tag dickgirl, since that would be too ambiguous.

TWYS is a completely broken and idiotic system.

Ozelot said:
TWYS is a completely broken and idiotic system.

Thank you for your valuable insight into the matter.

NotMeNotYou said:
Thank you for your valuable insight into the matter.

You're welcome.

Granberia said:
Simplified version of rules:

Herm = pussy + penis + breasts
Dickgirl = no pussy + penis + breasts

actually its more like
Herm = visible pussy + visible penis (this tag does not require breasts since maleherm implies herm)
Dickgirl = no visible pussy + visible penis + visible breasts

Mutisija said:
actually its more like
Herm = visible pussy + visible penis (this tag does not require breasts since maleherm implies herm)
Dickgirl = no visible pussy + visible penis + visible breasts

That's why I said "simplified". You still forgot to mention, for example, that camel_toe and bulge also counts.

howto:tag genders :P

parasprite said:
howto:tag genders :P

Feral: Highly dependant on species.

Teats, udders, coloring, size, body shape.
Artist's style may introduce some anthro/humanoid characteristics as well (arched eyebrows).

Did I mention that I'm pissed off that purplekecleon art was taken down because certain pink feral character with girly eyebrows wasn't allowed to be tagged as something else than male? Oh yes, I did. Let's mention it again anyway because I still didn't have my question answered. If that character wasn't allowed to be tagged with intersex then what about hundreds of mlp pics that have feral characters with penis, no breasts/teats and drawn in less feminine style that pk character that are currently tagged with intersex?

Granberia said:
Did I mention that I'm pissed off that purplekecleon art was taken down because certain pink feral character with girly eyebrows wasn't allowed to be tagged as something else than male? Oh yes, I did. Let's mention it again anyway because I still didn't have my question answered. If that character wasn't allowed to be tagged with intersex then what about hundreds of mlp pics that have feral characters with penis, no breasts/teats and drawn in less feminine style that pk character that are currently tagged with intersex?

Don't bother. This website is moderated by transphobes. Logic isn't going to work.

Ozelot said:
Don't bother. This website is moderated by transphobes. Logic isn't going to work.

Well, that's an absolutely false accusation you have there. If you paid more attention, you would have known by now that they aren't. Heck, one of them is and I respect their decision (now ex admin due to personal reasons).

Edit: That's all Imma say

Xch3l said:
Well, that's an absolutely false accusation you have there. If you paid more attention, you would have known by now that they aren't. Heck, one of them is and I respect their decision (now ex admin due to personal reasons).

Edit: That's all Imma say

When in doubt, deny deny deny.

Ozelot said:
Don't bother. This website is moderated by transphobes. Logic isn't going to work.

Are you for real? Simply trying to adhere to a usually-sensible set of rules based around visual information (visible sex instead of gender identity), just to keep everything from becoming a jumbled mess is in no way the same as being transphobic on purpose. Stop being so goddamn obnoxious...

Though I agree about the MLP thing (just happened to make a comment on it ten minutes ago), which I find a bit weird too since it goes against the same rules applying to everything else.

If I'm not mistaken, people regularly base their dickgirl/herm tags on teatless ponies on the fact that the snouts are of the canon female variety. But that's obviously outside information, which isn't supposed to count according to the staff. So.

i am trans and i do not find this especially transphobic because we are not tagging genders, we are not implying anything about the character's gender identity. we are tagging what is visible in the image purely for categorizing purposes :d

Indeed. These tags aren't supposed to be taken personally at all, they're just describing images.

It's not a flawless system by any means, but again, not an active attempt to mislabel anyone's character. That's just an unfortunate by-product every so often.

Jugofthat said:
Indeed. These tags aren't supposed to be taken personally at all, they're just describing images.

It's not a flawless system by any means, but again, not an active attempt to mislabel anyone's character. That's just an unfortunate by-product every so often.

Not at all. The tags are labeling what the character is. You're basically TELLING the person what their gender is, even if that isn't what they are.

Ozelot said:
Not at all. The tags are labeling what the character is. You're basically TELLING the person what their gender is, even if that isn't what they are.

I disagree, they're only telling that if you want to interpret them that way.

To me, a well-tagged image describes what I'm most probably seeing. A fox, with blonde hair, no breasts, a bulge in its underwear which implies I'm dealing with a male. It doesn't matter at that moment if the owner really identifies (the character) as a genderfluid two-spirit cauliflower, what's depicted is a male fox.

Granberia said:
Did I mention that I'm pissed off that purplekecleon art was taken down because certain pink feral character with girly eyebrows wasn't allowed to be tagged as something else than male? Oh yes, I did. Let's mention it again anyway because I still didn't have my question answered. If that character wasn't allowed to be tagged with intersex then what about hundreds of mlp pics that have feral characters with penis, no breasts/teats and drawn in less feminine style that pk character that are currently tagged with intersex?

Purplekecleon specifically wanted the character tagged female.

Jugofthat said:
I disagree, they're only telling that if you want to interpret them that way.

That's like saying "We don't choose to not marry gays in our church because we HATE them, you're just interpreting it that way."

Disclaimer: I don't think that mods are transphobic. I don't reply to ozelot because I have him/her blacklisted.

Mutisija said:
i am trans and i do not find this especially transphobic because we are not tagging genders, we are not implying anything about the character's gender identity. we are tagging what is visible in the image purely for categorizing purposes :d

Take into account that you are regular user here who is rather active on forum, know some details about tagging system, and that some changes are way to big to be implemented in the near future. We can't expect other people to know that much especially since forum/comment search feature is really basic.
Also statement "we are not tagging genders" is only half true. To my knowledge it goes like this:

How to tag sex on e621
1. If sex is visible then tag it.
2. If not, and gender is not ambiguous then assume that gender = sex and tag it.
3. If not tag ambiguous_gender.

The whole system based on sex/gender tags is not really adequate for tagging furry art. But there's no simple way to fix it. The only way I can see is to bind tags to each other, so for example (penis pussy breasts) would give posts that have character with these 3 body parts instead of current penis pussy breasts which give post with these 3 body parts not necessarily on the same character. But it was said few times that it's not going to be implemented in near future, and sure there are more pressing issues with site now.

But IMO there are some simple things that could be done to reduce complains. Like aliasing male to male_sex, ambiguous_gender to ambiguous_sex, or changing intersex tags names, etc.
I'm also not really sure how feral characters should be treated.

EDIT:

parasprite said:
Purplekecleon specifically wanted the character tagged female.

If that's the case then pic description was wrong and takedown was unavoidable. However it doesn't change the fact that intersex tag was removed and replaced with male.

Ozelot said:
That's like saying "We don't choose to not marry gays in our church because we HATE them, you're just interpreting it that way."

Oh please, really?

You happen to see them as tags literally labeling characters, or in your words: telling what gender the character is. This isn't a fact, you could just as easily see them as tags labeling images and nothing more. You know, a matter of interpretation. Got nothing to do with ruling people out.

Male here doesn't really mean male, it's actually "this_looks_to_be_a_male", but that would be a bloody annoying term to search for.

Jugofthat said:
Oh please, really?

You happen to see them as tags literally labeling characters, or in your words: telling what gender the character is. This isn't a fact, you could just as easily see them as tags labeling images and nothing more. You know, a matter of interpretation. Got nothing to do with ruling people out.

Male here doesn't really mean male, it's actually "this_looks_to_be_a_male", but that would be a bloody annoying term to search for.

Nope, I see them as literally describing the character. As do many other people. The impression when you put the world "male" on a label next to something is that it is male. It's insulting to trans people/artists who identify with their characters in some way, and then they are told "stop interpreting it that way."

But all this will be ignored because transphobic attitudes. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The tone around here from users and admins is that trans people should just fuck off and accept being mislabeled.

We can make sure none in the world is offended, including potatokin, but then our tagging system would be just as worthless as other image galleries.

Or we can do like we do now and have a tagging system that makes it easy for people to find what they're looking at, people looking to get offended will still find something to get offended about.

Peekaboo said:
We can make sure none in the world is offended, including potatokin, but then our tagging system would be just as worthless as other image galleries.

Or we can do like we do now and have a tagging system that makes it easy for people to find what they're looking at, people looking to get offended will still find something to get offended about.

Seriously, this is false alternative fallacy. There are some changes that can be done without changing whole system. Also comparing transsexuality to being potatokin is transphobic, and you really should stop that.

Ozelot said:
Nope, I see them as literally describing the character. As do many other people. The impression when you put the world "male" on a label next to something is that it is male. It's insulting to trans people/artists who identify with their characters in some way, and then they are told "stop interpreting it that way."

But all this will be ignored because transphobic attitudes. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The tone around here from users and admins is that trans people should just fuck off and accept being mislabeled.

Look, I'm not saying I'm pleased when that happens. But since the alternative is a whole bunch of inaccurate returns on people's searches _{(not to mention the issues it'll cause with blacklists, leading to incessant whining)}, it's pretty much a case of tough shit.

But you're always welcome to come up with ideas that are going to prevent either from happening. I can't imagine the admins wouldn't like everyone to be happy.

Ozelot said:
Nope, I see them as literally describing the character. As do many other people. The impression when you put the world "male" on a label next to something is that it is male. It's insulting to trans people/artists who identify with their characters in some way, and then they are told "stop interpreting it that way."

But all this will be ignored because transphobic attitudes. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The tone around here from users and admins is that trans people should just fuck off and accept being mislabeled.

>Complains about what they think is a "problem"
>Doesn't offer an effective way to fix the "problem"

I would sure love to hear how you can fix the site and accommodate it to your feelings, oh perfect one

Peekaboo said:
We can make sure none in the world is offended, including potatokin, but then our tagging system would be just as worthless as other image galleries.

Or we can do like we do now and have a tagging system that makes it easy for people to find what they're looking at, people looking to get offended will still find something to get offended about.

Because trans people are all just looking to be offended, right?

Not that any kind of work-around has ever even been attempted.

Waba_Grill said:
>Complains about what they think is a "problem"
>Doesn't offer an effective way to fix the "problem"

I would sure love to hear how you can fix the site and accommodate it to your feelings, oh perfect one

Even if I offered an alternative it would not be listened to. I'm not the one running the site.

Granberia said:
Seriously, this is false alternative fallacy. There are some changes that can be done without changing whole system. Also comparing transsexuality to being potatokin is transphobic, and you really should stop that.

Nonono, you're just *looking* to be offended about being compared to crazy people because of gender issues.

Ozelot said:
Even if I offered an alternative it would not be listened to. I'm not the one running the site.

Say it anyway. No one is going to listen if you keep your mouth shut.

Granberia said:

But IMO there are some simple things that could be done to reduce complains. Like aliasing male to male_sex, ambiguous_gender to ambiguous_sex, or changing intersex tags names, etc.
I'm also not really sure how feral characters should be treated.

That's something worth considering. I'd still prefer to avoid the word "sex" because of other connotations it has, but we might be able to minimize that with something like male_(sex) (or something similar). I don't think there's really much we can do about intersex, and feral characters have always complicated things. Throw in imagined species and...well you know the rest.

If that's the case then pic description was wrong and takedown was unavoidable. However it doesn't change the fact that intersex tag was removed and replaced with male.

I'll just say that I'm honestly kind of surprised that it took until now for them to do a takedown.

Ozelot said:

The tone around here from users and admins is that trans people should just fuck off and accept being mislabeled.

If you are labeling yourself based on what a character looks like, there is literally nothing we can do to help you.

Ozelot said:
Even if I offered an alternative it would not be listened to. I'm not the one running the site.

I'm always open to new ideas that might help reduce conflict and improve tagging.

Peekaboo said:
We can make sure none in the world is offended, including potatokin, but then our tagging system would be just as worthless as other image galleries.

Or we can do like we do now and have a tagging system that makes it easy for people to find what they're looking at, people looking to get offended will still find something to get offended about.

I know what you're trying to say here Peekaboo, but we aren't talking about offending tumblr/reddit/potatokin here. These are long-standing legitimate concerns that are worth discussing. However, I can assure you that if any changes are made, it will not be at the expense of reliable and predictable tagging.

So we are supposed to take the angle of a cock into consideration when tagging?

So with a gay piece: if a character is nearly completely male and the cock looks to be going into the testicles, we should tag 'maleherm'?

post #668265
post #664345

Just a couple found within a minute.

Should I retag these as maleherm?

_Waffles_ said:
So we are supposed to take the angle of a cock into consideration when tagging?

So with a gay piece: if a character is nearly completely male and the cock looks to be going into the testicles, we should tag 'maleherm'?

Just a couple found within a minute.

Should I retag these as maleherm?

In most cases, the angle of the cock is really only used as a tiebreaker when there is conflicting information. If you'll notice, the overwhelming majority of herm/maleherm posts will have a pussy or cameltoe actually visible. With both of those pictures you linked the angle only slightly conflicts with anal. Even if it isn't exactly correct anatomically, anal is still a more likely as a possibility, so it still gets tagged male.

I should also add that maleherm is also pretty hard to find, even in furry art.

parasprite said:
In most cases, the angle of the cock is really only used as a tiebreaker when there is conflicting information. If you'll notice, the overwhelming majority of herm/maleherm posts will have a pussy or cameltoe actually visible. With both of those pictures you linked the angle only slightly conflicts with anal. Even if it isn't exactly correct anatomically, anal is still a more likely as a possibility, so it still gets tagged male.

I should also add that maleherm is also pretty hard to find, even in furry art.

Well in all technicallity I have only seen one herm on this sight.

For some reason a pussy+testicles+penis = herm on this site/furry fandom. When a herm would just have a penis where the clitoris would be. No testicles. Not sure why the testicle thing came to be,or the entire entact seperate genitalia, but I am not willing to go against that tidal wave of hate.

_Waffles_ said:
Well in all technicallity I have only seen one herm on this sight.

For some reason a pussy+testicles+penis = herm on this site/furry fandom. When a herm would just have a penis where the clitoris would be. No testicles. Not sure why the testicle thing came to be,or the entire entact seperate genitalia, but I am not willing to go against that tidal wave of hate.

The balls are optional here. It's almost convenient that the popularity of pussy + penis - balls hasn't really hit the furry fandom, otherwise we'd be more pressed to make a distinction here. :V

But yeah, we actually don't really have a good reliable way to search for with versus without balls (-balls helps somewhat, but they aren't as actively tagged as you would think).

parasprite said:
I'm always open to new ideas that might help reduce conflict and improve tagging.

No, you aren't.

parasprite said:
The balls are optional here. It's almost convenient that the popularity of pussy + penis - balls hasn't really hit the furry fandom, otherwise we'd be more pressed to make a distinction here. :V

But yeah, we actually don't really have a good reliable way to search for with versus without balls (-balls helps somewhat, but they aren't as actively tagged as you would think).

Yea. I am noticing more and more that we have the best tagging system, but a lot is still missing because of really stupid squabbles over TWYS still...

Ozelot said:
No, you aren't.

i can sense slight bitterness in air

Ozelot said:
No, you aren't.

How do you know? Have you tried pming her?

Xch3l said:
How do you know? Have you tried pming her?

We've talked before. Suffering from the same issue I've encountered amongst all the other admins around here, nothing special.

parasprite said:
That's something worth considering. I'd still prefer to avoid the word "sex" because of other connotations it has, but we might be able to minimize that with something like male_(sex) (or something similar). I don't think there's really much we can do about intersex, and feral characters have always complicated things. Throw in imagined species and...well you know the rest.

Maybe it would be worth it to just make separate tags for gender and sex?
Like, for example to have,
male_(sex), female_(sex), sex_not_visible, intersex tags
and
male_(gender), female_(gender), ambiguous_gender

and remove
girly, and tomboy tag since they becomes redundant.

It introduces few new tags, but it doesn't remove ability to search for things. It makes new searches possible because girly and tomboy tags don't allow use of intersex characters.

Though it's not perfect since it raises another question - what to do with tags like male/male?

parasprite said:
I know what you're trying to say here Peekaboo, but we aren't talking about offending tumblr/reddit/potatokin here. These are long-standing legitimate concerns that are worth discussing. However, I can assure you that if any changes are made, it will not be at the expense of reliable and predictable tagging.

I know, the whole transgender issue is not a joke in itself, I'm just tired of the transgender tag debate on here. Unlike the actual problem that is trans-phobia, I feel like most of the time the debate on here regarding tags related to trans is mostly driven by someone being overly angry and insulted by tiny things.

Peekaboo said:
I know, the whole transgender issue is not a joke in itself, I'm just tired of the transgender tag debate on here. Unlike the actual problem that is trans-phobia, I feel like most of the time the debate on here regarding tags related to trans is mostly driven by someone being overly angry and insulted by tiny things.

Notice that probably to the most people making takedowns it's not "OMG they decided to tag my character on e621 as male, I revoke my permission", but "OMG my art is being posted on some site I know nothing about without my permission and my character is tagged as male". It's not very big issue but it ruins first impression of the site, especially since artist is absolutely new to the site and does not know that changing it can't be trivially done without ruining tagging system for everyone. He/she doesn't know that our tagging system is not as useless as on FA. Experienced users being snarky about it doesn't help at all.
IMO if there's a way to fix it at least slightly without ruining whole tagging system then it's worth the effort.

Ozelot said:
We've talked before. Suffering from the same issue I've encountered amongst all the other admins around here, nothing special.

I didn't get a pm :V

Granberia said:
Notice that probably to the most people making takedowns it's not "OMG they decided to tag my character on e621 as male, I revoke my permission", but "OMG my art is being posted on some site I know nothing about without my permission and my character is tagged as male". It's not very big issue but it ruins first impression of the site, especially since artist is absolutely new to the site and does not know that changing it can't be trivially done without ruining tagging system for everyone. He/she doesn't know that our tagging system is not as useless as on FA. Experienced users being snarky about it doesn't help at all.
IMO if there's a way to fix it at least slightly without ruining whole tagging system then it's worth the effort.

This is kind of besides the topic of the thread, but the most frequent takedown reason is actually overwhelmingly "I don't want my art/character on here, I never gave permission". Which is one of the reasons why we highly encourage others to ask permission before uploading. ;)

parasprite said:
This is kind of besides the topic of the thread, but the most frequent takedown reason is actually overwhelmingly "I don't want my art/character on here, I never gave permission". Which is one of the reasons why we highly encourage others to ask permission before uploading. ;)

well, except for some cases like all the pics i've been uploading weekly (give or take a day sometimes). artist Mike Sherman died in 2006 iirc so aside from quality concerns (which actually haven't added near as much to my deletion record as i first thought it would even after going through and sorting low quality/dupes out of those i haven't yet uploaded) i'm not sure how that could get a takedown.

Granberia said:
Maybe it would be worth it to just make separate tags for gender and sex?
Like, for example to have,
male_(sex), female_(sex), sex_not_visible, intersex tags
and
male_(gender), female_(gender), ambiguous_gender

and remove
girly, and tomboy tag since they becomes redundant.

That doesn't make sense since crossdressing or looking girly in no way implies a male-sexed character is anything but male in gender. If I want feminine MALES in skirts it makes no sense for me to search for female_gender. Transvestites and traps =/= transgenders. Comparing dysphoria to fashion choices is insane.

Furthermore, the site operates on a tag what you see system, so it is impossible to include gender AT ALL to everyone's satisfaction. You can't see gender, you can see sex. Sex is what matters for porn anyway for the vast, overwhelming majority of users. Even if we tried to tag gender independently from sex, we'd still be basing it on appearance. The best you can do with TWYS is to tag characters when possible and include a note of some sort in the character tag's info page. If you care who the character is then you can see the gender there. If you don't then odds are you only care what the character's sex is anyway.

The current system, in almost all cases, works fine. Radical changes such as separating sex and gender would make things less efficient, would require significant inconvenience as everything is retagged, and would lead to a great deal of confusion as people adjusted to the changes. Just how frequent are the complaints by artists over this issue? Is it enough to make it worth a complete revamp of a fundamental set of tags?

0mnm652 said:

The best you can do with TWYS is to tag characters when possible and include a note of some sort in the character tag's info page.

The description field can be used for this as well.

Just how frequent are the complaints by artists over this issue? Is it enough to make it worth a complete revamp of a fundamental set of tags?

Not as often as you'd think. Artists are usually fairly reasonable about it as long as you are patient with them, acknowledge their concerns, and help them to understand what we are actually tagging. Most of the gender-related ones I've seen have actually been character owners, but most of those are pretty minor takedowns in the grand scheme of things.

0mnm652 said:
That doesn't make sense since crossdressing or looking girly in no way implies a male-sexed character is anything but male in gender. If I want feminine MALES in skirts it makes no sense for me to search for female_gender. Transvestites and traps =/= transgenders. Comparing dysphoria to fashion choices is insane.

Furthermore, the site operates on a tag what you see system, so it is impossible to include gender AT ALL to everyone's satisfaction. You can't see gender, you can see sex. Sex is what matters for porn anyway for the vast, overwhelming majority of users. Even if we tried to tag gender independently from sex, we'd still be basing it on appearance. The best you can do with TWYS is to tag characters when possible and include a note of some sort in the character tag's info page. If you care who the character is then you can see the gender there. If you don't then odds are you only care what the character's sex is anyway.

The current system, in almost all cases, works fine. Radical changes such as separating sex and gender would make things less efficient, would require significant inconvenience as everything is retagged, and would lead to a great deal of confusion as people adjusted to the changes. Just how frequent are the complaints by artists over this issue? Is it enough to make it worth a complete revamp of a fundamental set of tags?

And this is what I meant when I said if anyone suggests an alternative tagging method, nobody is going to even try it.