Ages: “adult” or “teen” for 18/19 year old characters?

Seems like I remember seeing the description of the story symbology saying “adult” meant 18+, and “teen” meant 13-17, but it seems like I’ve seen stories with 18 year old spankees getting listed as “teen.”

Is that up to the author’s preference, determined by the validated according to context (meaning whether the 18/19 year old strikes them as a young adult or older teenager) or is it just sorta inconsistent?

Or have I misunderstood something?

The validators add those story codes.

Blarg, you are correct that 18 is the age that identifies a character as 'adult' , teens are 13 to 17. Sometimes an author doesn't actually mention the age, it may be a school year that is mentioned, but this can include 17 or older students. Of course, the USA school years are not obvious to those of us from other nations, so we may mistake the age range. Also, occasionally, us validators may make a mistake, or forget the age from previous parts of a serial, especially if we didn't validate the earlier parts.
Please feel free to report any story that specifies an age but is wrongly assigned, they can easily be amended, that's why we validate, to try and get an accurate synopsis, personally, I will be happy to correct any mistake I make and would prefer to be advised if I am wrong.
We are all volunteers, so please remember this, but we strive to keep the site at a high professional standard.
I hope this helps, thank you, Elorac

18 and 19 year olds are still "teens" as far as age is considered, but are considered adults instead of minors as far as the legal system is concerned.
That is why some sites specify that those discussed or depicted as characters in spanking stories must be 18 or over. On the whole, a good rule. And here the rule is no stories with sexual acts involving anyone under 18.

Not quite true. Flopsy explained once that since 16 is the age where one can marry in the UK, that's the cutoff age for sexual content. See for example "About a Girl Called Millie" by ReginaVictory.

I know I have occasionally been asked about character ages. The last time was with "A Totally Original Superhero Story" - where I (for some reason) referenced the ages of actors in a movie by the name of Shazam!.

Elorac


Ok, thanks, that makes sense. I thought maybe it might make sense to judge from the context of the story, but keeping it simple by a hard and fast “18 and up is adult, 13-17 is teens” rule makes it objective and unambiguous.

Good to know that this is how the tagging system works in LSF, Elorac.
I always think of it as an overlap of the two age groups; teens are 13-19, and young adults are 18-25; with an 18 or a 19 years old being both a teen and a young adult.


I don't want stir up a hornet's nest, BUT isn't spanking for us a sexual act?
I don't want to call anyone a hypocrite (and I'm guilty of doing so myself), but a vanilla's perspective on a spanking that "doesn't lead to anything further" shouldn't --I believe-- align with the spanko's worldview!

For example, LSF publishes novels of parental spankings (as in a blood related father/daughter, mother/daughter, and mother/son), but it doesn't have a category for an M/M spanking. Understandable, giving that the readership is mainly of straight males, but this is exactly my point-- it's a sexual act if it follows sexual orientation, right? Does that make the parental books, then, incestuous in a sense?
A hornet's nest, indeed!

If spanking is considered a sexual act, then real-life parental or teacher/pupil spankings become even more problematic!

As they should in my humble opinion.

I doubt any parent finding, say, a collection of Janus magazines, and printed pages of Daria Little stories in his or her daughter's room, would go on with spanking her for punishment- Most spanking parents would get pained by the mere suggestion that their kids could be like us when we were their age, and would defend their punishment of choice by emphasizing the "normalcy" of their kids, and attacking those perverted, must-have-been-sexually-abused-as-kids spankos!

But they won't, in my believe, admit that it could be a sexual act if done by others, but it's not in their case because it's done by a parent-- that would be, and rightly so, too creepy for them.