Fanfic Stats: How much sex is there?

The recent discussion about the amount of pointless smut scenes in fanfic got me curious.

Statistically speaking, how much smut is there?

I have to say that spontaneously – and based on the selection of the stories I read normally – I’d be inclined to think that “Yeah, there’s explicit sex in most fanfic”. But is it really?

For statistically meaningful results, it’s necessary to look at pretty big samples.

So I decided to take a look at the biggest fandoms at FanFiction Net.

Obviously, there are lots of other places around where fanfic can be found. Specialised archives, LiveJournal Communities, personal blogs and websites etc. But FFNet is the biggest general archive out there, with hundreds of thousands of stories, authors and readers. As a result, FFNet can provide me with samples that are big enough to be statistically meaningful. To find out more, I’ve looked at 14 different fandoms with more than 20,000 stories each and altogether 760,392 stories. Definitely enough data to show at least a tendency.

For the first table, I’m excluding stories rated “T”. With a rating described as “Suitable for teens, 13 years and older, with some violence, minor coarse language, and minor suggestive adult themes”, I think it would be necessary to determine on a case by case basis just how important sexual situations are in these stories. However, since sex scenes are only permissible as “minor suggestive adult themes” I believe that definitely excludes anything that could be termed “gratuitous explicit sex scenes”.

The table I created can at least show how many stories there are in the biggest fandoms at FFNet that must not contain any explicit or suggestive sexual scenes and which stories can (and are reasonably likely to) contain explicit sexual scenes.

The figures used in the following table were correct in the morning of September 17, 2008.

But the real problem with FFNet is another one: FFNet allows only stories up to a rating of M or R. That means, stories that are “not suitable for children or teens below the age of 16 with possible strong but non-explicit adult themes, references to violence, and strong coarse language”.

So what if the majority of fanfic is actually rated even higher than R or M?

What if fanfic is really all about MA or NC-17, stories that are “… only suitable for mature adults” and “May contain explicit language and adult themes”? What if these stories actually make up the biggest part of fanfic?

That’s why I looked additionally at AdultFanFiction.net.  As a general NC-17 archive with 91,343 authors, AFF.net is big enough to provide a reasonable indication for the presence of higher rated fanfic, at least statistically speaking. Or in other words: since AFF.net is a pretty big archive, it’s reasonable to expect that if the M rated stories at FFNet are only the tip of an iceberg, it should be noticeable even though there are less authors and less stories over at AFF.net than at FFNet.

* There are 389,041Harry Potter stories archived at FFNet and AFF.net, 131,696 rated K or K+, 116,703 rated T, 53,411 rated M, and 16,799 rated MA or NC-17. In percent: 33.82% are rated K or K+,  29,97% are rated T, 13.72% are rated M and 4.31% are rated MA. Or: 33.82% must not contain sex scenes at all, and 18.03% are somewhat likely to contain explicit or graphic sex scenes.

Even considering that there’s many more authors and stories at FFNet, there don’t seem to be quite enough stories archived at the most well-known NC-17 archive to support the “tip of the iceberg” theory. At least at first glance.

For comparison, another table, this time limited to the genre “romance”.

Reason: In romance stories, two persons become romantically involved. That includes a sexual relationship.

And while it is possible that an “M” rated detective story is rated “M” because the detective is involved with the murderer, it seems rather unlikely that a romance story is rated “M” for anything but sexual situations.

**of all stories of that fandom archived at FFNet

Obviously, the problem remains that there are no graphically explicit sex scenes permissible at FFNet.

However, even if there were as many MA rated fanfic posted at FFNet as M rated stories in the fandoms I’ve included in the tables, stories that can contain explicit sex scenes would still not make up the majority of fanfic posted at the biggest fanfic archive there.

Of course all of this is quick and dirty stats and very fuzzy around the edges, but I think the tables show at least a statistical tendency at the biggest fanfic archive around.

To sum up: Even in the genre where we can expect the highest ratio of sex scenes, the storis that can contain explicit sex scenes according to the rules at FFNet do not make up the majority of fanfics among a variety of strong fandoms, no matter if the fandoms are books, movies, TV-shows, manga/anime or computer games.

To control the result, I’ve looked at harrypotterfanfiction.com. This is a large archive in Harry Potter fandom that also allows only stories up to a rating of R. The story total over there is 53,452 stories posted by 25,077 authors.

12,299 stories or 24% are rated mature. In the genre romance, there are 34,987 stories archived at harrypotterfanfiction.com. Out of that number, 9,535 or 27.25% are rated mature.

If I assume that the ratio of NC-17 HP stories per authors is more or less the same at bigger archives (small numbers screw up averages) … then I could tentatively assume (and I’m fully aware that “assume” tends to make an “ass” out of “u” and “me”!) that if there are 16,799 NC-17 rated HP stories at an archive with 91,343 authors, that another archive with 25,077 authors might end up having ca. 4,612 NC-17 rated stories. That, in turn, would change the relevant percentages as follows: 21.18% of the stories would be rated M or R, 7.94% would be reated MA or NC-17, and the remaining 70.88% would not contain explicit sex scenes.

Of course I freely admit that I don’t have enough data to really prove that. I don’t know how many authors there are at FFNet. And some of the other big fanfic archives out there don’t provide the data I would need. So that’s all very very fuzzy and by no means any proof for anything.

But all in all the extant data at least suggests that stories which can contain explicit sex scenes do not necessarily make up the majority of fanfic.

(Also, last but not least, I’m certain I made some really stupid errors somewhere in there. I always end up with 2+2=3 at some point. For what it’s worth, I hope at least some of you find this stint at number crunching somewhat entertaining.)