Technically, we did have an X - Red Riding Hood's Child. Although actually if you look on the text on that piece, it's all sliding euphemisms and nothing explicit, I knew it would squick people. (It squicked me, a bit.) But we put like four warnings on it in different places to try to make sure that people who really didn't want to hear it wouldn't, you know, listen.
Anyway. I have to admit that I didn't even notice the sex in this piece when I bought it. Cuz mostly when I think about flagging stuff for warnings, I think about flagging stuff I find disturbing, and what's a little all-in-fun anal? Not disturbing. Or at least not to me. This was supposed to run back in, oh, November? At which point our then-audio-editor, on taking a listen, told me, "Um, I think you need a warning."
If we're talking about personal philosophies, then I certainly agree that warnings should be more likely to occur on very violent material. If I were going entirely with my own gut, the only things I would probably ever put warnings on would be things likely to be triggering to people who have, for instance, PTSD. I've said before that I, personally, don't really believe in screening content for arbitrary designations of "contains sex" or even "contains blood."
However, the ratings aren't meant for me. They're meant for the percentage of our readers who *do* want to screen content. And based on the feedback we get from those readers, they really want to screen sexual content, and aren't as picky about violence.
Can I argue with that philosophically or politically? Yes, I can. And in fact it's a mindset which is sufficiently foreign to mine that PodCastle has actually engaged a couple people to do our ratings for me, because I can't always figure out how things should be rated based on that scale.
But my personal, philosophical, and political arguments aside -- the ratings system is a small concession that PodCastle can make so that those listeners feel more comfortable with the 'cast. And while they and I don't agree on everything, I think we can agree that we'd like the podcast to be accessible and welcoming to people with a number of different points of view.
On the other hand, I draw the line at using the ratings system to enforce different standards for different kinds of people, rather than just note when there's sex going on -- for instance, as Heradel mentions, I won't use a rating system that distinguishes between gay sex and straight sex. So there's always a process of negotiation going on.