Heya, Edward! So, let's look at the Medium Quality Guidelines, which are the guidance both nominators and curators use: https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/360006362473-Medium-s-Quality-Guidelines-How-real-humans-review-stories-for-Boost

Curse words are NOT an automatic disqualifier for Boost. The Guidelines do say this:

These factors can lead to a story being disqualified for Boost... Stories with shocking, sensational, NSFW, or profane titles/subtitles/cover images.

So, I wouldn't recommend using curse words in the title of a story, but having contextual profanity in a story isn't an automatic disqualifier.

As for your second question: a non-erotica, non-sexually explicit story that mentions sexuality or lust IS still eligible for Boost. We Boost a lot of relationship stories that talk about sexuality and lust in non-explicit contexts... the issue isn't the words, it's the context of the story.

If you really want to deep dive into how curation approaches this stuff, I'd encourage you to read the manual that our internal curation team is trained with: https://medium-teamspace.notion.site/Medium-Curation-Manual-How-to-Assess-Story-Quality-01277bfcb0d94894b80f4aa1be76ade9

It's available to anyone who wants to read it, because we want our curational processes to be as transparent as possible.