Quoting an email from Mark Coker of Smashwords:
In case you haven’t heard, about two weeks ago, PayPal contacted Smashwords and gave us a surprise ultimatum: Remove all titles containing bestiality, rape or incest, otherwise they threatened to deactivate our PayPal account.
Smashwords has built their site around PayPal. They are negotiating, but PayPal holds all the cards.
Big deal, you may think. Who wants to read about bestiality, rape, or incest?
Well…ever read paranormal romance? Werewolves getting it on? Is that bestiality? What if in the excitement of the moment, someone sprouts extra hair? THEN is it? Where’s the line?
As Mark Coker puts it later in the email, “PayPal is asking us to censor legal fiction. Regardless of how one views topics
of rape, bestiality and incest, these topics are pervasive in mainstream fiction. We believe this crackdown is really targeting erotica writers. This is unfair, and it marks a slippery slope. ”
I’m not a fan of the slippery slope argument in politics. The idea that “if we let people marry the same gender, soon we’ll be allowing people to marry dogs!” is, to me, bullshit. With all the trouble we’ve had getting marriage equality on the books, you can’t tell me that changing the law to allow inter-species marriage would ever happen.
But this isn’t a legislative battle. This (unless we raise a helluva stink!) won’t be debated. This is one company, enforcing its will through its ability to drive others out of business.
If we allow a company to strongarm us into a ban on “rape for titillation” in fiction, we might soon be trusting someone to judge whether or not a certain plot event is written too racily…yeah, I don’t like that.
As fellow blogger John Yeoman put it, “Whither Lolita (paedophilia) or Tom Jones (incest) or Tess of the d’Urbervilles (intimations of rape) or Black Beauty (with its sub-text of bestiality)? Indeed, what of Heinlein’s later sci-fi novels? His Stranger In a Strange Land challenges – graphically – every taboo in western culture.
Whither the Bible itself? (Lots of titillating stuff in the Bible…)”
So what? It’s just Smashwords.
…ever used PayPal on eBay?
What if Visa sees PayPal getting away with it? Do you trust your bank to decide what you should be allowed to read?
There’s a petition.
Joe Konrath says it’s not censorship, and erotica authors can find other ways to sell their stories. I think (and this is rare, I admire the guy) that he’s being shortsighted. I think this sort of thing rarely stops before it is made to stop, and when they are done with the erotica authors they will come after those who write…oh, dark YA. To protect the children, of course.
Erotica authors may well be fine if driven off the main sites people search for books. But I still don’t think it’s fair to do that to them. And I think we writers of Other Things will have a much harder time if it comes to that.
The time to stop this is now. I’m an adult–I’ll decide what I read, and I’ll decide with my daughter what she reads.
And nobody gets to decide what I write.