PayPal is Watching You

I'm reading a lot of posts today about PayPal and their (so far) mostly successful efforts to censor certain themes in erotica.

You don't need me to tell you that if it's incest, bestiality, and rape today, it will be something else tomorrow, and that if it can happen in erotica then it can happen in erotic romance any second now. This is how it works. The first to be targeted are the most vulnerable. And since incest, rape, and bestiality are all things which, if you're into them you may not want to be identified as being into them, they are easy targets.

So if you haven't yet, please sign the petition voicing your opposition to PayPal, Visa, and Mastercard's policies. And here's a post from J.S. Wayne with some other suggestions for actions you can take, including email addresses for Paypal so you can contact them directly. 

Remittance Girl has a great post here and one of the points she makes, that I'd like to reiterate, is that erotica is written and read predominately by women. So what is really happening here is, once again, the suppression of women's sexual imaginations. When you take into consideration how saturated our culture is with hetero male sexual imaginings, it becomes painfully clear that part of what it means to be a woman in our culture is to be denied your own sexual agency. Our sexuality is only acceptable when mediated by a male viewpoint.

Maybe that's why a book like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which has two rapes in it, is okay, but an indy-published eroticized rape fantasy authored by a woman is a threat to public decency.

What's most maddening of all about this is that everything we are talking about is fiction. You know, NOT REAL. It exists only in our minds. But a lot of people seem to have a really hard time with that distinction. No matter how many studies prove otherwise, they believe that there is a direct correlation between what a person fantasizes about and what they want to have happen in real life.

I've been yelling that this is not so for years. I've pointed it out the many times women came under attack for writing m/m, and I'll point it out again now. Fiction is a funhouse mirror that allows us the distance and safety we need to explore feelings our culture does not permit us to safely experience in other ways. Reading about violence can offer catharsis for intense emotional pain. A rape fantasy can be about being absolved of responsibility for having sex. Those elements and any others function for different readers in different ways and that is just one of the reasons why freedom of expression is vital for a thriving literature. 

The deep irony of all of this is that in claiming to "protect" us from obscenity, what censorship really does is deny us the safest outlet for exploration we could have.

I'm grateful that my publisher, Loose Id, has had the foresight not to do business through PayPal. I do have three of my freebie ficlets up on Smashwords, and one of them is The Cats Will Play, a Stan and Gus story wherein Billy Pipps engages in some interspecies bondage sex play. I'm pretty sure that getting tied up and having his dick licked by cats with psychic mind-control powers is not what Coker or the authors of the Paypal policy have in mind when they say bestiality, but it is sex with animals, and they're not shape shifters so there's no ducking out that way. I guess the only place it will be available now is right here.

Comments

[Maggie Chatterley]

Licked by a kitty on his....oh my, scratchy.
:)

Good post, btw

[Jessica Freely]

Yeah, Pipps is pretty out there.

And thx.

[Angie]

Agreement on everything.

And what makes it worse is that they're targetting things that aren't illegal or immoral or whatever. What's the problem with "barely legal" fiction? If they're legal, they're legal, even if it's only by an hour. Legal is legal, so why the pearl-clutching? And "pseudo-incest?" Really? So fake incest is just as bad as the real thing? (Assuming you think consensual incest is bad in the first place, but that's another issue.) If step-sibs want to get it on, why should anyone care? Are they going after m/m leather Daddy/boy stories next? [sigh]

My husband pointed out that, re: bestiality, the caveat that only "real" animals are problematic means that you can write bestiality with non-intelligent unicorns or heffalumps and that'd be within the bounds of the rules. [eyeroll]

What's really frustrating is that the courts don't go after this stuff. Nobody in law enforcement cares about written erotica, or even written porn. They see it as a waste of time, and focus on graphic porn, where there's at least a possibility that real people were hurt or exploited in its creation.

My favorite example, whenever some publisher claims that they "can't" publish explicit romances with any characters under eighteen because it's OMGIllegalPedoPorn!!! is Bertrice Small's The Kadin, which was published in the late seventies. The female lead has sex for the first time in the book when she's fourteen, and yet you can still buy this book, new, if you want to read it. The Pedo Police haven't kicked in Avon's door for publishing under-age smut in all these decades. Hello? They don't care.

If a publisher -- or a vendor -- wants to refrain from selling this stuff because they're afraid of harassment and bad publicity, that's fine. The crap one woman rained down on LiveJournal a few years ago over under-age fanfic shows that yes, it can cause a lot of grief. But grow a spine and admit that you're hiding from the whack-jobs -- don't pretend it's illegal just to shut people up.

Angie