Last week soured me.
Some of you have probably already heard about Paypal and their issues with Bookstrand and Smashwords, but for those of you that don’t follow those circles, Paypal has forced them (and paypal says they were forced by one of the credit card companies) to no longer allow websites to be served by them if they have certain content.
That content, right now, is pseudo-incest, bestiality, rape, barely legal teens (18-19 years old), and possibly BDSM.
Of course, incest, barely legal teens, and BDSM are all perfectly fine in real life. If you wanted to tie up your consenting, 18 year old step daughter and paddle her until she cries, that’s legal – but paypal doesn’t want you to fictionalize that scene.
Now since I started looking into self-publishing, I’ve been routinely disgusted by the rules and regulations posted on certain sites, specifically in regards to adult content.
As I spoke about before, the ideas of what constitutes offensive or morally objectionable to every individual.
This, however, has been bringing me to the brink. I’ve already been having a hard enough time coping with how difficult it will be to find a company who well sell my more extreme works that have true incest, rape, monsters, etc. Now to find out that I’ll also have trouble finding a place to sell more vanilla kinks is just absurd.
It’s got me in knots, because this is completely unregulated. It’s not that this stuff is illegal, yet it doesn’t matter because Paypal is a corporate entity that sets their terms of service however which way they want. They can, legally, enforce this rule, and the only way they can be stopped is to get outraged.
But who’s going to get outraged over erotic stories containing certain kinks no longer being available on certain sites? The reason erotica has boomed lately is because of the anonymity of purchasing the books in electronic format, because even those who read it don’t want to admit they do. And they certainly don’t want to admit that they have less mainstream kinks such as pseudo incest!
And the sites are hurting themselves. Let’s just look at it with dollar figures: Barely legal pseudo incest? This is a huge, huge market right now. Every other book or more features both, or at least one or the other. There’s consumer demand for it.
If I ever go to a corporation to ask them what my moral code should contain, I’ll let you know.
Some interesting posts on this whole debacle:
Self Publisher Slipper Slop – Part 2 – Why Frogs Boil
BANNED from BookStrand and All Romance eBooks
(Image Source)
The power of the corporation by the corporation shall devastate the earth.
It truly is frightening when corporations have more power over individual rights and freedoms than government in some regards.