Paypal's Rules on Obscenity

The eBook sales platforms Bookstrand and Smashwords have recently changed their publication policies in order to comply with PayPal obscenity rules, according to a series of posts by ERECsite. These new policies are hitting self-pubbed erotic fiction authors hard--and not just the people who write the taboo stuff. Throwing the baby out with the bathwater comes to mind.

However, Bookstrand and Smashwords weren't blind-sided. The PayPal obscenity rules have been around for a long time. Most folks who sell using PayPal are perfectly aware of these rules. The payment service evidently just decided to enforce the obscenity prohibition.

Here are the relevant portions of PayPal's rules:

You may not use PayPal for transactions involving... (f) items that are considered obscene ... (h) certain sexually oriented materials or services.

So what does obscene mean? For more detail, you'll have to look to eBay, the company that owns PayPal. Here are eBay's rules:

Obscene materials, while not easy to define, aren't allowed on eBay. For some guidance, we prohibit items depicting or describing bestiality, necrophilia, rape, scat, and incest (real or fictionalized).

Further, eBay explains:

Child pornography is illegal and not allowed on eBay. We generally don't allow the listing of any item that depicts people under 18 years of age naked, including child erotica. We may also remove listings that involve the exploitation of minors, regardless of whether the items are sexual in nature.

So there you go. You can't pay for incest and pedophilia fiction with PayPal. The rules were always there. The ebook sales platforms should have expected the crackdown.

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Demagoguery and Erotica

According to a few angry Amazon.com authors, Amazon is "purging" self-published erotica e-books. That's not quite true. Erotica titles are not being purged. Amazon is deleting incest stories--most of them involving an underage character.

To my mind, incest and pedophilia are inseparable. Both pathologies involve exploitation of the weaker. There is no consent. Unfortunately, discussion and refinement of these concepts on the Amazon forums is pretty well futile. Anything less than blanket sympathy arouses indignation by the "victimized" writers. One of the banned authors tells the forum that incest fiction must be published by amazon because mainstream erotica publishers won't touch it. Entitlement, much? Disagreement is met with contempt. One of these authors writes: “Why are you posting on an erotica forum if you don’t like erotica?”

The subtext of this self-serving statement is this: if you don’t embrace pedo-incest erotica, you don’t embrace any erotica. This antilogic pisses me off. Some random author doesn't get to tell me what erotica is, or isn't. He doesn't get to decide what society will or will not accept, either. Related sentiments are trotted out on the kink boards. "You have to accept all perversion--even pedophilia--because you people are perverted." Nope. The kink boards, like collarme, have very strict rules about pedo pics or pedo fiction. Such material is quickly reported and removed.

Morality and erotica are not mutually exclusive. Decency in BDSM is not an oxymoron. Even if you live on the edge, you can still have standards.

Near as I can figure, amazon does.