PayPal Puts the Screws on Erotica

I’ve always thought that PayPal was a useful service, and regretted the fact that they crashed every time I tried to log onto them.  (Even when I tried to logon through other people’s computers, they crashed.  It’s not the computer, it’s me.  I am cursed.)

Be that as it may, I’m not so sorry anymore about being unable to use Paypal.  Because they’re now using their financial power to censor the work of authors.

Specifically, they have ordered Smashwords to remove certain kinds of erotica from their site, and to do it in just ten days.

Now, erotica is one of the two killer apps for the Internet.  (The other is games.)  Smashwords and other sites host a lot of erotica— in fact, when I logged on recently, all of the most recent uploads on their home page were erotica of one sort of another. My guess is they’ve got all sorts of people uploading and downloading sexy stuff all day, all to their joy and mutual gratification.  (And, in this context, don’t the very words “uploading” and “downloading” begin to take on a certain sexual charge?)

My guess is that 100% of Smashwords’ sales go through PayPal, which is not only used to purchase fiction but to process credit card sales.  Most of the authors are paid via PayPal.  (Though not me, because I’m PayPal’s personal nemesis.)

So Smashwords had no choice but to accede to PayPal’s demands.  The alternative was to close up shop entirely.

(I’ve also heard that PayPal has put the screws to AllRomance and Bookstrand, sites I’ve never heard of till now.)

What PayPal demanded was that Smashwords remove erotica featuring bestiality, rape, incest, and “pseudo-incest,” which I guess is where the participants are legally but not biologically related.   (Pedophilia was already banned by Smashwords’ terms of service.)  Now it’s not like I particularly want to defend stories in which humans have sexual relationships with barn animals, or in which violence is depicted as a form of titillation, but I also don’t want some third party— a bank, no less!— deciding what is suitable for me to read.

PayPal in turn may be responding to credit-card companies like Visa and Mastercard, who enforce “chargebacks” against “high-risk” sites, where there’s an increased chance of overcharging or identity theft.  (Gambling and porn sites are considered high-risk.)  So PayPal might have been reacting to pressure from credit-card companies.

Now what we have here, folks, is— hmm, what’s the word I’m looking for?— stupidity.  Because none of these companies are actually looking at the internet firm in question, they’re just creating arbitrary categories and punishing any company that seems to fit them.

Smashwords is a perfectly legitimate outfit, it’s not Bangkok Bang-Bang or Horny Schoolgirls or Donkey Show Dee-lite.  My guess is it doesn’t practice identity theft and doesn’t create spurious charges.  And PayPal’s own records should show that.  So their defense for their action is either 1.) We’re really really stupid and we don’t know our own business or for that matter how to consult our own records, duh, or 2.) We’re a bunch of puritanical, dictatorial asswipes.

Bear in mind that this is the freakin’ Internet we’re talking about.  The Internet flows around obstacles.  When PayPal cuts itself out of a part of its cash flow, that cash flow will go elsewhere.  Guar-on-teed.

And while I acknowledge that the subject of incest is complex and problematical and most often tragic, so is incest’s relationship with literature equally complex.  Lose depictions of incest, and we lose Homer (all those Olympians are very closely related).  We lose crucial stories by Le Guin and Heinlein.  We lose Wagner (Brunhilda was Siegfried’s auntie).  We lose bits of Poe, Shelley, John Irving, A.S. Byatt, Doris Lessing, Frank Herbert, and Theodore Sturgeon.  Gone is Le Morte d’Arthur (Modred is the result of an incestuous relationship between Arthur and his half-sister), Game of Thrones, Oedipus Rex, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and Nabokov’s dazzling Ada.

So who the hell is PayPal to decide what we can read, write, and upload?  Nobody elected them.  Their decision-making process is completely opaque, and the results completely arbitrary.

We’ve been hearing warnings for decades about the Nanny State.

Nobody thought to warn us about the Nanny Bank.