Remittance Girl's Blog, page 34

The Challenge: Au Vanille et Chocolate

I decided to try my own challenge. It wasn’t easy! Especially the vanilla one.

[image error] Take one: a la vanille

I walked into the bedroom, pink from my evening shower, to find Robert naked and taking up most of the bed.  He sat propped up against a wealth of pillows, reading a paperback. His long legs sprawled over the real estate, burnished skin stark against the white sheets.

“Whatcha reading?” I asked, perching myself on the end of the bed. I poured a generous puddle of almond oil into my hand and began to moisturize my legs.

“This is terrible,” he said, not looking up. “The characters are totally unbelievable. And the plotting. Jesus!”

“What’s it called?”

“I got if off your desk. Fifty shades of… something.” He sniffed the air and looked up. “I smell… almonds. Almonds?”

“Mhm.” I was attending to my shins. Otherwise, they get like parchment. “It’s supposed to be sexy. Everyone’s raving about it.”

“I think the author’s a virgin.” Robert grunted and threw the book aside. It skidded to a noisy stop on the wood floor, just by the wall.  “Can I tempt you to get a little closer?”

I looked up at him, then. His peacefully slumbering cock was slumbering no more.  “My hands are all oily.” Smirking, I held them up, fingers splayed.

Robert’s mouth twitched into a crooked smile. “I know.”

I shuffled up for the bottom of the bed, between his stretched out legs, on my knees, brandishing my glistening hands. “These hands are lethal weapons. I want you to know.”

With one oily finger, I traced a shiny path down the underside of his engorged cock.

“Lethal?”

“Mmm… Lethal,” I purred as I curled my fingers and slid both hands down the entire shaft. Then up again, stroking him slowly, measuring the tease, letting my fingers hitch and slide over the flare of his cockhead.

A low, pleasured groan erupted from the depth of his throat. “You’re really very good at that.”

“Years of experience.”

His brows knit together. “We could fuck, you know.”

And we could have, but there was something about the sweet smell of the oil on the hot skin of his cock, and the hypnotic rhythm of my hands. I didn’t want to stop. “Maybe not,” I whispered and tightened my grip.

That’s when his hips began to rock. There was nothing in the world more erotic than watching the muscles of his stomach ripple as he arches. I noticed his hands, fisted in the sheets and then gazed up into his face.

“I like watching you like this. Is it good?”

“Fuck. Yes. It’s. Good.” The plump words tumbled out like single things.

Then nothing but the sound of his ragged breathing and the wet, slick sound of skin against skin, growing in volume as I stroked him faster. The sucking, kissing, licking sounds buried themselves in my cunt.

His body stiffened, his back bowed and his eyes flew to the ceiling.

“Jesus Christ,” he gasped.

Warm spurts of semen spattered my arms and my thighs, then dribbled, honey-like over my slowing hands.

I lowered my head, parted my lips, and trapped the last weak eruption in my mouth.

 

[image error] Take Two: au chocolate

I walked into the bedroom, pink from my evening shower, to find Robert naked and taking up most of the bed.  He sat propped up against a wealth of pillows, reading a paperback. His long legs sprawled over the real estate, burnished skin stark against the white sheets.

“Whatcha reading?” I asked, perching myself on the end of the bed. I poured a generous puddle of almond oil into my hand and began to moisturize my legs.

“This is terrible,” he said, not looking up. “The characters are totally unbelievable. And the plotting. Jesus! This woman wouldn’t know BDSM if it fucked her from behind with a ball gag on.”

“What’s it called?”

“I got if off your desk. Fifty shades of… something.” He sniffed the air and looked up. “I smell… almonds. Almonds?”

“Mhm.” I was attending to my shins. Otherwise, they get like parchment. “It’s supposed to be sexy. Everyone’s raving about it.”

“I think the author’s a virgin.” Robert grunted and threw the book aside. It skidded to a noisy stop on the wood floor, just by the wall.  “Come over here, pet.”

I looked up at him, then. His peacefully slumbering cock was slumbering no more.  “My hands are all oily.” Smirking, I held them up, fingers splayed.

Robert’s mouth twitched into a crooked smile. “Exactly.”

I shuffled up for the bottom of the bed, between his stretched out legs, on my knees, offering up my glistening hands. “Would I be wrong in thinking that I know what you’d like me to do with these?”

With one oily finger, I traced a shiny path down the underside of his engorged cock.

“You wouldn’t be wrong.”

I purred as I curled my fingers and slid both hands down the entire shaft. Then up again, stroking him slowly, measuring the pace, letting my fingers hitch and slide over the flare of his cockhead.

A low, pleasured groan erupted from the depth of his throat. “You’ve gotten very good at this.”

“I’ve had an excellent teacher.”

His eyebrow arched. “I could take you, you know.”

And he could have, but there was something about the sweet smell of the oil on the hot skin of his cock, and the hypnotic rhythm of my hands. I didn’t really want to stop. “I’m yours for the taking,” I whispered and tightened my grip.

That’s when his hips began to rock. There was nothing in the world more erotic than giving this man pleasure. Watching the muscles of his stomach ripple as he arched. His hand curled firmly around mine, controlling the rate of his pleasure.

” You’re such a good girl.”

“I do my very best, Sir.”

Then nothing but the sound of his ragged breathing and the wet, slick sound of skin against skin, growing in volume as he guided my pace. The sucking, kissing, licking sounds buried themselves in my cunt.  The grip of his hand around mine, and the arousal in his eyes almost tipped me over.

His body stiffened, his back bowed and, with almost lightening speed, he fisted his free hand in my hair and pulled me down.

“Swallow every drop, slut,” he demanded.

My lips closed around the flared, burning head just in time to capture the first thick jet of come. I sucked greedily, gratefully, as he held the back of my head and thrust upward, bruising my lips. He forced his way into my throat and erupted a second time, feeding me his lust.

Then the grip gentled. He stroked my hair, brushing it away from my face to watch my lap up the last of his semen.

“Good pet. Beautiful pet,” he whispered.

Kinky States of Mind: An Erotica Writing Challenge

On my last post, Selena Kitt made a particularly insightful comment about the sex writing in Fifty Shades of Grey: “For me, the sex was incredibly vanilla for a BDSM novel.”

I had to agree with her and then I went on to wonder why.  It’s not that all the sex in the story was, physically, strictly vanilla. The restraint of her not being allowed to touch him is always there. And some of the scenes do have the physical trappings of BDSM, so why did it read so vanilla?

I came to the conclusion that writing BDSM sex is far less about the external scene than it is about how the person whose POV is represented in the narrative is interpreting it. The M/C in Fifty Shades of Grey has a very vanilla state of mind (and I would extrapolate and venture that E.L. James is probably not much of an avid practicioner of BDSM herself). And so, appropriately, she reads/interprets/experiences all the sex as vanilla, even when, externally, it doesn’t appear to be.

I think it’s something of an interesting  writing exercise to think about this. Take, for instance, the most vanilla position on earth – the missionary position:

From a vanilla perspective, the missionary position allows for the partners to be face to face. It’s a very intimate, loving position with lots of gazing into the eyes of the other going on. It’s easy to kiss. Both partners are within easy reach of the other, to caress and be caressed.

From a power play perspective, it’s definitely a one person-on-top position. The top has all the freedom of movement. They control the thrust. The top’s weight can be interpreted as a form of physical bondage. And all it would take is the top having a firm hold on the bottom’s wrists to make it instantly kinky… if that lack of movement was of some internal significance to the bottom.

( It was just very rightly pointed out to me on twitter, by I.G. Frederick, that it is also perfectly possible to have a very D/s missionary fuck where the Dominant is on the bottom, too)

It’s really all about what kind of language you are using to describe how it feels. And it’s going to feel entirely different to either vanilla lover vs someone in a dominant or submissive role.

So, here’s my challenge: Have a go at writing the exact same sex act, using nothing but the tone of language and the POV of the narrator to present it as either kinky or vanilla.

If you take up my challenge but post to your own blog, please leave a comment to link to your efforts. I’d really love to see how different writers experiment with this.

Fifty Shades of Twilight: a Fifty Shades of Grey Review

Over on the ERWA Blog, Donna George Storey commented that perhaps one positive aspect of the massive popularity of Fifty Shades of Grey was that women who liked it might then go and seek out books that actually fess up to being erotic fiction. My worry is that they’ll read Fifty Shades of Grey, identify it as erotica, and assume that all erotic fiction is as poorly written as this.

For those few of you who haven’t read it, the book charts the course of a 22 year-old ingenue’s relationship with an older, kinky billionaire. I’m not good at writing summaries, but this was easy because … well, that’s all there is. It has all the hallmarks of a mild BDSM romance without the mandatory HEA ending.

I really hate writing a totally negative review, so I’m going to first tell you what is good about the book: it’s not very long; it has a secondary school reading level, and nothing blows up. And, to be fair, I think this is a reasonably fair portrayal of the problems faced when a kinky person sincerely attempts and fails to date someone vanilla. Finally, I have to say that the sex, while not brilliantly written, is not too bad. For a mainstream novel, that’s refreshing.

Okay – check positive aspects.

I wasn’t surprised at all to read that 50 Shades started out as Twilight Fan Fic 1. What disturbs me most about the phenomenal popularity of this novel is that, like Twilight, it revels in the sheer mediocrity of Anastasia, the main female character, and presents us with a male romantic interest, Christian Grey, who is obsessively drawn to that mediocrity. Implicit in its popularity is the disturbing truth that so many women must feel equally mediocre in order to identify with her so strongly.

Anastasia is a 22-year old virgin who has never orgasmed, never masturbated – never gotten to 2nd base, in fact. She’s graduating with a degree in English literature but doesn’t own a computer. One would think that, alone, would make for an interesting, under-socialized, sexually inhibited and disturbing sort of girl. But she isn’t represented that way. She’s represented as entirely normal.

22 year-old virgins are pretty damn rare in the industrialized world. 22 year-old virgins who have never masturbated are downright odd and require some explaining. 22 year-old non-masturbating virgins who instantly turn into uninhibited fans of rough-fucking and grade-A cock suckers are simply a pornographic mythology. We need an explanation for Anastasia’s very strange sexual development and we don’t get one. (And hands up how many of you took to deep-throating like a duck to water).

In that sense, the critics’ description of Fifty Shades of Grey as ‘mommy porn’ are fair; it is ‘pornography’ in as much as it offers us a heroine who is an unreal and fetishized symbol of sexual innocence.

Admittedly, Anastasia has two inner personas who annoyingly jockey for attention in italics. There’s her ‘goddess’ who is an insatiable and feisty libertine and the Cynic, who keeps calling her a whore. Sadly, either of her italicized sub-personas would have made a more interesting and loveable character.

In the other corner of the ring, we have Mr. Christian Grey: the 27 year-old BDSM-loving, control freak billionaire. Despite the fact that he extolls his own virtues as a canny reader of people, the plot revolves almost completely around how pathetic he is at reading her. He is terminally impressed with her beauty, mental acuity, her snarky mouth and her wide-eyed innocence (charming qualities which are not in evidence in the actual text – maybe he’s in love with a character in another book and doesn’t know it yet).  He lavishes inappropriate gifts upon her that she supposedly doesn’t want but can’t stop mentioning. We’re told he’s a rule-bound control freak who, inexplicably, breaks all his own rules with a frequency that quickly gets boring. We’re given to understand that he has a long history of practicing BDSM but shows a jaw-dropping propensity for misjudgement. All in all, very much like Twilight’s Edward, it’s simply a mystery as to why he is so besotted with the heroine.

I’m not one of those erotica writers who insists that BDSM always be represented as a happy and healthy lifestyle choice. I’ve met too many people who were drawn to BDSM to fulfill needs that have their origins in a traumatic childhood.  So, it did not bother me that Christian puts his kinky propensities down to early childhood abuse. However, it does bother me tremendously that a character, who has supposedly been practicing BDSM for as long as Mr. Grey, can’t tell the difference between a Dominant and a Sadist.

Dominants enjoy controlling the sexual experience of their subs and will give them pleasure or pain – mental or physical – with a view to having an enhanced intimate experience. They don’t get off on inflicting pain when they are absolutely aware that it is a wholly unpleasant experience for the submissive. Yes, some dominants do mete out punishment that is not physically pleasurable, but they do it knowing that the sub is getting mental pleasure from the power-relationship.

Sadists are a very different matter.  They do get off sexually and mentally on inflicting physical and mental pain and their ability to be aroused by witnessing or inflicting it it is not associated with the masochist’s consent or fulfillment. Now, if you’re a sadist reading this and are about to accuse me of defamation, please read that first sentence carefully again. I’m not saying that principled and disciplined sadists don’t set limits of consent for themselves and their partners. Many do. But they do so because it allows them to practice their sadism in a safe and ethical manner.  They may be sadistic within consensual bounds and enjoy it. But, if they allowed themselves to inflict non-consensual pain or humiliation, it would still arouse them – even if they felt guilty about it.

This is a major problem I have with the success of E.L. James’ novel.  It really does spread misinformation about the subtle but important differences between dominants and sadists. There is no question in the readers’ mind that Anastasia is not going to get off, either mentally or physically, on the final belt whipping. And it would take a massively incompetent dominant to think she would. Mr. Grey is a sadist and, for all his pretense at consent, a very inexperienced and unprincipled one. Now, don’t get me wrong. A novel about an inexperienced and unprincipled sadist might be very intriguing. But this is not that novel.

It would be fair to say that, in most aspects, this reads like a very mediocre erotic romance. The characters are either uncannily perceptive or staggeringly stupid depending on what the plot requires.  It uses the same tired and annoying plot devices of improbable misunderstandings to artificially heighten the tension. It is a litany of contrived conflicts that beggar the suspension of disbelief of any intelligent reader.

So, I’m going to say something that is probably going to piss a lot of you off: if you thought this novel was entirely brilliant and smokingly erotic, I do have to question your ability to be a discerning reader. The writing is flaccid, the characterization is appalling, and the plotting is downright pathetic.

I can’t begin to explain why, with so many brilliantly written erotic novels about BDSM out there, Random House chose to pick up this one.  You have a right expect much more of your kinky erotic novel that this.

You really do.

We’re better than this, I promise.

http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2012/04/18/so-i-read-fifty-shades-of-grey ↩

Quietude & Brewing Stuff

Nikos Kessanlis, The Crowd, 1965

I’m sorry the blog has been quiet for a while. I have some projects on the boil I can’t tell you about yet, but will announce soon.

In the meantime, my monthly post at the ERWA blog is up. This one is on The Voices of Others: Genders, Sexualities and Beyond

What are they putting in the water?

Is it something in the water, or a secret corrosive side-effect of too much reality TV? No compulsory logic classes in first year university anymore?

During the whole censorship / PayPal debate, over and over again, I read people equate and confuse real examples of illegal sexual behavior with fiction.

Hyperbolic comments like "Well, I'm glad that stuff is banned. Do you really want someone fucking your 12 year old sister?"

Huh? *BLINK*

I have no idea what is going on here, but it's rampant. Blinding lapses in simple logic. Obvious inabilities to mentally separate fiction from reality.  It was really quite chilling.

Were we always this stupid and I just didn't notice it, or have people been slowly getting dumber? And what's caused it?

The Women We Failed and the Ones We Left Behind

There is a hauntingly good post at the New Yorker this week.  John Cassidy asks the question "Why Republican Women Vote for Santorum" and offers up an amazingly insightful and frightening response from one of his commenters:

About women supporting Santorum: I too find this baffling, and can only attribute it to some form of Stockholm Syndrome. As someone who grew up among born-again and evangelical Christians in Appalachia, I would hypothesize that women who have accommodated themselves to living an evangelical lifestyle have nothing to gain from questioning the premises of Christian patriarchy. Their lives are more comfortable, less fraught with domestic conflict, if they simply decide to be happy and make the most of their assigned roles. Although to a feminist the trajectory of their lives seems constrained, on a day-to-day basis evangelical women feel productive and empowered by playing a dynamic role in their churches and schools, from which they derive a potent sense of community. Nor are they necessarily barred from having a job. They have avenues for self-expression such as crafts, baking, or book clubs. (If your first reaction is to disdain these, then unless you're a professional artist you probably have too high an opinion of your own creative outlets.) In fact, when I recall the women I grew up under, they didn't think men were superior at all; they took the patronizing attitude that men were to be indulged in their masculine delusions. It would be elitist/snobby/condescending/wrong to view such women as passive or merely subservient. How many of us want to challenge the social constructs within which we have created active lives that are reckoned as meaningful? At any rate, this is my best effort to make sense of the women's vote, which is otherwise unfathomable and preposterous to me.

—CWolfe

Personally, I lay this at the door of the more radical aspects of 2nd Wave feminists, whose zeal to hermetically seal women away from their everyday realities, their faiths, their families, the men they loved and their histories was so hyperbolic that they succeeded in demonizing the whole movement for a great many people.

We left these women behind out of an intolerance for their realities and a disdain for their capacity to endure and succeed within a very narrow world-view. Now, we're inheriting the wages of that elitism and snobbery. They were too absolutist, in too much of a hurry, and to unwilling to even contemplate the positive sides of these women's lives.

When Margaret Atwood wrote The Handmaid's Tale, little did she know how close to many women's lived-reality her fiction was straying. But her ending was unbelievable and exemplary of many urbane, educated and sophisticated women's answers to these issues.

Personally, I'm a staunch atheist, but I've lived long enough in deeply religious cultures to know you can't demand a woman purge herself of all the structures of her life before she is welcomed into the arms of feminism.

We left these women behind with a sneer. And this is what we've inherited.

 

 

Experiences Define Us: What Writers Are and What They Do

For those of you who have read along with my journey towards getting accepted into a PhD program, I want to thank you for your sturdy company. I have been accepted into a PhD in Creative Writing program at a university in the UK. I will take a year off teaching to study starting in September.

For those of you who have stood shoulder to shoulder with me in the trenches in the battle against erotica censorship, I want to thank you for your brave and shining hearts.  We have won, it seems, a small victory of sorts. PayPal has backed down and reformulated its TOS with regards to taboo erotic fiction. It is, sadly, only a small victory. Graphic novelists, game developers and comic book producers are still not being afforded the respect or freedoms they're entitled to.

I've read a lot of post-game criticism of Mark Coker for his light-handed, politic way of doing battle. It might have not been my style of combat either, but I'd like to remind all of you that only he (Smashwords) and Selena Kitt (Excessica) put up any kind of a fight at all. That, regardless of his perennially mild tone to PayPal, he went a long way to getting you what you wanted – the freedom to write what you wanted and somewhere to sell it.

I want to thank the fabulous Rainey Reitmann at the Electronic Frontiers Foundation. The EFF emerged as a passionately vocal advocate and a ferocious activist in her fight to defend legal fiction from commercial censorship. If you do anything on the web, they deserve your donation.

I also want to thank No Boundaries Press for stepping up to the plate and offering a haven to a lot of writers who suddenly felt abandoned and kicked to the wall when the PayPal fiasco went down, and to the Comic Book Defense Fund who decided that our fight was theirs as well. And we should reciprocate the support, because content with drawn images is particularly under threat.

It is our experiences that define us. This month has taught me more about what it means to be a writer than the previous ten years. I've learned to articulate and defend what I do academically, legally, economically and morally.

I've learned who my friends are.

I've learned who my enemies are, too.

To the writers who blithely stepped aside while their fellow erotica and romance writers went to the wall, who said nothing, who looked the other way, who felt it didn't concern them and carried on with business as usual : SHAME ON YOU.

To the smug assholes and bitches with their lips pursed around self-righteous, moralistic, parsimonious, off the cuff reprimands: FUCK YOU. I sincerely hope you end up in loveless, lustless unions with partners who cheat on you out of mindnumbing boredom and in response to your staggering mediocrity,  your lack of human decency, your sagging tits, your shriveling pudenda and your unruly, ungrateful children.

To the fatuous, pasty-faced eBook retailers who knuckled under, and did nothing but send blunt and dispassionate emails of rejection to the writers whose books have made you money: MAY YOU FIND YOURSELF RELEGATED to the selling of undesirable tupperware and unfashionable shades of low-quality lipstick. You don't deserve to sell the written word. You're nothing more than 'product floggers'.

To the brave writers who continue to push at the boundaries of the comfortable, the acceptable, the saleable and the polite: you will have your place in history. The canon of literature is a long list of authors who took chances, caused controversy and pissed off the placid.

To the intrepid readers who brave the discomfort of challenging writing, who support and encourage writers to reach further and write bravely, who joined us on the battle lines and demanded the freedom to buy and read what they wanted: everything I write is for you. You complete the cycle. Without readers, I would be no writer.

Keep writing what you write and reading what you read. Write the truest thing you know.  And celebrate the little victories.

Just Doing Business: Why PayPal’s Ban is Unethical and Bad Business #censorship #paypal #erotica

With the evolution of the whole furor over PayPal’s move to pressure e-Book sellers into culling their virtual shelves of erotica books containing what PayPal considers to be offensive material, I have noticed the same simplistic defense appear over and over again.

Let me quote a commenter on Mercy Pilkington’s blog post on the Good E Reader site:

Rob Hurt 13 hours ago

So companies no longer have a choice with whom or how they want to do business? If there were a book about how to rape a two year old (including graphic pictures), should PayPal be forced to accept payment for that, too? It may not be an issue since a book like that would be illegal, but who is PayPal to censor what writers are allowed to imagine?

If people want to write filth, they are welcome to, but what kind of stupid logic says we should force another company to put aside their moral objections and be a part of this?  This is so twisted!

I see a lot of these. First, the commenter presents the most hyperbolic case of an imaginary book containing one of the banned subjects. Then he goes on to argue that PayPal has a right to decide what business it doesn’t want to do.

There is a fundamental logic flaw in this argument. PayPal is not a bookseller. They are a microtransaction processor. In essence, they are exactly a bank or a credit card company who facilitates a transfer of funds from the consumer (the book buyer) to the retailer (Smashwords, AllRomance, etc).

In order to understand the subtle but concrete difference, let me offer you a metaphor:

You’ve been shopping in a bookstore. You walk up to the counter with the books you want to purchase. You hand your credit or debit card over to the cashier and she rings up your purchases, and takes your card.

But your transaction is denied. Your card is not accepted.

Why? Because the credit card company or your bank doesn’t like the books you’ve purchased.

If PayPal was in the business of selling books, it would have every right to refuse to stock books it didn’t want to sell. BUT THAT IS NOT THE BUSINESS IT IS IN. It is in the business of monetary transfer. Now, if the item you were purchasing was a lizard on the endangered species list and, therefore, an illegal product, it would have every right to refuse to process the transaction arguing that participating in the sale makes it a party in the illegal transfer of funds (the business it is in) and therefore liable under the law for facilitating a crime .

But these books are NOT illegal. Writing them is legal. Publishing them is legal. Selling them is legal and reading them is legal, too.

So, next time you hear the argument that PayPal has a right to pick and choose what sales it processes, please remember that there is a fundamental flaw in this defense. And for the imaginative among you, consider how much power this puts in the hands of banks and financial institutions if PayPal gets away with this. With more and more purchases being made on the internet, think about just how fundamentally online financial institutions could manipulate the market for their own moral stances, political agendas, or simply to financially benefit product companies owned by the same conglomerate.

If this doesn’t frighten you, it should.

Just Doing Business: Why PayPal's Ban is Unethical and Bad Business #censorship #paypal #erotica

With the evolution of the whole furor over PayPal's move to pressure e-Book sellers into culling their virtual shelves of erotica books containing what PayPal considers to be offensive material, I have noticed the same simplistic defense appear over and over again.

Let me quote a commenter on Mercy Pilkington's blog post on the Good E Reader site:

Rob Hurt 13 hours ago

So companies no longer have a choice with whom or how they want to do business? If there were a book about how to rape a two year old (including graphic pictures), should PayPal be forced to accept payment for that, too? It may not be an issue since a book like that would be illegal, but who is PayPal to censor what writers are allowed to imagine?

If people want to write filth, they are welcome to, but what kind of stupid logic says we should force another company to put aside their moral objections and be a part of this?  This is so twisted!

I see a lot of these. First, the commenter presents the most hyperbolic case of an imaginary book containing one of the banned subjects. Then he goes on to argue that PayPal has a right to decide what business it doesn't want to do.

There is a fundamental logic flaw in this argument. PayPal is not a bookseller. They are a microtransaction processor. In essence, they are exactly a bank or a credit card company who facilitates a transfer of funds from the consumer (the book buyer) to the retailer (Smashwords, AllRomance, etc).

In order to understand the subtle but concrete difference, let me offer you a metaphor:

You've been shopping in a bookstore. You walk up to the counter with the books you want to purchase. You hand your credit or debit card over to the cashier and she rings up your purchases, and takes your card.

But your transaction is denied. Your card is not accepted.

Why? Because the credit card company or your bank doesn't like the books you've purchased.

If PayPal was in the business of selling books, it would have every right to refuse to stock books it didn't want to sell. BUT THAT IS NOT THE BUSINESS IT IS IN. It is in the business of monetary transfer. Now, if the item you were purchasing was a lizard on the endangered species list and, therefore, an illegal product, it would have every right to refuse to process the transaction arguing that participating in the sale makes it a party in the illegal transfer of funds (the business it is in) and therefore liable under the law for facilitating a crime .

But these books are NOT illegal. Writing them is legal. Publishing them is legal. Selling them is legal and reading them is legal, too.

So, next time you hear the argument that PayPal has a right to pick and choose what sales it processes, please remember that there is a fundamental flaw in this defense. And for the imaginative among you, consider how much power this puts in the hands of banks and financial institutions if PayPal gets away with this. With more and more purchases being made on the internet, think about just how fundamentally online financial institutions could manipulate the market for their own moral stances, political agendas, or simply to financially benefit product companies owned by the same conglomerate.

If this doesn't frighten you, it should.

First they came for the erotica writers : PayPal as censor

Let me offer you a scene.

A small bank in any town. Morning. The light slants through the front windows and splashes over the polished granite flooring. A conservatively dressed woman stands at the front of the line, waiting for the next available teller. A place becomes free and she steps up to the counter.

"Hello, I'd like to withdraw $50 dollars from my account." She slides her withdrawal slip across under the glass barrier.

"Good morning Mrs. Smith. $50? What denomination would you like that in?"

"Two twenties and a ten, please."

"What are you going to use this for, Mrs. Smith?"

"Excuse me?"

"It's a new policy, I'm afraid. What are you going to be using this money for?"

"Hmmm. Well... I'm going to buy some books. Okay?"

"What books?"

"None of your business!"

"Oh, but I'm afraid it is our business, Mrs. Smith."

"You've got to be joking."

"I'm afraid not. We wouldn't want you to buy anything that contravened our corporate values."

"You're a god damn bank!"

"Look, do you want the money or not, Mrs. Smith?"

____________

In the last few months, PayPal has slowly but systematically effected a chilling change. It has threatened to stop processing any transactions and freeze the vendor's account if online eBook vendors do not immediately purge their virtual shelves of any fiction books containing incest, rape, bestiality or underage sex.

AllRomance eBooks, Bookstrand, and Smashwords have all been forced to conceed to their demands, because there is no other transactional service out there that can efficiently process their transactions. Some of them have knuckled under with barely a whimper, but Mark Coker, of Smashwords, has done his level best to negotiate a sane relationship.

And your first reaction may very well be: Great! Good riddance to bad rubbish. But please consider what is happening rationally. An online microtransaction provider is deciding what people can and should read.

Fictional representations of criminality are not criminal. These are absolutely legal books. They may not be to your taste, but they are legal.

And consider who the decisionmaker is here. Not the publisher, not the bookstore, not a literary critic, not the government, not the courts. An online bank has exercised its power in the transactional phase of the book buying process to act as censor.

My best selling novel, Gaijin, is one of the books that has been banned. It has representations of non-consensual sex and I leave it up to the reader to decide whether they are arousing or not. I do this quite deliberately, because over 40% of all women have rape fantasies of some kind. I wanted to explore why and what lay beneath this phenomenon. Two psychologist, Critelli and Bivona, published a wide-ranging and groundbreaking study on rape fantasy and found that, for many women, rape in fantasy had other meanings. It reflected historical social reality, but was appropriated and metamorphosed into mechanisms for permission to explore sexual fantasies.

And before you judge me as an author, or judge my book as filth, please read this reader review.

If this carries no weight with you, consider this: if we were to cull the canon of Western Literature using the PayPal banned content guidelines, here is what would disappear:

The Old and New Testaments
Chaucer
Boccaccio
Most Classic Greek homoerotic poetry
Romeo and Juliette
A Clockwork Orange
The Tin Drum
Little Birds
Lolita
Flowers in the Attic
I, Claudius
Equus
Everything by the Marquis de Sade
Story of the Eye
Satyricon
Moll Flanders
Tess of d'Urbervilles

Need I go on?

Readers do not have to buy or read books that offend them. But denying them to right, as adults, to choose what they read, is obscene. And to have a bank do it for them is worse.

First the came for the erotica writers. Are you next?