PayPal has interpreted its market leadership as a mandate to enforce particular standards of morality among e-book vendors who rely on its payment processing platform. Well, thank goodness we have a third-party payment processor to tell us what we should and shouldn't be reading.
According to e-book publisher and vendor Smashwords, PayPal has required that all erotica containing references to rape, incest, or bestiality be removed from the site, or PayPal will cease doing business with Smashwords altogether. The Smashwords press release can be read here, and a related Tech Crunch article is here.
Someone else is going to have to chime in with respect to the prevalence of rape, incest, and bestiality in erotica, but the discussion of the impact of such erotica on the social, psycho-sexual, and spiritual health of the nation is a discussion for another day. And it is a discussion that we should be having; it is NOT a topic which should be resolved one way or another by the actions of a payment processing company.
I'd like to direct your attention to the photo above. It's a still from HBO's popular new series Game of Thrones, based on the A Song of Ice and Fire series of epic fantasy novels by George R. R. Martin. The characters are Jamie Lannister and his sister Cersei, who happens to be Queen. These characters are not infrequently locked in each others arms; their incest, and the product of their incest, is a major part of the storyline.
How long until PayPal refuses to fulfill orders for DVDs of Game of Thrones, Season One? I suggest we don't wait to find out, but stop doing business with PayPal altogether. Vendors can decide what to sell, and customers can decide what to buy, but the payment processor should have no say in the transaction.
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