Big Ed's Place

Last week, I wrote about how PayPal had put the squeeze on Bookstrand to eliminate erotica subjects they didn’t like, despite them being legal. This past week, they did the same to All Romance Ebooks and Smashwords. They gave little notice and refused to negotiate with the site owners, which made it clear that this is a bully tactic.

As I wrote last week, I’m not surprised that this has happened. It was just when and who was going to do it. There’s plenty of angry rhetoric elsewhere on the web about it, which I don’t need to repeat here other than to nod my head in agreement. Yes, this sucks, and yes, it’s censorship, and yes, it should be resisted if it can be.

However, rather than rally about free speech issues and the right to our basic human sexuality (which was the topic of one of my very first blog posts), I want to explain a different reason that PayPal’s move is a bad idea. That reason is simple pragmatism and economics.

In his letter explaining Smashwords’ policy changes due to PayPal’s pressure, Mark Coker wrote (emphasis mine):

*Incest:* Until now, we didn’t have a policy prohibiting incest between consenting
adults, or its non-biological variation commonly known as “Pseudo-incest.” Neither did our retailer partners. We’ve noticed a surge of PI books over the last few months, and many of them have “Daddy” in the title. I wouldn’t be surprised if the surge in “Daddy” titles prompted PayPal to pursue this purge (I don’t know). PI usually explores sexual relations between consenting adult stepchildren
with their step parents, or between step-siblings. Effectively immediately, we no longer allow incest of any variety in erotica.

That surge occurred because it was profitable. I know of several authors who were making thousands of dollars a month because they wrote pseudo-incest stories with Daddy in the title. Many of those stories were crappily written and offered at high prices. But they sold, and they sold well enough to make a lot of money. That, of course, drew other writers into the game and I myself seriously considered it. I, like Mark, wouldn’t be surprised if that was part of why PayPal got into the game, but I bring it up for a different point.

It wouldn’t be so profitable if there wasn’t a huge demand.

Now let’s look for a moment at the topics that PayPal is banning: incest (and pseudo-incest), erotica with characters under 18, bestiality, and rape for titillation. I know the first has a huge demand, and the second certainly seems to. Bestiality has a strong solid niche, if I follow storiesonline codes correctly. I know a lot of women fantasize about rape and probably a lot of men, but I can’t speak to the demand.

But what’s not on the list? Necrophilia, for one. Scat and watersports. A handful of other kinks that could be considered equally objectionable, but just don’t have the popularity (and I’ll have to explore the popularity of those big kinks in a future post, but my post on taboo erotica is a good place to start).

It leads me to conclude that PayPal is going after these subjects in part because they’re popular, which will, I think hurt them, and the rest of us as a society, in the long run.

This is because the economics pretty much ensure those topics aren’t going away. Many moralists have this mistaken belief that if they restrict the supply of something, it’ll go away. Given how well this worked with Prohibition and the War on Drugs, and the on-going saga of prostitution in most of America, you’d think the moralists would have figured out that trying to restrict the supply doesn’t work. Unfortunately, that doesn’t appear to be the case.

In fact, I happen to believe that most moralists are incapable of seeing that their restrictions and bans don’t work. Their views are idealistic rather than pragmatic. In their ideal world, people follow the rules and the law. If it’s out of sight, it’s not happening. It’s a nice world to live in, but it’s not this one.

As long as there is strong demand, all that bans do is drive the price and the risk up. Those risks are not always borne by the consumer either. How much of the cost of cocaine these days is what the users pay to the dealers and how much is what the rest of us pay for the ineffective DEA efforts?

The kicker is, economics also provides the pragmatic answer to getting rid of things we find distasteful. It’s called lowering the demand. Remember how necrophilia erotica isn’t viewed as a problem? Or better, consider tobacco. I don’t recall seeing any tobacco smugglers around these parts, and the supply at least in my neck of the woods is drying up. It seems there just aren’t as many customers as there used to be…

So… how do we, as a culture/society, reduce the demand for this type of erotica? If the attraction is that it’s taboo, making it more taboo by banning it would seem to defeat the point. One could go for humiliation or punishment for the consumers, but child porn shows this isn’t a successful strategy either (and my solution for child porn is here).

I don’t have a good answer, other than to grow up as a society. That’s going to require it’s own post some day.

I do know that PayPal is guaranteeing itself some lost revenue. Amazon will certainly pick up the slack, and any adult financial processors worth their salt will find a way to get into the game. There might be some long term gain that we don’t know about (fex: a quid pro quo that they’ll help presidential candidate Santorum go after ‘filth on the internet’ in exchange for regulatory breaks should he win), but otherwise they don’t seem to come out ahead financially.

Which leads me to my last point: there’s no guarantee this will last. Greed all too often wins out over morality, even within a corporation. Maybe the next eBay/PayPal board of directors won’t care, and will quietly look the other way. Maybe people will find a way to run under the radar. I certainly am (the donate button on my Tip Jar page could be yanked at any time if PayPal actually noticed what I write here). Or maybe they’ll reverse themselves.

That happened locally. Several years ago, the weekly free independent newspaper made a big hullabaloo about how they weren’t going to accept ads from escorts, massage parlors, and other semi-obvious fronts for prostitution. They were lauded for their moral stance, particularly because they admitted that they charged those advertisers much more than other businesses. Well, all those ads are back. There was never an open admission of the change in policy either. I’m guessing they just needed the revenue too much to put morality ahead of pragmatism.

Maybe PayPal will do the same. If not, well, I wish them the enjoyment of the lost profits their stance will bring.

The online world I belong to as an erotica author is exploding due to PayPal’s continued pressure on ebook publishers and distributors. They managed to get Smashwords to cave on Friday and begin yanking books with content that PayPal finds objectionable.

My last blog post was about this, as will be my next one. There’s also plenty out there in other places and, frankly, just keeping up has been challenging this weekend. I’d like to blame my slow writing on that, but I really can’t. It’s a necessary distraction and there are plenty of other ways my writing has continued to trudge along.

I did write 543 words on Blown, bringing it to 2964 words. I’m close enough to know it will finish between 4000 and 5000 words. So, two weeks, probably. I’d like to pick up the pace a bit, but that looks like what it will be for a while. However, I figured I could offer a small tease of what’s to come:

FYI
–Takes place in March 1983. Will be released after Nick gets done reviewing/editing. Teaser: Gina’s home for Spring Break. The illustration is up on the Summer Camp stories page too.
Blown
–Takes place January 1982, during a major Atlanta blizzard. Teaser: think about the title a minute.
Need to Know
–Takes place April 1983. Teaser: Involves a trip to Florida. Note that this story and all subsequent ones cannot be released prior to Nick releasing Ch20.
Burst
–Takes place May 1983. Teaser: Involves Erin’s car breaking down and her shirt getting dirty.
CNN
–Takes place early June 1983. Teaser: CNN stands for “Coulter News Network.”
Baptized
–Takes place late June 1983. Teaser: Takes place at Camp, involving a very large party.

If you recall the previous titles (Bent, TMI, Broken) you might spot a pattern as well.

Recently, PayPal informed Bookstrand.com that they had to remove books with certain sexually explicit topics or PayPal would cut off payments. As a private company PayPal can certainly choose who they do business with, but it’s also pretty clearly censorship at work. PayPal’s list of forbidden topics are not just those that would be illegal if engaged in, but those which are quite legal but generally taboo. The full details can be found here.

This is of course not the first pass at censorship of ebooks. Amazon insisted that actual incest titles be removed but maintained the fig-leaf that pseudo-incest was okay (my post on it here). And if we look past ebooks, censorship efforts against erotic and sexual material have been going on for centuries. It’s still going on in a majority of the world. Open, explicit conversations about sex and sexuality are the exception in human history and not the rule.

Those of us who do talk and write about sex are living at the edge.

I think sometimes we forget that. It’s easy, because people who talk openly about sex tend to talk with other people who talk openly about sex. It’s rather hard to have a meaningful one-sided conversation and people who don’t want to talk about sex have a habit of avoiding those of us who do. It’s not quite an echo chamber, but it is a self-selected society that is not representative of the world as a whole.

It’s also easy because, for many of us, the sexual revolution has been a mainstay of our entire lives. The median age of the U.S. population is 36.8 years. Nancy Friday’s groundbreaking book My Secret Garden, in which women uncomfortably admitted to having sexual fantasies, is 39 years old. Today, with hundreds of thousands if not millions of blog posts on the internet where women discuss their sexual fantasies, it’s hard to realize that the sexual revolution is that young. Merely 40 or 50 years. It’s older than most of us, though not so old that we’re beyond the counterrevolution.

But the fact is, as much as we want to decry PayPal’s censorship, what they’re doing is normal. We’re the radicals for daring to publish this stuff that’s out on the edge.

Furthermore, in many cases, we deliberately push the edge. We go into taboo subjects and we put racy covers on our ebooks. We’ve learned that pushing the edge even further is profitable. This, of course, has always been true. It was most amusingly proven with Naked Came the Stranger, where a deliberately poorly written book became a best seller because of its explicit sex. It’s also proven anytime one peruses storiesonline or literotica–the most popular stories are not the best written by literary standards, but simply the ones with certain codes. Want readers or buyers? Push the edge, hard.

Now at some point, I’ll post more on how I find that to be both sad and understandable. For the purposes of this post, I’ll simply point out that there are serious benefits to living at the edge, from profits to having more fun. The bridge night doesn’t quite stack up to the orgy in the ‘fun’ category, after all. The edge is also, in my opinion, more alive. We confront deeper truths about ourselves and have greater growth and greater experiences of life when we live at the edge. It doesn’t have to be sexual. Not only is the unexamined life not worth living, it’s pretty damn pathetic. Eleanor Rigby played by the rules and stayed away from the boundaries. Not John, Paul, George, and Ringo.

And with those benefits, comes the risks. The center can easily lash out at the edge and damage it but good. PayPal’s demonstrating that right now, as it cuts off income for many writers and possibly an entire ebookstore because they don’t like what the edge is doing. And because they can.

So does this mean we shouldn’t live at the edge? Hell, no. Does this mean we should be quieter? I’m not sure that’s a great idea either. As much as the near-naked drag queens in gay pride parades drew vilification by mainstream culture, I believe they were just as much responsible for moving the debate toward gay rights as the normal looking barely out of the closet guy next door gays. I fully expect “Daddy’s Slut” with the naked butt on the cover to get slapped down and banned, though possibly not before the author makes some serious cash. But maybe in the process, it’ll make it easier for Tentacle Dreams to exist in the world.

We live at the edge. We’re going to take our lumps for doing so. But we, and the world, are still better off for us living where we do.

One of the constant challenges for me these days is learning curves. I don’t have the time to just learn for the sake of learning like I did back in my single-and-bored days. I need something solved and I need it solved now, so I can do other things (like write). Of course, even the writing requires learning curves–html, WordPress, Photoshoppe, epub formatting, and so on. As much as I’d like to farm them out, there are some things that don’t make sense to be farmed out.

This was one of those weeks. My home network went down. In the past, I’ve paid computer consultants way too much money to set it up and maintain it. So this time I’ve been fighting the learning curve to do it myself. I’ve made progress and I can now get to the internet, though there are still some issues left to fix. Needless to say, it’s been a non-writing distraction.

I did manage to write during my lunch hours, though. I completed 870 words on Blown, bringing it to 2,421. I’m also revamping some stories further down the road in the Chris Coulter series and also trying to edit some of my science fiction. It’s all good, but there just aren’t enough hours in the day to learn everything I need to learn.

Recently, I had a private conversation with someone about sex workers. He wondered if they had self-esteem issues, as commonly portrayed in the culture, or by being strippers etc. they’d become pretty hardened. Not knowing of any studies, I decided to see what I knew personally.

Of the three women I knew who did or had done phone sex, all were in it for the money first. One explicitly said that she did phone sex because the hourly wage was higher than anything else she was qualified for. That one had serious self-esteem issues. Neither of the other two did (though they did have “can’t manage money wisely” issues).

Of the two strippers I got to know socially and not in a strip club, one clearly had self-esteem issues. The other was putting herself through college. I didn’t get to know her well enough to know about the self-esteem issues. The women I met in clubs often had self-esteem issues poorly disguised.

The three women I know who did erotic massage got into it due to a mix of curiosity, money needs, and feeling empowered by the role. I’m not sure how to separate out the esteem issues from the money needs, but none of them did it for more than a year or two, so I’m guessing self-esteem had to be part of it, because that’s curable.

I’ve socially known a half dozen former prostitutes, but that sampling is skewed. Women who drift from prostitution into tantra or bdsm (which are the two communities where I met most of these former sex workers) are generally highly sexual and don’t have obvious low self-esteem, but also clearly get a kick out of the adoration they receive. I suspect prostitutes and former prostitutes with low self-esteem wouldn’t migrate over into the tantra or bdsm communities.

Oh, and the one pro Domme I got to know–not a self-esteem issue in her body. She just realized how much she truly enjoyed dominating men (and women), got good at it socially, and then discovered she could make 3x her day job doing it, with fewer hours per week. Bye bye day job. She was… impressive. She was the epitome of quiet forcefulness. I watched her play a couple of times and she never raised her voice and never frowned, but carried a presence that made subs in the vicinity go weak at the knees.

Which leads me to believe there’s a wide range and conclusions probably can’t be drawn. Of course, that’s why I write the Compassionate Courtesan Universe–because conclusions can’t be drawn for sex workers as a group. They’re just as varied of individuals as the general public.

I didn’t get a lot of writing done this past week. I added 706 words to Blown, bringing it to 1,551. However, I do feel good about the week. I got a fair amount of clean up done. Much of that was/is behind the scenes maintenance here and elsewhere. I also added a review here and a flash story that had been completed some time ago. More work is, well, in the work.

There’s something soothing about cleaning the little stuff up. It’s like lifting small stones off your back. They’re not a heavy burden, but it still feels good when they’re gone. I’m hoping that the psychic lift will help in the coming weeks. I do want to get back to more words per week, but it’s still slow going for energy reasons. It’s hard to write when, I’m exhausted, frankly. So we’ll see.

This bit of silliness came to me due to the puns on “pie” and “bush.” I hope you enjoyed it.

Midnight in Paris is Woody Allen’s recent homage to Paris, writing, and the sense of “a golden age.” Following his recent films, Woody himself doesn’t appear in the film and just keeps his roles behind the camera (this is a good thing). Instead, we get to follow Owen Wilson as Gil, a Hollywood screenwriter and aspiring novelist in Paris for a vacation with his fiance’s family.

The set up is that Gil dreams of living in Paris as a writer and believes the Twenties, when many great writers and artists did concentrate in Paris, constitutes a “golden age.” Then one midnight, he gets the chance to get into a car and go back to the 1920′s. There, he meets and interacts with many greats–F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Cole Porter, Pablo Picasso, and a dozen more. In many ways, the fun of the movie was trying to recognize what famous writer or author he was interacting with. Then the next morning he was back in the modern day, dealing with his in-laws and a family friend who didn’t get him.

I found the film sweet. Owen Wilson maintained an understated charm that frankly, Woody would have messed up if he’d been playing the character. He came across as intelligent, nostalgic, urbane, and bright. At the same time, his laid back demeanor fit in well as someone who got swept into parties as an unexpected guest, and also someone who clashed with his Republican father-in-law and a pedantic family friend. There’s also a simple romance that focuses on the attractions and some good comedic scenes as Gil tries to cover up what he’s doing in the nights.

I also liked two thematic elements. The obvious one about there being no real golden age led to me nodding my head. While Gil certainly thinks the 20′s were better, I’ve been around a fair number of people who believe the 50′s or 60′s were better (I leave it to the reader to ascribe a political affiliation to the decadal nostalgia). The more subtle one about the artistic process and interactions also tugged at me. I absolutely loved Gil’s interactions with Hemingway, who just couldn’t see why Gil wasn’t more passionate and manly. It certainly inspired me to read more Hemingway, just to remind myself how that comes across in his work.

The one flaw in the story was it was just too difficult to believe that Gil would have ever been engaged to his fiance’. They do nothing but clash and there’s no chemistry. She clearly doesn’t get him, and there’s no backstory as to how/why they would have gotten together. That, in many ways, reduces her to a prop. It would’ve been simple to throw in a paragraph or two of dialogue that said, in effect, “you’ve changed since we met. I used to love….” That would’ve let us see some tenderness between the two who are now clearly mismatched.

I recommend it, on a three out of fours stars scale. Besides all the usual outlets, it can be found at Barnes & Noble.

Once upon a time, I used to enjoy travel. Those days are long since over. In particular, I’ve grown to hate airline flights. I’m 6’3″ and that means any airplane flight is several hours of sitting with my knees in my chest and my elbows trapped against my side. I exaggerate, but not that much. Additionally, I get panic attacks in heavy turbulence. Let’s just say planes are not fun.

The one thing that airplanes do offer is a forced ‘break’ from the outside world. There’s no distracting internet, no email from my day job, and, if I’m traveling for business, no 4 year old insisting I come play with him right this minute. Furthermore, I’m generally proscribed from doing work for my day job on the airplane, even if that’s the reason I’m on the flight. The company doesn’t appreciate me working where people can look over my shoulders and learn about our inner dealings.

So mostly I read. Sometimes, when there’s no one in the middle seat next to me, I fire up the laptop and try to write. If there is someone right next to me, I generally don’t because it’s too cramped and because I’m not crazy about people reading my screen. I do, generally, write erotica after all.

So this past week I had a business trip, with the usual team dinners in the evening (i.e., not much time to write in the hotel). The flight out was jammed, with a nice older man jostling my elbow for the arm rest. But on the flight back… I had some space. Unfortunately, one of my coworkers was across the aisle from me. So, while he probably couldn’t read what I was writing, I knew that prudence dictated skipping the smutty parts.

As a result, I mostly edited a previously completed science fiction story, edited a story for another author, and then turned to Blown, since Center Stage is right in the middle of a naughty bit. I managed 113 words, bringing it to 845, and then… nothing. I hit a wall where I just didn’t know how to write the next scene.

It was frustrating, because I didn’t want to start another queue jumper or a brand new story with Blown and Center Stage both at the top of the queue. I’ll probably tackle the next Devil story after they’re done, but I haven’t worked out some key details in my head. Sitting on the airplane, I didn’t work them out either. No words flowed.

So I gave up. It was the wrong environment and so I muddled through with my book (not a great one, but c’est la vie) until the plane finally landed and life overwhelmed me once again.

I’d thought about doing a “what’s the story?” for the picture below, but realized it was really too obvious. Either the picture’s staged, or the couple just really really really had to get busy right then and right there, which may have been the result of alcohol or other inhibition lowering drugs.

I’m guessing it’s staged because it’s too much in the open, in too bright of a day, with way too much skin showing. I’ve had a lot of sex in public places and those are pretty much no-no’s.

Because, at least for me, the thrill is the risk of being in a public setting and the adrenaline rush that accompanies the possibility of getting caught–but I don’t want to actually get caught. It creates too much opportunity for huge complications, from arrest to getting photographed and the photos boosted to the web (a serious problem when every cell phone has a camera) to simply have the person catching you be an asshole and ruin the mood. Only in fantasies do observers watch quietly or join in.

So the number one trick to sex in public places is to arrange it so that you’re likely to see anyone coming before they see you. Since it’s difficult to look around 360 degrees constantly (not to mention up, if you’re in a city), this usually means picking a place with some sort of “back wall” that prevents people from approaching in one or more directions. It also usually means fooling around at night, when shadows work to your advantage and people can’t see as far.

That’s not to say that sex outdoors in the warm sun can’t be fun, but I will always remember the time we were fooling around in a mountain meadow and had just finished up when a hiker appeared. If he saw us, he never let on, but my heart didn’t stop pounding until we were well on our way home.

The number two trick is, like many things, plausible deniability. E.g., “I swear, your honor, she was just sitting on my lap. The accuser couldn’t have seen anything because of the way her long loose skirt covered us both.” The key is usually noise and rhythmic motion. If both of those are limited and subtle, it truly can be hard to tell what people are doing.

Now I say this as someone who’s had a lot of sex in public places and to the best of my knowledge never gotten caught. Just about every public flashing or public fooling around scene in my stories is based on a true past experience (and if you want to know if a specific scene is, ask in the comments). The hiker in the field is as close as it’s been and I plead youth and excess hormones.

Now that isn’t to say that some of my “never did it’s” won’t show up in future stories. I’ve had a number of ideas that never came to fruition due to a lack of adventurous partner at the time it seemed possible. For example, I wondered if one could get away with sex on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. I heard a claim that it had been done in the 70′s but Google is failing me on finding more details. In the post 9/11 world, I wouldn’t try, but I could easily see writing a story set in an earlier time period where the protagonists pulled it off. I also had a photography session in the University library scheduled with a woman who chickened out before we did it. If you ever read a story involving a trench coat, stockings, and nothing else between the stacks, you’ll know where it came from. I also have plenty of ‘true’ experiences that haven’t made it into stories yet, but may sometime when the right characters call.

Which means that, in the end, I can “get away with it” the best in fiction. I enjoy it, and I intend to continue to enjoy whatever flights of fancy cross my mind in future stories. Just no amused cops in the middle of the day.