Self Certifying Erotica Makes Me Nervous as Hell
In the last week or so, most of the major retailers and e-book distributors have begun to ask authors to self-identify certain themes in their erotic books. And if you don’t do it correctly, you might have your books removed and your account closed.
You can probably guess what those themes are, but I’ll cut and paste them from Smashwords anyway for clarity’s sake:
- Age Play
- Bestiality
- Dubious Consent
- Incest (or pseudo incest)
- Nonconsensual sexual slavery
- Rape for titillation
So there you have it. The big taboo subjects some retailers will take and some will not. Hint: most will not.
They left out the taboo subjects that no retailers will take as a matter of course, although Smashwords was kind enough to list a few of them: underage erotica, snuff, scat, necrophilia, etc.
My initial thoughts have to do with the starting premise that retailers seem to hold onto. They are assuming that any book categorized as erotica is meant to titillate. It’s a blanket, black and white assumption which doesn’t allow for a whole lot of nuance. But it means that if any of these “taboo themes” occur in the book–no matter the context–they must also be designed to titillate. And being titillated by immoral and unhealthy things is just something they can’t allow.
Unless of course, it comes to violence, which is where I find myself the most self-righteously angry. Because I assume that any book categorized as a thriller or a suspense novel is also designed to titillate, just in a way we’re more comfortable with. But retailers don’t see it that way. Those books must have some moral code that’s showing the horrors of the crimes committed in their pages even if they are described in highly detailed ways using graphic language. So it’s perfectly fine in a thriller to brutally describe the rape of a twelve-year-old as long as we know it’s villainous.
But let’s be honest. People like reading about murder and brutality because it’s exciting. It’s thrilling you might say. Those books get the heartbeat up, they spike adrenaline and really get people going.
Just don’t say they titillate.
But we all know that in the US we‘ve always had a strong preference for violence over sex. It’s built into our religious traditions, our philosophical values, and our national sense of self.
Violence is good. Sex is bad.
And we’ve created ways to catalog violence in literature with great detail. Detail we have refused to allow in literature about sex. So while under thrillers you might find a dozen or more subcategories under which books can be put, with smut there are seven: General Erotic Fiction, BDSM, Erotica Collections & Anthologies, Gay, Lesbian, Sci-fi/Fantasy/Horror, and Traditional Victorian.
Limiting to say the least, especially considering the taboos they’re asking us to self-certify either are, or are not, in our books.
I firmly believe that in an ideal world, readers would be able to get a good sense of the subject matter of a book, and then make an informed decision to read it or not. That’s a far better system than retailers or publishers deciding what’s appropriate and what is not. But while this new categorization scheme is allegedly designed to provide exactly that sort of information, I’m highly skeptical of how they will use it.
Actually I’m not skeptical. They will use it to decide not to carry books whose themes they don’t like. They already do and I’m sure they will continue to do so.
So the call to sign into your account and “self-certify” your books so they can be “better categorized” feels a bit like telling drug users to come down to the police station for clean needles. Trust us, it will be fine. Please tell us about the things you’re doing so we don’t have to go through the trouble ourselves. “Self-certify” feels more like a forced confession in this context and it’s frustrating to say the least.
The reality is that the things which “titillate” us are rarely safe. Yes, many readers enjoy fun fantasies of love and romance (although even those are often tinged with dangerous amounts of coercion and intricate layers of submission and the relinquishing of the self) but more often than not, our fantasies and desires are by definition mixed in with taboo subjects.
All of which we’re not allowed to write about because while we assume that someone can read about Hannibal Lector and still decide not to murder and eat people, we are more doubtful that someone can read about fucking a goat and not run out and do it that afternoon.
Poor goat.
I don’t know how this will continue to evolve, but it worries me. Anytime someone tells you to confess to a thing which they have already stated as “bad” for the sake of the greater good, you know you’re in trouble. Yes, it’s complicated, and in an ideal world, the more categories of smut we had the easier it would be to find and read the things that turn us on. But I don’t have much faith that it will turn out that way.
I’ve personally taken a somewhat liberal view when it comes to categorizing my own books. I don’t have a choice in the matter. If I want to publish them via online retailers today, I have to “self-certify” each book, but that doesn’t mean I can’t allow for nuance. Does the girl die at the end of The Ortolan Hunters and how consensual is Susanna’s last encounter in Boardwalk Affairs? Since I know what happens if I answer one way, I’ll stick with the interpretation that lets me keep writing.
But if we lose the ability to write and share complex, intricate, ambiguous, and even straight up fucked-up things (which we are losing rapidly), then we’re left with something more akin to propaganda than we are literature.
I’ll keep paying attention as this plays out, and I’ll trying to find ways to write, publish, and sell books directly to readers without the intervention of a morality police which has already stated loudly and repeatedly that sex makes them deeply uncomfortable (a problem they joyfully lack when it comes to violence).
But I’m worried.
It’s nice to live in a country that allows for the freedom of the press, but capitalism works in a way that can mitigate even our most cherished rights simply by way of creating for-profit gate keepers. We have the freedom to write and say what we like. But the size of the megaphone we get to use is strongly connected with how deep our pockets are.
Freedom of the press is meaningless if your printers, your publishers, your distributors, your retailers, your credit card companies, your online payment gateways, and your government all get a say in what they think should be allowed out into the world.
And that’s not only dangerous, but incredibly, pathetically, and miserably boring.
