Authors and publishers are under threat again. The current-crack down unfairly targets the erotic fiction maket whilst ignoring crime, horror, literature drama, and non-fiction.

My writing is not intended to promote or condone rape, abuse (beit sexual, physical or mental) of any person, or any illegal act. The things I write about are fictitious scenarios that harm nobody.

Nimue Brown blogged on this topic. Read her whol post here: http://blogspot.loveyoudivineinfo.com/2012/02/its-obscene-paypal-erotica-and-censorship/

So here we are, people, with a crack-down on online obscenity. By obscenity, we mean anything assumed to be for sexual titillation that somebody official finds objectionable. Both the ‘sexual titillation’ aspect and the ‘objectionable’ are totally subjective. You can bet they won’t be cracking down on literature, drama, crime or horror fiction.

Now, no matter how extreme the content, fiction, by definition, is not real. No one really does any of the things in the book. No one bleeds, or dies. So assuming an offence exists, we’d be talking about a victimless crime, and a thought crime at that. If you are offended by the construction of victimless crimes and thought crimes, about freedom of speech, and about who has the right to determine who can find what sexual, you need to start paying attention to what’s happening. This is also a situation in which hypocrisy is fine, and a suggestion of honesty isn’t. If you can pretend that the book is instructional, or memoire, or literature or crime… then you can write all the graphic rape scenes you want. No one is gunning for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, despite the graphic violence and anal rape. But it’s a crime novel, so we all know that no one reading it would get off on that kind of content, don’t we? Right.

There are real people out there being raped, really raped. Those in authority would rather use their time chasing people who write about it.

There are children being abused. Apparently it’s a better use of money to chase book distributors whose content might be a bit dark.

Victims of domestic abuse are beaten every day, but for some people, the things you imagine are in far more urgent need of policing.

While real victims are suffering the consequences of real crimes, it is not just ridiculous to spend time and money chasing authors and publishers, it’s obscene. It’s criminal.