An Open Letter to PayPal

Dear PayPal,

I am a longtime user of your service. In fact, I've been a PayPal user for over a decade. You've grown into quite a business! For that matter, you pretty much have the market cornered when it comes to the service you provide. So if you, PayPal, decide to dictate what a business does, dangling the continued use of your services over their heads unless they do your bidding, you pretty much have that business's balls in a vise.

In addition to being a PayPal user, I am also a writer and consumer of erotic fiction, something you've been cracking down on recently.
Now, you are a business. No business should be required to buy or sell products/services that they find objectionable. That said, you're not in the business of selling erotic fiction. You are in the business of processing financial transactions between people who sell products/services and those who consume them. So long as those products and services are legal, it's really none of your damned business what I'm buying, why I'm buying it, or if it might offend someone who is not directly involved in the transaction.

According to your website:

PayPal acts like a digital wallet where you can securely store all your payment options, such as your bank account and credit card. When you want to make a payment, you don't have to pull out your credit card or type your billing info every time.

Nowhere on your site could I find any reason to believe you should have any say over what I buy. You are a financial go-between, not the morality police.

And yet, here you are, attempting to dictate what businesses can and cannot sell, what consumers can and cannot buy, using what can only be described as a monopoly to force businesses to comply or else lose the ability to use PayPal.

"Well," I can hear you saying, "they don't have to use PayPal."

Yes. Yes, they do. Because consumers want to use PayPal, and being able to use PayPal to buy from a company can mean the difference between a customer purchasing a product or choosing not to. In this day and age, being unable to offer PayPal can be a serious detriment to a business's bottom line.

PayPal, as a longtime user of your services, I am not interested in your moral views, your decisions about what is and is not objectionable or obscene content. All I want from you is the ability to securely use my credit card online to purchase products and services without having to enter my credit card information over and over. That is the service you agreed to provide, and it is the only service I want from you.

Now, do I want to read books containing bestiality, barely-legal individuals, incest/pseudo-incest, or rape for titillation? Good heavens, no. But I don't need my bank telling me that. I can choose -- or not choose -- a book without someone looking over my shoulder to tell me it contains content they find obscene. That, and where does it stop? What's next? Consensual BDSM? LGBT erotica? Fiction containing sex in public, adultery, menage/group sex? All of those things have been considered "obscene" by different people throughout recent history, so where do you, PayPal, draw the line?

Further, where is your anti-graphic violence task force? If you're going to censor sex as "obscene," then what about material containing bloody violence? Or will there come a time when PayPal decides I can't purchase a book containing rough sex, but I'm more than welcome to pick up a box set of Saw or whatever other torture porn is available these days?

In order to purchase erotic fiction, I must be 18. Or 21, depending on the site. That makes me a legal adult, and thus of an age that I am legally assumed to be mature enough to take responsibility for what I choose to consume. I don't need Bank of America to cause my debit card to decline when someone within the bank decides I'm buying an objectionable product, and I don't need PayPal to keep me from purchasing something its powers that be find obscene or offensive. All I need Bank of America to do is process the transaction. All I need you to do is process the transaction.

You are neither the angel nor the devil on my shoulder. You are not my babysitter. You are not the moral police or the thought police.

You are my digital wallet. Stay out of the rest of my business.

Sincerely,

L. Witt
Longtime PayPal User
Consumer & Author of Erotic Fiction