Why Fiction Should Have No Limits
There's a line people like to draw. On one side, the stories that are acceptable — the ones that win prizes, get shelved in libraries, and show up in book club recommendations. On the other side, everything else. The stories that make people uncomfortable. The ones that explore violence, depravity, obsession, and yes, sex — the kind of sex that polite society pretends doesn't exist in the human imagination.
That line is getting thicker every year. And it's being drawn by people who have no business holding the pen.
PEN America has documented nearly 23,000 book bans in U.S. public schools since 2021. In the 2024-2025 school year alone, nearly 7,000 instances of book bans were recorded across 23 states. Utah has a state-sanctioned list of banned titles that grows longer each month. Florida has led the country in book removals for three consecutive years. Titles being pulled from shelves include Judy Blume's Forever, written in 1975. The Perks of Being a Wallflower. A Clockwork Orange, published in 1962. Books that have been read by millions, studied in universities, adapted into films — suddenly too dangerous for a teenager to encounter.
And that's just the institutional side. The corporate side is worse.
Amazon has been waging a quiet war on erotica authors for over a decade. Authors on KDP — Amazon's self-publishing platform — report having entire backlogs deleted overnight. One author lost 106 titles in a single purge. The stated reason is usually a vague reference to "content guidelines," with no specifics about which passages or themes triggered the removal. Authors who attempt to re-upload corrected versions risk having their entire accounts terminated. The guidelines themselves are deliberately unclear — Amazon won't define where the line is, which means authors are left guessing until they get banned.
Barnes & Noble followed suit, introducing an "erotica content" designation that effectively hides books from their public website. No clear definition of what qualifies. No appeal process worth mentioning. Just a quiet burial.
The pattern is the same everywhere. Wattpad suppresses explicit content from search results. Facebook and Instagram won't allow ads for anything categorized as erotica. Even platforms that were built to be open — like Kobo — have caved to tabloid pressure, pulling thousands of self-published titles at once after a single newspaper ran a sensational headline.
Here's what nobody wants to say out loud: fiction is not a crime. Writing about violence is not violence. Writing about taboo desire is not an endorsement of that desire. Every horror novel, every crime thriller, every war epic exists because authors are free to explore the darkest corners of human experience without being treated like criminals. We don't arrest Stephen King for writing about child murder. We don't ban Cormac McCarthy for describing brutal violence in prose so vivid it makes your stomach turn. But the moment sex enters the equation — especially sex that doesn't fit neatly into the "tasteful romance" category — suddenly fiction becomes dangerous. Suddenly the author is suspect. Suddenly the reader needs to be protected from their own imagination.
This is not a new phenomenon. The Marquis de Sade was imprisoned for his writing. James Joyce's Ulysses was banned in the United States for over a decade. Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer was published in Paris because no American or British publisher would touch it. D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover was the subject of an obscenity trial. In every case, history vindicated the work. In every case, the people who wanted it suppressed are remembered as the villains of the story, not the heroes.
The censors always lose. But they cause a lot of damage on the way down.
The real cost isn't to literature as an abstract concept. It's to the authors whose livelihoods depend on platforms that can delete their work without warning. It's to the readers who can't find the stories they're looking for because an algorithm decided those stories shouldn't be visible. It's to the culture at large, which becomes a little more sanitized, a little more afraid, a little more dishonest about what humans actually think and feel and want.
Erotica is the canary in the coal mine. When platforms start censoring sexual content, they don't stop there. The same tools and policies that suppress erotica get applied to LGBTQ+ narratives, to stories about race and identity, to anything that makes someone in a position of power uncomfortable. The ALA's research shows that 72% of book challenges originate from coordinated pressure groups, not organic community concern. This isn't parents protecting their children. It's organized campaigns to control what stories are allowed to exist.
We built SmutLib because we believe fiction should have no limits. Not "fiction should have no limits as long as it's literary enough." Not "fiction should have no limits unless it makes someone uncomfortable." No limits. Period. If it's legal to write, it's legal to read, and it deserves a platform that won't flinch.
That doesn't mean we think every story is good. It doesn't mean we endorse every theme or scenario that appears on this platform. It means we trust readers to make their own choices. It means we trust authors to explore whatever territory their imagination demands. And it means we refuse to be another platform that talks about creative freedom while quietly building a longer and longer list of things you're not allowed to write about.
The internet was supposed to be the great democratizer of publishing. Anyone could write, anyone could read, no gatekeepers required. Somewhere along the way, the gatekeepers came back. They just wear different clothes now — they're algorithms and content policies and "community guidelines" instead of obscenity boards and church committees. But the result is the same: someone else deciding what stories you're allowed to tell.
We think that's wrong. And we think you probably do too, or you wouldn't be here.
Write what you want. Read what you want. That's the whole philosophy. Everything else is just implementation.