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Monday, April 13, 2009

The Glitch

Queerty isn't buying what Amazon's selling:
It's all a "glitch", says Amazon. After a weekend of being bombarded by emails organized by Twitter (we told you it was an important gay political tool!) under the hashtag #amazonfail, the world's largest online retailer of books is apologizing for de-ranking dozens of gay books by classifying them as "adult literature"…

[S]ome of the books de-ranked over the weekend, including Paul Monnette's 1992 National Book Award winner Becoming a Man, have been added back, but many others, including E.M. Forster's Maurice, remain classified as too-hot-to-handle adult material, which means that in Amazon's eyes, Hugh Grant was in a porn when he appeared in the Merchant & Ivory adaptation of the book.

Amazon's silence isn't helping the impression that there's some homophobic censorship going on, either. Do a search for "homosexuality" on Amazon and the first title to show up is A Parent's Guide to Preventing Homosexuality.

[A]t least one author was told that the decision was based on policy, not technical error.

A petition against the policy is rapidly attracting signatures and contains more details.

It's an old story, of course, that "adultness" attaches to innocuous registrations of queer and same-sex life while different standards attach to heterosexual desires and practices. I don't doubt that a glitch exacerbated the already prevailing double-standards in play here, compounded by a little (okay, a lot of) PR tone-deafness.

It's actually quite a good thing to find very public organizing against these idiotic double-standards playing into a corporate bottom line and therefore nudging the standards a smidge in the direction of sense as a result, even if Amazon ultimately isn't behaving like a mustache twirling villain here but is just being a bit inept, as I expect is actually the case.

Of course, the deeper pathology that censors and delegitimizes profane discourse literally everybody hears every day as a matter of course, and that celebrates inter-personal violence while walling off representations of inter-personal pleasures and passions in all their variety, will be an engine yielding these sorts of double-standards and scandals and outrages endlessly pointlessly on and on and on, however this one resolves itself.

2 comments:

jimf said...

> Do a search for "homosexuality" on Amazon and the first title
> to show up is A Parent's Guide to Preventing Homosexuality. . .

Eh. My blood pressure spiked too when I saw this today on
Slashdot, but then I realized:

1. I have **never** paid any attention to Amazon's sales
rankings.

2. I never search books on Amazon with keywords as general
as "homosexuality". I'd start to worry if "Brokeback Mountain"
didn't come up at all when you search for "Annie Proulx",
but that doesn't seem to be the case.

Frak 'em anyway, of course. It's the dark side of the Web
showing -- we have some decentralization, of course, but there's
an awful lot of the reverse -- Google and Wikipedia as the
portals to all knowledge, Amazon as the vendor of all media,
and AT&T (and a handful of other companies) as the vendors
of all bandwidth.

It'll get worse -- count on it.

jimf said...

Amazon seems to be swearing up and down now that this was
just a technical mistake.

E.g., the quotes at
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/index.html

I'm reminded a bit of the shenanigans at the galactic
"Library Institute" in David Brin's "Uplift" SF novels.

The billion-year-old Library Institute is supposed to be
a high-minded and benevolent guardian of galactic culture,
poised serenely above transient political squabbles, but is
nevertheless suspected by some rabble-rousers (such as the Tymbrimi)
of subtly distorting the information available to low-status races
(among them, the inhabitants of Earth) in support of the
power and prestige of the galaxy's elder races.

You can't even trust a Librarian, when he's beholden to the
Soro. ;->