Not signed in (Sign In)
-
Options
Categories
- Main Junction
- London Zoo
- Warren's Pub Table
- FREAKANGELS
- Music
- Printheads
- Art And Moving Pictures
- Internet
- Mad Science
- Fantastika!: SF & The Weird
- Blogs
Welcome, Guest
Vanilla is a product of Lussumo:
Documentation and Support.
This discussion has been inactive for longer than 5 days, and doesn't want to be resurrected.
-
Amazon have made the knuckleheaded move of delisting books with gay content on the grounds that they contain adult material. Even when they don't. And even when you can still buy books on training attack dogs, or Mein Kampf.
This piece by an author who has the temerity to write about lesbians contains the gist, including useful links. Twitter is where you'll get the latest updates. And my latest blog piece works its way round to it all, over at www.youdothatvoodoo.com -
Was just about to make this thread, glad I stalled and decided to search again. Ben Templesmith and Neil Gaimen have been providing plenty of information regarding it. If you're on twitter #amazonfail is the trending topic.
-
- CommentAuthorKosmopolit
- CommentTimeApr 12th 2009
People need to start bombarding Amazon with complaints about the gay.homoerotic content in stuff like Master & Commander and Terminator. -
I am checking this out on my own, and if this is true the results are very spotty - Dorothy Allison's work for instance still seems to be ranked.
I am going to run a few more authors through and see if this passes the smell test. -
-
CommentAuthorwarrenellis
- CommentTimeApr 12th 2009
Stand by.
This does indeed stink, and I've signed the petition etc. However, please bear in mind that it's Easter Sunday, and there's no way in hell any decision-maker at Amazon is going to be anywhere near the office. Give them a day to fix it before you break out the pitchforks and torches.
Obviously, if this piece of code is still working in 24 hours, more serious steps will have to be taken. But let's see what they've got to say on Monday morning Seattle time. -
-
I've sent mine in.
Absolutely sad. Lots of feminist sexuality is now "adult" as well. -
- CommentAuthoricelandbob
- CommentTimeApr 12th 2009
am standing by.
Will check this out tomorrow after a good nights sleep and will be acting accordingly... -
-
CommentAuthorEddie Current
- CommentTimeApr 12th 2009
And depending on how much leeway the higher ups give themselves, Easter Monday may be a wash for immediate change too. If I don't see things happening by Tuesday latest, might be time for an "executive mailbox carpet bomb", in the consumerist.com sense. Lots of letters. Lots of well thought out letters. -
-
Is looking to me on first pass like an error by a junior admin in charge of recataloging stuff.
Dan Savage's books still have rank.
Dorothy Allison's do not.
Amisted Maupan's /Tales of the City/ ranks.
/Coming to Power/ does not, but it is out of print.
This seems way too random and hit-and-miss to be a concerted attempt on the part of Amazon to deny LGBT folks a voice, so I suspect something more incompetent is going on. -
[lots of me going on about stuff before I did my homework, redacted before somebody did it for me]
-
-
CommentAuthorCat Vincent
- CommentTimeApr 12th 2009
They're also delisting books on poly (The Ethical Slut) BDSM (Screw the Roses, Send me the Thorns), the biographies of Harvey Milk and Torchwood's John Barrowman, philosophy works by Foucald... and all the anti=gay parents manuals suddenly shot to the top of book searches on 'homosexuality'.
...but books on Crowley's Enochian sex magic still ranked, as are Lost Girls and The Invisibles.
A few of us are trying to find a pattern to the delisting, other than just pro-queer (as non-explicit, but hated by xtian, titles such as Heather Has 2 Mommies is now unranked, for example, it can't be the 'explicit adult content' they say they are protecting their poor frail punters from. News if it surfaces. -
-
Some examples for those who are skeptical - search on the following:
/The Celluloid Closet/ - a totally innocuous film guide to gay cinema - not ranked
vs
/Reel to Reel/ - race and movies, by bell hooks - ranked
-----
Fucked!
/The Gay and Lesbian Theatrical Legacy/ - not ranked
vs
/How I Paid for College: A Novel of Sex, Theft, Friendship & Musical Theater/ - not ranked
----
Equally fucked!
/Woof!: A Gay Man's Guide to Dogs/ - tiresomely totally innocent book on gay men and pet dogs - not ranked
vs
/Pornstar Pets/ (DVD) - nasty adult DVD about straight sex - ranked
----
Fucked!
OK - this is fucked. I retract any comments I made above about it seeming innocuous. This is deliberately targeted at any work with 'gay' in it.
That being said, I'm waiting 'til Monday and after to hear how this gets fixed, in the interests of not seeing the thread immediately nuked by a million angry posts. There does seem to be something stinky going on here, though. -
This seems to have started on Friday, and to have picked up speed since then. And some of the books that were delisted are now ranked again (Virtually Normal by Andrew Sullivan, for example). I smell a group of interns left over the weekend to do a scrub of naughty books, who are now scrambling to fix their mess before their bosses get back to the office.
Heather Has 2 Mommies was delisted? I'm Christian, and the only thing I hate about that book is the stench of goodly-heartedness. -
I clicked on Amazon's callback customer service number. I registered my complaint regarding the ranking of gay and lesbian books being lumped in with "adult sexuality", and was advised that the following number would be open on Monday, 7 a.m PST:
800 372 8066
Calling this number yields the "Amazon.com Associate Team", so I suspect it is not particularly a hotline to the top.
I was polite, identified myself as an Amazon Prime customer and stated that I wished to register a complaint as to the recent ranking change regarding gay and lesbian titles. I suggest all others do the same. Yelling, stomping and gnashing of teeth should be left for the Fred Phelps crowd. -
This started back in February, according to this piece.
www.youdothatvoodoo.com -- so, Twitter is some good, huh? -
- CommentAuthorKosmopolit
- CommentTimeApr 12th 2009
I did a search on "queer" lots of listings, no "adult only" advisory but everything seems to come up unrated. -
Yeah okay, forget what I said about interns. There's an agenda at work here.
-
The internet subversives are going around the site re-tagging products with "gay" terms. Just in case it's a search algorithm glitch.... I re-tagged the KJV Bible, Kindle 2 and The Secret just for starters.... I think Harry Potter's already been hit.
I just hit the Bill O'Reilly collection with "gay sex" tags. It gave me a tingle... -
@Ian_M:
I know right? That's just so goddamn blatant it HAS to be a mistake...right?
For whatever weird reason, if you follow the second or third hit on 'homosexual' into 'homosexualITY' (fiction), you still get stuff like /Rubyfruit Jungle/. Weird. -
-
CommentAuthorBrianMowrey
- CommentTimeApr 12th 2009 edited
Signed petition, withholding any purchases until they undo this (haven't had money this year anyway)
Amazon can sell or refuse to sell whatever they want (and be as hypocritical about it as they want to) -- it's not the same thing as political persecution, which goes on in this country every day against all forms of sex (at least, on the books -- in practice, rampantly more heavily against homosexuality). It's just amazon owning their own business.
That said, the idea of a modern book retailer censoring adult content is a joke. Before the internet, it would have been a joke. These kind of books just sit on the shelves. Kids can open them up and look at the big picture of what mommy and daddy should be trying to bring back the magic. Today, when porn and eroticism are more nearly mainstream in Western culture than they've been since Rome converted, any retailer taking the side of family values is probably instantly surrendering its dominance of the market. Any kind of adult material screening voids my desire to do business with them. (At the absolute most extreme, they should make it so that users have to be logged in and set their account to 'adult ok' to avoid screening -- but even that's blatant stupidity. I can look up 'vagina' on wikipedia and get a big old picture of a human female vagina. I shouldn't have anything barring my money from the same content. (Not that I have any money right now.))
No, writers shouldn't have their careers fucked because they're gay and a certain company suddenly wants to get biblical -- but it's up to us consumers to see that that doesn't happen, not the retailer. I know it's harder to reorganize the entire artist-(small-discount-seller)-reader relationship that Amazon's created than it is to scream for apology, settle for compromise, and still use them: but if any type of content screening is accepted on such a huge retail entity, it's a blow to the health of modern literature. All this twitter-bitching in self-titled meme-style already has my hopes down, though. We've gone from "we're here, we're queer, get used to it" to "amazonfail"? Really? How about "amznpwndmyporn"? Fucking internet.
And Jesus Christ, Amazon. We're fucking adults. And sex is why literature exists. Recession hasn't hurt your sales enough?
edititedd for grammear -
This discussion has been inactive for longer than 5 days, and doesn't want to be resurrected.