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\o Amazon
I'm guessing you've seen this on your flist already, but if you haven't - go search for "homosexuality" on Amazon.com and see what they've just done to LGBT books, searches and sales rankings.
I wouldn't normally cry wolf, but the site of that search page makes me so sick that I'm going to call delete-my-Amazon-account instead.
I wouldn't normally cry wolf, but the site of that search page makes me so sick that I'm going to call delete-my-Amazon-account instead.
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And is this only Amazon.us?
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I have no idea if it's only the .us site or not, but regardless, it is physically sickening.
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I'm convinced the (american? religious?) penchant against homosexual lifestyles comes from the core of their whole 'right to breed = we must breed' mentality. The only problem we have in the world today is that there are too many people - all our issues with resources/environmental impact wouldn't be a concern if people would just breed responsibly, but instead religion's entrenched this belief that we Must Breed Our Own Dynasties and our whole society enforces this over and above the right of the invidividual. Of everything, the gay&happy lifestyle threatens this the most.
I'm glad this petition is hitting Amazon where it hurts, right in their greed pocket. I picture a public retraction soon.
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Anyway, to clarify what I said above: it is quite possible that this act of censorship was wholly deliberate and malicious; that would be the saddest situation of all, since that, right there, would be prejudice in its most unadulterated form. On the other hand, another possibility is that it was at least partly unconscious i.e. "we're doing this for the sake of our children" rather than "we're doing this as an outright crusade against queerness". Of course, the two mentalities are intertwined, but I don't think they're one and the same. Getting to the main point, I think one of the main problems with rooting out discrimination is that it some elements of it are so entrenched that they are unconscious. It's easy to imagine someone who commits to the notion of LGBT equality in public spheres, but who tells an entirely different story when it comes to more personal matters (e.g. who their children marry or make friends with, the ideas that they ingrain in their children etc.)...and they can believe both these things without feeling that there is any inconsistency in their views.
Actually, this is one of the grey areas for me in ethical terms: while I believe that parents should have a large degree of freedom in how they bring up their children, it's highly problematic to say that discrimination is perfectly acceptable in private when it isn't in public, especially since what we're taught in private does (often unconsciously) impact upon how we act/think in public.
Re: Amazon getting kicked in the money sack. Oh, yes. I hope so too.
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I can understand the 'for the sake of protecting youth' argument, even though I feel that family groups should be the responsible ones in teaching their children how to integrate information from different sources. (In this world of free-flowing media, censorship really can't help anyone because there will always be another source. I tend towards the educating-people-on-how-to-think-critically argument on how to manage information.)
However, if Amazon truly meant well w/r/t 'protecting the children', they should have applied their policy more specifically: instead it's like they clicked a button that blanketed 'erotica' and 'porn' and 'LGBT'.
As an aside, even just writing that sentence makes me wonder about their genres. Erotica clearly deals with sex, but LGBT literature deals with sexuality, which is not necessarily 'sex.' So if the magical censorship button instead targeted 'erotica' and 'gay erotica', this argument against Amazon would be have been about censorship, but not discrimination. But their policy targets 'erotica' and 'gay erotica' and 'gay science fiction' and 'gay young adult' and 'gay westerns' and 'gay gardening manuals' and 'gay history' and 'gay literature' and 'biographies that just happen to be about gay people' because anything 'gay' gets initially grouped under the LGBT umbrella right from publication. Which brings us to the other point in our discussion, namely whether this was deliberate malicious intent, or an unconsious mistake caused from entrenched beliefs. Even Amazon's system of classifying publications suggests an entrenched discrimination. :/
I prefer imagining the malicious intent, because I picture a group of fat, stupid people sniggering in a room when they decide 'HEY guys! it's time to outrightly crusade against queerness', and because they're such isolated stupid people, they can be so very easily targeted and removed from power and replaced with thinking considerate people. The entrenched, 'accidental' passing of this policy in a boardroom meeting full of well-intentioned individuals *who just didn't realise this action would possibly upset anyone* is what terrifies me, because it /is/ the entrenched, unconscious discrimination kicking in then.
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Nyx stop me I'm writing Monty Python Turk fic with bad punnery. HELP.
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no. WRITE IT. :D If you do, I'll write nasdack!Fran/Aerith on a catwalk somewhere.
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You are so on; I even have Reno-the-jester making punny recurring logic puns.
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Personally, I go for the teach-people-how-to-think-critically model myself. I think the benefits of fostering critical thinking in people outweigh those of managing the content they're exposed to, full stop. Besides, as you mentioned, censorship is going to have a pretty hard time with the internet as part of the equation (this is why I laugh everytime the government announces that they will be introducing a new "family-friendly" internet filter. Wasn't the last one was hacked by a young boy in record time, who then posted instructions on a forum so that everyone else could get around it too?)
And here is my brief aside: I always find the ideas surrounding the figure of the "child" that underlies these "protect our youth" discourses really interesting (and problematic). We don't seem to have a vocabulary to discuss children and sexuality beyond notions of "corruption of innocence", "paedophilia" etc. The wtfery surrounding the Bill Henson exhibition comes to mind.
Re: conflation of sex and sexuality: yes, and here is where the entrenched discrimination comes in. I tend to view censorship as a means policing of "appropriate" forms of sexuality, so: porn/erotica? Inappropriate because it depicts excessive (hence deviant) forms of sexuality. LGBT lit? Inappropriate by virtue of the fact it suggests an alternative to the heterosexual norm (this is inherently deviant). As you've suggested, Amazon's classification structure in itself seems to propagate discrimination :(
I am torn between the very attractive image of a bunch of fat, stupid people plotting a crusade in a boardroom, and the well-intentioned but naive alternative. I mean, the former would be disheartening insofar as it suggests that such overt discrimination still happens, but this kind of visible discrimination is easier to tackle. The latter scenario, on the other hand, might reaffirm that yes, we've gotten to a point where outright discrimination has been outlawed, but now we're left to deal with the more invisible kind, which cannot be so easily rectified.
Still, you can hope that some good will come out of this Amazon debacle: those who might have been unaware of the disciminatory implications of this sort of action probably won't be after everything is said and done (or am I being idealistic here?)
p.s. K, apologies if I'm spamming your post with my rambliness. Also, hope you're feeling better <3 The hot tea seems to have worked wonders for me.
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Still a bit plaguely, but ah well!
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In which an employee of Amazon claims that at Amazon, everything's automated, and there was probably 'just an algorithm' run which blanket-applied the ranking-removal. But which tells me that at some point, all GLBT works were entered with something like a tag of 'adult', even if they weren't. I think.
Also, do you follow metafandom's collection of debate-posts? They're very good for keeping on top of issue discussions posted in the realm of blog.
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I have actually friended metafandom under another journal, which I created for the sake of my honours thesis. I don't check back on it that often, though it looks like I'll have to do so more regularly.
Speaking of which, would you be interested in discussing any thoughts you might have on fanfiction? My honours thesis revolves around race in digital space and fanfiction, and I hope to post up a bunch of questions and topics based on these in my other journal soon. No obligations, of course, but I'd love to hear anything you have to say once I get them up <3
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Word-perfect. I mean, have we really not moved forward in the last forty years of HEART ACHING BRAIN BREAKING SOUL SHATTERING activism? I mean, I'm not even that old and I've already "lived to see" so much shit thrown at the GLBT community that it's ri-fucking-diculous.
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Time to move my wishlist items elsewhere.
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You've GOT to be kidding me. What is this sh*t?!
Another reason never to buy anything at Amazon.com.=_=; I only ever come there to check reviews on books, and buy them on another site. XD;; Bol.com is much better in my experience. (And they've got good service too.)
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I feel there should be a community for Amazon.com slash.
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