what if sex is no longer a viable metaphor

So, Amazonfail fallout continues a day later. Really, the best part is the discussion that the debacle has sparked.

Still, answers coming out of Amazon itself are conflicted and I have no idea what to think about what's really going on over there. There does seem to be an effort underway to remedy this situation (see update here), which is the important thing. But it's been an amazing phenomenon, regardless.

Debauchette has posted some more interesting thoughts here. In particular, she says this:

Sure, we have erotic texts that are intended to arouse the reader, and that genre of literature usually gets its own isolated aisle. But sexuality is often used as a means to explore deeper themes, or to expand on philosophical discourse, or to access internal experiences, psychology, emotion, spirituality. Sometimes sexuality is political, legal, historical, or grounded in current events, and can take the form of fiction, memoir, history, essay, poetry. Identifying something sexual as “adult” is clumsy and arbitrary, like some clunky algorhythmic Miller’s test.

Specifically, she's discussing the disappearance of Catherine Breillat's book, Pornocracy, that was the companion piece to her film Anatomy of Hell. I've found both book and film to be weird and full of philosophical problems (e.g., they posit a victimhood inherent to the female experience and a model of gay manhood as "pure" and immune to the "corruption" that is female. Such things make me bristle for several reasons.) But Pornocracy is an excellent example to point out that sexuality can function in a text as a vehicle to discuss any number of other things, just as debauchette says. And that's why Amazon's new practice of shuffling texts that deal in sexual subject matter to a virtual ghetto is so deeply unnerving. If we can no longer find books that talk about sex, we'll be losing a deplorably great percentage of centuries worth of recorded human thought -- thought regarding a hell of a lot of stuff that's only tangentially sexual in nature.

Anyway, all these other bloggers linked above and below have said it all better than I. With any luck, all 57, 310 books will have their popularity rankings properly restored in short order and Amazon will devise a smarter system for preventing Harry Potter searchers from stumbling upon this damnably pernicious book with it's filthy, wanton jacket.

N.B. To be fair, I ordered my personal copy of Pornocracy off Amazon a while ago-- and I had to wait several months for it. The current printing was released in July of last year. Before that, there was some older translation of it that Amazon just didn't stock. So, the barring of this particular book may have had just a little something to do with the fact that they've only sold a handful of copies (to pervs like me) in the first damn place.

The internet is eating our brains a la #Amazonfail

This post is really just an update to the last one, but this new intrique so very fascinating that I thought it deserved its own little spot on in the sun.

Follow this link to read about a weird internet uproar facilitating tactic this LiveJournal blogger is calling "Bantown." I don't know if that's an official term or what, but it's a very interesting theory.

UPDATE: #Amazonfail is looking increasingly hoax-like. There's this. OK, I will admit that I'll be highly, highly amused if all this mess is nothing but hacker hijinks. If #amazonfail is nothing but a prank after all, wow, I mean, really? Way to hit us where our good little liberal hackles raise, hacker people. The volume of this fracas is not unimpressive.

Of glitches and fails

By now, news of "Amazon Fail" has hit (some of) the mainstream media and should therefore be common knowledge -- particularly if you're enjoying life amongst the Twitterati. But just in case you haven't heard, let me 'splain. Or rather, let me allow some of the other internet scribes to do the explaining.

Here's a link to the situation, as it was when everyone woke up yesterday morning. And here's a link to a bunch of links containing updates. And here's the #amazonfail Twitter stream. Basically, what's going on is that Amazon had stripped a number of titles of their sales rankings. That means that when you search an author, if one of the books being targeted is among his or her oeuvre, that book will be relegated to the bottom of his or her listing, rather than the top where the "most popular" books pop up first. Now, guess which books are being targeted? Well, it seems that some puritanical Cro Magnon has decided that any book containing "adult" material shouldn't show up at the top of Amazon searches. The real kicker, however, is how the concept of "adult" is being defined by Amazon. In particular, any queer-themed literature has been banished to the deepest recesses of the Amazon search engine. Some actual erotica has been swept up in the downdraft, but mostly, this very handy method of censorship seems to be hand-picking all the good literature with some erotic content and leaving some laughably bad drek in it's slug-slimy trail.

By way of example, debauchette puts it right succinctly:

What constitutes adult content? Apparently classics, like Lady Chatterley’s Lover, as well as non-”adult” texts like Valenti’s Full Frontal Feminism. Yet Surrender the Booty 3: The Search for More Arse has been left untouched. Maybe they’re just weeding out the good stuff to keep the bar nice and low.

Nice, huh?

Now, there's conflicting information coming out of Amazon itself. Some of the reports are saying that they were, indeed, trying to keep adult materials--by their definition of "adult"-- off the main page. But now they're calling the stripping of the sales rankings a "glitch." Way to unconvincingly backpedal, Amazon. If it's just a "glitch," I might consider forgiving you. Except...

This isn't the first time the dickcheeses over at Amazon have instituted some deeply problematic policy. About a year ago, just in time to coincide with National Poetry Month, Amazon told all the little micro-presses that, if they wanted to sell their books through Amazon, they had to use Amazon's own print-on-demand service. Now, most micro-presses in this country publish poetry-- the stuff of which I read a lot, but not too many other people do. So, I buy a lot of poetry from small presses off of Amazon because, well, it's Amazon. It's a great one-stop shop that prevents me from having to ferret around all over the internet trying to find the work of poets of my own generation. So, yeah, my main Visa card actually gives me rewards in the form of Amazon gift certificates. I am, literally, a card-carrying Amazon devotee. However, the problem with Amazon forcing micro-presses to use their POD service is trifold: a) Amazon's affiliate is the most expensive POD printer on the market, thus making it cost-prohibitive for many (most) cash-strapped, shoe-string-budgeted micro-presses to sell their wares on Amazon, b) Amazon's POD printer produces books of far lower quality than many other cheaper, smaller POD printers, and c) so many people (like me) prefer to get all their small-press-published books from one place that many micro-presses can't afford not to sell their books on Amazon. So, the people behind these little presses, who bring important work to us out of the goodness of their hearts-- knowing full well they'll spend more money on than they'll make through their literary capitalist ventures--are essentially caught with Amazon's fat, bulbous thumbs up their asses. That ain't cool, Amazon. Particularly when you didn't ask permission first.

So, last year, when Amazon enacted this POD policy, the small community of small-press publishers raised a tiny, squeaky amount of internet hell. They called for a boycott that clearly did not cause so much as a mosquito bite on the sweaty skin of this particular Goliath. But now, with this Amazon sales-rank-stripping fiasco, a whole lot more folks are up in arms. The good news is that the angry folks have some organizations who'll probably be willing back up a real boycott. The queer community is nothing if not organized these days-- certainly much moreso than the kinkster community and the sexy-lit nerd community (Ok, we don't actually have a community. It's just us and our flashlights and our vibrators under the covers, alone on Saturday evenings in apartments where there's no room for sofas amidst the bookshelves.).

But ultimately, I don't think a boycott's really going to hurt Amazon too much. They sell too many things besides books at this point. They're simply too big and too good at what they do for large factions of their customer base to be able to resist the the siren call of books discounted 32% and free shipping for purchases over $25. No, boycotting won't get 'em where it hurts.

The only thing that I can imagine have an wounding effect is getting the attention of that other monolith, The Mainstream Media. We're well on our way-- the LA times has been reporting on this mess ever since the first #amazonfail hashtag appeared on Twitter. In the meantime, I'm doing my part by answering anti-censorship-minded blogger-targeted calls-to-arms like this one, and contributing to the googlebomb "Amazon Rank."

I strongly encourage any of my readers who have internet presences of any variety (a Facebook page works as well as anything, guys!) who don't think queer lit should hang its head in shame and hide in corners, who don't think people should be prevented from reading the smut of their choice-- high- or low-brow, and who think censorship is one of the greatest hobgoblins to emerge from the putrid cauldron human civilization, to follow suit and link to the Amazon Rank googlebombing campaign, just like I have.

Please. Amazon does not want bad press. A negative news story on your morning news show of choice will create a de facto boycott that will trump whatever organized queertopia could possibly establish, I promise.

Go get your googlebomb on. I mean it, now. Shoo!

UPDATE: For good measure, I'm gonna go ahead and link the pretty dumb things post on the same topic. Chelsea G., as always, says some wise and witty things, and her post is also a good source of links for more information. Bon appetite!.

fucking art

I've started watching the IFC series Indie Sex on DVD. The first installment is about censorship and covers many of the same issues discussed in Kirby Dick's hilarious and disturbing documentary about the MPAA, The Film Has Not Yet Been Rated (the one I wrote about here) . I must note, however, that Indie Sex is, perhaps, a little kinder to the Jack Valenti and his band of suburban Los Angeleno hausfrau harpies than Dick is. A few big deal directors and actors confess that they're willing to sacrifice their artistic freedoms for "the protection of the children" (as though kids aren't all playing grab-ass every time we turn our backs anyway)-- and they insist that the MPAA serves a purpose and isn't expressly evil. But nonetheless, the show is worth watching.

The first episode opens with a quotation from Picasso: "Yes, art is dangerous. Where it is chaste, it is not art."

I had not heard this quotation before, and yet, I think it addresses a very relevant crux. On my last post, my dutiful Republican heckler said, "A bound-Asian chick hanging with her ta-tas exposed ... that's art?!" ... to which I thought, well... yeah!

I don't think Picasso was using the word "chaste" with the strictly sexual connotation it implies when used vernacularly, but rather to point out that art that risks nothing isn't really doing the job that art is supposed to do-- that being, challenging the public consciousness-- a decidedly unchaste act. And as a result of the inherently risk-taking nature of art, and the social anxiety surrounding all that relates to human bodily pleasure, art and fucking tend to make pretty compelling ... uh... forgive me... bedfellows. Right?

My heckler also mentioned Monet and Manet (in a tired, lazy-ass Seinfeld reference, I must point out) and called them artistes important, especially in comparison to photographer Nobuyoshi Araki. Now, I have an Araki poster on my wall at home (It's a close-up of a mouth, turned sideways. However, it's so abstracted and decontextualized that my mother asked me if it was somebody's asshole (giggle)) and would probably sooner gag myself to the point of daily puking (even being as vomit-phobic as I am) before I stuck some pleasant impressionistic water lilies on my wall. But that's simply a matter of taste. It's not because I deny that artists like Monet and Manet were breaking myriad rules (and thereby making, yes, IMPORTANT contributions to their field) by the standards of their day. Monet was laughed out of galleries for his mushy, blurry flowers and glowing hourly renditions of Notre Dame. The Manet painting below, with its naked woman staring obliquely (defiantly?) at the viewer, was rejected from the Paris Salon as much for its rough and sketchy rendering as it was for its immodest depiction of the female form.


Art is, by definition, rule-breaking. If my posting a picture of a Japanese girl strung up by her tits breaks one of your rules, Joe, well then... good! It's doing its job.

I'd also like to offer up a second quotation from Frederico Fellini, also by way of the Indie Sex show: "Censorship is advertising paid by the government."

It is one of the great ironies of human nature that the more we try to police our appetites, the curiouser and curiouser we get about the excessive varieties of methods through which we can sate those appetites. As much as I'd like to say that censorship is a conservative impulse in the proactive parlance of our government today, I know that's not actually true. Misguided "feminists" seek to ban pornography. Radio and television personalities are culturally hushed on a regular basis for their "hate speech" (sentiments with which I most often find uproarious, but for which I would NEVER seek legislation that might deny these folks their rights to voice their offensive and bullshitty opinions in the first place). But nonetheless, when it comes to regulating sexual imagery in art, in film, in text, it's usually a Republican (Scalia, anyone?) behind the initiative. And that'll keep me voting for the other guys every time.

Fortunately, in spite of conservative, fearful-of-sex attitudes, Fellini's quip tends to hold true. Government-fueled outrage is an excellent vehicle by which the masses are carried into arthouse theaters. And that's a fantastic boon for underfunded art-smut (my favorite kind of art-- and my favorite kind of smut).

On that note, allow me to direct my fair reader(s) to FGT (F/thyGorgeousTh/ings), a soon-to-be site full of prurient things with an eye to the aesthetic. The two women (my oft-quoted debauchette and another sex-worker-blogger, Kasia) behind the site alternately call its contents "postmodern porn" (a designation that strikes me as a little dated... wasn't postmodernism replaced with... what? the post-ironic age? in the mid-90s? Or, at least, most certainly, when everyone lost their senses of humor when NYC was attacked in 2001?) or "art porn". Regardless of what they call it, I find it notable that the erotic and the artistically sublime are ascending to such blended, interspersed prominence, in these, our internet fora.

With sloppy, ugly porn so available, where's the creative risk in making fucking pretty again, I might ask? As this website develops, we shall see, I have no doubt.