Frak YOU Amazon.com!!

So apparently Amazon.com managed to drop it's LGBT books from the ranked lists as they are now classified as "Adult Material". WTF!?

This post from the blog Jezebel possibly sums up the outrage of the community the best. It includes a list of the books stripped of rankings and those allowed to keep them. It's slightly mind blowing.

All Things Digital is suggesting that what Amazon did was an accident but the #Amazonfail hashtag on twitter would indicate that it's a little late. Over the course of a weekend an entire movement has started and spread to thousands of people on the internet. Where does Amazon base its entire business? Online. Not only does Amazon now have a problem with people mobilizing on the net pushing for boycotts and demanding an apology, Amazon itself is remaining very quiet about the whole ordeal. Bad Move.

The new consumer has every peice of information at their fingertips. Our main source of information is not a library; it's an opensource encylopedia that is both free and constantly updated and sourced. We are able to track packages from the minute we place the order to the minute they arrive at our door. We want to know what's going on and if we don't then we want a reason. Keeping quiet about something this big could potentially cost Amazon a noticeable amount of business.


This whole thing pisses me off supremely because I just ordered three books from them: My Gender Workbook, GenderQueer, and Nobody Passes. I have a huge project for my Contemporary Sexualities class due on Thursday so I'm scrambling to get the last few pieces lined up. My ducks are rarely in a row; I'm lucky if my ducks stay in the same vicinity. So I ordered these books for my project and now I find out that in doing so I'm supporting a company that is undermining the validity of the LGBT community.

What does it say about our society that a story concerning corporate discrimination against an entire community gets broken on twitter?



Side Note: I discovered that it is possible to set bread on fire using only a toaster oven and a lack of understanding of said toaster oven. On the plus side I know that my smoke alarms work. Betty Crocker Homemaker of Tomorrow I am not.



(In case your wondering this is what "frak" means.)

a side note to the reading response II

In reading through the articles I was struck, rather amusingly, by something that was mentioned in the introduction. When talking about growing up as a feminist Traister mentioned reading Kate Chopin's "The Awakening" which doesn't seem like much to most people but mattered greatly to me.

It's a bizarre and possibly unnecessary point to make but it reminded me of a rather heated debate I got into with my English teacher when we were analyzing "The Awakening". The main argument being made was that the protagonist committed suicide because she was abandoned by the man with whom she had fallen in love. My argument was that it was not the loss of her love but rather the realization that she was living in a world that would not permit her to live as an independent and intellectual being. She could not have an equal intellectual relationship with men as she seemed to want. We never reached an agreement. It is a point of contention that remains to this day.

Debates like these are one of the reasons I love the internet and particularly the blogosphere: they allow for a continuation and expansion of debate to include more voices and allow for more ideas to be introduced. It is through debates like these that policy is honed and improved, causes and activists are kept fresh and sharp, in short they prevent the ideas from devolving into empty rhetoric. That's kind of important. Just a little.