The last time I was in Paris, I walked into a bookshop and found Catherine Breillat’s Pornocratie on a display table.  Breillat’s known for her controversial films which often use sexuality to explore other dimensions of the human condition, among them Romance (1999), Sex is Comedy (2002), and Anatomy of Hell (2004).  Anatomy of Hell was the film adaptation of her book Pornocratie, or Pornocracy, a book thick with theory and sexual violence, and in top French form, it was both lauded and reviled when it came out. I’m not crazy about the book itself, but it’s worth mentioning because it was a best-seller in spite of the controversial rhetoric and sexually explicit, and violent, imagery (which, by the way, pales in comparison to American Psycho). When I wandered through that bookshop in Paris, it was on display among philosophical texts, which aligned the work with Bataille and Ballard. The other day, I saw it on display at a small bookshop in Williamsburg, between Barthes and Deleuze. It used to be available on Amazon – I did a search for it last week – but now it’s gone.

The way books are published and sold has been on my mind lately because nobody seems to know how to deal with, or sell, sexual subject matter in the States.  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. But that was Amazon’s earliest explanation for the filtering – it was looking for a way to filter out adult content from its search results.

What made me think of this is a post at Dear Author, in response to the Amazon disaster.  Right now, if you go to Amazon and search “homosexuality,” your first hit will be A Parent’s Guide to Preventing Homosexuality. Jane’s deduced that the books are being filtered according to their meta data, and the meta data consists of short-hand descriptors and categories.  Gay and Lesbian categories are certainly being filtered, possibly erotica and sexuality as well.  Since many books fall into multiple categories, a book that’s concerned largely with feminism but manages to fall under the Gay and Lesbian tag, even by a stretch, is filtered out.  And the categorization seems a little arbitrary and counter-intuitive in some cases.  A Parent’s Guide to Preventing Homosexuality doesn’t include any references to homosexuality in the meta data.  It’s categorized as a Christian book, a sociological book, a textbook, but not as a book that deals with homosexuality itself, in spite of the title.  Other books that address parenting and homosexuality are identified immediately as “gay and lesbian,” and parenting falls in as a subset. Presumably these are all marketing tactics, but because Amazon is targeting these categories, the outcome looks less like marketing – with the aim of reaching a target audience – than censorship, as interested buyers will have a hard time finding the books they’re seeking.

At Feministing, a publisher was able to reach Amazon for an explanation, and got a strange one, but one that confirms the original response that Amazon’s taking down the visibility of what it considers to be “adult” literature.  This is from the publisher’s email to the author of Full-Frontal Feminism:

Basically he said that amazon has been experimenting with the way they dole out content specifically so that people who are searching Harry Potter or whatever won’t run into links to products that might be offensive.

…It’s super fucked up, but apparently he’s saying that Amazon is a bully when it comes to stuff like this and it’s all about sales for them and it’s not about censorship. [He said t]hat they love you, love Seal, but that this is mandated from their bosses, who essentially want to be Walmart.

…He also said no human is responsible for the decisions per se, and that it’s all about tagging and feeds which are constantly being tweaked. He does think that amazon will retweak the tags based on the uproar that happened over the weekend.

So the logic is that through this filtering approach, Amazon is hoping to appeal to the largest possible market by hiding content that could be considered offensive.  That might make sense if Amazon were sanitizing its entire product list, but as others have noted, sex toys are readily available, as well as soft and mainstream pornography, heterosexual erotica, sexually explicit films, sexually explicit photo books.  Why it’s targeting homosexuality as a category remains a question, and a pretty disturbing question at that. But then, it’s also targeting books deemed erotic, like Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

Some think Amazon’s been hacked; I’d like that to be true, but it’s unlikely.  Since its representatives are responding and taking ownership of the situation (apart from the PR rep who claimed it was just a ‘glitch’), it sounds as though the company’s moving toward a general sanitization of its stock, like Blockbuster (back when it was relevant) and Walmart. Whatever it is, I’m going to stop using Amazon.  I could call it a boycott, but it’s really just because it’s lost its use value. Amazon’s benefit was its comprehensive selection. Take that away and what’s left? Shipping costs and a wait period, presuming you’re able to find the book you need in the first place.

Oh, and in case you have the urge to read Breillat’s book, it’s available at Powell’s, my new go-to site for lesser-known books.

*

Update:

Amazon’s PR rep cites an internal error:

This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection.

It has been misreported that the issue was limited to Gay & Lesbian themed titles – in fact, it impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories such as Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica. This problem impacted books not just in the United States but globally. It affected not just sales rank but also had the effect of removing the books from Amazon’s main product search.

Many books have now been fixed and we’re in the process of fixing the remainder as quickly as possible, and we intend to implement new measures to make this kind of accident less likely to occur in the future.

Same PR rep denies that the site was hacked.