InsaneJournal

Tweak says, "Gladly Pay You Tuesday"

dejadrew (dejadrew) wrote in scans_daily,
@ 2009-04-12 22:07:00

Entry tags:

creator: fumi yoshinaga, medium: manga, theme: homosexuality, title: antique bakery

Amazon-fail and Yoshinaga-win within.
As many of you already know and are rightfully and righteously freaking out over, Amazon.com has started de-listing books with GLBT content from the Amazon rank sales charts. (Google-bombs away!)

Upon hearing this, with a sinking feeling, I started surfing Amazon's selection of graphic novels, and yup, they appear to have de-listed one of my favourite shounen-ai manga, featured below the cut.

"Oh, Miss Ito, you've got some cream on you..."

Yep, Sherlock Holmes he ain't. But that's no reason to drop his book from the charts. Bastards.

The truly WEIRD thing is, many of the same creator's less popular but far more explicit works are still in the rankings. Antique Bakery is actually more of a slice-of-life drama/comedy than a pure yaoi. The drawings of the cakes are more pornographic than any of the sex scenes. Seriously. I think I gained like twelve pounds just reading the damn thing.

(Read comments) - (Post a new comment)

	I don't get it? proteus_lives 2009-04-13 02:03 pm UTC (link)
	Why would Amazon take them off? Do they think GLBT people don't read books? Political pressure? (Reply to this) (Thread)

in a nutshell: people are stupid. Particularly about sex.

bluefall
2009-04-13 07:24 pm UTC (link)

Looks like a couple things are going on. There's the whole "please be my mommy cause I can't do it myself" bullshit, wherein someone at Amazon decided it would be a spiffy idea to implement a SafeSearch feature so nobody ever has to be bothered by accidentally being reminded that sex exists while looking for some other type of story ever again, thereby ghettoizing any book that has anything to do with sex into the virtual equivalent of a back room behind the counter. Hence, in order to, say, find a book on how to have a sex life as a disabled person, you'd have to know the title and author of the book already and specially request it.

Then there's the old conflation of "queer" with "sex," such that something like Heather has two Mommies or the memoirs of a transman or an academic consideration of the political and military ramifications of DADT are automatically interpreted as the equivalent of hardcore porn, because of course if it's about gay it must be about sex.

Hence why the YA and academic GLBTQ world has been the most glaring victim, but any number of other stories have also been ghettoized (from feminist lit to self-help and erotica).

(Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	Re: in a nutshell: people are stupid. Particularly about sex. proteus_lives 2009-04-13 11:38 pm UTC (link)
	Well, that's just silly. I fucking hate nanny-ism. Treating people like children does not fly with me. It's the cousin of censorship. Then there's the old conflation of "queer" with "sex," That is so fucking high school. People seriously to grow up when it comes to sex in general and GLBTQ issues. (On a sidenote, people should put that on a belt buckle. Like TCB.) (Reply to this) (Parent)

(Read comments) -