Well, the hopes that Amazon was just an innocent victim of a bantown event or right wing complaint campaign have been shot to hell. The company released an official statement about deranking nearly 58,000 titles that had feminist, LGBT, or sex-positive* titles, and unfortunately, it’s not satisfactory and indicates that the deranking was, in fact, intentional-ish:
“This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error,” Drew Herdener, spokesman for the online retailer, wrote in a statement.
“It has been misreported that the issue was limited to gay- and lesbian-themed titles,” he said. “In fact, it impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories such as health, mind and body, reproductive and sexual medicine, and erotica.”
Don’t lie to us, dude. Yes, the books were in those categories, but there was a thick political difference between who got dinged and who didn’t. Heather Corinna’s teen sex ed book got hit with a de-ranking, but a bunch of abstinence and sex-negative books are still ranked. “Heather Has Two Mommies” somehow got hit for being “adult”, but books on preventing your kid from being gay weren’t. The pregnancy and dating guides that got hit were gay-centered, but similar books aimed at straight people were spared. Feminist titles like “Full Frontal Feminism” and “The Means of Reproduction” got deranked, and these are predominantly political books. #amazonfail may be slowing down, but mostly because people suspect the problem was fixed. But even if Amazon didn’t intend for their policy to be ham-fisted, somehow they bought right into the assumption that liberal views on LGBT issues and female sexuality are more suspect than more conservative ones.