Sex Op-Ed: Amazon, B&N Dragged Into The Corporate Porn Censorship Wave

by Coleen Singer. 

The New York Post in a recent article revealed in its usual Fox News – meets – Yellow Journalism style the BIG HEADLINE that Amazon’s Kindle Bookstore and Barnes and Noble eBook Store are being overrun by a new wave of ebooks that tread over the line of “what’s fit for print”.

Read on…

NY Post Author James Covert reports, “Following the sleeper success of “Fifty Shades of Grey,” smutty e-books have engulfed Amazon and B&N’s sites, many of them crossing a line well beyond the sadomasochism and bondage scenes in E.L. James’s kinky trilogy. “9 Hot Taboo Family [Censored for SEO protection] Stories,” an Amazon Kindle book whose author is listed as Lillian Frost, is “jam packed full of steamy sexual encounters between daddies and [censored], mommies and [censored], and sisters and [censored],” according to a blurb on Amazon’s site yesterday afternoon “[censored, but pertaining to sex with furry friends],” a Kindle book by Shameek Speight, tells the story of a housewife whose dog becomes the “Man of the House,” according to a publisher’s note, also viewed yesterday. That’s despite Amazon’s aggressive crackdown on obscene titles in late 2010.“

WHOA! Sex with furry friends, sex in the family and other really questionable literature lurking on the cyber shelves of Amazon and B&H?  How did THAT happen in the traditional marketplaces for romantic and erotic fiction, those time-honored literature traditions that for the most part, spin steamy yarns using as many adjectives for the male anatomy as possible?  You know the style. “I gripped his hot, steamy and throbbing member and guided it into my glistening, wet and inviting love canal….“.

Why is the ebook marketplace now being flooded with inappropriate and sometimes possibly illegal novels?

Main Reason (IMHO)? –  Google and the New Wave of Social Media.  In a recent article I went into this in pedantic depth as to how the current Google search algorithms have pretty much pushed “generic porn” search words and phrases back to page 247.  Favoring Wikipedia, Redbook, Cosmo and other great bastions of steamy sexual titillation.  Sure, a quick longtail search on Google for “Busty lactating MILFs doing the Balinese Monkey Chant with dildos” will still hit the first listing (if such a site exists!), but the more generic words people use for adult entertainment now lead to squeaky clean sites, with hard working pornographers thrown under the bus.  Tumblr, Huffpo, Pinterest, blogger.com and so many other SFW outlets for adult entertainment producers have now piled on, resulting in a pressing need for anyone trying to attract surfers to either a steamy sex site, blog or just about anything else to have to explore new options to come into “the back door”, as it were.

Now, I’m certainly no SEO expert, but a quick Google search tells me that to spread an adult message, the top two places that get listing are Wikipedia and Amazon.  As everyone else probably figured this out even faster than I did, the marketing focus obviously needs to be getting listed on those websites. Wikipedia, also knowing this, is now sealed up tighter than a drum of toxic radioactive waste for new pages that have even a hint of ways new pages might lead to porn.  There is also a lively (and scummy) new industry that came out of that of SEO companies that will write and submit your Wikipedia page, at the starting price of $10,000 to do it for you, with no guarantee the page will even stay up there for more than a month after they get it initially approved. I suspect that some of the Illuminati of Wikipedia moderators may be making a lot of extra lunch money here, but that’s just my penchant for unfounded conspiracy theories.

… Leaving eBooks as a low-hanging fruit for spreading your message and adult company branding by releasing SFW content for mainstream eyballs.

Talk about the “Law Of Unintended Consequences“!  In what traditionally was a well-run, ethical industry of primarily female authors making a decent living from writing steamy erotica for pulp and eBooks, is now being inundated by frustrated website operators that suspect if they compile some erotic stories buried in there member area since 2001 and publish as an eBook, the traffic will flow back in from the bi-line branding. Sure. Why not?  Most of that is going to be crap anyway, and the savvy romantic and erotic reader shoppers at Amazon and B&N know how to spot a real author and avoid the obvious link bait compilations of recycled blog junk. But, where this now gets dangerous for a new wave of censorship, we get some knucklehead headline copyboy assistant at the New York Post jumping up and down, screaming “Sleazy readers: [IncessstCensoredForGoogle], [bestiBoyalityCensoredForGoogle] among the topics as Amazon, B&N take low road with raunchy e-book profits!” (READ THE REAL WORDS HERE)

Knowing a thing or two about the mainstream press and media, I’m pretty sure that Daily Post Author James Covert did not write that headline as his actual story is pretty devoid of inflammatory statements (well, except the leading panic invoking incest, sex with Fido, etc).  Dishing out a few probably accurate factoids, Mr Covert goes on to say “Romance and erotic novels are the book industry’s biggest category in fiction, topping $1.4 billion in sales last year. Erotica is growing faster as e-books make it easier to download and read dirty stories discreetly. While the retailers often ban titles that go too far, some racy writers say the policing is arbitrary and half-hearted. If sales of a dirty book are strong, it can usually avoid a ban, although its success may get downplayed to the public, writers say. Lately, B&N has begun to scrub hot-selling smut from the top 125 titles on its bestseller list, according to several authors. This spring, “The Nolan Trilogy” by Selena Kitt, which depicts wayward Catholic school girls in the 1950s, abruptly halted its quick ascent at No. 126, according to Kitt. That’s despite selling more than 200 copies a day — easily enough to break the top 100 normally, she said. Getting blocked from the bestseller list is “a relatively new thing” for erotica writers at B&N, she said. Asked about the alleged scrubbing of the bestseller list, a B&N spokeswoman said erotica titles “as their sales warrant will appear in our top 100 rankings online.” Amazon likewise has abruptly cut steamy pulp titles from its own bestseller lists — a move that invariably tanks sales, writers complain.”

It appears that Amazon and B&N are making a careful business decision in preventing titles from getting on the top 125 list here.  They certainly don’t want to ban erotic books as they make a LOT of money for them.  But they probably want to bury it just a little bit from view to avoid the new moral “forces that be” from spotting it too easily and ending up in yet another media firestorm about how naughty the eBook behemoths are.

But Wait! There’s More!

If you scan through the titles and descriptions of erotic eBooks at both retailers, there are a LOT of dirty words on there that will certainly be discovered by P.M. David Cameron’s proposed ISP filters, as well as the super-duper-secret NSA-style army of “no dirty words” compliance spidering companies contracted by a major credit card associations (not Diner’s Club or Carte Blanche, btw) and the [censored] card merchant [censored] to make sure website operators keep it all nice and clean if they want to continue being able to process credit cards.

Never heard about that?  Here’s the scoop on yet ANOTHER aspect of internet censorship, this one specific to a certain credit card association [CENSORED]  and its very own scary NSA-style contractor.

“[Censored] runs a Business Risk Assessment and Mitigation (Censored) program which restricts merchants posing significant fraud, regulatory or legal risk from using the [Censored] system. In other words, any violation of the [censored] categories, will most likely terminate your merchant account… ouch! The [censored] merchant categories include ‘Deadly Sins’, such as: child [censored], [censored] and extreme sexual [censored], Illegal prescription drugs (yay!), copyright infringing merchandise, illegal tobacco product sales, [Censored] and other [Censored] ‘Sins’. As determining if merchants providing ‘problematic’ products and services are operating legally or not isn’t easy, some acquirers are avoiding acquiring certain industries altogether, such as: gaming, adult, pharma, tobacco and alike. [Censored] and the acquirers perform web crawling, monitoring merchants’ online content, as part of a continues effort to shut down merchants which are caught violating any [censored] category.” – Source Credit Card Processing Blog (not censored)

How does the [Censored] spider find what it’s looking for to flag for removal?
Words.
Dirty Words.

Sure. I agree with the wisdom of not allowing credit card processing of what is in that above list (oh, wait. we don’t know what the list is because it is censored from publication due to dirty words), but as with most things, “mission creep” comes into play and, when using words and text for the “triggers”, it then starts also taking out freedom of speech by those using some words, but are not actually doing anything bad, illegal or morally reprehensible.

Ergo, by offering the sale of some of content with “bad words”, Amazon and B&N risk running afoul of the credit card companies that provide most of their revenue.

Ever curious, I put on my “[censored]” hat and went to Amazon to see what a spooky spider might uncover as far as “dirty words” in the Kindle Bookstore. Nobody in the adult industry knows “for sure” what all of the dirty words are, but a few of them I know from talking to porn site owners:

• “Abduction” – One of the most historically popular fantasy themes in erotic fiction. 1,594 Kindle Store Results for titles and descriptions.
• “Forced Orgasm” – Another stock in trade fantasy motif in erotic fiction. 128 Kindle Store Results for titles and descriptions.

The list goes on and on, so are Amazon and B&N playing with fire here in the eyes of the credit card processors?

What happened when the list of dirty words hit the e-commerce porn sites over the past 2 years, was a massive removal of content and editing of text. “Forced Orgasms” became “Highly Encouraged Orgasms”, and many other humorous, albeit time consuming edits.

“With book sellers threatening to censor what we can write in books and Google restricting what we can write on a webpage… one is left to wonder what wounds the written word will have inflicted upon it next.” said Stewart Tongue of EngineFood.com

The rub here is that this does not come under the US 1st Amendment as this sort of censorship is being done by private corporations who can do pretty much anything they want.  Don’t like it? Sue them. Yeah. See how far that will get you with the deep pocket corps.  It was easier dealing with the feds in most respects for the protection of free speech.

For what it’s worth, this little blogger’s suggestion to Amazon and B&N as far as their response to all-of-the-above corporate censorship? Tell them to fuck off and stand up to them.  Mainstream already has crippled porn by forced removal from the language.  You are next.  But you have the money to fight back the tide (and Jeff Bezos now owns the Washington Post that swings a really big dick in legislative circles).

Weary of [CENSORED] yet?
Get used to it. It’s the new normal.

Have a wonderful highly encouraged [CENSORED] orgasm, readers!

Coleen