4 posts tagged “censorship”

Yesterday, a firestorm broke out over Amazon.com's delisting of gay and lesbian books from sales rankings and search tools, on the grounds of their "adult" content.  Heather Has Two Mommies is deemed "adult," as are books by E. M. Forster, Rita Mae Brown and Radclyffe Hall.  You can find these books by searching authors and titles, but if you're just browsing, you're out of luck.

The jury is out on why this this happened, but one thing is clear: Amazon has completely mishandled the public relations aspect of this.  Their first response to a complaint was a bland corporate email explaining that they delisted "adult" books out of consideration for all their customers.  Now, they're saying it was all a "software glitch."

Now, the word "glitch" is spectacularly non-communicative.  It means "something went wrong" - yeah, we kinda know that already.  It's actually a word used to deflect responsibility from human error.  I know from experience that describing a problem as a glitch really means "we did something new with our system we didn't think it through we had no idea of the enormous implications please leave us alone so we can fix it."  

I hope Amazon's glitch was that innocent.  But even so, they owe us a better explanation, because this glitch has intellectual freedom implications for readers and financial implications for writers.

The New York Times, Time magazine and other sources have reported that Sarah Palin, while mayor of Wasilla  asked the director of the public library if she would be "all right" with removing books from the library based on "inappropriate content."  Later, the library director and the chief of police were asked to resign for being insufficiently supportive of the new mayor, althought the director eventually kept her job.  It's all pretty vague - we don't know if the attempted firing was related to the attempted censorship, and despite a chain email making the rounds, there is no authoritative list of which books Palin was challenging.

All very murky, but none of this feels very good. She reminds me of many small-minded political figures who often misunderstand libraries and have no concept of the "freedom to read" which underlies our collection policies.  She reminds me of somebody I knew who wanted to remove a children's picture book from the library because of a naked...(drum roll...) ...mouse. 

Did I say small-minded?

God bless the folks at Sports Illustrated.  They decided to do libraries a favor this year and not send them the swimsuit issue.  They didn't tell us they weren't sending it, and they didn't offer any kind of credit for a missed issue, and they didn't ask our opinion.  They just didn't send it.  Clean, simple.

Truth be told, the swimsuit issue is a royal pain.  It's prone to being mutilated, stolen, and taken in the restroom (ewww).  But it's our royal pain, and who the hell do these suits think they are to make our collection development decisions for us?  We called to complain, and will do our best to get this issue on our shelves.  For the sake of the articles, of course.

Weird.  Here's Ms. Sensible Shoes fighting for the right to objectify women.  It's a complex world.

In all my years as a librarian and an Internet maven, I've never had an occasion to do a Google search on the keywords "newbery award scrotum."  But I wanted to catch up with the controversy over this year's Newbery winner, The Higher Power of Lucky, by Susan Patron and Matt Phelan.  A passage in the book recounts an incident wherein a character's dog is bitten on the scrotum by a rattlesnake.  Thankfully, the dog lives, but apparently the mere use of the word "scrotum" has given some school librarians the vapors, and they're refusing to buy the book for their collections.

Give me a break.  If a ten-year-old kid has not heard the word "scrotum" before, there is a serious problem with his or her education. And while I recognize that school librarians have different selection criteria from public librarians, I don't see how any rational selection policy would mandate the exclusion of a book because of an incidence of one perfectly normal little word.

So, scrotum, scrotum, scrotum, scrotum.  Ban ME, ya bozos.