It was totes a glitch you guize!

Instead of apologizing for letting something this disgustingly discriminatory happen, Amazon is crying "glitch!" and effectively blowing off taking any responsibility for this event.

Uh huh.

A "glitch."

And I'm the motherfucking Tooth Fairy.

This "glitch" has been going on for months. Its focused, specifically on anything that presents sexuality in a positive, progressive light. The autobiography of Ellen DeGeneres is delisted but A Parent's Guide to Preventing Homosexuality isn't. Books on sexuality and disability are gone, but the autobiography of Ron Jeremy is still up.

Glitch my fat ass.

Way to go Amazon. You could have apologized and agreed to fix it, but no, letting the people who have been excluded feel like they are worthwhile customers to you is just beyond your capabilities, isn't it?

Same Shit, Different Company.

When in doubt, deny, deny, deny. Even in the face of evidence.

Queer Kids Don't Exist-Action Needed

And the saga of clueless hetero people being obsessed with teh GHEY SEXXORS! continues, now with added fuckery.

Amazon dot-fucking-com has decided to strip the sales ranks from TLGBQ books, which keeps them from showing up in bestseller lists and some searches, because they have been deemed "adult" material.

Someone is thinking "what about the children?" in deciding to do this, and indeed, I wonder "What about the children?"

What about the gay children?
What about the lesbian children?
What about the bisexual children?
What about the trans children?
What about the children that come from families with transitioning, transitioned and/or queer parents/siblings/other family members?

Why the fuck doesn't anyone think about them?

Cause its only about the sex right? Thats the only reason anyone is trans or queer, because of sex. Dirty steamy stinky sweaty sex. We are all just straight folk with a fetish, right? And if its about sex, then we can't have the children seeing it! Oh NO! Except for Playboy. Because objectifying women is okay, hell, standard operating procedure, and we have to train em young, amirite?

What can you do about this?
There’s a petition going here, and you can complain to Amazon directly. Their exec customer service email is ecr@amazon.com and their customer service phone number is 1-800-201-7575. Folks are trying to google bomb the term Amazon Rank (more info here). And, of course, you can boycott Amazon. I am also going to contact the company I work for (who sells our product to Amazon) and let them know that it would be a great show of support to the non-cis and non-het communities if they joined the boycott as well.

If you want more information, the first link in this post leads to a great collection of links and a great take-down of this stinky business.

I intend to do everything I can to let this company know that I don't appreciate being treated like a shameful family secret.

ETA: textual fury has mentioned in the comments that books about disability and sexuality are also disappearing!

What the fuck! Its like the biggest troll in the world got into Amazon and took the fuck over! Only cis, het, abled bodies can bump uglies now or else its too "explicit" for kids?

I have also heard rumors that feminist theory is starting to go missing as well.

I will say this again, because it bears repeating: What...The...Fuck?!

Why I am a purist

I love sci-fi and fantasy. I was raised in the era of movies like The Dark Crystal, Legend, Labyrinth, The Neverending Story, the Princess Bride, The Last Unicorn...My parents helped. We always had sci-fi books laying around the house (I still read the entire original Dune series once a year or so) and my mom would tape things like Red Sonya or Neverending Story for us to watch over and over again.

As I got older, I started getting a little pickier about my books. There were some tropes that seemed ever-present in fantasy specifically that bugged me to no end, the handsome hero swinging his phallus replacement around to protect the fragile but oh so beautiful princess from being touched. If I was lucky, the fragile princess would have power of her own, but it was almost inevitably magic of some kind, which allowed her to stay on the fringes of any battle and usually was the excuse for her weak constitution. Even female heroes would end up saved by the man yet again, regardless of her own strength.

Eventually, my mother (who can be seriously awesome) introduced me to Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth series. This series seems to fall victim to some of the usual tropes at first, but very quickly it is revealed that not all is as it seems in that regard. The series is full of strong female characters, and by that I don't mean "Strong Female" characters, but strong characters that happen to be female. Its not a perfect series, but it does amazingly well in the gender department. Goodkind displays an amazing depth of insight into female perspectives, experiences and realities.

Can you imagine my joy when I found out they were making a TV series?

Absolute. Pure. Bliss.

Then I watched it.

I've read Backlash, I should not have been surprised. I should have expected that the entertainment industry would sap all individual personality from the female characters and insert tired old tropes about how women "really are." It doesn't matter if the character is essentially in charge of an entire council of nations and is the highest authority in the land. Underneath it all shes just a weak little girl who needs men to save her. She still has her amazing power, but now using it ONCE makes her faint like a delicate fucking wilted flower!

Additionally, the racial characterization is unbelievable. Why, pray tell, is the one character which was written with a specific speech pattern ie "I am" becomes "I be" (meant to indicate her native language's grammatical structure conflicting with the language she currently speaks) cast as a woman of color? Especially when this character was not originally written so? To make it worse, shes a sorceress who lives in a hut full of bones, and uses bones to ward off the underworld. Cue the "mystical POC/ voodoo preistess" stereotype. Tia Dalma anyone?

Theres more, but frankly, it isn't even worth addressing in some ways, cause we have heard it all before.

In all honestly, I wish I could even be anything other than bored and disappointed.

In short, don't bother with "Legend of the Seeker" As usual, the Western entertainment industry took perfectly good source material that actually portrays a complex world and boiled it down to the things that make white guys feel most comfortable.

I'll Never Let You Go

One question I hear at work, every day, without fail:

"Is there a Starbucks/Dunkin' Donuts or any kind of coffee place in here?"

The answer to both variations of the first part of this question is a resounding "No." There are no Starbucks in the airport at all, and the Dunkin' Donuts is two terminals over. You have to exit and re-enter security to get to it. As for the second part, all it takes for someone to see the only coffee place in this terminal when they are standing and talking to me is for them to do a 180 degree turn and it is right there, large as life, with a huge, bright orange, purple and green sign. This indicates one of a few possible issues for the person in question.

One possible issue is that their eyesight is failing them. Always possible, and there really is no way for me to tell if this is the case. That is an understandable reason to ask about the "popular" places, actually, as I assume their logos could be easily recognizable for someone with vision issues.

Another possible issue is just obliviousness. We see examples of that all the time here. People asking where the bathrooms are when there are simple signs everywhere indicating this, or asking how to get to baggage claim when the biggest signs in the terminal give this information in 5 inch tall letters and arrows. We used to get the same issue at the movie theatre I worked at for years. Some people can't be bothered to read signs and they figure that anyone with an airport badge or in an employees uniform is here to do nothing more than answer their questions, no matter how inane. To be fair, at the movie threatre that was the case. Not so much at the airport, but I digress.

However, the most likely reason for ignoring the obvious coffee shop in favor of asking me where the well known national chains are is, I suspect, training. We are trained, by the constant exposure to commercials and the ubiquitous presence of these places, that if we want coffee and pastry, then Starbucks or Dunkin' Donuts is the place to go. You know the country runs on Dunkin'. We are taught through branding and advertisement practices, (which are becoming subtler and subtler) that these are the places you go for these products because only they do them "right."

Honestly? I have never gotten a coffee or a pastry from either of these franchises that tastes significantly "better" or "more right" than anywhere else, including when my spouse brews coffee for us in the morning. Every cup of coffee tastes different depending on who brewed it, how clean their instruments are, the quality of the water, and a hundred other factors that can change just by walking across the street to the other Starbucks. We have been convinced that because we got a product at a specific location then it must be right regardless of the actual flavor, consistency, etc. We are so well trained that we will be faithful to brands for brand-names sake, ignoring actual quality in the process. We will memorize a brand-specific menu and think that we can get these things the same anywhere without actually knowing what we are putting into our bodies. "Frappaccino"... "Dunkaccino"... Do you even know the difference between a latte and a cappuccino or what a macchiato is? Do you even need to know?

What I want to know is why. Why in the world do we trust big brand names? There are constant examples of criminal greed, fraud and indifference to public good...YOUR good...in the corporate world, generally from some of the biggest names. Why the hell do we trust them? In a small local store, the owner and employees are responsible for the business and business practices. It is not hard, should something happen as a result of this business' actions, to figure out who is responsible and who shoulders the penalty. In the corporations, the business itself is a singular entity for the purpose of public relations, taxes, and our relationship to them, but when something happens as a result of how the business is run, suddenly there is no single person who is actually responsible for how this business functions. We have seen this again and again. We continue to see it now as the economy is forcing the corporate world to eat their own.

And yet, we continue to cling to this idea that a big recognizable name means we can TRUST them, or even that we OWE them something and therefore must remain exclusive customers. This sounds like an abusive relationship to me. I for one am going to start working on a shelter for victims of economic violence, where we learn that corporate logos can't love you back, and that you don't need them to survive.