Sexerati | Page 3

Updates: Amazon removing queer, sexuality titles from front page search

More on Amazon’s ushering of queer & sexuality titles into a dirtier, ill-lit corner of their shelves: the LA Times blog asks why American Psycho remains indexed as any other book when Running with Scissors is buried, Edrants calls for a boycott, and Heather Corinna blogs at Amazon wondering why clearly marked explicit porn titles weren’t targeted when young adult books were. meta_writer (via debauchette) lists all the targeted books identifed so far.

Updates update: Craig Seymour’s account of what happened when he confronted Amazon on removing his books from front page search, & de-ranked author Kate Bornstein weighs in (via Sarah Dopp). Consumerist’s angle is “gay and lesbian books lose sales rank for some reason” and shows us what comes up now for Amazon searches for “homosexuality.” And about twleve hours after it all blew up, Amazon responds to the LA Times, calling this whole thing a “glitch.” Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon proposes the “glitch” could be driven by a campaign against specific books on sexuality (including one of the saddest sentences I have ever had to quote: “Anais Nin is dinged, but Henry Miller isn’t.”)

/ 2 Comments

Amazon removes sales rank from sexuality, queer titles

Rachel Kramer Bussel & Audacia Ray discovered this morning that Amazon no longer lists a sales rank for a number of their books. For a time today, Ray’s Naked on the Internet was displayed without cover photo or reviews. Heather Corinna notes that the feminist anthology on sexual assault, Yes Means Yes, has also been stripped of its sales rank. (Update from Heather: her own book, S.E.X., is gone, as are “a pile of YA repro health guides, but strangely, others are fine. Our Bodies, Ourselves’ Changing Bodies, Changing Lives, gone, Toni Weschler’s Cycle Savvy (about menstruation and charting), gone, but Michael J. Basso’s Underground Guide to teen age Sexuality, is fine.”)

Obv, I’m not linking to their Amazon listings. You need a dildo, I can link you to that, though: those results come up fine.

They’re not alone: a policy at Amazon is excluding many more books from being ranked, and the only official explanation so far is an email from an Amazon rep to a targeted author stating that:

“In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude “adult” material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.”

While there’s nothing new about writing on women’s sexuality being dismissed as a solely pornographic concern, that doesn’t explain why Young Adult & gay romance titles have also been removed from sales rankings. Or why Surrender the Booty 3 The Search for More Arse is a “considerate” search result to return, but letting me know how many people bought Full Frontal Feminism is not.

/ 8 Comments

#overshare

Maria Diaz has asked us to follow along with her SXSW panel, A History of Growing Up Online, right now as it goes down via #overshare on Twitter. (Quote: “We were the forerunners of blogs…“)

/ Add a comment

Karen Rayne & Karen Kreps Let Teens Self-Savvy: An Interview on Sex Ed Online

Sex @ SXSW is in its own full-swing: Sexerati has landed, been conservative for no decent reason about giving out promotional buttons (ask me for one!), and has had a chance to even bump into some of these fine panelists. Here’s the last in this interview series, a two-for-one with the co-presenters of Sex Ed Online: How Teens Self Savvy, Karen Kreps and Karen Rayne.

Dr. Karen Rayne provides advice and support to parents on how to educate their children and teenagers about sex and sexuality. Karen’s knowledge about adolescent development and education provides her with a solid background for guiding parents through these tricky conversations. She also occasionally moonlights as a sex educator for the children and teenagers themselves.

With more than two decades developing interactive content for the Web and computer-based training, Karen Kreps published the book, Intimacies: Secrets of Love, Sex & Romance, a collection of columns she wrote for The Good Life magazine. For seven years at Austin’s BookPeople, she’s hosted monthly public discussions about “Intimacies.” She blogs about relationships at True Intimacies. Through her company, Net Ingenuity, Karen enables other people’s success by helping them communicate clearly online and in print. She’s attended every SXSWi and twice served on panels.

MGG: I’ve heard a number of adult educators working with youth & teens around sex ed online express that they need support around how to approach youth-centered online spaces. How do you position yourself, as adults, in youth/teen sex education online? What role to you enter into online spaces as — as educators, as parents, as mentors, as one there to listen only and not jump in?

Karen Rayne: It’s important to strike a balance in these spaces. As an adult sex educator, I find myself primarily drawn to sitting back and listening. However, there are two times when it is appropriate to jump in as an educator and as a mentor: when someone asks me a direct question or when correct information is clearly missing.

By and large, teenagers are interested in adults’ thoughts and information. They just don’t want it shoved in their faces when they already have it. I find I do a lot less work and get a lot more respect from teenagers if I listen a lot and talk only a little and only when necessary. It’s the same, really, online or IRL. Read More »

/ 1 Comment

Sexting Suicide? Don’t Do It.

Elizabeth Wood deftly shreds MSNBC for laying the blame for a teen woman’s suicide on “sexting”:

I’m furious about the way this young woman’s story is being reported. Jesse Logan killed herself last July not because of the “dangers of sexting” but because of the dangers of sex stigma and “slut shaming.” She had sent some naked photos of herself to her boyfriend by cell phone. When they broke up he showed those photos to other people at their high school. Some of those people then viciously shamed and bullied Jesse.

(Also, I fear we need a sex panic chart. If you’re an infographic slut, get in touch, please?)

/ Add a comment

Rebecca Fox Will Not Just Be Quiet, Please: An Interview On Blogging as Bloodsport for Women

Rebecca Fox and Rachel Sklar are next in Sexerati’s Sex @ SXSWi series — for their panel, “Why Professional Blogging is Bloodsport for Women.” Rebecca is the Managing Editor at Mediabistro; Rachel was the Founding Editor at The Huffington Post’s Eat the Press, and is now with the media consulting firm Abrams Research.

First I got Rebecca to give me some answers far more concise than my questions themselves, on sex, gender, and being better bloggers, if not better people. I know. Read.

MGG: How do women open up their personal lives more online? Why is that what’s thought of as our “personal” lives is that much broader than it is for men?

Rebecca Fox: Social networking has cracked things wide open with respect to how much of our personal lives end up online, for both men and women. Through Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and other platforms, it’s become easy to be privy to formerly private interactions between people, along with information about where they are, who they’re with, and what they’re doing, frequently in real time. A byproduct of that is the sense that everything that’s online about a person who is using these technologies is fair game, i.e. open to discussion and commentary by anyone who sees it or has access to it. Women may not be doing more of this online than men, but what got me thinking about the idea of this SXSW Core Conversation were the different kinds of repercussions experienced, overall, by women compared to men.

MGG: For “professional” bloggers — we leave out so much of our private lives, or at least, we’re expected to. But even when we don’t explicitly write about who we’re dating or how we’re feeling or where we hang out and with who, all those details can get fleshed out for us by other bloggers, or in photos or on Twitter or whatnot. Does one have to blog as if those other stories don’t matter? Or is that a phenomenon of just particularly hyper-bloggy media cliques? How do we maintain integrity even if we don’t have control over our story?

Rebecca Fox: Hyper-bloggy media cliques, as you call them, do seem to increase the amount of online hay (comments, reblogs, etc.) that is made over the personal information that appears online. Read More »

/ 1 Comment

Keely Kolmes Soothes Geek Hearts: An Interview on Mental Health 2.0

More Sex @ SXSWi, this time with Keely Kolmes, Psy.D. Keely is a clinical psychologist in private practice in San Francisco, who has worked part-time as a Staff Psychologist at Counseling and Psychological Services at Stanford University for the past five years. Keely says, “I have been living my life online since 1993. Prior to becoming a psychologist, I worked in computer tech support. My 2009 SXSW Core Conversation, “Therapy 2.0: Mental Health for Geeks,” will be co-presented with Thomas Roche on Tuesday, March 17th at 3:30pm in Room 5B. We will focus on staying mentally healthy in an online world. You’re invited to come share your experiences.” I asked Keely exactly what I would ask were I in the audience (now you can have time to share, too).

MGG: Living a part of one’s life online, even what that doesn’t include sex, can bring on enormous stress that doesn’t even always seem real or reasonable to the person going through it. As a psychotherapist, how do you help the people that you work with normalize that stress?

Keely Kolmes: This is a big question, and an interesting one since, as a psychologist, I’d first want to gain a fuller understanding about the source of that stress and how it is manifesting in my client’s life. Is the source of stress internal, external, or both?

For starters, it would be useful to understand how my client is conceptualizing her online life. For some, there is a seamless integration between online and offline existence, but this is certainly not true for everyone. I like to have a comprehensive sense of my client’s relationship boundaries, level of privacy, and whether or not she is engaging in activities that cause her any embarrassment or regret. Also, some people consider their public online self to be a character or just an aspect of their personality while others do not compartmentalize it at all. I think it’s really important for both therapist and client to have clear, mutual understandings about these things, or it’s easy to make incorrect assumptions.

That said, assuming my client is comfortable with her online behavior, boundaries, and self, then learning ways to manage that stress is something we would work on. Read More »

/ 2 Comments

Judith Levine, on the teen sexting panic (that also wasn’t)

From her column at American Prospect, some smart cold water to throw on the the latest technological bogeyman, the mobile phone: “The sexual dangers to youth, online or off, may be less than we think. Yet adults routinely conflate friendly sex play with hurtful online behavior…[e.g.] the San Francisco-based Family Violence Prevention Fund, which calls sending nude photos ‘whether it is done under pressure or not’ an element of ‘digital dating violence.’”

/ 2 Comments

danah boyd on the MySpace sex panic that isn’t

“The Attorneys General - mostly angry at me and other researchers - have spent considerable time trying to publicly reject the ISTTF report that was published last month,” writes danah boyd. That is, the Internet Safety Technical Task Force’s findings are being combated not with alternate findings, but with PR, like Connecticut State Attorney General Richard Blumenthal’s latest media moment concerning the deletion of over 90,000 “sex offenders” from MySpace. Writes boyd, “We see a number like 90,000 and expect that it’s high and outrageous. But it is not more than would be expected by statistical patterns. And it’s not an automatic indicator of a problem.”

/ Add a comment