Slashdot Mirror
Books With "Questionable Content" Being Deleted From ebookstores In Sweeping Ban
Nate the greatest writes "The Kernel started an uproar last week when they 'discovered' that the Kindle Store and other ebookstores sell adult content in the erotica category. None of the content is actually illegal, but it is icky enough that the major ebookstores decided to respond by removing anything even vaguely questionable. Unfortunately, they went too far, resulting in an act of censorship the likes of which we haven't seen since Paypal went after the indie ebook distributor Smashwords. The Daily Mail reports that WH Smith went so far as to shut down their website with the promise that it won't reopen until all self-published titles have been removed, and according to BBC News, B&N is also deleting content. Numerous authors have reported on KBoards that Amazon and B&N have removed far more than just the titles that feature questionable content like pseudo-incest; they appear to be running keyword searches and removing any title that mentions innocuous words like babysitter, sister, or teenager. And they're not the only ones; there's a new report that Kobo has jumped on the ban wagon as well."
Who decides? Isn't this a Shade of Grey here? Think that book will get banned as well, as popular as it is? (never read it and never will, but am aware of its cultural significance)
Fahrenheit 451?
Every time we complete some sort of cycle, discover a new tribe, a new people, new nation or continent, new media, new format, new distribution whatever, there's always this stupid witch hunt. -Oh no a person is saying/writing/portraying things I don't agree with, this must stop right now. Democracy is bad. Censor that shit right away! -burn all those books.
To make it worse there's this pseudo fanatical craze to get rid of nudity with a passion but violence? not so much. somehow nudity is worse...reminds me of the MPAA rating system. Sure you can show blood, but the naked human body? are you out of your mind?!
This is always the problem with controlled distribution, formats and media. Someone decides what's best for you.
A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
This is what digital books are going to get you , censorship, on the fly redactions and corrections to appeal to current political climates, and a simple refusal to sell anything that in anyway displeases the power elite.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Because that's chock full of incest, and we wouldn't want to apply our arbitrary rules inconsistently, would we?
I myself like Japanese anime and culture, and have read a few doujinshi which feature young anime characters in sexual situations, but...
>The National Crime Agency warned on Sunday that books appearing to legitimise child abuse "might feed the fantasies of paedophiles and in some cases encourage child sexual abusers to commit contact offences".
I'm sorry, but that's just bullshit.
Maybe we should ban first person shooters too because it might legitimize murder and encourage people to commit actual offences...
Anyone who can't tell the difference between an actual, human person and fictional character(s) are no different than the ones who abuse children, or murder, or rape women...
Erotica and romance novels are two completely different categories. Romance novels usually have some sort of plot or story that would function just fine without the smut. Erotica (aka plot? what plot?) would suffer as a story with the smut stripped out because it takes up the bulk of the content.
Romance is what women use to masturbate whereas erotica is what men use. That's been my experience of what the definition of the two are when it comes to policy.
have you actually READ any of the "romance" novels? romanticizing adultery? yeah that's there. lewd descriptions of sex? yeah that's there. just general descriptions about hot nights? yeah most definitely there.
ladies magazines and mens xxx mags stories are pretty much the same. what's the difference otherwise? well, the pictures of course. and that in the womens magazines half the articles are about how to get laid(the rest of the articles are just indirectly about it).
oh and they would NOT function without the smut. not by a long shot. how the fuck do you make a story about being an (american)indian in 16th century raped(romantically-consensually) by a sensuel colonist function without the smut about fondling breasts and being fucked while tied up?? turn a 4 page novellette into one paragraph??
lady of camellias is something that sort of works without the smut, by just implying the smut. the cheap stuff on womens magazines.. not so much.
oh and the only way to enjoy those stories is to get some hot chicks to read them whilst sipping wine(in university, IT guild ftw). it's better if you get some late victorian style smut though..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Women want more (about 200 pages) foreplay than men, what else is new?
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Please ban the following books as a threat to an Orderly Society. Also, the children. KThxBye!
* The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
* The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
* The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
* To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
* The Color Purple by Alice Walker
* Ulysses by James Joyce
* Beloved by Toni Morrison
* The Lord of the Flies by William Golding
* 1984 by George Orwell
* The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
* Lolita by Vladmir Nabokov
* Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
* Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White
* A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
* Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
* Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
* Animal Farm by George Orwell
* The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
* As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
* A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
* Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
* Winnie-the-Pooh by A.A. Milne
* Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
* Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
* Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
* Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
* Native Son by Richard Wright
* One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
* Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
* For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
* On the Road by Jack Kerouac
* The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
* The Call of the Wild by Jack London
* To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
* Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
* Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin
* The World According to Garp by John Irving
* All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren
* A Room with a View by E.M. Forster
* The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
Before anyone mods parent as trollbait, here are indisputable examples of Incest in the Bible:
1) And Cain went out from the face of the Lord, and dwelt as a fugitive on the earth, at the east side of Eden. And Cain knew his wife, and she conceived, and brought forth Henoch: and he built a city, and called the name thereof by the name of his son Henoch. - Genesis 4:16-17
2) Howbeit, otherwise also she is truly my sister, the daughter of my father, and not the daughter of my mother, and I took her to wife. And after God brought me out of my father’s house, I said to her: Thou shalt do me this kindness: In every place, to which we shall come, thou shalt say that I am thy brother. - Genesis 20:12-13
3) And Thare lived seventy years, and begot Abram, and Nachor, and Aran. And these are the generations of Thare: Thare begot Abram, Nachor, and Aran. And Aran begot Lot. And Aran died before Thare his father, in the land of his nativity in Ur of the Chaldees. And Abram and Nachor married wives: the name of Abram’s wife was Sarai: and the name of Nachor’s wife, Melcha, the daughter of Aran, father of Melcha, and father of Jescha. - Genesis 11:26-29
4) And the elder said to the younger Our father is old, and there is no man left on the earth, to come in unto us after the manner of the whole earth. Come, let us make him drunk with wine, and let us lie with him, that we may preserve seed of our father. And they made their father drink wine that night: and the elder went in and lay with her father: but he perceived not neither when his daughter lay down, nor when she rose up. And the next day the elder said to the younger: Behold I lay last night with my father, let us make him drink wine also to night, and thou shalt lie with him, that we may save seed of our father. They made their father drink wine that night also, and the younger daughter went in, and lay with him: and neither then did he perceive when she lay down, nor when she rose up. So the two daughters of Lot were with child by their father. - Genesis 19:31-36
5) The sons of Merari: Moholi and Musi. These are the kindreds of Levi by their families. 20 And Amram took to wife Jochabed his aunt by the father’s side: and she bore him Aaron and Moses. And the years of Amram’s life were a hundred and thirty-seven. - Exodus 6:19-20
And finally the best one combines incest and rape:
6) And Thamar came to the house of Amnon her brother: but he was laid down: and she took meal and tempered it: and dissolving it in his sight she made little messes. And taking what she had boiled, she poured it out, and set it before him, but he would not eat: and Amnon said: Put out all persons from me. And when they had put all persons out, Amnon said to Thamar: Bring the mess into the chamber, that I may eat at thy hand. And when she had presented him the meat, he took hold of her, and said: Come lie with me, my sister. She answered him: Do not so, my brother, do not force me: for no such thing must be done in Israel. Do not thou this folly. But he would not hearken to her prayers, but being stronger overpowered her and lay with her. [II Kings 13:12-14]
Someone was clearly brain damaged by high school. MOST literature contains sex. Certainly nearly all of the good stuff. This is because most humans have sex in their lives. It makes it important in narratives about humans. Joyce's Ulysses includes a guy masturbating in the bushes while perving on a cripple and a vivid description of a rimjob. Gravity's Rainbow is basically a 760 page dick joke. The Sound and the Fury is all about how women's liberation (promiscuity in Faulkner's mind) affected Southern men. McCarthy's Child of God has graphic descriptions of necrophilia. Very few major novels since the 1950s have been vague about sex. Even before then it was almost always there (what did you think the entire conflict of The Sun Also Rises was, or Dorian Gray, or Whitman's poetry?), it just wasn't as explicit or graphic.