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It's a Baskin-Robbins world
Apr. 14th, 2009 09:18 amRegardless of the cause of Amazon's massive deranking fail and their response to it, the incident has put a focus on an ongoing problem regarding public perception and media and GLBT (or queer labeling of your choice) representation, in that it's all equated with sex. Which is why Heather Has Two Mommies gets hit with the Amazon Cataloguing Ban Hammer, among other problems. ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rm pointed out a good post in AfterEllen about this issue (acutally, you should just look at rm's post itself; it has several good links as well as some good discussion).
From my own perspective this brings up issues I struggle with myself. Despite being a reasonably intelligent and thoughtful person I recognize that I have problems when it comes to seeing people outside of binary classifications: man/woman, white/person of color, straight/not straight, vanilla/kinky, vanilla/chocolate. The norm/not the norm. It limits them and it limits me.
And there have been times I realized that I have trapped myself inside the box of equating everything about being not straight as being about sex.
My being straight affects several aspects of my life even if I'm not always aware of them. It affects not just how I go about having romantic and/or sexual relationships, but how I conduct myself in public, how I conduct myself at work, raising a family, health care, and so many other things that have absolutely nothing to do with sex. Now imagine every book about those subjects being tagged as having to do with sex.
Even if we accept that what happened with Amazon was a technical error that was completely innocent, it still happened the way that it did because of a larger problem that concerns all of us.
(Incidentally, apparently I only care about the Amazon issue because I'm just another one of those silly people in the homosexual community. Hey, thanks for having me - my heterosexuality iz pasted on, yay!)
rm pointed out a good post in AfterEllen about this issue (acutally, you should just look at rm's post itself; it has several good links as well as some good discussion).From my own perspective this brings up issues I struggle with myself. Despite being a reasonably intelligent and thoughtful person I recognize that I have problems when it comes to seeing people outside of binary classifications: man/woman, white/person of color, straight/not straight, vanilla/kinky, vanilla/chocolate. The norm/not the norm. It limits them and it limits me.
And there have been times I realized that I have trapped myself inside the box of equating everything about being not straight as being about sex.
My being straight affects several aspects of my life even if I'm not always aware of them. It affects not just how I go about having romantic and/or sexual relationships, but how I conduct myself in public, how I conduct myself at work, raising a family, health care, and so many other things that have absolutely nothing to do with sex. Now imagine every book about those subjects being tagged as having to do with sex.
Even if we accept that what happened with Amazon was a technical error that was completely innocent, it still happened the way that it did because of a larger problem that concerns all of us.
(Incidentally, apparently I only care about the Amazon issue because I'm just another one of those silly people in the homosexual community. Hey, thanks for having me - my heterosexuality iz pasted on, yay!)
