Pansynthesis

And that’s what I mean about how adult classifications drift towards oppressing the expression of gay people and feminists, unless you put a great deal of oversight into the system. I suggest that eliminating the “adult” classification is the better way to handle this, especially since real porn isn’t going to get dinged by it, since it’s so mainstream now.
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The problem really goes back, regardless of how this happened, to the danger in putting up an “adult” wall that could be misused in this way. Even by accident. It’s important to keep in mind that feminists and LGBT folks are the first people who get hammered when this sort of censorship mechanism is put into place. Once the wall is in place, it takes a lot of effort to police it to make sure this doesn’t happen. Consider, for instance, how Playboy and biographies of porn stars didn’t get hammered. Why not? Straight porn is so mainstreamed now that their own publishers don’t feel the need to label these materials pornographic. But people get easily alarmed by anything gay, which is assumed sexual even when it’s not. This affects tagging, and is the reason this happened.

Amazon needs to go above and beyond the usual spin machine, dismissive nonsense on this one. Why? Because the people attacked are the sort of people that are always under attack, and we’re a tad touchy as a group. We have a right to be—the deliberate abuses outnumber the honest mistakes 5 to 1 when aimed at gay people and feminists (and disabled people and depressed teens, to name two other groups who saw books about their concerns de-ranked), and that context means that people are going to need a little something extra if we’re going to believe you. And now that it’s been made pretty damn obvious that Amazon did in fact intend to give certain books demerits for being left-leaning and inclusive, they need to think even harder about how bad this is.
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