Amazon.com Promotes Guide To Pedophilia… Say What?

I’m scared shitless.  I’m about to go First Amendment on you.

For years I’ve been writing about ice cream trucks, trips to the salon to regain my Mojo, and my super-pup So-kr8z, but I’ve never tackled something controversial or political. Even writing about the intimate details of my endometriosis just feels personal and safe to me. My dabbles into “politics” consist of refraining from using the “F-bomb” during conference calls and voting from home in my electric blue, polar bear jammies in September. Suffice it to say the level of my discomfort in writing this post is palpable, but screw it, here goes.

Last night, as I lay in bed in the aforementioned pajamas, chawing on snacks, listening to the CMA awards (and remembering, when a song came on about cancer, why I don’t listen to country music anymore), I wiped the tears off my iPad in order to peruse Twitter and found the most appalling thing I had ever seen.

Colleen Lindsay — ex literary agent extraordinaire, new employee in Business Development at Penguin Group, and a constant source of my daily dose of publishing info and general humor — had posted a sort of WTF? tweet about a self-published book on Amazon titled, The Pedophile’s Guide to Love and Pleasure by Phillip R. Greaves II. The book blurb on Amazon.com written by Greaves himself made me choke on a pumpkin seed:

This is my attempt to make pedophile situations safer for those juveniles that find themselves involved in them, by establishing certian rules for these adults to follow. I hope to achieve this by appealing to the better nature of pedosexuals, with hope that their doing so will result in less hatred and perhaps liter sentences should they ever be caught.

I tried to ignore the fact that this daft dude can’t spell (and I tried to dispel the pumpkin seed lodged in my throat) in order to digest what this is saying. Is this the future of self-publishing? As a girl who’s working on a novel and trying to wrap my noggin around the future of publishing, this is beyond disconcerting.

I wondered… If I “doth protest too much” from my $1100 mattress, aren’t I grappling with the idea of censorship? I loathe censorship. I read banned books; I own them and caress their spines (though I do admit that this feels akin to saying, “I’m not racist, I have black friends”). Amazon.com certainly took a stand against censorship in allowing this book to be sold on their site. In fact, according to USA Today, an Amazon representative said, “Amazon believes it is censorship not to sell certain books simply because we or others believe their message is objectionable. Amazon does not support or promote hatred or criminal acts, however, we do support the right of every individual to make their own purchasing decisions.”

So I just have to ask: Isn’t the sale of this book “promoting criminal acts?” I admit that I haven’t seen the book, nor will I, and apparently Amazon.com has conveniently changed their “non-censorship” position (perhaps because of the thousands of “reviews” wherein folks claimed that they would be boycotting Amazon.com until this book was removed, but that’s just my uneducated guess). At what point do we delve further into this issue? I don’t want someone else deciding the dissemination of information I’m able to receive; however, I don’t feel fuzzy knowing that there’s a guide out there to perpetuate pedophilia and to promote “liter” sentences for pedophiles. Frankly, I’m at a loss.

You know what else bothers me? Aside from the First Amendment hoo-ha and the issue of censorship, as the manager of Lissa Rankin’s book tour, I am blissfully working my tail off to help promote her book What’s Up Down There? Questions You’d Only Ask Your Gynecologist if She Was Your Best Friend. It’s chock full of positive messages about loving oneself and one’s body, and helping to enlighten women about all of those things they don’t know about their bodies and might be afraid to ask. Yet here’s this guide to pedophilia book and, according to the LA Times, “two hours after Techcrunch posted news of the ebook on its site, the $4.95 ebook went from a sales ranking of 158,221 in the Kindle store to 5,668.” So here at Owning Pink, with all of our grassroots efforts to promote a positive book and Lissa’s message, we might have been outsold for a moment by Mr. Greaves and his guide to pedophilia?! Just… wow!

Still choking on seeds.