Amazon’s ebook marketplace downplays smut, says Noah Berlatsky.
Noah Berlatsky’s recent article at The Atlantic talks about the awkward position of pornographic literature in the Kindle marketplace: because Amazon isn’t primarily associated with smut, their products are a nice, safe platform for the large and primarily female market for dirty novels, but at the same time, because they’re not associated with smut, they’re awfully reluctant to have that market linked with them, despite its size and profitability.
By dispensing with book covers, and indeed with books, the Kindle has made it possible for readers to peruse 50 Shades of Grey wheresoer they go, without fear of scorn — and, for that matter, without fear of harassment. According to the (also pseudonymous) porn writer Venus Santiago, back in the 90s, when she purchased Black Lace titles at a brick and mortar store, “the clerk felt free to hit on me.” After that happened several times, Santiago said, she stopped buying in public. With the Kindle, though, you don’t need to buy in public.
That simple fact has been the key to the Kindle’s success. Sure, plenty of people now use it as their primary literary platform, but when it was starting out, romance and smut (to draw a basically-imaginary distinction) were the first success stories. This is, once again, the erasure of the female libido as an awkward fact nobody likes to acknowledge, a cultural practice that continues to help women feel ashamed, and men feel unwanted.
Photo—Masaru Kamikura/Flickr
Nuh uh, women are innocent flowers and the big bad men always hurtz dem wit der porn. Women are so angelic they need no porn!!11! 😛