Until Thursday morning, the frankly-titled, self-published e-book The Pedophile’s Guide to Love and Pleasure: A Child-Lover’s Code of Conduct was available for purchase on Amazon.com, and late Friday the retailer also pulled a book titled Understanding Loved Boys and Boylovers. The books’ removal by Amazon—despite the company’s initially defending their availability on its site, calling removal “censorship”—was a direct response to consumer outrage and media controversy.
Notably, Amazon still sells Loving Boys: Volume II (and used copies of Volume I, which is apparently out-of-print) by the late Dutch professor and convicted pedophile Edward Brongersma.
Although Amazon has declined to comment on the pedophilic books or their (temporary? permanent? conditional?) removal from the site this week, Amazon did publicly respond to an outcry against the sale of Understanding Loved Boys in 2002. Then, Amazon spokesperson Patricia Smith cited the First Amendment and said, “We believe that providing open access to written speech, no matter how controversial or ugly, is one of the most important things we do. And we will continue to make controversial works available in the U.S. and every where else, except where they are specifically prohibited by law.”
Right on.
But back to the matter at hand: Should these books be banned from Amazon’s stock, and should the two books be lumped into the same, perhaps ban-able category?
More information on the books, their authors and their content after the cut.
David L. Riegel wrote Understanding Loved Boys and three other pro-pedophilia books sold by Amazon (all of which have now been pulled) and has not spoken with the media. But according to the author’s description of Understanding Loved Boys on Amazon, Riegel views pedophiles as “sincere, concerned, loving human beings who simply have—and were probably born with—a sexual orientation that is neither understood nor accepted by most others.”
In the opening chapter, Riegel asserts that “there is no evidence” that children are invariably harmed by sexual experiences, calling the trauma associated with those experiences “very infrequent, almost to the point of being nonexistent”.
While he does offer a perspective on pedophilia that normalizes the behavior (seemingly likening it to homosexuality), dismisses victimization and comforts offenders, Riegel does not offer how-to advice for pedophilic activity. The author of Pedophile’s Guide, Phillip R. Greaves, does.
Pedophile’s Guide includes tips like using the finger of a latex glove as a child’s condom, and according to the e-book’s description Greaves’ authorial intent was to, among other things, “make pedophile situations safer for those juveniles that find themselves involved in them” by establishing adult-conduct rules which would, hopefully, “result in less hatred [for pedophiles] and perhaps liter sentences should they ever be caught” [sic].
Greaves told The Smoking Gun that while he did have sex with other children while still a child himself, he has never engaged in sex with a child as an adult. According to Detective Dustin Taylor of Greaves’ town of residence, Pueblo, Colo., Greaves is a “normal man” with no criminal record.
In this video, Greaves does not strike the viewer as normal.
Greaves did, however, tell TSG, “The best advice I can give a pedophile is, accept that masturbation is your best friend.”
While the content of these books is objectionable, it is not illegal. None of the above-mentioned books contains pornography, or graphic images of any kind—the one thing explicitly not permitted on Amazon’s virtual shelves. And Amazon continues to stock other books of questionable content, such as the Brogersma titles, Dearest Pet: On Bestiality and Mein Kampf.
In the ethical division between the freedom of speech and ideas and the unequivocal demonization of pedophilia, where do you stand?
Well… I think it’s important to distinguish between “censorship” and “curation.” A business owner deciding not to stock a product doesn’t constitute censorship, even if said owner does happen to be the Big Bad of the books world. They have no legal or ethical obligation to sell those books, any more than Powell’s or Broadway Books does. In other words–it’s not Amazon’s job to uphold the first amendment. (the fact that they have so much influence/marketshare definitely does mean their actions are worth considering in the broader context of our access to information, but… This is the bed we made when started buying everything on Amazon.)
While that’s absolutely true, Alison, since Amazon itself used the word “censorship” in regards to such removal, critics of this move using the term are just playing by the rhetoric Amazon itself used before backing down. Amazon cried censorship first; it’s their own fault if they’re being called censors now.
I’m with Alison that this is neither a first amendment issue or a censorship issue. If anything, they stand a chance of being on the wrong end of a civil suit if some aggrieved family discover that book and a little brown amazon box were found in a child molester’s (or bomb maker’s or what have you’s) home.
What I suspect is that Amazon applies a litmus test for these kinds of materials. If these books are being purchased in the same order as a crate load of Abnormal Psych books, then it’s probable that it serves the public to continue to provide them. If they’re being purchased along with, I don’t know, windowless vans, then maybe it’s time to pull the product. That, in my mind, would explain why they have changed their position on the issue.
@b!X It was totally on them for playing the censorship card.
I wonder if they were distinguishing between “self-censorship” and “censorship by majority”. I bet they get a billion letter writing campaigns to ban the sale of everything from Mien Kampf to Everyone Poops. In response to something like that, pulling the book could be seen as censorship, as opposed to autonomous curation etc.
The moral panic about this totally disregards the broader forces that cause violence towards children and sexual partners. Children are always more likely to be abused, physically or sexually, by a family member or someone they know, rather than an individual hiding in a windowless van with an amazon.com book as @atomic suggests. But rather than addressing the unequal power dynamic in the family, in schools, or in the church, we would prefer to flip-out as if one newly-printed book started a new child-abuse fad. This doesn’t even begin to address the media’s role in fetishizing underage women and mixing violence with sexual desire, or society’s disregard of non-statutory power imbalances (high-level politician targeting an intern comes to mind).
I’m not trying to defend abusive relationships with children, but if the panic is over books that merely broach the subject in an alternative way, such as Tony Duvert’s work, than I think it is more about a desire to avoid having an uncomfortable discussion about power, youth, and sex in our society that could point to mainstream institutions as culprits and not just lone wolfs. It seems silly to label this a ‘free speech issue’ when no one, including the Mercury, is willing to have a conversation on the issue, and instead just wants to reify whats ‘normal’ (to most Americans any letter in Savage Love wouldn’t strike the reader as normal). You can’t just draw a line at 18, label any desire south of that as a disease, and pretend like everything above it is perfectly fine.
Problem: solved. Now that we’ve taken away their how-to guides those pedophiles are going to have a pretty hard time figuring out how to molest anyone.
As long as they do not pull the Sam Adams book.
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&…
This begs the question…where would one find the book “Pedophilia for Dummies”? Guess you sick f***s are going to have to seek it out at Powells.