willametteLive.com || Painfully miffed

Painfully miffed
By Kitty Powell
from WillametteLive, Section Word
Posted on Fri May 01, 2009 at 03:01:34 PM PDT

The Twitterverse erupted in a sea of criticism on Sunday, April 12 when it was revealed that the world�s largest online media clearinghouse, Amazon.com, had de-listed over 57,000 items in its database � including many gay-themed books.

Within days, the Internet behemoth corrected what it called a �glitch� and had re-listed items such as Annie Proulx�s Brokeback Mountain, which had incorrectly been labeled as adult content. But the correction didn�t occur soon enough for many authors who felt that they had suffered from loss of sales and disappearance from what has become the most important marketplace for books.

While the Twitterverse has mostly died down about what has become known as �Amazonfail,� one Salem woman, erotica writer I.G. Frederick, is still tweeting away about what many have interpreted as an attempt at censorship by a company that has, over the last decade, forced many independent bookstores to close their doors.

At a meeting in Salem recently, I.G. Frederick passed her two most recent books wrapped in a brown paper package because she is still not ready for the people don�t know her by her pen name to know this: She is a purveyor of smut � and her brand of erotica has a Sado-masochistic bent.

Her first book, Broken, published in 2008, tells the story of how psychologist Jessica Richards got the way she is � how she transformed from a Louis Vouitton-wearing psychology Phd student forced by sudden poverty into an S&M relationship with a professor, into a powerful dominatrix with her own sex slave.

Her second book, Shattered, gives a further taste of what she�s offering and why it clearly doesn�t fit with the mainstream. It tells the story of how Richards who uses an uncommon, non-proven therapy to help a young male patient recover from past traumas. It was released concurrently with Broken.

�It is a cautionary tale,� Frederick said. �It gets people thinking about what they should and should not allow themselves to get into.�

This kind of storyline isn�t for everybody. Then again, the book was named one of the best erotica books of 2008 by a reader�s poll, so it is appealing to somebody.

That somebody includes a group of about 40 Salem residents who meet regularly at restaurants to share information about the S&M lifestyle. Frederick started the group, which includes people from all adult age groups and sexual orientations.

Again, not for everybody. For even the most open-minded of individuals, books like these can come across as completely beyond the pale, disturbing, and even subversive.

But the problem is not necessarily that these books exist, it is that I.G. Frederick exists in Salem � a community not particularly known for its tolerance of people with other lifestyles.

For people like Frederick, who is bisexual and who has lived with an African-American man as a white woman here in Salem, the Internet has long been a place to find acceptance among people whose lives and choices attract harassment from those around them.

�Salem is a very nasty town,� Frederick said. �My social life is mostly elsewhere.�

For people like Frederick, Amazonfail therefore represents a complete turnaround in what the Internet behemoth has meant to the marketplace. Where once Amazon represented a place where books by smaller publishers could find customers, the company�s increasing dominance over book sales and this surprising new technical glitch has many non-mainstream writers worried about censorship.

Amazon.com has responded to the controversy by calling it �an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error� and by promising to restore the titles � which include health and reproductive medicine in addition to homosexual content.

In the meantime, Frederick, who also writes science fiction under her real name, has much to do and can�t continue to lose days to the Twitterverse in her quest to raise awareness about Amazonfail.

�The Twitterverse has a short attention span,� Frederick said.

She�s got an erotica showcase to judge in Seattle at the beginning of the month and has over a hundred texts to read. And she is trying to sell her house so she can move somewhere more hospitable to people like herself � Portland, if she can afford it.