Today's outrage was that Amazon.com offered for sale a book entitled: The Pedophile's Guide to Love and Pleasure, a self published by Phillip R Greaves. If ever a book title was designed to provoke outrage this was it. A quick search on the book's title using our most well known search engine produced pages of tweet, blog and discussion board comments many along the lines of “I want to get this sick bastard and smash his brains out”. Right now it is hard to find facts about Greaves using online search as everything about him is buried under pages of this sort of comment.
So what is the book about? According to Yahoo News's reproduction of Sky news quoting Fox News the book's blurb says:
"This is my attempt to make pedophile situations safer for those juveniles that find themselves involved in them, by establishing certian [sic] rules for these adults to follow," …
It went on: "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 [sic] sentences should they ever be caught."
A blog on CNN.com states:
“The author of "The Pedophile's Guide to Love and Pleasure: A Child-Lover's Code of Conduct" said he published the controversial tome to address what he considers unfair portrayals of pedophiles in the media.
"True pedophiles love children and would never hurt them," Phillip R. Greaves II said in a phone interview with CNN on Wednesday.
When asked if the self-published e-book was a "how-to manual," he said, "there are certain parts that are advisory," which set out lines that should not be crossed. "Penetration is out. You can't do that with a child, but kissing and fondling I don't think is that big of a problem," he said.”
Initially Amazon seemed to be willing to hold a line on keeping the book available on its site. Sky news reported:
“In response to the criticism …. the online retailer said in a statement: "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."
The inevitable Facebook page campaigning for a boycott of Amazon rapidly appeared and some time last night (the 10 / 11th November) Amazon removed the book from sale.
Other self-published books by Greaves remain on sale there and on BarnesandNoble.com. All the titles on Amazon get a one star rating from user reviews but these reviews seem to all be written post the furore following publication of the Pedophile's Guide. It seems the Pedophile's Guide has got people looking at his books and - judging by the user reviews - even buying them, perhaps so they can enjoy the satisfaction of being outraged at them. Mind you, Greaves does give the reader who wants to feel self righteous and superior plenty of material to satisfy them given his interesting grammar and his lack of awareness that his word processor has a spell check.
But I wonder has anyone other than Greaves himself actually read the Pedophile's Guide before commenting on it. Remember: 'don't judge the book by the cover'. My guess is that if we could read the book most of us would find it was not worth reading and by the same token not worth the outrage either.
I don't know whether Greaves was being clever or idiotic in choosing the title of his book; was he wanting to provoke the outrage or was he too dumb to see it coming. Intentionally or not it was designed to whip up delicious feelings of outrage, anger and self righteousness against the monsters all right thinking people in society must hate. And I am one of those monsters.
0 comments:
Post a Comment