Regarding the sale of Amptoons.com (which I posted about last month), Hugo writes:
Barry, you owe your readers a public forum where you can further explain your decision, and offer those who are stunned and hurt an opportunity to express that to you directly.
It’s the right thing to do, and it needs to happen right now.
Okay. Here’s the same post, this time with the comments open.
* * *
Announcement: I’m not the owner of “Amptoons.com” anymore. I sold it a couple of months ago.
Five months ago, I was facing two problems. First of all, I was in real financial trouble – we were paying all our bills, but by a slimmer margin each month, and if things had kept on going that way it was only a matter of time before we’d come up short. Plus, one person in the house hadn’t been able to pay his rent in a long time, while another seemed on the verge of being unemployed (although as it turned out, that was a false alarm).
Second of all, I kept on having to beg my host not to shut down “Alas” for using too much server time – and in fact, “Alas” was briefly shut down more than once, and I was forced to remove a lot of functionality in order to reduce server load. My host kept on telling me that I needed a dedicated server, but the cost of that is well beyond anything I could consider.
Then a buyer approached me offering to purchase amptoons.com, so he could use it to improve search engine rankings for his clients (how that all works isn’t something I have any knowledge of). He offered a substantial sum of money – not enough to erase my money worries, but enough to ease the pressure for a while. Plus he offered to provide a free dedicated server for “Alas.”
The contract took months to wrangle, but here’s the bottom line: The new owner has absolutely no control over the content of “Alas.” However, “Alas” plus my cartoonist pages are the only parts of amptoons.com I have any access to or control over. The buyer also has the right to put in one or two inconspicuous links on “Alas,” positioned in a way that would make it unlikely that anyone but search engine robots would follow the link.
I was assured by the buyer that he would never host porn sites on “amptoons.com.” And I wrote into the contract that his link on “Alas” could never be a direct link to a porn site. But beyond that, I have no ability to control what the buyer does with his pages – the deal is that he has absolutely no say in what’s on “Alas,” but we also agreed that I have no say over what he does with his own property. And – as a couple of “Alas” readers have noticed – some pages I don’t own include links to porn.
[Edited to add: A couple of readers have speculated that I didn’t know that the new owner would link to porn on his pages. That’s not true; I kept the links off of “Alas,” but I knew that he would be putting links to porn on his own pages.]
I’m essentially in the same position as someone with a blog on “blogspot.com” – I don’t own the domain, and although I control what’s on my own blog, I don’t have any say over what’s posted on the domain other than my little piece of it.
I realize that some “Alas” readers will feel that I’ve sold out, or that this puts me beyond the pale. I’m genuinely sorry for that. For the record, I don’t feel I’ve been victimized (as one person suggested in email), nor do I feel like I’m a total sell-out. What I feel is this: I’ve made a compromise, one that I probably wouldn’t have made in a perfect world.
That’s all. And now, back to your regularly scheduled political rants.
* * *
New comments from Amp:
I warned the new owner that a likely result of this sale would be many other blogs delinking “Alas.” He said that didn’t matter to him and wouldn’t impede his profit; whatever his business model is based on, he isn’t concerned about that.
My views on porn: I’m not terribly pro-porn; most porn, like most mass media, seems sexist and harmful to me. The arguments that porn prevents rape or is in some way tremendously beneficial to society strike me as not at all supported by the evidence. On the other hand, I’m also not especially anti-porn, in that I don’t see porn as being particularly separate from or different than regular mass media, either in how sexist and racist it is, or in the harm it does. I’m convinced that there are other problems far, far more pressing than porn, and I think what I’ve written about over the years reflects that. If all porn disappeared from the face of the Earth tomorrow, I think that sexism, misogyny, and the wage gap would continue uninterrupted.
As I understand it, from the questions I asked before selling “amptoons.com,” the practical outcome of what the new owner does is that when someone searches for “porn,” they’re more likely to find his clients’ sites than other clients’ sites. I’m not thrilled with that, but I also frankly don’t believe it makes the world a worse place if porn company A gets ranked above porn company B in porn searches. Nor do I believe that I could have prevented such manipulations from taking place by refusing to sell the domain.
For me, this compromise is similar to the compromise I’ve made in the past accepting pay for cartoons from small publications who depended on strip club and escort ads for their income; or for being a secretary for various firms on Wall Street (some of those firms do, in my view, far more harm than porn ever has).
I’m not saying what I did was great. It wasn’t. It was a compromise, one that I felt I had no choice but to accept. It’s not something I would have done if I thought I could afford not to do it. It’s a bad thing, disturbing to me, and understandably disturbing (or much worse than disturbing) to my anti-porn readers. I know that some people who formerly liked me will now have lost all respect for me. I understand that, and I regret their departure; at the same time, my respect for them is undiminished.
That said, I’ve never been big on the politics of personal purity. It’s hard to be sure, because I’ve written thousands of blog posts and comments, but I don’t think I’ve ever criticized another feminist for being insufficiently pure in their personal life, their porn use, their income source, or the ads on their blogs.
* * *
One criticism of me that I think is especially strong is that I should have announced the sale of amptoons.com before it happened, to give people a chance to comment and to give other bloggers the chance to delink. It was wrong of me not to do that, and I sincerely apologize for that.
“Alas” reader “Curious” has usefully posted many links to other bloggers criticizing me on this thread. Some of the bloggers are people who have, as “Achilles and Patroclus” says, “the same folks who have been berating Amp for being insufficiently feminist for literally years now”; but others are people who have been quite kind to me over the years, and who I don’t think are knee-jerk Amp-bashers.
* * *
Comments are open for discussion (very much including criticism), but the usual moderation policies apply. Also, I want to remind people that I’m not at the computer all the time, so it may be many hours before I read comments.
This thread is for feminists, feminist-friendly, and pro-feminist posters only.
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As others have already pointed out: so like many men in need of money, you decided to turn pimp.
Well, no doubt the anti-feminists who find your blog welcoming and friendly will notice no difference.
A few questions: are you required to continue using the URL amptoons.com for your blog, or could you shift it to a new URL? Hopefully, you left yourself the discretion to move your own site in case amptoons becomes too degraded.
I don’t think I understand quite well enough why it is that owning the site gives a porn purveyor advantages in internet searches for porn. Is it something alphabetical?
Reserving judgment. I try to give everyone the benefit of the doubt.
I just want to say the only criticism I can see that is valid is that you should have told everyone before it happened, or at the very least, when it happened. Since you have heartfully apologized for that, I see no reason to berate you. I must say I’ve considered far worse things when confronted with difficult financial matters, and I don’t blame you for doing what you thought best for you.
As far as not being sufficiently feminist, well, that’s just plain old horsesh*t. if we all had to live up to some perfect standard of feminism I’m sure a great many of us, myself included would fail. My idea of feminism has always been to try to include as many people as possible rather than exclude people because they may have made one or two decisions over the course of their lifetime I deem “non-feminist”. If we applied that standard to everyone, (and really, what would that standard BE exactly?) I’m quite certain there is not a person in the world who would be able to be called a feminist then. And that just seems counterprodictive and silly.
I guess I’m just saying, I think you are most definitely sufficiently feminist and I don’t so much care about links I never go or can even find, so I’m certainly planning on continuing to read, learn and enjoy here at Alas.
Barbara: I can shift after one year, if things have degraded.
As for the owner’s business, I have no understanding of how it works, but I don’t think it’s alphabetical.
I’m not upset about it. I don’t think anyone needs to flash feminist credentials ever anyway. It’s your domain, you do what you have to do. I still feel welcomed, and I don’t feel pimped.
I still feel welcomed, and I don’t feel pimped.
Well, I don’t and I do.
As someone who has spent years online talking about how porn has negatively impacted my life and my marriage, it’s a huge slap in the face to find out that my visits to this blog has helped promote porn.
For me, this compromise is similar to the compromise I’ve made in the past accepting pay for cartoons from small publications who depended on strip club and escort ads for their income; or for being a secretary for various firms on Wall Street (some of those firms do, in my view, far more harm than porn ever has).
I’m not saying what I did was great. It wasn’t. It was a compromise, one that I felt I had no choice but to accept. It’s not something I would have done if I thought I could afford not to do it.
The difference here is that the compromise you have made affects others as well as yourself. Selling your cartoons or working for Wall Street is not the same as selling other people’s cartoons to dodgy publications, or using other people’s work to get an income from Wall street. But that’s what you’ve done here, you’ve sold other people, pimped other people’s time and effort and thoughts – and without a thought that you should ask them first about that.
Second comment is that you are dismissive of the porn industry adverts as “not making the world a worse place”. I wonder if your new owner had links to white supremacists or other race-hate sites, would you find that acceptable, or would that be a case of “well it exists anyway so why not ?”
I don’t know how important search engine traffic is to you. If it is, just make sure that this doesn’t happen to you… Some “search engine optimization” techniques will get your site removed from Google, as Google considers it to degrade the quality of their search results.
Kate and Kaethe;
Of course feminists do things that arent feminist–I’m wearing heels right now, for example–and none of us are perfect. But the critique of Amp goes beyond that. The critique is that Amp essentially sold the domain’s google rating, which was based mostly or in part on feminist cred, specifically to promote porn profiteering. Thats a different order than wearing lipstick or laughing at a funny but sexist joke or something. The idea being that Amp was feminist when that was useful, but not when not, and that what he sold was valuble in part because of the content, interest and support of a broad feminist community.
I’d like to see Amps response to those criticisms; as I’ve said elsewhere, I think the originally post totally skirts the issue. Rereading it though, made me feel a little bad for Amp, though becuase he obviously didnt feel great about this decision.
I’m with Delany above.
piny wrote: (in the Link Farm thread: )
I can’t tease apart the connection between what Heart and others are writing about Amp’s decision and their feeling about Amp personally –any more than I would expect them to do that about my opinions. It’s not going to happen, so why pretend ? I feel sympathy for the POV of folks like Delany and curious, but I’m not going to sit here and claim that I would do things differently if my back were up against the wall. In fact, I just heard from my accountant that my own back is about to meet the wall, big time. So there’s that coloring my vision, too.
Their reasons can be as genuine as the day is long. If I were to sell a color cover to a paper like The Mercury, I could understand their objections even though I don’t regard my work as pornographic. A huge amount of that paper’s income comes from the “escort” ads in the back. The fact remains, however, the sincerity of their objections doesn’t pay my bills. Would every one in that circle who heard the details of my financial troubles be amenable to my suggestion that if they were serious in their feminism, they could –oh, I don’t know– each pony up one hundred dollars for a small commission to keep me going for a year while I figured out what the hell to do ? I have my doubts. Usually begging from people who already don’t think much of you offers little but the opportunity to collect more reminders from them about the smallness of their regard.
Looks like I will have to remove this site from my daily reading list. I cannot in good conscience and knowingly allow my visits to this site help porn purveyers.
amp–thanks for the updated comments, they were useful.
I think it’s worth trying to figure out how much and in what way this deal helps porn purveyors, though.
If, as has been suggested elsewhere, the main difference is that now one porn site is a little bit higher in a Google ranking than another porn site, I have a hard time getting up in arms over it.
If, on the other hand, this means that browsers who google “feminist” will get porn, well, that’s clearly very very serious.
A and P
It means that Porn site A will list one notch higher in search results for porn than Porn site B. No more than a notch at most: the blog rank at this domain is not high enough to influence more than one or two notches in search results.
Actually, also the opposite _may_ happen. I’ve been looking at the pages and what could happen is people searching for porn, will end up at a pro-feminist site.
Amp, thank you for opening this up. I confess that I am so technologically illiterate that I still don’t fully understand the mechanics of how all of this works (SEOs, or whatever they are.)
I have every intention of continuing to read Alas, and I honor the work of this blog and of you, Amp. Opening up a comments thread is a big step forward. My hostility to commercial porn remains kneejerk, absolute, and powerful, and I remain disappointed that this has happened.
At the same time, I wasn’t in your shoes, Amp. I don’t like what you’ve done; as a feminist man it troubles me greatly for the reasons I made clear at my blog. But I am grateful that we are to have dialogue about this. Thanks for being willing to listen, and to offer a more detailed explanation. Your sincerity is appreciated and acknowledged.
As one who tends to hammer the “personal purity” issue a a lot, your point in that regard is taken.
Curiosgryl,
I think your argument only stands if the “official feminist position” (if there ever could be such a thing) is that porn is inherently antifeminist and bad. I’m not a super porn lover, I definitely think it can do great harm, particularly as a previous poster said for individual marriages and relationships. I also think it’s not unlikely it contributes a great deal to patriarchy. But I personally am not amped up about porn. And I am most certainly NOT the only feminist out there who feels that way. Do think it’s fabulous? Not so much. Do I think it’s evil incarnate and that anything that even remotely, no matter HOW remote contributes to its existance is automatically bad? Nope. I think it’s a divisive issue that has distracted the feminist community far too long far too much. There’s not really anything to be done about that, it’s not the only divisive issue, nor will it be the last, but it’s just not all that important to me personally, I do NOT feel that it degrades the quality of THIS site at all.
I guess, I could draw a parellel like this. Let’s pretend I have a blog (I don’t, but let’s pretend). Let’s pretend that this particular blog is a space that is frequented by a LOT of people who are highly intelligent and contribute a great deal to the intellectual moral discussions I host. I post a lot of incredible feminist friendly analyses, I am open and honest about criticisms, and in general provide an incredible service to an online feminist community by inviting engaging and productive discussions about a variety of issues (all of which I think this site does). Now, let’s say that as a way to earn a little extra cash, I am a passion parties consultant, which is tangentially tied to the porn industry, and I have a link on my site to my passion parties order stuff and vice versa, as an attempt to increase traffic to both places and hopefully be able to sell more products. What I have done is actually much more eggregious than what amp has done because I openly linked to it solely to gain financially.
Now, I am supporting the porn industry, and probably pissing off a lot of readers. So be it, but it does not detract from the work I do on my blog that provides information and discussion to a wide variety of people. Arguably, I may have done a disservice to my blog because I may have pissed people off enough to make them leave my site, and whenever engaged and critical brains leave, that has the potential to harm the discussion and productivity overall. HOWEVER, the choice to leave is theirs, and I can’t very well be asked to NOT do something for myself that I deem necessary on my OWN blog simply because it might piss people off.
Granted, my views on this may be biased because I start from a position that porn is not really something to concern myself with anyway, but overall, I don’t think
#1) I have any right to tell amp what he can and can’t do with his own damn site
#2) that it’s my job to judge how he makes ends meet, even if it isn’t an optimal solution. It’s not illegal, and I don’t think it sufficiently harms anyone (except maybe their feelings, and well, if people had the right to yell at me everytime I hurt someone’s feelings, no one would ever stop yelling at me)
and most importantly
#3) it does NOT take away from the service he has already provided and presumably continues to provide with his insight, analysis and ability to create a forum for productive discussion (this is NOT an easy task).
And I have to say, and I may get flamed for this, but I don’t think Amp would be taking nearly as much heat if he were a woman. Let’s be honest, it’s NOT always easy to be a man and be a feminist, and there are few people I know who are as passionnate about social injustice, particularly gender discrimination as Amp happens to be – in SPITE of the fact that he is a man. I’m not suggesting we should go easier on him because of that, nor am I suggesting he get a cookie for being a downright decent human being, but I DO think he deserves the same respect a woman who dedicated as much of her being to feminism as he does would get from other feminists.
This is a little tangential, but I’ve been reading this site for a few months now, and it’s not the first time Amp has come under criticism for not being “feminist enough” and I can say from my own personal perspective that I really believe if he were a woman the criticism would be much less and more diluted than it currently is, and I just think that is a shame.
I guess my response is in general, if you feel that this issue completely undermines all the other things on this site, then I suppose you are free to go about your business, though I do think it is a shame that you feel that way. I can say with certainty, I do not feel that way. Naturally, I can only speak for myself.
ms_xeno, I have seen your artwork on walls and in your portfolio, and you know how much I admire your take-no-prisoners kind of feminism, and I’d like to think of myself as the kind of person who would help you out financially if you really needed it and it were possible for me.
That said, we both know that if you were really strapped for money one small picture of your thonged ass in the “escort” (hate that lying bullshit) pages in the back would garner more money to pay your bills than a whole front cover would. The sincerity of your objection to paying your bills that way is something I utterly understand.
There are a group of individuals that, through the years, have looked for any excuse to attack Amp, that’s all that this is (possibly more than a little jealously is also involved–these same individuals always rant a bit when BLOGs other than their own succeed in some way or another).
To those of you who feel that being here supports porn, do you really feel that the daily outpouring of thoughtful ideas and discsussions that occur right here on the main pages is somehow trumped by a link within a link (within another link?) that rates porn sites?
Really?
And everything else aside, maybe we should talk a little bit about entitlement, and the notion that some folks seem to hold that the domain Amp worked to build is somehow theirs to control?
SMM
“Comments are open for discussion (very much including criticism)”
Okay, I’ll take this to heart.
A lot of your analysis seems invested in denying that porn causes harm, or minimizing the extent to which porn harms. I think this undermines your apology.
Also, I’m not sure you’re in a position to make statements like, “If all porn disappeared from the face of the Earth tomorrow, I think that sexism, misogyny, and the wage gap would continue uninterrupted.” Why assert this? You don’t know for sure, and the degree of the impact of porn isn’t what’s at issue here.
A debate about the extendt to which porn is harmful is a red herring; what’s being examined are your actions — how the announcement was initially made, why were comments closed so that the announcement post would drop to the bottom of the page, why was the contract in negotiation for months without discussing it at this site and using readers as a sounding board, etc.
I see you give Hugo a nod and a link at the top there, when other feminists have been writing about this prior to Hugo, and at length. This struck me as a bit disingenuous, and also leaves you open to accusation that you ignore women bloggers, but when a male objects, you quote him and respond. I think that gets you off on the wrong foot.
Finally, I don’t think it’s a question of a “politics of personal purity”. I think that’s an attempt to reframe this issue, and makes the critics sound a bit priggish. It’s about a conflict of interests and the good faith of your readers and contributors at a site that represents anti-racism, anti-sexism, and has that privilege list link roundup as one of its resources.
“I also frankly don’t believe it makes the world a worse place if porn company A gets ranked above porn company B in porn searches.”
This isn’t what’s at issue. What’s at issue is your decision to take part in this system.
I think you did have other choices.
This comment is from someone who is not a regular reader of Alas, FWIW.
My feelings are fairly jumbled. I really hate porn, on the other hand I also hate a lot of other things — like Vogue Magazine and most of the entertainment industry, and yet, I go to movies and buy magazines, and I rarely stop to consider whether, for instance, buying the New Yorker supports Vogue (I don’t think it does, but you get the idea). On the whole, I think it’s more important that voices in support of feminism have a home, even if it’s not as ideologically pure as I’d like it to be, and I see porn as being more of a symptom than a cause of the objectification of women. So on those grounds I don’t exactly give Amp a pass, but I can understand why it’s a compromise he feels he could make under the circumstances.
I take it some of the criticism has been directed either at Amp’s inability to predict the likely outcome of the sale of amptoons.com, or at his not having dug his heels in sufficiently deep to prevent an outcome that he at least *said* he wanted to avoid. In particular, the wording:
leaves a noticable gap between what was judged important enough to get written into the contract versus what was deemed OK to rest on assurances.
Myself, I’m not going to mount an anti- (or pro-) porn manifesto. I just wanted to point out that some of the uproar seems to boil down to people feeling that Amp misled them in the initial announcement about precisely what his commitments were.
SourDuck,
The issue of the harm porn does speaks directly to the issue overall – in regards to coptation or “selling out”. If Amp thought that porn was evil and extremely harmful, then it would be disingenuous for him to say, but I am willing to make that compromise. If he thought it as horrible as many of those criticizing him, then the criticism of coptation makes a lot of sense. If you take what he is saying at face value, then it makes absolute sense that while he doesn’t see this as a preferable solution, he felt it was necessary at the time, and who are we to judge that?
And, what pray tell do you suppose his other options would be? In the future, if his back is up against a wall and he needs some support, should openly tell all his readers, and all other feminist sites about his PERSONAL affairs and ask for help? Really? I think it’s disinengenuous for a person who is NOT a regular reader of the blog to step in and say he was wrong… if you weren’t here before, then what do you care?
“I think you had other choices”
This comment in general really strikes a chord with me. It’s about the least feminist position I’ve ever heard. ‘I don’t actually know the circumstances you were under, nor do I know you at all (presumably, since I’m not even a regular reader of your site), but I don’t AGREE with the decision you made, so I am going rationalize that there MUST have been another way and suggest that YOU made the WRONG choice. And in fact there had to be SOMETHING else out there, and you should have been smart enough to see it and do it, regardless of how much personal stress and other factors are going on in your life (of which I have no knowledge) , because in hindsight, I can see that it was just WRONG.’ Wow. Not judgemental at all, no siree.
I noticed that too.
To me, this sounds like you knew full well that what you were doing would be viewed by many of your readers as beyond the pale. And yet, you didn’t allow your readers to make the choice for themselves by disclosing what you were doing prior to closing the deal; you made your own choice and forced those who would have voted with their feet to be complicit in something that they would not have supported had they had all the facts.
one more thing and then I promise I’ll stop. Has anyone actually been able to FIND these porn link things? I’m still not sure what exactly happens with the ranking of the sites stuff, but I just did a google search for amptoons, alas a blog, feminism and a bunch of random women and things, and you know what? The closest thing to porn I found was other blogs talking about this issue. Granted, I did not search beyond the top 10 page, but I never really do that, and I generally don’t think a reasonable person looks at thing 7239 that pops up in a google search.
Maybe some will argue that’s a moot point, but I really don’t think it is…
Oh merde, Sam. How could I have forgotten that you’ve already seen my recent stuff ? You see what five hours sleep a night does to me. Anyway, your words are appreciated. By the same token, if you or somebody like oneangrygirl wanted a piece for a feminist benefit or the like, I would definitely see my way clear to donating it;So long as I wasn’t so hard up as to be living under a bridge or the like. :)
zuzu: “To me, this sounds like you knew full well that what you were doing would be viewed by many of your readers as beyond the pale. And yet, you didn’t allow your readers to make the choice for themselves by disclosing what you were doing prior to closing the deal; you made your own choice and forced those who would have voted with their feet to be complicit in something that they would not have supported had they had all the facts.”
Why should Amp have mentioned this to his readers ahead of time? Where is the dividing line between ‘community’ and personal space?
When did the feminists of weblogging have their secret meeting and hammer the rules by which the rest of us maintain our weblogs, or suffer the consequences?
The people who have guest weblogger here have some cause to quibble and perhaps Amp will need to remove their posts.
And if the rest of you don’t want to give this site any Google juice, then use rel=”nofollow” in your link and Google won’t follow it. You can even modify your past links using SQL (I’ll provide instructions if you need them).
By all means, remove a link from the blogroll. You mean, you all still have blogrolls? I though it was incidents just like this that demonstrated the tyranny of blogrolls.
I’m curious, thoug, zuzu and by proxy the other Feministe readers: what more do you want? To have Amp remove your comments in the past? Who cares about comments in the past? Seriously.
I am breathless with astonishment at the feminist weblogger responses to this, and not because I feel an overwhelming desire to defend Amp, as much as I feel a necessity to defend each weblogger’s ownership of our spaces. I just had in another weblog a person told me to stop calling myself a feminist because I didn’t agree with her.
Excuse me?
Amp wrote his views, his regrets, and he did so in uncompromising fashion, accepting full responsibility for his actions. But I get the idea that you all want more from him, and I can’t figure out what it is.
To be honest, I can’t figure out what it means to be a ‘feminist’ weblogger any more, either, because I didn’t attend the Secret Meeting where you all defined the rules.
Unbelievable. Incredibly disappointing. I feel betrayed in my trust in all of you, and that my links have gone to promote a view I can no longer tolerate. You all should have discussed with me, first, that there is now a predefined behavior and belief system we must follow to be ‘feminist’ weblogger.
I picked Hugo out because he is the one person who emailed me personally asking me to open up such a thread.
Hopefully my history will show that I don’t hesitate to link to women bloggers.
Why should Amp have mentioned this to his readers ahead of time? Where is the dividing line between ‘community’ and personal space?
So those who prefer not to support porn in any way, shape, or form could avoid doing so. Considering this is blog contributed to, and visited by, a large feminist population, is it really that much of a stretch to think there might be antiporn folks? By being secretive and asking for those specific things from the purchaser, like Zuzu said, it shows that Amp knew that what he was doing would piss off a large chunk of the community. And that’s pretty shitty.
As for the dividing line between “community” and “personal space”, I’d say it’s a community when you have a huge contingent of guest bloggers that create the bulk of the content. I haven’t thought of this as a personal blog in a long time, but a collective that just uses Amps name.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but…..
Visiting Alas does not increase the rating of this site. Visit as many times as you want, bring billions along with you and the Google ranking does not rise. Linking, on the other hand, will increase the Googleranking. So, delinking will lower the ranking of Alas, but not visiting has no effect.
(None if which is to say that if you feel betrayed that you should continue to visit this blog. If amptoons had been sold to white supremacists, for example, I wouldn’t visit – whether or not that had an economic impact on said theoretical purchasers)
As to the criticisms around…
I think that there are some valid points to be made (especially if Amp hasn’t explained why he didn’t choose other options). However, the ignorance of some claims amazes me. How could one blogger of long acquaintance (and some of her commenters) think that Amp was the one writing the pron reviews? Has she never actually read Amp’s writing? Perhaps she is just unable to distinguish one writing style from another? If Amp were a pron purveyor would he have sold his domain name? This adds little credibility to the insults that follow from both blogger and commenters. There are also pile-ons from those who never thought much of Amp (or outright hated him) in the past. I find these, for the most part, to be without value.
Given all of that, one of the most enlightening things for me was how some in the anti-pron camp don’t consider those who are pro-pron or undecided or neutral to be able to be considered feminist. I guess I kind of knew it already, but that really drove it home.
Wow.
Look in the sidebar — who wrote most of the posts?
Of the last 21 posts, 10 are by Amp, 8 are by other people, and 3 are link farms/carnivals posted by Amp. IME, that may be technically be “mostly” his posts, but it’s also a huge portion written by others.
Kate L;
I think I agree with you and amp in general about the importance of pron, and the idea that a lot of our culture is hateful and violent toward women. However I think it does matter what pron, or tv show or whatever is actually linked in this instance and what amp could have reasonable expected when he made the sale. In this case, the stuffi is pretty nasty and hateful, in my opinion. The link is at the bottom of the page, something like “software reviews.”
I wonder if folks would object less if it was a link that promoted CSI Special Victims Unit or Calvin Klein underwear.
For the record, I think amp was wrong about this, but I like this blog and hope it continues to be a place where feminist discussion happens. The main thing that I find upsetting about this is that amp seemed to know that this step might piss a big section of his feminist readership off and drive them away. I hope that doesnt happen.
This is the last time I will be posting, for a while this has been a hostile environment for radcial feminists anyway.
This is from one of the pages up on ampttons now in the “web reviews” section:
I’m Brazilian, and I know full well this kind of targetting of my kind as being lascivious and in need of being “scooped up” just walking down the street.
Yeah, Amp, you needed the money. Well guess what, I need to be safe and I damn sure will never support this kind of stereotyping, which has does real damage to me. I give up on trying to open your eyes, you are beyond sick.
Amp,
Let me start by saying I genuinely appreciate the work you have done, and the support you have given to Mary’s and my blog.
However, the biggest problem here — and you do seem to acknowledge this in your post — is the lack of clear disclosure. With disclosure, readers could decide for themselves whether to come here, and could judge for themselves whether an underlying financial arrangement was affecting what you write. Without full disclosure, though, it was both inevitable and foreseeable that many readers would end up unknowingly supporting traffic they abhor.
My view is that you’ve earned the right to be judged by more than one error of judgment, but I would also urge you to think beyond an apology to concrete steps that will mitigate or undo some of the harm.
Jake Squid;
Thanks for that clarification on the links/visits–that helps. I knew it didnt make a whole lot of sense to “stop coming here” as a direct action, which seems to be the motivation of some.
Yeah, Jake, what I know supports what you said — google rankings are improved by *links*, not visitation.
Thanks to whoever put in the code for asking google not to follow your link. I’ll probably apply that to my site so that I can still send my visitors here, but not support the pornographer’s endeavor.
But I’m certainly not going to stop coming here, even if I’ve stopped commenting for the most part. This blog contains interesting, thoughtful analysis written with a different tone than many of the other feminist blogs I read.
I also disagree that this is somehow more like “pimping” than publishing in a magazine that contains advertising for “escort services.” The money that ends up in one’s pocket either way is still, to some extent, earned by the women.
I’m relatively anti-porn, but I have to say that I really don’t think this act is any more heinous than the compromises I make in my everyday life. I don’t mind criticism of this any more than I mind criticism of blow jobs or makeup or population growth or people who live in suburbs. This is a controversial decision, which is in some ways an act of complicity with a system many of us disapprove of. It should be analyzed and considered and discussed and reacted to.
But to throw out the entire endeavor of this blog because of one ideological conflict seems, to me, a strange reaction.
“By the same token, if you or somebody like oneangrygirl wanted a piece for a feminist benefit or the like, I would definitely see my way clear to donating it.”
It’s likely I’ll take you up on that offer at some point. FYI, oag is an accomplished collagist herself; I have one of her more disturbing creations in my home office.
Not just porn either…racist porn. Amp has really struck a deal with the devil. I’m sorry but how can anyone in good conscience read this blog after learning that amptoons is in league (or extremely conplicit) with racist pornagraphers? For goodness sake people, wake up!
Sourduck, sorry not to respond to the rest of your post, but Kate in comment #24 explained well why I think my view of the harm of porn does matter. However, I can certainly understand why it wouldn’t matter to you, even though it does matter to me.
To the many people (both here and on their own blogs) who have said that I went about this the wrong way: Obviously, you’re all correct about that. I think that because I felt bad about making this deal at all, I didn’t want to think about it; and not doing an immediate announcement was one way of avoiding thinking about it. I know that’s no excuse.
Well, I’ve gone out in the open, so people can delink “Alas” or add “nofollow” codes if they want to. Which is what I should have done in the first place.
Beyond that, I’m open to suggestions. Seriously.
A question for the pro-porn people: whenever discusions about the misogyny and abuse in porn arise, the pros will say that they don’t endorse that nasty stuff, no, just the egalitarian woman-friendly kind that has nothing to do with degradation, abuse and exploitation of women.
They say they don’t like the grotty, racist sexist stuff, yet it’s the grotty, racist sexist stuff that is being linked to on this site – so why are they still defending it ? Why ?
On a very basic, down to brass tacks level, I find this whole “obligation” premise extraordinarily difficult to swallow. Barry provides this space, the bandwidth and the forum here at his own expense and could shutter it today if it were his choice. He could close commenting altogether (which would reduce his bandwidth costs significantly) and disallow the practice of permitting others (of all stripes) to flog their personal agendas on his dime and in his space. If there is obligation because an alleged “community” has been created here, it’s hardly an obligation on the part of the host.
As to an obligation to people who are linking? Come on. You link to a site at your own risk. At any time its content or ownership or format could change. If you aren’t monitoring sites on your blogroll on a regular basis and adjusting as necessary when they no longer fulfill your personal criteria for linking, that’s no one’s fault but your own. If you aren’t aware that your linking has greater ramifications, if you permit search engine robots to roam your site, that’s no one’s fault but your own. If you feel that you need to make public announcements about your blogroll (Is this 2001? Does anyone care any more? Are we still playing that ‘who links me?’ game?) and feel some need to distance yourself from other blogs as if anyone notices who is or isn’t on your blogroll or pays attention to the content of the numerous other blogs you may happen to link to on any given day enough to think that you may or may not support everything that the other blog authors think/write/say/do and will pass judgment on you as a result, that’s no one’s fault but your own.
This has devolved into playground slambook stuff. If you don’t like something that you’ve seen or learned about a blog or its author, you know how to delete a link. But this fist-shaking, hair-rending “you sold us out, you owe us X” stuff is just nonsense. You’re not owed diddly squat, folks. A hyperlink is not a relationship. A blogroll is not an inner sanctum of friends or a blanket endorsement.
ohno: in part because we don’t have a clue what you’re talking about. I just went and found the reviews section. Some of it looked vaguely unpleasant, but not obviously racist.
Also, until we find a way to end wage slavery, you can expect this to keep happening.
Why was my post banned? It might have educated hf.
I don’t like the grotty, racist sexist stuff, and I’m appalled that Amp chose to contract with the people who produce it.
I haven’t been around this site long, so perhaps I shouldn’t say anything, but I consider Amp’s decision to be a particular slap in the face to anti-sexist men. As a prominent male pro-feminist, he must have — or at least should have — known that his crap would wind up splattering on other men who profess to support feminism.
You’re right, ohno, that this isn’t a tough call. This isn’t about whether there can be non-sexist, non-oppressive porn. This is about whether you ally yourself with the people who produce and distribute the stuff we all agree is misogynistic, nasty garbage.
And yes, this is Amp’s site. But he didn’t sell his art, or his prose, or his blogroll to these people. He sold them his visibility. And it’s in large part his readers and friends who built that visibility.
What he sold was a commodity because of all the folks who have linked here over the years, and for no other reason. All of those links have, with this deal, been transmogrified into market share for pornographers and coin in Amp’s pocket.
And that, frankly, sucks.
Amp–its good that you are open to suggestions. I hope your strongest critics take you up on that. I wonder what Hugo things.
As for me, I dont have any reasonble ones. It seems like your firmly in the pickle of running a feminst weblog supported by pron.
Maybe you could give away some of the $$ to a good cause or something. Maybe you could commit to moving on from the domain when the contract expires. I dont know whats fair or makes sense.
A lot of people (Shelley) have made strong arguments that you’ve done nothing wrong and owe nobody anything, but it doesnt seem like you feel that way.
saltyC I dont think your post was banned. Maybe it got caught in a prn filter :)
I really feel, and perhaps I am the minority in this, that Amp did what he had to do to support his extended family. We were not in his shoes, do not know the whole extent of his situation and cannot begin to grasp what he was feeling. He is linked now to sites that admittedly he would prefer not to be linked to. He made a mistake, and now, I would say it is time to move on. I like the conversations here, and learning this doesn’t change a thing to me.
Amp,
I intentionally avoided suggesting what concretely you could or should do. The reason was that I felt it would be presumptious of me, both because I don’t face the financial circumstances that led you to this decision and because I don’t want to speak for people who were hurt by the decision.
That said, I could imagine several approaches:
You could seek to get out of the contract. They’re not obligated to agree to that, but they might. That leaves you in the same financial situation, and I don’t know whether advertising/contributions/selling your artwork can close the gap, but you have a lot of traffic so they may.
You could migrate your blog to another site as soon as you are allowed under the contract (I think you said a year). In the meantime, you could consider whether (consistent with the contract) there are changes you could make to the blog structure that would minimize the search engine effect. (For example, you could have a link on the front page that gave novices clear instructions how to use a “no follow” code should they choose to do so.)
Alternatively, or in addition, you could consider donating the proceeds relating to the period before full disclosure to an anti-porn organization. If understand the timing and situation correctly, you’d still have something like 90% to address your financial concerns, but you would have divested yourself of any benefit from the non-disclosure period.
You could ask your readers (in a post) for suggestions, recognizing that some would be more helpful than others.
Whatever (if anything) you decide to do, do something that you honestly feel is right, explain yourself, and then keep on with the good work you’re doing.
I don’t see a problem with Amp’s having sold his domain to a company of this sort, and I certainly don’t see how this change is sufficiently grievous to justify the reaction here. He sold something that was his, with the proviso that a blog people enjoy remain intact. Good on him.
I’m disgusted by the reaction here. A lot of people, none of whom were paying for this service, have been pretty quick to tell this guy how he should spend his money – that he should have gone even more broke for the sake of maintaining their comfort level on a freakin’ blog.
That last bit bears repeating: this is a blog – Ampersand’s online diary. He shared it with guest posters and commenters, but it’s his own in the end.
Amp isn’t a journalist, and nor has he claimed to offer up unbiased facts. If he had, then his readers deserved a full disclosure of his financial entanglements. Since he never did that, he’s a private citizen with all the rights of one.
If you don’t like the do-or-die deal he made to secure his finances, tough: I can’t imagine a single poster here going into hock to preserve the purity of Alas.
This is racist (from the “Ball Honeys” link on the Amptoons Review page):
“Review of Ball Honeys
Score: 87
Sub-Section: Ethnic
Company: BangBros Online
Date: Jul 16, 2006
Ball Honeys is the premier BangBros ethnic site. BALL. Black, Asian, Latina, Ladies. I don’t think I can be any clearer than this. Some of the finest ethnic babes around. All featured in hot scenes, new every week. This is actually one of my favorite sites. The girls they find have the hottest asses around. Nothing beats a big, round booty. Nothing beats the Ball Honeys. Each week, the boys at BangBros deliver a new ethnic mama and get down to business.
This is anti-lesbian:
Review of We Live Together
Score: 84
Sub-Section: Lesbian
Company: Nasty Dollars
Date: Jul 14, 2006
We Live Together is one of the best lesbian sites out there. If you love watching them play and get wild, you’ve found the best place to see it. Two college girls go out every week and rope in the cutiest girl they can. They bring her back to the apartment and then it gets naughty. We Live Together offers rubbing, toying, licking and everything in between. It is extremely hot. The girls they bring back are totally fresh and never seen before. Hell, I’ve never seen them again either. Just your average girl nextdoor types. Some of them are first timers and maybe a bit curious, while others are totally experienced and looking to play. Which ever it is, the girls at We Live Together are more than happy to please.
This is criminal:
Review of Liz Vicious
Score: 85
Sub-Section: Solo Models
Company: JayMan Cash
Date: Jul 22, 2006
Liz Vicious is the newest and hottest teen sensation to hit the new in a while. She has red hale, pale skin, and some have said she looks like Avril Lavigne. Well, a dirty, naughty Avril Lavigne maybe. Regardless, the pictures of Liz Vicious speak for themselves. If you ask me, she is here to stay.
Unlike many of the solo teen models on the net that just do tease pictures and videos, Liz Vicious is all about the hard stuff. She describes herself as the goth girl gone bad. I agree. There is something about her that just draws you in. If you are reading this though, you probably already know that.
***
The above? It’s Amptoons.
Note, when you click on the links, you don’t just get text, you get pornography too, photos.
And you click on the link down there at the bottom of this page where it says “review.”
Heart
As a Brazilian, I know what being targetted for being latina is, and it’s not funny. This kind of stereotyping is very damaging. I will never post here again.
I tried posting again about how I feel as a Brazilian about the stereotyping at the “reviews” page and again was censored.
ok, to get to this pron stuff, i have to scroll all the way to the bottom of one of amp’s 2 pages, and click on a word in a phrase that seems like just a boilerplate that i would probably ignore anyway.
then, i get sent to a site with text only. there, i have to do some more scrolling past some really stupid movie & product reviews to find the pron links.
this isn’t for someone who is directly looking for the pron, it’s for increasing google traffic which would already be going there. you think bang bros or 8th street latinas is hurting for traffic with or without amp?
these links offend me not one little bit. i like what an earlier poster said about being offended by vogue. there’s plenty out there that isn’t buried beneath a mound of links to be offended by.
and isn’t kinda ironic that the pron sites are paying for a feminist site to exist? making the anti-feminists pay for our ability to criticize them more freely? sounds like a sweet deal to me.
Look, am I crazy here? Does anyone else think that this is actually a good deal that Amp made?
Check it out:
What are the porn sites getting out of this? They’re getting their (racist, misogynist, abhorrent) porn sites ranked on Google a few spots above other (similarly racist, similarly misogynist, similarly abhorrent) porn sites. Does having these links on Amp’s site mean that these porn sites are going to get more traffic? Yes . . . AS COMPARED TO other porn sites. Not as compared to, like, Amazon.com or Cat Food Depot or Feministe or Pandagon or something. Porn bothers me. It doesn’t particularly bother me that one (racist, misogynist, abhorrent) porn site is doing better or worse than another (racist, misogynist, abhorrent) porn site.
What is Amp getting out of this? He’s getting much needed money, with which to support a website which offers a forum for discussion of Feminist issues.
My point is that the continued success of Alas, A Blog is more important in the whole scheme of things than whether one MILF site or another becomes marginally more successful. Let them fight it out amongst themselves. If their money goes to the continuation of Alas, A Blog, it’s certainly better than wherever it would have gone otherwise.
PS: Exactly what proud to swim home said.
PPS: Heart doesn’t believe that Amp is a good feminist? Quel Horreur! (I stopped listening to her when she started to explain how it’s okay to discriminate against transwomen because they weren’t ‘real’ women anyway. )
I’m done here, I’m done with the biased moderation, with the coddling of violence against women, with the slanders against radical feminists, this is my last post.
So far, I haven’t deleted or blocked any posts here. One post of SaltyC’s was caught in the auto-moderation, and I approved it when I saw it.
I feel like I’ve said things a dozen times, but everything I say is invisible until someone else repeats it, but in the interests of clarifying misunderstanding on the technology…
There is no ‘hit count’ that’s triggered when Amp’s page is loaded, with the link to the Reviews site. This just ensures that the web bots find the sites (establishes a connection).
The link in this page does not add to the link rank in the Reviews page, because it’s in the same domain. If the owner of the domain changes this to another domain (and it has to be outside of the IP block of this site), then there might be some small rank accrual.
The Review site links to other sites, with some additional text, so it doesn’t look like a linkspam site to the web bots. For all intents and purposes, it’s a legimitate site, and Google will not penalize it.
The porn link field is full of SEO (search engine optimization) so what happens is the sites linked _may_ get a few links higher than others in the same search. However, to repeat myself, it won’t make porn show up with a feminist search, and neither will it make a search on any of the feminist sites that have been linked here, appear during a porn site.
However, if trigger words are used as keywords in the Reviews a porn search _might_ show up at amptoons.com. I looked at the reviews, and it would see that they’re pretty careful about keyword use. Not good use of titles on the links for search engine optimization, though. (Bad use of SEO).
Now, all of the people who have been linked to the Reviews site in disdain have just managed to boost the search rank up for that page enormously, and I imagine the person who bought the domain is properly appreciative.
Now, as said by others, vising here and leaving comments might help you if rel=nofollow isn’t used in the comment URL link. Regardless, you are not boosting this site’s rank,
If you want to link here without doing so, use rel=”nofollow”, and the Google bot (and most other search engine bots) won’t follow the link or use it in rank calculation.
I agree with proud to swim home that there is a funny irony in that this feminist site is now paid for by links to bolster porn sites. But then, during this discussion, I’ve been told that because I defended this site and this decision, I’m no longer a feminist, so what do I know.
As for those wanting Amp to cut himself and bleed in public, give up all the money, break the contract–get a life.
Shelley,
To be clear, that was not what I was advocating. Amp asked for suggestions, and I offered ones that I thought allowed a way for him to meaningfully redress what he agrees he would have done differently if he had to do it over again, without asking him to “bleed” for the sake of bleeding. It’s for Amp to decide what he feels is right.
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I believe the commercial sex industry to be in and of itself an exploitation of the most vulnerable members of our society.
I have been a regular reader (but not commenter) of Alas and I would have liked to know that this so-called pro-feminist website in any way contributed to the promotion of pornography websites. And Ampersand knows that this issue is contentious among feminists; that’s what makes me suspicious about the way the sale was announced and then “vanished” without comments.
I will no longer be visiting this website.
Doing what you have to do to make money? It sure is hard out there for a pro-feminist blogger.
I’m really, really puzzled by this.
It’s just a URL.
Amp, why didn’t you (why don’t you) strip your content off this page, put up a sign that says ‘we’ve moved’, go to another host, and post a link?
Amptoons.blogspot.com?
This happens so often I don’t even pay attention to it–just alter my bookmarks. If I wanted to be real nice, I’d email the folks on my blogroll and tell them of the change.
I condemn no one who sell out in order to survive. No one.
My question is not, why’d you sell, but why are you still here?
What are you holding on to? It seems like you’re going through a lot of agony for fourteen letters and two periods.
saltyC, just how many angry ‘last posts’ are you going to make? Auto-moderation happens. Happens to everyone. You’re awfully quick to howl about censorship.
For that matter, Amp has been changing his structures and his content for ages to cater to the comfort level of people who have continued to be hostile, to say he can never really be a feminist, and who, every time, say this is an awful place hostile to their views and they’ll never ever come back again.
And they still do come back. Because he puts forth his resources to give them–give!–a forum for telling him how bad he is, because he clearly believes in the discourse and in improving his understanding. This place remains open to those criticisms and discussions and viewpoints, and they’re not censored. And their proponents keep coming back and using this space because it’s a good space for discussion, and then run home to complain that because someone dared to argue, this place is horribly hostile to “radical feminism” or whatever the label du jour is.
You know, I was sitting on the fence about this whole mess. I think Amp made some mistakes here, especially in the disclosure department. You know what, though? I’m damned well sticking around, in part because I trust that if I’ve got a problem, Amp will have the integrity to try and address it, even if he and I end up disagreeing. And if anyone else wants to use their resources to build a place as good as this one has been, I’ll be happy to be there, too. I’d rather discuss and see what Amp will do to rectify the problems, and contribute to the solution, then set effigies of him on fire and make sixteen posts about how I’m never posting here again. I plan on screwing up in the future, too. I believe in giving people chances. And as someone who’s eaten garbage to get by, I also believe in taking a step back before telling someone else what their financial options are.
This? Not my last post.
This is exactly the same situation that arises when doctors are given gifts and incentives by drug companies: the doctors themselves really believe it doesn’t affect what drugs they choose to prescribe, but studies show that it does deeply alter their attutides and behaviour to those companies.
You can’t claim, after this, that any of your stated views on pornography aren’t influenced by knowing that your blog is paid for by porn merchants.
Perhaps I missed this, but what’s to stop you from shutting down shop and opening a new blog elsewhere?
As for the people who’re badmouthing you, well, I hate to say it, but now you know what it looks like from the perspective of anyone who’s sex-positive who staps in here and trys to have a discussion from that perspective. You’ve surrounded yourself with a lot of rather harsh (to put it mildly) critics of any sex-positive writing, thought, or work.
I don’t know that it’s ever been directed at you before, but what you’re seeing in this thread is just a taste of what it’s like to try and hold a conversation here from a sex-positive standpoint.
Rest assured, Josh. We lock-kneed prudes find you every bit as harsh as you find us.
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You know, I haven’t seen a very clear explanation yet of what exactly it is that drives up the porn site’s hit counts. Is it simply having you on a blogroll? Linking to specific posts? Leaving an URL in comments? I haven’t seen anything about nofollow codes until this comment thread. So you haven’t exactly been “out in the open.”
A few people have loftily derided those who have thought that you are writing the pron reviews, or that simply viewing the page is the trigger for the hit count. Such derision is misplaced, because there has been no explanation of just what it is that drives the hits.
I have no strong position on porn, but damned if I’m going to participate in driving up the hit count of a porn site I don’t know about, haven’t reviewed, haven’t approved, is racist, what have you.
Moreover, if this works the way I think it does, and it’s the links from other bloggers that drives up the hit counts (and whether that’s based on just numbers of links, or traffic driven to the site through those links, I still don’t know), then you owe it to the people who link to you in whichever way affects the hit counts to disclose your arrangement to them, if for no other reason than that you’re now profiting from those links.
Alright, what are people missing here? Especially you people who seem to be sex-positive (stupid word)…even if you are sex-positive how can you continue supporting amp, knowing that it is racist pornagraphy that he is boistering? I mean, seriously, I can barely even formulate words to describe how this makes me feel as a woman, as a feminist, as a person who cares about racial prejudice in pornagraphy and how hurtful it is to women and men of color. Can we agree that this is not right? That this is shameful and degrading to women and men of color. Shame on you all for being complicit in this. This is racist crap you guys are writing off with your, ‘We understand, amp’ bs. This is not okay. There are standards. He has none.
If you’ve read this thread, you know what I know. If I’m unclear on it in my writing, it’s because I’m unclear on it in my mind; I don’t know how things work. Frankly, it all seems very dubious to me that anyone could make money this way.
Shelley seems to have a clearer idea of the technology than anyone else here, so I’m assuming that what she says in comment #63 is accurate.
I must really be out of it. Could someone please tell me what “sex positive” means? I can’t even begin to fathom — not androgynous? enjoys having sexual relations? happy being the gender they were born with?
Barbara, “sex-positive” is generally a euphemism for pro-porn feminists.
As for how Alas is helping the pornographer, it’s like this (and I’m copying from a comment at my place which was copied from somewhere else):
In other words, the pornographer needs a way to get his site boosted to the top of Google searches; that’s his only chance at attracting customers in the sea of millions of porn sites. By attaching to amptoons, which because of this blog is a very highly-ranked domain in Google (given its age and the number of links from other sites), he achieves his objective.
Violet Socks, thanks. That’s a euphemism I won’t be using and it shows why using euphemisms is usually a bad idea.
I was going to say that my earlier message was a bit jumbled, but Violet Socks has it mostly right. There’s a lot more to search engine optimization than just the page rank though–amount of other material in ratio to number of links, number of outgoing links in a page as ratio to incoming links, keyword lists, actual text of the links, page headers, and so on, all impact on how high up the search engine results list a site gets.
I had come back to volunteer to provide a clearer answer and more details on nofollow and whatever, if this is what you really want zuzu. But I can’t tell if you want to really know this, or if you’re looking to vent.
Just remember: you can continue to link to Alas a Blog, using rel=”nofollow” and you won’t add to site’s page rank. And a site’s ‘hits’ have nothing to do at all with search engine results. The page hit count is the number of times a site has been visited (as well as unique visitor count(, and it makes sense only if you’re selling ads, like Google ads. That’s not what the Amptoons.com buyer is interested in. He wants to optimize search engine results–two different beasties.
You can visit this site millions of times, and all that happens is Amp gets a nice ego boost, and his server costs go up.
Sex-positive? Wow, there’s a term for everything now. Interesting use of words.
Sorry that my earlier explanation was so jumbled.
Geez, I really like the graphic you use to separate comments. That is so cute.
Bottom line for me…
This feminist space is still here.
Yes, well, of course there’s also the fact that Alas is being supported by pornography. It’s a two-way deal. The blog is now running on a server paid for by the pornographer, who’s making his money from links to BangBros and other lovely stuff.
I’m not sure that that’s quite true, and I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask for a definition of “sex-positive” from someone who considers her- or him-self to actually be sex positive.
I mean, really, it’s like asking Susie Bright for a definition of Radical Feminist and getting back “It’s generally a euphamism for pro-censorship feminists.”
Perhaps your definition is a little biased, in other words.
Can this thread please, please, please not de-evolve into a sex-positive vs. anti-porn debate, since that horse has been beat to death…I shouldn’t have called ‘sex-positive’ out as a stupid word. I’m sorry. Can we move on…
It looks like a lot of feminists agree with you. So Amp will lose some links, and some readers. My own opinions are more in line with little light’s comments.
For those like anashi and Violet, who find the situation untenable, all I can say is that you’ve made your opinions clear. What are you proposing that Amp do to mend fences ? If the fences are beyond mending, how many more times do you plan on stating as much before you realize that not everyone is going to be convinced ?
Amp, are you totally blind or what? All these women comment, and the only person you respond to is anotehr guy?!