On Death Threats and Misogyny on Kindle
So far, we’ve talked about some of the terrible parts of Amazon more generally. However, there is a very personal story that needs to be brought to light, one that shows the type of misogynistic attitude that is invading romance writing at Amazon and in Kindle Unlimited and that is being allowed to boil over unchecked. No, Amazon cannot control what authors using its services say or do on other social media platforms, but it is a shame to see this and it is horrifying. As we dig deeper into the potential underbelly of Amazon’s publishing machine, we are finding more stories of women writers threatened into silence about the (often) men usurping them within the romance and erotic romance field.
That brings us to one Keith Taylor who now writes post-apocalyptic zombie fiction. Before, he wrote erotica fiction as Aya Fukunishi (yes, like the editor of Marvel comics, he took the pen name of a Japanese person to help his sales. We’ve spoken before about the problems of white writers assuming identities of marginalized voices before.) and K. A. Taylor.
We wish that all we could bring here was the story of someone who had assumed the identity of a Japanese woman to write fetishistic stories that used a fake ethnic identity to garner book sales. However, Mr. Taylor has done something more than that.
Three years ago, he was on KBoards, an independent author forum for writers on Amazon, and made a death threat against another author, Zoe York. He as “Aya” was stepping in to defend the rape-glamorizing fiction of Abby Weeks, an older alias of Chance Carter for some context. Here is the threat:
“A lot of us here are earning hitman hirin’ dollars these days. :P”
Yes, you read that right. Now, since then, Mr. Taylor has tried to claim it was “just a joke.” To me, at the very least, it’s a “joke” in poor taste. It reminds this writer of all the times a man would make a sexual advance or lewd comment and then try and defend it as “just kidding.” #MeToo has seen through the fact that sexual jokes “are just jokes.” I’d argue that Mr. Taylor most likely had no intention to bring physical harm himself against Zoe York. However, it is a disgusting threat nevertheless. Moreover, we live in the age now of things like #Pizzagate in which talking about things on the internet can inspire people out there who are actually less well glued together to take action. When someone writes essentially, “Let’s get a hitman,” even if for some awful reason they think it’s a funny joke, that “joke” could lead to real life harm. It happens when the wrong person takes it literally or becomes inspired to harm another.
Ms. York posted about this and her experience in light of everything coming to light on Twitter about badly behaving authors at the #getloud and #tiffanygate hashtags. Mr. Taylor seems to feel that he needed to issue a non-apology and came into her space and was very angry with her:
What I find the most egregious about all of this is that he tried to brush the comment off: “Comments posted on the internet are notorious for losing their meaning, for context being missed, and by sarcasm being stripped by harsh, unforgiving text.”
Well the context seems to be that a successful male author who had posed as a woc author to make a lot of money writing erotica used his status as a successful writer to threaten a woman romance author into silence. He may have perceived it as “just a joke,” but those are the types of subtle threats that women online experience daily on social media and that can keep us silent. The context here looks like misogyny was used to silence valid complaints about rapefic being glamorized on Amazon by men posing as women while their audience remained oblivious to the reality of their identities.
Then he talks about how the “sticking out tongue” emoji should have told her that it was all sarcasm and how “it had saved his jobs in the past.” To us, this seems a bit like a form of gaslighting. “Oh it’s not as bad as you think/Can’t you take a joke?”
No, in a world where violence escalates from online forums in horrifying ways, and in which women are harassed daily over social media for using their voices, a “joke” about hiring a hitman bandied about between two rich men is far from funny.
Mr. Taylor, in our opinion, you did something horrible to Ms. York and made it worse with a non-apology that insulted her all over again. We hope one day you can learn to be a kind, considerate person who doesn’t joke about having someone killed. Until then, maybe you need to listen more and see the pain around you.
Or maybe you’ll just impersonate another woman of color for a new pen name when people discover that the author behind the Keith Taylor brand is far from a likable person (at least as far as we’re concerned) :P
