Amp, I feel the stressing on the bills thing, but this was still a really fucking bad idea. “Don’t believe the hype,” indeed.
Thinking more about this issue: I remember reading Barry’s initial announcement and wondered why it was so important that he explicitly state the new owner of his website would never put porn ads on Amptoons.com. What we’ve got here is a man who sold his feminist blog to a porn outlet, misled his audience by using couched and secretive terminology, and did not allow anyone to ask questions or voice concern by disabling comments and trackbacks to this announcement. So far, he has yet to acknowledge this deception publicly with any of his peers, and as far as I can gather, did not make any of his co-bloggers and guest-bloggers aware of this transaction.
Some may think this is small beans, but in a community where sexual politics are so very personal, as well as political, this is an enormous business gaffe of exceeding irony. Of all the things one can do to save a buck, making money off the backs (and mouths and pussies) of women is not one that I encourage for a feminist man.
Not to mention the always necessary addition of “ethnic” porn for the discerning crowd.
If there is no shame, Barry, don’t bother lying about it.
Umn, yeah.
I’m sure that this is just an honest mistake, not a deliberate lie - but it would have been nice for you to include a link to the post in question, so that your readers could check it out for themselves. Not only did I not “explicitly state” that, I said exactly the opposite; I pointed out that the new owner was putting porn ads on amptoons.com. Here’s the paragraph you’re referring to:
I don’t think that’s deceptive. I see a couple of readers have suggested that maybe I didn’t realize he’d be including porn links on his pages, but it didn’t occur to me that people could take it that way when I wrote the above paragraph. To claim that I ever “explicitly stated” that the new owner wouldn’t put on porn ads is simply untrue.
Also, I haven’t sold my blog; I and the other writers remain the owners of all our own material, the new owner has no editorial say, no right to post, no right to censor our posts, etc..
I spoke to one of my co-bloggers before I made the sale, and informed a second before I made the news public; the two I spoke two were the two I thought would be most likely to object. But you’re right; in retrospect, I should have emailed all the co-bloggers and guest-bloggers before the sale happened. I’ll email them all now.
Whoops. Aside from the “two two two” error, I forgot to include a link to the post I quoted the paragraph from.
Thank you for answering, Barry.
Lauren, can you please send me an email? I want to email you something, and I can’t seem to find your current email address. Thanks.
And - as a couple of “Alas” readers have noticed - some pages I don’t own include links to porn.
Which makes it sound like you had no intention of actually copping to this fact except that the proverbial cat was already out the bag. Frankly, I think this is largely hairsplitting. You imply that amptoons will not be supporting p0rn and then go on to hedge your bets.
Motivations aside, it’s still poor form in my mind.