Amazon Removes ‘The Feral Girl’

OK. This is a rant. My apologies.

Today I received word that The Feral Girl: Illustrated Edition will be removed from Amazon’s platform. Why? Here’s what they told me:

During our review, we found the cover image for the following book(s) is in violation of our Content Guidelines: The Feral Girl: The Aenya Saga: Book One of Three by Alimonos, Nick (AUTHOR) (ID: 55973189)

As a result, we won’t be offering your book(s) for sale on Amazon. Our Content Guidelines apply to the book interior, cover image, and book details. To publish the book(s), you’ll need to update your cover image to follow the KDP Content Guidelines and submit it as a new book in your KDP account.

Here’s the offensive cover:

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I can only assume Thelana’s barely visible nipples were deemed too offensive for Amazon’s customers. But the strange thing is that this book has been sold on the platform for years without an issue. What’s more confusing, Amazon’s guidelines do NOT prohibit nudity:

Offensive content

We don’t sell certain content including content that we determine is hate speech, promotes the abuse or sexual exploitation of children, contains pornography, glorifies rape or pedophilia, advocates terrorism, or other material we deem inappropriate or offensive.

The Feral Girl makes no mention of sex, rape, pedophilia, terrorism, or any of these other things. Despite what Amazon may tell you, the novel does not even fall into the erotica category. Hundreds of other indie titles delve into matters of rape, bondage, harems, and women engaging in relations with dinosaurs and even monsters. By comparison, The Feral Girl is about as innocent as Disney’s Snow White. If we’re to be honest, there is much more to be offended by in A Game of Thrones.

In a world where hate speech and pornography run rampant on social media, it would seem even the slightest suggestion of women’s nipples is unacceptable. Women are free to go topless in New York City, but a piece of art showing the same is BANNED.

No matter. So long as the story remains intact, I figured, I was fine with changing the cover to something more “family friendly.” But then, Amazon BLOCKED me from accessing my book page. I assumed this was a mistake on their part, so I emailed them to ask them to allow me to remove the offending artwork. This is what they had to say:

We’ve confirmed that your book contains content that is in violation of our content guidelines and we will not be offering this title for sale on Amazon. As stated in our guidelines, we reserve the right to determine what we consider to be appropriate, which includes cover images and content within the book.

If you wish to re-publish your book with content that meets our guidelines, it will need to be submitted as an entirely new book and go through our standard review process. Previous customer reviews, tags, and sales rank information are not transferable because the title will essentially be a different product.

So after struggling for YEARS to promote my book and earn reviews, ALL OF IT will be taken down because I violated their guidelines, despite the fact that THEIR GUIDELINES MAKE NO MENTION OF NUDITY! What’s especially aggravating is the utter hypocrisy surrounding this decision, given just HOW much nudity can be found in their shop.

Here’s just an example of the many, many, many nudist titles Amazon deems acceptable:

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https://a.co/d/0fDaymBs

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To my eyes, this cover is FAR more suggestive, showing the girl’s nipples and labia. Now, it could be that Amazon’s automated system has yet to catch this one. But there are so many others just like it, you really have to wonder what’s going on, and why, if Amazon doesn’t allow nudity, they can’t just say so.

These hypocritical double standards are what make navigating social media confusing for nudists. And it’s not just that we are living in a Puritanical culture. We are swimming in an ocean of p@rnographic material that is too often conflated with innocent nudity.

The nudist/naturist philosophy is that the human body does not need to be sexualized. Yet we continue to be mistaken for sexual deviants or worse, because information about us is continually censored in favor of p@rn. Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon equate any and all nudity with sex, no matter how innocent, because sex = money, and greed is the only god we worship.

My trouble started when I tried to edit the Illustrated Edition to remove some of the AI images the book contained, because I was trying to show my support for flesh-and-blood artists. AI is the REAL threat to humanity, but “freeing the nipple” isn’t profitable, and too much has been invested in AI already. Fortunately for me, I have other published versions of The Feral Girl, including one in paperback, hardback, and a Kindle Gamer Edition. And they will have to remain as they are, because any changes I attempt to make may alert the censors. As nudist content creators, we live under constant threat of censorship—just as Bare Oaks founder Stephane Deschenes discovered when his Twitter account was removed without warning simply for discussing children in nudism—because the worst thing you can be in this day and age is a person who believes in the innocence of the human body.