Violet Blue brings to light the insidious ways in which internet advertising influences and reinforces sex-negative culture in yesterday's Open Source Sex column. Her example is a porn site whose AdWords requests for queer-friendly terms have been denied by Google as offensive, even though Google would permit the site to use terms that most transgendered people consider derogatory. She writes:
You can dismiss it as trivial because it's "just ads," but advertising has huge influence in our culture. I remember the dandruff shampoo commercials from my youth putting out the message that if you had white flakes on your black shirt, you had a shameful problem (that the product could solve, of course). I happen to have very dry skin, including on my scalp; I get white flakes on my black shirts sometimes if I scratch my head hard. And even though I think it's stupid, I feel somewhat embarrassed by that. I can directly trace that silly reaction back to those ads, because no one else ever mentioned such a thing, and not once has anyone ever comment on it (if they even noticed; or maybe they did notice, and didn't comment because it's a huge horrible shameful problem and they don't want to embarrass me).
That Google seems to have decided that "she-male" is ok but "transboi" is not also says something about the power of porn marketing in the mainstream. Porn marketers use "she-male" for a very specific purpose -- to sell porn to straight guys without triggering their homophobia -- that has nothing to do with actual transgendered people (or helping men overcome their homophobia, either).
I betcha the boys in charge at Google have heard "she-male" since they sneaked their first porn, but "the words that many transfolk use to identify themselves: 'transboi,' 'trannyboy,' 'transgrrrl,' etc." are unfamiliar and strange to them.
Google didn't respond to Violet's requests for comment in time for the column, but they did respond in time for a follow-up blog post.
