Yes, Fifty Shades of Grey Is Banned!

E.L. James’ 2011 novel began as Twilight fan fiction and became one of the fastest-selling books in publishing history, moving over 150 million copies worldwide. The story follows Anastasia Steele, a college student who enters into a BDSM relationship with billionaire Christian Grey. The book’s explicit sexual content made it a cultural phenomenon and a lightning rod for library challenges, though with an unusual twist: unlike most banned books, this one was primarily pulled from adult sections of public libraries, not school libraries.

In May 2012, Brevard County, Florida removed the book from all 17 branches of its public library system. The ban lasted less than a month after public outcry forced its return. Gwinnett County, Georgia and Fond du Lac, Wisconsin followed with their own removals. In Wichita Falls, Texas, the book was pulled from library shelves in 2013. The National Coalition Against Censorship pointed out that these same libraries held many other novels with sexual content and that adults should be free to choose their own reading material. The book appeared on the ALA’s top 10 most challenged list in 2012 and 2013.

Why You Should Read This

Look, it’s not great literature. James herself started it as fan fiction, and it reads that way. The prose is purple, the plot is thin, and Christian Grey has the emotional range of a particularly handsome parking meter. But 150 million people bought it, and there’s something worth examining in that number.

The book gave millions of women permission to read about sex openly. They read it on the subway, in the carpool line, at the beach. They didn’t hide the cover. The bans were always about the discomfort of seeing women publicly consuming erotica, as if bodice-rippers hadn’t been the backbone of publishing for 50 years.

Banning an erotic novel from an adult library is a special kind of paternalism. Nobody’s putting this on a third-grade reading list. The challenges came from adults who didn’t want other adults to have access to a book about consenting adults. That’s a hard position to defend, and the libraries that tried it mostly backed down fast.