That book series! John Presnall writes about it below. I have something to add to the discussion.
I am on the board of our county public library. There was a bit of controversy at a board meeting over this book and the genre called Gray Romance. Yes, it’s selling like mad and the library has fielded many requests for the Fifty Shades books, especially in e-book format, which ensures greater privacy while reading. Me, I cannot imagine the appeal of descriptions of sex among the sagging, but I guess in a book, you can imagine anything. The movie version, if made, will have to have younger body-doubles, don’t you think?
I live in a fairly conservative area. Of course, all kinds of people live in our county, but relative to the general population, people who live here are conservative. As an example in relation to the public library, when a salacious book by or about Madonna came out a number of years ago, the librarians kept it in a brown paper bag under the counter so children couldn’t see it. When no one, NO ONE, asked for it over the course of several months, the director had it sold to the neighboring Cuyahoga county library system where it was circulating like mad. That’s just the kind of county I live in. People find the idea of censorship distasteful, but they can’t see wasting money on what they consider filth, even soft-porn type filth. So, at this meeting the board discussed our operating policy, especially the section that reads, “materials produced primarily to trade on sensationalism or obscenity are not purchased.” If we bought <em>Fifty Shades</em>, we could keep it under wraps, but what would we do if the genre proliferates? That was the big question.
I wondered aloud, if we don’t keep erotica on the shelves, will anyone care? Probably, the director though, because there could be negative repercussions for her as the director of the libraries whatever she does. One way or another she could offend someone; if she supplies the genre then she outrages the community or if she doesn’t then she might have to a field a lawsuit from somebody, perhaps the ACLU, over censorship. The latter is the dreadful expense.
We are protected by our operating policy, but how do we define obscenity was the big question. Prurience is the term, but what are our boundaries? One board member, male, spoke of erotica as art form. Another man spoke about how public online information is, so that whatever is on the Internet, even who reads what e-book, is public information anyway. What the heck? There is no privacy anymore. Then the director said that’s why the library could aid and abet the secret readers, because once a book is brought back or in the case of e-books, expires, the library wipes the record about it. That’s another operating policy, that no public records are kept of personal library use.
The board president asked, “We don’t have books with pictures of naked people on the shelves, do we?” I said, “We do. There are plenty of nudes in books of photography, but we don’t have books by Robert Mapplethorpe on the shelves, for example.” The director made noises about the inappropriateness of Mapplethorpe at this point. I tried this tack, “The library makes book choices all the time; it cannot buy everything. What if we make this choice based on how the book is marketed? If it is labeled by author and publisher as erotica, we don’t have to touch it, based on the current guidelines.” The market can label the book or whole genre prurient for us and we can ignore it. We settled on that. The final observation by the librarian was that since Ohio has a state-wide consortium that shares books, including e-books, then anyone can order Fifty Shades of Grey, using his library card. Our local censorship by marketing really means nothing to our public. Anyone can order the book through us and might not be aware that we have “censored” it by not buying it. Exactly, we don’t spend the public funds on prurient material, but the public has access if it so desires.
This is a dilemma of public libraries, how to be responsive to the requests of a diverse public. Sometimes the deaf ear is best, since we are not the guardians of free expression. Another way to put it is that we choose to turn a blind eye to Fifty Shades of Grey. I hear that it is badly written, anyway. Perhaps good writing is in the eye of the beholder.
John Presnall, this is a long way arond to my noting that if you saw people with e-readers, chances are good they were reading <em>Fifty Shades.</em> That’s the preferred publishing mode, apparently. Does that make the Nook the modern equivalent of the brown paper wrapper?
July 15th, 2012 | 2:34 pm
I’m not standing behind Fifty Shades of Gray, but I will point out that the protagonists are young and attractive. The ‘gray’ in the title comes from the male protagonist’s last name, not hair color.
July 15th, 2012 | 3:32 pm
Really? All my knowledge is from hearsay. That means it just is a newer iteration of Jacqueline Susann or Danielle Steel?
July 15th, 2012 | 11:31 pm
I have no clue who Robert Mapplethorpe is…but basically it is not necessarily the work of a single author… it is fan fiction, which very loosely started out being the fan fiction of Twilight, so a sort of derivative of a derivative. “Literary” blog posts that turned into books. A derivative, that was mostly about marketing for a young english major that went by the name “Snowqueens Icedragons”… Interestingly, the sexual content in “Snowqueen Icedragons” derivative work, more or less created some controversy that forced the author of Twilight(or the trademark lawyers/administrators) to distance herself from her fan fiction “derivatives”…
So then Snowqueen Icedragon decided that instead of censoring herself to please the mealy-mouthed administrators, she was the best author doing the fan fiction, and that she would go off and do her own blog. So she started her own web site named “FiftyShades”…
So the names of the books were meant originally to sort of reinforce her blogging brand/Trademark. At first some people, namely copyright lawyers figured there would be copyright issues, and like sharks started circling the waters for blood.
But in order for a work to constitute a derivative, it has to at least be plausibly something that Meyers herself would have written, and following her lawyers advice to be all about the respectable branding of vampire drama for a familly audience, she can safely say that “”that’s really not my genre, not my thing … Good on her—she’s doing well. That’s great!”
i.e. Meyers Genre is Kate test Kosher: “The library makes book choices all the time; it cannot buy everything. What if we make this choice based on how the book is marketed? If it is labeled by author and publisher as erotica, we don’t have to touch it, based on the current guidelines.” The market can label the book or whole genre prurient for us and we can ignore it. We settled on that.”
So once again Snowqueen Icedragon went rogue, against the “trademark”/collective good power of Wesley Mouch, and the Librarian power structure, i.e. “So, at this meeting the board discussed our operating policy, especially the section that reads, “materials produced primarily to trade on sensationalism or obscenity are not purchased.”
The novel is about entrepreneurship, so in a way maybe even it is about Dr. Lawler’s Cartesian, or Ayn Rand’s John Galt, but with a sort of biographical flair and self awareness as an author. The idea of “rape” in the Fountainhead is basically a rejection of the formal importance and process branding of the words “yes” and “no”, and generally speaking I am guessing that the sex in 50 shades which I have also not read mainly speaks to the extension of a man who knows what he wants in life and goes out and gets it.
So really it is an entrepreneurial book, by an entrepreneurial author, describing a woman who wants an entrepreneurial man who knows what he wants, and the love between such a man and a woman who also knows what she wants.
To touch back on the origins of this derivative post, is there any difference functionally between using the sun to get warmth to brave a cold sea, and making use of literature to light a similar fire before stepping into frigid water, and perhaps even more generally what does it say that people go to beach and enjoy the contrast in feeling between “hot” and “cold”, does such a pleasure not perhaps signify a desire for sex that is also contrasted with societal propriety, and the collective good?
July 16th, 2012 | 7:07 am
John Lewis, that’s interesting. Given the subject matter, I still don’t want to read the trilogy. Anyone can buy the book, though if the material is all on a website, why would anyone bother. Between what you write and what Annika writes, at least the success of the book become a little more comprehensible.
Our library system is funded by taxpayers with some money coming from the state and most of it coming through the county commissioners through property tax levies. Community standards count and our community is generous with the library because it is careful of our community’s standards. We enjoy the provincial privilege of ignoring that part of modern culture we wish to. When I was a young woman, I would have found that appalling, thinking it important to know or at least know thoroughly about whatever was going on in modern culture. Experience has taught that most things are a great ho-hum.
As I expect this trilogy is. What’s funny about this is that all the information I had on the series was what the library director told me. She had not read the books and was apparently misinformed. That meeting took place months ago. Not only has no one on the board coming to a subsequent meeting and corrected the error, the subject has never come up again. No one cares.
We do all care about things like the public trust, the preservation of our community, protecting the young. The challenging is in balancing all of that with protecting free speech and expression, which is also part of the public trust. A few months ago we began considering filters for the computers after children in one library reported a man masturbating to sado-masochistic pornography at the end of the computer bank. The man’s response to the librarian asking him to cease and desist was not polite and the librarians called the police. The police confiscated the computer as evidence. The man was banned from the library. It was an isolated incident.
Go look up the work of Robert Mapplethrope and good luck to you.
July 16th, 2012 | 10:09 am
Oh, no I am perfectly fine with “community standards”. Congrats on participating in politics at a local level.
I might watch the movie, some pretty big people have signed on to make it. Not everyday someone manages to sell 20 million copies of a book, so there must be something to it.
Obviously the website got taken down, and that is when I first heard of the controversy(The IP controversy, not the content of the book)
See http://dearauthor.com/features/industry-news/master-of-the-universe-versus-fifty-shades-by-e-l-james-comparison/#comment-356678
Also some high tech plagerism analysis, that is legally insignificant, but interesting.
July 17th, 2012 | 4:21 am
When I heard that Fifty Shades of Gray was about sadomasochism, where the protagonist is able to “harm” the women without actually harming them (how it was explained to me,) it immediately reminded me of what René Girard and his book, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World.
…but I will not be bringing that to the beach. It’s the perfect time for whiffle ball on the Jersey Shore. Those Hidden Things can wait.
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