Libricide! . . . Or, Warm Your Hands In Fifty Shades of Abuse

If you haven't heard about Fifty Shades of Grey yet you're either living under a rock, or you're illiterate.  If its the former, you should probably come on out, I hear it's cold out there.  If it's the latter then I'm really impressed you're reading my blog.  Regardless, Fifty Shades has sparked heated controversy.  You know what I'm talking about, you either love it, or you hate it.  But as The Independent, an Irish newspaper reports, a UK-based women's shelter, Wearside Women in Need, has decided they hate it enough to destroy it. 

They've organized a book burning, scheduled for November 5.  They claim the book glorifies abuse, the objectification of women and normalizes such behavior.  They even liken the behavior of sadist Christopher Grey to British serial killer Fred West.  In response, they feel their only course of action is to burn what copies they can of E.L. James's Fifty Shades of Grey. 

Random House, the book's publisher, is quick to point out that all depictions of behaviors are carried out by consenting adults.

The usual suspects have been trotted out to condemn the book burning.  Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, the book burnings of Alexandria, of the Qin Dynasty, and more recently, of the Nazis.  These are powerful indictments against the Wearside Women in Need, and I think there's a legitimate usage of powerful figures to oppose book burning, or, as the article points out, biblioclasm.

The free market of ideas only works as long as every idea has its day in court.  Everyone is allowed to express themselves and, if the system really works, the best ideas rise to the top, are adopted and the weaker ideas simply die out.  This is one of the fundamentals of democracy, and justly, any talk of book-burning, or the genocide of ideas, is the antithesis of democracy.  But trying to put the genie back in the bottle, if you'll allow me to blur the metaphor, is futile.  The box is opened, the horse is out of the barn.  Whatever metaphor you'd like, the idea is out there and burning a book isn't going to put the world back the way it was.  All they're really doing is stoking the flames of curiosity.

But maybe that's their goal.  The article points out that maybe this is just a ploy to garner attention to their cause.  In that case, shame on them, for inciting indignation for even a worthy cause.  We tell the story of Peter and the Wolf as a cautionary story for exactly this reason.  The threat of a book-burning is a terrible thing, and ought not to be bandied about for political reasons.

Regardless, I deplore the burning of books in every instance.  The suppression of an idea by violence is anathema to the ideals of freedom and ought to be deplored.

Fifty Shades of Crazy?

Last week saw sales for E.L. James's erotic "Twilight" fan-fic Fifty Shades of Grey fall to tenth place on Publishers Weekly bestseller list.  Bolstered by strong internet sales in its early weeks, and then by selling her soul to the Devil (probably), Fifty Shades has continued to hold the top three slots in Top 10 Overall, Trade Paperback and the number two slot in Audiobooks for the year.  Amazon sales continue to maintain their juggernaut status, with the collected trilogy continuing to sell well.  The runaway bestseller has spawned numerous imitators, and left the rest of the world scratching their heads.  The camps of those who love it and those who find it less than rubbish seem as divided as the Tea and Democratic parties.

So what's going on?

In 1841 Charles Mackay wrote a book called Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, describing the paroxysms of stupid into which people sometimes work themselves.  His book popularized the strange phenomenon that occurred in the Netherlands in late 1636 and early 1637 when people went crazy for tulips.  Sometimes called Tulipomania, at its height a single tulip bulb could sell for ten times the average income of a skilled craftsman.  We recognize the phenomenon as an economic bubble, and we're still falling prey to it today.  Mackay continues by examining a number of popular delusions to which we're still (more or less) prey:  "alchemy, crusades, witch-hunts, prophecies, fortune-telling, magnetisers (influence of imagination in curing disease), shape of hair and beard (influence of politics and religion on), murder through poisoning, haunted houses, popular follies of great cities, popular admiration of great thieves, duels, and relics."

Now, while the tulip mania had some sort of basis in reality, and built on false hopes of government intercession, at its base it was an economic bubble.  People were getting rich, and hoped that they would continue to get rich.  So at least people were going dumb for something tangible.  The rest is simple superstition, which nonetheless motivates more people than we'd like to account for.  Recent statements by a Republican nominee seem to indicate that some people, as my training instructors liked to say, are still "stuck on stupid."

It would be irresponsible of me to conclude that fans of Fifty Shades are simply ill-educated or lacking mental faculty.  The epithet of "mommy porn" has been applied to these stories often, and not just by literary detractors.  Feminists have argued that this sort of depiction undermines much of their work over the last half century, relegating women to subservient positions.  Champions have responded that the book touches on deeply buried wants (some say needs).

Splitting an argument into a false dichotomy is one of those fallacies that logic teachers try to beat into our heads, and the dispute over Fifty Shades is no different.  Certainly, if you like it, you're not wishing for the return of women as chattel, or a diminution of hard-won rights.  But maybe there's something to the popularity of a book about BDSM.  Maybe women really do want to get a little kinkier in bed?

Every so often, sex becomes popular.  Wait, let me re-phrase that.  Every so often, talking about sex loses some of its taboo and the popular dialogue embraces a more nuanced approach.  Kinsey gave us his eponymous report.  The 60s taught us the joys and social dangers of lack of restraint.  AIDS made us all terribly aware that pleasure has its physical price.  While Fifty Shades certainly isn't a Kinsey report, it has unleashed a popular dialogue of sex that has been clouded by the book's abysmal quality.

Like the tulips' unqualified beauty was clouded by the avarice of short-sided men, perhaps the lesson we should learn from Fifty Shades isn't that people like to read really trashy fiction, but that they'd like to experience a fuller, deeper sexual experience.  But first we have to be willing to talk about it.