Uh, oh. The "s" word. One of the easiest ways to get your book on the banned books list.
Every year there are plenty of books that are challenged due to being "sexually explicit." It seems that people have a lot of different interpretations of what qualifies as "sexually explicit;" books with vaguely implied sexual situations, or books written for parents to share with their children about puberty and where babies come from - more often than not with no actual depiction of the sex act - get slapped with this label.
Then you have books that are labeled as both "sexually explicit" and "unsuited to age group." One of the book series that got slapped with both labels was the 50 Shades series. What age group? Y'all know these were written for adults, right? I mean if we're saying that they're unsuitable for adults because they started out as Twilight fan fiction you might have a valid point... But the "unsuited for age group" label is supposed to reflect books written for children or teens, or assigned to children or teens, that parents or teachers feel are too mature for the age group that is meant to be reading them. I hope no one is assigning 50 Shades - except maybe as an example of how not to write.
And before 50 Shades, there was the Sleeping Beauty Trilogy. Sleeping Beauty came out before erotica had become more acceptable, so the author used the pen name A. N. Roquelaure. Now that she has become well known and respected, and has gone back and forth between horror/dark fantasy and religious novels, the Sleeping Beauty books are now as often as not printed with her real name - Anne Rice.
We seem to have a real problem with sex in this country – whether it’s admitting we're reading a book about it, or teaching our children about it. I personally have no problem reading sexual scenes in books provided they are well-written and further the plot or the character's journey.
I was curious about the Sleeping Beauty books. In the oldest versions of the story, the chaste true love's kiss becomes something more sinister. In one version, the sleeping princess gives birth while still in her cursed state and it is only when he baby sucks the poisoned thorn out of her finger that she wakes.
So with the obvious undertones in the original fairy tale, and knowing that Rice has written about sexy, angsty vampires*, I said, "well, let's give this a try." And... well, a more appropriate name for the series would be the Spanking Beauty series. I'm not even kidding. Not a whole lot of plot, and a whole lot of pretty people getting spanked and paddled. A lot.
*At least these vampires aren’t sparkly…
So my suggestion is that if we put warning labels on these books, that they read as follows:
Don't read The Sleeping Beauty Chronicles - all that paddling gets old after a while.
Don't read 50 Shades of Grey - there is a lot out there that's just as racy and better written.
I recall reading a review of the 50 Shades series on Amazon.com that was written by a gynecologist who said that there were a lot of scenes that were "anatomically inaccurate." Which I guess what you get when you don't let people read about sex.