There was a time not long ago when Boston College students could purchase a naughty bestseller at their local bookstore. When classes and hum of college life got to be too much, they could stumble into the campus market in McElroy and snag a copy of Fifty Shades of Grey. I’m sure purchasing the book in such a public manner took Herculean courage.
The BC Bookstore is the one institution on campus that offers (at premium prices) anything your little college heart might desire—a nice rug, a $90 biology workbook, a flannel with a soaring majestic eagle.
At the behest of a customer, BC pulled the popular novel off the shelf. The book is still listed and available on the store’s website and is still on The New York Times bestsellers list. It’s once visible presence in the actual store, though, is now a part of a glorious past.
Is it objectively good that Shades has been banished from the holy cept of the BC Bookstore? I think we can all admit that Fifty Shades of Grey in any form isn’t a good piece of art (looks around, nods). But Shades wasn’t exiled because it’s crap. It was exiled for all the reasons it’s become culturally relevant—it’s a popular tale of sexual wish fulfilment. It’s become what Twilight once was—a guilty pleasure for a mass of the population—except one story is about vampires and proper sexual behavior, while the other is about improper sexual behavior and power.
I’m making a fuss about the fact that an awful book was kicked out the Bookstore because BC pulled the book in response either to intimidation from a customer or the sudden realization that the book doesn’t mesh with Jesuit ideals.
It was cast out firstly because someone made a fuss, and the fuss was most likely made for the what it’s come to mean, lest it tempt innocent freshman. Thou must not lure young, impressionable doe-eyed 18-year olds (legal adults) down the sinful path of S&M. Yes, repression, not education or conversation, is clearly the better play here.
The Bookstore isn’t a sacred place. It’s a market (though admittedly a sacred place for some). It’s a place the school sells Vineyard Vines button downs with a BC logo, a few comic books, James Patterson, and Plato’s Republic somewhere in the back corner. If a book is on the bestsellers list, it should be in the bookstore.
Years of English classes from Jesuit institutions have taught me that taking a book off the shelf is evil. It’s what Big Brother or the fascists in V for Vendetta would do. It’s not what we (Americans) do (except if it’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Moby Dick, or Catch-22 ect.). Admittedly, BC hasn’t banned Fifty Shades of Grey, but deftly disavowed the sensual work.
Banning books doesn’t work. If the BC Bookstore had just left it alone, you wouldn’t be reading this. You might not have even noticed. Shades stuff is all over the place. It’s an artifact of popular culture now, the butt of jokes that in each utterance seems to ooze out more revenue for the S&M giant. It means something like “vapid guilty pleasure.” It’s like Twilight or a Snickers.
BC isn’t making the argument that they want to provide “good” art in their store. It’s a store so they’ll sell what people will buy. That’d be a more defensible argument I think, we want to offer our students good art and therefore Shades shouldn’t be sold. But there’s plenty of inconsequential stuff there (see James Paterson) as well as plenty of essential stuff like duct tape and shampoo.
I think Fifty Shades of Grey lies somewhere in between. It means something, whether you’ll grant it that or not. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but based on precedent and cultural footprint, it deserves to be in our bookstore.
