50 Shades of Grey

Just kidding! This is not another post arguing about the release of the 50 Shades of Grey movie this weekend, but this IS a post about books and the hidden mysteries that are inside. In class earlier this week we talked about books and their content. It is funny how we hold books to a higher standard than other media. It is not ok to ever say anything bad about books because books are almost “untouchable”. Well I disagree with that. After looking at some of the popular teenage books, I was blown away by their content. There were lots of graphic sexual scenes and 100’s of F words in some of these books aimed towards TEENAGERS. If these books were movies they would definitely be rated R. The scary thing is that these books are all very readily available to children at a young age. Why are we allowing children and teens to read this kind of content but it is not acceptable for them to watch it in a movie? Why have ratings on video games, movies, and other types of media but not books?

This is an argument that makes lots of people really mad. I thought this topic was ironic because of the release of the 50 Shades Of Grey movie this weekend. I have seen countless numbers of posts on social media about this book that has turned into a movie. What if this book had a rating in the first place? What if people knew what they were getting into before they read the book? Would parents allow their teenagers to read this book if they really knew the content beforehand? I really do think that ratings on books could make a big difference. Hopefully people can realize that ratings on books would not be to discourage people from reading books, but it would be to monitor the content that they are exposed to. I think this is an important thing to consider. What do you think about ratings on books? Do you think this would discourage people from reading or encourage people to read even more?