{"id":1372,"date":"2012-03-28T15:04:22","date_gmt":"2012-03-28T19:04:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.monsterlibrarian.com\/TheCirculationDesk\/?p=1372"},"modified":"2012-03-28T15:04:22","modified_gmt":"2012-03-28T19:04:22","slug":"fifty-shades-of-shame","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.monsterlibrarian.com\/TheCirculationDesk\/fifty-shades-of-shame\/","title":{"rendered":"Fifty Shades of Shame"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I haven&#8217;t read <em>Fifty Shades of Grey<\/em>, but I am outraged by the media&#8217;s assumption that women are reading it on ereaders because they&#8217;re ashamed for the world to know what they&#8217;re reading. While it&#8217;s true that most of the copies sold have been ebooks, some of that is probably because print copies have been scarce. I can&#8217;t speak for all women, of course, but the last time I checked the catalog in the Indianapolis library system, there were 77 holds. \u00a0That&#8217;s 77 people, probably mostly women, who are okay with marching up to the circulation desk to check it out- 77 people who aren&#8217;t ashamed to read a physical copy with a cover that other people might see, even though Dr. Drew announced his disapproval, the media has anointed it <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2012\/03\/10\/business\/media\/an-erotic-novel-50-shades-of-grey-goes-viral-with-women.html?_r=2&amp;scp=1&amp;sq=fifty%20shades%20of%20grey&amp;st=cse\">&#8220;mommy porn&#8221;<\/a>, and many reviewers have not been kind (Jesse Kornbluth at the Huffington Post called it &#8220;a sad joke&#8221;). The point is, it&#8217;s turning a lot of people on to books. Those people are not hiding their taste in reading, they&#8217;re celebrating it. Good for them. It&#8217;s fine to keep your taste in reading private, of course. But no one should be made to feel that they need to justify or defend it. \u00a0Why do I read genre fiction on my ereader? It&#8217;s not because I&#8217;m worried that someone might see I&#8217;m reading a book without the Oprah seal of approval. It&#8217;s because I read so damn much of it that if I bought physical copies of everything I read I&#8217;d be buried in them, and sometimes I&#8217;m too impatient to wait for the library.<\/p>\n<p>Whatever you read, be it <em>Fifty Shades of Grey<\/em>, gory zombie novels, steampunk with parasols, witty Regency romance, or all of the above&#8230; here, we stand by your <a href=\"http:\/\/www.monsterlibrarian.com\/about_reading.htm\">right to read <\/a> what you want, the way you want to, regardless of what anyone else says, does, or thinks.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I haven&#8217;t read Fifty Shades of Grey, but I am outraged by the media&#8217;s assumption that women are reading it on ereaders because they&#8217;re ashamed for the world to know what they&#8217;re reading. While it&#8217;s true that most of the copies sold have been ebooks, some of that is probably because print copies have been<\/p>\n<p><a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.monsterlibrarian.com\/TheCirculationDesk\/fifty-shades-of-shame\/\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[44,929,928,60,930,83,6,802,128,868,195,213],"class_list":["post-1372","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-ebooks","tag-erotica","tag-fifty-shades-of-grey","tag-genre-fiction","tag-genre-readers-bill-of-rights","tag-horror-fiction","tag-libraries","tag-media","tag-monsterlibrarian-com","tag-reader-shame","tag-reading-engagement","tag-romance-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monsterlibrarian.com\/TheCirculationDesk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1372","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monsterlibrarian.com\/TheCirculationDesk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monsterlibrarian.com\/TheCirculationDesk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monsterlibrarian.com\/TheCirculationDesk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monsterlibrarian.com\/TheCirculationDesk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1372"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.monsterlibrarian.com\/TheCirculationDesk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1372\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1376,"href":"https:\/\/www.monsterlibrarian.com\/TheCirculationDesk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1372\/revisions\/1376"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monsterlibrarian.com\/TheCirculationDesk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1372"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monsterlibrarian.com\/TheCirculationDesk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1372"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monsterlibrarian.com\/TheCirculationDesk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1372"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}