It must have been August, let’s say… 1980. The phrase “beach read” was a decade away from being coined (it only emerged as a marketing tool in 1990). I was 13, and had spent July at summer camp. While I was away, my uncle Ted — a writer who often received free books from publishers and newspapers — stayed in my room for a few days and left on my bedside table a copy of California Generation by Jacqueline Briskin. There is no way that Uncle Ted, who rightfully fancied himself an intellectual, read this novel before giving it to me. He probably glanced at the first page to see that it featured high-school students, and thought I might like it.

The cover promised “SUN, SIN, AND SEDUCTION”. And the back-cover blurb: “They’re the California Generation. The golden spoiled youth in a sun-drenched land of dreams — where the stars come out at night to see and be seen, where money, beauty, and sex pave the way to success, and where everyone hopes to ride off into the sunset…”

Briskin’s novel doesn’t disappoint: it delivers almost every kind of sex you can imagine — or, at least, every kind you could have imagined in 1980. But it’s more than just another bonkbuster (a portmanteau that was coined later, in 1989). There’s counter-culture rioting, lots of adultery, and several abortions. It also features a good deal of drugs, including an LSD trip where a dandelion communicates the secrets of the universe.

Did my parents object to me reading about such precocious topics? Did my father phone his brother to rebuke him for leaving wildly inappropriate material in my room? The answer to both questions is a resounding no.

My parents always let me read whatever I wanted. Our living room was lined with bookshelves containing everything from a complete collection of The World Book Encyclopedia to Fear of Flying, and I was free to help myself. Once, when I was staying at a friend’s house, her father caught us reading Judy Blume’s Forever. He roundly scolded us both (“You will not read this kind of trash in my house!”) before confiscating the book. I was fantastically jealous; it would have been much more fun to read Forever if I’d had to sneak around to do so.

With no such limits imposed upon me, I read all about SUN, SIN, AND SEDUCTION in plain sight — lounging in the living room, or on a chaise lounge in our backyard. I brought it to our country club to read on the pool’s dry deck, and I carried it to the dentist’s office and read it in the waiting room. I looked young, even for my age, so I’m sure I was met with disapproving and/or astonished stares as I flew through Briskin’s 534 steamy pages.

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How sensitivity readers corrupt literature

By Kate Clanchy

First published in 1970, California Generation begins on the eve of graduation for California High’s class of 1960, and follows several characters through that tumultuous decade. There’s a vacuous beauty queen who must get married when she gets pregnant before graduation, a movie star’s son who’s addicted to heroin, and a straight-laced social climber who’s “struggling with his own homosexuality” (thanks again, back-cover blurb).

Despite the sensational marketing, the novel intelligently depicts important events and topics of the era, including the civil rights movement, John F Kennedy’s presidency and the Vietnam war. All of the characters are what EM Forster himself would have called round: morally complex, with rich and vivid histories. As a teen, my favourite storyline was the romance between Ken, a Japanese-American artist and son of a gardener, and a rich white girl named Leigh.

But when I think of reasons to forbid my impressionable young self from reading this novel, Ken and Leigh rank chief among them. Theirs is a volatile relationship, and more than once Leigh bears bruises after their arguments. “Masochism’s a nasty habit,” Ken tells her, when she confesses she likes it when he hits her. Both characters are portrayed as highly sympathetic, and a sensitivity reader today might worry about communicating a harmful message.

If my mother had picked it up — which she may well have, noticing how many times I re-read it over the years — would she have become concerned about me romanticising a violent relationship? Doubtful. The only time I remember my parents being troubled about a book was years later, when I was 16 and engrossed with Jean Stein’s oral biography of the tragic Warhol muse, Edie Sedgwick. Even then, my father didn’t tell me to stop reading it. He just explained he was worried I seemed to relate to such a troubled young woman, and asked if I wanted to speak to a therapist. I said, “No, thank you” — and went back to reading.

As a parent, I hewed to the philosophy I was raised on, and always let my daughter read anything she chose. She never picked up California Generation, but if she had, I might have initiated a conversation about many of the attitudes in the book, including the dated psychological analysis of the gay character, Marshall. But I also trust that my child has the ability — and the well-developed prior knowledge — to discard whatever wrongheaded or antiquated attitudes may be embedded within any novel’s pages. I trust her instincts and intelligence, and her ability to interact with a text, rather than adopt it as gospel.

Suggested reading

Spare us the bedtime morality tales

By Giles Fraser

It never would have occurred to my parents that a book might be a brainwashing device. On those living room shelves, they had both testaments of The Bible, as well as William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist (the mere title terrified me so much that I used to turn it around, spine facing inward). They also had a copy of Mein Kampf — not because they didn’t find its ideas abhorrent, of course they did; my father’s father died fighting in the Free French Airforce, and my mother is Jewish — but because they believed in the written word as a record of history, and that both the good and the evil were worthy of examination.

The eclectic breadth of my parents’ library, their utter lack of censorship and the conversations I heard them having about books gave me the freedom to retain my own mind, no matter what ideas I encountered on the page. Stories and characters, whether fictional or nonfictional, were never credo, but fodder for my own imagination and burgeoning teenage intellect.

Several years ago, a friend of mine house-sat for me with her teenage girls, who stayed for a few weeks in my daughter’s bedroom. My friend is a stricter mother than I, and had forbidden her 12-year-old from reading John Greene’s The Fault in Our Stars. When I got home and changed the sheets on my daughter’s bed, I found that very book wedged between the mattress and box spring. Did I rat the girl out to her mother? Of course not. Instead, I laughed, and slid it onto my daughter’s bookshelf, where she could find it any time she might want it.

The thing about books that contain adult content is that they also contain adult ideas. The best ones do not telegraph moral messages. At 13, while being thoroughly entertained by Briskin’s just-salacious-enough storylines, I was also learning about the sexual revolution, and the history of birth control and the evolution of the very ideas that may have led to my parents being so permissive about reading material.

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Teenagers need to have sex again

By Julie Burchill

Surely, in this age of TikTok and unfettered internet access, there’s much to appreciate about first encountering adult material in the form of words, rather than video clips. And, unlike your average influencer, a novel will never tell you what to think. In this age of memorising hashtags and calling them opinions, what better exercise for young minds to get lost in stories from which they must draw their own conclusions, and develop their own ideas?

Since signing on with a mainstream publisher in 2012, she’s sold over 150 million copies of her books worldwide. Last week, she released Freed, the final part of a retelling of the original Fifty Shades novels from the male love interest’s perspective. Again, James is following Meyer here, whose Midnight Sun (leaked in 2008 though not officially published until 2020) is the masculine take on the Twilight story.

Following, and, as usual, going further. Where Meyer contented herself with one volume of perspective-shifting, James has gone for a do-over on all three of hers; and where Meyer’s books sustained an atmosphere of age-appropriate repression and Mormon-appropriate sexual repulsion (Meyer is LDS), James went the whole hog-tied way into BDSM. James took the characters and relationships from Twilight, and rewrote the story to suit herself. “All my fantasies in there, and that’s it,” she said in 2012.

Edward Cullen still met Bella Swan, only now he wasn’t a 103-year-old vampire, and she wasn’t a depressed high-school virgin with a maddening tendency to bleed. He became an emotionally repressed (and very handsome) billionaire; she became a shy, klutzy (but beautiful!) student. In Twilight, Bella’s love helps Edward learn to control his instinct to suck her like a Capri-Sun; in Master of the Universe, Bella teaches Edward that there’s more to sex than trussing a woman up with cable ties and lovelessly banging her senseless.

Eventually Edward was renamed “Christian Grey” and Bella turned into “Anastasia Steele”; the whole thing was reworked and presented as an original fiction, and the cultural phenomenon we all know and masturbate to/hold in contempt was born. And there is so much contempt for James. Deriding her is as much of a compulsion for large chunks of the public as paddling Ana’s pert behind is for Christian. Feminists said she glorified abuse; BDSM-ers said she made BDSM look bad; conservatives said she was corrupting public decency; the sneery tag “mommy porn” was invented to describe her work.

And everyone, but everyone, said she couldn’t write. “In fact, if I were a member of the Christian Right, sitting on my front porch decrying the decadent morals of working American women, what would be most alarming about the Fifty Shades of Grey phenomena… is that millions of otherwise intelligent women are willing to tolerate prose on this level,” wrote Katie Roiphe in a 2012 article for Newsweek asking why the collective female libido seemed to have achieved a consensus around submission.

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Villains have never had it so good

By Sarah Ditum

Part of the strangeness of the reaction to Fifty Shades — both the passion of its fans, and the dismay of its detractors — is that it’s nothing very new, and nor would James ever pretend it was. As much as it owes to Twilight, and to the collaborative inventions of fanfiction, it’s also part of the grand tradition of the bonkbuster, which dates back to the 1970s. And the bonkbuster has always loved a bad boy: the caddish Rupert Campbell-Black, of Jilly Cooper’s Rutshire Chronicles, would make no better of a boyfriend than Christian Grey.

But bonkbusters also tended to celebrate variety and adventure for their heroines, not only sexually but professionally. Anastasia Steele is a retreat from that: a one-man woman whose eventual career is a gift of her wealthy husband (he buys a publisher for her run) and who gives up her surname when she marries him. After all the benefits of second-wave feminism, it seemed like what straight women really wanted was not to have it all but to give it all up; and they wanted it enough to buy James’s fantasies not just once but twice over.

Retelling might, in fact, be too strong a word for what James has done in her Christian-narrated novels. Comparisons of Master of the Universe and Fifty Shades suggest the shift from one to the other was not that extensive after all (Master of the Universe has been almost totally erased from the internet now); similarly, when you look at the original trilogy and the new one side-by-side, there’s often very little difference to detect.

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Nora Ephron was a prophet of desire

By Sarah Ditum

For example, the first time Christian gets Ana off, he does it by playing with her breasts in a “slow, sensual assault”. This continues until her “whole body sings with sweet agony”, at which point she tells us: “He kisses me, deeply, his tongue in my mouth absorbing my cries.” From his perspective, this is a “lascivious assault”, which ends when “I move quickly to kiss her, capturing her cries in my mouth.”

Where we do get new information from the Grey version, it’s mostly reassuring confirmation that he was always secretly concerned about Anastasia’s consent (take that, feminists worried about BDSM/BDSMers worried about being confused with rapists!), and childhood memories of his mother that help to explain his emotional remoteness. It’s not exactly Rashomon, but then, being Rashomon would be very much against the spirit of Fifty Shades. Nobody came here for the fracturing of reality into multiple perspectives, thank you very much.

The grand fantasy of Fifty Shades isn’t really the spanking or the restraints or any of the other delightful perversions that Christian introduces Ana to. It’s that a woman could know a (billionaire, handsome) man completely and, by loving him, redeem him. Through all the business in the Red Room of Pain, Ana achieves the ultimate in vanilla: straight, monogamous intimacy. To that end, nothing could be hotter than the revelation that Christian and Ana were having almost the exact same subjective experiences all along.

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Books won't save you

By Sarah Ditum

I don’t share a lot of the moral concerns about Fifty Shades. Yes, much of what occurs between Christian and Ana would be deeply alarming if it happened in a real relationship, but prissy fussing about how it misrepresents consent overlooks the fact that this is happening in a fiction. People who enjoy submission are also enjoying a fiction: it’s necessary to believe in your own resistance in order to extract the pleasure of being possessed.

So however careless Christian appears to be about Ana’s boundaries, readers know that she ultimately wants to be totally his; and they know also that her surrender becomes a way of mastering him. Even writing as infelicitous as James’s has a huge advantage over visual pornography when it comes to sex, in that it can show us its characters from the inside, and fulfil the part of the fantasy which is about feeling rather than simply doing (or being done to). If there’s danger in Fifty Shades, it’s not the sex so much as the romance.

To love someone is always to be slightly at the mercy of the unknowability of the other. Ana is able to overcome that with what the rewrite trilogy now confirms is perfect understanding. But in the real world, there is much that women are never going to comprehend about the men they love, however much they prostrate themselves in the effort — and much that men never make any effort to understand about the women who love them. More than horsewhips and hemp ropes, it’s that gulf of sympathy that leaves real-life people hurt.