Muns, Raleigh. "Sex and violence in the libraries (mostly sex) "

The Current (University of Missouri-St. Louis) December 6, 2005 (vol. 38, no. 1170), p. 4

Most people are unaware that the majority of libraries are secretly seething with works chock full o' sex and violence goodness. Those who seek to remove such literature from our libraries typically pick on obvious choices. For instance, the magazine Playboy used to be a staple of large city public libraries but is rarely found in them today. The main rationale used for ceasing library subscriptions to Playboy revolved around ongoing "damage" to the magazines by library users. Interestingly, a formal study comparing damage to Playboy vs. damage to Boy's Life (official magazine of the Boy Scouts of America) found that there was more harm caused to Boy's Life by peanut butter stains and torn pages than anything done to copies of Playboy.

St. Louis County Library does not subscribe to Playboy, and St. Louis City Library only has the 1953-1968 issues on grainy black and white microfilm. Of related interest is that the Library of Congress stopped funding the transcription of Playboy into braille during the tenure of Ronald Reagan as America's Grand Inquisitor. The only population that actually looked at the magazine just for the articles had been tripped up by the banninators.

Still, should one know where to look, it's pretty easy to get your fill of some good old fashioned prurient literature within library land.

Let's start with The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio. Written in the year 1350, this book can be thought of as that century's version of the notorious computer game, Grand Theft Auto. In the 100 tales spun in this classic work: you can find a young woman growing sweet basil in a pot containing the decapitated head of her murdered lover (Day 4, Story 5); a man pretending to be deaf and mute seducing all the nuns in a convent (Day 3, Story 1); and a lecherous priest teaching a young virgin how to put his "devil" in her "hell" (Day 3, Story 10). Understand, Boccaccio isn't attacking God or religion; his targets were the corrupt individuals in the 14th century Church bureacracy. For full access to the "Decameron" point your browser at http://www.brown.edu/Research/Decameron/ and enjoy!

Willy Shakespeare is rather well known for injecting baudiness into his writings. Unfortunately, his sexiest work, the poem "Venus and Adonis," is seldom read. Old Bill could be writing a Harlequin Romance when he puts these words in the mouth of the aroused Love Goddess, decrying to Adonis: "Graze on my lips, and if those hills be dry, Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie." Whoa. Passages like these were excised by one William Bowdler in the 19th century, resulting in many of the versions of Shakespeare that persist in boring most high school students. I had to wait until attending UCLA to finally be introduced to "the two-backed beast."

With all of this hot and heavy literature already in our libraries (and I'm just scratching the surface), I'm amazed that books like Sex by Madonna aren't purchased by more libraries. I lost the battle for purchasing it in my second year here at UMSL (1992). I strongly protested that we ought to purchase it precisely because it was controversial. How else can one do a comparative analysis of Madonna with Shakespeare or Boccaccio? In the entire MOBIUS consortium, only noble Mizzou saw fit to purchase Ms. Ciccone's unworthy tome, and one of their two copies is already "missing" from their non-circulating closed special collections library. The remaining copy is probably stained with peanut butter.

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Email Address: muns@umsl.edu

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