10 Banned Books
It’s almost hard to believe that books are still being banned in the world. Aside from a crackpot dictatorship or genuinely sensible reasons, such as keeping Stephen King’s Cujo out of preschools, you’d think we’d have moved past such an archaic form of censorship by now. But alas, the times have yet to be a’changing. And while some reasons for banning a book make at least a little sense, these explanations are just baffling.
It’s almost hard to believe that books are still being banned in the world. Aside from a crackpot dictatorship or genuinely sensible reasons, such as keeping Stephen King’s Cujo out of preschools, you’d think we’d have moved past such an archaic form of censorship by now. But alas, the times have yet to be a’changing. And while some reasons for banning a book make at least a little sense, these explanations are just baffling.
10 James And The Giant Peach – A Sexual Spider
But the protagonist of the novel, Billy Pilgrim, is also “unstuck in time,” which means that the book makes precious little chronological sense. One minute, he’s in his mansion after the war getting massaged to sleep by a Magic Fingers machine attached to his bed. The next moment, he’s in the past in an alien zoo being forced to make love to a porn star for the Trafalmadorians’ entertainment.
It’s for scenes like the latter that the novel is usually banned. It’s been cited for obscene language, explicit sexual scenes, and “an act of bestiality.” If you’re talking about, say, middle schoolers, those are decent reasons to at least question a book’s merits for that age group.
But in 1985, a high school in Owensboro, Kentucky, threw logic out the window and banned Slaughterhouse-Five for the aforementioned “Magic Fingers” passages. For context, the Magic Fingers was a machine that simply vibrated the main character’s bed because he was depressed and had trouble sleeping. It would “jiggle him while he wept.” Compared to forced copulation for the pleasure of extraterrestrials, that seems a little benign.
But the Owensboro school didn’t stop there. They also made sure to mention that they didn’t like one particular sentence out of the entire novel: “The gun made a ripping sound like the opening of the fly of God Almighty.”
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