Sex sells. This age-old adage has defined our society for decades, from Wonderbra’s traffic accident-inducing ‘Hello Boys’ billboard campaign in the 1990s to the scantily clad women in the infamous music video for ‘Blurred Lines’. Sexualisation has long been a mainstream consumer interest. Perhaps it is not so startling, then, that Fifty Shades of Grey has conquered the public curiosity and grasped media interest so heavily, its iron grip spawning an empire that has culminated in one of the most highly anticipated films of the decade. It is extraordinary to track its development, from its humble beginnings as a piece of Twilight fanfiction posted on the internet under the pseudonym ‘Snowqueen’s Icedragon’ to the bestselling book in the UK since records began in 1998. Simultaneously beloved and disparaged by the public and media alike, it has been described as ‘Mommy Porn’ and, according to Salman Rushdie, “made Twilight look like War & Peace”.

While its prose may not be poetic or skilful, its depictions of sexual relationships, of power play and the socially ‘taboo’, is but the 21st century’s latest addition to a rich historical heritage of erotica that began in classical antiquity. Catullus, the Roman Republic poet famed for his lovelorn verses, continues to attract attention for his poem 16, its obscenity resulting in a full English text translation being unavailable until the late 20th century, and whose explicitly sexual opening line was deemed by The Telegraph as “one of the filthiest expressions ever written in Latin – or in any other language, for that matter”. Ovid, too, dabbled in the erotic; the finale to Book 3 of his instructional Ars Amatoria details female bedroom decorum, from the “cries and panting breath” a woman should make to advice on sexual positions, such as the highly unsubtle reference to Andromache, the Theban wife of Hector, who was “too tall to straddle Hector’s horse”. Depictions of the erotic were, however, not isolated to the West; the Arabian Nights, a collection of Asian and North African folk tales from the Islamic Golden Age, is not only the source material for Disney’s Aladdin, but also an iconic literary work that includes tales such as Ali with the Large Member and The Caliph Harun Al-Rashid and the Three Slave Girls, all set within the kingdom of a tyrant ruler who satiates his misogynistic lust by marrying virgins and murdering them the next day.

Sir Richard Francis Burton’s unabashed translation of the Arabian Nights caused a moral outcry in Victorian England when it was published in 1884; yet this was just the latest in a long line of eroticism and literary brazenness that caused a lurid public fascination and culminated in imprisonment and court trials. Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, or Fanny Hill to refer to its famed namesake, was deemed the first ‘prose pornography’ after its publication in the middle of the 18th century; its depiction of the sexual exploits of a young prostitute, not limited to scenes of voyeurism, masturbation, and masochism, resulted in the arrest of its authors under the charge of “corrupting the King’s subjects”.

Within the same century, across the English Channel, the infamous libertine, the Marquis de Sade, wrote the twin novels Justine and Juliette, the former a virtuous woman subject to sexual torture and humiliation, the latter her nymphomaniac sister who indulges in sexual depravity at its extreme. Napoleon ordered de Sade’s arrest in 1801, and the Cour Royale de Paris agreed in favour of the demolition of all de Sade’s works in the same year.

It was over a century later when fiction depicting sexual language and imagery was purged of its lewd label in the renowned R v Penguin Books Ltd. trial in the 1960s. The call for the uncensored transcription of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover to be banned from print under the Obscene Publications Act of 1959 was implemented due to the fear that it would be accessible to women and the working-classes. Drawing attention and critical thought to the definition of obscenity and to the question of a value judgement system being imposed on art, and justifying the literary merit of a piece of literature, the overturning of the case was the spark that ignited libertarianism in the printing press and kindled a kind of deviancy in the published written word.

It was Lawrence’s prose that safeguarded him, the “pure deepening whirlpools of sensation swirling deeper and deeper through all her tissue and consciousness”, the “peace on earth of her soft, quiescent body”, that deemed him a lyricist in the jury’s eyes. There is a stark transition between these quotes and the repetitive ramblings of E. L. James’ heroine about her ”inner goddess”, swaying in a “gentle victorious samba”, her cheeks turning “the colour of The Communist Manifesto” as she listens headily to the voice of her lover, “warm and husky like dark melted chocolate fudge caramel... or something”.

Evidently, it is not for the aesthetic merit of the prose that society has become irresistibly drawn to James’ tale; it is to indulge in the graphic, the explicit and the unadulterated world of sexual fetishes that are void of discussion in casual society. The introduction of e-books has enabled us to indulge in fantasies without judgement, to be both liberated and surreptitious in our consumption, and it is a probable explanation for how erotica has paradoxically reached such endemic proportions in the public consciousness. A hasty search on the internet brings to the fore thousands of erotic literature sold solely in the e-book format, images of a rippled torso or a crimson lip enticing customers alongside their price; many are for free, or charge a petty price. Perhaps the most striking aspect is the volume of the work that is self-published, with many authors linking to their biographical information on short story and fiction websites.

For it is the clandestine world of the internet, the ability to read material and erase it from traceability, to be able to attach words to your desires anonymously, that has pioneered erotic fiction. A simple search brings a whole realm of erotic fiction to my fingertips, from homoerotic fanfiction between Sherlock and Watson to a website whose short stories involve categories as diverse as ‘Xeno’ (for the uneducated prudes xenophilia, or sex with aliens), ‘Humil’, appertaining to acts of humiliation, and ‘MC’, the curious acronym for sexual acts regarding mind control. The most popular stories, however, duly follow the BDSM trend that Fifty Shades of Grey has pushed to the forefront; hundreds of thousands of hits bestowed upon the poetically titled I Watched My Wife Get Drunk, Seduced, and Abused, although it loses its virtual laurel wreath to the most popular story on the website, Claire Turns Slut. Tales of women gaining sexual gratification and pleasure from maltreatment and from affirmed declarations of their ‘wantonness’ are incredibly widespread, to the point of oversaturation on almost every website that acts as a platform for erotic fiction.

In itself, the type of behaviour exhibited in these types of stories ushers in questions regarding whether female sexuality is being exploited to the point of inequality. It is a controversy that Fifty Shades of Grey has already been subject to, from the accusations around its celebration of an emotionally abusive relationship to its depiction of highly-enforced traditional gender roles. It is exploitative and liberating all at once because a female author writing about female sexuality and building a platform, albeit unintentionally and controversially, upon which we can discuss it, is freeing in a society where we can gape and sigh at Rihanna’s body but never make mention of our own.

Whether erotic fiction is a harmless playground for individuals to build and engage in their most extreme sexual desires and fetishes, or whether it is detrimental to the cultural perception of women in the same degree as video pornography, seems to be a question lost in the hype of the release of the most publicised erotic work of all time. It is testament, however, to the burgeoning curiosity and openness regarding the most intimate and dark parts of humanity, and a firm validation of the age-old adage “sex sells”. But at what cost?