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Books banned for sexual content

Name: Books banned or restricted for sexual content
Creator: AI Analytics
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

3,119 titles have been banned or restricted for sexual content across 52 countries — one of eleven stated grounds tracked across the censorship record.

Titles

3,119

Countries

Reason

Sexual content

Most-banned for sexual content

Ranked by the number of distinct countries that banned or restricted the title citing this reason.

Title	Author	Year	Countries
Lolita	Vladimir Nabokov	1955	9
Lady Chatterley's Lover	D.H. Lawrence	1928	8
Tropic of Cancer	Henry Miller	1934	7
The Story of O	Pauline Réage	1954	6
The Decameron	Giovanni Boccaccio	1353	5
Tropic of Capricorn	Henry Miller	1939	4
Portnoy's Complaint	Philip Roth	1969	4
Brave New World	Aldous Huxley	1932	4
American Psycho	Bret Easton Ellis	1991	4
What If It's Us	Adam Silvera, Becky Albertalli	2018	3
Ulysses	James Joyce	1922	3
The Story of Zahra	Hanan al-Shaykh	1980	3
Sons and Lovers	D.H. Lawrence	1913	3
One Thousand and One Nights	—	1706	3
Naked Lunch	William S. Burroughs	1959	3
Hubert Selby Jr.: Last Exit to Brooklyn	Hubert Selby Jr.	1964	3
Fanny Hill	John Cleland	1748	3
Droll Stories	Honoré de Balzac	1832	3
Call Me By Your Name	André Aciman	2007	3
Woman at Point Zero	Nawal El Saadawi	1975	2
Watchmen	Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons	1987	2
Twilight	Stephenie Meyer	2005	2
Trust Exercise	Susan Choi	2019	2
The Yacoubian Building	Alaa Al Aswany	2002	2
The Unbearable Lightness of Being	Milan Kundera	1984	2
The Tin Drum	Günter Grass	1959	2
The Song of Achilles	Madeline Miller	2011	2
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo	Taylor Jenkins Reid	2017	2
The Second Sex	Simone de Beauvoir	1949	2
The Notebook	Nicholas Sparks	2015	2
The Naked and the Dead	Norman Mailer	1948	2
The Monk	Matthew Lewis	1796	2
The Kite Runner	Khaled Hosseini	2003	2
The Joy of Sex	Alex Comfort	1972	2
The Handmaid's Tale	Margaret Atwood	1985	2
The God of Small Things	Arundhati Roy	1997	2
The Color Purple	Alice Walker	1982	2
The Catcher in the Rye	J.D. Salinger	1951	2
The 120 Days of Sodom	Marquis de Sade	1904	2
Show Me	Helga Fleischhauer-Hardt, Will McBride	1974	2
Sex	Madonna	1992	2
Release	Patrick Ness	2017	2
Peyton Place	Grace Metalious	1956	2
Nana	Émile Zola	1880	2
My Secret Garden	Nancy Friday	—	2
My Dark Vanessa	Kate Elizabeth Russell	2020	2
More Joy of Sex	—	1973	2
Middlesex	Jeffrey Eugenides	2002	2
Madame Bovary	Gustave Flaubert	1857	2
Les 120 Journées de Sodome	Marquis de Sade	1904	2

Where sexual content is most cited

Country	Titles
United States	2,364
Malaysia	575
New Zealand	52
Belarus	52
Ireland	27
Australia	24
United Kingdom	19
France	10
South Africa	7
Vatican City (Holy See)	7
Iran	6
Canada	6
Saudi Arabia	5
Italy	5
Brazil	5
Norway	4
Kuwait	4
Egypt	4
Germany	4
China	4

← All reasons & the full index

Source: Verboten, built on the banned-books.org Open Censorship Core (CC BY 4.0). Verboten compilation CC BY 4.0.