Voidly · Verboten · Reason
Books banned for sexual content
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
52
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 |
Source: Verboten, built on the banned-books.org Open Censorship Core (CC BY 4.0). Verboten compilation CC BY 4.0.