50 Shades of Gray was *awful*... though I'm told in this case the movie was actually better than the books (never saw it). I would hate to find myself in the hands of anyone who thinks that drivel passes for bdsm!
Anyway, I've always been a very curious kitty, and a very ravenous reader. When I was a kid I would read everything in the house, which was mostly stuff My parents were done with or had put in the shelf for reference. By the time I was 9, I had read both Stranger in a Strange Land and the Joy of Sex - two essential books, imo. By highschool I learned to navigate the interlibrary loan system, so I was able to track down untranslated manuscripts from the Marquis de Sade without shelling out a huge percentage of my net worth. Although it was a bit disappointing, the Marquis' work wasn't half as mindblowing as the hype had me expecting, and there are other works published in the same era that are *way* more extreme.
~Mme X~