Universal Pictures and Focus FeaturesTake this as a warning: Do not try 50 Shades of Grey at home. At least not without proper safety training.
According to the Washington Post, sex injuries in the United States have doubled, and many of the mishaps coincide with the release of the raunchy fan fiction books. The newspaper analyzed data from the Consumer Product Safety Commission detailing annual emergency room visits. We'll save you the bore of reading through the scientific methods, so just trust us when we say this study (and WaPo's research of it) is legit.
What they concluded is that since 2007, twice as many Americans have visited emergency rooms for injuries involving sex toys, and most of those visits coincided with the 2012 and 2013 releases of the Fifty Shades novels. What's even scarier is that 83% of those injuries required what's deemed "foreign body removals." Yikes.
The majority of those getting hurt while trying to get down were males over the age of 40, which means we probably have many cases of wives forcing Christian Grey-esque moves on their unwitting husbands. Perhaps the movie version should come with a disclaimer beforehand? After all, the contents of the Red Room are not meant to be operated by novices. You've got to give these folks points for trying, though.
Luckily, most of the injuries reported were more embarrassing than serious. And, we should point out that there's no way to prove definitively that 50 Shades of Grey is at fault for all of these injuries. But, you can't argue with timing. Or the power of Christian Grey.