What We Talk About When We Talk About “Fifty Shades of Grey”
This may be sacrilege to say, but we can’t seem to muster any interest in reading the new, best-selling erotica novel that everyone’s talking about, Fifty Shades of Grey. After all, even the author admits that it’s not that good! For SM erotica, we’d rather stick with a classic like Story of O. Yeah, yeah, we get that Fifty Shades is “mommy porn” for grown women who wished that the Twilight novels were just a little dirtier (hi, we’re your target audience) but maybe we don’t want to read something that has garnered a reputation as mommy porn. That all said, what we are fascinated by are the kind of conversations that this new novel is inspiring:
- Katie Roiphe, writing in Newsweek magazine, claims that spanking (including this novel) is suddenly mainstream because women can’t handle all the equality and money and power in the workplace that is suddenly coming their way.
- The Frisky says that Roiphe understands neither feminism nor BDSM if she thinks that.
- A male reviewer at the New York Daily News says that the book “manages, miraculously, to be at once pornographic and deeply unappealing to men – it is a kind of pornography that attracts only women.” And this, he writes, “is exactly why this book matters.”
- The author, E.L. James, admits that the book is neither ground-breaking nor particularly good and that she’s shocked how well it’s doing.
- Okay, so this news blooper has absolutely nothing to do with Fifty Shades of Grey, but it has everything to do with spanking — a major theme of the novel — and how the subject turns so many adults (especially Fox News anchors) into giggly, awkward, embarrassed teens.
- Is the book worth the hype? The ladies at Jezebel find it “ridiculous” and complain that it contains way too many “OMG’s” for their liking.
- Apparently this book actually started out as Bella and Edward fan fiction. Does this mean that an erotica novel based on Star Trek — the original target of fan fiction writers — is coming soon?!
