A few months ago, I borrowed a copy of Fifty Shades of Grey from the local library, intrigued by all the press coverage it was getting. I read most of it before throwing it down in disgust.
Now please don't get me wrong. I'm not a prude, I think there's a definite place for erotica and even for out and out pornography in our lives and in our culture.
For those of you who have been living under a rock, or who have been absorbed with politics or football, or both, for the last half year, Fifty Shades tells the story of Ana Steele, recent college graduate and neophyte reporter, who meets and becomes enamored with Christian Grey, wealthy beyond belief, handsome, and utterly self-assured. But Christian has a peculiarity - okay, call it a perversion - he enjoys inflicting pain on women as a part of his sexual repertoire.
Should Ana run for her very life? No, of course not, or there wouldn't be any book. Instead she decides to explore the dark side of sex with the enigmatic gazillionaire. There is an almost interminable series of emails between the two, punctuated by encounters in which Christian hurts Ana in mutually agreed on ways, and Ana endures the pain in order to stay with Christian.
As I remember, the novel never quite says whether she enjoys being abused.
Critics have made much of what they call the bad writing in the book. Personally, I didn't think the prose was all that bad. Certainly it's a cut above some of the other stuff available out there. In addition, of course, there has been a great deal of attention on the sexually explicit parts of the book. A colleague at the library where I work says she doesn't think Fifty Shades is any more graphic than the numerous "bodice rippers" in circulation. Perhaps not.
I'm not in much of a position to argue that point, having studiously avoided romance novels all my life. What bothers me so much about Fifty Shades and the spate of imitators now flooding libraries and e-publishers is the presumption that sado-masochistic behavior is in any way normal, and that women should endure whatever pain a man might want to put them through in order to hang onto the guy.
Helping people with their check-outs at the library and logging in transfers from other branches, it has become clear that most of the readership for this book is composed of young and middle-aged women. Possibly they are reading the book for amusement, but I worry that impressionable people will take away the idea that it's okay for a man to hurt a woman and that it's a woman's lot to suffer silently for the sake of his pleasure.
The whole thing seems to me to be a complete refutation of everything the feminist movement has accomplished in the last fifty years. What a great pity.
Pete, I have not read the Fifty Shades books and don't intend to. But I have heard enough about them to be absolutely SHOCKED that they would be so appealing to women. We sure disagree POLITICALLY, but we sure DO agree on this one!
ReplyDeleteFifty Shades of Grey was so incredibly bad. Like you, I read it out of curiosity, and it is awful. It reads like bad internet fiction, which is how it began. Ana is a stupid character and the first person narrative always has her arguing with her "inner goddess" which is annoying. The character of Christian Gray is always described as wearing gray; like she just has to hit us over the head with it. Even his eyes are grey. Whether the prose itself is terrible, the writing structurally is bad and could have used a better editor. At the end of the very first chapter Ana is glad she'll never have to see Mr. Gray again, even though he JUST SAID a few pages ago that he was going to be at her graduation. That's bad continuity in just the first 20 pages. There's a similar odd bit during one of the sex scenes. Oh, and for all the talk of the sex in the book, there's really not much. Half the book is lame e-mail correspondence between the characters.
ReplyDeleteAnd it goes on for 500 pages! For a book that supposed to be erotic and have a certain sexual frankness, it takes the author 300+ pages before she can even use the word "vagina". Like most bad romance fiction, everything is euphamisms. But to make it worse, it's the same 3 euphamisms over and over. Ana always talks about her "down there", usually after an ellipsis and in italics. She can't ever seem to use the word condom either, constantly just referring to the "foil packet" from when it comes.
As to the "abuse", the question is whether sadomasichism is abuse or not as it's meant to be enjoyed. She seems to like aspects of it early on when Gray was going easy on her, but at the end after a hard spanking she cries and cries and breaks up with him. So we just wasted 500 pages, since anyone could have told her she wouldn't be into it. But her good sense is compromised by the sex. I never found anything appealing about the Christian Gray character at all. He was always a creepy jerk. But for some reason she sleeps with him and since he's her first, she has all these feelings for him that cloud her good sense. Let that be a lesson ladies; casual sex makes you stupider! And the sex itself is insanely unrealistic, seeming to last for insane lengths of time and she always comes first.
But what can we expect from an author whose model of good literature is Twilight? (If we thought E.L. James' prose was bad, Stephanie Meyer's is even worse!) Fifty Shades began as Twilight fan fiction and the results are exactly what you would expect. What I can't understand is how this warranted 1) 2 more books of equal length, 2) an actual printing of this thing; it can't just live on the internet with the other poorly written erotica? and 3) why it sold the way it did. If you want that sort of thing, you can get it from better writers. This "viral" mentality in our culture is disseminating crap at an alarming rate.
I'd much rather watch Secretary than read Fifty Shades. It's the same elements, but there's real character and it's meant to have an odd sense of humor. In Secretary our lead gets into spanking as a way of refocusing her self-mutilation tendencies for which she had been institutionalized. That's much more interesting than some virgin neophyte meeting a businessman who hands her a sex contract.
It was several months between reading most of the book and writing the blog entry. Obviously, your memory of it is better than mine. The main thing that bothers me is that there seems to be a large number of women who are reading it and might be inclined to think of this as in any way normal behavior in a relationship. Thanks for your comments
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