Fifty Shades of Grey

Please tell me they were younger than you so you could laugh at their idiocy. Please.

She's older than me. And married.

God help us all.

I wish I could say exactly where I saw a lot of links to download this book trilogy but it is probably against the sites guidelines. There are a lot of links though.

Not of interest to me of course, but anything that robs that woman of money for what by all reports so far is the worst, most dangerous torture-porn fantasy this side of Saw is only a Good Thing as far as I am concerned.

Putting it on par with Saw may be going too far.

...Right?

Saw never tried to claim it was a liberating force for women's sexuality.

I don't consider Saw and Fifty Shades equatable. Saw is torture porn, and it is happy to admit it is torture porn. Fifty Shades claims to be a sweeping romance in which a virginial heroine (so virginial she's apparently never heard of porn and has never touched herself and has never felt sexual attraction to anyone in her whole life before Grey) gets acquainted with her kinky side and transforms a controlling psychopath into a slight-less-controlling psychopath.

And this is held up as the impetus behind a great feminine sexual awakening.

God above.

The infuriating part? Women already had a "great sexual awakening" in the 60's, and back then there was actually an issue with the way females were expected to act. Their sexual and social liberation actually caused something.

This book is just trash being backed by the news media. It has no right putting itself on par with one of the most important events of social history.

I just can't believe that people defend this. "Oh, Christian changes! He gets less controlling! He loves Ana, so it's okay!"

That doesn't change the fact that he repeatedly STALKED HER (and the text specifically calls it stalking!), broke into her room and had rough sex with her because she jokingly sent an e-mail saying she no longer wanted a relationship, traced her via her phone, and constantly frightens her into obeying him.

This is not HEALTHY! This is WRONG! Why do people defend this?!

Having read the second book and part of the third one, I can say that no, Christian doesn't change.

He's not as controlling a dick with Ana but he still controls aspects of her life. Like, recently there was a chapter where he was pissed off at her for various reasons (their lives were being really stressful and stuff) so he denied her the chance to orgasm.

Now that might not sound like much, and Christian himself admits that it's a fairly common form of punishment for dominant and submissive relationships.

The problem was that the two were married at the time and Christian had insisted that he wanted to change and was okay having a "vanilla" relationship with Ana. Sure Christian. Sure you do.

To another point someone made about how Ana is "so virginal she hasn't done ____" ...I read her as asexual at first. And that would have been interesting to me but obviously if it's a romance novel, that's not gonna happen.

Yeah, the only explanation for Ana's complete and utter lack of any sexual experience or, hell, feelings at all is that she's asexual. But then she magically becomes not-asexual.

Seriously, there's no reason why a young woman of this day and age who grew up in a normal (normal as in not fundamentalist and highly repressive of female sexuality) household would be so clueless about her own body.

Ana grew up with a mom who got married four (or three?) times, so I think they'd definitely TALK about that sort of thing.

She later admits to having made out with a guy on a couch once. They apparently got to first base.

The scary thing though is that she had, Christian hadn't. Apparently "Mrs. Robinson" and the subs don't do make out sessions.

Really, sometimes I forget that Ana and Christian are supposed to be older than Bella and Edward were.

edited 3rd Oct '12 1:01:23 PM by Hermiethefrog

Sometimes, I forget that Ana and Christian are not the same people as Bella and Edward.

The current discussion reminds me of this. I wrote a response arguing that this implies being okay with/ not having a stance on the fucked up message, and she said

I know it was a long time ago, but I was going through so much "wait wut" that I stopped thinking about it.

edited 3rd Oct '12 3:40:41 PM by SnowyFoxes

Still having the Facebook argument. She keeps insisting his stalking and controlling are okay because "he gets better" and "he was abused and saw his mom die in front of him" and "he never claimed to be normal!" And "Ana could've said no and stopped it whenever she wanted!"

BULL. SHIT. Ana is portrayed as so weak willed and desperate for sex that she was perfectly okay with him taking her virginity in a bloody painful way (literally, the way it's described sounds like a horribly painful way to lose your virginity) and is willing to sign the sub contract even though she doesn't really understand its implications. Not to mention the fact that it isn't a sub contract, it's a slave contract, two very different things, and Ana has effectively no real world experience in BDSM.

When you're nervous and have never had experience with BDSM before, Christian Grey is the last person on the planet you would want as a dom.

edited 3rd Oct '12 3:29:39 PM by Accela

Tell her to spend a month at a place called Fetlife. She'll learn, one way or the other.

OK, the thought of Anastasia being somehow "converted" from asexuality disturbs me. I'm not asexual, but I have a very low sex drive, and I utterly despise the idea that you need a relationship and smoking hot sex every night to be a complete person.

A story like that would freak me out a bit even if the relationship were completely consensual and non-abusive.

I doubt E.L. James intended Ana to come across as asexual. I think she was just clinging to the idea that a female protagonist should be as virginal as possible and took it to the extreme. In the process, she made Ana come across as both impossibly clueless and completely unrealistic.

Seriously, unless she was raised in the most hardcore, sex-shaming, fundamentalist family in the world, Ana could not possible be as ignorant about sex as she is. Hell, I was as naive as hell until high school because my family is pretty religious, but just being around other high schoolers and...y'know...the INTERNET...taught me very quickly about stuff. There's just no way Ana went through her whole life without experiencing at least some kind of sexual feeling.

Probably more of a gray-ace range anyway. there are indeed people who are fine without having sex, ever, but once they have access to sex, they quite enjoy it at any rate.

Personally as a practicing sub myself, I find these novel sickening. At best it's an extremely guilty pleasure, at worst a torture porn fanfic that gives people the absolute wrong message about BDSM and spreads misinformation about a subject already misunderstood by the mainstream media. How this thing even got published is a horrible thing to begin with. And most baffling of all, there's fanfics of this abomination! That would make them fanfics of a fanfic that's a fanfic of the vampire genre. How long will this cycle continue?

Which is exactly why I wrote this above, and still think it to be true:

"for what by all reports so far is the worst, most dangerous torture-porn fantasy this side of Saw is only a Good Thing as far as I am concerned."

There's far better BDSM stuff in story and book form out there. Note, however, I am not referring to "The Story of O". I think that is almost as bad as the dreck that is the subject of this thread.

I overheard one of my sixteen-year-old students dubbing herself "the Future Mrs. Christian Grey" today.

I died a little bit, on the inside.

Give her a taste of what she's in for, and smack her right across the face.

See? It's spreading to the retarded teenagers. This is EXACTLY what I was afraid of.

I am ashamed of my age group.

In all fairness, the other students were haranguing her about bringing it to school... but because it was erotica, not because it was BAD erotica.

I'm ashamed of humanity in general.

Eh, everyone's fangirled something at sixteen that they regret.

edited 15th Nov '12 5:57:27 PM by Bur

I've read this book now.

Now, I realise that it's common practice among Caustic Critics to compare a book to the Antichrist, claim that its existence justifies book burnings and so forth. But... it really is that bad.

The writing is utterly inept, like something you'd expect from a somewhat talented twelve-year-old. The style is hideous, sub-netspeak Valley Girlese filled with "oh my", "holy crap", and using the word "hot" to mean "sexy". The sex scenes are mind-blowingly repetitive and unpleasant. The two protagonists are such awful people, it's not even funny. That said, there was one character I liked: Anastasia's stepfather Ray. He seems like a nice, stand-up guy (apart from his fatal character flaw of not stabbing Christian in the balls). That begins and ends my positive opinions on this novel.

Everyone else has already pointed out how messed up the sexual issues are, but I've seen fewer comments on the political/economic message of the book. Christian comes off as a strawman capitalist written by a virulently anti-corporate writer; a young Mr. Burns, if you will. He actually says: "I can just snap my fingers and four hundred people will be out on the street." Seriously, E.L. James? This is our romantic hero? Bear in mind, this book was written in 2011. (Yes, I know that we find out later that he's been working to combat world hunger. The protagonist doesn't give a shit about world hunger, and neither does the author; it's just there as a characterisation tool and to make the protagonist seem slightly justified in wanting to fuck him.) The implication seems to be that having your own office and helicopter makes you somehow more attractive than the guy who drives the garbage truck or works in the convenience store.

There are hints of an interesting plot about two lovers whose sexual preferences are incompatible. It made me start to think about how you would write a romance between, say, a person with a regular sex drive and an asexual (who's still romantically attracted to the former). But... yeah, the book doesn't live up to the premise.

Forget Hype Aversion, the fact that even one person enjoyed this book astounds me. Don't read it, not even to mock it. It's not worth your time.

edited 16th Nov '12 1:22:11 AM by DoktorvonEurotrash