50 Shades of Crap

During my recent hospital stay, my brother asked if I had read 50 Shades of Grey.  “No.  You know I don’t read romance.  Have you?”  “Yes, I have and I think you should give it a read.  You might find it interesting.”  That was how I lost four days which I will never get back nor will I trust my brother’s reading recommendations especially when he says you might find it interesting. 

I started the book on a Wednesday afternoon.  I can recount what worse during my stay.  Of the hospital bed, the endless giving of blood, hospital food, the reading 50 Shades of Grey was hands down the worst.

For those of you who are unaware, this book is details a woman’s coming of age story with a young, rich, handsome man who is addicted to bondage and domination.  I have nothing against bondage, domination and submission.  I’ve even played with it a little myself.  What I have a problem with is someone with very little talent becoming a cultural icon in the literary world and a symbol of women’s liberation as the clichés in her book run wild and free.  I’ve grown accustomed to untalented people making waves in the worlds of music, television and movies.  However it pains me when this happens with books.  It’s like mixing Kool-Aid into champagne.

The main reason why this book caused such a stir was because the subject of bondage, domination and sex are generally written by men with very little regard for the women except as vessels for semen.  The idea that a woman would write a book with graphic sex scenes not dripping with romance seems to have come as quite a shock.  In addition, this book with its mature subject matter made all the “legitimate” bestseller lists.  

I came of age when the women’s movement was gaining widespread support and visibility.  Women were burning bras, marching against pornography shops in Times Square, demonizing Hugh Hefner and debating the legalization of abortion.  That is why I’m finding it so hard to understand why 50 Shades is such a phenomenon.  Has no one read Xaviera Hollander’s The Happy Hooker or saw the movie? Did everyone miss Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying?  Has anyone read Pauline Reage’s The Story of O which explored similar subjects?  These books were radical for their time because most people never seemed or wouldn’t admit to the fact that women enjoy sex in all its incarnations and women actually wrote these books.  People act as if this book was the first novel to delve into one of the lesser discussed areas of sexuality when in actuality it is following a trail that has already been blazed.

None of the books I referenced are great literature.  They will never replace D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love or James Baldwin’s Another Country or any other great work that explores sexual morays.  What these books ask us to question is how far are we willing to explore for pleasure, if pleasure and pain are co-dependent and what is normal.  I have no standard answers to those questions.  I honestly believe no one does and if someone says they do, they also have a bridge for sale.

What I can answer is that we all ask these questions and the answers are as varied as the people who ask them.  There is no wrong or right.  There just is.  Maybe that was the whole point of 50 Shades.  A good idea poorly executed.

I might just send my tattered copy of The Story of O to E.L. James.  If she’s going to write about submission, it’s best to submit to a master.  Or get your butt whipped in the process.