The phenomenon of Fifty Shakes of Grey baffles me. Critics claim the writing is insipid likened more to the musings of a teenage schoolgirl than an author whose pen has garnered international fame. Yet the books’ success is undeniable and has sent publishers of a genre historically reserved for middle-aged single women with too many cats scrambling to repackage former ‘romance’ classics, and hopeful EL James’s furiously pounding the keyboard - no pun intended.
Why I give an iota about the novels I can’t say for sure, maybe it’s their meteoric success or why a storyline that seems to epitomize what women throughout history have fought hard to overcome. What I can state emphatically is that I haven’t read the books - entirely. How the first two installments landed in my possession at all is definitive proof a higher power, and while most men would have left them on the dining room table I was intent on deciphering what makes them irresistible to so many.
Desiring to learn what it is about this particular flame that’s drawn so many moths I scanned the pages in search of its magic ingredients. I immediately discounted the gratuitous sex scenes out of sheer absurdity (i.e. a twenty something virgin, never kissed, but gets her world rocked right out the gates, right?!?!), and massive boredom forced me to pass over the tedious email interludes between main characters that seemed little more than filler. But buried in the final pages of book one I finally happened upon the treasure I sought. After the heroine had been submissively ass-kicked into humiliation by her billionaire masochistic boyfriend, she indignantly dumps the psychopath on the spot and leaves his mansion with these thoughts,
“I climb into the back of the car…Embarrassment and shame wash over me. I’m a complete failure. I had hoped to drag my Fifty Shades into the light, but it proved a task beyond my meager abilities.”
And there it was. I had followed the rose line and found the Holy Grail. Now I understood that while the sex, bondage, and carnality might have grabbed the attention of these women, what kept them turning the page was something more prfound – hope. A few weeks later this notion was confirmed when I asked a woman who had read all three books why she thought Fifty Shades of Grey was such a success,
“They give women everywhere a glimmer hope that they too can fix their man. If Anastasia can change someone as f*ed up as Christian Grey there’s hope for all of us.”
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Generally speaking men don’t have the best reputations. In many respects this is our own doing. Men are most often recognized by their character flaws given labels such as cheaters, liars, and narcissists. All of this leaves women, single and married, wondering where all the good ones have gone, if any are left at all. The consensus is, given credence by sitcoms and daytime talk TV, that with such meager pickings in the man pool women have no choice but to reach down in the muck of masculinity and pull up whatever will suffice, then spend the rest of her days trying to conform him into what she hoped for all along.
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When it comes to relationships between a man and woman there’s an understood dynamic that gets rarely talked about, the woman is to be accepted for who she is which includes her bitchiness, mood swings, and insecurities – calling it part of the package. And a man’s failure to do so tags him as controlling, demanding, even misogynistic. While he, on the other hand, is a raw lump of clay waiting to be shaped into something of beauty, form, and function. And should he fight against this ‘improvement’ he gets labeled stubborn, insensitive, and well, a man
Most men, if pressed, would admit to experiencing this first hand- the pressure to become something that seems more palatable and easy to digest. While the majority of women, if answering honestly, would confess to pushing for it, all the while feeling altruistic in her tolerance of his repeated disappointments and her continued attempts at turning Mr. Maybe into Mr. Right, while claiming it’s all in the name of love. Which brings me back to Fifty Shades of Grey.
Christian Grey is uncommonly handsome, unimaginably rich (he bought a company just because his girlfriend worked there and he thought her boss wanted to sleep with her), loves her with the intensity of Charles Manson, and pursues her with the ferocity of a serial rapist; all of which apparently makes up for his clinical insanity, controlling nature, premeditated abusiveness, and the incapability of expressing love unless he’s sexually humiliating her or treating her as a blow up doll or punching bag. Yet this compels Anastasia to take pity on him and, as she puts it, try to ‘drag him into the light’.
**
By the grace of God the Queen has no desire to read the novels, quite frankly I’d be troubled and self-conscious if she did. Because I have to believe there is hard truth in my friend’s rationale for the books’ popularity. Let’s be real, isn’t that what fantasy is all about anyway, the romanticized fulfillment of an unmet reality? Doesn’t Anastasia’s persistence at straightening out the unraveling of someone as deranged as Christian give hope and validation to women everywhere striving to create their own Fifty Shades? And doesn’t her eventual achievement in saddling him, even if it comes with whelp marks and anal beads, fuel those expectations?
Like the man who views pornography then wishes his partner looked and acted more like the actresses he sees, doesn’t Fifty Shades produce a level of dissatisfaction with a current relationship, whether it be sexually, materially , or emotionally, and then foster a longing for something better?
And hiding behind the defense that it’s ‘just entertainment’ doesn’t obscure the fact that Fifty Shades does have the tendency to raise these sorts of questions. The amusement and sexual zing potentially gained from reading about Anastasia’s avant-garde erotic exploits hardly makes up for the damage that comes from wondering, “why can’t he be more like Christian?”
Originally published in 2012