Yes - a youtube clip. It's worth googling and watching if you can't see it. Apparently it's now a trilogy? I wish Kobo would stop flogging it.

(ba-dum-dum)

Ha! I googled it. That was great. 

On with the review? [Oops -- I was just going to mock the dirty talk, but then I got ranty. God, I hate this book.]

Imagining Gottfried reading it will help me deal with the insipid dirty talk ("You. Are. So. Sweet. Baby." actually gets repeated in more than one scene) and the author's strange idea of how women's bodies work. I kid you not, they start the baby-making and the protagonist, a virgin who has never masturbated, immediately has multiple orgasms, on command. From things like nipple play and vaginal penetration, which are both fine things to do, but on their own generally do not end in orgasm.

And her orgasms are immediate. A sentence or two of nipple-poking and she comes half a dozen times. This is important: the point of erotic fiction is to describe, in detail, the events leading up to orgasm, not to write "she came" as many times as possible on one page. It's not titillating; it's not even interesting. If porn is supposed to provide fuel for fantasy, then it's barely even porn. (Unless you like to fantasize about men who buy you cars and clothes, despite your repeated, modest, totally-not-a-whore objections. Then it's perfect.)

So on top of reading about some weird white supremacist fantasy-world, where the only people of colour are date rapists and starving Africans and queers exist only in the deepest fears of heterosexual men, I'm trapped in an equally weird Porno-land, where women's pleasure is immediate, visible, simple, and entirely dependent on male action. I'm glad women are buying more sex toys and taking pleasure into their own hands in response -- but the narrative itself suggests there is something really wrong with women who struggle to experience pleasure, or who have complex -- or worse, queer -- desires. 

Book Monopoly, sex stores, Kobo -- they're going to push bad fiction on us. They're not our friends; they're not interested in anything but taking our money. So it's gross, but it's not surprising. But the book they're marketing so aggressively as women's sexual liberation is really just an atrocious, anti-feminist parody of women's sexuality, and of kinky sexuality. I can't help but see Fifty Shades of Grey as just one more piece of the larger backlash against feminism that makes up so much of current pop culture. 

One last thing: the narrative goes on and on about how even though the protagonist accepts expensive gifts as a part of a contracted sexual transaction with her lover, she is definitely, really, truly different from sex workers. Sex workers, on the whole, are nicer and more interesting, know more about their sexualities, and they have much better business sense. So I'll have to give EL James that one. Anastasia Steele: not a whore. 

I got about 2/3 of the way through the second book before I just gave up and started reading tentacle porn (awesome, bizarre, consensual tentacle porn, might I add, though kinda weird with the pregnancy fetish... but I guess that comes with the territory). The blog in question was a recommendation from someone else's negative review of Fifty Shades. I spent most of the book skimming through the increasingly boring sex scenes. The last note I took was: "THIS MAKES NO FUCKING SENSE."

And really. Tentacle porn was the logical, realistic alternative.

Should have just stopped when they got hit by that train. 

In other news, as pointed out in the BizzyBiz review (which is quite funny) The Oatmeal did a very funny blog post about why Twilight is so appealing, and so easily marketable. His thesis is that the female character is just an empty shell that women can "wear" while they fantasize about a perfect man, who is described in intricate detail. Does this pan out for Fifty Shades? Check out the fan-created character profile wikis for Anastasia Steele and Christian Grey. Ana is looking a bit slim!

One last super-weird thing? "Fifty Shades" is a nickname the protagonist gives to her lover, based on something he says early in the first book about being "fifty shades of fucked up." It gets picked up until it becomes one of their catchphrases, reflecting what everyone keeps saying about the dialogue being the creation of a total moron. So throughout the second novel, the protagonist keeps saying things like "I love Fifty Shades... Fifty Shades makes my panties combust with molten desire... Oh, Fifty Shades, you cream my broccoli soup like no other..." The narrator's voice, in the book, says the same thing all its pushy fans are supposed to. I'm gonna go out on a limb and say it's just not an intelligent enough masterpiece to actually be reflecting on its own marketing. So it's just obnoxious.