Looks like you got some good, useful keywords, as well as solid (and face-to-face!) support from a strong local research network - that's priceless.

If, as you say, there's virtually no scholarship on OOB in general, then that means there's a piece crying out to be written on the reactionary politics of OOB in its moment as a pointedly - even pugilistically - provocative riposte to the anti-sex feminism of Off Our Backs and the landmark Barnard conference. What would make such a piece so timely now is the considerably more conservative cultural climate today, which the events of 1984 could only gesture towards: a climate of hyper-sexualized youth (the "raunch culture" of "female chauvinist pigs" - sorry, I still do think that problematic has some purchase on pop culture, so long as they keep making shit like the Bratz dolls and Girls Gone Wild), but one regulated by strident heteronormativity and homophobia, not to mention far more repressive laws governing cultural production and representation.

"The sexualization of girls" (Gail Dines' version, which I think is close to Ariel Levy's, but more shrill) did come up in this discussion about OOB. I don't think anyone would object to you saying Bratz dolls are awful -- though we might have said for the heteronormative and essentializing performance of femininity rather than because they're "sexy" -- and The Scandelles did a Girls Gone Wild parody that involved dressing a woman in a Tigger costume (http://homocinema.web.iq.pl/plakaty/4434.jpg) which I don't really get but it wasn't a rejection of the concept by any means -- but the analysis was mostly about how fighting the "sexualization of girls" presumes girls (and other little queermos) don't already have sexualities. So we all thought that the imposition of adult fantasies -- including fantasies of "purity" -- on childrenwas a problem, but generally agreed that it was alright for kids to have sexual fantasies like the ones in OOB and for adult women, who were fighting the stigma that their fantasies had been imposed on them by pop culture or childhood abuse or whatever, to talk about how their fantasies developed as children. The question I still had, though, is whether OOB is really that straightforward a testimony on actual experience or memory, or whether the literariness of the texts indicates that they're still very much the creations of adults fantasizing, and in doing so, rewriting, childhood subjectivities.

The rest of my ambivalence is around some of the "extreme" contexts referenced. Feminists really were vicious to each other, and "sex-positive" feminists faced, as evidenced at the Barnard conference, extreme forms of censorship for choosing to focus on possibilities for sexual pleasure instead of on how to limit sexual danger. But the feminists on the other side of the "wars" were also reacting to extremes, and the greater proportion of the women setting up shelters and rape crisis centres were not a well-funded, well-supported group with an easy road ahead of them. The radical feminist movement, via the shelter system, certainly kept me and other women and people I loved alive in the late 80s and early 90s. And they did it in a cultural climate where marital rape had only recently been legal in Canada, and the cops really did leave women alone in hotel rooms with no money, with or without their kids, so they could "cool down" and go back to the husbands who might have tried to kill them only hours earlier. What the man-hating, sex-hating radical feminists were doing was extreme, and what they were up against was extreme. (Women from a shelter in BC once helped my mother break in through a bedroom window to kidnap me and one of my brothers while our father blocked the front door, thinking she couldn't get in. She later returned to the home to avoid a custody battle that she would have lost, and did eventually lose in Ontario, but the act itself was dangerous, and vital, and truly radical in a system that didn't otherwise give a shit about women. Um, and also: my mother = not to be trifled with.)

How that got diverted from actually addressing violence to screaming at other feminists about nipple clamps and pursuing a culture of violence against trans women and prostitutes is beyond me, but they weren't just hysterical nutjobs, and they weren't making violence against women up just to cockblock all the fun feminists. One of the dinner people told me the weird collection of issues -- trans rights, porn, and bdsm -- isn't arbitrary, like I thought it was, it's about policing deviance, but I don't follow the reasoning that takes radical feminism from addressing violence, which can definitely be done at the same time as exploring possibilities for pleasure, to policing deviance. 

"How that got diverted from actually addressing violence to screaming at other feminists about nipple clamps and pursuing a culture of violence against trans women and prostitutes is beyond me"

Certainly - it sounds very much like a proverbial case of fiddling while Rome burns...

Point about imposition of adult fantasies on children's subjectivities: well taken.

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.