By Laura A. Lords
Oh my…where to begin?
Fifty Shades of Grey
is a sensation that has swept women across the
country away into a hedonistic gallery of sexual romance. Alas, I
am perplexed. E L James has taken it to mind to tackle an entire
community of people (the BDSM community) and get it devastatingly
wrong. She slapped an erotic romance label on the front of it,
attached a wonderful ‘Mature Content’ warning, and it became
a New York Times Best Seller.
Perhaps perplexed is not the right word. I shall take
a page from James’ own writing technique and resort to my
thesaurus… I’m bewildered, confused, confounded, baffled,
stumped, stymied, bamboozled, and stupefied. Well, that wasn’t
nearly as exciting. James must have a much more extended version
than I do, for the novel is full of odd, out-of-place words
that
never
show up in normal conversation, nevertheless, the
snarky comments Anastasia and Christian favor.
What’s more, I’m convinced that while I’m envious of James’
comprehensive thesaurus, I can’t imagine she bothers to use it
much. It has come to my attention that Kate should simply be
named Tenacious Kate. For the first half of the book, it is
really the only way that character is ever described. I can feel
that poor inanimate being, screaming inside James’ head, “There
is more to me than this! I’m not this flat…and boring!”
Perhaps it isn’t an extensive thesaurus, but simply a weird
word of the day calendar that James has propped up on her desk.
It is probably sitting atop her
BDSM for Dummies
book. This book, she obviously never cracked. I won’t even
get started with yet another young female lead character who
proves to be such a terrible role model for today’s young women.
Let’s simply say that the concept of Anastasia “fixing”
Christian’s sexual preferences is abhorrent, ridiculous, and
offensive. This is a lifestyle choice, and it is consensual. It
is not some kind of disease to be treated or worked through in
therapy. I would think by 2013 our society would be more capable
of understanding that everyone’s “Inner Goddess” doesn’t exactly
want the same things.
As far as Christian is concerned, no self-respecting
Dominant, or one worth his salt at least, would take a virgin in
as his submissive. The idea that by sleeping with her before hand
and participating in “vanilla” sex (along with a detailed
contract of terms and items that young Anastasia wasn’t even
familiar with) makes this kind of relationship okay… is
detestable. This is abuse of power. It is emotional, physical,
and sexual abuse. James dedicates pages to the contract itself,
tosses in Anastasia’s claims at love, and suddenly makes it seem
like this is perfectly acceptable. Of course, Anastasia is simply
attempting to “cure” Christian of his screwed up ways, so hey,
what’s the harm?
Oh my… I seem to have gotten off on my own little rampage
here. Let’s put the counterfeit BDSM issues back into its closet
and simply talk about the writing. Aside from boring, flat
characters who receive little in the way of descriptive qualities
and conversation that is meant to be snappy, yet is full of
intense language even a “bookie” like myself has to look up and
refresh herself with…the novel is full of three things: “Oh my”,
“Wow”, and the ellipsis. I barely can recall a paragraph that
went by without one of these terms or pieces of punctuation being
used.
Then you have sentences like these,
“Saturday at the store is a nightmare. We are besieged by
do-it-yourselfers wanting to spruce up their homes. Mr. and Mrs.
Clayton and John and Patrick – the two part-timers – and I are
besieged by customers.”
I get it. The store is full. I understand. However,
“besieged”? Really? And obviously so much so that James felt the
need to use the word twice in the course of two sentences. I read
that and immediately an image of strong Viking raiders came to
mind, banging their battle axes and hammers against the door of a
small town hardware store. Hey, they need their paint swatches
too. It was, certainly, the most vivid image the book was able to
draw for me; which is sad considering it had absolutely nothing
to do with anything actually happening in the book.
I could go on and on about the issues I have with this
book. As I said before, I haven’t even tackled the wonderful role
model these characters give us. No, I will leave that as it is.
There’s little to be done for it in a world where characters like
Bella from
Twilight
are revered so highly already. Female role models
have headed downhill at a rate faster than my opinion of these
over-sexed Harlequin romances.
I’ll leave you with this. No one has an “Inner Goddess”. If
you’d like to test that theory, hang a few mirrors up and check
out your next ‘O’ face. There is nothing God-like about it.
Secondly, the childlike renaming of genitalia simply makes it
seem like ‘vagina’ is a dirty word. It isn’t, so renaming is as
“
there
” (and in italics at that) is just juvenile. And finally,
take it from the internet. There is better smut online. Better
written smut and it’s free. Go forth and find good smut.
