50 Shades of Rubbish

I was going to title this blog '50 shades of shite', which would have been better in terms of alliteration but my daughter would have told me off for swearing.  Oh, dear, she's still going to tell me off.  Oh well, never mind - it can only get worse (and probably will)

I read a lot.  Even from the age of 8, I could have told you that Weetabix was made in Welwyn Garden City and that Pork Pies came from Leicestershire.  I always finish a book that I've started.  I finished, The Finkler Question, even though it was totally up it's own bottom. I finished, Yellow Dog despite it's lack of plot.  I finished the whole Twilight Series even though it irritated me from the very first word.  I finished We Need to Talk About Kevin with it's bizarre punctuation.  I even finished the Bible and I can tell you that was a tough read.  Today, I decided not to finish 50 Shades of Grey.

It made me angry.  Not because of the terrible writing, or the fact that the characters are so obviously 'borrowed' from the Twilight books or even that the plot is tired and worn (young virgin tames older bad boy).  This book pushed every feminist button I own.  I'm not against sex, in fact I quite admire a book that doesn't stop at the dots.  (He led her to the bedroom, pushed her inside and......)  At 14, like Caitlin Moran, I discovered the Female Eunuch because I was searching the library for help with my sexual education.  I'd been through the dictionary and cross referenced every rude word I'd ever heard and needed more detail.  You could usually get an idea from the cover which would offer up interesting bits of erotica.  The Female Eunuch, with the naked body on the front cover didn't automatically open up to a page full of rubbing, sucking and thrusting but it was a fascinating read.

50 Shades has been described as 'Mommy porn', from which I assume that women in their 30's and 40's are reading the sex scenes and then saying to their husbands, "Darling, would you mind wrapping your silk tie round my wrists - not too tight though!"  Maybe it's spicing up their post-baby sex lives.  But this book isn't aimed at them.  It's aimed at 14 -18 year olds, thumbing through the library for an imagined sexual experience.  And they ARE reading it.  Of course they are. Everyone is talking about it.  I bought it by accident (from the cover, I thought it was a thriller) and both my teenagers asked why I'd bought it.

This book is about S&M.  It's about the total control of one human being by another.  In this case the man controlling the woman.  Some feminists have said that they admire this book because the girl is choosing but read between the lines and you will see that she is being manipulated.  The book is made warm, fluffy and unrealistic by suggesting that everything works out just fine, that he falls in love with her and ends up living a perfectly normal life, with the occasional beating. (I haven't finished the book - I'm just guessing).  But we live in a world where one in three women is likely to be beaten and or coerced into sex at one time in their lifetime.  We live in a world where there is serious gender inequality in some countries, where no woman is allowed to look at a man, receive education, travel or leave the house without permission, where baby girls are killed at birth, where women are not allowed to inherit or own property, where women are not allowed to work, where one woman needlessly dies in childbirth every minute of every day where women are not allowed to vote and are subjected to genital mutilation.  I can not understand why, women who live relatively equal lives entertain sexual fantasies of domination and control by a man.

Fred and Rose West were Sado-masochists in their sexual life and look how that turned out for them?