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Bad Erotica for the Masses

Published by marco on

Updated by marco on

If scooping information from the madly bubbling froth of the U.S. media lies at all within your purview, you will no doubt have heard of the latest rage in American literature, called 50 Shades of Grey. A modicum of research reveals that the epithet literature is a good deal more generous a term than the referenced work earns.

It’s more commonly called “Mommy Porn”[1] which seems to be the designator that U.S. culture is going to use to indicate that reading poorly written soft-core pornography is now considered less than reprehensible. In this, the U.S. lags a good part of the rest of the world; the pity is that the popular demand to which it capitulated is for such low-quality erotica rather than some of the more renowned works of the tradition.[2]

Readers of these trashier variants—heretofore known as “bodice-rippers”—had become accustomed to being careful about with whom they shared their tastes. The advent of e-books were an absolute Godsend as it allowed them to read what they liked without hiding the cover from their nosy neighbors or their co-commuters.

The U.S. is notoriously prudish and it’s hard tell whether this celebration of what is essentially trashy erotica is indicative of a general trend or just a well-orchestrated marketing campaign. Trashiness has always been accepted, but the acceptable degree of sexual content never came close to matching that for violence. Where a film that depicts hundreds of people being mowed down could garner a rating that allowed 13-year–olds to watch it without supervision, it could not contain even a split-second of female nipple on screen without being doomed to an R-rating.

But an analysis of the societal piety of the U.S. is a discussion for another day. The question is: is the book bad? Yeah, it sounds pretty bad. One review in particular—Fifty Shades (#1) by Katrina Lumsden (GoodReads)—summarizes the two lead characters as follows:

“Ana is just a giant mess of a human being. She’s insecure to the point of it being laughable […] and a complete ditz. […] Christian is a misogynistic, self-loathing, abusive piece of shit. […] Most of the time he’s serious, brooding, and threatening. How charming.”

And why is the lead male character (Christian) worth supplicating to? Why, because he’s rich and good-looking and, because of the genre, well-hung. So, this is yet another book that—perhaps unwittingly?—has a member of the lower echelons idolizing the rich and letting them get away with almost anything because of that feature. You would think that America would be less likely to be taken with a book about a rich guy subordinating a woman just because he can.

And why, when people tend to like books starring characters with whom they identify, do so many people identify with a ditz with serious self-esteem issues? Or are they just enjoying watching an idiot get her comeuppance—for being an idiot? Is this perhaps evidence of cruelty more than identification or sympathy? Are they voyeuristically experiencing what a great—and well-equipped—lover she thinks Christian is, or are they laughing at her for thinking she, who started the book as a virgin, could even be in a position to judge either quality?

If you’ve seen a few pages, you may be reminded of the clumsy writing associated with the Twilight novels. The article Master of the Universe versus Fifty Shades by E.L James Comparison makes a strong case for the book being a barely modified rehash of some extended Twilight fan-fiction written by James herself between 2009 and 2011. You can’t plagiarize yourself, of course, but the point is that it was bad enough that the country was taken by storm by the execrable writing of Stephanie Meyer, but now it’s dropped a level further by being swept away by a search/replace update of a fan-fiction based on the same series. The important thing is that the submissive female lead-role made it unscathed. The publisher and author claim that 50 Shades is completely original; a comparison of the two works using Turnitin—a self-styled “global leader in plagiarism prevention and online grading”—showed that the works are 89% similar, with many pages differing only by the names of the characters.

And all of Hollywood is jostling to participate in a movie based on the book. I wonder who’s jostling more? Actresses dying to play yet another submissive, ditzy lead? Maybe Katie Holmes now that she’s not so busy with Scientology? Or actors dying to play the rich misogynist? Michael Douglas has the right pedigree—it’s the role he played in Basic Instinct, Fatal Attraction and others—but he’s gotten a bit long in the tooth. Rumor has it that Angelina Jolie is looking to direct it which doesn’t quite jell with the strength of some of her more recent films—Changeling, A Mighty Heart and In the Land of Blood and Honey spring to mind—and makes you wonder whether she’s even read the book or is just riding the tide of popular opinion.


[1] Am I the only one who sees this as a more-than-oblique reference to the far-more-ubiquitous “Kiddie Porn”? Is that really the connection the publisher wishes to draw? Somehow I doubt it.
[2] As a tale of a woman who willingly submitted to the submissive role in a dom/sub relationship, it sounds like a pale shadow of L’Histoire d’O (Story of O), which was published in 1954.