Fifty Shades of Needs a Rewrite

We’re going to tear the apron off the Fifty Shades trilogy, but at least try to stay on the vaguely decent side of the equation.  We admit it, we have read all three books and as one of the few remaining white, middle-class heterosexual men out there, have our own opinion about the whole genre of female oriented erotica. 

Up front we have to recognize something important that does need saying out loud.  Humans like sex.  We’re hardwired for it by nature as the predominant way to reproduce the species.  Almost every human you meet in the next twenty-four hours is a direct result of sex.  Society, culture and by extension religion have imposed what could loosely be called ‘morality’ on top to cloud the issue, but as a species, we agree that we like sex.

We don’t use the term “porn”, as what is pornography is very much in the eye of the beholder.  A still photo of a salad bar could be titillating to someone who is starving, while a cellphone video of an unclothed ankle could produce much consternation in countries with certain cultural norms that could result in a public beheading.  Pornography is a pejorative term, with the overtone of something that has to be banned, censored, controlled or otherwise marginalized. 

We prefer the term ‘erotica’, meaning substantively dealing with stimulating or sexually arousing descriptions including literature, art, photography, sculpture and painting.  We don’t make much of a distinction between MILF Island Vol. 23 and The Naked Maja by Goya.  We don’t mean the Moro Islamic Liberation Front either.  Both are erotica by our definition.  One is a little older than the other, reflecting media and distribution methods of their respective times.

Fifty Shades by E.L. James has been tagged with the sobriquet “Mommy Porn” which we object to, but do recognize that a nugget to truth lives in the tag.  The trilogy is an old-fashioned romance novel overlaid with some rather saucy behaviours between consenting adults, delivered in a fairly graphic manner. 

The issue for many groups seems to be not in the boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-marries-girl story arc, but in the descriptions of their sexual relationship.  Some feminists are up in arms.  Some libraries won’t carry the titles.  Others have claimed that the series perpetuates violence against women, while others have applauded the series as liberating for female sexuality.  We don’t object to their behaviour, as it is two people of the age of majority, who are actively consenting, so game on.   

As a saucy read, the erotica side of the house is OK at best.  It isn’t The Story Of O by Pauline Reage (Anne Desclos’ pen name) which is significantly better.  As a romance, we could hardly keep our eyes open as we couldn’t give a flying fornicative act if they ever actually came to terms.  Really what Fifty Shades needs, in our humble opinion, is another rewrite, from top to bottom, with an actual outline this time. 

However, (our opinion and $4 gets you a fancy coffee at Starbucks) the commercial success of Fifty Shades is perhaps more illuminating:  E.L. James is laughing all the way to the bank having sold 20 zillion copies of the books, surpassing the Harry Potter series.  Even Wal-Mart stocks the titles, so you know somebody is plunking down the coin to read it.

The illumination comes not from the money involved or the breathless internet chatter (Oh God, Christian Bale should so play Christian Grey and Mila Kunis as Anastasia, which would so rock!) but the simple act of it being OK for women to read erotica without hiding it, or feeling shameful.  In our reality, it always has been OK, but we don’t consider our morality to be particularly mainstream.  If the graphic descriptions cause the creation of shall we call them, saucy feelings, then so be it.  As long as you come home to eat, we don’t care how many menus you look at. 

As long-lived, important, ground-breaking erotic literature?  We call it Fifty Shades of Meh.