What the...?! (concerning “Fifty Shades of Grey”)
Maybe I’m a bit late with this statement but I didn’t have the time until now and I still feel the need to write this.
As you may know if you follow my “reviews”, I read E. L. James’s “Fifty Shades of Grey” trilogy a short while ago. Before and after reading I found some articles about it. Some of them made me laugh, others made me simply angry. And now I wonder if our world, our society really is that narrow-minded…?!
There’s that author who never wrote a novel before and now there’s her debut: something erotic! How dare she?! It’s not as if we lived in the year 2012, knew how sex works, were able to see naked women almost everywhere, and shared the latest porn sites with our closest friends… Maybe we’re back in the Middle Ages…? But no, wait! Erotic writings already existed back then… It’s mostly just a cliché when you think that the people at that time were absolutely prude… What do you think where that many children came from? Can’t you imagine that those people had FEELINGS, even sexually? Or are you one of those who think that the beginning of the 20th century was black and white just because the photos of that time are? No? Then just think about it… ;)
Now there are those that scream: BDSM! Right, how could I forget…? Maybe because there’s just a tiny element of this in “Fifty Shades of Grey”…Ana gets tied up sometimes (wow, big deal) and gets spanked twice… Cliché covered, I’d say… But I want to “answer” those who wrote those articles claiming that women of the 21st century want to give up the power they gained with emancipation. Maybe they should notice that everything is about mutual consent! If you read the novel(s) thoroughly, you’ll surely notice that fact. So, let me ask you, isn’t it a sign of power when an independent woman decides what her sexual life should look like? It’s her own free will! So if she’s “beaten into submission” it happens because she wants it to… And by the way, there are also men who are submissive… ;)
I don’t want to ignore the possibilities when people are forced to do something they don’t want to do but this can happen any time and doesn’t have to do anything with a “proper” sexual method… I condemn this a lot!
In the end, I just want to say that you should never judge a book by its cover… If you don’t know something it’s okay as long as you catch up on the topic before saying something about it…
And to conclude: Read all three volumes of “Fifty Shades” and you’ll see that this is more a love story - though rather unconventional - than anything else… If you really want to be “shocked”, read de Sade, I’d “recommend” “Justine”… ;)
Sorry that this was rather sarcastic and angry but I simply hate closed-minded people, whatever it’s about… ;)
01/10/2012