Katrina Lumsden's review of 50 Shades of Grey on Good Reads has me laughing out loud. Her choice of GIFs are master-class. "At one point, she thinks putting her hair in pigtails will keep her safe from Christian's lusty advances. Fuckin' really?"

  • http://twitter.com/niczar Niczar

    So what is this a codeword for?

  • Efemmeral

    Given the blockbuster sales and the poor reviews, will someone PLEASE explain the commercial success of this book? Is it being bought by book virgins who’ve not experienced anything better? Is there some sort of product-identification portrayed by owning and displaying the book, like, “I own this book so I’m wild and sexual”? If reading kink is the goal, isn’t there better kink available? God knows there’s better literature which gets back to my question, why is this such a hit?

    • BookGuy

      I heard a bit with the author on NPR a day or two ago, and she trumpeted the fact that it was popular with people who don’t read books.  Seriously.  And then, of course, we got audio from her at a book signing, during which a woman of indeterminate age approaches the author and tells her how much she loves the book, which is a big deal because she doesn’t like books.

      So, yeah.  Popular with the barely literate explains a few things.

    • xzzy

      Don’t forget to account for the sales created by people who have heard the book is terrible, and bought it themselves to witness firsthand just how terrible it is.

      • C W

        Ah, the Reality TV demographic.

    • Ashley Yakeley

      I’m guessing it’s popular because it matches up with its readers’ fantasies of submission and abuse.

      It is worth bearing in mind that in fantasy, appealing things tend to get turned up to 11 and unappealing things edited out. I don’t think the women getting off on it are really seeking out this kind of abusive relationship, and I don’t think this (from the review)

      “Any woman raving about this book is participating in some of the most blatant misogyny I’ve ever witnessed, cementing in some peoples’ minds the idea that women enjoy being debased, abused, and controlled.”

      …is entirely fair.

      On the other hand, there probably is better kink available.

      • Donald Petersen

        I hope so.  I met my wife through the Personal ads on The Onion’s website (back then I figured going through The Onion would be a useful filter to find people with my kind of taste, but The Onion is a much different vegetable these days), and as part of filling out one’s profile, one of the questions one was encouraged to answer was along the lines of “What’s your favorite sex scene in a movie?”  I was mildly horrified to see how many women wrote in Secretary.

        For my own part, I wrote in the scene from The Lady Eve after Barbara Stanwyck runs away from the escaped snake and cuddles Henry Fonda in her stateroom.  It’s a tight closeup of their faces, and they’re neither kissing nor even really facing each other, but you can tell her words and voice and intoxicating scent are having quite an effect on the poor fella who’s been “up the Amazon” for a couple years.  Tentpole just out of frame!  The sexiest sexless scene in Hollywood history, you ask me.

        And no, I’m not 86 years old.  I’m not quite half that.  And I like nudity and raunch as much as the next degenerate.  But Secretary?  People find that movie sexy?  And not just disturbing?

    • GrrrlRomeo

      It’s porn. Men aren’t typically asked to explain their porn. Why should women?

      • Bonobo

        If a new porn movie came out and the news was flooded with stories about its unstoppable success and mainstream appeal, and when I watched it, there was nothing compelling or unique about it, I would wonder why.

        • GrrrlRomeo

          I hadn’t heard it had mainstream appeal. I heard it was appealing to straight women in particular. And so I just thought, huh, straight women are getting off. Good for them.

          Successful porn movies come out all the time. When it’s targeted towards male viewers, it’s not news because society expects that of men. The buzz about this “50 Shades of Grey” has to with the fact that it’s women that are getting off, and they’re not  hiding the fact they’re consuming erotica for no other reason than to get off. It’s disrupting gender expectations. That’s really all there is to it.

          • http://burntheflag.ca Jardine

            Really? Name one porn movie that has sold 20 million copies in the US.

    • hardwarejunkie9

       It’s tied into the explosive popularity of Twilight. It’s literally a Twilight fanfic gone wrong and published.

      You’re just seeing legions of Twitards acting out all their sexual frustration in spinoff porn.

      • Antinous / Moderator

        It’s literally a Twilight fanfic gone wrong

        Twilight fanfic gone right has Edward and Jacob in a BDSM relationship.

        • elix

          Twilight fanfic gone right got Ctrl+A;Del’d by the author once they realized what they were doing.

        • That_Anonymous_Coward

          And now you’ve given me nightmares.

        • Jerril

           I only vaguely know who Jacob is (can’t avoid learning about Edward and still live in this culture it seems) and even I would read that.

          • Antinous / Moderator

            Strictly speaking, they already are in a BDSM relationship, just not an physically sexual one.

    • elix

      It’s a thinly-altered Twilight BDSM fanfiction with lots of sex. If you can explain why Twilight is so popular, this is just the Tijuana Bible version with the names changed to protect the author from getting sued into oblivion.

  • http://deansli.st/ Dean Putney

    If those broken images next to the gifs are annoying you as much as they were me, you can paste this into your URL bar to make them go away:

    javascript:jQuery(‘body’).find(‘img[src="<a"]‘).css(‘display’,'none’);

    • Bonobo

      Chrome seems to automatically remove the “javascript:” part from the beginning when I paste it. Un-feature.

  • http://twitter.com/jasonnewton Jason Newton

    It doesn’t help that Brett Easton Ellis keeps twittering about it. Seriously, his stuff has more depth than this.

  • http://www.jjsaul.com Jim Saul

    Oh man… make sure to go on to her review of the next one:

    It was during moments like that when I wished I knew Ana in real life, simply for of the amount of fun that could be had fucking with her. 

    “Ana, you don’t understand. It’s so much worse than that. A concealed weapons permit means she can buy a concealed weapon. Concealed weapons are….invisble.”

  • http://profiles.google.com/carboncow robert feller

    I couldn’t get past the annoying and distracting animated GIFs…fail…

  • http://disqus.com/Kimmoth/ Kimmo

    I find ads annoying, but not very distracting. The GIFs that were part of the content, I found generally amusing and well-chosen. So I read the reviews of all three of these turds.

  • http://www.summerseale.com/ Summer Seale

    There are some advantages to traveling and having moved abroad since a few years, it would appear. Not being exposed to the fandom of these sorts of fads is apparently one of them.

    The only time I heard about this book was when people started making fun of it online. I think it was Gilbert Godfrey’s reading of it in a mock commercial on Youtube which led to my first hearing the name. After that, I figured it was some sort of romantic porn book and I didn’t have much time for it.

    I supposed I was right? As to the review of it: it didn’t make any sense to me because I literally know nothing about the story, the characters, the plot, or anything other than the name of the book, and that it’s basically trashy porn.

    Is there anything else I should learn from it? I’m asking seriously because, at times, one can feel a little isolated all the way over here outside of the borders of the U.S.A.

    • Jerril

       Trashy Twilight fanfic BDSM porn with the serial numbers scraped off. No Intelectual Property Was Harmed In The Making Of This Porn stuff.

      Everyone I’ve spoken to in the BDSM scene is scathing of it as being a toxic representation of actual BDSM, and they usually go on to note that it is also bad porn.

  • adent1066

    Hilarious review. I suspect if 50 Shades were written by a man, that author would have been a virtual pariah by now.  It would have been described as poorly  written, anti-feminine torture porn.

  • kiptw

    In most movies now and for the last fifty years, someone who listens to classical music is a villain. A horrible, cultured psychopath with a British or German accent.