245 search results for "50 Shades"

Aaaand we’re back.

Since the announcement of Grey, I’ve had some Tumblr messages and a few emails asking me if I would ever rewrite the Boss series from Neil’s POV. I can’t see a way that I could do that without being extremely derivative of E.L.’s move, but it would be an interesting project. In the meantime, I do have dual POV novels coming out on August 4th, entitled First Time. You can pre-order them now, if you’re interested.

Other thing: I get messages every now and then from people who are like, “I want to donate to your blog,” or whatever. And I appreciate it, and I always tell people to buy my books if they’re interested in supporting me, but if you’d prefer, I put up a Patreon. The higher level donations are definitely intended to be one time only, so please be sure to cancel your subscription or whatever after you make the one-time donation.

This day in history: Actress Barbara Stuart, of Gomer Pyle U.S.M.C. fame, died.

For your reference and enjoyment, here’s my chapter three recap of Fifty Shades of Grey.

Now, let’s do this:

I have internet again. Our long national nightmare is over.

Here are some interesting things relating to E.L. James and the travesties she commits against humanity and the English language:

• Everyone thinks Christian Grey is a serial killer
• Surprise beyond surprise, James will be rewriting Fifty Shades Darker from Christian’s perspective. 
• The world is basically doomed.
• But this guest reviewer at Smart Bitches knows what’s up.
• And if you’re looking to hire a social media consult, I’m pretty sure James’s is looking for a job.

Also, several people emailed me to point this out, and I’m rolling:

But perhaps my favorite of the bunch from this week is Janet Maslin’s review of Grey for The New York Times. Maslin writes:

Speaking of cries for help, Ms. James leaves herself badly exposed by this book’s flagrant air of desperation. Her own fans write better stories about Christian Grey than she does. The fact that hers is the hidebound, trademarked and much-copied version doesn’t make it the important one. She has let time stand still in order to capitalize on one big hit, but she’s working in such a fast-moving medium that her failure of imagination is dangerous. She didn’t exactly invent these characters in the first place: She was a “Twilight” fan who appropriated them, tweaked them and made them hugely salable for a while.

Someone please send Ms. James a whole bouquet of aloe plants for that sick burn.

On to the recap!

You guys didn’t really think I would leave, for a week, right after Grey hit the stands, and NOT do a recap before I left? Are you high? Why did you fall for that?

So, while I’m in Gay, MI, which I have renamed it in honor of A Concerned Home Owner, relentlessly Gay, MI, please enjoy this recap until I return.

This way, my silence on the subject doesn’t lead people to believe that I’m actually dead.

I’m supposed to be on a blogging hiatus. Is it really too much to ask that 50 Shades related foolishness just pause for a minute? Yet, like the cop sidekick in an action movie, I was so close to going home and saying goodbye to this dangerous life, and then I got shot.

Shot in the face with the most absurdly staged news story in the history of all time.

In a twist unlike any that has ever happened to any other hotly anticipated retelling of a blockbuster novel, Grey, the retold  50 Shades of Grey, has been stolen and is in grave danger of being leaked to the general public.

Oh, how terrible it must feel when one rewrites the first novel of their series from the hero’s perspective, only to find it has cruelly been leaked ahead of release day! Probably not as bad as someone plagiarizing your entire series, then turning around and putting out their own version of the spin-off novel you wrote and shelved because it was leaked to the public, and claiming that their novel was also leaked, because they don’t just want to rip off your intellectual property, they want to absorb your entire life and become you.

Something like that.

Now, I’m not saying this was James’s idea. But I am saying that a publicist is at work on this one. What are the odds, really, that:

• Stephenie Meyer publishes the Twilight series.
• Stephenie Meyer begins work on Midnight Sun.
• Midnight Sun is leaked online
• Stephenie Meyer shelves Midnight Sun indefinitely.

and then

• E.L. James is “inspired” by Twilight and writes 50 Shades of Grey.
• E.L. James announces the publication of Grey.
• Grey is allegedly stolen from the printers.

Obviously there’s no chance of Grey being shelved or even postponed because God is dead, just like I am on the inside. But I’m sorry, it’s just too coincidental that a series plagiarizing Twilight just so happens to have a companion novel told from the hero’s perspective a la Midnight Sun, and it also just so happens to get stolen and possibly leaked, especially when the printing company is apparently not having it, either:

A spokeswoman for CPI UK confirmed it is printing the 50 Shades of Grey companion novel Grey: Fifty Shades of Grey As Told by Christian, but said: “I doubt it’s gone missing from one of our printworks seeing as I haven’t heard about it.”

Here’s hoping that James choses to rip off the rest of Meyers’s career arc, and vanish without fanfare.

Now it’s back to the hiatus hole for me.

By now, every single author with a summer release knows that their book is doomed to fall into the black hole that is Grey, E.L. James’s regurgitation of her blockbuster novel 50 Shades of Grey. A title like Grey is like an event horizon. It will suck everything into its gravity with no chance of escape. All other books will come to a standstill, approaching, but never reaching, the sales success they would have had if Grey hadn’t come crashing into the market. And it doesn’t just happen to small books. Big, splashy titles will be affected, and you’ll see regular NYT #1-ers failing to reach the spot.

In other words, fiction sales this summer are “fifty shades of fucked up.”

So, if Grey is expected to sell out its unheard of print run (1.25 million copies in its first printing), why does it need to be prominently advertised on other titles? Oh, for example…

If you can’t see the graphic, it’s a screen shot of the Amazon page for my book, The Boss (which is free and, from what I understand, pretty fantastic, so check it out if you want). Before the reader browsing through the page can even reach the book’s description, there’s an add imploring the consumer to visit the Kindle store page for Grey: Fifty Shades of Grey as Told by Christian, and providing links to “More ‘Fifty Shades’ titles.”

In other words, “Before you have a chance to read about this book you were interested in a minute ago, might we redirect you to this other one, instead?”

Besides the fact that this creepily implies a similarity between the two titles (or the author’s tacit approval of the franchise), it’s a low blow to authors who just want to break even. My books are fairly successful, and share something of a crossover audience with the Fifty series. But tons of other authors have seen this ad pop up on their pages, too. The titles don’t even need to have anything in common with Grey; while my book is seemingly a shoe-in for readers who like BDSM billionaire soap operas, one author reported seeing it on her “very, very, very gay” all-male menage book. One saw it on her erotic thriller’s page. If your book is erotic romance or erotica of any flavor, it appears to wear the Grey badge of awful.

So, what gives, Amazon? Grey is already #1 in both the Kindle store and among regular books. It is a part of the bestselling fiction series of all time. It has a first print run of 1.25 million copies. Does it really, truly need sales so bad as to potentially drive them away from authors who sell less? One author who found her product page bearing the advertisement reported that she “barely broke” a thousand dollars in profit last year, a far cry from the $95 million James made in 2013. The ad showed up on the product page for one author who reports selling approximately 120 ebooks per year. 120. What compels the logic that E.L. James desperately needs those 120 readers to see her title and potentially drive readers from that 120 copy selling author to Grey? And that author has no hope of seeing her book placed prominently on the Grey product page.

According to Publisher’s Weekly, Vintage Press, James’s publisher, doesn’t feel the book needs any advertisement at all:

When asked why Vintage announced the book just two weeks before its on sale date, Bogaards said, it’s what E.L. James, nee Erika Mitchell, wanted. “Erika wanted this to be a surprise for her readers, and the only amplification that was necessary on our end was to point press to her tweet [about the publication], which we did.”

So, if a simple tweet will suffice to drive the sales of this book (and it absolutely will and has), I have to ask…why would anyone go the extra mile to potentially squash the sales of other authors? Maybe I’m just not retail savvy enough to understand it. Either Amazon is behind the campaign (possible) or Vintage Press has sprung for the placement (more possible). Either way, the retail behemoth has to understand that Grey is guaranteed money in their pockets with or without this advertisment, so it doesn’t make sense to undercut sales of other titles.

 

I guess the lesson we can all learn from this is that there is no coattail so small that E.L. James’s masterwork cannot ride it.

50 Shades of Grey is the Hotel California of books. You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.

Stopping just short of actually peeling Stephenie Meyer like an orange and making a Silence of The Lambs suit out of her, E.L. James has decided that what the world needs, what we really, really need, is for her to crash her new title, Grey, a retelling of 50 Shades of Grey, from Christian’s POV.

I hope this is a fan-made graphic and not the actual cover to the follow up of a billion-dollar trilogy, because I expect to see this kind of thing pop up on a stock cover site.

But I know what a lot of you are thinking, because I fell asleep on my phone last night and woke up this morning to a vibrator going off underneath my neck. So the answer is, yes.

Yes. I am going to recap it.

Grey comes out on June 18th. I’ll be leaving for my annual trip to the U.P., where I will begin writing The Baby, so I won’t be able to begin recaps on Grey until after that. So Grey recaps will start on June 29th.

Hey everybody! Just a few more 50 Shades of Grey related things for all of us to shake our heads about this lovely Saturday evening.

A 50 Shades of Grey fan has doxed an anti-fifty blogger. @Kaydeelex has had to choose between her professional career or her blog, which points out the abuse in 50 Shades of Grey. You can read more here. I am not at all surprised to see a 50 Shades of Grey stan behave so abusively, for obvious reasons.

Miss Quin and I talked about 50 Shades of Grey…for like almost an hour. If you’re interested in hearing our somewhat bewildered take on the movie we watched the night before, you’re in luck!

The images in the 50 Shades of Grey posts will soon be fixed! There is a crack team ready to roll on this. They are not unlike the Avengers. PS. I was in this total state of crushing anxiety, like, how am I going to meet my deadline and fix this and I’m letting everybody down, etc. and then so many of you emailed me to help out with this. When I told Mr. Jen, he said, “I knew they would have your back.” So thank you, thank you, thank you for having my back.

E.L. James is fixin’ to tank her sequels.  Variety reports that James is demanding more control over the sequels (including writing the screenplays, despite having no experience), and Vanity Fair reports that Universal is actually entertaining the idea. Meanwhile, notoriously accurate Hollywood gossip peddler @EntyLawyer had this to say (thanks, @Katiebabs, for bringing this to my attention)

Jamie Dornan has out clause for 50 Shades sequel if production does not start by certain date. EL James will delay it beyond that date

— Enty Lawyer (@entylawyer) February 21, 2015

@katiebabs No script. No writer. No director. No start date. They wanted sequel V’Day 2016. Shooting won’t start until at least then.

— Enty Lawyer (@entylawyer) February 21, 2015

@LindsTR There are huge delays and right now it is 50/50 that you will be looking at a new Christian Grey.

— Enty Lawyer (@entylawyer) February 21, 2015

No matter what happens, it’s surely not great news for the franchise if the sequels are in this much trouble just a week after the first movie opened.

I know a lot of you have been waiting for me to go see 50 Shades of Grey and come roaring back to the blog in a blaze of righteous fury, but it’s a little difficult for me to do. The film is bad. And not bad in a fun, Showgirls kind of way. Bad in the way that feels like you’d be doing the actors a service by turning away from the screen and sparing all of you a lot of embarrassment.

In her role, Dakota Johnson did the impossible: she made me like Anastasia Rose Steele. Every annoying quirk and simper of her book counterpart is washed away, in part because the audience is spared the litany of complaints and absurdly antiquated expletives that made up her internal monologue in the book . Although she still bites her lip–my guess is that at least $500,000 of the film’s $60M budget was spent on chapstick–and trips over her own feet, movie Ana is funny and endearing. She has a backbone that book Ana lacked, and more sexual agency than E.L. James afforded her. There were places in the film where her delivery seemed to suggest that she was as bewildered by the actions of Christian Grey as the audience should have been.

The best that can be said about Jamie Dornan is that he showed up to the set and stood in the correct lighting. I can’t even say that he did the best he could with what he had to work with. It has to be difficult to perform in a role where the character’s singular personality trait is “sexy weirdo,” but Dornan doesn’t even appear to be trying. There’s a sense throughout that he knows he’s too good for the material, but rather than coming off with the same oh-jeez charm that Johnson exudes, Dornan flounders, seemingly unwilling or unable to find a workable angle to slip more than one dimension into the character. It’s as though the leads are aware that they’re in a bad movie, but only one of them is trying to make the most of it.

The rest of the cast is hit-or-miss. Marcia Gay Harden breezes through her scenes as Christian’s mother in a bad impression of Lucille Bluth, while Jennifer Ehle infuses the role of Ana’s hopelessly romantic mom with effortless maternal sweetness. The fathers might as well be wallpaper, and Rita Ora, whose casting was touted as the second coming when it was announced, is reduced to uttering a handful of earnestly delivered, but forgettable lines. She shows a lot of promise for the sequels; though the script keeps her effectively silent, she steals the attention from the rest of the supporting cast in her scenes.

Screenwriter  Kelly Marcel and director Sam Taylor-Johnson managed to trim many of the most ridiculous and creepy bits from the novel. Not only did they do away with the infamous tampon interlude, but they mercifully shortened the fingering-under-the-dinner-table scene at Grey’s parents’ house, and we were spared Ana’s forced gynecological consultation. References to the helicopter were reduced by at least 90%, and when Christian fails to kiss Ana outside of the coffee shop, she doesn’t crumble to the ground weeping in a parking garage. Gone too is any mention of Ana’s sexual non-history. Though she tells Christian that she’s a virgin, the script doesn’t bring up her startlingly absent pre-Grey sexuality.

But even without the melodrama, 50 Shades of Grey is destined for absurdity. The on-set fights between the director and author are well-documented. It’s fun to guess at which lines remained at the author’s insistence; when Dornan mournfully tells Johnson, “I’m fifty shades of fucked up,” you can almost hear the screenwriter’s resumé revising itself. It’s no surprise that in moments when the dialogue skews to the side of clunky, it’s almost always on lines that appeared in the book. “I don’t make love. I fuck, hard,” and “Laters, baby,” both statements that fans of the novel swooned for, fall flat when spoken aloud, and more than a few bursts of laughter punctuated the showing I attended, usually at moments where the audience was clearly meant to engage emotionally. The soundtrack does no favors, either. As Christian took care of Ana’s virginity “situation,” Sia warbled the lyrics, “You can do it,” in the background, as though the soundtrack was unintentionally cheering him on thrust for thrust.

And oh, the thrusting. The only real disservice the movie does to the book is not deviating from the sex scenes as written. The novel contained endless pages of repetitive sensuality; he ties her up, he goes down on her, they introduce a prop of some sort, he mounts her and she “detonates around him.” As mind-numbingly copy-pasted as those scenes read, the hastened pace of filmmaking renders them more unbearable. Viewers are given a tantalizing glimpse into a room with far too many and far too similar sex toys: my friend Quinn remarked that Grey’s Red Room sported no less than five identical canes, and he appeared to have enough multiples of the same type of cuff to bind a sub with seven arms. Yet a blindfold, some dangerously represented bondage, and a few timid slaps with a riding crop and a flogger is the only kink the audience sees. Yes, the visual is more tantalizing than reading vague descriptions of touches down there and ellipses-heavy orgasms, but we never actually see the culmination of all their breathy passion, either. Instead, we’re treated to various angles of vigorously flexing buttocks and some extremely light sensation play, none of which seems to back up Grey’s deep need to cause Ana pain. I’ve been on connecting flights that were more painful than any of the BDSM in this movie.

A common theme in reviews I’ve seen from other bloggers was a sense of relief that Grey doesn’t come off as abusive. This makes me wonder if I didn’t accidentally wander into the wrong theatre and see something else entirely. Christian still tracks Ana’s cell phone to find her and take her away to undress her and sleep beside her in his hotel room. When Ana sends him a message giving him the brush off, he enters her apartment uninvited in the name of  seducing her. He steals her car and sells it, replacing it with a more expensive one without asking her, and when she objects, he spanks her and leaves her without aftercare. Another spanking incident takes place at his parents’ house, where he hoists her over his shoulder and slaps her behind out of anger at her failure to clear her vacation plans with him. Perhaps the most disturbing example of his abuse comes at the end of the movie, when, at Ana’s request, he lets loose on her with with a braided belt. Though she doesn’t safe word, the sight of her lying there, openly weeping and clearly not enjoying herself, isn’t enough to stop him. Without Ana’s inner monologue describing how terrified and intimidated she is by Grey’s behavior, his abusive tendencies and exertion of total control over her really are lessened in comparison, much in the same way that having a cavity filled is less unpleasant than having a root canal. The abuse is still there in full force, and though Ana comes off as spunky, she doesn’t object to Christian’s actions until the very end of the movie. No matter how much agency the script gives Ana, her simply not minding or being able to excuse Grey’s stalking and possessiveness doesn’t absolve him of it.

The run time, a bloated 125 minutes, caused one gentleman in the theatre to stand up and shout, “Thank God!” the moment the credits rolled. Considering that E.L. James is rumored to have demanded to write the sequel’s screenplay, maybe we should all just be thankful that this first movie wasn’t as bad as it could have been.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, I did wear a little something special to meet Mr. Grey:

(For those who’ve asked, I made the t-shirt on Zazzle, and it’s available here)

 

Last night, I went and saw 50 Shades of Grey. I have feelings. Feelings that are going to be explored more in-depth in some vlogs I’ve done with @ThatMissQuin (her feed is NSFW), and with a review I’ll be posting tomorrow or Friday, if I can’t handle my emotions.

In the meantime, I did live tweet the movie, and I’ve Storifyed (Storified?) it to tide you over until I can deliver more Shades shade.

 

You liked 50 Shades of Grey and its sequels. You enjoyed the movie. You log onto Facebook to tell people how much you liked it, and BAM! You’re slapped in the face with shared articles about how it promotes abuse, about how Christian Grey is a stalker, about why the books aren’t a good example of a healthy D/s relationship. It almost feels like you, personally, are being called into question. You get defensive. You type, “It’s just a movie! Get over it!”

I’d need both my hands, my feet, and someone else’s hands and feet (preferably not severed) to count the number of times “Get over it!” has appeared on my Facebook timeline this week. The same for “It’s just fiction!” I understand where the impulse is coming from; 50 Shades of Grey has caused some women to have a “sexual awakening,” or began their interest in reading altogether. Maybe you read the books and thought they were the most gripping, well-written pieces of fiction ever. Maybe you were shocked at how closely they resembled your own fantasies. For whatever reason, these books captured your imagination and brought you a large amount of enjoyment. They became special to you–possibly the most important books you’ve read in your entire life–and now it seems that the world is against them.

I never thought 50 Shades of Grey would receive the kind of whiplash reactions in movie form as it did when the books were first published. I clearly underestimated the mass appeal of the film medium and the ticking time bomb that was set to explode the moment anyone showed any small amount of excitement or derision over the franchise. There’s so much frustration on both sides, but I can really only speak from one viewpoint. So that’s what I’m doing today. I want to give you, the 50 Shades of Grey fan, a primer on how not to argue with a 50 Shades of Grey critic.

 Don’t assume that critics haven’t read the books or seen the movie. I’m consistently amazed when people tell me that because I don’t share their opinion, I must not have read the books. “You probably just read the first book! You didn’t read the others, or you’d see that he changes!” But I did read the book, so now your argument is… well, it’s over. If you assume ignorance of or unfamiliarity with the material is the sole cause of criticism, I have bad news for you. A lot of critics have read all three books, specifically so that we’re armed with knowledge to back up our opinions. And we still think the relationship is abusive, warped, and chock full o’ rape.

Don’t tell us that the books created new readers. Whenever any book sells the way 50 Shades of Grey sold, obviously it’s not selling only to “career readers.” It’s absolutely selling to people who weren’t readers before, and we all know this already. But having readers come to the genre because they like one specific book doesn’t improve anything for readers or authors. These readers don’t want romance novels. They want one specific romance novel. They are going to read and buy any copycat of 50 Shades of Grey they can get their hands on, but that’s all they’re going to buy. Which is good news for those authors who were already writing D/s romance with über-possessive Dom heroes, but bad news for anyone writing in any other genre. Ditto for the readers; when the demand is for books that are exactly like 50 Shades of Grey, publishers are going to be all too happy to supply them, until the market is saturated and it’s hard to find anything that isn’t about a sexually inexperienced college student and her abusive billionaire boyfriend. How does that benefit readers or authors? It just doesn’t.

If you’re engaging with an author who is critical of 50 Shades of Grey, don’t tell them to be thankful for the money they’re going to make. I’ve never made it a secret that my current financial success wouldn’t have been possible without 50 Shades of Grey. But you know what? I’m sure the funeral director who has an unusually successful quarter isn’t thankful for that train derailment. 50 Shades of Grey existing isn’t something authors can magically undo. We weren’t asked, “Would you like to make more money? Here’s the catch: a horrible, copyright infringing, abuse and rape glorifying train wreck of a novel is going to become a runaway bestseller and everyone is going to fight about it endlessly on all forms of social media. Still game?” We didn’t have that choice. I’m sure there are some people who would have said, “Yes, I’m comfortable with that. But as it stands, if authors are making money hand over fist because of 50 Shades of Grey, they never asked to. They don’t have to give thanks if they morally object to the content of the book or the plagiarism controversy surrounding it. We don’t owe E.L. James anything, and it’s insulting to tell someone that they should be thankful for a favor they never asked for. “Thank you” is not an obligation.

 Don’t assume that the person you’re talking to doesn’t understand what BDSM is. I know that 50 Shades of Grey makes it seem like BDSM is this dark, secret thing that not many people are aware of, but it’s been out there for centuries and it’s more common than you’d think. Make sure that the person you’re discussing the books/film with is actually confusing BDSM with abuse before you try to educate them on the fact that BDSM isn’t abuse. Also, don’t assume that because you have experience with BDSM and you enjoyed the books that your experiences are being called into question. It’s perfectly fine to enjoy the book, but from a factual standpoint the BDSM practices are poorly represented. You may have twenty-five years of experience paddling asses, but that doesn’t make the kink in 50 Shades of Grey any more accurate.

It doesn’t matter that it’s “just fiction.” Before Jaws hit theaters in 1975, great white sharks weren’t the villains we now believe them to be. But when the movie–which was purely fiction–became a blockbuster, it directly caused humans to seek out and kill sharks, causing widespread population drops in shark species across the board. The influence of that piece of fiction (coincidentally also based on a novel) even coined its own name: The Jaws Effect. When Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita was published, it was perceived by the public to be an erotic novel, despite the fact that it told the story of child sexual abuse through the viewpoint of an unreliable narrator. The result? To this day, we refer to sexually precocious teen girls as “Lolitas,” despite the author’s intent. Yes, 50 Shades of Grey is fiction, but fiction isn’t created or consumed in a vacuum. It is influenced by our culture, and influences our culture, and 50 Shades of Grey isn’t an exception. Even though something is “just fiction,” it can still have detrimental effects on society or expose problems that already exist in our perceptions. So when someone says “50 Shades of Grey promotes abuse as romance,” they’re not saying, “50 Shades of Grey is a totally real thing that happened and is a cautionary tale.” They’re saying that this work of fiction is having, or has the potential to create, real world effects.

Don’t assume that people can only care about one thing. “Why are you worried about 50 Shades of Grey? There are homeless people dying in the streets! There are people in Africa who are starving! There are child molesters and drug dealers and terrorism and you’re complaining about a harmless fantasy!” You know what’s interesting about all of that? Me liking 50 Shades of Grey, or even just me not talking about 50 Shades of Grey, would not solve any of those problems. I could go for an entire day not talking about 50 Shades of Grey and there would still be starving people and abused children in the world. You know what’s another interesting fact? I care about all of those issues, as well. I’m sure you’re capable of caring about all of those issues while simultaneously enjoying and defending 50 Shades of Grey, right? Are we operating under the assumption that people who don’t like 50 Shades of Grey are incapable of being informed about and sympathetic to more than one cause at a time? If your demand is that I change all the ills of the world before I express an opinion about 50 Shades of Grey, then I’m going to have to ask you, respectfully, to fulfill the same quota before you express yours.

 Don’t say, “If you don’t like it, don’t read/see it!” It’s not like there’s some commune somewhere that we can escape to in order to not be aware of 50 Shades of Grey. It’s in the news, magazines, on the internet, everyone is talking about it. There is no escape. Some people (like me) read the books out of curiosity because everyone was talking about them. And we didn’t know we wouldn’t like them until we read them. Like Harry Potter or Twilight, everyone is forced to know about them.

Don’t call into question the feminism of someone who dislikes 50 Shades of Grey. Yes, E.L. James is a woman. Yes, she is a successful woman. But so is Sarah Palin, and, like Sarah Palin, E.L. James has said and written some things that are pretty damaging to women. It’s not anti-feminist to criticize the actions of a woman if those actions are harmful to other women. If someone says they believe that 50 Shades of Grey is harmful to women, the answer is not to tell them they’re not being a good feminist. They’re being great feminists; they’re questioning our cultural perceptions of relationships, gender roles, and heteronormativity, and how they affect all women.

“The idea we need to protect women from 50sog is patronising.” Bull. The primary readership is new to BDSM lifestyle, and rape is involved.

— Comrade Twerk (@megamandaplays) February 16, 2015

Comrade Twerk brings up a good point. You may feel patronized by women wanting to protect other women from the messages in 50 Shades of Grey, because you already know that the behaviors depicted in the books are unhealthy. But that doesn’t mean all women know that the behaviors in the books are unhealthy, and their ignorance could be exploited. In the same vein, you might know not to mix chlorine bleach and ammonia, but someone else might not know that. Do you find the warnings “DO NOT MIX WITH BLEACH” on your household cleaning products patronizing? To the point that you would be willing to risk someone killing themselves with mustard gas by accident, just so you never had to see those warnings in the future?

 When someone is pointing out the problematic content, don’t tell them to “get over it.” So many people who have taken issue with the themes of abuse and rape in 50 Shades of Grey are speaking from personal experiences of abuse and/or rape. When you tell them to “get over” their problems with the books, you’re telling them to “get over” the abuse they experienced. Is this true of every critic? No. But even if the person you’re talking to didn’t experience intimate partner abuse, you’re still telling them to “get over” caring about the prevention of rape and intimate partner abuse. Yes, even if you didn’t see that element present in the novels. You’re still trying to silence discussion of some very serious issues.

We know you’re tired of seeing people complain about 50 Shades of Grey. We’re tired of seeing you sing its praises. You know how you just posted a wall of text status update about how great 50 Shades of Grey is and how haters need to get a life? People who don’t care for 50 Shades of Grey, or who don’t want to see anything about it because they’re plain disinterested, had to see it. If you don’t want to hear people complain about 50 Shades of Grey, then you need to stop talking about it, and we wouldn’t have to hear your side, either. Or, you could simply accept that when millions of people discuss a world-wide phenomenon, they’re not all going to agree with you. The people who don’t agree aren’t attacking you by not enjoying something that you enjoy. They’re not calling into question whether or not you’re a good person. They’re exercising their right to voice concerns that, like it or not, are shared by millions of people.

If you truly believe that fiction cannot shape or be shaped by our culture, find a piece of fiction that is wholly devoid of culture context, commentary, or influence and use it to back up your point. If you find a tender love story at the core of 50 Shades of Grey, try to present it to us without accusing us of misunderstanding BDSM or not reading the material. If you can’t defend the books without dancing around the criticism by invoking larger issues, guilting critics, or silencing the conversation all together, then you can’t effectively defend the books or movie at all.

And if you don’t like that… “get over it.”