Reading Fifty Shades of Grey is something I had to simultaneously try to do, and try not to do. Confusing, yeah? Ok, well, it's as if you give your number to someone when you're drunk, who, upon subsequent meetings (drunk again), turns out to be not at all your type, and also with whom you hook up anyway. Sober, you regret it, and try ignoring them. You do so, not replying to texts and ignoring calls, until the next time you get drunk and run into them. After some initial awkwardness, (duly related to your assholish and adolescent avoidance) and a drink or three, and one thing leading to the next, they're back at your apartment again.

The next morning, you really don't like what has happened. Again. They left in a cab before sunrise, and you woke up alone, but it still happened, and you still feel compromised. And you are aware that they must now think you're into them. How could you not be? You keep doing it. And surely they text you, that night, except now they're sexting. After a few messages you respond:

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I do not consent to this interaction. I'm not going to read any more of your messages.

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Yet your phone keeps buzzing. You keep reading them, because you are conditioned to check your phone when it vibrates, and the messages are acting on you in a way you are not comfortable with; somehow this turns you on, and you don't want it too. You text back:

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I'm booking your miners.

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Fuck

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*U'm blocking your number.

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Double fuck.

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*I'm

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Fifty Shades of Grey is a bad choice of fuck-buddy, chosen not because they are actually really great or exciting, but because fuck-buddies are supposed to be. What happens in this book is generally presented to our culture as risky and liberated, and therefore acted upon as though doing so will make you so. But it doesn't. This type of sex, without the proper relationship (one of informed consent), serves to create a division between people; an over-emphasized connection with the experience instead of the person. A yeah-I-did-that kind of relationship to sex. Not my jam.

The main characters, whose names are so bad I refuse to write them, are boring and dangerously simplistic archetypes. Naive Virgin and Troubled Powerful Abuser. She seems to have no agency whatsoever. He has the eyes of a mesmerizer, and fifty-billion dollars. She wants and has waited for love; he hates women, and wants to punish her for being one. He's sooo hot and powerful, and she's sooo stupid. She tries to get the badly-wanted (truly needed) love, he repeatedly assaults her, and finally, after the part I skipped, she leaves. Ending of book one. I read just more than half and skipped ahead, and read some of the sex scenes, the last page, and then the last twenty pages, hoping to find out if something more happened. The book is worse than bad porn (not least of all in that it is designed to have several sequential instalments, which is so fucking pretentious) and is not worth reading. Yet I had a hard time not reading it, thinking it might have some miraculous turn-around, some redeeming aspect, and yet it does not. And though I know this, I want it to. How can a book this horrible be so popular?

The sad part is, I am severely outnumbered by people who think this book was worth reading, and buying. And, that said, the sadder part is what its popularity says about us collectively. I was entertaining a fantasy that this novel is some epic work of meta-genius, taking a judgmental poke at the people buying it by being so obviously unreadable, yet it is no such thing. It's just horned-up, heavily-marketed hype for a culture with an unhealthy relationship with itself. A culture in which some people feel like they signed up to be loved, and some people who don't sign up for anything and just want to fuck hard and hit things (objects resembling women). I am tempted to say “I don't hate women, I don't hate myself, I'm not reading the rest of this book, and think no one else should bother as well.” Yet, I may have to respond to some criticism later about how B(ondage)D(ominance/iscipline)S(ubmission/adism)M(asochism) is not about hating women or myself. I know that. But the way it is portrayed here is. Barf.

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