fifty shades of wanting your life back.

So what I did was, I read Fifty Shades of Grey last weekend, and it made me feel things. Sexy things. Frustrated things. Grammatically incorrect things. Here's a random sample.

1. From now on I think editors need to limit writers to only one adjective per noun. None of this "deep, profound melancholy" or "cool, cold water."

1a. Yeah, don't get me started on "cool, cold water."

2. The porny bits kick in around page 87; you can pretty much skip the first part.

2a. And oh my lord, the porny bits! This shit gets REAL.

3. In the words of the poor bastard to whom I kept reading passages aloud one night as he tried to quietly read an article about outer space, "I'd be kind of turned on if it wasn't so horrible."

3a. To that end, here are some of the phrases I hope never to hear again: "the arousal of my sex" (yes, as in vagina. She did use the word vagina, thank goodness, but not nearly often enough), "Come for me, baby," "my inner goddess."

3c. For more of the very, very worst writing of this series, check out Fifty Shades of Suck. My inner goddess can't stop hitting her head on the table.

4. Guys, they have period sex! Insanely dirty period sex! To me this is a Sexy Final Frontier, something everybody probably does but nobody talks about. I love that she went there. I have this image in my head of a woman with one of those headlamp book lights staying up late to read over the description of a dude pulling out a young woman's tampon in a hotel bathroom, eyes wide. It's so over the top. Bread and circuses.

5. Here is something that I both love and hate: clunky literary allusions, meant to lend credibility to otherwise horrifying prose. In the case of Fifty Shades, it's an ongoing reference to Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy. I know that sales of Wuthering Heights spiked post-Twilight (thanks in part to the terrible Twilight-inspired editions). Given my irrational dislike of the Victorian novel, I will have a nice little chuckle if a whole generation of women starts slogging through Tess. Joke's on you, ladies!

5a. When I was in highschool I had to read Far from the Madding Crowd, also by Hardy. I had a really hard time wrapping my head around the novel until my filthy-minded teacher started pointing out all the penile, erectile, and otherwise phallic imagery in the book, at which point something clicked in my adolescent brain.

6. It is incredible how many people are reading this book. The first one in the trilogy has over 800 people on the library waiting list. I sincerely hope that this leads to bored people having a lot more interesting sexytimes. I also hope its popularity helps break down some of the antiquated social stigma around porn and erotica for women. Given the overwhelming prudishness of our society it's not at all surprising that part of the reason for this book's popularity is that in this digital age it can be read on a tablet with relative anonymity--a number of articles note that fans of the series who are grateful for the ability to read it without anyone knowing that they're reading it, because it's not the sort of book they'd want to broadcast about. The fact that women are still concerned about public displays of sexual appetite is problematic. If you want to read smut on the subway, for pete's sake, just read smut on the subway. Life is short.

7. I also really, really hope it will lead to some better-written smut, because for the love of god, I cannot abide this garbage. My inner goddess wishes E.L. James had had a better proofreader. After all, a solid, unforgiving, take-no-prisoners edit is nearly as satisfying as a solid, unforgiving, take-no-prisoners fuck.