Fifty Shades of Grey

Women are catching up and technology is helping relieve the stress that catching up brings along as its friend. The percentage of women making more money than their husbands/partners is at an all-time high.  Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem must be feeling very proud.  Catching up has come with a price. According to E L James, author of the best selling erotic novel trilogy, Fifty Shades, many women today are exhausted trying to do it all: the kids, the house, the errands, the husband/partner, the job with the demanding boss, the pain in the neck co-workers.  Women want to escape from lives that make them feel like they have to do it all.  


Reading O Magazine is just not cutting it for women today.  Gosh, even Oprah is struggling.  Women, who spend their time nurturing and taking care of others while they hold down stressful jobs, secretly desire a man who will take care of all, and I mean all, their needs.  Welcome Christian Grey!  Grey is the handsome, sexy, 27 year old billionaire in this "mommy porn" trilogy.  Christian lavishes heroine Anna with expensive electronic devices, a $35,000 car, a closet full of designer clothes, shoes and sexy lingere and of course romantic money-is-no-object dinners out several nights a week.  Anna, whose self esteem is fairly intact, questions what such a man finds so irrestistable about a 22 year old virginal recent college graduate.  

Anna works hard not to enjoy all the perks life with a handsome billionaire boyfriend has to offer.  She returns his gifts.  He sends them back.  She prides herself in being an independent woman, he likes domination.  She is worried about his predilection for kinky sex but he is irresistible.  What passes for romance in this sexually graphic novel would make Jane Austin cringe, but readers of this book are not searching for classic literature.  

Sex now comes in a variety of constantly evolving new forms.  Playboy and Penthouse magazines have been replaced by Internet porn, the Sex and the City series has been replaced and updated by the HBO series, Girls, romance novels are written by Shakespearean scholars and women download porn on their ebooks.  Betty and Gloria may be shocked!   


Yes, women have read romance novels secretly and not so secretly for years.  Currently I am reading a delightful book, written by Eloisa James.  This James is an NYT best selling romance novelist and author of the new book, Paris in Love, a memoir about her year in Paris while on sabbatical from her English Literature Professorship at Forham University.  James received her education at Harvard, Oxford and Yale.  She lectures on Shakespeare all over the world and has published in many scholarly journals.   For years James kept the fact that she wrote historical romance novels a secret, using a pen name for fear of being found out thus damaging her scholarly career.  Mary Bly, daughter of poet Robert Bly, aka Eloisa James, came out at a faculty meeting in 2005 and the rest has been hi$tory.  

When I saw the author of the Fifty Shades trilogy interviewed on Dateline last week, it was rather like looking in the mirror.  The author said she is shocked at her success.  I was shocked to see a rather frumpy, chubby, middle aged woman.  In a two week time period she sold 4 million books and she recently landed herself a five million dollar movie deal.  Sex and the City movies were go with your gal-pals movies.  Shades of Grey movies will be go with your lover movies.  


E. L. looked a bit like a deer in headlights while being interviewed by Elizabeth Vargus on Dateline.  She believes her success is due in great part to the fact the women can download the books and no-one needs know about it.  The books are being released in paperback this week for those not as yet Kindled.  (The word kindle started off as a verb after all.)  All the buzz has probably made it easier to snatch a book off the shelf at the bookstore or at the airport without too much  embarrassment.  

James is a Londoner, a television executive, a married mother of two teenage sons who, she says, have not read her books.  (Yeh, right!)  Her husband refuses to travel with her on the book tour, although she admits some of her research on bondage had to be field tested with him.  No wonder he has gone into hiding.


Technology continues to change fundamentally everything about the world we live in, sometimes in unexpected ways.  Partners of tired women who are secretly reading Fifty Shades are not hearing that “I’m too tired tonight honey" excuse so much anymore.  One day last week while I was reading Fifty Shades on my Kindle during a middle school class when everyone was expected to be reading independently one of the students asked me what I was reading.  “Oh, Pride and Prejudice," I said without missing a beat.  Yeh, right!