 |
| this should be in every bookstore |
I picked the book up off my shelf, started to flick the pages, saw that I had, in fact, read to the end of the book, that there were notes til the end of the book. I remembered what happened, in a vague, big-plot sort of sense, but none of the funny details that would let a breakdown be funny (or as funny as any of them ever were, anyway). And I realized that I just didn't want to read the last chapters again. The writing is bad, the message is worse, and... I don't really have time for this kind of crap. This kind of shitty portrayal of kink, this kind of perversion (and not in the fun way) of a sexuality I hold dear. My time? Not worth it.
But I've gotta close it out, so a few parting thoughts (click the "five-oh shades" tag at the bottom to see previous posts in the series):
What I remember about the end of the book is this: Anastasia, finally, leaves Christian Grey. Which is great, which is phenomenal, which is arguably the only sex-positive, consent-conscious, I'd-even-go-so-far-as-to-say-sort-of-feminist moment in the entire five-hundred-odd-page drivel. James, to her infinitesimal credit, even alludes some pretty great reasons why Anastasia would leave:
"He has needs that I cannot fulfill, I realize that now."
"This is really it. This is what it boils down to - incompatibility..."
"'I can't stay. I know what I want, and you can't give it to me, and I can't give you what you need.'"
These (isolated as they are here - but we'll get to that in a minute) are perfect reasons for leaving a relationship, healthy reasons, even. Recognizing when two (or three, or four - you go puppy piles!) people just aren't going to fulfill on another's needs is, so much so that they're going to be unhappy trying: that is perfectly valid. Painful, difficult, but really valid.
It's also a circumstance many kinksters are terribly familiar with. Kinky, or poly, or otherwise "other" sexually inclined folk run up against this very conundrum, explicitly, all the time: 'I want to be with this person, I want this person to be with me, I love them, even. But I'm kinky, they're not, or I'm kinky, and they're differently kinky than me. And nobody's needs are going to get met if we stay together, and it's going to slow-simmer into resentment and, eventually, dissatisfaction on both our parts. It's painful, it sucks, but we both have to recognize it.'
And if James were to leave it how the above, isolated phrases imply she leaves it, I'd have better things to say at the end of the book. But on the heels of my last post, the assumptions and context that go along with Ana leaving are especially disappointing. Some additional quotes from the last chapter:
"He's not normal."
[from above]: "incompatibility - and all those poor subs come to mind."
"I have had my eyes opened and glimpsed the extent of his depravity, and I now know he's not capable of love - of giving or receiving love."
And that last one pretty much sums it up. There are a lot of issues in this book that rub me wrong, some trivial, some not. The lack of negotiation, the anti-woman caricatures, the bad writing. The fact that, although I love that she leaves him in the end, I'll eat my feminist jacket patch if it's not just a set-up for them to eventually get back together, for Anastasia to be heartbroken for time enough that readers sufficiently salivate, making the reunion all that much more tragically satisfying.
But I'd be willing to forgive all that (maybe not the anti-feminist bits, but the rest, surely) if the underlying message of the book didn't tell me that how I love, how I have sex, how I express affection and gratitude and desire is inherently wrong: that it is, in it's very nature, impossible. The book is a denial of my sexuality, of the sexuality of thousands (hundreds of thousands? where to draw the line anyway, really, because the number of people who deem themselves "not really kinky" and use toys and power exchange and role play in their sex lives is growing every day?).
I've often been told that I shouldn't take offense so much. As if being offended is something I choose. Peel back the layers of what it means to be offended, for me, and it basically strips down to hurt. I am hurt. It is hurtful, especially because of how popular this book is, that someone would say these things about me, about my friends and my community, would not only write this perspective, but succeed with it, popularize it with others, make so much money from it.
Which isn't mean to come off as reason to be pitied, or as victimized. I don't think E.L. James has a right to that kind of influence over me, or any kinkster. But simply to say: that sucked, lady. That sucked, and that hurt people, and that was a step back for kinky people in a lot of ways.
So with this, I say goodbye to Fifty Shades of Grey. I'm not going to read the next books (I've got better literature, and better kink literature, to spend my time on).
Consolation prize? I'm probably having wicked better sex than you ever will, James. Put that in your crop and flick it.
No comments:
Post a Comment