Hmmmmm... February 14th or Valentine's Day (a day dedicated to love, romance and the declaration of devotion to someone you admire, find attractive, or perhaps simply just lust after) is just around the corner. Hubba-hubba! Does anyone else think that the kind of conduct that is not only endorsed for one single day per year, but openly encouraged is not particularly cute, but in fact creepy?
In these enlightened times, thankfully such behaviour - which the recipient of such attention would at any other time of the year consider to be be tantamount to sexual harassment, or possibly even stalking - can be sidestepped to make way for the more obvious commercial nuisance value, becoming as run-of-the-mill as Easter and as mainstream as Hallowe'en'. Valentine's Day now is more frothy, plastic, shallow and just a little bit too superficial.
So what bright spark thought it would be the perfect time to release the cinematic rendition of E. L. James' blockbusting, multi-million best selling novel and gargantuan yawn-fest trilogy 50 shades? It begs the question whether Hollywood producers actually read any of the books that they turn into their next cash cow or just go with the flow, riding the zeitgeist (or what they imagine is the zeitgeist - which in regards to the 'shades' trilogy is nothing more than a popularised consumer trend) in the belief that what does well in print will naturally do well in the cinema. Hello? Does no-one remember Travolta's Battlefield Earth?
Perhaps they succumbed to the buzz (and I'm not talking about the sound created by the vast army of rabbit wielding aficionados of the 'shades' series), perhaps they believed the same hype that catapulted said book to the top of the bestseller list, hype generated by E. L. James' (real name: Erika Mitchell) and her husband, screenwriter Niall Leonard's media and industry contacts? The cynic in me believes that the only real motivation was money.
Anyone who hasn't been living on Mars for the past few years will already know that the subject matter in the 'shades' series (I prefer to call James' trilogy the 'shades' series as it reminds me of the brand name of a supermarket toilet roll, quite like the book does) is not aligned to traditional interpretation of intimacy and human sexuality. Whilst the gender roles of the principal characters Christian Grey and Anastasia Steele are fairly straight forward (Woman: Independant, career driven, strong but vulnerable, and a VIRGIN / Man: Independantly WEALTHY, at the pinnacle of his career, powerful but secretly sensitive and very, very, very, RICH) the excessive power play and control is not.
BDSM is not as mainstream as readers of the 'shades' series might imagine. It is practiced by a large number of very responsible, intelligent, people who get enormous pleasure from either submitting themselves totally to the will of another, controlling the will of another or mixing it up from time to time. It is also - sadly - misrepresented in sensationalist magazine articles and by the media in general so that those who wish to practice are considered deviants by those who do not.
BDSM has - very occasionally - led to deaths, but these are minimal compared to those who are killed as a result of male/ female or male/male sexual assault or rape. In fact there are more deaths reported as a result of autoerotic asphyxiation than caused by partners taking part in consensual sado-masochistic sexual activities. Whilst 'shades' might have broadened the outlook of some readers who had never experienced anything more adventurous than being taken roughly from behind whilst imaging it is Johnny Depp, the James' novels do not represent BDSM or practitioners of BDSM. For the record, spanking is NOT BDSM.
I'm not going to go into the whys and wherefores of the shortcomings of the 'shades' trilogy. It's been explored many, many times before, as has the obvious anti-feminist subtext. Needless to say that anyone who is, or has taken part in consensual BDSM will realised that E. L. James is a fantasist at best (but hey, it's fiction after all so perhaps it's forgivable) but more importantly she has not got a clue. On a more literary level, the books have been likened to 'the dribbling, scrawlings a of a pre-pubescent girl', 'puerile', 'immature', 'insulting' and 'syntactically appalling'. Enough said.
The popularity of the 'shades' series did interestingly, coincide with the launch and immediate adoption of handbag-friendly EReaders. LH, a very good friend of mine and skilled exponent of BDSM observed that "women, whose sexual enjoyment is much more cerebral than men's prefer intellectual stimulation rather than pure visual titillation, which is why the novel is the perfect vehicle for that type of sexual gratification. The EReader has allowed women to take their erotic reading material out of the traditional bedroom setting and enabled them to read such material wherever they wanted, with no-one within the vicinity being any the wiser about their choice of reading material, which no doubt adds to their feeling of concealed sexual liberation."
'Shades' was one of the first such modern 'mummy porn' novels and was discussed in hushed tones in playground gatherings, at coffee mornings in Starbucks and the like and at impromptu relationship maintenance meetings between friends. It became a thing of gossip and naughtiness and immediate accessibility, as well as sudden respectability. So it is strange that whilst 'shades' allegedly allowed women to explore erotic fiction much more easily, the charity shops of the UK are filled with copies of the 'shades' books, yet no-one I know has ever seen anyone reading it in public.
So, back to the point. If the books don't represent BDSM, and at the end of the day it's just a story about sex, is it the romance that is so alluring? The romantic la ronde as Christian attempts by degrees, to seduce Anastasia and introduce her to his range of non-vanilla sexual practices? Is it the fact that Christian Grey is in reality nothing more than a manipulative, controlling sexual sociopath? Or the fact that he is so fucking RICH he shits gold?
Realistically, if the books had been written about an ASDA checkout girl being introduced to alternative sexual practices by a penniless chav in a Burberry peaked cap, would it have had the same hold over the minds and loins of so many millions of women worldwide? What if the Anastasia was a bored, middle-aged divorced mother of three and Christian Grey was a Albanian taxi driver with a penchant for being pissed on? No? Then, maybe if Miss Steele was a plain-looking, college educated feminist who has to interview a local charity worker and is inadvertently coerced into putting a string of pearls up her arse?
Doesn't really work does it?
In the end the real star of the book is not Mr Grey, but his wealth. So perhaps the decision to release 50 shades around Valentine's Day was nothing more than another cynical attempt to tap into the millions and millions in currency wasted worldwide on St.Needy's Day. The book is classed after all as a 'women's erotic novel', so the Hollywood tycoons are betting their wages that whilst lots of men know about the books and that they are about sex, not many have read it.
The perfect film then, for us poor deluded blokes - perpetually short of ideas on how to please the little lady, short of buying the ubiquitous assortment of excruciatingly painful and incorrectly sized red and black lingerie and a glass dildo - and who allegedly (according to popular belief) generally need a field map to find the clitoris. Will the film guarantee us men who take our women to the movies on St. Sexpest's Day a night of unbridled passion and some hanky-spanky?
From what I've heard about it so far, no. Apparently it's about as erotic as watching someone try to balance a blancmange on the end of their cock.
The wealth and power is a bit of a turn-on though...
Money = Power. Therefore, as money = power and power is an aphrodisiac, money is the greatest aphrodisiac in the world. QED.
Hollywood, I bow to your ceaseless ability to fleece us out of our hard-earned cash.
See you on the back row suckers.
