“I Like Romance!”

It must’ve been early 2013…

This operations executive I worked with – let’s call her Rose – stormed into my office and threw herself into one of the visitors chairs in front of my desk. She was fuming… As it turned out, she was upset with one of her friends who gave her Fifty Shades of Grey to read…

“Do you know what I’m talking about?” she glanced in my direction and then looked away… flustered.

Of course, I knew what she was talking about. How could I not? For most of the previous year, people all over the place brought it up a lot: at business lunches, corporate cocktail parties, cultural fundraisers, but most of all – in the media… And that SNL sketch! Amazon Mother’s Day Ad for Fifty Shades of Grey! It pretty much encapsulated the public opinion of it…

I had no intention of reading it, though. Granted, graphic erotica has been a valuable tool in literature for a really long time and is one of the most consequential subjects of the freedom-of-speech battle. But, by all accounts floating around me, this particular book just didn’t seem to be the kind I could spare my time on. It seemed to be too single-focused, too linear in its narrative; not multifaceted enough for my taste. Plus, some of my acquaintances, who actually gave in to the worldwide tizzy and read it, profusely complained about the linguistic shortcomings, and the unacceptable in an “American story” britishisms, and so on. Most importantly, it was my understanding that the female protagonist – the very object of all that BDSM everyone was swooning about – was an uncommonly innocent college senior. And that made it for me too… How shall I put it? … too immature, too underage, a bit improper… I mean, Ms. James is my age…

Rose was spewing broken phrases, “I was reading it and then I got to the point when He…” (That was how she put it – as if a person who hasn’t even touched the book should’ve just understood who she was talking about. I didn’t even know then that the “grey” of the title was actually the dominant’s last name. Nevertheless, her exasperation left no doubt who “He” was.) “… says, ‘I don’t make love. I fuck, hard.'” At this point she turned her face fully to me. The look of dismay in her eyes! “I shut it closed and threw it into the incinerator!”

I smiled at her, thinking that it was actually straight to the point and that, all things considering, one shouldn’t have expected anything different. But apparently Rose did.

“Why would she give it to me? …And what’s wrong with her – why does she like it so much? …I don’t even read novels! But especially… I hate this kind of blatant lust… I like romance!” She wasn’t talking about books – she clearly meant it as a matter of principle…

I had mixed feelings about all that hissing and puffing coming out of her… It goes without saying that prudes irritate the fuck out of me. But that wasn’t even all that important in this instance. You see, she was a very attractive woman in her early 40s with 20 years of marriage and 3 kids! (How did you make them, honey? Through platonic romance?) On the other hand, I knew her husband too…

Fifteen years her senior. Former show-runner of his own international business. Now, prematurely forced to retire by the competition, he was managing his diverse assets into various gains to sustain their upper-middle class existence. A man, whose extensive foreign travel and prolonged overseas residences made him think of himself as a sort of… James-Bond type. I’m not kidding: he actively collected 007 movies memorabilia – with Sotheby’s and Christie’s alerts on his phone, no less. He was arrogant, casually chauvinistic, and unbearably full of himself… He and I – we knew we were naturally-born enemies, as truly mutually antagonistic species, from the first moment we met…

So, that self-absorbed bastard of a lousy husband of yours didn’t even bother to awake your sensuality; just has been using you all these years… – I thought to myself. She was sitting in that chair, her body turned sideways towards me… Her button-front blouse’s placket making waves – as it happens even with the skinniest women – giving me glimpses of her silvery La Perla bra, the tops of her breasts, and the smooth skin of her sternum… It was hot. Oh, baby, I wish I could get you alone… To discuss further – the fucking… and the romance…

But that was out of the question. So, the only thing I said was, “I guess, a lot of women around the world have ideations about submission and feel aroused by reading about it. That doesn’t mean most of them would like to get really hurt as a matter of punishment, sexual or otherwise…”

And even though I didn’t mention to her Michael Haneke’s heartbreakingly terrifying La Pianiste – that movie wouldn’t land within her range – I did tell her about that other novel… The obvious predecessor to Fifty Shades: also THE erotic novel of its time, also written by a woman, who was also British and credited by her two initials – The Sheik (1919) by E.M. Hull. The tale that kept the female readership of the time fervent by the idea of falling in love with a man who keeps you captive, repeatedly raped, and slapped around quite a bit. The fervor further intensified by the scorching screen presence of Rudolph Valentino in the 1921 Hollywood adaptation (sans the rape scenes)…

…It’s remarkable how misled I was by the confusion of the public’s misinformed point of view… Served me right too, since I clearly betrayed my own principle of never expressing an opinion that was not entirely my own…

It was 5 years later that I found myself with an ample time to kill and in a desperate need of a distraction, while my choices for it were severely limited… One of them was Fifty Shades of Grey… And I remembered Rose’s hilarious indignation… It could be amusing, I thought, to reflect on that bitch through this…

So, I started reading it, waiting for that moment that sent Rose flying off the handle… 40 pages in, 50… But it’s all like virgin trepidations and amorous enthrallment and wide-eyed wonderment – a very girlish, very rosy romancing. (With a single stab at darkness via a play on one word taken from Tess of the d’Urbervilles – that classic example of the “destruction of morality through the industrialization” symbolism, featuring the debasement of especially cruel and tragic nature… I’m still wondering about its relevance to Christian and Anastasia relationship.) It’s no wonder “romantic” Rose kept reading it this far in spite of her aversion to novels… And it’s an easy, quick read too – with pages just flying away without any real attempts at grabbing for audience’s intellectual faculties…

Then, finally, it happens… On page 91 (!!!) Mr. Grey declares it to the awestruck Ms. Steele – and it’s the first explicit mentioning of sex altogether. And after that… Oh, those clueless people back in the day, regurgitating the overheard opinions! And those poor women unable to self-reflect! And that silly Rose! She should’ve kept on reading! Because Christian Grey, in the most fairy-tale romantic way, spends the rest of the book giving up one piece of his former private self after another (with the unfortunate exception of his bad temper and poor manners) in order to be with his one-and-only: the girl who turns out to be the love of his life, in spite of the fact that she has no submissive tendencies whatsoever. (And how, let me ask you, it’s even possible for him to do? Wouldn’t that require some serious cognitive reprogramming? But never you mind! Fantasy is as fantasy does!)

And yes, the sex scenes – whether straightforward or with bits of some frightful fun – are liberally dispersed throughout. And they are descriptive enough to elicit healthy contractions and secretions… But trust me, it’s not the erotica and the bondage that carried all those readers (whether they realized it themselves or not) through EL James’s volumes. On the contrary, it’s all the proper mechanics of romantic fairy tales, the nuts and bolts of a Cinderella story. The power of love that turned a man with the history of welting, scarring, and controlling female bodies into a loving hero who would do anything for his beloved’s pleasure.

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Want to read my novel Fireworks and Other Illuminations? Explore it here: “Fireworks and…” the Novel

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1. Featured Image: Dryad, 1884-1885 by Evelyn De Morgan ↩︎