50 Shades of Foil Packets

Some of you have already been lucky enough to have heard my verbal take on what can loosely be described as a ‘book’, but I've decided to dedicate it to writing for everyone to share and enjoy. A few weeks ago, I lost several precious hours of my life to reading 50 Shades of Grey. I picked it up mainly to see what the hype was about, already knowing I probably wouldn't enjoy it. Lesson number one: trust your instincts. Not only did I not enjoy it, it’s probably one of the worst ‘books’ I've ever turned the pages of.

We are supposed to believe Christian Grey is the most handsome man on the planet, even though he sounds like as much fun as a colonoscopy. By simply looking at him, you will orgasm. All in all, a very realistic premise. He has such an effect on the virgin Anastasia Steele, she stumbles into his office and falls to the floor. Just how he likes it, evidently. From here, Mr Grey becomes a stalker, and goes to Anastasia’s workplace to buy bondage equipment. She thinks he is simply buying hardware supplies. He plays the hero by ‘rescuing’ her from the advances of her best friend when she is drunk, after she drunk dials him. He immediately kicks into stalker mode and tracks her mobile phone with his sophisticated stalker equipment and swoops in to save the day and take her back to his apartment where she wakes the next morning wondering if they ‘did it’. No, he tells her, necrophilia is not his thing. What is his thing is being a dominant and preying on unsuspecting young women to be his submissive.

Of course, as has become the norm in massively popular fiction of late, we are subjected to yet another female protagonist who is emotionally insecure and reliant on the love of a man to make her feel any sort of self worth. What a role model. I hope all young women from now on strive to be taken advantage of by a wealthy, physically attractive, emotionally-inept man and live happily ever after.

The main issues

• Half of the book is emails between Ana and Christian, after he attempts to buy her affections with a laptop and a new car. The emails lack any sort of witty repartee, and made me want to write them both an email telling them to fucking sort themselves out.
• Christian tells Ana early on that he doesn't ‘make love’, he ‘fucks’. He then proceeds to have ‘vanilla’ sex with her when he learns she is a virgin. They also appear to ‘make love’ more often than they ‘fuck’, inconsistent with his alleged dominant personality and the whole point of the ‘book’.
• ‘Foil packets’ is the term used to try and make condoms sexy. Eg. “He rips the foil while I am breathing hard”, “I am panting and vaguely hear the rip of foil.” and “I fish out both foil packets that I find and lay them on the bed by his hips.”
• It doesn't work, and by the 50^th time the foil packets are referred to, we get the point, they are having safe sex. Do you want a fucking prize Mr Grey?
• It is somewhat creepy that Grey pays a gynaecologist to visit his home and consult with Ana about birth control methods.
• What is even creepier is that this entire exchange takes up the better part of a chapter until it’s decided she will go on the pill. You would have thought this would be the end of the narrative concerning safe sex. But no, even after the need for foil packets has been eliminated, we are constantly reminded Ana needs to take her pill by the alarm going off on her phone. Grey even calls her from time to time to check she has remembered to take it. Normal.
• Grey was sexually abused as a teenager, taken advantage of by a friend of his mother. Rather than seeking professional help or attempting some kind of normalcy in his life, he continues to catch up with ‘Mrs Robinson’ and swap notes on the dominant/submissive lifestyle.
• This is a New York Times best-seller. I've not read the other two books in the trilogy, but about 60 million copies have been sold thus far. Imagine for a moment, if all the money that went towards purchasing the books was instead given to a charity of some kind or to an agency that promoted positive change in the world. IMAGINE.
• As far as I can tell, Christian Grey does not comprise of fifty shades. He is beige at best, and all shades of mentally affected.

Have you read 50 Shades? Tell me what you liked or didn't like about it, and remember kids, it’s all about the foil packets.