Oct 182012
 

We open with more vanilla sex. There must be a layer of dust in the Red Room of Pain by now.

If the first book in this trilogy had a very thin plot, there’s too much plot in the second book: the Leila problem, Ana obsessing over Elena, the ongoing exploration of Christian’s Gothic-ness, and more. These subplots don’t harmonize at all, and Ana’s narration keeps jerking from one to the other, with no sense of priority. Ana seems to have the attention span of a hummingbird, flitting from one emotion to another in a matter of seconds.

As Christian has sent Ana’s measurements to a personal shopper at a department store, she has a full wardrobe of new, expensive clothes. (Did I mention he did this while they were broken up?) She puts on some sexy, slightly fetish-y lingerie, and Christian gets her to wear some ben wa balls.

They’re going to a masked ball, escorted by a security team, while Leila is still at large. I should mention that, in all the talk about the Leila situation, nobody has mentioned calling the police and getting them to find her. It’s a “police are for little people” attitude. It’s kind of telling that, for all of Christian’s surveillance and private security, and for all the emphasis he puts on controlling the world and especially women, he can’t keep track of one mentally ill woman with a concealed weapons permit.

At this point, I’m rooting for Leila to show up and just start shooting people at this party full of millionaires. Eat the rich! Instead, we get more wealth porn. EL James even reproduces the dinner menu. Also, what’s the point of a masked ball if everybody is introduced to everybody else by name?

Elena is somewhere at the party, prompting yet another jealous snit from ana. (I can’t recall if the book specified Christian’s age when he started his relationship with Elena, but age of consent in Washington state is 16, or 18 if the adult is in a position of authority. So, it wasn’t necessarily statutory rape.)

The chapter ends with Ana bidding the $24,000 dollars Christian forced on her in the charity auction. That’s the sole source of drama in this situation. I expected that Ana would be nervous and jumpy about Leila while in a room full of people wearing masks, but that was not to be.  The parts of this book that don’t aggravate me bore the crap out of me.

  2 Responses to “The curious kinky person’s guide to Fifty Shades Darker: Chapter 6”

  1. In book 1 it states Christian was 15 at the start of his and Elena’s “relationship.” So yeah, it was definitely statutory rape, at the very least it began that way.

  2. It’s statutory rape. He was 15, and even if he wasn’t, the age of consent is only 16 as long as the adult isn’t more than five years older. It used to be three years. This is a buffer period intended to keep someone from going to jail because one of the partners turns 18 while the other is still 16. Before this buffer, a lot of perfectly fine teenage relationships had to end because even a kiss was illegal. The five-year difference is set at five years because few teens will date someone even that much older. The reason there’s a limit at all is to keep someone much much older from manipulating a kid. So Mommy’s best friend can’t legally use her many more years of experience to trick you into bed, something much more difficult for a still-wet-behind-the-ears 21-year-old to do.

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