I submit that Ana is a passive-aggressive sadist, delighting in Christian’s emotional pain. Witness the words I have bolded:
Oct 222012
Peter Tupper
Oct 212012
False alarm. They settle into the apartment. And Ana dozes off by herself, only to wake with a glimpse of a Dark, Shadowy Figure staring at her, who Mysteriously Vanishes. She does not, of course, tell anybody about this. (Bet you she’d go down into the basement alone in a horror movie.)
Oct 202012
Continuing the rich-bastard party, Ana somehow gets into the auction for the first dance of the evening. I say “somehow” because that’s how she gets into everything.
“Now, gentlemen, pray gather round, and take a good look at what could be yours for the first dance. Twelve comely and compliant wenches.”
Jeez! I feel like I’m in a meat market. I watch, horrified, as at least twenty men make their way to the stage area, Christian included, moving with easy grace between the tables and pausing to say a few hellos on the way.
Oct 192012
As I’ve mentioned in earlier posts, it would be fascinating to witness the birth of a particular fetish, and I was fortunate enough to find one that has born recently.
Tales of the Veils, a site devoted to veiling fetish, announced its seventh anniversary last month.
Oct 182012
We open with more vanilla sex. There must be a layer of dust in the Red Room of Pain by now.
Oct 182012
Here we find out that Mrs. Robinson’s real name is Elena Lincoln (is that American enough?).
We could go into a debate over the ethics and morality of a sexual/BDSM relationship between an adolescent male and an adult woman, whether it is intrinsically exploitative, whether we would feel different if the genders were reversed, and so on. That’s outside the purview of this blog. I will say that Ana’s feelings regarding this other woman aren’t driven by anything like that. They come from jealousy, pure and simple.
Oct 172012
There’s a fair bit of action in this chapter, but not much to actually advance the plot. Also, EL James’ idea of witty, flirty banter wouldn’t pass in a CW teen soap.
Oct 162012
- Brian: What are you playing?
- Tim: Tomb Raider 3.
- Brian: She’s drowning.
- Tim: Yeah.
- Brian: Is that the point of the game?
- Tim: Depends what mood you’re in really.
- Brian: What sort of mood are you in then?
- Tim: Well, I got a letter from my ex-girlfriend this morning, 3 months too late, explaining why she dumped me. It was full of ‘you’ll always be special’ and ‘I’ll always love you’ platitudes designed to make me feel better whilst simultaneously appeasing her deep seated sense of guilt for dumping me, running off with a slimy little city boy called Duane and destroying my faith in everything which is good and pure.
- Brian: So it didn’t really work then.
- Tim: No, it made me wanna drown things!
- Spaced, episode “Battles”, series 1, episode 4
Videogames are a relatively new art form, but they are as deserving of discussion as any other. Likewise, videogames do say things about sexuality and gender, and in extreme cases this revolves around rape. Recently, the owners of the Tomb Raider franchise set off controversy when they said they would include a sexual assault in heroine Lara Croft’s background.Things get even dicier when you factor in the interactive nature of videogames, and giving players the opportunity to put their characters in sexual relationships, sometimes non-consensual ones.
Clarisse Thorn and Julian Dibbell have edited and published an anthology (ebook and print) about this thorny area, titled Violation: Rape in Gaming.
Oct 162012
Fitzgerald, William. Slavery and the Roman Literary Imagination. Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Initially I assumed that classical slavery had very little to do with Atlantic slavery, but subsequent research has suggested that the legacy of Roman and Greek ideas about slavery did inform both period thinking about Atlantic slavery and our modern fantasies about it.
Roman slavery was a very different institution than American slavery. Slaves were ethnically and culturally diverse, and did everything from the most skilled to the least skilled jobs. Slaves could be manumitted, becoming freedmen, and their children were born as citizens. Everybody regarded slavery as a fact of life, and there was no abolitionist movement.
Oct 112012
This chapter introduces two nemeses to the story: Leila, Christian’s deranged former submissive, and Jack Hyde, Ana’s new creepy boss. Instead of resolving the problems of the Ana-Christian relationship, the narrative shifts to dealing with external threats. It’s probably not coincidence that Jack and Leila function as dark doubles of Christian and Ana: there’s a kind of dream-splitting at work in this story, with the bad elements of a figure separated and projected onto another figure by the dreamer or fantasizer.
