Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson in Fifty Shades Darker
Just when I thought I was through with this damned thing….
Feb 112017
Feb 082017
I will be one of the guest speakers at a colloquium on the new Fifty Shades Darker film, set to debut on Valentine’s day, 2017. This should be a great discussion on how BDSM and the mainstream interact.
Time: Thursday, 23 February, 2017. 7:30 – 9:00 PM
Location: SFU-Vancouver, 515 West Hastings Street, Vancouver, Room 7000.
Jun 242015
My apologies for addressing the film adaptation of Fifty Shades of Grey so late. I obtained one copy of the film through admittedly dubious means (let’s just say the text messages are in Spanish), and another in which the subtitles were in originally in, I think, Thai, then covered up by another layer of subtitles in Spanish, and all the explicit sex was cut.
Beyond all that, I could only watch about five minutes at a time. Somebody asked me how I got through the film and I joked, “I kept a fifth of Scotch handy.”
Mar 192015
I will be one of the presenters at Kink Talks Back to Fifty Shades of Grey, an interview and Q&A gathering of kink-community people talking about the mass media phenomenon.
Time: 6pm-9pm, Thursday, April 9th, 2015.
Place: Room 1600, SFU at Harbour Centre, 515 West Hastings, downtown Vancouver BC
Sponsored by SFU’s Department of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies
Admission: Free.
Feb 122015
As of this writing, Fifty Shades of Grey holds a 32% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, a 47 on MetaCritic, and a 3.1 on IMDB. Suffice to say, it won’t sweep the Oscars next year. I do predict it will do well at the Golden Raspberries. Its loyal fanbase will probably guarantee a commercially successful opening weekend and a lot of DVD sales, but I suspect it will do poorly in the long run.
I am a little disappointed we won’t see little CGI chibi versions of Dakota Johnson’s subconscious and inner goddess hopping around.
Aug 212013
This is the master list of all posts in The Curious Kinky Person’s Guide to the Fifty Shades Trilogy.
Also check out the Ebook edition.
Fifty Shades of Grey
- Introduction
- Chapter 1
- Chapter 2
- Chapter 3
- Chapter 4
- Chapter 5
- Chapter 6
- Chapter 7, part 1
- Chapter 7, part 2
- Chapter 8
- Chapter 9
- Chapter 10
- Chapter 11
- Chapter 12
- Chapter 13, part 1
- Chapter 13, part 2
- Chapter 13, part 3
- Chapter 14
- Chapter 15
- Chapter 16, part 1
- Chapter 16, part 2
- Chapter 17
- Chapter 18
- Chapter 19
- Chapter 20
- Chapter 21
- Chapter 22
- Chapter 23, part 1
- Chapter 23, part 2
- Chapter 24
- Chapter 25
- Chapter 26, part 1
- Chapter 26, part 2
- Conclusion
Fifty Shades Darker
- Chapter 1
- Chapter 2
- Chapter 3
- Chapter 4
- Chapter 5
- Chapter 6
- Chapter 7
- Chapter 8
- Chapter 9
- Chapter 10
- Chapter 11
- Chapter 12
- Chapter 13
- Chapter 14, part 1
- Chapter 14, part 2
- Chapter 15
- Chapter 16, part 1
- Chapter 16, part 2
- Chapter 17
- Chapter 18
- Chapter 19
- Chapter 20
- Chapter 21
- Chapter 22
- Conclusion
Fifty Shades Freed
- Prologue & Chapter 1
- Chapter 2, part 1
- Chapter 2, part 2
- Chapter 3
- Chapter 4
- Chapter 5
- Chapter 6
- Chapter 7
- Chapter 8
- Chapter 9
- Chapter 10
- Chapter 11, part 1
- Chapter 11, part 2
- Chapter 12
- Chapter 13
- Chapter 14
- Chapter 15
- Chapter 16
- Chapter 17
- Chapters 18 & 19
- Chapters 20 & 21
- Chapter 22
- Chapter 23
- Chapter 24
- Chapter 25, part 1
- Chapter 25, part 2 & epilogue
- Conclusion
Other posts
Apr 032013
Perkins, Lori, ed. Fifty Writers on Fifty Shades of Grey. Benbella Smartpop, 2012 Amazon
Much like Christian Grey himself, the Fifty Shades trilogy is everywhere, overwhelming and relentless, dominating bestseller lists, metastatizing into countless imitators, and spawning an entire industry of gifts, CDs, boardgames and other branded merchandise, plus a feature film. Through sheer repetition and ubiquity, we find ourselves trying to accommodate it, even to make excuses for its flaws and offences. Some of the authors in this essay collection try too hard to put a positive spin on Fifty Shades. Even the collection’s editor, Lori Perkins, says:
Some have wondered how a “classic” can be so “poorly written.” But I contend that it is not poorly written, but rather written in an everywoman’s voice, a necessary part of its success I once worked with an author who used plebian language…. When she returned my edits, she told me that she did indeed know the word “simultaneously,” but when she was fantasizing, she always used the phrase “at the same time as,” and she knew that her readers did as well. [Pg.3]
EL James’ prose is not “plebian” or “in an everywoman’s voice”, it’s just plain bad. You don’t need an MFA to read or write good prose or hot prose.
Mar 292013
Revised, edited and expanded, The Curious Kinky Person’s Guide to the Fifty Shades trilogy is now available in ebook format for Amazon Kindle, with more formats to come.
Feb 052013
After writing more than 87,000 words on this trilogy (some of it excerpts), what can be said?
Someone once asked me if Fifty Shades had any good points. I thought a moment and said, “It’s very good at making money.”
That’s ultimately what is most baffling about Fifty Shades: its phenomenal commercial success, particularly in light of its inferiority to so many other romance or erotica books on the market. You’d think people had never read a sex scene before. Why it is so popular is a mystery, even after reading the entire thing.
Jan 262013
On a strictly literary and technical level, Freed is actually a worse book than its predecessors. EL James’ prose remains about the same, her characters are no better developed, and Ana’s response to everything is to flush or think “Holy shit!”
Furthermore, the plot is shapeless. Fifty Shades of Grey had the will-she-won’t-she-sign-the-contract plotline to create tension and give events some structure, though the contract was later abandoned. Darker was about whether they would stay together. Freed opens with Ana and Christian already married, and from there the plot was fight-makeup-fight-makeup, interrupted by one artificial crisis after another, usually resolved in the next chapter, or completely irrelevant events like the entire cast going to Aspen for no good reason. Then it’s back to scenes from a really bad marriage, as Ana feebly struggles against Christian’s controlling regime.
There’s no character arc either either. Despite all the sex, stalkings, car chases and kidnap and ransom schemes, Christian’s attitude towards Ana is basically unchanged by the end of the story. From one of their earliest meetings, the moment when Christian saves Ana from being hit by a bicycle, it’s clear that Christian sees it as his responsibility to look after Ana, with the implicit assumption that she can’t take care of her self. That continues right through to the end, when Ana, near comatose, hears her husband and her step-father both talking about her as if she was a little girl in need of a spanking. Ana, for her part, is so immature that it’s apropos. So, one-percenter Bluebeard meets dim-witted girl-woman and they live happily ever after.
