Christian does call Ana on her childish attempt to make him jealous, all the while dragging her into a restaurant and ordering a full meal for her, plus haranguing the server. (This guy deserves the Tyler Durden special sauce on his order.)
In the first book of the Fifty Shades trilogy, an emotionally damaged one-percenter attempted to coerce a college graduate into an abusive relationship (which she had no understanding of or desire for) through a combination of seduction, bribes, deception, stalking and emotional blackmail. She finally realized that she was neither submissive nor masochistic, returned his gifts, and left him. The end.
Hopefully Anatasia Steele would have realized there are other men in the world, that there are other options than a false choice between slut and old maid, and perhaps she might even experimented with BDSM with some other person who is not so deranged and compulsive.
Except it wasn’t the end.
If you need more evidence that the Fifty Shades trilogy is actually an anti-kink book, look no further than the Fifty Shades one-off magazine, probably on a newsstand near you.
From Crushable.com, about a new BDSM/supernatural novel called Devil’s Brand by Casea Major:
At first glance, it seems to merely be inspired by E.L. James‘ bestseller with its questionable BDSM and lip-biting heroine. In fact, this protagonist Marci Lowe sounds like she might have some more agency than Anastasia since she’s a bankrupt heiress, so at one point in her old life she was maybe successful?
[…]Here’s where I might be starting to lose you, where you think, So what if there’s a brooding businessman with a taste for BDSM? That’s not my Christian Grey. Wrong. Devil’s Brand began its life as The Darkest Shade, a Fifty Shades fanfic.
I didn’t have high expectations of this book when I started. If anything, now that I’ve read it, my low expectations of Fifty Shades of Grey were too high.
BDSM is about rules, which are there to regulate the interaction so that all parties involve benefit. Christian presented Ana with a contract, but that has been completely abandoned by now. Christian pays lip service to concepts like consent, negotiation and rules, but he’ll go beyond them on the thinnest of excuses. Ana just doesn’t understand them at all. Put them together, and you get a disaster.
A digression, which will tie into the peculiar relationship dynamic at the heart of Fifty Shades.
On her way back to Seattle, travelling separately from Christian, Ana thinks about how she’s managed to render the steel-hard man downright squishy.
Ana has a dream about Christian in a cage, offering her a phallic strawberry. The real Christian wakes her up.
She gets dressed, including borrowing a pair of his underwear (identified by brand name, of course.) I get the impression that Ana thinks this is being deliciously wicked, whereas Christian probably thinks this cute, at best. Remember, Christian’s been in kink since he was a teenager, with 15 prior submissives, and owns a private dungeon. Wearing your lover’s underwear or going commando is training-wheels compared to what he’s done.
I started this project to critique Fifty Shades of Grey, and instead I end up trying to diagnose it. What is this book? And why is it so unexpectedly popular?
