Less expected have been all the tortured Internet analyses, encouraged by the author herself, that characterize Fifty Shades as a pioneering handbook for a new type of sexually liberated feminism – one in which barely disguised rape fantasies play a prominent role.
#What is fifty shades of grey about manual#
Clare Phillipson denounced the book as "an instruction manual for an abusive individual to sexually torture a vulnerable young woman." The denunciations came as expected, led early by the director of a British shelter for abused women who called for copies of the book to be burned in a ceremonial pyre (since modified to a symbolic recycling).
#What is fifty shades of grey about series#
Marie Adeline led all pretenders at the porn-mad Frankfurt Book Fair this year by winning a six-figure advance for North American rights to her upcoming S.E.C.R.E.T., a two-book series in which merry widows live out their sex fantasies "under the careful guidance of the clandestine matriarchy."Īs of now, however, the revealed matriarchy is very publicly divided by the wild popularity of a book that celebrates a young virgin's willing submission to a "super-hot" sadist in his "red room of pain." The irony is that both manuscripts would have almost certainly died in the corporate slush pile had they followed the traditional path to publication.īut publishers learn fast, and the avalanche is under way: Agents say they are flooded with manuscripts that promise to be "just like Fifty Shades, but better." Pseudonymous Canadian writer L.
Not to be outdone, rival Penguin is celebrating as its own originally self-published women's porn title, Sylvia Day's Reflected in You, climbs past Fifty Shades on the charts to become the top-selling paperback in the company's history. Publishing giant Random House, buoyed by more than $200-million in revenue from a franchise it first acquired last April, rewarded every one of its more than 5,000 employees with a $5,000 bonus this month. National Book Awards.Īlthough it began life as a self-published e-book of the sort once expected to doom the publishing industry, Fifty Shades is being credited with saving bookstores as well as countless lacklustre marriages. Fifty Shades became the top-selling book in British history and was named popular-fiction book of the year at the U.K. Recognizing the enormous impact of Fifty Shades on the book industry alone, Publishers Weekly magazine named James its "publishing person of the year" – the first author ever so honoured. James, her publishers and the legions of copycats whose own pornography is now clogging mainstream bestseller lists. The new dirty word is submission, and its arrival on every tongue is revolutionizing sexual politics even as it enriches Fifty Shades author E.L. Not since Grace Metalious's Peyton Place has a bad book so clearly illuminated the unruly ids surging beneath the pieties of middle-class life.
What a woman wants, as expressed by the extraordinary success of Fifty Shades of Grey, the fastest-selling book of the 21st century – with almost 100 per cent of those sales made to post-feminist women in developed countries – is "whippings, floggings, spankings, canings, paddlings" and every imaginable form of sexual humiliation and pain inflicted by icily sadistic, ultra-domineering men.
More than a century after Sigmund Freud asked his famous question – "What does a woman want?" – womankind has responded.
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