Fifty Shades of Shit Getting Kicked Out Of It

Disclosure: I have only read the last book in the Fifty Shades trilogy. I ruined the ending for myself, thereby avoiding what I imagine to be two more books full of bad writing, coy allusions to naughty sex, neurotic behaviour and consumer pornography. I won't be going to see the film, because it would cost money. 

There are two versions of Fifty Shades in the public consciousness. One is best expressed by the press release for Club Noir's Valentine Burlesque.

Fifty Shades of Grey is the year’s, nay the decade’s, most hotly anticipated movie for its 100 million fans.

Christian Grey is the 21st century’s Rhett Butler. Handsome, rich, sexual. Enticing a woman into a billionaire’s world of fetish.

Club Noir’s event Forbidden Fruit promises the chance to enter Grey’s realm.

The other has a more sociological perspective. Here is Rape Crisis' take.

Film-goers should boycott the film Fifty Shades of Grey and instead give the saved cash to women’s refuges and domestic abuse charities.

Isabelle Kerr, manager of Rape Crisis Glasgow, said the film – and the book on which it is based - is nothing more than “stalking, sexual violence and intimate partner violence romanticised and eroticised.”

Inevitably, I am not coming down on one side or the other. The second interpretation is clear to point out that the version of BDSM in Fifty Shades is not the BDSM that people practice (the complexity of domination and submission sits well beyond the ability of Hollywood to express), but uses a sophisticated reading of the books and films to translate Grey's personality from the world of fiction into a real-life counterpart.

I intend to offer my own interpretation of Fifty Shades. 

Fifty Shades is a satirical novel that attacks the myth of capitalist benevolence by tracing an allegorical relationship. From its presentation of Grey as a rich, yet deeply disturbed, plutocrat, through his lover's status as an aspiring middle-class student, it challenges ideals of equality and identity, concluding that money has become the ultimate justification for any moral lapses, and that all these obscenely wealthy bastards want is a family, anyway.

The attention to detail within the book is not in the plot (which is drab romanticism or melodramatic business drama) or the sex (which fails as erotica), but in the extent of Grey's belongings. His yacht is more potent than his collection of sex toys, and his beloved's habit of naming her body parts with twee names serves not only to undercut the sexual narrative but emphasis her naivety. 

That she is so easily read as a victim reveals the inequality of their relationship... but her final victory, described in a breathless flush, is either a fantasy of a woman dying in a ditch (a bit like the one in The Last Temptation) or the assertion of a more traditional morality, rooted in reproductive rights.