It’s been a few years since I read the first two parts of 50 Shades of Grey – not having the stomach for the third – and a few years since I had to interact with Anastasia Steele and the eponymous Christian Grey. Returning to these people so many years later in Grey, written, as the dedication suggests because of “those readers who asked… and asked… and asked… and asked for this”, I’d like to speak to “those readers” too. I’d like to give them a piece of my mind.
Not a nice guy
However, the more I read, the more I feel almost embarrassed for Christian. He begins as not a very nice person at all, contemplating Anastasia as she stumbles into his office almost like a equestrian looking over a prize filly whose antecedents haven’t yet been verified.
“It occurs to me that I could refine her skills with the aid of a riding crop,” he muses as she fumbles, “Adeptly used, it can bring even the most skittish to heel.” And then, as she interviews him about his business (Grey is a CEO of some magical vague company that he magically vaguely built up himself) “Yes, her mouth needs training, and I imagine her on her knees before me.” Just a woman trying to be a professional with a man sexualizing her before she even gets a chance to ask a (vague) question about world hunger.
When the questioning cuts to close to the bone, when Anastasia asks him whether he’s gay, Christian reacts with a violence that doesn’t seem quite fitting with the image we’re meant to have of him as this suave, worldly, diplomatic man, “How dare she! I have an urge to drag her out of her seat, bend her over my knee, spank her and then fuck her over my desk.”
The more I read, the more I was filled with that weird, squirmy feeling you sometimes get when you see someone you once thought was so hot and so sexy, but now that you’re no longer taken by him, you’re even more mortified by his very human cravenness.
The same sad story
In fact, if he wasn’t handsome – a handsomeness he returns to over and over in the book, very bored with all the female attention he gets (“it’s just a face, sweetheart”) he could be any overpossessive mummy’s boy. I’ve known a few. I bet you have too.
Grey revisited is a sadder story than the Fifty Shades trilogy, not least because it’s the classic tale of every naïve girl seduced by an older man and told that she was sweet. The reader is meant to be swept along with Christian’s growing infatuation with her: you’re told a hundred times how “dainty” she is, how “blue” her eyes, how virginal, how pink her skin. How white.
In this case, Ana reminds me of Snow White, a pure-as-driven-snow ingénue, a creature so protected by her own purity that she moves through life in a sort of bubble wrap making people want to take care of her and feed her and tell her not to drive in the rain.
And creepy, too
Other books that I think of are the serial killer trope. “I want to flog and fuck this girl in my playroom,” says Christian, “Have her bound and wanting… needing me, wanting me.” “I groan inwardly, trying to chase away the image of her suspended from the ceiling in my playroom.” If you were reading this book as a thriller or a crime novel, it would work just as well.
I think the best comparison would be John Fowles’ The Collector, where a young man (not handsome, but rich) buys an abandoned house and “collects” a young woman he’s been eyeing, just to keep her there for his pleasure. Much like Christian, Frederick, the man in The Collector, tells his victim he will only have sex with her if she wants it – see, see how nice I am for pretending to give you a choice – and showers her with amenities, on the condition that she never leaves his cellar. Anastasia is a virgin when she meets Christian and is very quickly deflowered and groomed to be the submissive of his BDSM dreams, a cycle he’s carrying on from his own youth when he was preyed on by a woman twice his age.
Christian wants to control Anastasia and not just in the bedroom, and perhaps that is what I have the biggest issue with: this book telling women that it’s okay to be with someone so domineering, so demanding, because they love you “somewhere inside” and it’s rather sexy to have someone demand you stay in shape and wear high heels and never wear jeans.
“If you were mine,” he hisses at Anastasia, “You wouldn’t be able to sit down for a week after the stunt you pulled yesterday.” Or, when she “defies” him and asks a question, “Like Eve, you’re so quick to eat from the tree of knowledge.” Christian Grey is the khap panchayat you’ve always dreaded, starring as a hero in a romance novel. Good grief.
Ana-rexia
A few words about Anastasia’s seeming eating disorder though. She’s the Snow White, the Sleeping Beauty, of this tale, and it’s all magically compounded by the fact that she never seems to eat at all. Christian is obsessed with feeding her –part of his control thing – but is also obsessed about telling us, the readers, about her “slight” frame, and “delicate” features. So he loves that she’s thin, but wants her to eat bacon, eggs and pancakes every day.
In her turn, Anastasia is Ana-rexic, revolting at the idea of food, having the most trouble in their sexual contract with the idea that she’ll have to eat, and only very occasionally “grabbing” something when he forces her to. You have here a classic case of anger issues meets hunger issues.
If you read deeper into the text, you’d notice that she has definite leanings towards some kind of dependence or the other, drinking frantically when she can, both asking him to hit her and begging him not to, and obediently following his lead for the most part, except for the one or two times she doesn’t. She enables his extreme possessiveness – the number of times “you’re mine, only mine” comes up in the text is alarming – and finally, when she does get the courage to break up with him, she’s back in his arms within the week.
Grey? I think a better title for this would be Run, Ana, Run. Run to a place with fluffy towels and a first time that will light candles and lead you through it and a man who doesn’t insist on being in every part of your life from the moment you meet him, and someone who will make you feel like it’s okay to let go and eat a cupcake every now and then.
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Not a nice guy
However, the more I read, the more I feel almost embarrassed for Christian. He begins as not a very nice person at all, contemplating Anastasia as she stumbles into his office almost like a equestrian looking over a prize filly whose antecedents haven’t yet been verified.
“It occurs to me that I could refine her skills with the aid of a riding crop,” he muses as she fumbles, “Adeptly used, it can bring even the most skittish to heel.” And then, as she interviews him about his business (Grey is a CEO of some magical vague company that he magically vaguely built up himself) “Yes, her mouth needs training, and I imagine her on her knees before me.” Just a woman trying to be a professional with a man sexualizing her before she even gets a chance to ask a (vague) question about world hunger.
When the questioning cuts to close to the bone, when Anastasia asks him whether he’s gay, Christian reacts with a violence that doesn’t seem quite fitting with the image we’re meant to have of him as this suave, worldly, diplomatic man, “How dare she! I have an urge to drag her out of her seat, bend her over my knee, spank her and then fuck her over my desk.”
The more I read, the more I was filled with that weird, squirmy feeling you sometimes get when you see someone you once thought was so hot and so sexy, but now that you’re no longer taken by him, you’re even more mortified by his very human cravenness.
The same sad story
In fact, if he wasn’t handsome – a handsomeness he returns to over and over in the book, very bored with all the female attention he gets (“it’s just a face, sweetheart”) he could be any overpossessive mummy’s boy. I’ve known a few. I bet you have too.
Grey revisited is a sadder story than the Fifty Shades trilogy, not least because it’s the classic tale of every naïve girl seduced by an older man and told that she was sweet. The reader is meant to be swept along with Christian’s growing infatuation with her: you’re told a hundred times how “dainty” she is, how “blue” her eyes, how virginal, how pink her skin. How white.
In this case, Ana reminds me of Snow White, a pure-as-driven-snow ingénue, a creature so protected by her own purity that she moves through life in a sort of bubble wrap making people want to take care of her and feed her and tell her not to drive in the rain.
And creepy, too
Other books that I think of are the serial killer trope. “I want to flog and fuck this girl in my playroom,” says Christian, “Have her bound and wanting… needing me, wanting me.” “I groan inwardly, trying to chase away the image of her suspended from the ceiling in my playroom.” If you were reading this book as a thriller or a crime novel, it would work just as well.
I think the best comparison would be John Fowles’ The Collector, where a young man (not handsome, but rich) buys an abandoned house and “collects” a young woman he’s been eyeing, just to keep her there for his pleasure. Much like Christian, Frederick, the man in The Collector, tells his victim he will only have sex with her if she wants it – see, see how nice I am for pretending to give you a choice – and showers her with amenities, on the condition that she never leaves his cellar. Anastasia is a virgin when she meets Christian and is very quickly deflowered and groomed to be the submissive of his BDSM dreams, a cycle he’s carrying on from his own youth when he was preyed on by a woman twice his age.
Christian wants to control Anastasia and not just in the bedroom, and perhaps that is what I have the biggest issue with: this book telling women that it’s okay to be with someone so domineering, so demanding, because they love you “somewhere inside” and it’s rather sexy to have someone demand you stay in shape and wear high heels and never wear jeans.
“If you were mine,” he hisses at Anastasia, “You wouldn’t be able to sit down for a week after the stunt you pulled yesterday.” Or, when she “defies” him and asks a question, “Like Eve, you’re so quick to eat from the tree of knowledge.” Christian Grey is the khap panchayat you’ve always dreaded, starring as a hero in a romance novel. Good grief.
Ana-rexia
A few words about Anastasia’s seeming eating disorder though. She’s the Snow White, the Sleeping Beauty, of this tale, and it’s all magically compounded by the fact that she never seems to eat at all. Christian is obsessed with feeding her –part of his control thing – but is also obsessed about telling us, the readers, about her “slight” frame, and “delicate” features. So he loves that she’s thin, but wants her to eat bacon, eggs and pancakes every day.
In her turn, Anastasia is Ana-rexic, revolting at the idea of food, having the most trouble in their sexual contract with the idea that she’ll have to eat, and only very occasionally “grabbing” something when he forces her to. You have here a classic case of anger issues meets hunger issues.
If you read deeper into the text, you’d notice that she has definite leanings towards some kind of dependence or the other, drinking frantically when she can, both asking him to hit her and begging him not to, and obediently following his lead for the most part, except for the one or two times she doesn’t. She enables his extreme possessiveness – the number of times “you’re mine, only mine” comes up in the text is alarming – and finally, when she does get the courage to break up with him, she’s back in his arms within the week.
Grey? I think a better title for this would be Run, Ana, Run. Run to a place with fluffy towels and a first time that will light candles and lead you through it and a man who doesn’t insist on being in every part of your life from the moment you meet him, and someone who will make you feel like it’s okay to let go and eat a cupcake every now and then.
