Fifty Shades of WTF?

What goes around comes around. Or so they say. Never was this more satisfyingly proven than in this instance, in which the worst book I never read became a sort of throwaway, the kind of thing you give to Goodwill because you're never going to wear/read it again. In spite of the fact that a movie sequel is in the works, if not out already, at least some readers are tiring of the tawdry world of women enjoying getting the shit beat out of them. That kind of mindset sank the Ghomeshi trial sufficiently that he walked free - a fact that hit me so hard that I haven't even been able to write about it, much as I saw it coming. Why this strange phenomenon happened in an Oxfam store in Swansea, Wales, is anyone's guess, but maybe they just have better literary taste there, a hangover (!) from their most illustrious literary son, Dylan Thomas. Well, or at least their drunkest literary son.

Fifty Shades of Grey: the book you literally can’t give away

A branch of Oxfam in Swansea has asked donors to bring ‘less Fifty Shades and more 60s vinyl’. Are Britain’s charity shops stuffed with more bestselling soft porn than they know what to do with?

Emine Saner   @eminesaner

Wednesday 23 March 2016

With almost enough copies of Fifty Shades of Grey to build its own sex dungeon, a branch of Oxfam in Swansea has asked people to stop donating the erotic novel or any of its sequels. “We appreciate all your donations, but less Fifty Shades and more 60s and 70s vinyl would be good,” wrote Phil Broadhurst, the shop’s manager, in a post on Facebook.

For a while, Oxfam published a list of its most-donated authors; between 2009 and 2012, Dan Brown was top. Could EL James and her Fifty Shades have beaten the Da Vinci Code author? “I think Dan Brown is still pipping it, actually, but [Fifty Shades] is up there,” says David Taylor at the Oxfam bookshop in Salisbury. Copies of Fifty Shades there are sent to the local depot for redistribution to other shops; his branch doesn’t sell it. “It sounds snobby, but there are 10 charity shops in our street and you can buy it in any one of them,” he says. “There’s no point in us selling it.”

Other bookshops are not reporting much in the way of bestselling soft porn. “We get our fair share,” says an employee at a British Heart Foundation shop in Edinburgh, but it isn’t one of the shop’s most-donated books. “I don’t even think we’ve got any in,” says the manager of a charity shop in Liverpool.

At the Red Cross bookshop in New Romney in Kent, only two or three copies of Fifty Shades have been donated. The most-donated books, says assistant manager Lorraine Logan, “would probably be Lee Child, Karin Slaughter, that type – crime fiction”. They also get a lot of military history and books about the area. “We’re in a quiet little town,” she says. I think she’s implying it’s perhaps not a hotbed of S&M enthusiasts. Quite what this says about Swansea I’ll leave to the imagination.

. . . And speaking of Swansea, birthplace of that poet once voted "the drunkest man in the world", I found a pub with his name on it in his home town. Reviews were rather tepid, averaging 3.2 out of 5. I've included some of the more memorable ones.

Dylan Thomas - Fayre & Square

Swansea Enterprise Park, Llansamlet, Swansea, United Kingdom

3.2
24 reviews

went there this afternoon, had a "codfather and chips" myself and for my wife, i should have complained immedietly but my wife said to leave it, the batter was overcooked and greasy with not much fish which was mostly grey, it is repeating ...More

Lack of staff and food was not so good for what you pay. Nacho and pulled pork starter with severe lack of pulled pork for £7.. avoid.

Had a gd time and gd staff.plus gd food

My food was cold. And the waitress spilled my desert on me. I complained to the lady in charge and she said she would send me a letter authorising a next free visit for 2. The letter never came. Obviously a ploy to get rid of me and my wife. Customers are not important to them that's why you pay upfront.

Food was ok but wait 10 minutes for drinks food went cold very short staff behind the bar only 1 service

Ok for cheap food and a pint, but poor service due to lack of staff

You get what you pay for. Buy cheap buy twice. Both appropriate for this establishment.

For the price the food is very good.

My 6 year old ill plus me an my partner has had food poising

We had food poisoning after eating here

This is a place we have been visiting for a number of years as it is local. It used to be brilliant then slipped drastically for a time but we believe has recovered. Many other people must think so too as it is usually relatively busy when we go midweek. It is not fine dining by any stretch of the imagination but food is USUALLY good and ample portions. We are a family group of older generation i.e. 50's - 90's and they cater for the tastes of the group which is all we want.

Well I can't review the food as after standing at the bar for ages, when the barmaid finally arrived she told me I had to join the queue of about 8 people ordering food, all of who had arrived after me.
I told her I had arrived before them but she wouldn't have it, so I left!

Awful place!!

Ordered food waited 1 hour food was cold and tasted vile never again what a disappointment to us all it tasted bit funny to

POST-POST RUMINATIONS. This can't be true. I mean, the whole story of Fifty Shades in the Oxfam store.

THIS can't be true. . .

. . . and THIS can't be true. . .

. . . or not to this extent, anyway. That igloo-looking thing would require HUNDREDS of donated copies of Fifty Shades. There aren't even that many people in Swansea, let alone older women with dirty minds who were willing to shell out however-many-pence for this thing a few years ago and are now bloody sick of it all.

The copies look identical, and they wouldn't. There would be various different editions, as there always are with bestsellers. Some would be without their dust jackets, or even their covers if the readers had gnawed them off in a fit of frustrated horniness.

This just doesn't make sense to me.

Are these really copies of Fifty Shades at all, or fake books? If they are, they were remaindered by a large retail chain, or perhaps sent over by the publisher (though it's unlikely they'd want to sell their product by donation in an Oxfam store in small-town Wales). Or this is a display in a whole different store, maybe in another part of the world - who's going to know, anyway?

And who in Swansea has the cleverness to make a stack of Fifty Shades symmetrical enough to rival Mr. Whipple's giant tower of Charmin Bathroom Tissue?

I am sure it's a hoax, though even Snopes hasn't caught on yet. I think it's meant to poke good-natured fun at the book, at Swansea, at Oxfam, at - oh never mind. I'm not even sure any more.

We've been Onioned here. Now I feel just a little bit foolish.

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Fifty Shades of George

(from The Memory of All That: The Life of George Gershwin by Joan Peyser)

Fifty Shades: let's bring back perversion!

  

Most of what happened to me in my childhood happened in the den.

We called it the “den”, not the “TV room” or “family room” (the inference being it can't be a family room without at least one TV), for reasons unknown, except that maybe in the ‘60s, that was what you called it.

It had a pullout sofa-bed, a black-and-white TV, an ancient ironwork-sided sewing machine, and an “imprinting machine” (my Mum did imprinting, personalizing leather goods and even pencils for my Dad’s stationery store) with drawers full of magical gold foil that I was forever tampering with.

But most of all, it had books. Seemingly thousands of them, I always thought, though I now remember just one solid wall, and another with (? Did I transpose this from my older siblings’ ever-changing university digs?) brick-and-board bookcases.

Lots of these were in German. My sister studied German in university for reasons that are now a complete mystery to me. Why? There was not even the remotest connection in any part of our family to Germany, and yet she wrote her Master’s thesis, in German, on The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill.

I would often hear the wailings of Lotte Lenya on the stereo when I came home from school, which was very embarrassing when I brought a friend home. But I digress. In those brick-and-board bookcases, there was Goethe, there was Schiller, and there was a feeling I was just supposed to accept this as “normal”, because my sister (13 years older than me) said it was.

To my 10-year-old delight, there were a few dirty books (hers, I assume) strewn amongst the dull novels in the den:  A Rage to Live by John O’Hara (“oh, darling, you’re in me and I’m all around you, just in time, time, tme”), Sons and Lovers (“I will always remember that evening when the peewits called”), and even Cocksure, a mildly gamey book by Mordecai Richler, which thrilled me because it had the word “bastard” in it.  All this mulled around and around in my mind. I was beginning to formulate, or even come up with a formula, for what sex meant.

It surely meant simultaneous orgasm. If you had anything else, it was dirty and even frightening, and definitely “wrong”. You were not normal. This was especially true if you were married.

It meant forbiddenness. It meant crossing barriers of class, power and station (Lady Chatterley’s Lover). This was definitely stuff I wasn’t supposed to be seeing.

Then I discovered it, nestled dustily right against the volumes and volumes of Goethe and Schiller: THE COMPLETE WORKS OF SIGMUND FREUD!

Now I was off to the races.

Now I learned. I learned about penis envy. I learned about polymorphous perversity. I learned that women were inferior beings. I learned about latent homosexuality. I learned about vaginal orgasm. I learned.

I learned about stuff, then believed to be crucial to understanding human nature, that is now so dusty and obsolete that nobody even thinks about it any more, let alone talks about it. When you think about it, it is remarkable that so many people accepted without question theories that had never been proven clinically, or any other way. It was simply the truth.

The one hangover now is “anal”, which means, I don’t know, uptight or something. It did to Freud, too. An anal personality, anal retentive. Holding in your poo for some reason, though I couldn’t tell why, maybe because you were constipated or couldn’t get to the bathroom.

These were the golden days. These were the days of “perversion”. Do you remember perversion? Back then, anything that wasn’t simultaneous orgasm in the marriage bed was perversion.

Homosexuality was the result of a domineering mother and a weak father. Nobody questioned this. It was the only thing I ever heard about the matter, except for the expressions “limp-wristed” and “pansy”.

There was still a moral taint on it, the shadow of illegality that broke the spirit of Oscar Wilde. There was a sense that it was a sort of blight, that it was impossible to “correct”, and that the sufferer just had to abstain (I mean, forever) and conceal it completely to be socially acceptable.

So. Homosexuality was a mental illness or even a “perversion”. These attitudes, we now see, were groaningly wrong and must have caused immeasurable grief to thousands of people.

I didn’t know about a lot of other things, extreme things such as whips and chains.  I didn’t really know until tomorrow (oops, that’s the future, so I’d have to know in advance) when this Fifty Shades of Grey movie comes out. (Note: this was written on February 12. Confusing.)

ANY kind of inflicting of pain or punishment on another person was, in my backward day and with my den mentality, seen as sadism, and therefore “perversion”. It stood to reason, in my mind. Being turned on by experiencing pain, or (worse) inflicting pain was so twisted that I could not understand it at all. But it has changed, and drastically, in a fairly short period of time. At this point in our social evolution, it’s quite OK so long as the other person, the masochist, “gives consent”.

This happened with Jian Ghomeshi, remember? All his girl friends “gave consent”, so in an official sense, it was all OK.

Except that they didn’t. And it wasn’t.

“You can’t give consent if you are abused,” a very smart person I know (an award-winning news reporter) told me. Therefore, the woman who had been pounded to a bruised pulp and had her ribs broken by Ghomeshi hadn’t “consented”, because if someone beats the living shit out of you and breaks your bones, your abuser cannot use the legal excuse that you “gave consent”. Even if you did, it's null and void, because presumably you didn't know in advance that you would be brutally crushed.

Or maybe it's not. We’ll find out, won’t we?

The BDSM “community” insists that the receiver knows exactly what he or she is in for, wants it, and can get out of it any time, with a signal of some kind. But it seems to me that sadism is something that can be awfully hard to manage. Doesn’t it sometimes, just sometimes, go over the edge? By its very nature, I think that the possibility of loss of control might be part of the thrill.

And what of a person who “consents” but is deeply masochistic and profoundly self-hating? I’ve heard of “rough trade”, though I don’t know much about it, and I will confess that I don’t want to. Brian Epstein used to be found beaten, bloody and unconscious after such encounters. Was this  “OK” because he had given consent? Or did he, in the first place? 

(And if everybody's drunk or stoned and out of control, what does THAT add to the mix? It isn't fashionable to ask these things, but I ask them now.)

Such a person (a victim in my view), and I am only putting this out as a possibility, might WANT to be very badly hurt, even killed. Moreover, it might not be good for them to get what they want, because it’s too dangerous and they are too psychologically sick. I can hear the screams of protest right now: wait a minute, that’s impossible! It can't go too far as long as everyone's cool about the "rules". But in the wild and woolly world of human sexuality, is anything truly impossible?

Ghomeshi could argue that she wanted it, even told him it was OK. I don’t know what was going on there. If his unknown victim (the one with the bruises and broken ribs) claims it WAS consensual, then we’re really in a mess, aren’t we? Caught in a legal and sexual murkiness that we may never straighten out.

I have hardly touched on this Fifty Shades phenomenon, but I see that some women’s groups are protesting that it glorifies domestic violence. But hey! Violence is OK (or, at least, playing at violence is OK), even exciting, if you give your consent. Isn't it?  How about if you have a domineering husband who keeps threatening to leave and pull his financial support out from under you and your children? Might you be more likely to “consent” in this situation? You’d probably do anything to save your children, not to mention your life.

“It was just a sex game gone wrong.” Yes. I know this has been used before. “She wanted it, she asked for it.” What does that mean? How often do sexual and gender boundaries get blurred and confused? How about financial/power boundaries? (Christian in Fifty Shades certainly fits the rich and powerful profile.) How many ways can one human being make another human being submit, and how is this so different from slavery? (Master-slave language is very much a part of the “lifestyle”, making me wonder what black people think of it.)

I have not heard the word “perversion” in so long, I don’t know where it went. Does it even exist now, does the concept exist? I know that certain Christian fundamentalists seem to think that if people are “allowed” to be gay, it will open the floodgates to having sex with horses: an “anything goes” philosophy.

That’s horse’s-ass stuff, but I will say, I wonder where all this is taking us. Even playing at inflicting pain alarms me: why would anyone need to do it, unless they were, in some way, sexually perverted? Hurting someone is wrong. Wrong. Isn't it?

But no, now it’s stylish, and it’s certainly popular. I just found out that the original Fifty Shades trilogy started out as Twilight  “fan fiction’. With all its supposed restrictions on content, if fan fiction has become this sexually extreme, I honestly have to wonder what will come next. I wonder what will become of human boundaries, if there are any, and what will happen to the nature of something we still insist on calling “making love”.

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Fifty Shades of Chair

God, my chair, my chair!

This is a chairy tale, but a nasty one, a Grimm with a bad ending.

I hate office equipment. I wish I could type inside my head, make the words float out on to the page or even suspend themselves in mid-air like in Stephen Hall’s Raw Shark Texts. Instead I’m left with typing, which is as awkward now as it was in the class I took in high school. Imagine being a typing teacher all your life, trying to teach a bunch of sullen kids a boring skill on the “qwerty” keyboard which was designed when typewriters were first invented. The whole board was set up to slow typists down, because the only way to correct errors back then was to spit on the page, or cut the piece out with a scabbard.

So. The chair. My office chair always sucks, and I’ve been through a few of them. There is always something seriously wrong with them. For years I played musical chairs with my husband. “This thing is made of vinyl!” I’d complain in the summer, peeling my shorts-clad legs off the seat like Velcro. So I’d get his fabric-covered one for a while, the one with hard plastic arms that bored holes in my elbows. The proportions just weren’t right on this thing, so I ended up with backache and fatigue.

Not to mention eyestrain. Let’s get into eyestrain, shall we? Being an author, I’ve had to edit manuscripts. Back then anyway, we used a marked-up hard copy and a computer copy and sort of fixed one using the other. So I needed some sort of stand to hold my papers, double-wide, and still see my monitor.

God.

I hunched and squinted as I tried to see the damn monitor, jacked up as it was to make it just visible while I shuffled papers.  I got used to agony in my lower back, the price of my art, perhaps. The truth is, I just didn’t know how else to do it.

“This thing is a piece of shit!” I’d cry in the winter, as the cold plastic froze my arms to my sides. So once again we went through the old switcheroo.

This latest chair created more problems. I began to slide down farther and farther on my spine, at the same time hunching forward because I couldn’t see my monitor at all. “Why do you do that?” my husband would ask. “I need my paper stand.” “Why?” “I might need to use it again.” “Why?”, and so on.

Another switch of chair. Finally, when my bizarre posture had actually given me medical problems, I decided I needed a Brand New Chair that would fix everything. Since we’re cheap, and since they had a nice selection at a good price, we went to Costco. Like the Three Bears, I had to sit in each one to see which of them was “just right”.

Amazingly, it was the second one I sat in. Like a first-class airplane seat (and how the hell would I know what THAT felt like? I’m guessing), it just cradled my body, but kept my back straight. The arm rests were lavishly padded and curved to match the curve of forearm and wrist and hand.

I! Loved! That! Chair! I loved it in the morning, I loved it in the evening, I loved it –

Then I got it home.

My keyboard rests on a tray that pulls out. Keeps the dust off n’ stuff (supposedly, but in reality my keyboard is just as filthy as everyone else’s). Every time I pulled up to my keyboard, the deluxe first-class arms of this thing pushed the tray back in.

But it got worse. The new chair wouldn’t go down far enough. I almost felt like a little kid with her feet dangling up off the floor. I could not believe this. “WHY WON’T IT GO DOWN?” I screamed. “It’s as far down as it will go.” “This was designed for a six-foot man.” “Why didn’t you notice that at the store?”

I didn’t notice ANYTHING at the store.

You don’t sit back and lounge in an office chair. You work from it. You keyboard, you mouse, you do stuff. You roll it forward and back. (And that’s another thing. That big plastic mat-thingie underneath the chair just kept sliding all over the place. The casters made dents in it  that the chair kept falling back into, and they were about a mile back from my computer. My wrist was in agony, like a toothache. Everything was wrong.

“So (sarcastically), do you want another chair?”

Bastard!

He had groused and grumped about buying a proper plastic floor mat with those little teeth in it to grip the carpet, refusing to even consider it because it cost something like $40. 00. I kept trying to explain it to him, how the casters were cutting into the rug. “Then pull the plastic mat back,” he said. “I’d need to do it every five minutes.”

I like my chair, I really do, and if I had a circular saw, one of those things with teeth all around it, it would be no more. Right now my tray with my keyboard on it has a shelf sitting on top if it, an old shelf left over from one of those really tacky particle-board book cases. My monitor has one under it too, to jack it up at least an inch to make up for the fact that the chair is too high up and can’t be fixed.

Now I am nagging him to PLEASE let me get a proper mat so the thing won’t slither and slide all over hell’s-half-acre like Bambi on ice. He gets this squinched-up, disapproving look on his face (I can read his mind: “God, what a waste of money”), doesn’t even make eye contact with me because I know he does not understand my needs.

He complains all the time that I spend too much time at the computer. I have this little habit of writing. In my entire life, I have had maybe two people understand what I do, and my husband is not one of them. He thinks I play at it. Everyone thinks I play at it, that I pretend and delude myself that I’m “doing something”. So how can my back hurt, I wonder? If it isn’t even “work”? And why won’t I come out of that room and go to Costco with him to look at bulk sausages and stuff?

To all but those two people, ANYTHING would be better than doing what I do, the waste of time. Even having books out is futile, isn’t it? Some sort of Hemingway fantasy? (And didn’t Hemingway end up shooting himself in the head?). Why do you need a special chair, for God’s sake, and a plastic floor mat with little dit-dots on it so the chair won’t buck and heave under you like a wild horse?

I threw my keyboard at the wall once, so that the underside is secured with masking tape. I have slammed innumerable mice, and thrown a few, which is satisfying because the cover pops off and the battery goes flying across the room. I can’t throw a chair, can’t lift the thing, would like to throw a husband but he is rooted seventeen feet into the ground. Not getting it. While I sit there mousing and hurting. Mousing and hurting.

Postlog. This is something I wrote a long time ago, for That Other Blog, Open Salon, which I didn't really know how to do. I didn't realize you had to "like" people's stuff (usually without reading it) so that they would "like" yours (usually without reading it). It got worse and worse. I didn't need junior high all over again, though it surprises me how often I have to relive it. Then someone dissed me in a high-and-mighty fashion for using a photo of Sylvia Plath without writing to her estate for permission to use it. This photo had been blogged and reblogged hundreds, if not thousands of times, but then these two women, chittidy-chattidy, yatter yatter yatter, we're in and you're not, finally drove me out. When I said I thought the photo was in the public domain, one of the bitches said, "I'm speechless." They simply could not believe what a yokel, what an uneducated idiot they had in their midst.

I set this blog up on a whim and haven't changed it much, though most blogs are sleeker and look more sophisticated. I hate sleek and sophisticated. I like simple blogs with lots of pictures, because part of me never left kindergarten. I was a lot happier then. My happiest time was when I was ten and in a special class and we ran riot and gave our teacher a breakdown. For once in my life, someone called me "smart" and even acknowledged it. It wasn't to last, for the biddies of mediocrity would ultimately close in, as they always do.

I don't even have this font any more, isn't it wild?

 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

    It took me years to write, will you take a look

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Fifty Shades of Masturbation

 

I've tried to ignore it up to now. God, how I have tried! But because I'm interested in literary trends, I couldn't help but notice something:  in all those year-end summaries for 2012, just one book (or series of books) was at the very top of the list.

I don't think I need to tell you which one it was: Fifty Shades of Grey, a sort of Dairy Queen soft-serve of female pornography. Its wild success has left publishers everywhere feeding all their well-written novels into the shredder and beating the bushes for women who can't write, but CAN fuck, or at least fuck their female readers' minds.

There was so much written about this remarkable phenomenon (warmly applauded by publishers on the verge of bankruptcy) that I decided to narrow my search and just read religious views. I thought they might be more entertaining. Then I was so overwhelmed by all that stuff that I narrowed it down even more, restricting myself (with a taut silken tie) to Catholic views.

 

 

 

I don't know about you, but it makes me squirm just to think of Catholics having sex (though they do have lots of children, don't they?). It makes me squirm even more, as if my hands were wrenched behind my back with cold, hard handcuffs, to think of the Pope writing about simultaneous orgasm (if such a thing even exists). I found this juicy tidbit on a site called The Catholic Realist. This is from the comments section:

I’m not judging the book or you but I have one question, Is there a better book you could have read, a book with Christian values, instead of the 50 shades of grey book?

What a great question! If there is, I don’t know of one…and that’s a problem. The Catholic Church has some amazing books written about holy, married, sex, but most of them are written in a way that’s inaccesible for the average person. Pope John Paul II’s Love and Responsibility gets pretty specific in talking about what an ideal sexual encounter between a married couple looks like – including suggestions on using foreplay to build up to the woman’s climax so that both spouses can ideally orgasm together. But as much as I love JPII, his book is not an easy read – it’s not super accessible.

We also have Christopher West’s The Good News about Sex and Marriage. West also gets pretty explicit – he talks openly and honestly about all kinds of questions married couples would have including things about oral sex, anal sex, sex toys, and orgasms. While his book is an easier read than Love and Responsibility, it reads more as a Catechism than something designed to enhance holy married sex.
 

 

Hmmmmm. I didn't realize there WAS a Catechism (and I confess as a Protestant I'm not even sure what that is) for oral and anal sex, not to mention vibrators and "dills". I wonder if West writes about them in the sense of  "thou shalt not try this, thou shalt not lubricate that, thou shalt not put batteries in that thing over there," etc. From what I have heard, the Catholic church only sanctions conventional marital sex in the missionary position, and only if the couple desires to conceive a child. Anything else is sinful and forbidden.

But still, having someone tell me not to do something is pretty arousing in itself. I haven't read these religious sex how-tos any more than I've read the Fifty Shades trilogy (which is supposed to be one of the biggest buckets of swill in literary history), but only because I couldn't get through them without going into cardiac arrest.
 

 

This passage also interested me. It's a sort of inventory of cliches that keep repeating in Fifty Shades:

According to my Kindle search function, characters roll their eyes 41 times, Ana bites

 

her lip 35 times, Christian’s lips “quirk up” 16 times, Christian “cocks his head to one

 

 side” 17 times, characters “purse” their lips 15 times, and characters raise their

 

 eyebrows a whopping 50 times. Add to that 80 references to Ana’s anthropomorphic

 

 “subconscious” (which also rolls its eyes and purses its lips, by the way), 58

 

 references to Ana’s “inner goddess,” and 92 repetitions of Ana saying some form of

 

“oh crap” (which, depending on the severity of the circumstances, can be intensified to

 

 “holy crap,” “double crap,” or the ultimate “triple crap”).

 

…Ana says “Jeez” 81 times and “oh my” 72 times. She “blushes” or “flushes”

 

 125 times, including 13 that are “scarlet,” 6 that are “crimson,” and one that is

 

"stars and stripes red.” (I can’t even imagine.) Ana “peeks up” at Christian 13 times,

 

 and there are 9 references to Christian’s “hooded eyes,” 7 to his “long index finger,”

 

 and 25 to how “hot” he is (including four recurrences of the epic declarative sentence

 

 “He’s so freaking hot.”). Christian’s “mouth presses into a hard line” 10 times.

 

 

 

Characters “murmur” 199 times, “mutter” 49 times, and “whisper” 195 times

 

(doesn’t anyone just talk?), “clamber” on/in/out of things 21 times, and “smirk” 34

 

times. Christian and Ana also “gasp” 46 times and experience 18 “breath hitches,”

 

suggesting a need for prompt intervention by paramedics. Finally, in a remarkable bit

 

of symmetry, our hero and heroine exchange 124 “grins” and 124 “frowns”… which,

 

 by the way, seems an awful lot of frowning for a woman who experiences “intense,”

 

 “body-shattering,” “delicious,” “violent,” “all-consuming,” “turbulent,”

 

“agonizing” and “exhausting” orgasms on just about every page.

 

Hmmmm.

Literary types such as myself protest this series of books mainly because they are so badly-written: pure tripe with a side order of smut. Religious people are uncomfortable with the very idea of  erotica and porn (and they may have a point: it can and does take the place of "real" sex in many marriages), and believe it's sinful for a wife to be aroused by anything except the holy touch of her husband.

I have another theory! Here it comes - it's evil, wicked and sinful.

These are masturbation books.

These are books that make women (especially middle-aged women who are frustrated and perhaps inorgasmic) begin to experiment with self-pleasure, something they may have avoided because our culture still thinks that female sexuality is dirty, smelly and dangerous, and never a force for good.

 

We're not supposed to touch ourselves "down there", are we? It feels too good, and besides, it does not serve the needs of our Master (not God, but our potbellied, stubbly, burping, useless husband). And God might not like it either, though up to now he's never really said anything about it.

Do you remember masturbation coming up in the Bible? Only that Onan guy, and we're not quite sure what happened there. But the problem with female masturbation is obvious, isn't it?

It's not goal-directed. It does not serve the marriage or serve the Lord. It does not help us conceive yet another baby.  All it does is give us pleasure, and for God's sake what makes you think THAT is OK?

But consider this.

 

There is an organ of the human body (ONLY of the female body) which has no other purpose whatsoever than to give pleasure. So much pleasure that, indeed, it can and does trigger orgasm. Furthermore, religious teaching tells us never to touch this organ. Only our husbands may touch it, but for the most part they don't because they don't know where it is or, in some cases, that it even exists.

So we carry this thing around, dormant. Then along comes this hot book, a lowest-common-denominator kind of thing that the most meagre IQ could understand, and all of a sudden women are starting to get ideas.

They're starting to get ideas about pleasure.

About female pleasure, and about how they've pretty much missed out on it because they are waiting for their stupid-ass husbands to figure out where their clitoris is.

But maybe one day they realize that this whole thing can be a do-it-yourself job. And THAT is the day of sin and God's retribution, of thunder and flame descending to envelop the world!

But, curiously, it doesn't happen. The worst that happens is one of those mind-blowing orgasms that show up in the book 14 million times. Will Mr. Stupid-ass Husband ever catch on? No, he's too busy looking at porn on his iPad and whacking off.

There's this impossible sexual ideal around, and it would be great if it ever happened, that a couple can feel intense passion for each other for 50 years and always experience simultaneous orgasm with no prior stimulation at all. After all, it only takes him 15 seconds. So what's HER problem?

In the middle of this erotic wasteland, Fifty Shades comes along and gives women an excuse (at least for a while - eventually it will go away again) to feel some real sexual pleasure, perhaps for the first time. Women had better get their hands on this book, and the vibrator that should be attached to it, before it's too late and the Pope has the lot of them rounded up and burned.

Fifty Shades of Grey Elephants: Janet goes berserk!

Janet has had ENOUGH! Don't stay in your seats, folks. . . RUN!!!

Should I slit my. . . sleeve?

Have you ever owned a shirt or dress that fit great but had too-large sleeves? Do you ever think of just making small changes to shirts or dresses simply to have a new look? A dress or shirt that fits perfectly, but has an issue with the sleeves, is easily fixed by changing the look of the sleeves. You don't have to have a lot of sewing experience to create new sleeves, and in some cases, you don't need to sew at all!

Blogger's note. I don't know how I end up in these things, these weird things. All I wanted was a bit of advice on clothing alteration - which I hate doing - but when I got an incredible bargain on a beautiful long-sleeved blouse and discovered the sleeves were 3" too long, and when I further discovered it would cost more to get the bloody thing altered than it cost to begin with, I was determined to find some fast-and-easy, no-sweat methods of shortening sleeves.

I knew such methods didn't exist, but I thought I'd try it anyway, like you'd look up a home remedy (such as relief for crackling ears). These always end up being entirely useless, but in this case the alteration methods were so bizarre and incomprehensible that I just had to pass them along to you, Gentle Reader, mon cherie, light of my life. (Come on over here.) I assure you this is strictly cut n' paste and I didn't change a word of it. It was too good to be true, just the way it was. So. . . take up your scissors, and prepare/beware! 

A quick no-sew method for changing sleeves is to use a giant, gold safety pin. You'll find the pins, in different sizes and colors, at any craft store. The pins are made so that the head screws off and allows you to slide beads onto it. So, you won't slide the beads onto the pointed end of the pin, but onto the opposite side. When the bead pattern of your choice is in place you can then screw the head of the pin back on.

(Blogger's note. "Giant gold safety pin"? What the fxxx? I have never seen one of these in my entire life. And what's with this screwing off the top of the giant safety pin and putting beads on it, but "not on the pointed end"? Sounds about as easy as screwing them on your elbow.)

Now open the pin, slide it over your sleeve with the beads on the top part of the sleeve, then gather the sleeve. Close the pin and you've created a new look for the sleeves as well as the shirt. The beads are showing on the outside of the sleeve and the whole sleeve is gathered to make it much shorter. This is a great way to correct shirts and dresses that have sleeves which are much too long. The great thing is, you can change the beads at any time, and you can use the same pins on several different outfits.

(OK! - if you want giant gold safety pins with beads on them stuck to your sleeves.)

Create a cute, unique look for sleeves by first laying the shirt flat on a table. Find the center of the sleeve, opposite the sleeve seam in the underarm area. Crease the fold of the sleeve. Cut a slit from just above the hem to almost at the shoulder area. Now hem the slit. Start near the top or bottom of the slit and stitch around it. Try to turn the sleeve, when you get to the top and to the bottom, so that you'll create a point rather than a rounded look at the points of the slits.

(Uhhh. . . what the hell is going on with this? I'm going over and over it. "Find the centre of the sleeve", OK. Crease the fold of the. . . cut a slit? - waitwaitwait, cut into the fabric just like that? "From just above the hem to almost at the shoulder area" is so vague and confusing it frightens me. I think it means you just take some big old scissors and grab the sleeve and hack the hell out of it. I never knew you could "hem a slit" without turning the whole thing into a bloody mess.  The rest of the instructions are completely unintelligible. "Turn the sleeve" (turn it where, how?), "points of the slits"? This is against the laws of physics, sorry. And once you've got that big ol' slit running down your sleeve, then what?

But it ain't over yet. . .

Do something similar by first cutting the hem off sleeves that are too long. Cut the slit and hem it. Sew a piece of fabric around the hem area of the sleeve. This piece should be long and hemmed on one long side. Sew the new piece around the hem area of the sleeve. Make sure the ends of the new piece extend beyond the slits on each end. That way, you can tie the new piece of fabric into a knot. The new look, of a slit with a tied sleeve, is cute for t-shirts and similar sleeves. It can also give a dressier look to simple outfits.

(This woman is obsessed with slits! Doesn't she know this is a family blog? Tying a slit into a knot is even more bizarre. I don't think I've ever seen anyone with their sleeves tied in knots, nor do I wish to. As for that "dressier look". . . I think the doggie below wins the prize for that.)

Completely change the look of some sleeves by using elastic to gather them upward instead of around the arm. Start right below the shoulder seam and begin stitching elastic down the sleeve, opposite of the underarm seam. Crease or iron the fold so that you'll have a guide for the elastic. Use eighth-inch or quarter-inch elastic to gather the sleeves. Use a straight stitch, stretch the elastic slightly, and stitch all the way down to the hem area. Stop above the hem, or take the hem out, put in the elastic, then stitch the hem back in again.

(This one sounds downright hazardous. I think all that gathered elastic could snap back in your face like a slingshot and possibly knock out an eye. I would imagine that this method would indeed "completely change the look" of your sleeves, not to mention rearrange your face.)

Changing the sleeves in an outfit can completely change the look of the shirt or dress. It's easy to change them in many different ways to create all new looks for your garments. Whether you sew or not you can still change the look of many outfits. If you have a dress or shirt with sleeves that are too long, or you simply want a new look for an old outfit, use one of the above techniques to change the sleeves. It's easy, cost little, but will give you a whole new look!

(I must say, I do love her optimism and unassailable confidence. I'd like to introduce her to Julian, the man who taught me how to cure an ear infection by rooting around in my ear with a Q-tip. What he lacks in competence and knowledge, he more than makes up for in sheer lunacy. These two sound like they were made for each other.)