
Take Christian: He isn't just gorgeous and rich, he's also well-groomed and well-dressed. And its appeal actually is much more complicated than the summary suggests. And the fact that he's a manipulative stalker is treated as not just charming but correct - every time Ana defies him by doing something he says not to, his reasons for controlling her turn out to have been right.īut it's hot silliness, with oodles of plot compared to most porn.

The worshipping of Christian's wealth are off-putting. The references to Ana's battling superego and id as her "subconscious" and "Inner Goddess" age fast. erotic role-playing around concepts of bondage, discipline, dominance, submission, and sado-masochism. Much of what happens in it is abuse cloaked in the language of consensual BDSM, i.e. That's fine and healthy and worth admitting, because look: Most of what critics say about this franchise is true. Millions of women are reading these books to help them climax. So if we want to understand why Fifty Shades became a billion-dollar industry, let's just state the obvious. What we do know is that the bulk of consumers are women, that a significant enough proportion are Christian and married to warrant an astonishing amount of religious blogging on the subject, and that the main factor driving sales is word-of-mouth. The truth is, we don't really know who's reading Fifty Shades. A 2012 analysis of the Fifty Shades readership found that fewer than 30 percent of people who bought these books had kids at home.


But dismissing a phenomenon this powerful as "mommy porn" is a gigantic mistake it denigrates and dismisses both a genre and a demographic to which we ought to be paying particular attention.
