Fifty Shades of Grey ... ok im male i read it

[Fleet Captain Roak]

There was a Doc on the book and 'Mummy Porn' last night on Ch4 - sure people will be able to find it on Ch4 On Demand .

Didn't see all of it as I was flicking channels , but Jilly Cooper mentioning '**** fisting' was an eyebrow raiser & v.funny !

A male friend leafed through the book at a hotel he stayed at Saturday and found it too tame (lame ?) for his tastes , as have a few of the naughtier ladies I know . Bondage isn't really my thing at all , but I dare say I'll pick up a copy in a charity shop for 50p sometime in the next 18 months and read it when I've nothing else to look at .

IF Amy Child's can read it in 2 days , I should breeze through it in 4 hours !

[Australis]

Maybe you should listen to it instead:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5K1RcKJVbHA

[darkman]

Originally Posted by Waylander

gotta admit the whole thing makes me laugh - get a bloke reading a mucky book/porn on the train and they're perverts

Yeah, they probably are, that is not normal behavior.

[Waylander]

Originally Posted by darkman

Yeah, they probably are, that is not normal behavior.

yet it's perfectly acceptable for a woman to read porn in public? Strikes me as double standards somewhere along the line

[jumpin' jellybean]

No it's not.

Mucky book/porn tend to be understood as meaning porn magazines. Is it acceptable for anyone, or any gender, to read porn magazines in public? No, it's not.

Is it acceptable for anyone to read erotic fiction in public, be it Fifty Shades, Marquis de Sade, The Story of O, Catherine M or whatever? Yes, it is.

The difference is the visual content. Other people may know that what you're reading has explicit sexual content if you're reading a novel, but they're not exposed to that content against their will. If someone is reading a magazine primarily comprised of pornographic images, everyone else in that vicinity is exposed to it, whether they like it or not.

There's no double standard.

While I'm utterly appalled by the self-hating, abusive nature of this novel, I have found it really amusing to see how some men (not necessarily on this forum) are responding to the phenomenon. On one hand there's the dismissive "Wow, women will read any old trash" attitude, on the other there's the "See! See! It's okay for women but not men!" cries of male privilege desperately seeking validation.

It's definitely one of those cases where response to a pop culture event is more interesting than the event itself.

[kevinj]

I never read pornography, I just look at the pictures.

[mini_beastie]

Someone I know who has read the first book said that it isn't even all that racy. I'm not sure what sort of stuff she usually reads are but it's not like sex in novels is something new. Plenty of books have extremely explicit sex scenes and still probably wouldn't be called porn because the sex isn't the entire point of the story it's just part of it. I think the reason this books is causing such a stir is that it is being read by people who maybe wouldn't normally read erotic novels and are talking about it a lot.

[Happy-Hangman]

Originally Posted by jumpin' jellybean

While I'm utterly appalled by the self-hating, abusive nature of this novel, I have found it really amusing to see how some men (not necessarily on this forum) are responding to the phenomenon. On one hand there's the dismissive "Wow, women will read any old trash" attitude, on the other there's the "See! See! It's okay for women but not men!" cries of male privilege desperately seeking validation.

I think one of the reasons that some men - and some women - are having trouble with this isn't so much that it presents a double standard, but that the hype surrounding the book is so odd.

That reading S&M porn in public is a little odd is, I think, a given. But blokey fiction being what it is, I think many would have expected this kind of silly promotional flurry to have surrounded some modern day Harold Robbins tripe. That it relates to borderline (and I hate the term) 'chick lit' has simply surprised many men - who are largely unaware that erotic fiction (however badly written) is big business. Unreconstructed males, as has already been noted, tend to look at the pictures...textual porn confuses the poor dears, whoever it's aimed at.

[Barsoom]

Originally Posted by jumpin' jellybean

Is it acceptable for anyone to read erotic fiction in public, be it Fifty Shades, Marquis de Sade, The Story of O, Catherine M or whatever? Yes, it is.

Is it OK to read John Norman's Gor books in public? Is it OK to read them at all...?

[Happy-Hangman]

See, that's kind of my point. I read a lot of fantasy stuff in my teens, and was a little taken aback by the unpleasant sexualisation of violence in the wretched 'Gor' books. I remember chatting to a sci-fi bookshop owner at the time about this trend in fantasy - as there was a lot of that low-rent tat about at the time (mid '80s), and he just shrugged and said that that kind of aggressive sub-dom rape fantasy was how many of his patrons 'got their jollies'.

Fantasies where women were dominated, abused or even raped seemed fine to them. Weeping damsels-in-distress and avatars of courtly love and idealization were, likewise, hunky-dory. The notion that women might be getting off on this old tat would probably have caused half of them to spontaneously combust. Even within the mainstream consciousness graphic sexual fiction and 'porn' seems to be considered - quite wrongly, I know (I had one female flatmate, a few years back, who wrote this stuff, and another whose bookshelves were crammed with it) - a male thing.

It's just disappointing that the books which seem to have persuaded the general public that women like smut, too, are so....crap.

There is a lot of fem-centred erotic fiction around. Is the same true for the male market, or are all those talking-heads on radio and TV chatting about these bloody books right when they say that male audiences are too visually orientated, these days, to make that market sustainable?

There used to be a market for male porn fiction - the only commission I ever had from a would-be literary agent in the '90s was for a text-based porn periodical. I couldn't do it, partly because I don't read that kind of material and didn't see its appeal, but mostly because anything I did try to write turned out like one of my piss-take Torchwood DuVet tales...but with bosoms...and I really don't think that's what the client was after.

Hmmm....'Fifty Shades of DuVet'....