Welcome!

Welcome to Fifty Shades of Grey Considered, a blog that will look at the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy as a media and social phenomenon. I've been watching Fifty Shades of Grey happen for the last 18 months as it went from a curious publishing anomaly to something that has "distorted the adult book market" as one disgruntled competing publisher put it. I've been posting articles about it over on my main blog, Politically Sexy, for the entire time, and it's occurred to me that I've written enough posts about Fifty Shades of Grey that I might as well start my own blog on the topic. Therefore, this blog.

Basically, I am a big fan of Fifty Shades of Grey as a phenomenon. Romance novels don't interest me all that much, being a guy, but I do like the kinky, and I also like the way that Fifty Shades of Grey arose from fanfic rather than being foisted on readers by some big corporate publishing entity. (I know that Random House is the official publisher of the Fifty Shades books, but they only negotiated for the rights to publish the novel in traditional media after it had become a bestseller as an ebook, beating out THEIR books with all their marketing muscle behind them.)

I'm also interested in it as a social phenomenon, a genuine grassroots success whose 65 million copies sold worldwide indicates a definite interest in kinky reading fun among the "soccer moms" who were its primary audience. And though the books definitely had Random House's considerable money and marketing muscle behind them, they faced considerable hostility from many groups with vested interests: ordinary prudes who didn't like the strong sexual content, feminist prudes who didn't like the maledom/femsub relationship between Christian and Ana, literary types who hated that a romance novel was kicking ass in the marketplace with unparalleled success, less successful writers (i.e., almost all writers) who resented the books' success when THEIR work was OBVIOUSLY better, and smaller groups of people with various social and political axes to grind.

And I LOVED the way the soccer moms just kept on buying, reading and enjoying the Fifty Shades of Grey books without the least concern for all the media types badmouthing it. I felt a sense of renewed faith in readers' willingness to follow their own tastes, and I savored the media types' frustrated anger as they were unable to control the readers.

It was a delicious experience, and this blog is my attempt to share it with you, and speculate on what comes next ... and no, I'm not just talking about who will be cast in the movie.

OH, yeah, and the artwork? It'll be redone. I think I've nailed Ana: bright, fit, shapely, happy ... but I got an off-the-rack Christian Steele avatar in Second Life, and ... nope, just not right.