Why Do the Bluenoses Rage?

"What, me, porn?"

Ran across a story about a schoolteacher who bought a student a copy of Fifty Shades of Grey. A private school teacher named Roger Aidoo bought a copy of Fifty Shades of Grey for a 14 year old male student, who had requested the book as part of an extracurricular reading assignment.

The student's mother, Maya Ladson, did not think this was an appropriate thing for the teacher to do, and complained to the school about it. Fair enough, the school administrators hauled Aidoo in, gave him the third degree, and were apparently satisfied with his story that he was not all that familiar with the fact that Fifty Shades of Grey contained lots of explicit BDSMy sex.

Ladson, however, ain't buying it. She wants Aidoo fired. But the administrators, in a rare display of scholarly backbone, aren't firing him over the irate cries of one crazed bluenosed mom.

Here's my take on the story. Buying the kid a copy of Fifty Shades of Grey was a boneheaded move by the teacher. But it's not a firing offense. Hell, any kid with access to a computer can find porn that will make Fifty Shades of Grey look like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. So the appropriate thing to do is to haul Aidoo in and tell him, "That was a really stupid thing to do, and if you do anything remotely like it in the future, we are going to fire you so hard and fast it will make you head spin. Now get out of here, you knucklehead."

The interesting thing is why Lawson's panties got totally bunched up over this. Bluenoses seem to get worked up over sex-related matters orders of magnitude more than regular people do. That's why they have so much influence, I suppose. I suspect that bluenoses are people who have attempted to repress their own sex drives in various ways, and every sexual thing that comes along is just a huge irritant to them, whereas it just does not bother the less sexually repressed. They're pains in the asses and generally useless, and it would be a shame if Mr. Aidoo lost his job because he irritated a bluenose. He would hardly be the first if he did, however.

50 Shades of Grey: The Next Mainstream Bondage Romance?

First published 3/1/2012
It's been a long time since there was a breakout bondage romance in mainstream media, and it looks like the drought is over: Fifty Shades of Grey by E L James, a London television executive who got published by a small Australian publisher and who is not getting wall to wall buzz for her book.

It's the story of a hot young woman seduced by a bondage-loving billionaire and all the deliciously naughty things he does to her. It's doing tremendously well in terms of sales and it has the buzz machine going on overtime. How successful is it? Well I linked to the Kindle version of 50 Shades because the paperbacks, which were printed in a small run initially, were going for $105.00 each on Amazon when I created the link. The Kindle version is only $6.95, so ... I figured most would prefer it. It's being called everything from Pornography for Mommies to Twilight for adults.

Now, there's an interesting story there. Fifty Shades of Grey apparently started out as Twilight fan fiction. And the Twilight fanbase adopted it as a tribute to the wonderful Twilight books (you know, Stephenie Myers' series about a vacuous high school girl who is inexplicably attractive to vampires). Then, the narrative goes, she somehow sneakily rewrote it as her own creative work, USING the Twilight fandom community to promote her book.

By all accounts, it's hard to see how 50 Shades is Twilight fanfic, so I'm not sure I buy this narrative, though it's apparently true that James wrote fanfic in the Twilight community as Icedragon Snowqueen. I really don't know enough to have an opinion, having read neither book. (Oh, I'm gonna read 50 Shades!) But it's some great gossip!

It's interesting, almost always, when a bondage story breaks over into the mainstream, it's a romance. Spicy romances, to be sure, with plenty of sex, but the feel of the genre is unmistakable: Story of O, 9 1/2 Weeks and 50 Shades all are about women who have relationships with a single man who brings out the submissive in them, while they bring out the dom in him. Secretary would be the film equivalent, I suppose.

I'm always interested in bondage that makes it into the mainstream, maybe 50 Shades will be the novel that becomes the gateway fiction that leads readers to find all the great erotic bondage fiction out there. Fiction like: Karg!