Jezebel.com Hypocrisy: Slut-Shaming Fifty Shades of Grey Readers

First published on 10/16/2012

As I wrote in an earlier post on mainstreaming kink, I am seeing signs of a backlash against Fifty Shades of Grey and its readership in the material the flying monkeys bring in of late. All sorts of groups hate Fifty Shades of Grey. Feminists because maledom/femsub, BDSM people because Christian Grey is neurotic, social conservatives because it's sexy AND kinky sexy, literary types because it's not Great Literature ... and there's probably more, but these are the main groups with beefs.

Despite all the different groups backlashing against Fifty Shades of Grey, I felt that there was some vague underlying theme to the backlash, but I couldn't quite figure out what it was.

Until I read this very insightful review by Kristen Elizabeth on the TVequals.com website, of a recent episode of Law and Order: SVU that dealt with a Fifty Shades sort of author who got raped. The review was full of sharp points well presented, but this was the paragraph that really got me going:

It’s like we’ve finally reached a point in our society where we’re willing to let women enjoy sex…as long as it’s straight-forward, missionary position, no-kink sex. Anything else and it’s suddenly all right again to mock and shame them. If you need proof of this, just look at the backlash against 50 Shades or the way romance novels have been treated throughout history, but most especially in the past forty to fifty years. A book that is entirely about a woman having and enjoying sex or even just falling in love is dismissed as being fluff or ridiculed for being implausible…even by other women!!

And that's when it hit me: the women who are backlashing against Fifty Shades of Grey are engaging in a variation on slut-shaming. They're saying: "These women who read Fifty Shades of Grey are NOT LIKE US. They like trashy books like Fifty Shades of Grey, it's not a GOOD book like the ones we read, their fantasies are IMPURE, all WRONG, not the proper sort of fantasies for a woman to have! They like to read sexual fantasies about transforming neurotic billionaires through love! They're trashy, sexually immature, not very bright, oh might as well just say it ... SLUTTY women!"

That was what was bothering me, that hidden subtext running underneath the criticism of ALL the articles I read, most especially in the comments to the various articles and posts, like a crowd muttering obscenities while the candidate speaks, egging them on without speaking any obscenities themselves. That slut shaming.

I'm not too surprised by this sort of thing from social conservatives, they are what they are and I expect hypocrisy from them, it is after all embedded in the beliefs that make them social conservatives.

But c'mon ... Jezebel.com? That's what bothers me, that they engage in slut-shaming while loudly decrying the practice of slut-shaming when it is used with respect to things other than like Fifty Shades of Grey.

You don't have to take my word for it. Here's a list of Jezebel's articles about slut shaming, they're on the right hand side of the page, scroll down them and read as many as you like, you'll see a very clear condemnation of slut shaming.

Now here's a list of Jezebels' articles on Fifty Shades of Grey, look at all the negative, slut-shaming-ish comments embdded in them, like the one in article on "Try Not To Imagine Your Nubile Daughter in Bed Reading Kinky Sexy Books":

The fact that semiliterate sexually inexperienced children are fans of Fifty Shades of Grey actually makes perfect sense.

And you'll find much more slut-shaming type quotes in the comments at the end of the articles listed here, of course. (The article that is highlighted in the list at present is a review of the Fifty Shades of Grey Law and Order SVU episode Elizabeth reviewed. But the Jezebel review completely misses all the salient points brought up by Elizabeth in her review, though some of the commenters brought some of Elizabeth's points up. It's not ALL slut-shaming with regard to Fifty Shades of Grey, though there is far too much of it.)

The thing is, this kind of slut-shaming on Jezebel.com's part (and don't get me wrong, Jezebel is just one with the herd in doing it, all the sites do it, it's almost reflexive in most cases) is not only hypocritical with regard to their stand on the issue of slut-shaming, but just plain dumb as well. All these women who have read Fifty Shades of Grey are potential converts to the cause of sexual freedom.

"You liked Fifty Shades? Oh, isn't it great we can read books like that nowadays? Wasn't reading about all that fun they were having fun? I like that too!"

See, take that approach and maybe you have a new friend now instead of someone who thinks you're a stuck-up bitch for putting down Fifty Shades and its readers so severely. There are fifty million women who have bought Fifty Shades of Grey, more or less. MIGHT be a good idea to see if you can use the book to widen some horizons.

But hey, the appeal of a little bit of cheap moral superiority is intoxicating to many people. Ask any fan of the double standard, or anyone who wants to consider women who wear party dresses when they go out clubbing to be "deserving" rape victims.

Yeah, Jezebel.com, that IS the company you are keeping.

Arizona Women Seek Fifty Shades Online

First published on 10/10/2012

A CBS New affiliate in Phoenix, Arizona is reporting what may be the most obvious and ordinary news report ever: that Arizona woman have gone online to see Fifty Shades of Grey-like experiences!

Channel 5 in Phoenix reports that over 4,000 women have flocked to a website called seekingarrangement.com in order to seek an arrangement, which is about the vaguest term imaginable for wanting to get tied up, gagged, butt-plugged and fucked, but I guess it works in keeping the local authorities off your neck.

/me looks at the title of his blog, "Politically Sexy" and tries to look innocent.

Well what the hell, nobody's buying my secret to keeping slaves from drooling, guess I might as well dye my hair gray and start calling myself "Christian." It's a living!

Mainstreaming Bondage: Halloween 2012 Brings On The Gimp

First published on 10/3/2012

If you go to Target and ask them if they have a Gimp suit for Halloween, you'll probably get told "No.' But if you go to Target and ask them if they have a "Rubber Suit Man" outfit, they'll tell you yes ... and the costume you will find will be a gimp suit. Don't believe me? Check it out!

"Oh my!" as Anastasia Steele might say, and she'd be the one to say it, because you have to believe that the success of 50 Shades of Gray just might have gotten this particular outfit green-lit for Target. Now that's going mainstream!

We'll have to see if there's a backlash against the suit, now that it's being "noticed" by online media it'll probably hit the mainstream media soon.

The flying monkeys have been bringing in a LOT of negative stories about 50 Shades of Gray of late. The social conservatives never liked it, some feminists never liked it, and a lot of literary types never liked it, even a lot of bondage fans never liked it, and now that the books aren't making headlines by topping the bestseller lists week after week after week, the naysayers are trying to get some traction. And a backlash against 50 Shades could very well be accompanied by a backlash against kink. I hope the hell it doesn't happen, and if it does happen that it gets no traction in the media or the culture, but let's face it ... there's a lot of people out there who hate kink, 50 Shades of Gray and sex generally.

As always, I'll keep you posted.

Fifty Shades of Pearl Scratching

First published on 10/1/2012

Bandwagon jumping on the 50 Shades phenomenon has hit a new low. A post on the Babble blog (a parenting blog) by Carolyn Castiglia describes an item for sale on Ebay through October 8: a used copy of Fifty Shades of Gray. And we mean THOROUGHLY used: its being auctioned off by a trio of Brooklyn wives described as "MILFs." They all enjoyed it VERY much, the ad copy assures us, but the blog post makes sure, saying:

Get it? Three hot white girls scratched the pearl to this book!

There are SO MANY things wrong with this. The cringe-inducing metaphor of "scratching the pearl" ("petting the pearl" or even "poking the pearl" work so much better), the notation that it's "white chicks" (why would it matter if they were hottie black chicks?) but most of all, the fact that if you bid on that book, you are pretty much on par with a Japanese businessman stopping along the way home to buy a pair of used girl's undies from a vending machine.

I still got my old copies of Playboy and Bondage Life stacked away somewhere, and my Gor novels are right on the shelf ... I wonder ... (/me checks his paypal account for income from his ad for the secret to making slavegirls stop drooling, notices there has been none) ... naaaaaaaaaaah.

All that said, here's the ebay listing. Never let it be said that I stood between the equivalent of a lonely, perverted Japanese businessman and fulfillment.

Fifty Shades of Grey: Suitable for Television Only?

First published on 9/26/2012

Another heartening sign that the people are smarter than the media comes from an article on booksnreview.com, which asks the question, "'Fifty Shades of Grey' Movie: Too Kinky for Film? Fans Rather See Anastasia Steele and Christian Grey on TV Show, HBO Series'.

Hell, yeah! Sometimes you see indie movies that do sexually challenging stuff right, but mainstream movie makers almost never get it right. They always tone the sexy way down. With 50 million in sales, the book clearly has huge potential to be either a monster movie a la "Gone with the Wind" or a franchise a la Star Wars. The studio heads are going to be so hot to protect their monster movie's profit potential that they are going to absolutely avoid doing anything too risky.

Remember the hash they made of "9 1/2 Weeks"? Of "Exit to Eden?" The only reason they didn't fuck up "Story of O" is that it was done by the French. So the odds on a good movie version of Fifty Shades? Low ... way fucking low.

TV cable channels like HBO and Spartacus, however ... different story. They have got some kickass writers and producers who have proven that they know how to handle the raunchy. Game of Thrones and Spartacus are some of the hottest mainstream sexual imagery going right now, combined with topnotch dramatic stories. This would be the best shot Fifty Shades has at a good film adaptation, but it's not happening. Going to be a freaking movie. And almost certainly, a fucking failure.

We shall see.

Fifty Shades of the Big 12

Fifty Shades of the Big 12

With football season well under way, I thought some of you might enjoy this link, a parody of Big 12 football as written by Anastasia Steele. Enjoy! Also, in the same vein, a parody of Big 12 football as written by Cormac McCarthy. I don't even follow Big 12 football, but these parodies had me cracking up. Good fun!

Marie Claire: Mainstream Media Continues To Just Not Get Fifty Shades of Grey

First published on 9/20/2012

The Autralian edition of Marie Claire Magazine's website is asking, "Has Kinky Gone Mainstream?" referring of course to the way 50 Shades of Gray has steamrollered its way into public consciousness via selling 50 million copies.

They ask in that lame, timid way that mainstream magazine articles typically do, "Has kink become mainstream?" Then they refer to a few experts, quote a few random people they know, and go on to draw some safe-sounding conclusions about not following the crowd and doing kinky stuff just because that's what's fashionable, and instead exploring what YOU want to do (or not do) is the key to have a fulfilling sex life. The painfully obvious disguised as wisdom.

And when they are not engaging in a festival of "Duh!" they are getting it wrong:

But is this anything new? “Nobody is reinventing anything. It’s all been done but differently,” says Dr Morrissey. “Think the Marquis de Sade’s The 120 Days Of Sodom written in 1785, Pauline Réage’s Story Of O in 1954, right through to Nancy’s Friday’s My Secret Garden: Women’s Sexual Fantasies in 1973. What’s revolutionary is the fact that it’s so public.

No, that's not what's so revolutionary about 50 Shades. It's the fact that it's MOMMY porn, not Daddy porn. It's a demographic that has never been associated with porn of any kind, and now they're going for kinky sex. THAT'S revolutionary! If GUYS had taken up some porny book big-time, if them mainstream even noticed, they would dislike it, thinking "Horny guys getting kinky, can't be a good thing."

But since it's mommies it IS revolutionary, which is why Marie Claire's staff have no idea how to respond to it, and really don't "get" it. Really revolutionary stuff has a way of being hard to figure out.

Carla Gugino to Get Kinky on The New Girl TV Series

First published on 9/18/2012

The flying monkeys brought in a little semi-non 50 Shades of Gray news this week, a post on the Cinema Blend website that announced in breathless tones that Carla Gugino will get kinky in season two of a television series called The New Girl.

Well I had to check that out because Carla Gugino is an actress who will do a risky scene, she did the lesbian rape scene with probable panty gag in Jaded, after all, one of only two scenes in the history of television with probable panty gags. Link to a vidcap from the scene showing the gag. (They're "probably" panty gags because they look like panties stuck in the women's mouths and in the Gugino scene, there wasn't a lot else out there on the beach to gag her with but her panties. It would be a certain panty gag if the whole scene had not been shot in extreme chairobscuro).

Reading the post, Gugino will play an executive that forces a subordinate to sign a contact that will "bind his body and his will" to her. The article describes this as "going all 50 Shades on him."

No. No, no and no. Two major problems here. One, doesn't sound very consensual -- sounds like straight-up abuse of power, whereas 50 Shades was all about the consensual -- and two, the genders are all wrong. The women who enjoyed 50 Shades enjoyed a fantasy about a woman submitting sexually to a man, not a fantasy about a man submitting sexually to a woman.

Let me be very clear here: there are women who enjoy fantasies of dominating men, and there are men who enjoy fantasies of being dominated by women, and that's fine. They are as entitled to their fantasies as anybody else is. I'm not entertaining any notions that maledom/femsub is the order of nature or other such bullcrap. It's all good.

But I am saying that the vast majority of 50 Shades readers like maledom/femsub themes, after all, that's what 50 Shades is, and they also don't care for femdom/malesub themes. After all, the popularity of 50 Shades sprang straight from romance readers ready for some hotter action. And while there are thousands and thousands of romance novels about bold pirates capturing spirited wenches and finding love instead of a quick roll in the captain's lounge, there a very, very few romance novels about bold pirate wenches capturing spirited young studs and finding love, etc.

That's because the romance readership doesn't like them. Romance novels, except for that explicit sex thing, have always slavishly followed their readers' tastes, which is why they are now by far the top selling variety of adult fiction. And their failure to get it on with the explicit maledom/femsub kink is why they have lost so many readers to erotic romance ebooks like Karg. (And, well, OK, 50 Shades as well. It has outsold Karg by ... a lot. I'm not at liberty to divulge numbers here, as it would be too embarrassing for the publishing industry, by which of course I mean "me." Not that any other ebook writers' numbers look that good next to 50 Shades.)

Now there is no reason for The New Girl not to chase after the relatively small demographic of women who like femdom/malesub kink, it's their show, they can do as they like.

But my suspicion is that they are introducing this "50 Shades" theme to attract more viewers (television is a numbers game after all) and if THAT'S their goal, they're doing it all wrong. They need to go after the big demographic that likes maledom/femsub themes if they want numbers.

I suspect the reason that they are doing it wrong is that they haven't caught up with the paradigm shift that 50 Shades represents. Most mainstream TV and movie producers will reflexively prefer a femdom/malesub theme over a maledom/femsub themes because they fear offending feminists, and women who are pro-feminism. And they think they can get away with it in terms of attracting viewers because they think anyone who likes anything kinky will like anything described as kinky. If you like bondage, you like nuns and schoolgirls and whipped cream and dwarves and, well, anything. Which is world-class dumb of them, but hey, there's a reason network television is hemorrhaging viewers every year, and it ain't intelligence.

Back to the Eighties: The Right Responds To Fifty Shades of Grey

First published on 9/17/2012

I'm feeling the right wing crank up their anti-sex machine with regard to the success of 50 Shades of Gray. I've already written about the cheap attack on 50 Shades by an almost certainly fictional "expert" which was initially made on an obscure right wing blog. Now Fox News has got an actual "expert" on the attack, albeit in a different way, with more sophisticated techniques, in an article entitled How Women Made Porn Fashionable.

The interesting thing is that both articles make extensive use of lies and misdirection for their attacks. It's like lying has become a habit so engrained in the right that they use it whether they need it or not. So I thought I'd administer a good old-fashioned Straight Dope forums-style beatdown on this article right here on my blog.

To start with:

Women are consuming and endorsing porn such as ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ -- a book recognized as ‘mommy porn.’ Poorly written, it is not a how-to-manual and it’s not poetic erotica.

So it's not a how-to manual, and it's not poetic erotica (whatever that is) so it's porn. Never has the middle felt so excluded!

Then we get:

Pulp/romance novels transformed into a new genre embracing porn as literature - explicitly sexual scenes featuring bondage/discipline, dominance/submission and sadism/masochism

He's way oversimplifying to make his point here. Romance novels still exist. It's obvious that a lot of their readership have shifted over to the erotic romance genre, especially in ebook format, which is what 50 Shades is an example of. But erotic romances are not really the same thing as porn, either. I was EIGHT CHAPTERS into the Fifty Shades before Ana got so much as a kiss. Eight chapters! Who ever heard of porn that went eight chapters without any sexual action? 50 Shades is erotica, not porn, dude. Not that you know the difference, or care to.

More than 20 million copies have sold in the US (40 million worldwide), and it is yet another example of the way porn is becoming more than socially acceptable amongst women. Moreover, it is becoming an aspirational target for women. Women and the media have linked consuming porn or behaving like a porn actress with instant money, fame, power, glamour, prestige, respectability and social acceptability. In other words, if you become a porn actress or behave like one, you will triumph with all of these things. Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian became famous and rich for making a sex tape, and they spun off empires of TV shows, fashion lines, perfumes and paid appearances. The message is: one leads to the other.

This is complete bullcrap. Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian did indeed make sex tapes and they were indeed leaked to the Internet, but so have many other women. Yet only Hilton, Kardashian and a few others got rich and famous. Why just them? Could it be that Hilton and Kardashian's sex tapes took off because they were ALREADY rich and famous and had the connections to make the media sit up and take notice? Why yes, I believe it could be that. You'd have to be a complete dumbass to think that making a sex tape all by its lonesome was the gateway to fame and fortune. Then again, this article is aimed at women who read FoxNews. So ... I guess warning them is probably a good idea.

Using sex for money and fame, women have found a new way to feel powerful and secure without a man or even necessarily a family – Octomom has openly become a porn actress and stripper.

I would really like to see some statistics that this is being done by women generally, which is how he phrased it. I'm betting the truth is, it's being done by a FEW women, and the rest are watching with an unholy mixture of glee, schadenfreude, and envy.

Mothers, too, are now sexualizing their daughters and dressing them up as sexual candy for the world.

Yet another totally unsupported assertion, save for a few media types. How 'bout some stats, dude? Most women I know think this sort of thing is ridiculous. This unsubstantiated bloviating is getting annoying, but then, that's is why I don't follow Fox anything anywhere.

Porn could never have become mainstream and socially acceptable without the support and endorsement by women.

I guessed you missed the 1970s and 1980s, when porn did exactly that, without the support and endorsement of women. It wasn't mommy that made XXX videos a billion dollar industry, it was daddy. Try to pay some attention to, well ... anything, dude.

And women and the media have linked consuming porn or behaving like a porn actress with instant money, fame, power, glamour, prestige, respectability and social acceptability. In other words, if you become a porn actress or behave like one, you will triumph with all of these things.

Yeah, that's why you see porn actresses on breakfast cereal boxes nowadays. "Wheaties will let you take on three guys at once without breaking a sweat, just like Mindi Boytoy!" Do you not ever check any of your thoughts against reality to see if they make any sense at all, dude?

Accordingly, girls are more fascinated and driven by the desire to become famous than they are to become an engineer, doctor or scientist: Kim Kardashian has 14 million followers on Twitter.

I would like to see some evidence that the set of women who have a realistic shot at becoming an engineer, doctor or scientist overlaps with the set of women who follow Kim Kardashian on Twitter to any degree.

The paradox is that women are becoming more educated than men as women surpass men in attendance and graduation rates – for every two men who get a college degree, three women will do also. But, women are failing to realize the dangers of falling for porn or promoting porn as the new fashionable profession and path to fame, riches and glory. This is the antithesis of female empowerment as MTV, Kim Kardashian and Octomom are teaching young girls to gain power over men by using sex.

So, they are getting the college degrees so they'll get all the good jobs, AND they are learning to gain power over men by using sex? We're TOTALLY boned, guys! And not in a good way! And ... who watches MTV any more? Is it even still on? Did this guy's brain set like cement back in the early 80s?

Women have now created false empty idols and have lost their real sense of self-worth, value and significance, replacing it with fleeting pseudo-power and artificial values and relationships, leaving them feeling unfulfilled and unsatisfied.

I had wondered what all those statues of Moloch were doing in the parking lot at Target, Walmart and most shopping centers ...

I appeal to women to beware of being deceived and betrayed into the world of porn and sexual objectification the same way that women were tricked into smoking cigarettes in the 1920s.

Let's see ... how did it go ... a woman who'll chew gum will smoke cigarettes, and a woman who smokes cigarettes will drink alcohol, and we all know what a woman who drinks alcohol will do ...

In April 1929, a PR expert, Edward Bernays, working for a US tobacco company, hired young models to march in the New York City parade and alerted the press that they were fighting for women’s rights by lighting "Torches of Freedom" as they lit up and smoked cigarettes. The media publicized the event and it helped to break the taboo against women smoking in public.

So that's why women took up smoking. I had thought they just wanted to get laid! (Some evidence that this PR event and others like it led to women smoking would be nice.)

Renowned physicist, psychiatrist, and psychoanalyst Dr. Jeffrey Satinover says porn is “a form of heroin, hundred times more powerful than before.”

Not believing a word of it. I'm betting this fellow works at one of those Institutes of Wacky Science that ideologues go to when they need an alarming quote. Had no idea porn was an opiate!

Forensic psychologist, M. Douglas Reed and renowned pharmacologist Candace Pert reveal that pornography is like a drug that triggers the brain to release a psychopharmacological flood of “epinephrine, testosterone, endorphins (endogenous morphine), oxytocin, dopamine, serotonin, and phenyethylamine,” which can lead to addiction and various other behavioral disorders.

More wacky science. But it would explain why I have to put a needleful of Kink.com images into my arm every few hours. But at least here we are told that porn is LIKE a drug, not that it IS one as in the previous quote. I like the way endorphins are described as "endogenous morphine." Does my brain have to go to a dealer located somewhere disgusting like my intestines to get it, I wonder, and pay it off with ... ideas?

Gal Dines, professor of sociology and women's studies and chair of the American Studies Department at Wheelock College in Boston, has written about and researched the porn industry for over two decades. Professor Dines, author of “Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality,” believes porn is a public health issue with documented negative effects on young people, distorting "the way women and girls think about their bodies, their sexuality and their relationships."

I'm betting Professor Dines has some very strong opinions about how women and girls should think about their bodies, their sexuality and their relationships. Note the "public health issue" bit ... it's the approach that Catherine MacKinnon took to attack porn and try to get it banned back in the 80s. Still harping on the same old saw. Hmm, I sense a trend here.

Pornography is equally damaging to adult relationships and social bonds – men are struggling to develop close, intimate relationships with real women with some men now preferring porn to sex with an actual human being.

Because looking at images of other people doing something is just as much fun as doing it yourself. That's why no one bothers to go on vacation any more, too.

Bottom line: porn does not promote love or sex but rather cruelty and hatred to women, and so, while women continue to endorse and make porn fashionable or a new ideal, they are foolishly robbing themselves and undermining all of the positive strides and triumphs they have made in their quest for equality.

Bottom line: get those pillbox hats and white gloves on and go back to church ladies, or you won't be feminists any more! I'm pretty sure that's where this guy is headed. It's a sad day when pornish bloggers have to give political writers savage beatdowns for lying and misrepresentation, but I guess that is where the right has gone with its political discourse.

A Brilliant Analysis of Fifty Shades of Grey From Feministing

First published on 9/1/12 I'm fascinated by the 50 Shades of Gray phenomenon, that's why I follow the news media about it. Otherwise I couldn't manage it, because by FAR the majority if the articles I find are absolute dreck. I've learned to scan and dismiss them in seconds.

So you can imagine my pleasure when I find a really good, insightful article, like the one I found on Obsidian Wings months ago, or the one I found on Alternet more recently.

I've found another really great analysis of 50 Shades of Gray on the Feministing Community site, entitled "Unconventional Sex Ed Lessons from 50 Shades of Gray". It's written by Mimi Arbeit, a feminist educator who teaches sex education to teens. She says she expected to find the book a huge disappointment because of all that she'd heard about it, but was pleasantly surprised by it, finding it a welcome change from the dominant themes about sex and romance in the media.

By that she means the book covers a lot of things that other books do not. Most importantly, Ana and Christian communicate clearly and honestly with one another about sex throughout their relationship. Christian is always careful to get Ana's informed consent before he has any kind of sex with her. They discuss and plan for contraception before they have sex. And the book directly and powerfully portrays Ana's experiences of sexual pleasure and desire. As I've noted repeatedly, James does a REALLY good job of conveying how much Ana and Christian enjoy their sex play.

Wildly popular books about sex read by teens NEVER have any of this stuff, says Arbeit, so she is enormously grateful to see an erotic romance that mentions all of the lessons she is trying to instill in her teen students, whose media experience does not include ANY of it.

Mind you, Arbeit's opinion of the book is not wholly positive -- she says she could just as easily write a list of ten things she finds problematical about the book, and I believe her. But she is glad of the book as a chance to open up a dialog which allows her to convey the importance of some of these themes to her teen students. And I think that's what opens her up to the positive aspects of the books that a lot of other readers missed. She saw what was there because her experience teaching teens had sharpened her eye to it.

Sadly, Arbeit is one of the relatively few non-romance reviewers of the books who has the guts to say they like elements of it. Most non-romance reviewers project a sort of arrogant, snotty attitude, often confessing that they read very little of the book or that they did not read it at all, following up by condemning it wholesale on the basis of all the stuff they did not read. Clearly, such reviews are all about confirming their status of not being the sort of person who reads 50 Shades of Gray or anything like it, rather than an honest examination of the book.

Here's a great example of what I'm talking about, a post to a fantasy message board called "The Black Gate by someone named "Theo." A choice quote:

So does 50 Shades of Grey go too far? Not on the surface, as according to its description it is little more than John Norman’s Gor brought back to Earth, minus the sword battles and the awesome tarn birds. And it’s not a question I can legitimately even try to answer, since I haven’t read 50 Shades of Grey, nor do I have any intention of doing so.

Didn't read it, so of course he makes a completely wrong comparison of 50 Shades with the Gor novels, which as a guy who read 20 or so of the Gor novels, the slavery was of the distinctly nonconsensual kind (the Gorean slaves just loved it because they were natural born slavegirls) which makes it WAAAAAY different than 50 Shades, which is all about the consensual.

But then Theo goes and accuses 50 Shades of being stealth pedophilia, based on the accusations of an anonymous poster on another message board who relates the story of a purported child psychologist who read the book and decided that Ana is written as a 12-year-old for some reason, possibly the "oh my!"s "Inner goddesses" and suchlike. It smells like one of those classic put-up jobs with a made-up friend who is an authority (child psychologist) is used to attack something to make it seem awful (pedophile porn) with vague evidence (even though Ana is identified as a twenty-one year old college grad, she's "written as a child") hoping it will stick.

Fortunately, a couple of posters on the Black Gate board who responded saw this piece of shit for what it was and gave it a thorough going-over.

To be honest, the Black Gate post is about an order of magnitude worse than any of the other posts which have dissed the book. But there are still plenty who will hate it based on a verbal description and a lot of social prejudice. You can see why I liked the "Unconventional Sex Ed Lessons" article so much ... it was a real breath of fresh air compared to much of what I read on the topic. And "Unconventional Lessons" is a real antidote to the dreck post from the Black Gate.