50 Shades of Grey; the movie

[thesummerqueen]

Women love reading books in which the characters are as stupid as they are,

That cracked me up so hard.

Good over all synopsis of the appeal of the book and romance novels though.

Some romance novels are quite funny and do not fit this mold. The story won't be high literature, but the dialogue CAN be snappy, and the characters can be portrayed as equally quick-witted and intelligent and interesting. That's why I still enjoy reading in the romance genre: it's like watching a show on CW (American TV channel) where you know all of the actors are going to be way more good looking than they have the right to be, and the issues and dialogue presented will be light and sparkly as flavored carbonated water. Sometimes you just don't want anything heavier, and that's okay.

I can't even agree with a friend that it's okay that 50 Shades is out there because it "gets people talking". I've read many good sub-standard books involving BDSM which were equally bad across the board - bad writing, bad dialogue, bad characters, etc - which somehow managed to NOT include an abusive relationship portrayed as the sort of thing to strive for. I've also read VERY good fanfiction involving BDSM. Some of the best? Fanfic'ing the Harry Potter series. Go fucking figure. This stuff is shit-in, shit-out: you input a love of Twilight, you're going to get bullshit in your output box. Maybe if she had spent a while reading something of a higher literary attainment, and maybe done a little reading about what ACTUALLY goes on in D/s relationships, she'd have made something less worthy of scorn.

It's appalling that so many women continue to worship this shit, and I'm sorry to say that it's symptomatic of the contributing factors in women continuing to be nearly-second class citizens in this country.