"In defence of 50 Shades of Grey" by Laurie Penny - a rebuttal.

[ceilidh_ann]

The circle of pop culture life vaguely resembles that of the stereotypical hipster argument. Something become popular, people brag about liking it before it was cool to do so, the backlash occurs with similar bragging, then the backlash to the backlash. Often this can go on and on until the original argument has lost all meaning and descended into

Comments

[annielumiere]

Wow. I'm delurking to say that I love you. I really, really do.

50SoG would have been fun for me, with its bad writing talking about an "inner goddess" and the "holy cow" and soap-opera plot, but every time the story showed some abusive behaviour, even just an order by the main character made me shiver.
I really love to talk about sex, to show that it is okay for women to discuss it but this seems to take it as an excuse to present a romanticized abusive relationship. If you don't like it, you must be a prude.

Sorry for the tl;dr. But thank you for posting this.

[profbutters]

Well said! This isn't the same thing, but I am getting irritated at the way mainstream media seems to be unable to distinguish between "slash," "porn," "fan fiction." Not all fan fiction is slash, not all slash is porn, not all porn is slash, etc. This quietly drives me insane.

I'm also fed up with the tone: "you may not believe it, but there is something called--gasp--fanfiction!" It's so condescending, and it's treated like breaking news. Argh.

I know I won't be able to stand reading it. By the way, the big Harry Potter conference I'm going to this week has a "Quill Track." Some of the panels are specifically about converting fan fiction to money-making books. So it looks as though this is being treated as the new road to success.

[often_partisan]

I'll happily read bad fiction because I enjoy critiques of that sort of stuff and even I draw the line at touching 50 Shades of Gray.

[improved]

This was perfectly written and I agree with everything.

[lauralenright]

Nicely done. I work at a library and those things have a billion reserves on them put there by suburban woman who I'm sure really have no clue, who just want to get in on the latest fad. Well, I know most have no clue because I see these people every week and knowing what they normally check out, I know they wouldn't bother with it if it wasn't currently hip (and so by reading it they can seem currently hip). This is all marketing and very successful marketing. But successful marketing doesn't make the product any better.