50 shades of mess

Lead review

It’s been all of four months since the Fifty Shades of Grey film came out. That’s four blissful months devoid of lip biting. But now we have the release of EL James fourth book, the imaginatively titled Grey.

Rather than coming up with a new story line, James is sticking with the “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” school of writing. So Grey follows the exact same plot as the original book, with the exception that it’s told not from the point of view of ingénue Anastasia Steele, but dominant billionaire Christian Grey.

I’ve defended the Fifty Shades franchise before. I went so far as to call the backlash against the film ‘aggressively patronising to adult women’. So as you can imagine, I was excited to read the latest instalment. I even deleted the MyFitnessPal app that I pretend to use in order to make space for it on my phone.

But a chapter or so in — I realised that something was horribly wrong.
Given how toe-scrunching irritating I can find protagonist Anastasia you’d think that hearing the story told from the more mysterious Grey would be a turn up for the books.

No more “holy-cow” or “inner-goddess” from a 22-year-old woman who owns neither a smart phone nor a laptop and who claims to have never masturbated in her entire life.

Not so. Because it turns out that Christian Grey isn’t just fifty shades of f***** up (there’s a whole thing about a peeled ginger root in a place that a ginger root should never be) but he’s also about a million different shades of sexist.

The way he sees women is so consistently irritating, especially his employees.
I’m a feminist; I see sexism, street harassment and chauvinism wherever I go.
And yet until this morning, not once has misogyny got in the way of my sex life.
I woke up embarrassingly enthused to read Grey’s version of the story for an hour or so, until my partner’s alarm went off — at which point I had every intention of jumping him.

Only, an hour later and a quarter of the book down Christian Grey’s attitude to women left me pondering: “what is the polar opposite of arousal?”

We learn in the first chapter exactly what Grey was thinking when he met Anastasia for the first time. His stream of consciousness is as cocky and arrogant as hers is neurotic. (Nice subversion of gender roles there).

The reader is treated to the running commentary in his head, from the innocuous “Yeah, she’s attractive” to the offensive “Suck it baby” and culminating is the creepy “Images of her in my playroom flash through my mind: shackled on the cross, spread-eagled on the four-poster, splayed over the whipping bench.”

In the original account of their meeting you could at least give Grey the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps he was thinking about charitable donations to Darfur or Baudelaire or TOWIE.

But no, here we have total conformation that he is in fact just imaging doing a variety of intensely violent things to a 21-year-old woman he’s just met, in a professional capacity.

It’s not just his potential girlfriend who enjoys the brunt of his sexism either.
Grey negates those pesky sexual harassment in the workplace law suits with a stroke of genius: Every woman who works for him has to be a blonde. Isn’t that clever? As he doesn’t fancy blondes, he doesn’t find himself tempted to dip his nib in the company ink. Brilliant.

At one point his EA, Andrea, tries to suggest that he leave his conversation with Anastasia in order to attend a meeting he’s committed to.

“Out! Now!” says his internal monologue. “I’m busy with little Miss Steele here.”
It’s not the first moment that begs the question: how could this man possibly be a billionaire?

And so poor old Andrea has to scuttle off to the meeting room to explain to a table full of businessmen that they’ve been ditched for a wide-eyed 21-year-old ‘Bambi’ (this is what Grey calls her after he’s taken her virginity. Nice).

“I need another submissive,” muses Grey, trying to remember how long it’s been since the last one with the same attitude most people reserve for their MOT or eye test.

Which is perfectly representative of his relationship with women.
Grey seems to think women are child-like commodities who have to be told when to eat, what to wear and even forced into blow drying their hair. Despite running a billion dollar empire apparently still labours under the misapprehension that you can get ill from having wet hair.

This morning I was cock-blocked by Christian Grey. The new Fifty Shades is supposed to be a fantasy. The book isn’t just successful because of the sex: we like the cars, the wine, the music, the restaurants, the apartments, the hotels and the clothes. It’s supposed to be a magical, seductive world. It’s Disney for grown ups.
So could someone please let E L James know, that it’s time to ditch the sexism? There should be no room for it in the real world, let alone in our fantasies.

Grey
E L James
Arrow
2015, pp 576 Rs 344