The Controversy on 50 Shades of Grey

I agree with what Stephen King said on the matter. He basically said that not all books are literature, and that's definitely true for both 50 Shades and Twilight. I really don't care what people choose to read, but the fact that it's popular doesn't automatically mean it's good. So little skill went into writing either, but they captured people's attention for some reason and now here we are.
 
They're so popular because they play right into the target audience's fantasies. With Twilight you had a lead who had less personality than a brick wall. 50 Shades just offers a ton of kinky scenes that titillated people who were fed up with their sex lives. Frankly, some of the scenes in the latter were just ridiculous to read ... I'd say they were horrifying, but I've read much worse thanks to the writers of the internet.
 
Precisely! Not all books are literature. There are certain components that make up literature, and good literature at that. Twilight and 50 Shades of Grey are certainly not good literature and will never appear on any academic reading lists. They were purely made as entertainment, and it's hardly that at best.

I think the majority of people liked them because they were fluff; easy to read that took no thought in comprehension. It's quite sad really what the world is coming too. People really need to open their eyes, and their brains to some good literature.
 
This isn't even that new of a phenomenon. Society eats this stuff up. Remember Naked Came the Stranger? It was deliberately written to be full of sex and bad writing and it ended up a bestseller. This was back in 1969.
 
It reminds me of self-help books, many of which are utter nonsense. The Secret comes to mind, first of all. I remember Dave Chappelle talking about it and the whole "think positive" thing; he said, you wouldn't go up to a starving African child on the brink of death and tell him, "you just need to think positive!" The point is that there is no secret; but that mysterious element drew a lot of people in anyway.
 
I don't really care about about how sexual the book is, I care about how God awful it is. I've only managed to read little bits and pieces of it...I seriously doubt it went though an editor at all.
 
polaroidsredwine said:
Good grief, this really is like the second coming of Twilight. The discussion just doesn't die.

50 Shades started as Twilight fanfic. In fact, if you run both texts through a similarity program, they will be something like 90% the same because the author only changed the names. That's it. The book gets a lot of negative press because the relationship in it is abusive at best and completely non-consensual in the worst. Seriously, BDSM is about trust and consent; without those, you might as well just call it abuse.
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I think the relationship in Twilight was abusive, too. Maybe less obviously so, but still.
 
The relationship in Twilight was just as obviously abusive. People just didn't point it out as much because there was ... well, Bella was never in a ridiculously portrayed BDSM relationship. Edward was just as much of a control freak, so it's no wonder E.L. James got it in her head to write him as a dom character for the prototype fanfiction 50 Shades started as.

Mercy on me, I never finished reading even the first book in the 50 Shades trilogy - I'm undertaking the endeavor at the moment. It's my policy to thoroughly understand the things I dislike, and this is the way to do it.
 
Twilight has been called an anti-feminist book, actually. I didn't even know that was a thing, but there it is. Even Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson have spoken out against the quality of the novels, which I find hilarious.
 
I didn't read it and I'm not going to. I don't like reading about sex. That's terrifying. I don't get why so many people are into it. Do they really talk about non-consensual relationships in there? And people are turned on by that? That's awful.
 
Matie said:
Now this novel seems to be the latest fad after the Twilight phenomena, and it has created controversy due to the way the female heroine is depicted as someone whose worth is only defined by the man she loves. And of course, there's the issue of the BDSM depicted.

I was reading yesterday this article on Forbes, that pretty much explains it. Welcome to Forbes

My stance is that the novel is a BDSM version of Beauty and the Beast.

Have you read it? What do you think?
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Definitely! It's like Beauty and the Beast with sex. It's full of sexual scenes, yes, and I find it quite vulgar, but the rest is OK. So honestly, I don't understand why so many people are being so hateful. It's not like it's the first novel to have sexual content in it and it's definitely not posing as an academic literature or any kind of literature for that matter. It's a novel! There are so many sex scenes (and I admit to skimming through most of it, not because I'm so morally upright but simply because they get boring after a while), but after I read the first book, I still went on to read the second and the third. Not because of the sex scenes, but because if you stripped it of its sexual content, it truly is a romantic story. And what can I say, I'm a hopeless romantic! Besides, why can't someone enjoy a book labeled as porn for its story and not the sex?
 
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