I first heard about THE BOOK, very fittingly it turned out, during a mommies-only parenting class. A beautiful but shy lawyer looked at the floor, turned fifty shades of red, and said, “It’s almost like … porn.” My Kindle was out of my bag and downloading before you could say “developmentally appropriate behavior”.
I ended up reading the first two books in the series at a breathless pace, then went back to savor the naughty bits. It was like I was back in elementary school, stealing my mother’s Judith Krantz novels, only now I didn’t have to hide in the basement cedar closet. After I read the third (and slightly disappointing) installment, I read them again in their entirety. Usually when my husband comes to bed and sees me with my Kindle he says, “Babe, please turn it off.” While I was reading THE BOOK(s), the sight of my Kindle made him smile that special goofy-but-irresistible smile usually reserved for lingerie and Jennifer Aniston movies.
It will probably come as no surprise that THE BOOK is Fifty Shades Of Grey by E. L. James. It’s so popular it has been credited with launching the new literary genre of ‘Mommy Porn’(even the New York Times used the phrase in their front page story). Hollywood has joined in on the action with a major studio recently purchasing the movie rights.
Why is this particular piece of erotica particularly appealing to mommies? Lord knows we are a group in dire need of a sexual jump-start. Parenting young children, something that is often started in a very sexy way, becomes un-sexy pretty fast. In the early days, mommies are sad in all their happy places. Even the most devoted and still-mad-for-each-other spouses fall victim to late nights and early mornings attending to the needs of the little people in their lives. For me, it seemed that for a good three years that every time my husband touched my boobs, one or the other child would cry out over the monitor. My dear hubby once lamented, “I think they bugged them while they were breastfeeding!” This is a good part of the reason I am proponent of letting children cry it out. Prior to Fifty, the last time most of us spoke with our girlfriends about sex was the “Oh God it is my 6 week post-partum check and my husband is waiting for the all-clear and I am not ready yet” conversation.
Fifty changed all that. Fifty is Mommy Porn because:
1. We found it first. We made it hot after it made us hot.
We are a generation of women who hasn’t started a trend since Sex and The City. Our younger sisters told us about Twilight and our babysitters loaned us The Hunger Games. We were just too old for hickeys and/or braids by the time these romantic sagas swept the nation. We can, however, buy our husbands gray ties and feathered handcuffs without anyone looking askance.
2. Forgot the playroom and the private jet, the biggest mommy dream-come-true in Fifty is the fact that Ana can’t seem to keep her weight up and Christian is always begging her to eat, eat, eat… Pear-shaped or apple, tall or short, uncomfortably plump or skinny bitch, sweating away at Soul Cycle or shaking at Core Fusion, we can close our eyes and imagine being force-fed a meal we did not have to cook (or order) ourselves.
3) Ana found the Holy Grail of Womanhood: A bad good man who was willing to become a good good man just for her. Christian makes a monumental change that makes wishing one’s husband would just pick up his socks seem very trivial in comparison. Hopefully most of us prefer our husband’s flaws to another’s virtues, but the thought of having Ana’s transformative power over Christian is, frankly, arousing. So a year or two from now, on corners all over Manhattan, you will find gaggles of giggling 30- and 40-something-year-old women in Lululemon waiting on line for tickets to the opening of THE MOVIE. Husbands in gray ties may join once the seats have been saved, unless they are tied up at home.
Until my next posting, LATERS BABY!
