“My inner goddess fist-pumps the air above her chaise longue.” “My inner goddess pole-vaults over the fifteen-foot bar.” “My inner goddess is doing backflips in a routine worthy of a Russian Olympic gymnast.” “My inner goddess jumps up and down, with cheerleading pom-poms, shouting ‘Yes’ at me.”

“My inner goddess has stopped dancing and is staring, too, mouth open and drooling slightly.” “My inner goddess is doing the merengue with some salsa moves.” “My inner goddess is doing the Dance of Seven Veils.” “My very small inner goddess sways in a gentle victorious samba.” “My inner goddess is swaying and writhing to some primal carnal rhythm.” The thoughts are provided by the narrator and main character, Anastasia Steele, who is a twenty-one-year-old American woman as well as such a clueless, self-absorbed ninny that you, the reader, find yourself wishing that you still smoked so you would have a cigarette lighter handy and thus could set fire to certain pages, especially the ones where Anastasia is telling you about her “inner goddess.” This is a hyperactive imaginary being-I keep picturing Tinker Bell-who reacts in a variety of ways to the many dramatic developments in Anastasia’s life, as we see in these actual quotes: Many pages go by in this book without any of It getting done, although there is a great deal of thinking and talking about It. What women want, to judge from Fifty Shades of Grey, is not just people doing It. “Let’s have sex,” she mused matter-of-factly.Ī few paragraphs later they’re all done, and the male reader, having invested maybe ninety seconds of his time, can put the book down and go back to watching SportsCenter.Īpparently that is not what women want, porno-wise. A man wants to get right to the porno:īart Pronghammer walked into the hotel room and knitted his brow at the sight of a naked woman with breasts like regulation volleyballs. When a man reads porno, he does not want to get bogged down in a bunch of unimportant details about the characters, such as who they are or what they think. So what kind of book is Fifty Shades of Grey? I would describe it, literary genre–wise, as “a porno book.” But it’s not the kind of porno men are accustomed to.

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