Our book store has sold a gazillion copies of the female erotica book 'Fifty Shades of Grey".
Women come in and buy the first one (often in some embarrassment) and then next day slap the next two on the counter with a grin. Okay it's not for everyone, but I get sick of people moaning about it's lack of literary depth. Uh hello people- EL laughingallthewaytothebank James has obviously tapped into a very important thing here and she wasn't aiming to arouse the Pullitzer judges.
If you think you can do better, please give it a shot because I can tell you you have a very large and very hungry female audience!
However, when our only male shop assistant greeted an awaited shipment of these books and said "Well, the desperate housewives will be happy", I got really cross and gave it to the poor guy- Why are sexually interested men just men and sexually interested women 'desperate housewives?'
Dare I say, boredom in the extreme. Obviously we have a very large portion of the population who are well and truly alive and vital and dying for a bit of the hot stuff. A lot of these people must be married. Is this book hitting nerves because many readers are long-time married or long-time single and are bored and lonely?
Let's just say that as I passed a 'juice' stand manned by 20-something gym members yesterday and noticed all the attentive customers were aged about 50, I don't think the ladies were interested in just the fruit being hand-squeezed! Let's get rid of the tags like'desperate housewives' and 'cougar' which try and come across as amusingly self depracating and falsely empowering and have a good hard think about what's going on here.
Let's move beyond hoping your husbands beer gut shrinks a little and getting by on gratuitous novels only.
Let's aknowledge that we are well and truly bloody alive and set about filling those needs- because it's harder to do naked cartwheels at 80.
I do not wish them to have power over men, but over themselves. ~Mary Wollstonecraft
