Does any mention of Fifty Shades make you want to pound finish nails into your gums? Okay, maybe it’s just me. But photographer and avid Goodreads reviewer Katrina Lumsden has taken 50 without lube for the entire team by writing what should be considered the only 50 Shades review anyone needs, ever.
In fact, her review does the neat trick of making it entirely unnecessary to read any of EL James’ books.
(…) I mean, come on, he pretty much jackhammers her hymen and she walks away with nothing more than a passing, pleasant soreness? Riiiight. How about the time he gives her a handjob with a soapy washcloth? Hello? Apparently neither one of them has ever heard of a urinary tract infection. Oh, or we could talk about her first time giving Christian a blowjob, during which Ana established herself as some kind of Queen of Deepthroat.
Anyone wanna hear about the tampon scene?
Lumsden is a hero and a martyr. But I think what made me want to finally trepan myself was seeing that when Lumsden did a word count on certain words and phrases, the term “inner goddess” was used in Fifty Shades 58 times. It’s used in place of pussy, cunt, vagina, etc. Inner. Fucking. Goddess. For fuck’s sake. If mine is gonna be a deity, I’ll take Shiva Destroyer Of Worlds, thankyouverymuch.
^My inner goddess will cap yours in the face if you don’t shut the fuck up^
Now go read them all, so you don’t have to actually read any of them:
- Katrina Lumsden’s Reviews > Fifty Shades of Grey
- Katrina Lumsden’s Reviews > Fifty Shades Darker
- Katrina Lumsden’s Reviews > Fifty Shades Freed
This is not a book about BDSM, this is a book about one sick, abusive man and his obsession with a young, naive invertebrate. It’s a book about a girl who has absolutely no sense of self, who sacrifices any pretense of individuality in order to hold onto a man who doesn’t even show her the faintest glimmer of respect. It’s about two attention-starved individuals with the emotional maturity of toilet paper convincing themselves that their relationship is ‘like, the best thing ever, OMG’. It’s trite, insulting, and dangerous.
Thanks, Phil!
I’m also one of those people who started reading the series because I wanted to know what the uproar was all about. The review I gave my sister was very similar to what Katrina said, including the terms trite and dangerous. In the 1st book, and presumably the others, the idea that a woman can change an abusive man if she could just be the one who makes him want to be a different person runs so deep that it’s scary.
I don’t recall seeing it in her first review (perhaps it’s in the others?) but I also thought that Christian was a terribly stereotyped image of the “damaged” people who participate in bdsm/power play. It’s not an area I have personal experience in (my info comes from hearing more knowledgable people speak of the subject), but it does seem like sex-negative people/organizations want to label participants as having had to come from abusive backgrounds. Anyone have thoughts on that?
And as far as the “Inner Goddess” thing goes, I didn’t read that as a euphemism for her pussy. It read to me like a combination of her libido and her supposed sexually empowered side emerging. lol Katrina’s interpretation may give me another reason to cringe and roll my eyes as I finish the last 2 books. Yes, I’m going all the way, with the same critical eye with which I read the 1st.
Lol. Yes Katrina’s review is very cool.
But I likened to atrocity of this to another political infighting between Putin v. Hugo and you can decide who will be “pounded”…..way “down there”…..Oh my!
http://ceciliayu.com/2012/07/23/venezuela-50-shades-of-grey/
Some female comedian from Scotland…had other ideas of what to do with those “down there” beads…btw….profanities alert…as I said…she is Scottish! (joke)
I’m a little tipsy, but this made me cry with laughter:
“Yes, there’s a sex scene involving a butt plug, and yes, it’s both hilarious and disturbing, if for nothing else but E.L. James’ refusal to use the word “ass”. Ana is always using the words ‘behind’ and ‘bottom’ to describe her other “down there”, and those words do not mesh well with the concept of an anal sex toy. I’m sorry, but hearing about how Christian inserted a butt plug into Ana’s ‘bottom’ made me both uncomfortable and highly amused.”
Trying to write anal sex w/o saying ass has got to be one of the most humorous concepts of all time.
XXX,
Alison
I was one of those people who read 50 Shades as a fanfiction called Master of the Universe. I was appalled by the badly written epic and it wasn’t three books then, it was one long tedious crapfest, cheesy as hell and the Twilight fans lapped it up because James, known as Icy back then to the fans, had Bella and Edward aka Ana and Christian getting it on long before Stephenie Meyer had them doing the horizontal tango in the last book Breaking Dawn. It actually took me a few days to realise that Inner Goddess was another name for the pussy etc. Lumsden’s reviews are perfect and everyone should read them, especially the brainless apparently sex starved housewives who have gone out and bought the book. Ironically they didn’t really need to spend their money making James richer than dirt, they could have actually Googled Master of the Universe on the net and downloaded the free version. I did eventually read the fanfiction all the way through, but there were many points where I actually lost the will to live.
I’m confused. I didn’t read it because I don’t like ghost stories.
I read these books more to find out what the big deal was. By chapter 6 of book one I was ready to stab both of the main characters in the brain just to end all of our pain.
This set of reviews is fantastic!
Inner Goddess? I thought I’d heard all the purple prose words for pussy they could possibly come up with. I think I’ll ram my eyes out with butter knives before I ever sit down to read that book.