Shady Story

Have to weigh in on Fifty Shades of Gray, just like everyone else in the world has.  Not having read the book, I speak only from hearsay, but I think it sets up a bad role model for women.  And women do identify themselves with romance heroines

It's too easy to let a man control us.  After all, they're bigger and stronger than we are, and more prone to violence. Also, it's been going on for centuries.  But it's wrong, not so much in the bra-burning sense, but in the relationship sense, as Nora, bless her addled little brain, finally realized in Ibsen's  Doll House.

And it's too easy to imagine our suffering as a man's redemption,  a Christ-like image if there ever was one.

Reading The Story of O years ago, I realized that by volunteering herself to be abused, O had surrendered her humanity.  She considered herself to be in a loving relationship but her "master,"  but he  saw her as nothing more than a plaything.

No happy ending there.