Sexplicitness

Friend Jeanell, who writes steamy romances, is beginning to feel like she's  actually writing "sweets," the genre code name for love stories that stop at the bedroom door.  It bothers her that a poorly-written book justifying BDSM is a multi-million dollar best-seller, that movies vie with each other in portraying "love" scenes more and more graphically, and that a long-running reality show is based on nothing but the sex lives of the female family.  Have we become a nation of voyeurs?

Call Fiorella a prude, but she'd prefer a little more censorship.  Or maybe it's called good taste.

Salvation Through Sadism.

You've heard Fio sound forth on this issue before, and now you'll hear her again.  She will never write a "romance" like Fifty Shades of Grey, no matter how much money it would pull in, because she thinks the book sets up a bad role model for impressionable women--i.e., all of us.  It's way too inviting to give up one's personal independence to a man who values you so much that he wants to own you, especially if that man is young, handsome, and rich, rich, rich--and it's thrilling to think that one can "heal him" by doing whatever he wants you to.

But sadists do not heal through acting out--they only get worse.  

Unlax, Fiorella, it's just a book of fiction, you say.  But, Fiorella replies, we model our lives and our values on the basis of fiction, which is why Fio's current book is anti-BDSM.  In fact, your faithful correspondent has been known to refer to WHERE THE HEART LEADS as her "up yours" to Fifty Shades--a position, she understands, that is quite familiar to Anastasia Steele.