Many feminists find the latest strand of erotica (horrible word: like putting a crocheted crinoline lady on a lavatory roll), in which women fetishise their own powerlessness, offensive. And it does seem a rather grotesque phenomenon to occur just as we are becoming fully aware of the many crimes of forced marriage, torture and "honour" killing against women who want only to be free.
I, however, was offended by this book, which its publishers claim has "outstripped" Fifty Shades of Grey after selling more than 50,000 paperback copies in its first week, right from page one, long before any sexual shenanigans started. The writing is standard Mills & Boon drivel, several levels beneath your average competent chick-lit, the banality of which is hard to convey without resorting to the use of Patrick Hamilton's "Komic Kapitals", a stylistic flourish used by the great man when mocking platitudes. Thus in the space of the first four pages, people have Winning Smiles, Grin Like Idiots and Never Waver From Their Determination.
This is all before the heroine starts her first day at One Of The Preeminent Advertising Agencies In The United States. For one moment, when she sees the building where she will be working, I had hopes that she might be one of these people one reads about in the popular press, who fall in love with inanimate objects and can be found boasting of their imminent marriage to the Statue of Liberty or a rollercoaster. "A sleek spire of gleaming sapphire that pierced the clouds I knew from my previous interviews that the interior on the other side of the ornate copper-framed revolving doors was just as awe-inspiring, with golden-veined marble floors and walls and brushed-aluminium security desk and turnstiles." Yes, yes, YES!
But soon she's sprawling on the floor of the lobby, looking up at a man with A Firmly Etched Mouth, A Blade Of A Nose and Intensely Blue Eyes which quickly Bored Into Me, of course. Heartbeats Quicken, Lips Part, Pulses Leap, Grips Tighten and, after a few Meet Cutes in which the heroine displays herself as a lovable, clumsy klutz, and a few fiery put-downs to show she's no pushover, they're going at it like knives in the back of his limo.
Gideon Cross, the hero, is a preening ponce who comes out with lines such as: "Romance isn't in my repertoire, Eva. But a thousand ways to make you come are." (Lying git; there were only seven last time I counted.) Eva, the heroine, is provided with a cast of supporting characters with which to flesh out the pages between the sex scenes the adorable gay couple, the neurotic socialite mother, the dishy bisexual flatmate but they're all just pawns playing for time until the porn resumes.
I've always found the idea of "female-friendly" smut particularly pathetic once again, it's a crinolined lavatory roll. Even before I read any of it, I was of the opinion that the rise of this sort of "mummy porn", as it is rather revoltingly known, showcased a sadistic rather than masochistic side of modern woman. It appeared to be just another way of tormenting men, when one was ready for something a bit stronger than TV ads showing them to be halfwits incapable of finding their own behinds with two hands, a satnav and a St Bernard. Listen, little man you're not a young, gorgeous billionaire who can make women come at the drop of a gold-and-onyx cufflink!
The day a book about the joys of being deliriously dominated by a man on the minimum wage becomes a runaway hit, I'll believe that women really are experiencing a genuine wave of masochism. But while the heroes remain uniformly super-rich as well as young and beautiful I believe that this craze is driven by fiscal as much as physical yearning.
Of course, like Christian Grey (hero of the EL James novel), Gideon has a Troubled Past, so he's good-bad, not evil, as the Shangri-Las once so succinctly put it. He's a sad, bad boy who needs only the devotion of a Good Woman to heal him and, who'da thunk it, she's in the same boat! ("We need help, Gideon. We're seriously dysfunctional"). I totally get why adolescents might like this stuff, but to discover that people of voting age buy it is to me as dismal a discovery as the fact that grownups read Harry Potter.
What's most offensive about these books is the neediness displayed. A heroine who desires nothing more from life than to be consumed by The One is a weedy, vanilla sap, no matter how much rough sex you edge it up with. And there's a backstory about the sexual abuse of children, which seems a singularly inappropriate handle to hang a one-handed read on (although the sex is so repetitive that I found myself skipping it, looking for the clean bits).
A comedian once said that a "spa hotel" was just a hotel with a picture of a pebble on the reception desk. Similarly, the new erotica is often just the same boring old romance with a lot of black on the cover. If you want a sloppy, soppy love story about two people with less substance between them than a phantom pregnancy and which, despite its fetishy cover, is actually about living The Good Life with The One You Love after overcoming Issues that stand in the way of your Relationship more M&S than S&M, more Sade than De Sade then this is the book for you.
