Four Romantic Pop Culture Moments That Are Actually Horrible
Chances are that if you're reading this it's because you're taking the bribe I offered to get you to read my far less exciting blog on the Parents And Colleges website. Hi! Don't feel guilty. That's what adulthood is all about. I'd also like to apologize in advance for the weird spacing. Blogspot is having a fit right now over formatting. I'm doing the best I can.
Lately it seems some of our modern day versions of romance are even more skewed than before. We're working so hard to prove how equal men and women are, in terms of sex, gender, and power that we often forget that some vestiges of old-fashioned romance should still be around. Like, you know, sweet gestures and loving prose. Wanting equal pay doesn't mean "fuck flowers and chocolate." It means "pay me equally and when your gender screws up, I'd like some flowers please." I happen to think that's reasonable.
#4: The Fancy Feast "Will You Marry Us?" Commercial
My suitemate in college was obsessed with cats. Unfortunately, until recently the hilarious irony of her severe cat allergy forced her to nurture her obsession from a safe distance, so she turned to cat videos to fill the desolate cat-shaped void. One of her favorites is the Fancy Feast wedding series. If you haven't seen it, that's probably for the best. Here's the commercial in question, so you have some context. Don't worry, if it's too much for you to handle I'll describe it in detail in a minute.
First of all, I want to point out that there is, in fact, an extended version of this. They call it a "short film" on YouTube. Let that sink in for a minute.
The "short film" starts off with an unbelievably WASP-y couple walking up the driveway to an immaculately groomed upper middle class residence. The grinning brunette girlfriend stops her nervous boyfriend, who for some reason is wearing a checked pink shirt, a diamond-print pumpkin colored tie, and a tweed jacket all in the same ensemble, to adjust his horrible tie. Instead of reacting the way a normal person would if he were nervous and also walking and his OCD girlfriend stopped him to adjust something firmly wrapped around his throat without warning, he smiles at her and they continue to the door. As the door opens and the brunette's mother opens the door, we also see that he was carrying a bottle of wine. Not only did this girlfriend put her boyfriend's life in danger by grabbing his tie while he was nervously walking up the drive to meet her mother, she put the wine in danger as well. Unbelievable. We see the interior of the house, where a ridiculously fluffy white (of course!) cat comes bounding down the stairs to cheerful Weather Channel music to greet her. After the Stepford Family has dinner, the young couple says their goodbyes and the girlfriend reluctantly relinquishes the cat back to her parents. This act catches the boyfriend's eye, and he gazes at the cat creepily, perhaps reflecting on how much less action he's gotten from his girlfriend since they got together (you just know she's a prude).
We are then treated to a montage of Brian (he just looks like a Brian) taking some serious initiative to single-handedly redo a beautiful house, which is unrealistic both in the sense that a man would get something like that done all by himself in a reasonable amount of time (we once had a do-it-yourself skylight that sat by our dining room table for almost a year before my dad finally asked a friend to help him install it) and that he has such impeccable taste and yet still wants to *spoiler alert* ask a woman to marry him instead of someone named Roger. The montage ends with Brian playfully batting at a blue fuzzy wall mount that is either some kind of exceptionally kinky toy (maybe Brian's interesting after all!) or a cat toy. Given that this is a cat food commercial, the former seems slightly less likely.
Brian leads Amanda into his newly furnished house with his hands over her eyes (at this point we can still hope that the fuzzy blue thing is a toy for grownups) and uncovers them to reveal a tiny fuzzy white (of course!) cat with a pink collar and something kind of terrifying going on with its eyes. Amanda rushes to pick it up and the cheap synthesizer music swells as she reads the inscription on its tag "Will You Marry Us?" Of course the answer is yes because this is a commercial, and the whole thing ends with Brian and Amanda feeding the cat some Fancy Feast as they eat their Chinese food and drink red wine on a packing box, because somehow all of a sudden the commercial is interested in being relevant to normal people.
Why It's Horrible:
Look, I'm clearly no fan of Amanda, but this is emotional blackmail. Brian poured thousands of dollars into renovating this house, then topped it all off by having a tiny, fluffy ball of kitten-an exact replica of her beloved childhood cat-playing on the floor before offering its proposal. Now Amanda is saddled with a house designed completely without any of her input, a cat with some kind of gland problem in its eyes, and a smothering boyfriend who will eventually leverage all this stuff against her in a fight later when she expects him to still do the dishes. It will all end with Amanda crying because she found Brian's receipt from a bar called The White Swallow when she was going through his wallet to get money for Froofie's conjunctivitis. She didn't want this life, you know.
#3: How I Met Your Mother, Robin Gives Away Her Dogs
"How I Met Your Mother" is a current comedy series on CBS about a guy named Ted who tells a several thousand hour story to his children about how he met their mother, going over every girlfriend he's somehow managed to have in his entire adult life. The episode in question ("Stuff") happened in Season Two of the show while Ted was dating a member of his friend group named Robin. Robin is exceptionally cool. A take-charge, independent woman with a taste for cigars and whiskey, she's clearly a horrible match for the constantly bumbling yet somehow cheaply charming Ted, whose awful track record with women is so unentertaining that his friend Barney (played by the ever-amazing Neil Patrick Harris, clearly an actor who actually takes the time to try to develop his character) essentially took over the show by Season 3 and is now the only reason most people continue to watch. This episode and all others that try to have the will-they-or-won't-they vibe that Ross and Rachel had on "Friends" is also completely pointless, since we know that Ted and Robin don't end up together (Future Ted already told us so in Season 1).
So Ted starts off the episode by reminiscing with Robin about all the cool stuff they've done together, but like the idiot he is he keeps mixing her up with the countless other girls he's somehow suckered into having a relationship with him. Since he assumes that Robin is a drooling infant who is incapable of understanding context clues, he tries to fool her by telling her he was mixing her up with his sister in these stories. Yes, incest works in the Game of Thrones universe but it's decidedly unsexy everywhere else. Once Ted confesses his clever ruse, it also becomes apparent that he's some kind of ex-girlfriend keepsake hoarder who uses his old relationships like a Rent-A-Center, so half of the things in his apartment used to belong to a girl he conned into sleeping with him consistently. Understandably, Robin wants him to get rid of all that shit.
Later in the story we find out that Robin's five awesome dogs are also keepsakes from old exes (which leads me to believe she's actually Amanda from the Fancy Feast commercial), prompting Ted to somehow think it's reasonable to ask her to get rid of them. Because dogs, as we know, are essentially the same as old throw pillows your 13-year old girlfriend made for you when she was at sewing camp. (Hopefully you were also 13 at the time.)
Oh and also once Robin actually does give her dogs away she comes to Ted's apartment to start over fresh, only to realize that he put all his hoarding shit back in its original place, rendering the entire process completely unnecessary and firmly cementing his place in history as the worst person ever. They have a big fight, then decide to move in together. Isn't that romantic?
I seriously considered never watching the show again.
Why It's Horrible:
Chances are you've seen my previous blog about my dog Frodo, so you understand how I feel about dogs. Also if you're a decent human being you're probably in a similar boat, but whatever. Dogs are amazing. They're comforting, loyal, and kind. They, unlike every boyfriend you'll ever have until you get married, will stick around forever, and they'll never try to emotionally blackmail you into committing more to them like Brian would. Getting rid of one, not to mention five of those amazing companions for a jerkoff boyfriend with a hoarding problem is just sad. Robin is a strong woman with the guts and talent to do anything she wants, and Ted has somehow reduced her to a quivering mess of compliance, trapping her in a world where her only friends are his friends and her only comforts come from sitting on a couch furnished by throw pillows from his old flames (but seriously, who gets pillows from a relationship? How does that work? Did he just steal them from her apartment? It's not like they're sleeping pillows that she might have brought when she was staying over, they're throw pillows. Weird.). If I had a friend whose boyfriend convinced her to get rid of her five dogs because he was an insecure douchebag, I'd spend my days and nights trying to find the best way to keep her from ultimately joining his harem and murdering people at his command.
#2: Maroon 5's "Payphone"
It's summer time, the season of catchy, breezy anthems to blare out of your car speakers with the top down. This summer has some particularly catchy tunes, the greatest of which being Carly Rae Jepson's "Call Me Maybe," a song that has somehow managed to infest the ears of children and adults alike, even people at NPR. Honorable mention includes Nikki Minaj's "Starships," which feels like a schizophrenic journey through three completely different songs with some fun breezy parts in the chorus, and Train's "Drive By," whose catchy summer chorus completely distracts the listener from its stalker lyrics.
One of the most played songs of the summer so far, though, is Maroon 5's "Payphone." A generally well-written pop anthem of heartbreak and sadness, the song details a desperate man's post-breakup thoughts as he reminisces about the good times he and his girlfriend had together before things went badly. He clearly really misses her and wants her back, sadly asking for a second chance with lines like "I know it's hard to remember the people we used to be. It's even harder to picture that you're not here next to me. You say it's too late to make it, but is it too late to try?"and "If happy ever after did exist, I'd wish to be holding you like this." It seems like the breakup was kind of her fault, but Maroon knows that she's only human and he just misses her. Maybe they can go to couple's therapy or something. Who knows.
Then Wiz fucking Khalifa starts rapping and ruins everything. Here's his input on the whole thing:
If their relationship was as beautiful as Maroon claims and he showed up on his ex's doorstep singing that song, taking her for all her faults and still wanting and missing her, there's a decent chance she'd let him in. Maybe she was going through a depression or needed him to communicate more effectively. Maybe she didn't think the magic was still happening. Either way, a romantic and honest song like "Payphone" would sway her into at least trying to talk things out. But fucking Wiz Khalifa ruined everything. He used his friend's attempt at reconciliation to boast about his success and take out his misplaced anger on an already upset woman he's probably never met. Now his bragging has brought up visions of her massive credit card bills (the ones that caused the depression that broke up her relationship) and the father who left her mother when she was a child in favor of fame and fortune. Wiz Khalifa has ruined two people's lives because he's a pompous asshole with no musical talent. What a shame.
In case you've been living somewhere devoid of women for the past year (like in a football stadium or the writer's room for "Two and a Half Men"), Fifty Shades of Grey is the first book in a trilogy about a woman named Anastasia Steele who falls for an incredibly wealthy and good looking but irreparably damaged man named Christian Grey. Anastasia comes off as a desperate attempt to breathe life into a Bella Swan-type character without being nearly as helpless and pathetic, but seeing as how the story is about a girl who becomes entangled with a man whose mother was a crack whore who let her pimp physically torture him as a child, leading to a serious sadism fetish...well, she's gotta be a certain level of pathetic. Or at least naive. The author can't stand this notion, however, so she writes Ana as a kind of psychotic, alternating violently between being paralyzed by Christian's domineering but sexy ways and being really angry that he's being such a prick. There seems to be little middle ground.
By all accounts, it looks like Ana is actually a really cool person before she meets this psycho. She's so beautiful that her permanently friendzoned best friend falls all over himself to do her bidding (her boss falls for her in the second book as well), she's smart and sassy (something that gets Christian so fired up that he likes to spank her if she's too mouthy), and she has a really close relationship with her family. By the end of the second book, however (I can't bring myself to read the third one yet), she's married Christian after only knowing him for a couple of months, she's almost died because one of his old submissives was so obsessed with him that she held Ana at gunpoint and had a psychotic breakdown, and she's officially her stalker husband's employee (see above). She has rare moments of clarity where we see that she does have a good concept of how unbelievably fucked-up this man is, but it's usually clouded over by a fun helicopter ride or some really good "vanilla sex," which he deigns to have with her once in awhile.
As you probably know, I'm a huge admirer of the Cracked website, possibly even to a fault. I get most of my new information AND most of my laughs in the same articles...you tell me who's winning, Reddit posters. You tell me. Anyway, as a nod to my favorite website, I've decided to pay tribute to them by stealing their format to write about something that's been driving me absolutely nuts lately-romantic moments in songs, movies, and commercials that are actually horrible when you stop to pay attention (good to see my on-topic titling skills are top-notch, isn't it?). You see, I'm kind of a romantic. A realistic romantic, anyway, which may also translate to "cynic" if you want to be cynical about it. I love getting flowers and rereading love letters, and as snarky as I am, the idea of literally being swept off my feet gets my girly excitement through the roof (Tom can pick me up, but only when we're standing in water...I traded brains for brawn and as long as we eventually get a house with a swimming pool I have no regrets). At the same time, I'm pretty picky about what romantic moments get me going. For example, I think the classic movie kiss's trademark face-mushing is really awkward. It's like the kind of effects they used in the movie 300, where the characters make a sudden movement which then becomes really slow for the important part, only to speed up immediately afterwards. If someone were to throw themselves on top of me, kiss me by pushing the entire bottom half of their face into mine and holding it there, maybe turning their head from side to side if they're adventurous, then pulling back suddenly, bracing my shoulders and staring at me, I'd be terrified. It's like a bizarre form of urgent CPR, and judging by the way they kissed back then, maybe the chest compressions that follow mouth-to-mouth weren't too far off from classic foreplay, either. But I digress.
Lately it seems some of our modern day versions of romance are even more skewed than before. We're working so hard to prove how equal men and women are, in terms of sex, gender, and power that we often forget that some vestiges of old-fashioned romance should still be around. Like, you know, sweet gestures and loving prose. Wanting equal pay doesn't mean "fuck flowers and chocolate." It means "pay me equally and when your gender screws up, I'd like some flowers please." I happen to think that's reasonable.
#4: The Fancy Feast "Will You Marry Us?" Commercial
My suitemate in college was obsessed with cats. Unfortunately, until recently the hilarious irony of her severe cat allergy forced her to nurture her obsession from a safe distance, so she turned to cat videos to fill the desolate cat-shaped void. One of her favorites is the Fancy Feast wedding series. If you haven't seen it, that's probably for the best. Here's the commercial in question, so you have some context. Don't worry, if it's too much for you to handle I'll describe it in detail in a minute.
First of all, I want to point out that there is, in fact, an extended version of this. They call it a "short film" on YouTube. Let that sink in for a minute.
The "short film" starts off with an unbelievably WASP-y couple walking up the driveway to an immaculately groomed upper middle class residence. The grinning brunette girlfriend stops her nervous boyfriend, who for some reason is wearing a checked pink shirt, a diamond-print pumpkin colored tie, and a tweed jacket all in the same ensemble, to adjust his horrible tie. Instead of reacting the way a normal person would if he were nervous and also walking and his OCD girlfriend stopped him to adjust something firmly wrapped around his throat without warning, he smiles at her and they continue to the door. As the door opens and the brunette's mother opens the door, we also see that he was carrying a bottle of wine. Not only did this girlfriend put her boyfriend's life in danger by grabbing his tie while he was nervously walking up the drive to meet her mother, she put the wine in danger as well. Unbelievable. We see the interior of the house, where a ridiculously fluffy white (of course!) cat comes bounding down the stairs to cheerful Weather Channel music to greet her. After the Stepford Family has dinner, the young couple says their goodbyes and the girlfriend reluctantly relinquishes the cat back to her parents. This act catches the boyfriend's eye, and he gazes at the cat creepily, perhaps reflecting on how much less action he's gotten from his girlfriend since they got together (you just know she's a prude).
We are then treated to a montage of Brian (he just looks like a Brian) taking some serious initiative to single-handedly redo a beautiful house, which is unrealistic both in the sense that a man would get something like that done all by himself in a reasonable amount of time (we once had a do-it-yourself skylight that sat by our dining room table for almost a year before my dad finally asked a friend to help him install it) and that he has such impeccable taste and yet still wants to *spoiler alert* ask a woman to marry him instead of someone named Roger. The montage ends with Brian playfully batting at a blue fuzzy wall mount that is either some kind of exceptionally kinky toy (maybe Brian's interesting after all!) or a cat toy. Given that this is a cat food commercial, the former seems slightly less likely.
Brian leads Amanda into his newly furnished house with his hands over her eyes (at this point we can still hope that the fuzzy blue thing is a toy for grownups) and uncovers them to reveal a tiny fuzzy white (of course!) cat with a pink collar and something kind of terrifying going on with its eyes. Amanda rushes to pick it up and the cheap synthesizer music swells as she reads the inscription on its tag "Will You Marry Us?" Of course the answer is yes because this is a commercial, and the whole thing ends with Brian and Amanda feeding the cat some Fancy Feast as they eat their Chinese food and drink red wine on a packing box, because somehow all of a sudden the commercial is interested in being relevant to normal people.
Why It's Horrible:
Look, I'm clearly no fan of Amanda, but this is emotional blackmail. Brian poured thousands of dollars into renovating this house, then topped it all off by having a tiny, fluffy ball of kitten-an exact replica of her beloved childhood cat-playing on the floor before offering its proposal. Now Amanda is saddled with a house designed completely without any of her input, a cat with some kind of gland problem in its eyes, and a smothering boyfriend who will eventually leverage all this stuff against her in a fight later when she expects him to still do the dishes. It will all end with Amanda crying because she found Brian's receipt from a bar called The White Swallow when she was going through his wallet to get money for Froofie's conjunctivitis. She didn't want this life, you know.
#3: How I Met Your Mother, Robin Gives Away Her Dogs
"How I Met Your Mother" is a current comedy series on CBS about a guy named Ted who tells a several thousand hour story to his children about how he met their mother, going over every girlfriend he's somehow managed to have in his entire adult life. The episode in question ("Stuff") happened in Season Two of the show while Ted was dating a member of his friend group named Robin. Robin is exceptionally cool. A take-charge, independent woman with a taste for cigars and whiskey, she's clearly a horrible match for the constantly bumbling yet somehow cheaply charming Ted, whose awful track record with women is so unentertaining that his friend Barney (played by the ever-amazing Neil Patrick Harris, clearly an actor who actually takes the time to try to develop his character) essentially took over the show by Season 3 and is now the only reason most people continue to watch. This episode and all others that try to have the will-they-or-won't-they vibe that Ross and Rachel had on "Friends" is also completely pointless, since we know that Ted and Robin don't end up together (Future Ted already told us so in Season 1).
So Ted starts off the episode by reminiscing with Robin about all the cool stuff they've done together, but like the idiot he is he keeps mixing her up with the countless other girls he's somehow suckered into having a relationship with him. Since he assumes that Robin is a drooling infant who is incapable of understanding context clues, he tries to fool her by telling her he was mixing her up with his sister in these stories. Yes, incest works in the Game of Thrones universe but it's decidedly unsexy everywhere else. Once Ted confesses his clever ruse, it also becomes apparent that he's some kind of ex-girlfriend keepsake hoarder who uses his old relationships like a Rent-A-Center, so half of the things in his apartment used to belong to a girl he conned into sleeping with him consistently. Understandably, Robin wants him to get rid of all that shit.
Later in the story we find out that Robin's five awesome dogs are also keepsakes from old exes (which leads me to believe she's actually Amanda from the Fancy Feast commercial), prompting Ted to somehow think it's reasonable to ask her to get rid of them. Because dogs, as we know, are essentially the same as old throw pillows your 13-year old girlfriend made for you when she was at sewing camp. (Hopefully you were also 13 at the time.)
Oh and also once Robin actually does give her dogs away she comes to Ted's apartment to start over fresh, only to realize that he put all his hoarding shit back in its original place, rendering the entire process completely unnecessary and firmly cementing his place in history as the worst person ever. They have a big fight, then decide to move in together. Isn't that romantic?
I seriously considered never watching the show again.
Why It's Horrible:
Chances are you've seen my previous blog about my dog Frodo, so you understand how I feel about dogs. Also if you're a decent human being you're probably in a similar boat, but whatever. Dogs are amazing. They're comforting, loyal, and kind. They, unlike every boyfriend you'll ever have until you get married, will stick around forever, and they'll never try to emotionally blackmail you into committing more to them like Brian would. Getting rid of one, not to mention five of those amazing companions for a jerkoff boyfriend with a hoarding problem is just sad. Robin is a strong woman with the guts and talent to do anything she wants, and Ted has somehow reduced her to a quivering mess of compliance, trapping her in a world where her only friends are his friends and her only comforts come from sitting on a couch furnished by throw pillows from his old flames (but seriously, who gets pillows from a relationship? How does that work? Did he just steal them from her apartment? It's not like they're sleeping pillows that she might have brought when she was staying over, they're throw pillows. Weird.). If I had a friend whose boyfriend convinced her to get rid of her five dogs because he was an insecure douchebag, I'd spend my days and nights trying to find the best way to keep her from ultimately joining his harem and murdering people at his command.
#2: Maroon 5's "Payphone"
It's summer time, the season of catchy, breezy anthems to blare out of your car speakers with the top down. This summer has some particularly catchy tunes, the greatest of which being Carly Rae Jepson's "Call Me Maybe," a song that has somehow managed to infest the ears of children and adults alike, even people at NPR. Honorable mention includes Nikki Minaj's "Starships," which feels like a schizophrenic journey through three completely different songs with some fun breezy parts in the chorus, and Train's "Drive By," whose catchy summer chorus completely distracts the listener from its stalker lyrics.
One of the most played songs of the summer so far, though, is Maroon 5's "Payphone." A generally well-written pop anthem of heartbreak and sadness, the song details a desperate man's post-breakup thoughts as he reminisces about the good times he and his girlfriend had together before things went badly. He clearly really misses her and wants her back, sadly asking for a second chance with lines like "I know it's hard to remember the people we used to be. It's even harder to picture that you're not here next to me. You say it's too late to make it, but is it too late to try?"and "If happy ever after did exist, I'd wish to be holding you like this." It seems like the breakup was kind of her fault, but Maroon knows that she's only human and he just misses her. Maybe they can go to couple's therapy or something. Who knows.
Then Wiz fucking Khalifa starts rapping and ruins everything. Here's his input on the whole thing:
Man fuck that shit
I'll be out spending all this money while you sitting round
Wondering why it wasn't you who came up from nothing
Made it from the bottom
Now when you see me I'm stunning
And all of my cars start with the push up a button
Telling me the chances I blew up or whatever you call it
Switched the number to my phone
So you never could call it
Don't need my name on my show
You can tell it I'm ballin'
Swish, what a shame could have got picked
Had a really good game but you missed your last shot
So you talk about who you see at the top
Or what you could've saw
But sad to say it's over for
Phantom pulled up valet open doors
Wiz like go away, got what you was looking for
Now ask me who they want
So you can go and take that little piece of shit with you
As you can see, Wiz is not interested in following any kind of linear storyline here, he just wants to use Mr. 5's pain as a platform to tell his own ex that he's better than she is. Maroon is trying to outline his pain plaintively and have a constructive conversation with the woman he clearly still loves, then mistakenly gives his friend Wiz the phone to add his two cents. Wiz, however, is not on the same page as his friend and would rather brag about his expensive cars and put this random woman down for not being as famous and rich as he is. He quickly gets into rant mode and sees this woman as an outlet for the emotional pain caused by his previous ex, rubbing it in her face that she can't even call him to apologize because he changed his number (why is Maroon using a payphone when this is clearly set at a point in time where the use of cell phones is acknowledged? Maybe he's actually kind of a deadbeat. That would explain a lot.). Then he refers to himself in the third person and tells her to go away and take that little piece of shit with her. I have to wonder, is she dating a smaller person now or is he somehow talking about his bastard son? These are the only two options. Either way, he's being really insensitive.
Why It's Horrible:
If their relationship was as beautiful as Maroon claims and he showed up on his ex's doorstep singing that song, taking her for all her faults and still wanting and missing her, there's a decent chance she'd let him in. Maybe she was going through a depression or needed him to communicate more effectively. Maybe she didn't think the magic was still happening. Either way, a romantic and honest song like "Payphone" would sway her into at least trying to talk things out. But fucking Wiz Khalifa ruined everything. He used his friend's attempt at reconciliation to boast about his success and take out his misplaced anger on an already upset woman he's probably never met. Now his bragging has brought up visions of her massive credit card bills (the ones that caused the depression that broke up her relationship) and the father who left her mother when she was a child in favor of fame and fortune. Wiz Khalifa has ruined two people's lives because he's a pompous asshole with no musical talent. What a shame.
#1: Fifty Shades of Grey
In case you've been living somewhere devoid of women for the past year (like in a football stadium or the writer's room for "Two and a Half Men"), Fifty Shades of Grey is the first book in a trilogy about a woman named Anastasia Steele who falls for an incredibly wealthy and good looking but irreparably damaged man named Christian Grey. Anastasia comes off as a desperate attempt to breathe life into a Bella Swan-type character without being nearly as helpless and pathetic, but seeing as how the story is about a girl who becomes entangled with a man whose mother was a crack whore who let her pimp physically torture him as a child, leading to a serious sadism fetish...well, she's gotta be a certain level of pathetic. Or at least naive. The author can't stand this notion, however, so she writes Ana as a kind of psychotic, alternating violently between being paralyzed by Christian's domineering but sexy ways and being really angry that he's being such a prick. There seems to be little middle ground.
In order to have a relationship with Christian, Ana has to sign a non-disclosure about their sex life (something that really should have sent her packing immediately), and is then asked to review and eventually sign an agreement to be Christian's sexual submissive, following an incredibly detailed set of rules that essentially govern her entire life, down to what she's allowed to eat and how she's allowed to cut her hair. She has to be ready to have sex with him any time, anywhere, and has to partake in whatever kinky games he comes up with in his Red Room of Pain (I'm not making this up. This book is part of the fastest selling series of all time. It beat Harry fucking Potter. HARRY FUCKING POTTER). Ana is a virgin, though, so Christian agrees to have "vanilla sex" with her first so that she doesn't suffer the indignity of having her first time suspended from the ceiling while he drips hot wax on her nipples. How considerate.
Christian also buys her a laptop and a Blackberry, so that he can get in touch with her at all times, becoming verbally abusive when she doesn't answer (he eventually buys her company so that she can take work off to have sex with him whenever he wants, and so that he can keep tabs on her at any time). Ana is so helpless that she has to learn how to use email to communicate with him, which is essentially all she does at work. He also buys her the same car he's bought each of his submissives in the past, so now she's fully part of the club. Somehow Ana still manages to fall in love with him even though he's a terrifying control freak stalker with no sense of boundaries, but she leaves him at the end of the book after he spanks her really hard and she has a moment of clarity. Maybe he rattled something back into place in her head? I don't know.
Why It's Horrible:
By all accounts, it looks like Ana is actually a really cool person before she meets this psycho. She's so beautiful that her permanently friendzoned best friend falls all over himself to do her bidding (her boss falls for her in the second book as well), she's smart and sassy (something that gets Christian so fired up that he likes to spank her if she's too mouthy), and she has a really close relationship with her family. By the end of the second book, however (I can't bring myself to read the third one yet), she's married Christian after only knowing him for a couple of months, she's almost died because one of his old submissives was so obsessed with him that she held Ana at gunpoint and had a psychotic breakdown, and she's officially her stalker husband's employee (see above). She has rare moments of clarity where we see that she does have a good concept of how unbelievably fucked-up this man is, but it's usually clouded over by a fun helicopter ride or some really good "vanilla sex," which he deigns to have with her once in awhile.
Not only is this whole concept insulting for strong women in a romantic setting, it's insulting to people who have creative sex lives. Let's be real, most of us have a fantasy or two (sorry Mom and Dad, I know you're reading this), and when you have a respectful partner whom you trust, that stuff is awesome. But this book, which a lot of critics rightfully point out is opening more dialogue on the subject of less traditional sex, makes it seem perfectly okay for a woman to exist as an outlet for a man's childhood traumas at the expense of her comfort and sexual security. The lines between sex and love are so blurred from the beginning in this series that any woman the protagonist's age (only 22 or so) who might be thinking about trying something new is encouraged to engage in this emotional roller coaster and constantly forgive his physically and mentally abusive and controlling behavior. Christian is bewildered that Ana freaked out when he beat the shit out of her because he'd told her to use a safe word like three weeks ago when she read the contract. He has no concept of what a normal person feels or needs, and he obviously isn't connected enough to her to notice when she's in serious enough pain to leave the relationship. Furthermore, their sex life will be forever shaped by his damages, even though he was considerate enough to forgo having her sign the contract. They started off their intimacy with him begrudgingly having normal sex so he could get to the kinky stuff next. This is a recipe for a thirteen hooker gang bang honeymoon if I've ever heard of one.
But whatever, he's got a yacht, a great body, and he's damaged, which is interesting enough to make her give up her entire personality. Girl power!
T.
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