50 Shades Shadier: Chapter 17 part 2

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Ana gets promoted to Hyde's job. She and Christian meet with Christian's psychiatrist, and then they drive somewhere. 

Guys! I get it! We're all watching the World Cup of soccer, not reading about this book, which is the World Cup of terrible books. I respect that. So please, you know. After the thing is finished and Costa Rica has won it all (Editor's note: we like underdogs!) come back and catch up on Ana and her adventures or whatever. I wrote this? But I didn't like, edit it? So there you go! This is old-skool blogging! No proofreading! So who knows what I said this week! I don't! I'm like EL. I just write it! I don't pay any attention to it!

But at least I got through this terrible chapter! Lucky me! And lucky you! Wait no. None of us are lucky. We're just whatever. Anyway here's this terrible book!

Where were we?

Our story thus far:

50 Shades Shadier: Chapter 17 part 1

How can anyone do anything at all during the World Cup? I obviously don't know, since I haven't done anything at all. Instead I'll just have to leave you with some bits from the beginning of Chapter 17 that I was working on before the World Cup started. Maybe when this is all done I'll be productive again but I'm just being optimistic. I cannot say for certain.

Somebody sent me a super-nice email about this blog which provided me with a considerable amount of momentum. However, even that is starting to wear off, and now I'm just hoping to be able to post something before I fall asleep. #Discipline.

Wait so where were we?

Our story thus far:

50 Shades Shadier: Chapter 16

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Ana narrowly escapes being sexually assaulted by her boss and Christian thinks it's all her fault. 

Chapter 15 ended with a cliffhanger, or as near a thing to a cliffhanger as we’re likely to ever see in this series: Ana, alone in the break room at work, is confronted by her skeezy boss who gives every indication that he intends to rape her.  Dramatic stuff!

Only, not really. The central conflict, to the extent that there is a central conflict in this book, is the conflict between Ana’s boring life and her new life with Christian. Although Christian is the new secret owner of Seattle Independent Publishing and thus, Ana’s boss’s boss’s boss or whatever, when Ana got the job at SIP, she did so on her own merit. So however things play out at SIP is unlikely to have much bearing on that central conflict between life with Christian and life without Christian. And because Jack Hyde, Ana’s boss, is separate from the central conflict, I doubt many readers actually read Chapter 15 and then worried that Ana was actually going to be assaulted. EL is a terrible writer, yes. But if Ana were to be raped by her boss in Chapter 16, the entire story would be overwhelmed, right? I mean, how could we be convinced to give a shit about CG’s birthday party or José’s plan to deliver photos in the aftermath of a traumatic assault carried suffered by the narrator? 

Right so EL’s bad, but she’s not that bad. She’s not going to introduce something so big that it derails the boring back-and-forth she’s got going between Ana and CG, so when I start reading Chapter 16, I’m not thinking, “Holy shit! Is this actually going to happen?” Instead, I’m wondering how, exactly, EL is going to keep the thing from happening that seems like it’s about to happen. 

Here’s how, after the jump:

50 Shades Shadier: Chapter 15

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Ana's boss gets super creepy. 

Eight chapters left in this book, and then I'm going to take a break from this shit. If it's insane to keep doing the same thing and expect different results, what do you call it when you keep doing the same thing, knowing that it's going to keep being terrible? Masochism?

Whatever. I hate this book and I hate it all the more now that I can't help but wonder what a man like Christian Grey would be like if he didn't have quite so much money, if he couldn't afford quite the lavish lifestyle that's so central to his ability to arrange for women to come and get beaten by him at his convenience. Would he be writing manifestos and posting videos of himself on youtube? Running over people in his Audi? Because let's be real: his wealth keeps CG from looking like an obvious sociopath. It's not fair, but it's true: if your sex dungeon is actually your mom's garage, somehow that looks worse than a dedicated sex dungeon in your billionaire bachelor pad. "Well, he spent so much money on this! He must be safe!" Right? I mean that doesn't actually make any sense but it's also kind of what's happening here, right? It's like the line between "crazy" and "eccentric."

Anyway. I mean we've made it this far. Might as well continue!

Just before I left New Orleans a dear friend and I went to Creole Creamery and took the Tchoupitoulas Challenge. That is, we each tried to eat the entire contents of a bucket filled with eight scoops of ice cream, eight toppings, and something like a half-can of whipped cream. The interior of the place celebrates those ice cream gladiators who've successfully eaten that much ice cream with photos and a plaque. Makes it seem like they really want you to eat all that ice cream! "Please! Gorge yourself on $25 worth of ice cream! Gorge yourself and be immortal!"

But in practice, when you say you're going to do it, the people assembling your ice cream bucket just see you as a future puker they're going to have to deal with, and they hate you the most. They do everything they can to dissuade you from this fool's errand. My friend did it. He ate the entire thing! And thus is a better human being than I am. (Editor's note: He is a superior human being, but not for any reasons related to ice cream.) I failed. I failed so hard and fast that it honestly shocked me. The main problem is this: Creole Creamery makes wonderful ice cream! But when you mix it all together like that, it just tastes like sugary garbage and your body says, "What the fuck are you doing to me?" And then tries to go into a coma so as to keep your brain from making any more mistakes. I'm confident that I could eat two pints--one quart!--of ice cream right now and I'm not even hungry. But you mix it all up like that and it's just goddamn impossible and I had the good sense to quit well before I hit the halfway point because I knew that the people who built my ice cream bucket were right.

I'm well past the halfway point here. I'm staring into this melting bucket of eight-different, poorly-chosen flavors, my body rebelling against my brain, and yet I carry on. Because who knows why.

Wait where were we?

50 Shades Shadier: Chapter 14

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Ana and Christian are sad about things. 

Hey so after I wrote this, Elliot Rodgers murdered a bunch of people because women weren't blushing and forgetting to breathe around him the way Ana Steele does around Christian Grey.

I'd like to say more but I haven't managed to put together anything sensible yet, but I feel like I ought to mention it, particularly since last week, we read about CG's ex, Leila, who almost shot Ana and and CG.

EL James misrepresents the world on basically every page in large and small ways. It doesn't matter that EL, for instance, doesn't understand how popular mac and cheese is in Seattle. But I think it does matter that the big "danger" in this book is an unstable ex-girlfriend. It matters because even though Christian exhibits nearly all the textbook traits of an abuser, EL creates straw-men in order to make CG look better by comparison. José refuses to accept "no" in the first book. And now Ana's boss is a super-creep. And then Leila shows up in Ana's house with a gun.

But of course, statistically, Christian has always been the biggest danger to Ana. Because he's the boyfriend! And it's always, always, always the boyfriend. It's basically never not the boyfriend. Almost all women who are victims of gun violence are attacked by an intimate partner, not a stranger. Women who are shot in their own homes, like Ana almost was, are virtually always shot by a partner or former partner. In the US, three women are murdered by an intimate partner every day, on average. Women get killed by their boyfriends, not by their boyfriends' ex-girlfriends. Women get killed by men.

I bring this up because Christian Grey is exactly what a dangerous misogynist thinks he sees when he looks in the mirror--a clever man who knows what's best for women. A "gentleman" ready to treat a woman like a piece of property--but for her own good! A "catch" who's not like the other guys! No not at all! I bring this up because I find this entire shitty book indicative of a culture that tells men that women are things to be possessed.  And that is a mindset that gets people killed.

We're not starting out with a lot of jokes, I'm afraid. But sometimes this shit just isn't that funny.

There are some jokes after the break, I swear.

On to Chapter 14!

50 Shades Shadier: Chapter 13

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Leila doesn't shoot Ana. Ana has some drinks with Ethan. 

I’m typing this from the bar at a bar. (Editor’s note: meta!) It took me ten minutes to screw up the courage to be the one weird jagoff typing at a computer and I mean, what’s the big deal? All these other jagoffs are looking at their phones, so is it really that weird for me to put my set up my Compaq Presario tower? I mean I had to get somebody to run an extra extension cord, but I really don’t see what the big deal is. 

I worked way too hard at that joke. I’m sorry. I’m just trying to kill some time before I have to start in on this chapter. Because let’s be real: it starts with one of the absolute most terrible starts of all time. I mean check this out: 

Holy fuck.
She’s here, gazing at me with an unnerving blank expression, holding a gun. My subconscious swoons into a dead faint, and I don’t think even smelling salts will bring her back.

Right? I mean look at that. Do I even have to say anything about it at this point? I don’t, right? You’re right there with me. I mean here’s my one question: who administers the smelling salts to subconscious? Inner goddess? I don’t even know what’s happening anymore.

So, let’s talk about what’s happening anymore:

Our story thus far:

50 Shades Shadier: Chapter 12 part 2

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Ana goes back to her apartment and Leila is there with a gun. 

The other day, I took a call at work and helped someone make a tour reservation. Pretty often people inquiring about tours will describe their party like this: "x adults and y children," perhaps presuming that the children will receive a discount. They will not! Because that would encourage more of them to attend, and perhaps create the false impression that the tour is aimed at children, and it isn't.

The reason I bring this up is as follows: I let the caller know that the tour is recommended only for children ages seven an older, but that that was a recommendation and not a rule. But in the midst of a busy day, hurrying through this explanation, I now realize that rather than using the perfectly good word "rule" I used the 50 Shades nonsense phrase "hard limit" and I find this deeply embarrassing. Fortunately, there's still some chance that the caller hadn't read the book, and even if she had, there's that chance that she might've given me the benefit of the doubt and thought to herself, "Oh, there's no way that this nice man answering the phones at a chocolate factory sees any connection between this simple phrase and Ana Steele, Seattle's most famous fictional resident."

Fingers crossed! is all I'm saying.

So. We're nearly halfway through this book, and, by extension, halfway through the trilogy. We're going to get a bit of movement in one of our subplots at the end of this chapter, but let's be real: Leila is a subplot. She didn't even appear in the first book, except for in the form of a few words in a hushed phone conversation in the final chapter. The resolution we seek is between Ana and Christian--we want them to either break up, or we want CG to stop being such a dick. Halfway through this mess, he's ceased to be a dick all the time but is still a real dick lots of the time, and I see no evidence that he'll ever totally change his dickish ways.

But whatever--I bring this up because even when EL does some things that feel like plot, it's not really plot, because it has nothing to do with the Ana's character, and she's the protagonist. It's just some stuff that happens while she happens to be in the neighborhood. Plot, if it's any good at all, has to have a specific relationship to our protagonist. The best plots resonate with the weaknesses of a protagonist and give the protagonist an opportunity to grow in order to overcome those weaknesses. Ana has so many weaknesses that I think she might just be a lost cause. Oh well!

So where were we?