Yet Another Fifty Shades of Grey Review

This is my review's easy-access table of contents, with sort of short-and-sweet sum-ups for each chapter. Each individual chapter review has a lot more than what's in here, of course, but this is the tl;dr version.

Hope you enjoy it as well as the links to the long versions!

Introduction: "After all, I'm a firm believer that you can't really have an opinion of something that's worth anything if you don't at least try it."

Quotes: "This kinda smacks of meanness—sorry—but people found it funny and the venting process enabled me to be able to get as far into the book as I did...for whatever that was worth."

Chapter One: "However, my biggest complaint, has to be that, for all James’s effort to build Grey up as a Dom, Ana is no sub."

Chapter Two: "She wants the Christian Grey life-sized doll that she can sit in her shelf and look at for hours on end. She wants the Tiger Beat poster of him that she can hang on her bedroom ceiling."

Chapter Three: "She's one of those emotionally unstable messes that bear traps people with her hotness. And the only reason why she can't see it is because she IS crazy. It is the ONLY explanation."

Chapter Four: "For a while, it was really bothering me that the one kinkster, Grey, in this story was a manipulative, secretive, abusive predator while all the vanilla guys, Jose and Paul, we such nice, normal, sociable guys. Well, James took care of that little problem in this chapter."

Chapter Five: "This is why—I'm sorry—I believe that vanilla people really shouldn't write kink. Kink is all a mind set. It's a complicated, complex mental game of make-believe that is terribly hard to understand from the outside looking in." 

Chapter Six: "James takes the very thing that BDSM stands upon, freely given and fully informed consent, and knocks it on its ass. James steals our first and last legitimacy, the one thing we can use in our defense against all the prejudiced cries of criminal deviancy and depravity. Without it, we are the worst images that the vanilla public as a whole fears. Without it, we become the very thing we—as kinksters—fear most and fight so stridently against. Without that basic and most fundamental element, we become the stereotypes of the rapists and the raped. Nothing more than the helplessly abused and their demonic abusers. This is NOT who we are."

Chapter Seven: "She’s trying to avoid the bad press the word 'sadist' has gotten in the mainstream. She wants to say that Grey is kinky—so she gives him all the toys and tools and appropriately furnished space—as that seems the easiest, most obvious, least complicated, and least complex way to say so. But she doesn’t want him to be THAT KIND of kinky, so she vehemently says he’s not a sadist, despite that her easy, obvious, uncomplicated, and simple way of expressing his kink kinda screams that he is."

Safeworded Out: "I'm not too proud to admit it: the book won. It got me—a very proud and high-tolerance, pain-slut masochist—to cry 'Communist Manifesto' at the top of my lungs. Like I'd said before I could not—for my own sanity, just couldn't—finish this book."

My 50 Shades Film Review: "The movie may have been boring as hell. But it's a fascinating social critique that everyone is still calling Grey abusive and Ana a victim in the film when the movie goes out of its way to show that the opposite is true. [...] Movie Ana isn’t stupid. She got into this relationship with her eyes open. She knew what he wanted. Knew what he was asking of her. Knew what all that meant. And entered the relationship anyway. Then, when the romance doesn’t go the way she wants, she uses the kink they consensually did as a stick to psychologically beat him with."