My editor really wanted me to talk about 50 Shades of Grey this week because everyone and their grandmother is fawning over that pile of shit, so here’s the break down:
50 Shades of Grey is a complete misrepresentation of BDSM. It was written by some middle-aged, British Twilight fan who obviously has never engaged in BDSM behavior before and used her stupid, poorly written book as a means of exploring her own fantasies of ownership and aggression under the umbrella of “BDSM” (Come on, guys. Twilight was nothing but metaphor for female purity and virginity masquerading as a novel and later, a movie with that actor who looks like a giant foot with hair and eyes).
Why was our entire nation, including full grown adults, obsessed with a romantic novel with the morality of a Disney cartoon? Oh right, 95 per cent of this world is stupid. To conclude, 50 Shades of Grey is about as important to BDSM culture as my pinky toe nail I just clipped off into the toilet, and it belongs down the toilet bowl with my toe nails and feces.
Now, onto what I actually wanted to write about.
For the last few weeks, my husband has been out of town, which has allowed me plenty of time to read, go to YouTube school and more importantly, venture out into bar culture without him.
I realized that, last year, the only time I spent in bars was either on tour (so not actually in them at all just on stage or in a hidden green room) or out with my husband and our friends back in LA. It was rare I went to a bar with just one girlfriend (or alone) and had a drink (or seven.)
Last night, I went to a bar with a good friend of mine and tried to enjoy a nice evening of tequila and shit talk, but at the end of the night we were interrupted by a dimwit who tried his luck and reminded me it must be very pitiful to be a straight man who is inherently cocky and almost always wrong in his verbal choices.
We’re at a transformative time for gender. Mother Nature is no longer calling all the shots (she’s still the Queen Bitch) but, because we have quickly begun to perfect this thing called technology and science it fucks with her order. Books and popular culture debate whether it’s “the end of men”. Whether the fact that as we North Americans move to an economy that values technological skills rather than manual labor, the work force has changed, thus family roles and gender as we have known them have, too. Not to mention, that our archaic, rigid definitions of sexual orientation have multiplied from two to a dozen.
You can be transgender or demisexual or married legally to your car (we refer to that as “objectùm-sexual”) and that’s totally OK – for some.
The only people that are really bummed out by all the visibility of otherwise marginal orientations are those who think of gender equality as a zero-sum game. It’s not, but I digress.
Hook-up culture is a vague purgatory that both plagues and benefits us all. Courting is not what your grandparents remember. Shit done changed (and we know it’s far, far from perfect), but still remains the doltish attempts from men to hit on women with the intelligence of a shoulder check. Except, now it’s not 1960 and women can turn around and say, “Back off, Warchild. Seriously.” We don’t have to pretend we’re blessed to get male attention.
Last night when a man tried his best to intervene on my friend and I’s conversation to “get to know us” by asking us first our names and how old we were (yes, he actually did that), we didn’t feel obligated to blush, lie and fake flattery. We told him exactly why his question is straight up stupid and maybe he learned something.
Then again, some shit ain’t changed: I had a random, drunken creep outside the bar (who I had not even spoken with) try to open the back door of my Volvo and get inside. Twice.
In short, 50 Shades of Grey is verbal feces and it’s a wiggly world. What do you think?
• EMAIL MISH: Send Mish your own sex questions and queries to [email protected]
