You know, boy meets girl, boy suggests girl spend three days a week in his Red Room of Pain. He wants to dominate her, not only in the bedroom, but outside it, too, and even prescribes what food Anastasia can eat and how she should maintain her pubic hair. Grey is tantalised by the innocent and virginal Steele Steele is beguiled by this reserved, inscrutable Adonis.īut it turns out that Grey doesn’t do vanilla sex, and instead presents the perpetually lip-biting Steele with a contract to become his sexual submissive. (It won’t take long sophisticated literature, this is not.) The book opens with college student Anastasia Steele interviewing billionaire Christian Grey for a student newspaper. What I wanted to know before diving in was, does 50 Shades still read as a provocative, taboo-busting page-turner? Or has it become a relic of a very different time?įirst, a quick recap for anyone who hasn’t read the book. Forget putting out a fragrance: Stars including Gwyneth Paltrow, Lily Allen, Cara Delevingne and Dakota Johnson (who incidentally starred in the 50 Shades movies) have released their own sex toys. You can now buy a vibrator when you stock up on sunscreen at Priceline. Today, ‘Popular with Women’ is one of the most viewed categories on Pornhub. Because the world has irrefutably moved on since 50 Shades was released. Mind-numbing boredom sets in.Īlso, curiosity. To be fair, criticism was widespread, with journalist Maureen Dowd opining that “James writes like a Brontë devoid of talent.”īut things change. (It was released in paperback in 2012.)Īt the time the book came out – and as the hysteria and hype around the book ballooned – I sniffily refused to read it, clinging to some sort of illogical literary pretension. This year marks 10 years since EL James’ (real name Erika Mitchell) book made the jump from the murky corners of Internet fandom and was first released in e-book form by Australian publisher Amanda Hayward. $1.8 billion: The combined gross of the movie adaptations.Įven now, none of these numbers truly convey the wonder and the mystery of how a work that started life in the literary gutter, as Twilight fan fiction, became a cultural phenomenon, a zeitgeist-shifting chart-topper that was the fastest selling book in history. Fifty: How many languages it has been translated into (including Mongolian).
That’s the number of books sold in the trilogy.
If you want to talk about Fifty Shades of Grey we’ve got to start with the numbers: 150 million.
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