![]() ![]() This is probably the spot to say that for the sake of this assignment I made a good faith effort to read these books at my city library, but I wasn't self-punishing enough actually to finish them and had to stop the agony halfway into the second volume. ![]() She who has done so much to help debase our culture should stand revealed. I'm made distinctly queasy by uttering that sacral American surname when referring to this empress of inanity, so let’s use her real name, Erika Leonard. Illouz writes that “more than ten million copies were sold in the United States in a period of six weeks … and the first volume set the record as the fastest-selling paperback of all time, surpassing even the Harry Potter series.” A great many women indeed have been living it up while dumbing it down, titillated by a charlatan amorist who goes by the nom de plume of E.L. The numbers Eva Illouz reveals in her new book on this cultural phenom, Hard-Core Romance, are shocking to those of us who can’t quite comprehend how these things happen: The Fifty Shades trilogy has sold in excess of 40 million copies globally, 32 million of which were purchased right here in our America. With their drooling enthusiasm for Fifty Shades, millions of dreamy-hearted women have chaperoned a cultural phenomenon-one that amply shows how far taste can be removed from hunger-just as millions of frail-headed men have made Tom Clancy a household name, Clancy's bestsellers being a breed of poli-sci porn for gruff guys. But then along came these blasted books and wrecked his American right to glut and sloth. He was a cardiac catastrophe in waiting, someone who’d been perfectly content to pass his evenings with TV and pizza. It was unclear whether or not the wife had acquired the battery-operated sex utensils employed in the trilogy, but it couldn’t have been clearer that her porcine husband was being put through a nightly, ghastly regimen of sexual aerobics, a regimen for which he was neither physically nor emotionally suited. As the wife read aloud her favorite lines from one of the books-sentences, as you know, of such galactic ineptitude it was hard to believe a primate could have written them-the husband sat beside her on the sofa, blinking at the camera with a look of the most shell-shocked capitulation. According to the missus, their sagging sex life had just been buttressed by her embrace of the Fifty Shades trilogy, and the prevailing mood of this piece, I recall, was one of willing but abject exploitation. At the height of the moronic craze over Fifty Shades of Grey, I happened upon a newscast showing a “lifestyle” story in which a camera crew had marauded into the home of a painfully white-bread couple from some nook of New England. ![]()
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