Fifty Shades of Gray

I saw a woman on BART the other day reading Fifty Shades of Gray. She was middle-aged, thick in the middle with deep marionette lines. She wore her eyeliner thick with little cat tails at the corners and her hair in that crispy finger-wave style with straight bangs. As she read, she developed the strangest little smile, just a hint of curling at the corners of her lips, and it grew as she read. It looked like she was fighting it, but not hard.

I hate that damned book. I’ve said it before and I’m sure I’ll have occasion to say it again as the motherfucking thing is still a bestseller. It was kind of cute seeing someone enjoy a book that much. I experienced the cuteness… and then a stab of revulsion at watching this woman wiggle in her chair reading porn. Then, kind of cute again thinking that we liberated American women are free to smirk and read porn on the train and tart ourselves up and wear short skirts and tell people to go fuck themselves. We are free to work at jobs outside the home, earn and bank our own money, and then spend that money on poorly written pornography that started out in life as Twilight fanfic before becoming a vomitous juggernaut of verbal paucity and fame.

Feminism for the win.

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