How sweet and hon­ourable it is to live in this age of equal­i­ty. A lot of snide remarks have been made about the qual­i­ty of the prose employed in the 50 Shades series. And most of those have, sur­prise sur­prise, been prof­fered by men. 

The world of lit­er­a­ture has long been an enclave patrolled by men. What are they afraid of that they should so assid­u­ous­ly deny women entry there? Why should­n’t they too sup with them there at the high table?

I con­grat­u­late E L James for tak­ing one of the last bas­tions of male chau­vin­ism and demand­ing that women be treat­ed as equals there. And so, to that long and illus­tri­ous list of are­nas where already this is true, we can now add the cat­e­go­ry of Care­ful­ly Mar­ket­ed Air­port Novel.

50 Shades is, impres­sive­ly, every bit as resplen­dent­ly unread­able as any­thing by Dan Brown. Each sen­tence seems to exist in a vac­u­um, relat­ed but periph­er­al­ly to any­thing that came before or will fol­low after. Rather like the one I began this piece with above.

It’s as if a Mar­t­ian were giv­en the task of writ­ing a book for humans, but instead of being allowed to vis­it Earth or in any way research what life on this plan­et con­sists of, all they were allowed to use as their basis for writ­ing it was, well, a Dan Brown book.

Its plot­ting is as lead­en as Jef­frey Archer’s, its prose as painful as John Grisham’s would lat­er become, and it’s as cyn­i­cal­ly man­u­fac­tured as any­thing pro­duced by the con­glom­er­ate that is James Patterson.

Not only that, but it’s all of that all at once. E L James has man­aged to take all the most offen­sive traits from the most egre­gious male repro­bates and fuse them all togeth­er in one fetid, fae­cal franchise.

Well I say, bra­vo. Here’s one more realm where women have now man­aged to sink every bit as low as their male counterparts. 

They can now tri­umphant­ly lit­ter their work-based ban­ter with un-nec­es­sary exple­tives as thought­less­ly as any of their male col­leagues. They proud­ly drown their week­ends in an obliv­ion of alco­hol, and are as com­fort­able uri­nat­ing in pub­lic and cak­ing the streets in vom­it as they stag­ger home after­wards as the best of us.

And at long last, to tag rug­by and Olympic box­ing, they can add the pro­duc­ing of the most cyn­i­cal­ly con­ceived and inept­ly writ­ten sub-soft porn. I hes­i­tate to call it excre­men­tal­ly bad, as that at least sug­gests reju­ve­na­tion in the form of manure.

So con­grat­u­la­tions. All we have to do now is to some­how get you girls in to the upper tiers of Wall Street and your jour­ney will be com­plete. Well done. And wel­come to the club.

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