I made and ate barbecue chicken for supper.\u00a0\u00a0As I write this, several hours have passed since supper.\u00a0 Yet, I am not a chicken, barbecue or otherwise.<\/p>\n
It's been cooking show reality TV night at my house which is\u00a0a family event.\u00a0 We all watch Hell's Kitchen and my kids and I watch Master Chef.\u00a0 Yeah, verily,\u00a0 chefs aplenty have paraded across my TV screen.\u00a0\u00a0I've watched them and enjoyed all of Gordon Ramsay's antics.\u00a0 Yet, anyone who has ever eaten my cooking will tell you that I'm no chef, certainly not of\u00a0the master variety. \u00a0<\/p>\n
Presently I'm reading Brenda Novak's historical romance boxed set. It contains 2 books:\u00a0 \"Of Noble Birth\" and \"Honor Bound.\"\u00a0 I'm reading the 1st One - \"Of Noble Birth.\"\u00a0 It's about\u00a0a son who should be heir to a dukedom who was rejected at birth because he was born with a birth defect - a deformed arm.\u00a0 The son becomes a pirate and he's just abducted a seamstress whom he believes to be his half-sister. (She's not of course.)\u00a0\u00a0 Yes, I'm reading it and I'm enjoying it but you know what?\u00a0 I'm not a seamstress, heir to a dukedom or a pirate.\u00a0\u00a0 Go figure.<\/p>\n
What's even more amazing is that the book I finished right before I started Brenda's excellent boxed set was \"Fifty Shades of Grey\" - the whole trilogy.\u00a0 Despite that, my hubby is not in the back building a red room of pain.\u00a0 I haven't turned into a submissive who wants to be beaten.\u00a0 Maybe there's something wrong with me?\u00a0 I mean, I read the book and I enjoyed the book so by some theories recently espoused by arch-feminists - I should be picking out handcuffs and matching riding crops by now.\u00a0<\/p>\n
That's the theme of a recent piece I read in the UK Independent<\/a>, entitled \"Do Women Really Want To Be So Submissive\" by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown.\u00a0 The publication\u00a0 is from the home country of Erika Leonard a\/k\/a EL James, the author\u00a0 of \"Fifty Shades.\"\u00a0 Ms. Brown thinks that\u00a0in creating the book Ms. Leonard \"has cannily exploited \"post-feminist\" confusion and sexual restiveness in a period of plenty.\"<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Ms. Brown calls the \"Fifty Shades\" narrative\u00a0\"so corny you couldn't caricature it\" and she describes the S&M parts as \"grubby and foul.\"\u00a0 She doesn't describe the \"vanilla\" sex that occurred more often than the S&M stuff, mainly, I suppose, because it wouldn't support her condemnation of the work.\u00a0 And boy, howdy, does Ms. Brown condemn the work.\u00a0 She says:\u00a0<\/p>\n James has sheathed hard porn in a soft summer wrap, sold fantasies of sexual subjugation to vacuous yummie mummies and middle-class female singletons who are clueless about its implications. Living comfortable lives, they must pursue vicarious excitement by reading about pain, and playing at it in their bedrooms. Sales of bondage equipment have shot up since the book came out.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n \u00a0Ms. Brown says <\/a>consideration of the book's impact is justified because \"the phenomenal spread of this bonk-buster takes it out of that intimate space and should make us think about the social and political landscape, the victories and failures of feminism, and the dissonance between female equality achieved and equality willingly surrendered by females.\"<\/p>\n Brown compares the success and impact of \"Fifty Shades\" with that of \"The Story of O,\" an S&M book published in 1954.\u00a0 Brown thinks that \"O\" helped push back post-war feminists, motivating women to be happy to go back home full time to serve their men and suffer for love. But she argues that today is a very different era.\u00a0 Today, Brown says, women want \"the same chances and successes\" as men.\u00a0 But, she worries that \"internal traumas and guilt, low self-esteem and inchoate fears still deny females real confidence and ease.\"\u00a0<\/p>\n Brown quotes Katie Roiphe who \"wonders why free will is such a burden for 21st-century women, why in some spheres they so readily surrender to macho power. Could it be that equality is too much responsibility, or even that its imperatives can be boring? Maybe.\"<\/p>\n Brown sees more troubling reasons for the success of \"Fifty Shades of Grey.\" She says:<\/p>\n There are, I think, darker reasons. When young women become instinctively assertive and free of gender constrictions, their liberty threatens the \"natural\" order. So they have to be reminded of their place, taught they can never be good enough and must relearn submission.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I told y'all earlier that I read and enjoyed \"Fifty Shades.\"\u00a0 I guess that makes me one of those middle-class females who is clueless about the vast implications of this book.\u00a0 Then again, unlike Ms. Brown, I actually read the entire trilogy.\u00a0 She's crying like Chicken Little based upon her reading of the first book.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0Does Ms. Brown even know that (SPOILER ALERT) in Fifty Shades Ana never signed on to become Christian's submissive?\u00a0\u00a0It surely doesn't sound like she knows that\u00a0it was Christian who signed onto Ana's sort of contract\u00a0by marrying her.\u00a0 The whole trilogy was about\u00a0Christian's \u00a0need to control & hurt women and how his love for\u00a0and committed marriage with Ana freed him from his old ways.\u00a0 For the love of all ducks, Christian is Fifty Shades and the last book is titled \"Fifty Shades Freed.\"\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n The trilogy didn't catch the world's fancy because it was about S&M.\u00a0 It wasn't about S&M.\u00a0 It was about a sadist freed by love.\u00a0 That theme doesn't make Ms. Brown's point though, does it?<\/p>\n All the high-flying feminist rhetoric from Ms. Brown does is make women less likely to identify with feminism.\u00a0 Women have grown beyond their need for an \"ism.\"\u00a0 And women today know that we can eat without becoming our food;\u00a0 we can watch TV without becoming our shows; and yes, we can read without becoming what we read.\u00a0 Our entertainment need not be measured by anyone's yardstick but our own.<\/p>\n Ladies who read \"Fifty Shades\" don't want to sign up to become anyone's submissive.\u00a0 In the end, the heroine of the trilogy changed the hero.\u00a0 The heroine didn't become a submissive - the hero became a man who didn't need to\u00a0dominate anymore.\u00a0<\/p>\n The biggest problem with Ms. Brown taking a politically correct feminist position about Fifty Shades, is that the women she's trying to convince know much more about the book than she does.\u00a0 Even if Ms. Brown had been right and the book tearing up all existing sales records was about S&M, women today are strong enough and smart enough to know that we don't get limited or defined by anything unless we allow it.<\/p>\n Fifty Shades fans aren't planning to become submissives who\u00a0want others to plot our courses, define our limits or control our lives.\u00a0\u00a0Most of us just enjoyed reading a sexy story about the power of love.\u00a0 And just like we don't need our own \"ism,\" we don't need anyone or any organization inane enough to think it can look down its haughty nose at \"vacuous\" middle class women.\u00a0<\/p>\n Like \"Fifty,\" we've been freed from the need for anyone's approval.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I made and ate barbecue chicken for supper.\u00a0\u00a0As I write this, several hours have passed since supper.\u00a0 Yet, I am not a chicken, barbecue or otherwise. It's been cooking show reality TV night at my house which is\u00a0a family event.\u00a0 We all watch Hell's Kitchen and my kids and I watch Master Chef.\u00a0 Yeah, verily,\u00a0 ...continue reading \"Fifty Shades of Feminism?\"<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3,5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2449"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2449"}],"version-history":[{"count":21,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2449\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2470,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2449\/revisions\/2470"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2449"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2449"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quackingalone.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2449"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n