In which uv tackles another subject like—Pho Hung’s demise—that is already months out of date.
10 You know that uv is struggling for content when the best joke our editorial staff can come up with is “mpg writing a review of Fifty Shades of Grey.” But the joke’s on the ed board —I have not only read the book; I am prepared to subject it to thoughtful and careful analysis. Seeing as how this is the first book I’ve read since high school, I don’t really know how to do a book review. I rely on my longstanding gimmick.
9 No book review would be complete without a quick summary of the plot. So here goes: a hot and sassy 22-year-old virgin college senior agrees to interview a young media baron—who is also her shitty university’s major benefactor—for her school newspaper (a publication that couldn’t hold a candle to uv). He is irresistibly sexy but proposes a contract in which she will basically become his sex slave. Naturally she figures that he’d be the perfect man to deflower her. As she ponders the contract, they have sex like a million times.
8 And that’s pretty much it.
7 A more charitable reading of the plot presents us with several significant themes and broad questions that are relevant to law students. The book’s protagonist–the exotically named Anastasia Steele–is a confident young woman who, despite plentiful opportunities (one being her boyishly handsome BFF, Jose) has been saving herself, presumably for someone special.
6 That the physically and emotionally abusive relationship documented in Fifty Shades seems like a plausible version of what Anastasia was looking for undoubtedly speaks to our shared incapacity as law students to experience real emotion and intimacy. Much has also been written about the sexual politics of BDSM relationships that are explored in depth in e.l. James’s first novel; the author delves into the fundamental tension between sexual empowerment and dominant/submissive relationships. And other serious stuff like that.
5 A more realistic reading of the plot suggests that it contains seven hundred sex scenes because its author hoped to shock her readers. Nothing makes a septuagenarian gasp like a sex scene with more detail than her lace petticoats. Like the scene where Christian Grey wears a leather glove. omg. Law students are a different crowd, however. After reading the facts of Pappajohn and Sansregret in first year crim, it takes some pretty kinky shit to get us going.
4 My 1L crim map reads as follows: “Pappajohn v The Queen SCC 1980: Mistaken, honestly-held though unreasonable belief negatives requisite mental element to rape. Mens rea for rape = to intend to have sex with non-consenting partner. Must be an air of reality to claim of “she consented” i.e. evidence to prove it. Sansregret v The Queen SCC 1985: an honest belief must encompass more than fact of consent; it must include a belief that it has been freely given and not procured by threats. You can’t use the Pappajohn defense when subjectively aware of the need to inquire into consent but deliberately decline to inquire because you don’t want to know the truth. That is wilful blindness.”
3 The relevance of the above passage to Fifty Shades should be clear: You can’t just use your incredible sex appeal to extract a helpless admirer’s consent to a bondage contract. Nor can you deliberately decline to inquire if this is what your admirer really wants, just because you don’t want to know.
Either that or I totally don’t get crim law.
2 By far the most implausible aspect of Fifty Shades, however, is the backstory of its antagonist. Christian Grey is a twenty-seven-year-old self-made media mogul billionaire who also happens to be an orphan. Do you have any idea how long it takes to build media empires? Even if he managed to complete his undergrad degree by age twenty (which we know he completed at Ana’s uni), that only gives him seven years to become the baller he is in the book. Ted Turner—founder of the Goodwill Games as well as the less-impactful CNN–inherited his father’s media company and still took sixteen years to make his first $100 million (the 1970s equivalent to a $1 billion).
1 It is entirely possible that the many questions posed by Fifty Shades of Grey are answered by its two sequels: Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades Freed. Maybe Anastasia and Christian are soul mates. Maybe Christian co-founded Fox News when he was five. Maybe Christian’s biologically improbable stamina derives from advanced stem cell therapy. In all probability, I will never find out.
Somehow, the introduction of a riding crop into the mix is not enough to make any one of Fifty Shades’ forty thousand sex scenes distinct from the others. Far from being shocking, Fiddy Shades is actually (quite) boring. If—like the majority of ut Law students—you can’t get through an entire edition of uv, you probably won’t finish the trilogy. In the event that you do, uv welcomes your Letters to the Editor to fill us in.
