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As irritating and pretentious and unfunny as I find Gilbert Gottfried, I must admit that this fake commercial of him reading explicit excerpts from 50 Shades of Grey, less because of Gottfried himself and more because of the increasingly horrified expressions on the readers' faces. Needless to say, this contains explicit sexual language.
May. 23rd, 2012
At the end of Chapter 19, Ana discovers that she's pregnant.
( Pregnancy, swearing, terror, discussion of abortion and adoption, mental abuse and worries of murder below. )
( Pregnancy, swearing, terror, discussion of abortion and adoption, mental abuse and worries of murder below. )
Oh for God's sake! Less than 2 pages after fearing for her safety because she's pregnant, Ana suddenly changes her mind (p. 413):
"...Perhaps I shouldn't tell Christian. Perhaps I...perhaps I should end this. I halt my thoughts on that dark path, alarmed at the direction they're taking. Instinctively my hand sweeps down to rest protectively over my belly. No. My little Blip. Tears spring to my eyes. What am I going to do?"
Well, because this is a romance about a fertile, heterosexual couple, they will be brainwashed by Baby Magic into abandoning their previous agreement to postpone kids. The Miracle of Reproduction will overawe them, activating their dormant, but hereditary and totally natural, parental instincts. With surprising ease and no ambivalence at all, they will quickly convert to anticipation and adoration of their little Blip. Baby Magic is overtaking Ana even in this paragraph: Automatically characterizing her thoughts of abortion as a "dark path," she "instinctively," without any thought at all, develops protective inclinations. YAY BABEEZ!
I detest this trope so very much. I've discussed before, in relation to Bones' pregnancy on her eponymous show, the trivializing, insulting and misogynist ways pregnancy is portrayed in popular media. It compresses a range of emotional, intellectual and characterological responses into a single trajectory of blissfully complaisant, essentialized and instinctive [ergo brainless] femininity. It's pretty much always a horrible derailment of character that represents a descent into utter boredom.
This can't end well either.
"...Perhaps I shouldn't tell Christian. Perhaps I...perhaps I should end this. I halt my thoughts on that dark path, alarmed at the direction they're taking. Instinctively my hand sweeps down to rest protectively over my belly. No. My little Blip. Tears spring to my eyes. What am I going to do?"
Well, because this is a romance about a fertile, heterosexual couple, they will be brainwashed by Baby Magic into abandoning their previous agreement to postpone kids. The Miracle of Reproduction will overawe them, activating their dormant, but hereditary and totally natural, parental instincts. With surprising ease and no ambivalence at all, they will quickly convert to anticipation and adoration of their little Blip. Baby Magic is overtaking Ana even in this paragraph: Automatically characterizing her thoughts of abortion as a "dark path," she "instinctively," without any thought at all, develops protective inclinations. YAY BABEEZ!
I detest this trope so very much. I've discussed before, in relation to Bones' pregnancy on her eponymous show, the trivializing, insulting and misogynist ways pregnancy is portrayed in popular media. It compresses a range of emotional, intellectual and characterological responses into a single trajectory of blissfully complaisant, essentialized and instinctive [ergo brainless] femininity. It's pretty much always a horrible derailment of character that represents a descent into utter boredom.
This can't end well either.
Of all the recycled phrases in the 50 Shades trilogy, the one that's driving me up the wall the most is "Fair point well made." Ana and Christian say this about as often as they have sex, which is up to twice a chapter. Sometimes they even say, "Fair point well made as ever."
I have never heard anyone in my life say this, especially not a 26-year-old Harvard dropout [Christian] and a 21-year-old recent college graduate [Ana]. If people under the age of 30 who have been born and raised in the US want to acknowledge someone's opinion that they disagree with, they typically use one of the following phrases:
"Yeah, but..."
"Okay, but..."
"Touché."
If one feels the burning need to use the word "point," one could say, "Good point."
One could also say, "You have a point."
If one feels like being particularly snotty, one could also say, "Fair point." I've never heard anyone actually use that phrase in the wild, but it's not outside the realm of possibility. I think I've probably read it in a novel somewhere.
But "Fair point well made"?! What the hell? Who even says that? Is it some sort of Britishism? If so, I've never encountered it in any of the British literature I've read before the 50 Shades trilogy. [The author lives in London, England.] It could possibly be a function of E.L. James' fallback on her own British idiom and her lazy refusal to invest in any research that would make the voices of two US citizens in their 20s realistic and believable. However, I can't really tell much about the origin and current use of this phrase, because, hilariously enough, most Google results of "fair point well made as ever" point to pages lambasting the 50 Shades trilogy for this irritating verbal hiccup.
I have never heard anyone in my life say this, especially not a 26-year-old Harvard dropout [Christian] and a 21-year-old recent college graduate [Ana]. If people under the age of 30 who have been born and raised in the US want to acknowledge someone's opinion that they disagree with, they typically use one of the following phrases:
"Yeah, but..."
"Okay, but..."
"Touché."
If one feels the burning need to use the word "point," one could say, "Good point."
One could also say, "You have a point."
If one feels like being particularly snotty, one could also say, "Fair point." I've never heard anyone actually use that phrase in the wild, but it's not outside the realm of possibility. I think I've probably read it in a novel somewhere.
But "Fair point well made"?! What the hell? Who even says that? Is it some sort of Britishism? If so, I've never encountered it in any of the British literature I've read before the 50 Shades trilogy. [The author lives in London, England.] It could possibly be a function of E.L. James' fallback on her own British idiom and her lazy refusal to invest in any research that would make the voices of two US citizens in their 20s realistic and believable. However, I can't really tell much about the origin and current use of this phrase, because, hilariously enough, most Google results of "fair point well made as ever" point to pages lambasting the 50 Shades trilogy for this irritating verbal hiccup.