I’d heard some buzz about the 50 Shades series around the web (let’s be honest, it was Pinterest) but I don’t usually pay much attention to that sort of pop culture so it went ignored by me. That is, until two friends, each unbeknownst to the other, discreetly and with the same mischievous gleam said the same thing to me almost verbatim, “So… I’m reading this book… It’s really bad. You have to read it.”

So I read them. All three. They aren’t exceptionally well written and I don’t know how anyone understood one another, given that everyone was murmuring and whispering all the time, but that’s what I think is interesting about the popularity of this series. My husband commented that “if all it takes is a shitty pulp romance to get women hot and bothered, guys like Pablo Neruda actually put work into this sort of thing, what’s the point?” Romance has been done though. Everyone knows women like romance and men like sex. What everyone doesn’t know, or at least isn’t willing to acknowledge, is that women like sex too. This book is sex.