Your Monthly Periodical

Written By: Kat

Fifty Shades of Gray is the latest estrogen-propelled sensation to sweep the nation. A 350+ page book about the developing BDSM relationship between virginal college graduate Anastasia Steele (gag) and Christian Gray (double gag), it’s a romance novel with a “kinky” twist. As ladies who like to be in the know, the editors of Your Monthly Periodical took this opportunity to educate ourselves on popular literature, then got together to discuss the piece. What appears below is an actual transcript of our conversation. Warning: may contain plot spoilers if you actually care to read this awful book, which we do not recommend doing.

SHEENY: I did not like the book. Where shall I begin? The repetitiveness was probably the worst part. The word gray was used on every single page about 50 times. There were a bunch of other words she kept repeating, too.

I was confused for most of the book until i figured out there were actually two voices in her head: the ”subconscious” and the “inner goddess,” who was supposed to be the sexy lady. It took me a while to figure that one out. The “inner goddess” thing kept making me think of yogurt or Dove body wash commercials.

I found it curious that Anastasia Steele was 21 and had never had an orgasm, had never even touched herself, and then someone touched her nipples and she had an orgasm. I feel like if you were that hyper-sensitive, you would have had an orgasm previously.

KAT: Thank you! That was how I felt, too. Ok, she’s 21, she’s never had an orgasm, she’s never had a drink in her life, and within three weeks, she becomes a sex-depraved lush boozer, tipping back cosmos…

SHEENY: FOUR COSMOS. If I had four cosmos, I would be vomiting. I can’t even make it though two cosmos. So, yeah, that and the fact that she could go suddenly from no orgasm to cumming on Christian Gray’s command…

KAT: That’s not rookie-level stuff. Honestly, her virgin-ness kind of ruined most of the book for me. I found it really creepy, describing taking her virginity. Now here we are talking about hymens?

SHEENY: OH! And she kept saying “there” instead of vagina!

KAT: She is supposed to be a college graduate, but it was like listening to a giggling little teenager, like a high school girl telling you about her sex life. The vocabulary was so frantic and juvenile.

SHEENY: OH! And the “foil packets” instead of saying condoms. It just kept making me think of Ramen Noodles. We get it, your characters are practicing safe sex. Everyone knows now, its weird to keep repeating.

KAT: They have sex like 8 times a day.

SHEENY: That’s a lot of sex. I just feel like she would have been really sore.

KAT: I also found it sort of unbelievable that this late 20something man has never had regular “vanilla” sex. Like, for real? Never once?

SHEENY: Yeah, not with anybody? Not by accident? Every time he has had sex, it has been a big production in his “Red Room Of Pain?” GOD WHY WERE THERE SO MANY TERRIBLE PHRASES?

KAT: “Holy Cow!” “Holy Moses!” Those phrases would have killed my chick boner, if I had found it possible to even get one over this book. That’s not what you think when you are being penetrated: “Oh, golly jeez darn!” Plus the descriptive language was out of control, I think I spent the first five chapters just reading about steel and sandstone and gray gray gray everything. Gray, gray, gray. Some of these phrases were like an English undergrad student wrote them: “I must be the color of the communist manifesto.” No one talks like that at all. Then there was the overuse of full first and last names, it went obnoxiously through the ENTIRE book.

SHEENY: I found it very dull that they printed the whole contract agreement. And then they repeated it later. This is just a legal document that is vaguely kinky, but mostly wasn’t that kinky. This is an erotic novel and I have to dig through contracts?

KAT: I didn’t get turned on once at all throughout reading this story.

SHEENY: I actually put the book down and thought about something else and masturbated. It was impossible, I had to think about something completely different.

KAT: The one thing I did know about this book before reading was that the author based it on Twilight Fan-fiction, so I kept envisioning Kristen Stewart as the main character, and that super ruined it for me because I hate watching her. All awkward and terrible.

SHEENY: She keeps describing her outfit, and its jeans and converse.

KAT: Unsexy as fuck.

SHEENY: Every sex scene is already horrible, then you have to hear descriptions of her wearing her room mates dress. Which is weird when Christian Gray offered to buy her a closet full of clothes.

KAT: And that was the other thing, this guy is super rich and can have probably any woman he wants, and he chooses this girl? I  just found her really annoying, and if you don’t like the main character of your book, even a little bit, its hard to care. The author did a bad job of making Anastasia Steele an appealing human.

I found her inability to get past Christian’s wealthiness distracting to the story. They made very clear in the first few chapters that this is not a normal guy, he’s a super billionaire. I wish the author had just moved past the gift-giving thing.

SHEENY: It was constant. “Oh, I cant accept this” “Oh, I cant accept this” Like shut up and take the laptop. You made the point once.

KAT: Can we talk about how he stalks her? He follows her around the country, calls her like 5 times a day, writes her constant e-mails, she cant hang out with her friends, she has to sign an NDA…

SHEENY: Big red flags.

KAT: I mean, maybe I don’t get the Master/ sub relationship quite right? I don’t think it’s that intense. But maybe it is, I don’t know. Another thing that bothered me was that the author kept referring to Anastasia as a “child” and kept using little kid descriptors for her. Again, that killed whatever underlying sex vibe was there.

SHEENY: Yeah, it did make it seem like some 30 year old man sexing a little 12 year old that he sometimes dressed up. She’s like “I can’t walk in heels” or “I can’t do my own hair.”

KAT: He gives her a computer and she’s like “I have an e-mail?!” What fucking college student in 2011 is astounded by e-mail?

SHEENY: And why did they have BlackBerries in 2011? He’s supposed to be super-billionaire, thats ghetto. Oh, and the tea thing I found weird– they kept mentioning over and over she drinks Twinnings English Breakfast Tea: like it’s a paid sponsored book.

KAT: Plus, tea? What country is this? Ugh.

SHEENY: This book is kind of like a 12th grader wrote it. I mean, there was no sex for over 100 pages, and the sex was not good.

KAT: It was weird and didn’t even try to be realistic. You don’t cum at the same time as your partner every single time you have sex, has the author ever even had sex?

SHEENY: You go from never having sex or masturbating in your life to cumming every single time, on command, thats quite a feat for an asexual 21 year old. I am quite impressed with miss Anastasia Steele.

KAT: There are so many better sexy things to read. I feel that what was done in this book has been done before. It’s stale.

SHEENY:  Yeah, you could just read the Story of O. How did this even get published? It’s shit.

KAT: This book was shit, I am not going to lie, I skimmed though the last few chapters of it because I didn’t care. I had to stop reading it a bunch of times because it was so absurd, I felt like my eyes were going to roll out of my head. But I am a bad judge, because I typically hate the female-targeted genres, chick flicks and romantic comedies.

SHEENY: I don’t find ryan gosling sexy. I don’t think reading shit novels like this and buying pandora bracelets gets men excited.

Conclusion: My suspicions have been confirmed. The housewives of America have been very naughty and they all deserve a good spanking.