by Barry, Dave
What do you think Anastasia does when she sees this contract? Do you think she gets herself a restraining order and an industrial-sized drum of pepper spray, which would be the response of a normal sane woman or reasonably intelligent cocker spaniel? Not our Anastasia! Crap no! She decides to go right ahead and get into a sexual relationship with Christian even though she thinks he is a moody weirdo pervert. (But hot!)
In this relationship, Anastasia keeps trying to get Christian to be a regular huggy-kissy-smoochy boyfriend, but he doesn’t want to do that. In fact, he doesn’t even want her to touch him because he has a Dark Secret in his past. What he wants to do, and keeps trying to get Anastasia to let him do, is tie her up and flog her with various implements, as per the contract. She doesn’t want that, but she keeps seeing Christian anyway because she finds him so darned fascinating, in the sense of hot.
So the plot is: They have sex, she wants to smooch, he wants to flog, there’s a bunch of talking about this, they have sex again, she again wants to smooch, he again wants to flog, there’s a bunch more talking about this, and so on for several hundred word-filled pages.
Finally, Anastasia decides to let Christian flog her, to see what it would be like. So he takes a belt and flogs her on the butt. Then, in the dramatic climax to the story, the moment we have been building up to, Anastasia comes to a shocking, life-changing realization, which nobody could have foreseen in a million years: Getting flogged on the butt hurts. Yes! It’s painful! Anastasia does not like it! Double crap!!
So she breaks up with him.
And then . . .
And then the book is over.
I’m serious. That’s the plot.
There are two more books in this series, titled Fifty Shades Darker and The Third Fifty Shades Book That Was Required to Make It a Trilogy. I assume these books bring these two lovebirds back together, as well as revealing the Dark Secret in Christian’s past. I don’t know because I haven’t read them, although I fully intend to do so in the future if the only alternative is crucifixion.
But never mind the other two books. The first book was the big one, the one tens of millions of women could not put down. So to get back to my original question, from the standpoint of a guy sincerely trying to understand women: Why was this book so incredibly popular? When so many women get so emotionally involved in a badly written, comically unrealistic porno yarn, what does this tell us? That women are basically insane? Yes.
I mean no! No. Of course it does not tell us that. What it tells us is this: Women are interested in sex.
This may be obvious to women, but, trust me, it is not obvious to men. In fact, it is contrary to everything men are led to believe, dating back to puberty. When a young man goes through puberty, he basically turns into a walking boner. He would happily have sex with any receptive female or room-temperature vegetable.* He thinks about having sex all the time, but the only person he knows who wants to have sex with him is himself. He would be very interested in having sex with an actual human female, but he has no earthly idea how to accomplish this. Generally he spends years in this frustrating state before he manages to find a woman willing to have sex with him. Some males become so desperate that they resort to paying for sex, or even running for Congress.
As a result of these experiences, men come to believe—and this belief is reinforced throughout their dating lives as they get shot down more often than the Egyptian Air Force—that women are nowhere near as interested in sex as they are; that women are capable, somehow, of not thinking about sex for entire minutes at a time.
So men exist in a state of perpetual confusion about when, exactly, human females are receptive to the idea of having sex. Men wish that women had some kind of clear signaling mechanism, as is found in other species. Dogs, for example. Years ago I had a female German shepherd puppy named Shawna. For the first few months of her existence, she exhibited no interest whatsoever in having sex with male dogs, and the male dogs in the neighborhood exhibited no particular interest in her.
And then one spring day, BAM, Shawna became a woman. To get the word out, she turned into a 50,000-watt AM hormone transmitter, broadcasting a scent that traveled vast distances at the speed of lust. Horny male dogs were showing up from as far away as New Zealand. The house was surrounded, day and night. You didn’t dare to open the door for fear that a furry canine sex missile would burst past you and commence humping. There were no misunderstandings between the genders; nobody was being subtle. The male dogs were, like, “I gather from the odor you are emitting that you are receptive to having sex with a male!” And Shawna was, like, “That is correct! I very much desire to be mounted from the rear ‘doggie-style’ and I do not care by whom!”
This went on for several tense days. And then, BAM, Shawna was over it. She stopped broadcasting and the males disappeared, and shortly thereafter Shawna was fixed and she never heard from the male dogs again, not even a postcard.
Unfortunately, human sexuality does not work this way, except on Jersey Shore. Human females are less obvious, which means human males must be able to pick up subtle cues, and unfortunately we are terrible at this. So we tend to assume that women just aren’t that interested.
This is why the immense popularity of Fifty Shades of Grey is actually great news for men. It’s a signal from the female gender—not unlike the one broadcast by Shawna—transmitting an exciting and encouraging message to men everywhere: “We are interested in sex! We’re just not interested in sex with you unless you’re a superhot billionaire.”
OK, so this is not a totally positive message for us men. But we can work with it! We can interpret it to mean that women would like their sex lives to be more interesting. Maybe they wish that we would be more obsessive and stalkerish. Maybe they even secretly fantasize about engaging in unconventional, even “kinky,” sexual activities. There is only one way to find out, men: You need to have an honest, “no holds barred” conversation about sex with the special woman in your life. I did this with my wife, and as difficult as this was for me, I’m glad I did because it was very revealing. Here’s the complete transcript:
Me: Hey, do you secretly want me to tie you up and flog you?
My wife: No.
Yes, communication is the key to a successful relationship. That, and not peeing in the shower. That’s pretty much all the advice I have for you men. In a word: Be sensitive. And now, if you’ll excuse me, my inner god needs to turn on the TV and watch huge men knock each other down.
I hate my mail.
There was a time when I liked getting mail. I’m talking maybe twenty years ago—a simple, primitive time when you could not even shoot and edit high-definition video with your phone. In those days my mail consisted largely of letters from actual human beings who genuinely cared about me. Granted, most of these people were Ed McMahon. Ed wrote at least four times a week with exciting personal news. “Dear David,” Ed would begin because we were on a first-name basis. “You may already have won $17 million!”
Mind you, I never actually won seventeen million dollars, but the point is that Ed cared enough about me, as a fellow human, to let me know that I already might have. I knew he sincerely cared because his letters always had a picture of his jovial face, beaming out at me with an expression that said “It’s ten-thirty a.m. and I’ve already consumed a fifth of scotch!”
I also used to occasionally receive letters from friends and relatives, usually handwritten, which, for you younger readers, is a kind of writing that you do on paper holding a writing thing in your bare hand. But times have changed. Ed went to that Big Tonight Show Couch in the Sky, and most of the rest of us don’t send letters anymore. Many younger people have never sent a letter. When my son, Rob, was in college, he had to send a letter for some reason that I don’t remember. What I do remember is that he called me to ask some technical questions, such as (I am not making any of these questions up):
Where could
he get a stamp?
Were there different kinds of stamps?
Well then, which one should he buy?
How much would it cost?
What should he physically do with the letter when it was finally ready to go?
Rob was quite annoyed that the letter-mailing procedure was so complicated. He felt about it pretty much the way I feel about doing my taxes. Which is why Generation Text doesn’t send letters, and, as I say, everyone else has pretty much stopped, too. Which means that all you get in the mail these days is bills and big wads of advertising crap that you immediately throw away. Whenever I read one of those stories about a mail carrier who, instead of delivering the mail, has been putting it in dumpsters, I think: Why can’t MY mail carrier do that?
But it’s not the fact that my mail is basically home-delivery landfill that makes me hate it. What makes me hate it is that it reminds me, over and over, six days a week except on federal holidays, that I am old. “Dear David,” my mail is saying, “You may already be dead!”
For example, I recently received a letter that begins as follows:
We need your help. We are conducting a survey to determine the interest and needs of those in our community who prefer or would like to know about cremation.
The letter—which comes from a concerned cremation provider in my community—goes on to ask my views about cremation, and whether my loved ones know about my views on cremation, and what I would like my loved ones to do with my ashes (which the letter calls my cremated remains) and—prepare to be surprised—whether I would like to receive “free, no obligation” information on cremation services.
Let me start by saying I am all for cremation. We Barrys are a crematin’ clan. Both of my parents, in accordance with their wishes, were cremated. And they weren’t even dead yet! (Rim shot.)
But seriously: Cremation always seemed to me to be the best post-death option. It’s definitely better than being embalmed. I have been to a number of funerals where the deceased had been embalmed and the casket was left open for viewing. What you’re supposed to think in this situation of course is: Oh! He or she looks so lifelike! But the truth is, the deceased never looks lifelike. The deceased always looks like a corpse, which is the last thing you want to see at a funeral.
So I’d rather be a box of ashes, which also has the advantage of being portable. When my dad died, our family—my mom, my sister, my brothers and I—drove his ashes to the cemetery, carried them to the grave and buried them ourselves. We dug the hole, put the ashes in, covered them up, said some stuff, then just stood there for a while, remembering Dad. It was sweet, dignified and unpretentious, like him. As we walked away, my mom was holding on to my arm, both of us weeping. We reached another grave, where Mom stopped and read the name on the gravestone aloud. Then she said: “So that’s why we don’t see him around anymore.” Then we walked on, but now we were weeping and laughing.
(I mention this so you’ll know that my mom had a dark sense of humor and would not have been offended by the cremation joke I made several paragraphs earlier.)
Another good thing about cremation is you can do a lot of different things with the ashes: keep them on the mantel, drop them out of planes, take them to the movies, use them in pranks, etc. One of the best memorial ceremonies I ever attended was in remembrance of Jeff MacNelly, the great cartoonist, and equally great guy, who died of lymphoma at age fifty-two because (if you want my opinion) there is no God. Jeff’s sense of humor was not unlike my mom’s. I called him up right after he was diagnosed and he said, in his big, booming voice, “People keep telling me, ‘If you have to have cancer, this is the kind to get!’ So I guess I should be thrilled.” In every conversation I had with Jeff, even when things got bad, he made jokes. There was a lot of laughter at his funeral. Also, drinking.
Jeff loved boats, and he loved Key West. So a few months after he died, a bunch of people who loved Jeff boarded a sailboat in Key West and went out into the ocean, where Jeff’s ashes were fired out of a cannon into the sea, after which there was additional drinking. It was great. Jeff would have loved it. The only way he would have loved it more is if the cannon had been aimed at a lawyer.
So ashes give you a lot of post-death options. Whereas in corpse form, you are limited. You can’t fire a corpse out of a cannon, as far as I know. Although I would love to be proved wrong.
So I am all for cremation. My point—which you have completely forgotten, and I don’t blame you—is that I don’t want to get mail about it. I don’t want to be nagged by cremation companies to think about my cremation options right now. I’d much rather think about my cremation options after I’m dead, when I don’t have to think about them, if you know what I mean.*
But that’s the kind of mail I get these days. I get mail aimed at old people because I am officially an old person. My mail never lets me forget this. I get three or four letters every day just from companies that want to tell me about my Medicare options. Here’s the thing: I don’t want to know about my Medicare options. I don’t even want to even think about Medicare because Medicare involves (follow me closely) medical care, which involves medical professionals inserting unnatural objects deep into your personal orifices and always (if you are an old person) discovering that you need Additional Tests. If there was a Medicare option whereby the professionals would be prohibited from coming any closer to you than fifteen feet unless they could see blood spurting from both of your ears, THEN I would be interested in reading about my Medicare options.
I’m looking at one of the Medicare letters right now. Here’s how it begins:
65 IS THE NEW 50. AND BEST OF ALL, YOU ARE NOW ELIGIBLE TO JOIN A GREAT HEALTH CARE PLAN . . .
OK, number one: “BEST OF ALL”? BEST OF ALL?? You’re telling me that the BEST THING about reaching this age is that I’m eligible to join your health care plan? What’s the second-best thing? Nose hair?
Number two: Sixty-five is not the new fifty. Whoever wrote those words is (1) an idiot and (2) not sixty-five. I am sixty-five and I remember being fifty, and they are not remotely the same thing. I’ll tell you what sixty-five is: It’s sixty freaking five. It is an age that is viewed, correctly, throughout the human world, as OLD. If you’re sixty-five and you keel over* and die, people don’t think: What a completely unexpected shock! They think: Well, he was sixty-five.
Every day I get the newspaper (which, for you younger readers, is a paper with news written on it) and I check the obituaries to see how many of that day’s deceased were younger than I am. That gives me one number, which we will call X. Then I check the People page to see how many of the people who qualify as People and who have birthdays that day—indicating that they are still alive—are older than I am. This gives me another number, which we will also call X, because at our age we have trouble remembering things. If the first X is smaller than the second X, then it was a good morning of newspaper reading. But most of the time, the first X is bigger. Sometimes the second X is zero: Not a single People-worthy birthday person is older than I am. On those days, I put down the newspaper and slowly chew my soy-based meat-free sausage with the realization that it could, statistically, be my last breakfast ever.
So do NOT try to tell me sixty-five is the new anything, Mr. or Ms. Direct Mail Marketing Douchebag.
I’m not kidding about the forgetfulness. Here’s a recent example: Every morning, after I feed (in this order) the tropical fish, the dog and my daughter, I go out and get the newspaper. Every morning I have done this, for centuries. So one recent morning I was in the kitchen, and the various pets and offspring were eating breakfast, and I said to my wife, “I’m going out to get the newspaper.” My wife gave me a look and said, “You already got the newspaper.” She then pointed to the newspaper, which she was reading. It was lying on the kitchen counter, where I had just placed it after bringing it in from outside. So I said, quote, “Ha-ha,” indicating that I was not at all alarmed by
this minor “brain fart” that in no way meant I was well along on the road to becoming a drooling fossil, doddering around with poop in his undershorts.
Then I poured myself a cup of coffee.
Then—this was at most ninety seconds later, I thought to myself, quote: “Hey, I need to go get the newspaper!”
So I went to the front door, opened it and stepped outside. It was only then that I remembered that I had just made a fool of myself by declaring to my wife, who was reading the newspaper I had just brought inside, that I was going outside to get the newspaper.
I turned around and I saw that my wife was watching me. This was a tricky moment, a moment when quick thinking was required to establish that I had not morphed into the late Walter Brennan (who, for you younger readers, was an actor who portrayed a fantastically old rural coot on an early sixties TV sitcom called The Real McCoys*). Here is what the shriveled husk of what was once my brain came up with for me to say as I stood there in the doorway looking at my wife looking at me: “I’m just checking the weather. It’s gonna be warm.”
This was a statement of spectacular idiocy. We live in South Florida. It has been warm here for five hundred and thirty million consecutive years. Going outside to see if this trend is continuing—especially if you have just been outside—is not unlike randomly jumping into the air every few seconds to determine whether gravity is still working.
My wife, to her credit, resisted the urge to say anything, and there are definitely things she could have said. Have you also pooped your underwear? is only one example. Later that day, however, out of the blue she said, “You weren’t ‘checking the weather.’”
