So the new Grey book is out. As if his perspective on his sex slave Ana wasn't clear enough in the first three books! I guess when you have a best selling product, you want to milk it till there is no drop left and then some more! I am sure there is a sequel to the new POV which technically is reprinting the same books! And the best part is we are buying! We are paying 10 dollars to practically read the same books all over again. In a way we are paying the same amount we paid the first time to remember that first time we read a "masterpiece"(that is literally a clever collection of moments from well-known heist films/ books--e.g. the gliding scene is borrowed from The Thomas Crown Affair). This leads me to think. Why do we want to read about a sociopath who wants to beat brown haired women and was born to a crack whore whose pimp stubbed his cigarettes out on a little boy's chest? I don't think we would have liked to read about such a sociopath if there was no Ana. And it is not about Ana and her virginity. Rather her virginity is representative of our desire to fix that which is broken. Her temerity is but a counterfoil to Christian's intimidating persona, probably sufficient to keep him interested and engaged with his new prey till a prey she no longer is. The text is insidious for it normalizes sociopathic behavior behind the veil of love, a fissiparous emotion nonetheless. No wonder women in Japan are going crazy for a "handsome gorilla" and Charles Manson is engaged. I guess if a man who beats or kills others can be tamed enough to be devoted to a woman, what more can a woman want. Aren't we all vying to tame men to do our bidding without caring really for whether he is less than a neanderthal! How have we come to this? Why do we continue to promote instability in men while making women do the work of making them stable or even human? Why are women instructed to carry such burden and how do we follow such instructions to the T? Are we really that weak? Or is this how our weakness is constructed through such books in the name of strength? What are the chances? Do we read such books because we know reality is something else? Is this the best projection of our unrequited desires? What does it mean for my reality that is presently sans a man and all my efforts of forgetting what exes did to me (how cruel they were in words at the least) by engaging with them civilly gives me no peace or closure? And does being rich cancel out sociopathic behavior? And what of BDSM--how does incorporating pain into pleasure make such behavior normal? And is there no possibility of civility under such acute cases of delivering pain in the name of pleasure?