Ana has a dream about being a moth flying too close to a candle flame.  I am unimpressed, mostly because there’s no magic in this book.  Prophetic or overly-symbolic dreams are really hard to make work in a thoroughly secular book like this one.  She goes on about moths, and all I can think about is how I dreamed I was a PowerPuff Girl last night.  (If this means I’m about to get superpowers, I will not complain.)

Ana wakes up to find she has her own Grey blanket, and goes on for a while about body heat.  Yeah, that happens when you have a large body on you.  Grey wakes up and realizes he’s almost late for a meeting, so he has to rush out.

Ana will not shut up about how Grey keeps sleeping with her.  (The unconscious kind of sleep.)  Apparently this is a big deal, because he’s never done so with anyone else.  While I’m perfectly aware that many people find unconscious-sleeping-together to be more intimate than sex-sleeping-together…I’m just sick of hearing about it.  He doesn’t make a big deal about doing it, and he’s perfectly at ease every time he does it.  There’s never any nervousness or anxiety.  The only thing that marks it as unusual is the fact that Ana keeps trying to cram “It’s unusual” down our throats. 

Ana emails Grey after he leaves for his meeting and tries to describe her feelings.  She says she felt debased while being spanked, but also aroused.  I went back to that scene.  She scribes it as ‘hot’ once, before the spanking begins.  Relative to the way she describes everything else, that’s pretty subdued.  Here’s a few samples of the rest of her descriptions:

·         I make no sound, my face screwed up against the pain.

·         try and wriggle away from the blows – spurred on by adrenaline

·         My mind empties as I endeavor to absorb the grueling sensation.

·         so mind numbing

·         this is getting harder to take

·         From somewhere deep inside, I want to beg him to stop. But I don’t. I don’t want to give him the satisfaction.

Now, I’ll grant you this: All those phrases could have been used in an effective, consensual scene.  But this Ana, and this is Fifty Shades of Grey.  When Ana thinks something is good, she lets us know at least a dozen times, and she also throws in some euphemisms about angels and such.  The stuff I listed?  Actually pretty neutral, as far as letting us know what the character thinks.  We would have to use context and our understanding of the characters to tell how they think about it.  Others may disagree with me, but compared to what I’ve read so far, this scene was distinctly lacking in enjoyment for Ana, on any level.

Then Ana moves on to how she felt after the sex.  In short, she felt good, but she felt guilty about feeling good.  And that’s okay, because she’s new at this.  There’s a lot of social stigma around kink, misplaced as it is.  She’s going to have some confusion and issues to work through.

Grey’s answer to her feeling guilty, though?  “Don’t waste your energy on guilt, feelings of wrongdoing etc. We are consenting adults and what we do behind closed doors is between ourselves.”  She tells him she has this issue, and his answer is to say ‘Oh, that, yeah, don’t bother.’  Like it’s a switch she can turn on and off at will.  This is not something to be dismissed out of hand.  He should not be rolling right over it.  It needs time.  It’s a normal issue, and it can be solved, but it can’t be solved by going ‘whatever’ and having more sex.

On top of that, his second sentence made no sense, because she didn’t mention feeling bad in relation to other people, or mention that she thought society might not approve.  Everything she mentioned is already between the two of them, so pointing out that fact doesn’t really shed light on anything.  It feels like a stock answer that he just throws at everything.  Like no matter what the issue is, he just holds up a “Nya, nya, nya.  It’s consensual.  Can’t touch this” banner.  That doesn’t work so well when the person having the issue is one of the supposedly-consenting adults.

I am grateful for your inexperience. I value it, and I’m only beginning to understand what it means. Simply put… it means that you are mine in every way.

Ew.  Just…ew.

They banter some more over emails.

You didn’t at any time ask me to stop – you didn’t use either safe word.

You are an adult – you have choices.

…

Alaska is very cold and no place to run. I would find you.

I can track your cell phone – remember?

So, she has choices.  And her choices are…do it without a fight, or run away, be tracked down, and be forced to do it.  Does this author even realize what she’s written?  That ellipsis I added only took out two lines of text.  How does she not realize that she’s contradicting herself in a single paragraph?

Apparently Grey is seeing two therapists.  I…really don’t know if there’s anything I can say to that which won’t horribly offend someone.  I mean, I like therapists and I wish more people would see them as real doctors instead of as charlatans.  And I know that mental problems are not easily solved.  But…this is Grey after years of therapy?  Good lord.

And descriptive linguistics is a hard limit for me.

I’ll admit it: I laughed out loud.

He’s a patronizing son-of-a-bitch sometimes. And then I think of Grace and I feel guilty. But of course, she wasn’t his birth mother.  Hmm that’s a whole world of unknown pain. Well, patronizing son-of-a-bitch works well then.

So, it’s not okay to round-aboutly call Grace a bitch, but it is okay to call his unknown birth mother a bitch?  We don’t even know who this woman is.  Maybe she was a loving mother who died, and Grey was neglected by a cousin, or by the state.  And why not just call Grey himself a bitch?  No, bitch is still gendered.  Call him a patronizing asshole.  (God, the English language needs stronger cuss words for men.  There just aren’t many that don’t have some origin in misogyny or classism, and the ones we have are comparatively weak.  Sigh.)

The problem is, I just want Christian, not all his… baggage

He is his baggage.  We are, all of us, in part, our baggage.  Our baggage does not define us, and we can become more than the sum total of our parts.  But ‘baggage’ in this sense is an intrinsic part of a person’s personality and not something that can be put down and left behind.  Even if someone overcomes hardship in their life, that history and the strength it took to make a better future is still part and parcel of that person.

You can want and encourage a person to improve, but you’d damn well better embrace all of them while doing it. 

Could I just lie back and embrace it? Like a submissive? I’ve said I’d try.

Fuck, I hate when my own words come back to me.  Yes, you can embrace it, but don’t “lie back.”  Actively embrace it.  Be supportive an encouraging and trustworthy, and if he opens up to you and asks for help, give him–

–what the hell am I saying?  I take it all back.  Don’t do that, Ana.  I’m all for redeeming people, especially self-redemption, but Grey is pretty fucking far gone.  Plus he shows no sign of stopping his Bluebeard ways or even wanting to, and Ana would probably collapse like a flan if she had to be someone’s support system.  You don’t have to be perfect to help others, but you do need a strong sense of self-preservation so that you don’t get destroyed in the process.

Also?  None of his issues need a submissive.  They need emotional support, a fuck-ton of therapy, and a few criminal charges.  I think her version of ‘submitting’ is just enabling, not helping.

At work, Ana gets a package from Grey.  It’s a BlackBerry, complete with an email from Grey already waiting for her.

I need to be able to contact you at all times, and since this is your most honest form of communication, I figured you needed a BlackBerry.

What the ever-loving-fuck is this?  Ana even writes back calling him a stalker for this, but she doesn’t reject the BlackBerry or run screaming for the hills.  She treats it like his ‘stalker tendencies’ are just a running gag between them, instead of being legitimately frightening and dangerous behavior.

Oh, man, the grammar in this makes me cringe.  I want to physically destroy things because of it.

She goes home after work, and she and Kate finish packing.  Taylor shows up to take her old car away.  The car is a hand-me-down from Jose, and Jose has put countless hours into its maintenance for her, all of it for free.  I know Jose is a wannabe rapist, but comparatively, he’s the nicest guy in the book.  Why doesn’t Ana just give him back the car, or at least feel bad that she’s getting rid of something he put so much love and care into?

Speaking of Jose, he shows up with dinner.  They all sit around and joke, and it seems relations are patched between Jose and Ana.  I’m torn, because I kind of want to like Jose.  He had a moment of utter fucked-upped-ness, but was remorseful and admitted it was wrong.  I think that’s as good as we’re going to get from this book.  I’m willing to forgive people.  Only, I don’t want to forgive this time, because this book treats the whole incident as a non-issue.  Ana even calls it ‘the attempted kiss.’  I feel like I have to stay mad at Jose, if just because no one else is upset about it.  Maybe I should like Jose, but hate everyone else?

Oh, jeeze.  Elliot shows up and gets hot and heavy with Kate (wasn’t he supposed to be there to help pack?), so Ana and Jose walk down to a bar.  Then we utterly skip anything that happened in the bar and move right on to Ana coming home.  Why is this book so cavalier toward alcohol, especially since the last time Jose and Ana were drunk together, ‘the incident’ happened?  This girl does not have an ounce of self-preservation.

Kate and Elliot are having loud sex.  I don’t care, at least it’s probably consensual.  Ana distracts herself by reading email from Grey.  She didn’t call him after work, so he’s called her five times.  Because he’s a fucking asshole and a stalker.

Will he ever give me a break? I scowl at the phone. He is suffocating me. With a deep dread uncurling in my stomach, I scroll down to his number and press dial.

No.  No, Ana.  Hang onto that scowl and that dread and that thought.  Don’t call him!  Run away!  IT’S NOT GOOD TO FEEL SUFFOCATED IN A RELATIONSHIP.

Fuck all, this book is actually trying to paint Grey as being worried that she didn’t call him for a few hours, and therefore trying to pass off that his actions are ‘sweet’ and ‘concerned.’  It is not normal to think your partner is dead in a ditch if she doesn’t call you for a few hours.  You know what?  Stalkers don’t normally think that they are stalking their victims.  They usually think that they are protecting/helping/doing something good for them.  That’s why they’re so dangerous, because they are so out of touch with proper boundaries that they will go to extreme lengths and think it’s okay.  Telling me that Grey was ‘concerned’ about her does not magically make him not a stalker!

“I went to a fundraising dinner. It was deathly dull. I left as soon as I could.”

He sounds so sad and resigned. My heart clenches.

Okay, Grey probably was bored.  But that’s just a mildly annoying thing.  It doesn’t make me feel bad for him.

They do that teenager-y “You hang up first.  No, you” thing.  It’s legitimately cute, but I hate both of them, so that sucks the cuteness out.

Ah, I was wrong.  The packing was on Friday, the moving is on Saturday, and Elliot is helping.  He hooks up the TV for them and then has to leave for family dinner with the prodigal sister.

He’s another character I want to like.  Very happy and irreverent every time we see him.

Grey sends a bottle of champagne and a card to congratulate them on the new apartment.  I kind of want to take a shot every time alcohol is mentioned in these books, if just so that I’ll have the same frame of mind as the author.  Alas, I write these in the middle of the day, so that would probably work against me.

On Sunday, Ana goes on for a bit about how her new Audi is so much better than her old Beetle.  Am I really off-base feeling bad for Jose over this car issue?

She goes to Grey’s house (apartment?  I still don’t know what to call it) and they argue about food again.  She hasn’t eaten.  Why hasn’t she eaten?  I’m honestly freaked out by this now.  How did this book accidently make a legitimately creepy, subtle eating issue, and yet so completely bork the intended issue?

The doctor shows up.  She’s an Ob/Gyn.  Well, at least he got a specialist.  Doesn’t make it any better that he’s forcing her onto a hormone therapy without anyone batting an eyelash.

The chapter abruptly ends, and so will I.