Accidentally read an erotic novel yesterday.
It was on the family kindle account, not sure who bought it? It could have been me, by mistake. It started off innocently enough, with our protagonist turning 18, graduating from high school, and going on a date with a long term crush. But then it started getting dark. I’m no prude – well maybe I am, a little bit – but this stuff was quite problematic, in my view. She gets kidnapped by a rich and handsome stranger, with her date quite severely beaten out of jealousy. Then she’s taken to a private island somewhere in the Pacific and repetitively brutally raped for a year. It’s OK, though, because even though he’s an arms dealer, he’s handsome and rich, and eventually she falls in love with him, in spite of the sadomasochistic elements and quite a bit of butt stuff. She is never given a choice, buts that’s ok, because he knows she’ll like it. That is not how consent works, boys and girls. I was horrified. I managed to finish it over a few hours, by dint of skipping over the dodgy sex bits that made me uncomfortable. I was just hoping the sleazy bastard would get his comeuppance. But no. She finds freedom, involuntarily, but misses him so much that she’s super grateful when he kidnaps her again. Hooray! Really?? It makes Fifty Shades of Gray look like Jane Austen. And there are two sequels! The author, whose name escapes me, apparently writes New York Times bestsellers, so there’s clearly an audience for this stuff. OK, I can see that at a stretch there’s some sort of evolutionary path from Mr Rochester to this guy. But the latter was surely fundamentally decent, and Jane had some agency, within the limits of society at the time? No, I think I’ll be sticking with my regency romance novels when I’m looking for a little light relief from life.