D: Shitty Book Club Time! Fifty Shades of Grey and the whole damn trilogy. You have a pisco sour, I have a brown derby. We have... thoughts.
A Lady: Yes! So many thoughts!
Mine are more positive than yours, I think?
D: Of course they are.
Well: 1) I do not go in for love stories. You can keep your Brontë, Austen, etc.
also 2) THERE IS SO MUCH BETTER SMUT OUT THERE.
A Lady: Oh, who cares about the love part; that's stupid.
D: It was like I LOOOOOOOVE HIIIIIIIIM; I CAN FIIIIIIIIIX HIIIIIIIM.
A Lady: And YES there's better smut, but doesn't it just warm the cockles of your frozen little heart that so many boring housewives are discovering smut?
D: Oh my god yes. That is something I can 1000% get on board with! Go and read your dirty stories, everyone! GO FORTH!
A Lady: Because usually these women are confining themselves to like, bodice rippers and heaving bosoms. And suddenly it's like: CANING!
D: Bodices got nothing on a ball gag.
A Lady: Although...
D: Although she never gets actually caned, does she?
A Lady: I KNOW! THAT BOTHERS ME. Like, caning/gags/even a little belting is beyond the pale? Pfft whatevs.
D: LET'S USE THE CHEKOV GUN RULE HERE. If you bring out the canes in book one, it'd better get goddamn used by book three.
Belting. Really.
I mean... no.
A Lady: "OH NO I CAN'T DO THIS!" Oh really, have you ever suffered anything at all? Really, you can't bear spanking?
D: Girl, you are 21 years old and have never gotten laid. You go out there and you FUCKING GET IT ALL.
A Lady: What, is she made of marshmallow?
D: Yes. Marshmallow and Jane Austen, obvs.
Also, basically 30% of the book is Consumerism Porn.
A Lady: Not even gonna lie, I loved the consumerism porn. Stuff!
D: La Perla!
A Lady: Helicopters!
La Perla!!
D: (jinx!)
Stockings! Manolos!
A Lady: Macbooks!
Louboutins!
D: Oh god. the Macbook. That was.... gobsmacking.
A Lady: Can we talk about how this girl in her 20s didn't have a smartphone?
D: OR A COMPUTER?
A Lady: Ain't no way you're an English major without a computer.
D: You're not writing those fucking papers in the computer lab.
A Lady: Or on your roomie's lappy, because 1. She has her own papers; 2. Can't Facebook while someone else is on your computer.
D: 3. She'd quickly grow to hate you (from personal experience of not having my own computer for ONE YEAR and borrowing roommate's computer and yeah dude that is not good for friendship).
A Lady: 4. Google Reader isn't going to read itself.
D: Well, clearly no one in this world spends any time online. Except on their... Blackberries.
And who the fuck is dumb enough to send personal hella sexy emails from their work email address?
A Lady: Oh god yes, she's clearly an idiot.
Oh hurray for you, you recognized Tess of the d'Urbervilles, hurray you love Austen.
But, aside from cliched and boring tastes in literature, what do you bring to anything?
You can't make conversation. You're apparently blind? Because everyone's all "GIRL YOU SLAMMIN" and she's all "I'm a mouse."
D: "My huge blue eyes are too big for my face!" "My chestnut hair is..... something?"
A Lady: ...which is clearly a symptom of the author desperately hoping that this is her sitch.
D: You are 20-some years too late, lady.
ALSO. Oh my god also.
You can talk about riding crops and dildos but you keep referring to your "behind." And your "sex."
OH MY GOD REALLY?????? Way to take all the sexy out.
A Lady: HER SPECIAL FLOWER!
D: HER TREASURE!
A Lady: It's like a Judy Blume character read some Harlequin novels. She's not tough enough to turn a top like that!
D: She was all "Okay, I'll change my name!"
"Okay, you can totally control every aspect of my life!"
"I'm a strong independent woman! Destiny's Child!"
A Lady: There are better, more convincing ways to portray a power bottom. For one, add some power.
D: All the women! Independent! Throw your knowledge of reproduction out and get knocked up immediately on accident!
A Lady: "Birth control is HARD!"
D: I am sure you had sex ed, and the friendly dorm RA with condoms and Plan B. Someone, SOMEWHERE had this talk with you.
A Lady: I can't. How can you be a contemporary author writing about kids in their 20s and be SO anachronistic? She's finishing college in 2011 and doesn't even have a computer and NO ONE IN AMERICA SAYS "PRAM," ENGLISH AUTHOR.
D: It reminds me of that scene in Daria were her dad is all "I'M EDGY! I'M COOL! I'M HIP!
EDDDDDDDGY!" (Why does youtube not have a better Jake Morgendorffer freakout reel? You disappoint me, internet!)
A Lady: Oh man. Okay. So: change the main idiot in 50 Shades and replace with Daria. You know who'd end up caning whom.
D: Wait. Daria and Sweet Innocent Thing? I WOULD SO READ THAT.
A Lady: Exactly.
D: Make it so.
A Lady: The birth of even better fan fiction!
D: And in that case, a one-dimensional character is okay, because she is literally a cartoon!
A Lady: But! What did we like?
D: Okay, okay, enough of my cold black heart.
A Lady: Did it spur you to find better smut? That would count as a positive.
D: Yes, I love that middleaged women are like "Ooh! Smut! Why yes, I enjoy this!" And yeah, also points, in a weird way, for sending me on a spite-quest to find better, dirtier smut to counteract the Love and Marriage and Babies plot. (Fuck this! Bring on the porn!)
A Lady: I didn't mind the marriage part so much...
D: Well. My cold black heart, etc.
A Lady: ...because can you imagine the spending allowance?
D: Oh my god, NO PRENUP!
A Lady: Even that should defrost you a little.
Free. Rein.
D: She ain't messin with no broke brother.
The tech.
The cloooooooooothes.
A Lady: The real estate.
D: The shoooooooes.
A Lady: The cars.
The lingerie.
The yacht.
The helicopter.
D: (Ooooh the lingerie)
A Lady: And first class, and first class...
D: The wine!
A Lady: ...and first class. Can you tell I'm flying economy back to New York tomorrow?
D: And the apartments, omg. I cannot even fathom a world where HOUSES, multiple, can be purchased. Apartments, multiple, is as much as my head can wrap around.
A Lady: Okay, so much for the envy.
The sexytimes weren't terrible, if you skipped over the actual prose and focused on the content.
D: True. If you ignored the terrible, terrible stand-in noun and were like "Okay, let's just visualize!"
So this lady got like, a jillion dollars for the movie rights, etc., and it's total crap. This clearly means we should write our cliché novel, but just add in lots of BDSM and STEP THREE PROFIT!
A Lady: Okay, but what happened last time we tried to write a novel?
D: Uh, we never started? But now we have spite to motivate us!
A Lady: Maybe all that happened was that I tried to persuade you to write a novel, and instead we wrote a blog.
D: In that case, we are totally on schedule. The schedule being "we're gonna do that."
A Lady: Okay, so I'mma start writing; you write something too and we'll see what disaster happens.
D: This is basically exquisite corpse w smut, innit? Yay! Trainwreck! Six-figure movie deal! That's how it works!
