Breaking Habits

Finally, this madness is about to end. Tomorrow the final movie installment of the Twilight Saga premieres in North America with Breaking Dawn Part 2. Finally, the buzz and hysteria over a series of novels that are nothing more than drug store romance with vampires and werewolves will be over. Finally, the story of a bland, cardboard female character that somehow becomes the center of  so much drama and angst will end. Finally, I don't have to hear another thing about Kristen Stewart's and Rob Pattison's fakemance.

Several years ago, (it feels like forever) I took the first book in my hands to read because my then pre-teen god daughter would talk about nothing else. Being an English teacher, and a dedicated god mother, I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. I struggled through these novels, drowning in gaping plot holes, unappealing characters and painful dialogue to find out what the heck everyone was getting so worked up over. Obviously being a masochist, I then dutifully suffered through the movies whose special effects and soundtrack could not compensate for the excruciating acting and direction. I came to a conclusion.

It's a young girl thing that stays with some women a life time. It's the need for fantasy. It's a notion that has been around for hundreds of years in fiction, then later, on the silver screen and finally on television and in comics. The notion of a perfect man who will sweep every tender heart off her feet no matter who she is, what she does, how she looks, and where she comes from. It's a destructive notion that, left unchecked, can be one of the major reasons why real men don't get a fair shake, and real women feel unsatisfied for most of their lives. It's a female version of porn.

While some men hide their proclivity for steaming, naughty sex under beds and in closets, women take theirs with them on the subway and to the coffee shop. Used in moderation, it can be an, ummm, handy form of entertainment. Used excessively, it could be the reason women and men have unreal, and untenable expectations about sexual, emotional and committed relationships. These characters never go to the bathroom, or have a bad day, or pick their noses. The men in romance novels and the women in centerfolds bask in their two-dimensional perfection, while the audience feels unsatisfied when they're torn away from that world into the three dimensional one.

What's worse is that it's become so subliminal that we don't even know those expectations have become embedded in our psyches. With the divorce rate skyrocketing, the media splashed with celebrity break-ups, and shows like TMZ salivating at the latest scandal, what is going on with "romantic" relationships? Do they even exist? Sure they can, but real romance only has the trappings and the soundtrack that we choose. Real romance is effort. It's not produced by multi-billion dollar movie, music and publishing companies. It's what we make it. Finding romance beyond the "who does the dishes", the bad day at the job, or the crazy commute home is not as easy as picking up a book or grabbing the remote. It's milking energy to build and keep the mystique of romance after the children's meltdown and before our own.

Maybe it's time that adults take responsibility for their relationships and actually invest the time in them that we do in fantasizing about them. Maybe it's time, as adults, we start building healthy perceptions and expectations about intimate relationships in young men and women, so that they don't enter in them, handicapped by Bellas and Edwards. Maybe it's time to consciously help our young break this really nasty habit. Too many sweets result in cavities and obesity. Too much brain candy will dissolve not only our grey matter but wreck our emotional well-being.

50 Shades of Puke

Anastasia Steele might not have a gag reflex, winning the Most Adept Virgin Ever Award, but I do; and it was engaged reading this drivel.

My friend was reading 50 Shades of Grey by E.L. James for a book club she's in; and having heard about it at least twice more that day, I decided to cave into peer pressure and read the damn thing. Damn my weakness! And to further compound this messy situation, I found out after reading the first book, that it was part of a trilogy. Triple DAMN!

Being obsessive compulsive about these things, I simply had to read the other two just to finish this lame story about a paragon and her Dominant boyfriend.

Don't let anyone fool you. It's just another romance novel, following the genre's pattern closely, with some darker than usual elements shrouding the male protagonist, Christian Grey, and a LOT of mind-numbing (and not in a good way) kinky sex. It's never a good sign when I finally had to SKIP the sex scenes to get to the actual STORY, such as it is.

It's as if James decided to go through a checklist of places where she would have her protagonists having sex. Bathroom. Check. Bedroom. Check. Office. Check. Kitchen counter. Check. "Playroom". Check. Elevator. Check. Car. Check. Boat, plane, ocean. Check. Eye roll. Check.

Of course, Anastasia is the perfect woman who for some unexplained reason has no self-esteem or understanding of how BEAUTIFUL she is. At 21, she has not had sex, nor really done anything sexual, including masturbation. Yet. She gives perfect blow jobs, hand jobs, and other jobs as well as being the perfect receptacle for Christian's passion.

Oh. Kay.

The emails between them are witty and funny. I'll give it that; but that's all I'll give it. Erotica isn't supposed to be boring. But. It. Is. The story is contrived. The plot twists ridiculous. The premise laughable. Grey's past is disturbing and not just in the way it's portrayed in the novel. It's disturbing in the way it's NOT portrayed.

This Shades series has brought out my disgust for the fad of the polylogy as a way to score oodles of cash for the publishing house, the media conglomerate making the movies, and the author. I'm all for art being a lucrative business, but money can't be the motivation for a story. Reading these novels whose stories could have been more eloquently and efficiently told in one novel, has become an exercise in futility.

Stay tuned for my next post. Romance: The Horror.

Laters, babies