As it happens, the prevailing stereotype of the Fifty Shades of Grey reader, distilled in the condescending term “mommy porn,” as an older, suburban, possibly Midwestern woman isn’t entirely accurate: according to the publisher’s data, gleaned from Facebook, Google searches, and fan sites, more than half the women reading the book are in their 20s and 30s, and far more urban and blue state than the rampant caricature of them suggests.

The current vogue for domination is not confined to surreptitious iPad reading: in Lena Dunham’s acclaimed new series, Girls, about 20-somethings adrift in New York City, a similar desire for sexual submission has already emerged as a theme. The heroine’s pale hipsterish ersatz boyfriend jokes, “You modern career women, I know what you like ...” and his idea, however awkwardly enacted, is that they like to be dominated. He says things like “You should never be anyone’s ... slave, except mine,” and calls down from a window: “If you come up I’m going to tie you up and keep you here for three days. I’m just in that kind of mood.” She comes back from seeing him with bruises and sheepishly tells her gay college boyfriend at a bar, “I am seeing this guy and sometimes I let him hit me on the side of my body.”

Her close friend and roommate, meanwhile, has a sweet, sensitive, respectful boyfriend in the new mold who asks her what she wants in bed, and she is bored out of her mind and irritated by him; she fantasizes instead about an arrogant artist she meets at the gallery where she works, who tells her that he will scare her in bed. So nice postfeminist boys are not what these ambitious, liberal-arts-educated girls are looking for either: they are also, in their exquisitely ironic, confused way, in the market for a little creative submission.

Further signals of the current cultural interest in sexual domination include the recent movie A Dangerous Method, which safely embedded spanking in a period piece exploring the history of psychoanalysis. Keira Knightley told interviewers that she was so concerned about the spanking scene during which her character was tied to a bedpost that, in order to get through it, she drank shots of vodka beforehand.

But some ladies may think the romance in 50 Shades of Grey detracts from the sexual fantasy. While some parts are reminiscent of 9½ Weeks and Last Tango in Paris, others are straight out of Pretty Woman, and the image of Mickey Rourke blindfolding Kim Basinger just doesn’t evoke the same mood as Richard Gere seducing Julia Roberts at a piano. E.L. James knows her S&M so well that Grey could read like a less sinister Story of O, if it weren’t punctuated by the narrator’s dithering inner monologue (every time Anastasia gets aroused, it seems, she announces it with a “Holy Crap!” or “Holy Shit!” or “Holy Moses!”)

If you couldn’t tolerate Bella’s moralizing conscience in Twilight, chances are you’ll feel similarly about Anastasia’s. That said, where Stephanie Meyer’s prose is G-rated, James’s is unabashedly explicit. Here, the most racy and alternately corny scenes from the first installment of her softcore porn series.

Anastasia and Christian’s hot elevator makeout session
“Before I know it, he’s got both of my hands in his viselike grip above my head, and he’s pinning me to the wall using his lips … His other hand grabs my hair and yanks down, bringing my face up, and his lips are on mine … My tongue tentatively strokes his and joins his in a slow, erotic dance … His erection is against my belly.” (Page 78)

Spoiler alert. It’s roughly the story of a soon-to-be college graduate, Anastasia Steele, set upon by a BDSM-loving corporate magnate, Christian Gray. Beyond that, it does not trouble itself with novelty. Things happen in “nanoseconds,” eyes watch like “hawks,” people are “putty” in each other’s hands. Anastasia trips—not once, not twice, but thrice—literally into Christian’s arms. She narrates their chemistry in rafts of breathless interior monologue, while, at intervals, Christian stares at her with “obsidian” eyes and provides terse explanations for buying her lingerie: “Your jeans were spattered with vomit.” 

The lover of the junkiest romance, the most hastily written porn, the most pieced-together chick-lit—even those free pamphlets at the gynecologist—might be allowed a touch of disappointment at the level of the proceedings. (If you forget that Anastasia is impervious to amour, remember, her name is “Steele.”)  

Those nods to Tess of the D’Ubervilles, scattered like errant dandruff, will fool no one. That line about ordering everything on the menu for her at the hotel—that’s from Pretty Woman! And wait—this lady looks suspiciously like Twilight's Bella, but grown-up. Her memo-loving, last-minute-rescuing, nipple-clip-wielding lover is his own kind of cold-blooded vampire. Let’s not even get to the matter of the plot, for which the reader keeps poking around, like the elusive last hunk of white meat in a bowl of chicken soup. Popular trash isn’t new, but bad literature that’s all bad with no story to truck it along is.