An Analogy of ‘Fifty Shades of Gray’ by E. L. James

I’m not prudish.  But I do believe in a true story in a book. When I first heard about ‘Fifty Shades of Gray’ and that it had a lot of sex in every page, I thought it was one of those porno books all for the sex. I didn’t want to read it. But when I continued to hear much about the book and that this was the writer’s first book and it was having tremendous sales, that caught my attention. I needed to see what other people found so exciting about this new trilogy.

I started reading the first book in the series, skipping the sex scenes, which I found tedious. I read the second and third book. By then I was hooked on the trilogy. There was an incredible story, a real story with real characters in this trilogy. Psychology is one of my areas of expertise, so you can image how much wealth of words and psychopathology I found in these three books.

The story fascinated me instantly. This was the story of an exceedingly handsome man with serious psychopathology. The second time I read each of the three books, I read the whole page and discovered that sex and sex scenes were very important to the telling of this story. This man needed to show everything through sex. He was abused physically as a child by his mother’s pimp, sexually abused by his adopted mother’s friend and introduced to Discipline & Bondage. He grew up into a man with mixed up values, surrounding all his good and bad actions with sex. So you definitely have to read the whole story without skipping the sex scenes to understand the story and Christian Gray.

It is not until he meets a normal and very pragmatic, young woman with her head right on her shoulders when he begins to experience normal life with a normal girl. At one point in the story, the woman who introduced him to Discipline & Bondage, tries to break up the relationship with this new girl whom she feels is really getting too close to him emotionally. He yells at her to stop interfering, that this is the first normal relationship he has had with a girl.

It’s  incredible to study the two main characters because they’re both terrific. I can’t help but ask, did the writer know someone like Christian Gray who had those psychological problems? The firmness of the girl’s character is a treasure of ideas which come out naturally and eventually help Christian grow out of his emotional problems.  But today, we stop here and continue tomorrow analyzing the trilogy.