Everything about Fifty Shades of Grey annoyed me so badly I refused to read it.
Everyone else is reading it? I won’t, then.
A virgin being sexually exploited by an older man in a travesty of a relationship? Thanks, but no.
A successful author selling 100million copies of her book in 52 languages? THAT COW. I shan’t give her another penny.
Then one day, after the media hype had died down, it had become a cultural phenomenon and I couldn’t really avoid it any more, I downloaded the e-book and read the whole trilogy in a weekend.
I read it that quick because, well, it’s not got a lot of long words and it’s sort of predictable.
It follows exactly the same narrative arc as every Jane Austen, Danielle Steele or Mills & Boon book ever written – young ingénue meets older man, misunderstandings and sexual tension ensue, and in the end her love saves him from himself.
Which, as anyone who’s lived on Planet Earth for more than five minutes knows, is about as likely as tap dancing kangaroos.
It was painful to read, and in more ways than one. I mean, one whole chapter is a sex contract written in legalese.
Now Universal have released a trailer of the film version featuring Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith’s daughter Dakota (was she named after the plane or the state?) and Keira Knightley’s ex Jamie Dornan, who’s worryingly good at acting a bit weird.
And, for the life of me, I can’t see a reason for anyone to go and see it.
Yes, Jamie Dornan takes his top off. Yes, there’s a fleeting shot of Dakota Johnson gasping in a blindfold.
But, er, that’s all the excitement they want to give you. Most of the trailer is taken up with Hollywood’s idea of what a virgin is like, which is wearing a cardy, cutting your own fringe and avoiding eye contact.
There are two problems making a mainstream film about k*nky sex.
First, if you’re using mainstream actors they’d like a career afterwards that isn’t dominated by (HA!) kinky sex. And secondly, you want a mainstream audience to go and see it.
Universal paid a rumoured £3million for the film rights, and millions more to make it – they need to put this film on general release to make their money back, which means a 15 or at worst 18 certificate.
There’s even suggestion they’ll make two versions – one for the giggly teenagers and one for the mums to buy on DVD for private titillation.
I’ll bet you that means the film will have to concentrate on the virgin-saves-naughty-man storyline, which is as limp as Larry Grayson’s wrist, and reduce the kink to five minutes here or there just to hold people’s attention.
And that, I’m afraid, really IS a Mills&Boon novel. One of the worse ones.
The problem is that Fifty Shades was read principally because it was a bit kinky – not too kinky – and it was mainly read without anyone else realising.
It began in 2011 as Twilight fan fiction, and then because of the explosion in ebooks it could be read on the morning commute without anyone around you realising you were mentally in a ‘Red Room of Pain’ with a collar in one hand and a whip in the other.
It spread by word of mouth and Erika Leonard didn’t land a print publishing deal until 2012, when it began to look like she’d be able to sell a few paperbacks.
They started off on that slightly-grotty ‘erotica’ shelf, and it took maybe a year for bookshops to start putting Fifty Shades in the front window displays.
People started asking if everyone else had read it, and suddenly people you wouldn’t expect it from began discussing b*tt plugs and love eggs in the canteen.
It was exactly the same as when you were at school, and everyone else knew what sixty-nining was and you didn’t and you just pretended you did while laughing at someone who didn’t, and praying none of your mates found out.
It was a case of “we’re all doing this, and if you don’t know about it you’re JUST NOT COOL and possibly frigid as well”.
At that point bookshops really started selling in bulk and the Fifty Shades display in my local Waterstone’s was of Titanic proportions.
People began arguing about whether this was a healthy affair, as it involved an inexperienced young woman, and whether it was glamorising abusive relationships.
The hero doesn’t merely spank his girlfriend, and he doesn’t do it because they both enjoy it. He does it because of his own terrible childhood and when the heroine finally finds out the reason it’s not shocking so much as pathetic.
It’s about as sexy as damp lettuce.
By that point in the trilogy I just wanted to slap everyone involved, and not in a sexy way.
Now there’s going to be a film that, if my guess is right, is going to be of interest only to teenaged girls and bored housewives, both of them in need of titillation and a fantasy, fixable man.
You can’t watch it in secret, like you could read it. It can’t have as much sex as the book.
The story of slightly-damaged billionaires who just need the love of a good virgin will be even naffer and you won’t really want to watch it with 500 strangers, at least a few of whom will be enjoying it a little too much.
There’ll be retail opportunities for branded love eggs, of course, and no doubt blindfolds, jeans, riding crops and velvet-covered ping pong bats as well.
It’ll be the DVD someone buys their partner next Christmas, with a knowing wink over the children’s heads. It will be an acceptable kind of porn for women, who generally like the mechanical business to have a story attached.
Perhaps some people will be persuaded into a kind of sex they’re not keen on, and perhaps some young schoolgirl will be under the impression that punishment and love-making are the same thing.
But more than anything else, it’s going to be a slightly rubbish film about as kinky as a beige jumper and there’ll be another two years of people looking superior and saying: “Oh, haven’t you seen it yet?”
And not one of them will realise that when you make something edgy a bit more mainstream, it’s not edgy any more.
It’s just Keira Knightley’s ex-boyfriend with his top off, engaging in some light spanking while looking sorry for himself.
Obviously, I’ll be getting a copy so I can scorn it properly. If only there was a handsome billionaire to save me from myself…