Earlier today, a friend sent me a link to a You Tube video of baby pandas playing on a slide. It was early, it was raining and it was Saturday: slightly sleep-deprived, I was glad of the distraction and made happier by what I saw. Hard as it is to enter into the mindset of an animal, it really did seem as though the baby pandas were having fun. Anthropomorphism? Maybe. But I’d swear to it that their happiness seemed almost discernible, as they tried the slide out once, liked it, tried it out again, got a bit more daring, and tried to climb up it only to bundle back down again together. You’d almost imagine you could hear them laughing…
The video certainly cheered me up, as I watched it in a local café, taking refuge from the rainy summer weather as I whiled away 20 minutes before a hair appointment. It also made me think. Maybe there’s not enough of that kind of harmless, aimless, pointless fun in life any more. Maybe I’ve got very bad at trying something out just for the sake of it, just because it might be fun, just because it might be the very thing to make me laugh. Growing older, my mind agonising over every detail, I’ve got very bad at taking trivial risks. Oh, I don’t mean the big things: I’m not about to start tombstoning along the local coast, or driving when I’m half asleep or going to Tesco’s in my pyjamas just to see whether anybody notices. But the smaller decisions, like whether to travel by a subtly different route, or try something new for breakfast, or talk to someone I don’t really know well yet – I need to recapture the risks I used to take so easily when I was, perhaps, 16: otherwise I will keep lumbering along like those baby pandas, blindly sticking to routine and never really experiencing the joy that a well-considered risk may bring.
Because life’s lived in colour, not in black and white. If black and white are tonal extremes, at either end of the kind of spectrum you might find in your local paint stockist or on the diagram of the colours available for use on your computer, then most of our lives are lived in between these tonal end points. There’s a saying attributed to John Lennon, that ‘life is what happens when we’re making other plans’; I’d say that life is what happens somewhere in between black and white. Glorious technicolour? Possibly. Shades edging gently into one another? More likely.
Using the word ‘Shades’ in Summer 2012 makes it unavoidable: I’m going to have to mention that book. Fifty Shades of Grey has been the publishing sensation of the year, selling millions, outselling almost everything you can think of, with sales topping 10 million as I write. It’s been nicknamed ‘mummy porn’, a phrase which in itself makes me physically shiver with revulsion. Once I got past my initial suspicion that mummy porn was some sort of necrophiliac convention involving ancient Egyptian sarcophagi, I felt even more repulsed when I realised what it actually was… the acceptable face of what used to be termed ‘soft porn’, which middle-aged women best defined as ‘mummies’ might enjoy. Oh the thought. The very thought. I’m actually shivering with horror as I type this. Soft porn for yummy mummies is the Cath Kidson website – soft furnishings in pretty flowery patterns… something else which makes me cringe a bit, being honest. Or maybe the Boden catalogue. Or some of the more self-satisfied discussion threads on Mumsnet. This… this publishing sensation (I’m not prepared to define it as a novel) is just… unpleasant. No. It’s more than that. It’s much more than that. It’s darker than grey and, when I think about it, it makes me a bit angry…
It makes me angry because there are so many books worth reading, and this (or these, for there are three of these godforsaken books flying off shelves and into handbags and onto bedside tables and perched on the sides of bathtubs everywhere… oh the horror…) is just not one (or three) of them. I’m going to own up. I read a bit of it. Not even a quarter of book 1. Engaging with the amount of it I did, I just felt ill, and that was before all the stuff that I overheard two middle-aged sales assistants in a department store saying had ‘made them have hot flushes’ got going. I’m hard to shock: when it comes to explicit description, I’m more likely either to laugh and move on, or to try to figure out some kind of logistical assessment of credibility. But what did shock me about what I read of Fifty Shades was just how badly written it was. The two central characters, Ana and Christian, do an awful lot of gazing at one another. He does a bit of frowning and a bit of chuckling. She experiences an increased heart rate and a weakening at the knees. So far, so Mills & Boon. It reminded me of some of the worst excesses of the Twilight books, or at least the first one when Edward the Vampire kept gazing at Bella and sniffing at how delicious she smelt and sighing an awful lot. It made me say, out loud in an empty house while reading it late one night, ‘Oh for God’s sake Edward, just eat her and be done with it. You know you want to.’ From what I read, Fifty Shades is basically Twilight with added S&M. This is not just romance, this is S&M romance, to paraphrase an advertising campaign familiar to yummy mummies everywhere. And that’s just where the problems start…
It’s not that I was shocked. I gave up on reading Fifty Shades at the point where Christian showed Ana his ‘red room of pain’, the room in his house where all the scenes which are alleged to drive the mummies wild, take place. There are whips. There are chains. There are shackles. There are throwbacks to an age of subjugation and the thing that makes me angry beyond reason is that over 10 million women have been too blind to see this. Women have felt ‘liberated’ and ‘excited’ by reading this stuff, saying that pornography has been the preserve of men for many years, and now it’s their turn. Otherwise sensible, often intelligent women have commented that the book has been such stuff as dreams are made on for them – the stuff of fantasies and daydreams. This horrifies me. Why feel liberated about engaging with something sleazy? The etymology of pornography tells its own story. Originating from French and Ancient Greek, the word dates back to 1857 (so my sources say) and means ‘one writing of prostitutes’, with the modern meaning of ‘salacious writing or pictures’ representing a slight shift in meaning, though of course the original meaning implied salacious content anyhow. Sometimes the word gets broadened in common usage to mean ‘excessive and potentially disturbing detail’, maybe in a phrase like ‘pornographic violence’. If a yummy mummy found her husband (the laddy daddy?) was staying up late at night, accessing pornographic material online or in a book or magazine, she’d be outraged. He might find himself cast out of the perfect household, his Jaeger suits flung unceremoniously across the stripe-rolled lawn. The yummy mummy would be on her BlackBerry to her friends instantly, wrapping her Boden drapey cardigan around her shoulders and setting out her best Cath Kidson crockery and matching napkins for a terribly angry complaining session about how horrible men are, over red velvet cupcakes and a flowing supply of drinks, beginning with Lapsang Souchong and ending up with Cava and a song…
But being serious. Women are saying they feel liberated by reading this stuff; liberated as sexual beings who have an identity beyond being wives and mummies. And yet what are they actually reading? Three offensively badly written novels which offer titillation in the form of a physical subjugation of the central female character by a serial sado-masochistic anti-hero, who is variously described in terms of being ‘impossibly handsome’ and rather, er, well-endowed. Even when Christian seems to be being considerate towards Ana, persuading her to eat, or advising her to dry her hair after a shower lest she catch a cold, he is merely doing two things: controlling her behaviour further, and making sure that she does not lose strength to the extent that she is no longer physically able to fulfil his fantasy. It doesn’t take to be Sigmund Freud to decode the symbolism of Christian Grey’s skyscraper residence, his piloting, his driving, while the ‘red room of pain’ clearly references just exactly the very opposite of what these silly, deluded yummy mummies are feeling so very liberated about. He ties her up and whips her, and you feel liberated reading about it? What – seriously? It baffles me, the whole thing – but it makes me angry as well, because just how on earth has this writer and her agents and her publisher made so much money by peddling these primitive, atavistic atrocities which put women so firmly in their place - and tie them there with belts, buckles and handcuffs. There’s nothing in that which is even as tasteful as the teenage boy’s typical joke about girls having small feet so they can stay close to the kitchen sink - the kind of thing which outrages the teenage boy’s sisters or mummy or female classmates. It scares me that a marketing campaign really can fool so many of the people, so much of the time: that so many women think this stuff is liberation personified.
But I suppose it all comes down to interpretation. Friends, colleagues, family members often question my choice of reading materials… colleagues are often appalled that I don’t read more romantic or historical novels like they do. Take this morning. After my coffee, I went to the hairdresser’s, reading (between the snippets of small talk and as I was made to look rather more human) a novel set on an American campus university, with a strong central motif of baseball and an almost entirely male dramatis personae. It’s only now that it strikes me that this was perhaps an unusual choice of reading material for such an occasion, as everyone else around me made their way through celebrity gossip magazines. I’m loving The Art of Fielding, though, and that’s as someone who knew little or nothing about baseball before I started reading it. I can’t bear the typical fluffy chick-lit or its grown-up, bonneted costume-drama second cousin. I would rather watch Fight Club than The Notebook, Lost in Translation than PS I Love You, but that’s just my tiny squaring on the colour card of taste.
We’re all gradations of the million shades on a paint chart, or of the 216 html codes for the colours on a typical computer spectrum. And that’s fine. The moment when you reach a synchronicity with someone – when you suddenly know beyond doubt that your shading coincides, is one of those things which can make it feel that life’s worth living. The converse, too: when someone makes it clear that your thinking simply doesn’t coincide with theirs, your shades are not just semi-complementing opposites but actively clash in a discordant adjacency unpairing – that’s the stuff of sadness and despair. Worst of all when you thought you had a shaded harmony, only for the crashing notes of hurt and sadness and infinite disappointment to intrude…
My friend knew I’d enjoy that baby panda video today; in turn, I sent it to a few different friends whose grey, rainy morning I thought it might brighten too. Life is not black and white. Our colours are different. We see them differently. We can be colour blind in misjudging one another and ourselves. But when the colours coincide in a spectrum between people, even for a while, no matter how or when it happens, it’s as though even the most serious of us, even at the most strained times, can recapture the sheer joy of a group of baby pandas discovering the happiness of playing on a slide.
But as for feeling liberated by that Fifty Shades of Grey?
I’d prefer to paint a wall and watch it dry.
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