50 Shades of Grey: The Magazine?!
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As with any epidemic, there’s a tipping point and a saturation point. And then there’s 50 shades of annoying. Yes, it’s true. There is now a theme-based magazine called “50 Shades of American Women Who Love the Book and Live the Life.” I saw it in Barnes and Noble, next to a magazine celebrating all things Hobbit.
And then, shamefully, I bought it.
“Don’t judge me,” I told the young man at the register. Behind him stood a bookcase filled with paperback copies of the 50 Shades trilogy.
He looked at the magazine and chuckled. “Are you kidding me? This stuff sells.”
Only after I paid did I realize his misunderstanding, taking me for a middle-aged woman in suburbia who turns all 50 shades of orgasmic any time someone mentions Charlie Tango. What I felt was not shame in my purchase for sexual reasons, but deep lameness in myself, an embarrassment akin to being caught singing along to Air Supply in my SUV while picking something green out of my teeth.
I’m all out of love/I’m so lost without you/got the green thing!/I know you were right, believing for so long….lalalalala….
As I walked through the parking lot, I rationalized my purchase, bigtime. Why did I pay 6 bucks for this stupid thing? It’s because I am a journalista. It is my duty to read this entire magazine and report about it on Scarsdale10583, just as I brought “Mommy Porn” to you in January, after reading the first 50 Shades novel.
And, of course, I’m curious. I know a zillion American women are reading the novel, but who are all these American women that, according to publisher Topix Media Lab, are “living the life?” And, what exactly, does that mean? Are they driving around as passenger-of-choice in an Audi R8 Spyder, drinking Bollinger’s Grande Annee Rose for breakfast, or wearing Ben Wa balls to PTA charity luncheons?
Is it true that many mom-n-pop hardware stores are running low on rope?
These are the hard-hitting questions I was hoping this magazine would answer.
So I devoured it from cover to cover.
And now I can tell you to buy it, so that you, too, can release your inner goddess with 80 pages of jump-starting sex secrets! Also, follow the recipes for Christian-inspired cocktails and meet the Sex Whisperer, who used her body to “fix broken men like Christian Grey!”
This magazine is like Cosmo with fewer articles about sex.
As I read it, I felt concerned. Is there really a sexual revolution going on out there, due to the 50 Shades phenom? Because I’m just not feeling it.
My friends and I read the books and enjoyed them and experienced a momentary spike in our marital sex-lives (“for like a week,” as my friend Kate said, rolling her eyes) and then we got bored with that whole thing, bored with the commercialization of the franchise and/or with having more sex with our husbands, and so we moved back into more literary novels with less sex in them and also into having less actual sex. I know, it’s sacrilegious to admit that, so burn me at the stake. (But make the fire just enough so I can feel the flames touch my loins, Christian.)
A glossy page declared this an American Revolution, because, “for the first time in a long time, American women are confidently talking about sex.” But, are these women really talking about their intimate sex lives…or are they talking about 50 Shades of Grey? Because there is a big difference. I peered over the magazine and out my window to the street below, almost expecting to see women in tri-cornered hats, with epaulets on their lingerie, holding riding crops above their heads as they marched forward into the next battle in the red room of pain.
Okay, okay. As much as I joke about the impact of the books on our culture, I learned that Fun Factory, a German company, experienced a 350% increase in sales for their Smart Balls, which are similar to the beads used in the novels. That kind of economic growth, my friends, cannot be overlooked.
Here’s what else I learned from the 50 Shades magazine:
1. 93% of people surveyed said they wanted a spanking now.
2. I am embarrassed for America.
3. EL James is working on a fourth book in the series.
4. Bret Easton Ellis has tweeted about 50 Shades of Grey over 50 times, as he vies for the honor of writing the screenplay version of the books.
5. I am embarrassed for Bret Easton Ellis.
6. Women in a Mormon feminist book club read it and discussed it. That was actually interesting.
7. 82% of fireman interviewed (yes, you read that right, fireman) said that would have a drink with Christian Grey. I have no idea what that means.
8. I can have an ass like Anastasia’s if I do squats with 16-pound kettle bells.
9. A first edition of Tess of the D’Urbervilles costs $14,000.
10. E L James can now buy all of the remaining copies of that book without putting a dent in her bank account.
11. You can have “vanilla sex” by applying Kiehl’s vanilla-scented lip balm before kissing your mate. Only $9!
12. On a quiz entitled “Which Shade of Grey are You?” I scored a solid 40 points, putting me in the “Steel” category. This means I’ll occasionally flirt with the dark side but I would only tell my closest friends. Shhh.
13. Lastly, I learned that 73% of those same firemen said that reading 50 Shades of Grey had not “spiced up” their sex lives. Poor guys. You would think, with all that access to hoses and poles, they’d be on to something good.
As I closed the magazine, I pictured the future direction this 50 Shades fad might take. Like Harry Potter before, first comes the book, then the movie, then the merchandising, and, ultimately, the Universal Studios experience.
Forget 50 Shades: the Magazine. Bring on 50 Shades: the Ride.
Columnist and blogger Julie Gerstenblatt writes with humor and candor about her life in Scarsdale, her friends and family, and the particular demands of motherhood and wifedom in modern-day suburbia. She recently published her first novel, Lauren Takes Leave.
Into the Wild
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I have written these words before, but I’ll write them again: I am not what you’d call athletic. I lack hand-eye coordination and any desire to move fast, except to avoid danger. This is pretty true in all seasons, including my favorite, summer. Beach volleyball? A jog on the packed sand? A swim, perhaps? My family asks, looking down at me in my lounge chair. I’ve got the umbrella set up, a baseball cap on, and have just located my reading sunglasses in my bottomless tote.
No thanks, I tell them, I’d prefer to sit on the beach and read 150 pages of a novel than dive through the ocean waves. You go have fun.
But then I would imagine my kids growing up and thinking back to summers of their youth, remembering me as the oceanfront ghost. “Mom came with us to the beach, right?” They would ask each other, gray haired, sitting by some fire and telling their own children and grandchildren about me. “I guess,” Zoe would shrug. “I think she used to hand me money for ice cream every once in awhile. But maybe that was dad.”
One reason I got off my butt this summer is to change the course of that future narrative. I needed to start building a more active legacy. Not just for my children to talk about when I’m long gone, but so that I would create experiences for myself now as well. Those tales written by authors that I read on the beach don’t quite count, even if they are compellingly real to me.
And so I decided to paddle board.
“I can’t believe you are doing this with me!” My friend Allie said. We were at the beach in Old Greenwich, where we had just rented two paddle boards for an hour. We received some vague instructions from one of the teachers there about how to paddle board (“Kneel on the board until you feel confident enough to stand up, at which point, you stand up. And then you paddle, and that’s pretty much it.”) and then we were almost ready to go.
Before zipping us into our life jackets, the guide hesitated. “I’ve got to tell you, by law, that you are not supposed to go swimming today, due to the environmental hazards of runoff.”
“Is that bad?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Allie said, sounding disappointed. We all let that sink in. Then she turned to the guy. “But, it’s not a problem if we don’t fall in, right?!”
“Right!” he said. He relaxed and we zipped up. “But,” he said, “it’s pretty rough out there right now. Strong headwinds. It will be hard to paddle, and it may be hard to stay on the boards.”
“We’ll stay on the boards!” We promised.
Only once I was out in the water did I realize that it was a promise I might not be able to keep. I couldn’t figure out how I was going to stand, with both feet tucked under me as they were. But Allie had paddle boarded once before. I watched her stand successfully, and then, because my knees were killing me, if not because of my bravery, I decided to do it as well. “I’m up! I’m up!” I called out, since she was now ahead and couldn’t see me.
“Yay!” we cheered into the strong headwinds and over the rough surf.
I was shaking like a leaf, but I was standing. Walking across the water. It was beautiful.
After about three minutes, the shaking in my legs ceased and I felt stronger. But I wasn’t really satisfied. My feet seemed too close together on the board, and I thought that with a stronger stance, I’d feel more confident, so I inched my front foot up a bit. And that’s when the world went sideways.
“I’m going to fall!” I shouted.
“No you’re not!” Allie called over her shoulder.
I imagined myself covered with pesticides and surrounded by sharks, my recently blown-dry hair a complete mess. I could not fall!
I was like a Weeble. I wobbled but I did not fall down.
Phew.
“I didn’t fall!” I told her, my movements a running commentary.
“Who knew you were so sporty?!” Allie asked, a few minutes later, as I came up beside her. Shows you how little faith my friends have in me, and/or how well they know me, depending on how you look at it.
“I’m not sporty, Al. But...I’m water sporty!”
I then proceeded to tell her about my summers spent at camp in Maine, the waterfront my only real joy. “I’m a Red Cross expert sailor.”
“No!”
“Yes! The sailing teacher took me and my friend Abby to Sebago Lake where we had to commandeer our own boats and capsize them and right them again.”
“Who knew?”
“And, I’m a diver. Inwards, back and front flips....” I trailed off, letting her be impressed. I decided not to tell her about the last time I did a backflip, at the Scarsdale pool with Brett and Andrew watching, about 8 years ago.
I emerged from the depths and looked at Brett, smiling in anticipation of his awe. “Yeah. You aren’t allowed to do those anymore,” he said.
And that was it. My career as a diver was over.
But now I had a new watersport. I had paddle boarding.
Which made me want to try kayaking.
Tune in next week to read all about it.Columnist and blogger Julie Gerstenblatt writes with humor and candor about her life in Scarsdale, her friends and family, and the particular demands of motherhood and wifedom in modern-day suburbia. She recently published her first novel, Lauren Takes Leave.
The Thrill of Victory and the Agony of Defeat
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My 10-year-old son, Andrew, attended sleep away camp this summer for the first time. He returns this Sunday, Aug 12th, and, by all accounts, he had a blast. Right from the start, every letter was positive, every phone call upbeat, every image of him on the camp website full of smiles.
“I love how they always have their arms around each other in the group shots,” my mom commented.
“I know, so cute,” I agreed. He was growing up right before my eyes.
The first time Brett and I talked to him, we noticed that Andrew’s voice was raspy. “Are you sick?” I asked. “You sound like you have laryngitis.”
“Nah, I’m fine,” he said, clearly sounding hoarse. “We had a color chase last night and we screamed a lot. The greenie meanies were after us!”
“Well, maybe you should just rest your voice today,” Brett added from the other cordless phone. We stood next to each other in the kitchen, each armed with our own telephone, so we could all talk together.
“Maybe gargle with salt water,” I suggested. “Or go to the health center for a cough drop.”
“Yeah, yeah, okay, okay,” he said. He definitely wasn’t going to do anything about his voice. This kid was humoring us, we knew, and we were babying him, we knew. But we have roles to fill in life and we fill them: the worried parent, the happy-go-lucky-camper.
On visiting day, Andrew looked great. His voice was still a bit scratchy, but that was to be expected because they had just had a song competition and a sleep out and a sneak out and because he had just dropped from the sky on the ropes course. There are apparently many things to yell about in the middle of Pennsylvania.
With about 10 days left at camp, I got a call from the camp nurse. Andrew had a fever of 101.4 and had spent the night in the health center. “Can I talk to him?” I asked.
“Sure!” she said.
“Hi, Mom,” he said. “I had a headache two days ago and yesterday it got worse and so I came here and they told me I had a fever and they gave me medicine and I had to stay.”
“Oh, poor you!” I said.
“No, it’s really fun! I watched five movies. One of them was Austin Powers!”
Austin Powers?
Now, personally I think Austin Powers is hysterical. But I quickly tried to remember if it is an appropriate movie for kids or not. Which one has Fat Bastard and Mini Me? In which one does he lose his Mojo? When do we meet Goldmember?
Oh, what the heck, I decided. The camp probably knows which DVDs to show to feverish 10 year olds.
My child was sick in bed, and I couldn’t see him, I couldn’t hug him, I couldn’t kiss his forehead or give him Jell-O. I took a deep breath. Instead of being too motherly or overprotective, I responded to the news of Austin Powers with “Yeah, baby!”
“I got to go to campfire last night and we had another fake out for the camp Olympics!”
“That’s great! I hope you sat far away from everyone else!”
“And we eat Pop Tarts in the health center!” he said.
“Good for you!” I answered. “Now, can I speak to the nurse?”
The nurse told me that they hoped Andrew would be out at lunchtime since he hadn’t had a fever since yesterday, but that, should it go back up over 100, he’d have to stay another day.
When I debriefed with Brett later that day – both of us former campers -- he and I came to the same worried conclusion. “There’s only nine days left in camp,” Brett said.
“I know.”
“And they’ve already had two fake outs,” he added.
“I know!” I said.
“Call the camp back and ask them if Andrew will be well enough to watch the Olympic break out,” he said. “The kid has been waiting all summer for it and he can’t miss it.”
“I know!”
Now, hoping that your child gets well is good parenting. Hoping that your child gets well so he can see fireworks explode as a helicopter lands on a raft in the middle of the camp’s lake or whatever is perhaps lacking in paternal maturity.
But we wanted it for him so badly.
Plus, Andrew had been training for this moment for the past six weeks. He was in peak camp spirit mode. He just had to make it to the Olympics.
Also, we’d been watching the real Olympics on television. We know that athletes battle injury, some competing with broken bones, others taped up to basically keep their ankles and rotator cuffs attached. Athletes do not back down when the going got tough.
It was sunny Saturday. A perfect day for a camp to begin their Olympics. I called back and asked to speak to the camp nurse just one more time.
We were his loving, doting parents. We’d be damned if a little thing like a highly contagious virus would keep our firstborn child from his first Olympic games.
Lucky for me, the nurse seemed to understand my concerns without me actually having to beg with the words “please let my son out of the infirmary for break out.”
“I know that you know that certain fun events might be happening here at camp today,” she said, in a stage-whisper of a co-conspirer. “And I promise you that we will make sure that Andrew and the other children here will not miss out on anything, if today were to be an important day at camp.”
“I love this camp!” my mom responded when I told her the news. Unfortunately, Andrew’s fever did not abate. The call came at lunchtime
saying that an antibiotic was given to clear up his sinus infection.
“Can I speak to him?” I asked. I was really milking this phone call thing at the health center. I passed the phone around to my mom, Zoe, and Brett.
“I think you are going to be mad,” he said. “I watched the fifth Harry Potter movie.”
“Oh no,” I said.
“I know that Serius Black dies.”
“Oh, no!” I said. Things were worse than I thought. “But will you still read the rest of the books with me?”
“Yeah,” he said. “And, guess what? The Olympics broke out! Professional water skiiers came and I got to watch from a golf cart with the other kids from the health center. I’m on the white team!”
“That’s awesome!” I said, thinking it sounded very much like the spectacle in London.
“Oh, and Mom, I started my medicine and I feel normal again. I get to go back to my bunk tonight.”
“Hooray!” I cheered. Andrew would return to the Olympic village in time for the all-inspiring rope burn competition.
Now, Go White!Columnist and blogger Julie Gerstenblatt writes with humor and candor about her life in Scarsdale, her friends and family, and the particular demands of motherhood and wifedom in modern-day suburbia. She recently published her first novel, Lauren Takes Leave.
The Particular Personal Torture of Summer Reading Lists
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August 15th. Each summer as a middle and high schooler, I would wake up on the 15th and feel a sinking pit in my stomach. After an entire summer of blissful oblivion, this was the day I would face the reality that I had actual homework to do. From the years 1982-1987, I had still not selected – much less read – my school’s summer reading assignment come August 15th.
I’m a procrastinator. I learned that word in 6th grade when my teacher – Paul Solomon, actually, who just retired this year – used that word to describe me in front of the class. I felt the sting of it and then the acceptance: hey, somebody understood me! There was a word to describe my condition. I liked to wait for the very last minute. I still do. Why else would I wait all summer to write an article about waiting all summer?
It’s not that I didn’t like to read. I loved to read. I became an English teacher, for goodness sakes. And if a future English teacher didn’t want to do her summer reading, imagine what the rest of the kids must have felt like.
Ugh, the drudgery. Having to pick a book from a Xeroxed list. Just the fact that these books were on a list created by teachers made them incredibly and irrevocably unattractive. I may have liked that S.E. Hinton title before, may have even wanted to read Rumblefish before, with the tough-looking pool-playing, leather-jacket wearing guys on the cover, but not now. Now that Rumblefish was officially on a summer reading list, it was officially off of mine.
Plus, it was so hot outside. Who could focus on Carson McCuller’s The Member of the Wedding when it was a humid 96 degrees and my friend Dana had invited me to Atlantic Beach for the day? I’d rather be in the cool waves than in the hot South with Frankie Aadams, that was for sure.
Also, the teachers at my school did something extra sadistic to us by ranking the books by level of difficulty. This was a cruel and unusual torture for a good girl like me who basically wanted to impress her teachers without having to work all that hard to do so. So I studied the list carefully, trying to psyche it out to fit my particular needs, but there was very little room for flexibility, since the list only contained about 6 titles. Not to mention, the ranking system was flawed, definitely. I mean, the books ranged from 1 (easy with illustrations) to 3 (challenging in the way of Russian tomes). It was like a rollercoaster, this list, either going straight up, up, up in a frightening slope or zoom, zoom, zoom down in a fast, breezy downhill. There was hardly any plateau at all for a student like me, who craved safe, steady mediocrity.
One year, I remember selecting Green Mansions, listed by those demented teachers as a solid level 2. The book sticks out in my mind because of the all-green cover and because I couldn’t understand a word of it. Honestly. I read the first page about 6 times before starting to cry. Next, I panicked. I thought I might have lost the ability to read over the summer. Was this what 9th grade was going to be like? Were the teachers using the summer reading list to vet the real students from the fakers? On the first day of school, was I going to be exposed as a fraud and sent back to junior high because of Green Mansions?
Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about this novel: “Green Mansions: A Romance of the Tropical Forest (1904) is an exotic romance by William Henry Hudson about a traveler to the Guyana jungle of southeastern Venezuela and his encounter with a forest dwelling girl named Rima.” The main characters, besides the aforementioned Rima, are Abel, Nuflo, Cla-Cla, and Kao-Ko.
I’m sure it’s a classic, but I’ve gotta say, you couldn’t pay me enough to read that book even now. I demanded that my mom take me right back to B. Dalton so that I could humble myself with a level 1 book. It probably had colorful fish on the cover and used rhyming couplets to explain the plot, but anything was better than trying to navigate Ytaiao mountain with Kao-Ko.
And now I’ve got to complain about B. Dalton, may she rest in peace, the only bookstore in town when I was young. By August 15th, the summer reading titles had all but disappeared from the local libraries, so my mom and I had no choice but to purchase a copy from B. Dalton. But, each August, B. Dalton had been picked clean by middle and high school students who all clutched the same perverse book list in their sweaty fists. There was nothing left for a late-comer like me, so, invariably, as part of the summer reading dance that I did with my mom, we would have to mosey on up to the information desk in the bookstore and sashay and parlay our needs to the salesperson. This is in a pre-computer era, mind you, so the salesperson would then take out some kind of huge index and look up the ISBN for my lame level 1 book and then handwrite out a carbon copy paper with my name and address and the ISBN. The book would then be delivered not to me, but to the store in 7-10 days, at which time my mom would drive me over to B. Dalton and we would pay.
I began reading that stupid novel in the bookstore parking lot, because, of course, school started the very next day.
Hey, as a procrastinator, at least I would have the plot fresh in my mind when I wrote my back-to-school essay about it.
I hope you’ve done your summer reading, everyone! And if not, I know just the word for you.
Columnist and blogger Julie Gerstenblatt writes with humor and candor about her life in Scarsdale, her friends and family, and the particular demands of motherhood and wifedom in modern-day suburbia. She recently published her first novel, Lauren Takes Leave.
The 40-Year-Old Party Girl
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In a recent article for The Awl , author Amy Sohn explains “The 40-year-old Reversion,” in which she talks about partying regularly with her Park Slope mommy friends, who semi-jokingly refer to themselves as hookers, sluts and drug addicts. I call my friends neat freaks, tennis junkies, and uber-readers, so I guess we hang out with a slightly different crowd. Then Sohn goes on to explain her – which, to be clear, is also my – generation of moms. To warn you, the language she uses is strong and I found her description shocking. In fact, my very own mother, upon proofreading this article for me, didn’t even want me to print Sohn’s words, worried that readers would confuse Sohn with me. But it’s important that you get just a taste of her point of view in order for me to then tear into it a bit. Sohn writes:
“We’re masturbating excessively, cheating on good people, doing coke in newly price-inflated townhouses, and sexting compulsively—though rarely with our partners. Our children now school-aged, our marriages entering their second decade, we are avoiding the big questions—Should I quit my job? Have another child? Divorce?—by behaving like a bunch of crazy twentysomething hipsters. Call us the Regressives.”
Now back to me.
I read the article and then skimmed through the 450 or so comments following the piece, in which Ms. Sohn and her friends were oft called selfish a-holes. As much as I was disgusted by the behavior of the people described in the article, I also had to admit that I recognized some of the acts and actions she listed from witnessing them in my own mommy world. Yes, occasionally, moms go out and have a fun Girls’ Night. The ones I know do not aim to get wasted every Thursday, but they do plan time away from home to socialize with girlfriends. But while Sohn goes for shock value in her recounting of these people, I would like to re-frame her understanding with a little bit of compassion.
Do we enjoy parties? Yes. Do we do it because we have regressed to our 20-year-old selves? No. We do it for precisely the opposite reason: because we know, by looking in the mirror at our wrinkled or Botoxed faces, how very far we really are from 20. We are not regressing and acting like kids. We are coping by acting out as adults.
We are adults who bury our mothers when they die of breast cancer in their 60’s. We bury our fathers who die quietly in their sleep. Sometimes, we bury our young husbands, and, incredibly, while somehow remaining erect, we bury our children. We bury a friend, who leaves behind small children that we promise to help raise. We console each other with hugs and tears and food and then pound it out at the gym and pedal fast at Soul Cycle to manage our stress and tame our grief.
And, occasionally, we spin down a pole on a party bus while slurping down Jell-O shots.
We are very much 40.
Our husbands look for work. We look for work. We sell off possessions while looking for work, and consider moving to a state that offers better lifestyle deals – lower taxes, cheaper property, better quality of life - than New York. We move to those states or we don’t.
We sing karaoke very loudly and off key while drinking Pinot Grigio from a pitcher.
We are not regressing.
We are very much 40.
We consider divorce. Our husbands come out of the closet. We definitely divorce. We get new breasts, and tuck in our tummies, and search for lumps. We manage our children’s homework and their ADHD and their demanding soccer coach. We take charge of family gatherings and dread Thanksgiving.
We attend a sex-toy party and look on in wonder and horror at all the things we don’t know while downing shots of some type of nameless alcoholic concoction that tastes vaguely like Children’s Tylenol.
We own it all and let it be a part of us: the good, the bad, the very real realities and the nights of drunken mayhem.
I am not trying to make excuses for bad behavior. Sohn mentions illegal acts and very large lapses of judgment that I think represent a fraction of the whole. I am merely trying to put occasionally outlandish nights in context by looking at them from my own, 42-year-old perspective. I remember being 20. 20-year-olds may party because they think they are immortal. I believe that 40-year-olds go clubbing and have a damned good time every once in a while because we know all too clearly just how human we are.
And so, I’d like to raise an imaginary glass and toast us moms. We have a lot of crap to deal with, quite frankly, and we need to bond together in a special kind of support group, not unlike AA. To the triathletes and cancer fighters, the boozers and the dancers, the PTA moms and dog-walkers, whether you are a karaoke-singer, pot-smoker, or pill-popper, whether you live for dermatological injections or despise those who do, Cheers. Whether you work in an office, from home, or not at all, Cheers. Whether or not you like your in-laws or even your husband, Cheers. If you are a mom, then you endure what we all do: the love, the heartache, the guilt, the worry, the stress. If you are a wife, then you know that sometimes you look forward to a drink with your husband and sometimes you crave one without him.
To all of you 40-year-old moms out there, good luck to you, and Cheers.Columnist and blogger Julie Gerstenblatt writes with humor and candor about her life in Scarsdale, her friends and family, and the particular demands of motherhood and wifedom in modern-day suburbia. She recently published her first novel, Lauren Takes Leave.
