50 SHADES OF 60
So, like many men I tried reading Fifty
Shades of Grey when my wife was reading it, and yes, I confess, I went right to the juicy bits. Well, what I
thought were the juicy bits. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not about to launch
into a critique of the books, that would be unfair as I did not actually read a
whole book and that was not because they were badly written. What the problem
is or so it seems is that men see in pictures and women see in prose.
It has long been agreed that men are
hunters and women are gatherers. Look back to the cave drawings when men drew
pictures of a woman being dragged by her hair back to their pad and women, one
would suppose, drew pictures of men bringing home the kill, along with a pint of
milk and a dozen dinosaur eggs and a copy of 'Wuthering Heights.' Okay I’m being a little silly, but then that’s
also a trait of men and some women, which, can I say men find very sexy in a
woman.
The point is (and Fifty Shades drove this
home for me) that men see in glorious Technicolor; why do you think we like sexy
lingerie so much? It’s not that we need to dress women up because they are not
enough without all of that stuff, it’s because that is how our minds work. So
when we try to read a book like Fifty Shades we go right to the graphic parts,
it’s a bit like having a comic when you were a young boy in school. People
would say, “Oh, he still needs to have a picture book, he’s not ready for the
chapter book yet.” Not true, it was simply that the way our brain works is
different to that of a woman, we want to see the whole picture right there in front of us. Women are more delicate and they take the time to
go deeper into the relationship while men go, “Yep, got that now let’s add some
stockings and suspenders.” Now the picture is complete. Men imagine the picture and then want to see it on paper to see if it matches up t our imagination.
The strange thing is that it stays that
way throughout our lives, well it did for me. Oh I think I’ve become more
sensitive with age, but to my great surprise (and joy) I am no less pictorial now than I
was at twelve with my first copy of Playboy. In those days you either new
someone who had an older brother or you simply plucked up the courage and made
your voice a little deeper and walked into the newsagent, all the while hoping to god that
person who served you was not a twenty-four year old woman. We all had the same
thrill and nightmare at the same time with this one.
I think the sad thing about the whole Fifty
Shades trend is that a lot of women want a Christian Grey instead of the Mike
Brown they married and a lot of Mike Browns want an Anastasia Steele who will do the things that Anastasia does instead of the Sue Jones
they married. The thing about this book for most people is not the actual physical
things that this adventurous pair got up to, no, for most people who have read
the books the thing now is the anticipation of something more, something new in
their own relationship, something different and exciting. The fun does not have
to stop ay 60, why should it. Maybe if we added a little spice into our lives
we would feel twenty-four again and that’s a good thing. Getting older is a
fact but growing up is an option even for women.
A good friend of mine once told me, that if a man or a woman say that they want to have monogynous relationship then that comes with a responsibility. Not a mechanical responsibility but a responsibility of passion and adventure that does not stop on your thirtieth birthday.
