Fifty Shades of Beautiful

There are many reasons I love the Fifty Shades trilogy: it would probably take me the whole blog to explain!

Here I would like to mention only one, and this is the positive way bookish/nerdish femininity is presented throughout. One of the truly feministic and empowering messages of the book has to do with Ana's bookishness. This is not because the girl who gets the most desirable man in town is a book-worm with no sexual experience, later to be transformed to a desirable woman herself. This has been done before.

It is actually because, (a) Ana continues to be bookish and study after marriage; to his credit, Christian never finds bookishness off-putting, and in fact, he presents Ana with a whole library at home and she places her desk there; (b) this is done without demonizing the sexy and beautiful girl (Ana's flatmate Kate), which is what usually happens in books and movies promoting so-called "simple" rather than coquettish femininity, and, (c) in the end Ana becomes so sexually strong that even Christian is in awe of her!

Bookish or not, Ana Steele (later Grey) is on her way to sexual dominance!