Woodie’s are fresh out of rope, according to one feverish creature. They’re probably running low on cable ties too. B&Q is loaning copies of the book so staff can prepare themselves for the onslaught on duct tape. We can only pray that Chadwicks and Ted Johnsons are getting a bit of the action too (so to speak).
Wondering where the Ulster Bank Construction Purchasing Managers’ index is headed? Well wonder no more. That index is headed for the stratosphere. Because every last woman in the country is a) tooling up in the hardware store or b) fighting hammer and tongs for a job in a hardware shop.
The CV for the job is fairly specific: you need to be about 21, a naïf fresh out of college, an introvert with parental abandonment issues and zero self-worth. And since you're a virgin – is that a problem? – you will blush a lot. Life will be a tad dreary for a while but some day your (hot, billionaire) prince will come, you will have a moment over the cable ties – yum — and next thing, you're on his helicopter, souls soaring in unison over the Cartier earrings and the first editions. Sorted. Like Cinderella, only better. Because that Audi is a keeper, unlike a lousy pumpkin.
Mills & Boon
That basically, is the route plan for
Fifty Shades of Grey
. Anyone old enough to remember the Mills & Boon 64-pagers will recognise the formula. The woman, invariably a blushing virgin, who shrivels prettily in the environs of the broody alpha male – the local laird/rich international man of mystery/some class of social superior – whose cruel eyes bore through her or disdain her entirely, until for no obvious reason other than a bout of total insanity, he roughly pulls her into his arms, kissing her hungrily while calling her a “little fool”. The End. The brilliance of the 64-page formula is that we never had to hear about the subsequent unpleasantness when he recovered.
Many a women in a staid or rough relationship had a soft spot for that laird. We know this because Mills & Boon fantasies sold by the shipload. They longed to be the healer to his wounded bird, to break through that protective carapace and tame the cruel beast within before swooning into his arms and a paradisiacal ever-after of love, (barely hinted at) lust, social status and financial security.
Then the women (well, a lot of them) saw the dangers and told their daughters that Cinderella was a nice fairy story but that only a moron would wait for a cruel-eyed, rich male to ride in to fix her life. And if he did, there would be a reckoning, my girl. Yet here we are, all tooled up for the big feature on St Valentine’s Day, in which our virginal heroine of the hardware with “too-large” eyes, flushes “a deep crimson” over the seriously damaged billionaire, whose only way of showing physical love is to tether her (literally) in his Red Room of Pain for interminable bouts of BDSM.
In the years since EL James published the first of the mega-selling Fifty Shades trilogy, the arguments have centred on where BDSM (bondage, discipline, sadism, masochism) diverges from the habits of violent, sexist bullies. Occasionally, a dominatrix pops up to explain that it's all about consent. But BDSM is not the issue.
So let’s say your daughter/sister/mother confides lip-tremblingly that she is now a Submissive to a hot billionaire Master? Mmmh, you might say, I’m a teeny bit concerned, Mammy, but thanks for letting me know. Anything else? Well, the job entails a lengthy, signed contract which requires her to exercise four days a week with a trainer provided by the Master, to eat only from his prescribed list of foods and to use a certain type of contraception because the Master hates condoms.
Portraits
Oh and when Mammy’s friend did portraits of her, the Master bought the lot of them because he doesn’t like other people looking at her. And there was that time he bought the company where she worked to make sure she was “safe” there. And that night she disobeyed him by going to a bar with a friend and he flew across the US to let her know he was very, very cross. And that other time he had a hissy fit in her office because she hadn’t changed her name to his, but sure that was grand because he just wanted everyone to know that he own – eh, loved her.
But she clings to that old Victorian/Twilight dross that only a pure virgin – oops, Mammy, does he know about us? – can save a tormented colossus from himself. “He thinks he doesn’t deserve to be loved . . . Does it have to do with his upbringing? His birth mom, the crack whore?” Yeah, Mammy, that’ll be it.
Now imagine the Master is a part-time hardware assistant who got the bus from his dingy Dundalk flat and its smelly Room of Pain (aka his bedroom) all the way to Bray, in a right temper because you went to a bar with a friend ? And hangs around your office a lot to make sure you’re “safe”, and tells you what to eat, how much to exercise and what kind of contraception you have to use? Ah here, Mammy, I’m calling the guards. @kathysheridanIT