You may notice that this post is up kind of late today. Basically, I had two final papers due today and while I started both of them ahead of time, the last 1/3 or so of both of them were written more painfully than I expected over the course of the past twenty-four hours. So I figured it would be better to get some sleep and get refreshed and give you a quality blog post a day late rather than pass off a half-assed, nonsensical blog post in my increasingly sleep deprived stupor.
Wait, that actually sounds pretty awesome. Let’s do this.
Chapter Six
Okay, I’m too tired to bother looking up what happened at the end of the last chapter, but I’m pretty sure sex-type stuff happened, so I’m just gonna try to figure it out from context.
“Hey, Dad. I caught you.”
Nope. That’s not going to work.
Eva catches up with her dad over the phone about her first week in New York, where he alternates between “Go out, be young, have fun” and “Some nights I wake up in a cold sweat thinking about you in New York”, so, yeah, this guy already has some pretty consistent characterization…
Then things get DARK but it’s still only implied that they’re DARK but it’s not doing a great job of it, so it’s more like things get (DARK).
I thought my dad might still love my mom. He’d never married. That was one of the reasons I never told him about what happened to me. As a cop, he would’ve insisted on pressing charges and the scandal would have destroyed my mother. I also worried that he’d lose respect for her or even blame her, and it hadn’t been her fault. As soon as she’d found out what her stepson was doing to me, she’d left a husband she was happy with and filed for divorce.
And wow there is a lot of trouble in this paragraph. Let’s go through it all because I don’t want to get to sleep or anything.
- From a narrative point of view, this “saying but not really saying” what the incident is gives it this weird, schizophrenic vibe. It’s fine if a narrator wants to keep a secret from the reader for a little while. It makes a little less sense when they’re pretty flippant about sharing all the details our of nowhere except for what the incident actually was.
- This is kinda spoiler territory, but it really deserves being said now because this seriously bothers me how this novel is handling this already. Eva is a rape victim, which we don’t know yet. Now look at the reasons she gives against reporting rape. Because her dad would have made her report it? And only because it’s his job? And the main reason why she doesn’t want this to happen is that it wouldn’t look good for her mom? These are all really shitty reasons to let a rapist get away with rape. I do not have particularly high hopes for how the rest of the novel handles this, and we don’t even know it happened yet.
Anyway, hopefully you’re good with how badly mishandled that was, because now’s apparently a good time for an Angry Birds joke.
“Hmm . . . Don’t put [getting a replacement phone] off. They’re good for safety as well as playing Angry Birds.”
“I’m over that game!” I laughed
Pop culture references: when you can’t think of a joke, just try to remind the reader of something that happened in the past five years instead.
“I’m over that game!” I laughed.
Anyway, Eva and Cary are getting dressed up all sexy for their sexy evening at uh I think a ball or something? I have no idea. I’m really tired. Anyway, here’s sexy Eva!
The dress my mom had sent was fire engine red and styled for a Grecian goddess. […] the back was bared to just above the crack of my buttocks in a racy V-cut.
Okay, I think reading the phrase “crack of my buttocks” has effectively killed my sex drive for the next month or so.
Anyway, here’s sexy Cary!
In his own way, Cary could give Gideon a run for his money . . . er, looks.
We… we know what an expression is, Sylvia Day. I wouldn’t write “Don’t count your chickens before they hatch … er, things you expect to happen until they actually happen”. I also wouldn’t write “Don’t count your chickens before they hatch”, but that’s not important. Things get depressing again.
Cary hadn’t been quite so perfect when I met him. […] But I’d been drawn to him, going out of my way to sit next to him in group therapy. He’d finally propositioned me crudely, having come to believe the only reason people associated with him was because they wanted to fuck him.
They kill some time before Gideon Cross comes back to read up on his backstory a little bit. We learn that his dad committed suicide when he was five, and he usually dates brunettes. That’s a pretty well-rounded backstory! Eva certainly thinks about it analytically.
How had Gideon’s father—or more specifically, his father’s suicide—influenced his life?
I really hope there’s no scene where Eva interviews Gideon, because it has the potential to be stupider than Ana interviewing Christian Grey. Eva meets up with Gideon and, well, the book continues to alternate between trying too hard to be depressing and trying to hard to be sexy, but never trying particularly hard to not be stupid.
- He looked remote and removed, a man who was inherently alone.
- He sensed my presence, or maybe he felt my yearning.
They get in his limo and Eva immediately starts… licking him…
I licked into his mouth, nibbled on his lower lip, stroked my tongue along his . . .
They argue about whether to have right then and there or not, and Eva’s very much in the “then and there” category, and you know what this means! It’s the moment we’ve all been waiting for: Gideon Cross’s penis! I did not fall asleep at this part!
Wait, that’s it? Come on, we got way more cheesy description when we first saw the Christian Grey flavored popsicle! What the hell is this crap?
“You’re so tight.” His gasped words were threaded with a hint of delicious agony.
I took more of him, letting him slide deeper. I sucked in a deep breath, feeling exquisitely stretched. “You’re so big.”
Oh my God, this is worse than Fifty Shades.
I lost my mind somewhere along the way, primitive instinct taking over until my body was completely in charge. I could focus on nothing but the driving urge to fuck, the ferocious need to ride his cock until the tension burst and set me free of this grinding hunger.
“It’s so good,” I sobbed, lost to him. “You feel . . . Ah, God, it’s too good.”
But Is It Better Than Fifty Shades of Grey?
I didn’t laugh anywhere near as hard as I did when I read the description of Christian Grey’s penis. Ha, hard. See? How hard can that be? Ha! Hard!
Oh God I’m so tired.
The Winner This Round: Fifty Shades of Grey
I’m going to be fair to Sylvia Day here and say that Eva’s reasoning for why not to report the rape is unfortunately pretty realistic. A LOT of rape goes unreported because the victims are embarrassed about it. That Eva is trying to justify herself not reporting the rape by bringing up all these petty reasons is actually pretty consistent with real rape victims.
It’s unfortunately realistic that most rape goes unreported, it was more so the way that this narrative feeds into that and contributes, in a really bland and shitty way, to a culture that silences it. It feels way too lifeless to be particularly aware of what it’s doing in the conversation it’s entering.
Yeah, I understand what you’re saying. That’s it’s acting as if Eva’s reasoning is actually perfectly legitimate, and it shows no signs of ever pointing out that it’s not?
Basically. There’s nothing wrong with a novel having a character who doesn’t report rape; it’s a tragic thing that happens. But the novel has to be aware of the discourse it’s contributing to, and in this case it reinforces the culture of silence that exists around sexual assault by portraying it as something the victim didn’t feel the need to report because she’d just sort of get over it. None of her reasons for not reporting it have take her own well-being into consideration; they’re all about other people.
So usually I read your blog and completely agree on just about everything. This time I’m going to have to go against you in regards to her reaction to her sexual assault.
Having been in a similar position, I justified not reporting it in much the same way, citing the reactions of my family and friends and how it would negatively impact them. It wasn’t til years later that I gave even the slightest consideration to how it had impacted on me. Its a truly shitty situation to be in, but I think in this case the author pretty much nailed how some people respond after the fact.
That’s a very good take on it. Admittedly, this post is almost 3 years old and I don’t really remember all the specifics here. I want to say that what I was trying to get at was essentially a point about character development? But I don’t remember by this point, especially since we’ve since read three sequels that have had more misses than hits. One thing I’ve tried to do is listen to views from abuse survivors to get more perspective as we critique this series. Like I said, you make a good point about how it works in this instance, and I’ll have to try to take that into consideration when writing on this in the future.
(On a completely different note, getting a comment on a three year old post saying “I disagree with what you said about sexual assault” triggered quite an “oh shit what did idiot 22-year-old me WRITE???” moment! I am certain I’ve written some stuff on this blog that I will come to find cringeworthy as time goes on. Here’s hoping I can at least always learn from it.)
Wow, I’d forgotten all about this part of the books. They all blur together in sort of an awful haze of turd-shaped words. Such a great point – it’s true people refrain from reporting instances of abuse (sexual, physical, emotional) because of how it might impact on someone close to them. We’ll definitely need to strike a better balance between talking about what would happen in an ideal world (Eva reports her abuse and no one worries about it becoming a ‘scandal’ and instead focusses on how they can support her) and what happens in reality.
I’ve also been loving getting notifications on old posts! Thank you for taking the time to comment while you’re reading through them, Trinnda!
I just discovered the blog and I’ve been reading through from the start 🙂 Its a good way to distract myself from the mountain of housework I’m totally not avoiding doing and will certainly get around to finishing off one of these days 🙂
I think the one other thing that struck me regarding this post is that we are seeing it from Ana/Eva/Bella/other name ending with a’s point of view. Again, speaking solely from my perspective, (and its terrifying that I can actually relate to one of these walking pornlit cliches) there’s a good chance she was making excuses to justify not reporting it and that her family would’ve been in complete support of her if she had pressed charges. Again, I’m reading through at this point and I may be way off the mark, I daresay you guys will find more comments from me further along, thanks for taking the time to respond to messages on such an old post as well!
I tried to read this blog at work and it wouldn’t let me, because it had tagged it as pornography
this is actually the saddest news =(
I too was sexually assaulted and did not report it. I feel like a lot of people don’t report sexual assault for what may seem like trivial reasons. I didn’t report it because the assault happened at the hands of my best friend and I felt like I should have seen the warning signs. I was also terrified of having my life scrutinized and torn apart in court. I do love your blog though. I’ve been going back through and reading all the post from the beginning so I can catch up.