50 Shades of Weh-hey

I know very little of the man they call Christian. I do know he is a bit of a shagger. He likes doing some weird stuff of which I am yet to discover. I know he was responsible for an upward spike in my love life. I know they are making a movie about it.
The chat I eavesdropped on recently between my wife and her friends was regarding the actor that is going to play Christian in the movie. I hear various names dropped. I throw my own name in. Silence. I back out the room. Apparently you don’t joke about these kinds of things.
Described as mummy porn I am intrigued. Mummy and porn are two words I would rarely use in a sentence unless it is in a Google search.
I read an article in The Age recently by Jeff Sparrow that Fifty Shades has outsold Harry Potter and that porn is now part of the culture. I always thought that porn was part of our culture.
‘Porn’ is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as:
“television programmes, magazine, books, etc. that are regarded as emphasizing the sensuous or sensational aspects of a non-sexual subject and stimulating a compulsive interest in their audience:
Eg like much of the country, I drool over gastro-porn on telly”
That puts a whole new spin on Masterchef.
So I checked ‘Pornography’:
“printed or visual material containing the explicit description of sexual organs or activity, intended to stimulate excitement.”
That’s more like it.
There is a photo doing the rounds in Facebook that shows the different styles of underwear through the decades. It is titled “Positive Proof of global warming” and shows underwear becoming skimpier and skimpier. While the title evokes a different message, I think it just shows the natural evolution of fashion and sex. It is the evolving acknowledgment that it is ok to talk about sex, that it is not taboo and that people are doing it every day all over the world.

For (ahem) ‘research’ purposes I typed ‘porn’ into Google. It took me a few seconds to compute the number of returned results. Nearly 2 billion results returned.  I checked a few more terms.
Music 9 billion
Art 5.4 billion
Porn 1.7 billion
Sex 634 million
Religion 210 million
Third on the list. It is a multi-billion dollar industry so I am not surprised.  There is an upsurge in the number of mainstream soft porn books being targeted towards women. There are ever increasing websites and movies targeted towards men. There are publishers  and movie producers that specialize in this type of work. There are loads of erotic stories online.
Pornography is everywhere: magazines at the petrol station, all over the internet, telephone sex lines, books and movies. It used to be targeted to men.
And now with thanks to EL James the playing field is evening out. I think it is only a matter of time before we see more similar themed books for women.