Perfect Abs and Emo Too: Bared To You Reviewed

I decided to read Bared To You because it was sold as a well-written version of Fifty Shades of Grey. And I thought: hey, maybe the optimists were right! Maybe FSOG was a flawed but timely incursion of erotic fiction into mainstream literature. To give credit where credit is due, Sylvia Day is not E.L. James. Her grammar is good, she varies her sentence structures and, although her propensity for purple prose is at times off-putting, she’s a competent wordsmith. That being said, I would not want to imply there was anything remotely literary about this book. There isn’t. Which is a shame, because someone should start writing literary erotica again.

It was certainly gratifying to discover that at least this heroine wasn’t a 22-year old virgin who’d never masturbated. However, like FSOG, it casts improbably young people in improbably mature situations. Eva is 22, a recent graduate who has landed a job at an ad agency in Manhattan with little to recommend her. She lives in an apartment with a wine fridge and a bi-sexual roommate who tucks bottles of Cristal on ice for her as a favour. Gideon Cross is a 28-year old billionaire who seems to own half of Manhattan.

I have to admit to being puzzled by the choice of age of the characters, both in this novel and in 50 Shades, until I realized that there is no way the litany of contrived conflicts in the plot would work with even marginally mature grown-ups. It takes characters with hair-trigger reactions, non-existent impulse control and an expectation that your lover comes to you without a past to make the plot move forward. Just like 50 Shades, the story jerks spasmodically along from emo moment to sex scene to emo moment like pawns doggedly inching their way across a chessboard of adolescent over-reactions.

The sex is interestingly written. It’s a rather strange hybrid between female-focused sex acts and the sort of cliché-ridden over-explicit dialogue that people who learn from porn-sites call ‘dirty talk’. He’s either going down on her repeatedly, or gasping out lovelorn remarks like ‘your cunt’s so tight’. Well, she’s 22. I’m not sure how this goes down with the mommy consumers of mommy porn. Does it remind them to redouble their kegel exercise efforts, or do they resign themselves to saving their pennies for a vaginoplasty?

Still, I’m unsure whether it’s the sex that is supposed to get you off or the conspicuous consumption. The book is littered with brand names. An ever-present materialism thrums like drone through the whole novel. It is so ubiquitous, I have to wonder if the ‘kink’ hiding in this story subliminal “1% fetishism”. Except, of course, the 1% doesn’t refer to everything by brand name. It’s the wannabe 1% who do that.

Along with the consumerism is an unvarying textual obeisance to the buff, ripped, perfect body. No one in this novel has any flaws. No one is plump, no one is bony, no one has acne, no one has visible scars. No one has a single physical shortcoming. It’s a world of Calvin Klein ad models, toned and photogenicly sheened in odorless sweat, fucking on the immaculately decorated set of a feature piece for Vogue.

Their perfect bodies might be read as an ironic juxtaposition to their myriad emotional scars. But probably not. It has the heavy taint of soap opera about it: the baseless, instant jealousies that are conveniently forged into both signs of inner damage and smoldering romantic love. There is a supporting cast of the mildly villainous and the long-sufferingly loyal to provide that friction: catty female rivals and overly affectionate gay friends. Puppets to adorn the rococo melodrama.

Don’t mistake me. There is actually a very compelling and rather serious plot beneath the glutinous and facile emo soup.  Two people, both of whom have suffered from child abuse, who have built individually intricate strategies for survival and suppression of its long-term effects. Had this been a novel about two realistic, imperfect, damaged souls who struggled to negotiate a sexual and emotional relationship in the wake of those experiences, it would have been a very good, and very hot, novel.

But sadly, this novel has used what might have been a very credible and almost insurmountable internal conflict and commoditized it, much like the bodies, the wardrobes, the interior décor and the characters.

Perhaps I’m just not the right sort of woman to read these types of books. I don’t need my fiction strewn with glossy images of super-rich lifestyles, impossibly sculpted bodies, decorated with brand products, or have my fictional mental traumas used to such transparently sensational plot-driven ends. The explicit sex doesn’t compensate for the number of times I rolled my eyes while reading this. I miss reading stories about adults.

Finally, I am quickly recognizing the blatantly mercenary strategy for publishers to manipulate readers into buying into a whole series by shoddily and abruptly ending the first book. Both this book and FSOG used this strategy. It is a supreme comment on how publishers – even the big ones like Random House and Penguin – have become nothing more than Mall-Chain discount sellers. No wonder they are quickly loosing their legitimacy as arbiters of good fiction.