Like the book, Fifty Shades follows shy, klutzy, virginal college senior Anastasia Steele (Dakota Johnson) as she meets and captivates ridiculous fantasy figure Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan), a haunted, handsome, commandingly self-assured young self-made billionaire bachelor with a tragic past. Pity it isn’t nearly as interesting as an actual movie. The film version is fascinating in its own way, in part because it’s clear the gawker wave is still expanding-the film is already poised to break first-week ticket-sales records-and in part because it’s clearly been designed as a corrective, simultaneously addressing the concerns of the prudish, the BDSM cognoscenti, and readers who like their sex-books a little less weighed down with constant references to an “inner goddess” who tends to react to new sexual stimuli by, direct quote from the book, “doing the merengue with some salsa moves.” As a balancing act between personal sexual fantasy and widely accessible blockbuster, the screen adaptation of Fifty Shades is endlessly discussable, and will no doubt sow the seeds for months of cultural conversation. Especially not as something deemed socially acceptable and mainstream. Fifty Shades became a phenomenon fed in part by its own popularity-the more it sold, the more it drew in gawkers who just wanted to see what the big deal was-but in part because its ubiquity drew in the vast audience of people, especially women, who’d simply never been exposed to graphic erotica or kink before. But the trilogy is also fascinating because of what its meteoric rise and cultural saturation says about America’s still deeply problematic relationship with sex: Even though sexual fetish is used in advertising to sell everything from cars to food to clothes to toiletries, it’s still strangely rare to see it used to sell sex. Rarely have so many bishops and dominatrixes come together to virulently condemn the same property.

It’s drawn fury from a wide variety of quarters: from conservatives because it’s kinky smut, from smutty kinksters because its understanding of consent and “safe, sane” BDSM protocols is nonexistent, from literary fans because so much of it is clumsily written. James’ pseudonymously written BDSM trilogy-first conceived as Twilight fanfic, then revised and self-published, then picked up by Knopf for wide release-has become a record-breaking international bestseller. As a cultural phenomenon, Fifty Shades Of Grey is fascinating.

Full contract from fifty shades of grey