SHADES OF GREY

As the world gears up for the release of Jamie Dornan’s undercarriage in Fifty Shades of Grey, Mother Pukka ponders the term ‘mommy porn’

It’s American author Pat Califa’s fault. It was her book, Macho Sluts that piqued the interest of EL James as she perused the shelves of a Hampstead bookshop. “It was my first taste of something really hardcore,” James told the Telegraph. “After that, I read some more BDSM [bondage and discipline, dominance and submission and sadomasochism] and that was it.”

Cue the titillating triumph that is Fifty shades of Grey – due for release in UK cinemas on 13 February. For the one per cent that hasn’t devoured the series like a rabid hyena on heat, the storyline is thus: boy-meets-girl, humps girl, spanks girl, ties girl up, tells girl she is a very naughty girl and sends girl grotty text message to repeat the whole debauched affair. Oh and the girl, Anastasia Steele is (was) a virgin. Eek.

It’s too easy to berate the God-awful prose and repetitive beat (it’s Mills & Boon but with expletives and nipple clamps) and would be wrong to do so. Fifty Shades doesn’t pretend to be Tolstoy: its unadulterated sadomasochistic bonking with a Twilight twist. Every kudos to James’ erotic antenna – she had the biggest weekly global sale of a book (665,000 copies) and became Amazon’s biggest-selling author.

The girl’s done good. But as I was devouring the initial copy (moistened by a monsoon on holiday and with pages resolutely stuck together – so dedicated I was to the literary cause), I wondered why it was the reserve of ‘mommy’s’? Or why, at the very least it had been dubbed ‘mommy porn’ by the swathes of editors (mostly male if you do the Google rounds), who no doubt see You Porn as a ‘significant other’.

Here I was pre-baby lusting after the Hugo Boss-suited Christian Grey and wondering if the shower hose could be morphed into some sort of make-shift love accoutrement. I considered wearing no knickers at dinner and left my partner petrified by the eerie silence as I imbibed another chapter, followed by a calamitous (in my head erogenous) desire to get some.

But to say that this onslaught of penis-pumped literature is for bored housewives looking to get themselves off after the kettle’s boiled? How dare they? I say ‘they’ as in the high-browed literary critics who reckon Fifty Shades and any other form of ‘overly-eroticised toss’ is just above them. It’s truly chauvinistic in every way and as James says: “It’s just a love story where people have sex. Get over it.”

What James has done is not pen a tome for dried-up old 'mommy's' left counting the Tetley’s tea bags until their partner returns home with the bread. She’s just got 100 million people’s – men, women, lawyers, doctors, even You Porn stalwarts - juices flowing. And in a world where there’s people who feel the need to shag every night for a year – that’s you Charla Muller and your 365 Nights: A Memoir of Intimacy – to get the spark back, surely that’s a good thing?

I’d truly recommend Macho Sluts.