Poor Mojo's Newswire

On websites like FF.net, the original home of Fifty Shades of Grey, anybody who can successfully operate a mouse has long had the option to masturbate to a story where Worf has rough sex with DJ from Roseanne. For Fifty Shades to have such crossover success, I figured it was probably better written than most fan fiction, and that the characters had been successfully disguised enough not to merit outrage or lawsuits. I have very limited familiarity with the Twilight franchise, but Bella, Edward, and Jacob are culturally omnipresent enough that I could probably pick them out of a lineup. Christian Grey, the Edward of our story, is a 27-year-old ginger who likes white wine and using emoticons in e-mails. He refuses to use contractions when he speaks, so in my head, I sort of pictured him sounding like Andy Dick at the medieval restaurant in The Cable Guy. Our Bella, Anastasia Steele, sounded like Speedracer, mostly because she's always shouting her catchphrase, "Holy crap!" At 21, she's never given a blow job, but when she does, instinctively knows to use lots of teeth. That dry, skittering sound you heard is your fallopian tubes curling like party ribbon. Fifty Shades dispenses with the supernatural plotline but also the main erotic draw of the Twilight books: the fact that the characters can't or won't have sex. Unencumbered by Mormon sexual ethics, pacing, or a YA classification, E.L. James is free to go straight to the fucking. Here is why the fucking is not very sexy: The Prose: I'm sorry. I know, it's soft porn, and it's not there to better us. But the advantage of erotic fiction over a DVD of I Can't Believe I Ate the Whole Team is that books will always at least FEEL more high-minded than movies. Besides, there are ways to write sex well. This is not that. This is like Tom Wolfe–bad sex scenes but punctuated by non-sex scenes that are gut-wrenchingly awful. A passage where we find out what Anastasia Steele looks like via girl-frowning-at-her-appearance-in-a-mirror exposition should be punishment for vehicular manslaughter in some states. . . .

There is no set policy on using explicit images in sexuality articles, because Wikipedia refuses to put such standards in place. It lets its users decide, and the result is that editors who happen to go to one of these pages decide what is and isn’t appropriate. But just as it seems a decision has been made, other people come in and decide it hasn’t, restarting the debate as if it never happened in the first place. Wikipedia’s users are a bureaucracy that tries to run itself as a democracy. The result is anarchy. Anarchy with pictures of dudes ejaculating in 270 frames-per-second super-slo-mo. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, who goes by the user name Jimbo Wales on the site, saw the autofellatio page as important enough to begin its debate on image use in February of 2005. “I invite people to think carefully about this photo in the context of an overall view of our charitable, humanitarian, educational mission,” he wrote, “and not be distracted by arguments about censorship and prudishness, which are very much beside the point here.” Yes, there was a penis being thrust into a man’s mouth on this page. But that penis needed to be “charitable, humanitarian, and educational” in addition to being covered in saliva. Jimbo put the decision on the image up to a vote, but before there was a vote, it was decided there needed to be a vote on whether there should be a deadline on the vote. Then it was decided there needed to be a vote on how to interpret the outcome of the vote. However, according to the rules of this vote to decide the rules of the vote, no consensus was reached. So apparently the image-decision vote would not be valid. But they finally went ahead with it anyway. No consensus was reached on that vote either. So despite all this effort, and all the thousands of words written on the subject, no decision was actually made. This is apparently how things work on Wikipedia.