You Can Date Boys When You're Forty: Dave Barry on Parenting and Other Topics He Knows Very Little About Read Online Free PDF

did I read it? I read it because, as a man with decades of experience iramn the field of not knowing what the hell women are thinking, I was hoping this book would give me some answers. Because a lot of women LOVED this book. And they didn’t just read it; they responded to it by developing erotic feelings—feelings so powerful that in some cases
they wanted to have sex with their own husbands
.
    I know that sounds like crazy talk, but I have firsthand confirmation of this phenomenon from my friend Ron, who is married to my wife’s cousin Sonia, a woman. Ron states: “While Sonia was reading the book, I was getting moreaction than Wilt Chamberlain.”
    Another friend of mine whose name I will keep confidential out of respect for his privacy * told me, “I’d be lying on the bed watching
SportsCenter
, and she’d be reading that book and suddenly,
WHOA
.”
    So what kind of book is
Fifty Shades of Grey
? I would describe it, literary-genre-wise, as “a porno book.” But it’s not the kind of porno men are accustomed to. When a man reads porno, he does not want to get bogged down in a bunch of unimportant details about the characters, such as who they are or what they think. A man wants to get right to the porno:
Chapter One
     
Bart Pronghammer walked into the hotel room and knitted his brow at the sight of a naked woman with breasts like regulation volleyballs.
     
“Let’s have sex,” she mused matter-of-factly.
     
    A few paragraphs later they’re all done, and the male reader, having invested maybe ninety seconds of his time, can put the book down and go back to watching
SportsCenter
.
    Apparently that is not what women want, porno-wise. What women want, to judge from
Fifty Shades of Grey
, is not just people doing It. Many pages go by in this book without any of It getting done, although there is a great deal of thinking and talking about It. The thoughts are provided by the narrator and main character, Anastasia Steele, who is a twenty-one-year-old American woman as well as such a clueless, self-absorbed ninny that you, the reader, find yourself wishing that you still smoked so you would have a cigarette lighter handy and thus could set fire to certain pages, especially the ones where Anastasia is telling you about her “inner goddess.” This is a hyperactive imaginary being—I keep picturing Tinker Bell—who reacts in a variety of ways to the many dramatic developments in Anastasia’s life, as we see in these actual quotes:
“My inner goddess is swaying and writhing to some primal carnal rhythm.”
     
“My very small inner goddess sways in a gentle victorious samba.”
     
“My inner goddess is doing the Dance of Seven Veils.”
     
“My inner goddess is doing the merengue with some salsa moves.”
     
“My inner goddess has stopped dancing and is staring, too, mouth open and drooling slightly.”
     
“My inner goddess jumps up and down, with cheerleading pom-poms, shouting ‘Yes’ at me.”
     
“My inner goddess is doing backflips in a routine worthy of a Russian Olympic gymnast.”
     
“My inner go CM woddess pole-vaults over the fifteen-foot bar.”
     
“My inner goddess fist-pumps the air above her chaise longue.”
     
    That’s right: Her inner goddess, in addition to dancing, cheerleading, pole-vaulting, etc., apparently keeps furniture inside Anastasia’s head. Unfortunately, this means there is little room left for Anastasia’s brain, which, to judge from her thought process, is about the size of a walnut. On the other hand, Anastasia is physically very attractive, although she never seems to figure this out despite the fact that all the other characters keep telling her, over and over, how darned attractive she is.
    As the book begins, Anastasia has somehow managed to complete four years of college, during which time she has had—despite being so physically attractive—no romantic involvement of any kind with anybody. In fact, she’s still a virgin. Also, she does not own