Chapter Eight

Chapter Eight

Chapter eight opens with Christian furious with Ana for not telling him (in all of the three or four times they’ve met) that she was a virgin. “I knew you were inexperienced, but a virgin!” he seethes. If I haven’t mentioned it before, I hate Christian.

Christian can’t understand why someone hasn’t swept Ana off her feet: “You’re beautiful,” he says. But, crucially, she’s utterly mindless and devoid of personality, with no talents, no hobbies and no ambitions. What a catch. 

Ana overlooks everything he’s saying and focuses on the fact he called her beautiful. “Perhaps he’s near-sighted, my subconscious has reared her somnambulant head.” Where do I even start with this sentence? Firstly, the punctuation means it makes absolutely no sense. Secondly, here’s a little tip for E. L. James: your target readership hasn’t a clue what ‘somnambulant’ means, and I would bet all of my life savings that they didn’t go scrambling to the nearest dictionary to find out. Your readers don’t want big words, they skip right over those; they just want badly-written sex scenes.

“How have you avoided sex? Tell me please,” demands Christian. This is extremely unfair. Okay, I’ve had a good laugh at the fact that Ana is a virgin, but in all seriousness, it is not a bad thing. Also, the phrase ‘avoided sex’ makes it sound as though she’s spent the last six years evading lust-crazed men who all want to get in her pants because, let’s face it, that’s all women are good for in this universe. Just because someone isn’t having sex, doesn’t mean they’re avoiding it.

Christian offers to ‘rectify’ the situation. Yes, that’s right: rectify. As though it’s a mistake that needs to be corrected. As though the fact that Ana has been saving her virginity for a nice, pleasant young man, who isn’t a complete and utter sociopath, is a wrong that needs to be righted.

Being the gentleman that he is, Christian says that he will make an exception to his usual hard fucking, and ‘make love’ to Ana instead. Oh, cheers. He takes her into his bedroom, with the predictable floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking Seattle and ultra-modern furnishings and every other cliché you could imagine into a CEO’s bedroom. He’s wearing a white linen shirt and jeans.

"I don't make love... I fuck. Hard."

Say what you want about Christian Grey, but at least he practices safe sex (in the contraceptive sense, of course).  He asks Ana if she’s on the pill. She isn’t, and he pulls out a pack of condoms. Good man.

The scene starts off like any conventional sex scene, really. There are some parts where he’s licking her feet, because he’s, you know, so sexually liberated, and there’s a revelation about how Ana has never masturbated before, but honestly, by this point, I’m not even surprised anymore. She could tell him that she doesn’t even know where her vagina is, and I’d just be like, okay, sure. That’s actually pretty believable.

This is the part I have a real problem with. Christian takes her bra off and starts blowing on her nipples and you think, okay, a bit of foreplay to get her warmed up. That’s pretty charitable of you, Christian. 

But then it appears that she has an orgasm from him just touching her boobs. If there are any men reading this (and I hope there are, I need to put this myth to rights), please believe me when I say that, to the very best of my knowledge, you cannot bring a woman to orgasm from playing with her nipples. You just can’t. If any girl tells you that she’s had an orgasm this way, she’s lying (or faking). He is literally just touching her boobs and she comes, and it’s her first orgasm too. No, just… no.

This is also the first example of Ana ‘shattering into a thousand/million/bazillion pieces’ when she has an orgasm. The author’s descriptive skills don’t stretch to much more than this, to be honest, and it makes me wonder whether she’s actually had an orgasm herself or whether she’s just some repressed middle-aged wench who thinks you can come from boob-fondling.  

After giving Ana her first ever orgasm through completely ridiculous means, Christian decides he’s now going to fuck her, hard. The actual description says that he ‘slams into’ her. After all that hard work he just did rubbing her boobs, he decides to make her first time more painful and uncomfortable than it needs to be. Nice going, idiot.

Ana has another orgasm. If possible, this is even more ridiculous than the nipple thing. I barely know anyone who enjoyed losing their virginity, never mind got an orgasm out of it, never mind the fact that this is minutes after a previous orgasm, which is coincidentally her first (which came from poking at her breasts with his tongue – no, I will never let this go. It can’t be done).

“Did I hurt you?” asks Christian. Like he cares. Ana compares her two orgasms to ‘the spin cycle on a washing machine’. The author has definitely never had an orgasm. “I’d like to do that again,” says Ana. Oh, sure. Losing your virginity and having two orgasms in the space of five minutes wasn’t enough for you, I get it. Christian’s not bothered though; he literally flips her over and starts again.

“You are mine. Only mine. Don’t forget it,” he says. If I haven’t said this a hundred times already, Christian is a creepy egomaniac who should not be lusted after, longed for or thought of as any kind of ‘perfect man’ ideal. “I want you sore, baby,” he grunts. Urgh! There are no words.

Ana has another orgasm. The count now stands at three in the space of about half an hour. I don’t care how repressed you were beforehand (very), that kind of thing just does not happen. Men: don’t feel disheartened if you can’t give a woman three orgasms in quick succession – feel alarmed if you can (and also maybe a little in awe of their supreme acting skills).  

After the epic orgasm-fest, Ana falls asleep, and when she wakes up, she hears Christian playing the piano in the next room (I’ll try and refrain from vomiting while I type up this next part, it seems I am allergic to cliches). “Bach, I think, but I’m not sure,” Ana says. She’d never heard the Flower Duet before Christian played it to her, but she’d know Bach anywhere; a real classical music virtuoso.

“It was exquisite, but sad, such a melancholy melody,” says Ana. Nobody talks like this in real life. Christian orders Ana back to bed and they wrap the blood-stained sheets around themselves, because apparently there is no spare bedding in his palatial apartment. Gross. A beautiful and fitting end to a romantic and sexually educational chapter, I think you’ll agree.

TBC!