I have not read 50 Shades of Gray, so I won’t comment on its content.
Two of my friends have read it; one (male) said “it hardly has any sex in it!” The other (female) said “Wow, there’s lots of hot sex in it!”
“How much hot sex?” I asked. Being a quantitatively-inclined person.
“Oh, about 30%,” she said.
That’s quite a bit, I thought, but my unregenerate self was on the man’s side in this debate. Of course, it said, I just wouldn’t read the padding.
But that is not the point of this post. The point of this post is that people are paying money to read pornographic fanfic. People I know are paying money to read pornographic fanfic.
Who could ever have come up with the idea of selling pornographic fanfic? Amazing. At one time in my life I would have paid for non-pornographic fanfic. On one of my old computers I have a collection of the good, non-porny Harry Potter fanfics I’d managed to dig up at the time, and I think it has six files in it. I used to shudder when friends told me they were letting their children look up new Harry Potter stories on the internet.
I’ve always been amazed, totally amazed, that fanfiction.net didn’t make the bottom drop out of the porn industry. Well, you might say, some people like their porn to not have Harry Potter in it. But for them, there were the House, MD fanfics. Or the Fruits Basket fanfics. Or Hunger Games, or whatever … I have to admit that my interest in fanfic waned when Snape died in the last Harry Potter book. But even back in the day, it was obvious to me that people could get most of their koffrecreationalkoff reading needs met without ever venturing outside the Potterverse, or putting down a penny of their hard-earned cash.
But here’s the really interesting twist: just a few months after a mainstream publisher’s ‘rescuing’ 50 Shades from fanfiction.net obscurity, thereby not only demonstrating that there is Money To Be Made but making the existence of this treasure trove of free porn visible to a mainstream audience, the site has started deleting anything with explicit sex in it. The rule being invoked has existed since 2002, but apparently nobody bothered enforcing it until this summer. Coincidence? Inquiring minds want to know.
Not that it makes a big difference, as the porn fanfics have just migrated to other sites. I still can’t see why anybody would pay for it, when they can just download the files and do a search-and-replace to remove Harry’s name!
