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Daily Mirror
27-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mirror
Netflix fans have just days to binge watch 'steamiest' romance franchise
There are just four days left to tune into the romantic drama Netflix viewers have just a few days left to stream a divisive film franchise based on raunchy romance novels. The streamer is set to remove Fifty Shades of Grey, Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades Freed from its library this Thursday, July 31. Based on E. L. James's bestselling novels, the erotic drama propelled Jamie Dornan to mainstream fame. It follows a sexual relationship between university graduate Anastasia Steele (played by Dakota Johnson) and young businessman Christian Grey (Dornan). As their relationship blooms, Christian introduces Anastasia to BDSM sexual practices. Although sex takes centre stage in the trilogy, the story also delves into interesting themes such as working through emotional trauma. Upon its 2015 debut release, the R-rated franchise received poor reviews. Rotten Tomatoes critics awarded it a sour 25% rating, with audiences rating it a more generous 41% score. Critics described the first film as a "less than satisfying experience," but that didn't prevent the franchise from expanding. The following films, Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades Freed, were released in 2017 and 2018 respectively. They were similarly slammed by critics. However, some moviegoers were quick to defend the franchise. "It's easy, it's fun, it's a little mischievous, it's got a story line... I dunno why people are so harsh," reviewed one IMDb user. They same fan added: "I watch films to relax and switch off. It left a smile on my face at the end maybe I'm a romantic at heart, who knows. I guess I liked the ultimate love conquers all message." Another simply penned: "Plain and simple, I loved all of the series.. beyond the pale sensuality with this undertone of wanting to find love.. I loved it." Meanwhile, book blogger 'Natasha is a Book Junkie' shared a glowing review: "It [Fifty Shades of Grey] pulled off the almost impossible task of faithfully bringing these fictional characters to life and making them even more psychologically layered and three-dimensional than they might have been in the first place, turning my overall viewing experience into an absolute thrill start to finish."
Atlantic
01-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
The Sex-Workplace Novel Has Arrived
Twenty years ago, a reader looking for taboo sex in print had to slink to the back of the bookstore and make whispered inquiries. Today, kinky books make up an established genre, one that shares front-table space with other major releases and possesses its own classics and conventions. This robust menagerie encompasses pulpy household names, including E. L. James's Fifty Shades of Grey, which in 2011 vaulted BDSM onto the New York Times fiction best-seller list. It has a literary canon— Marquis de Sade 's Justine, Pauline Réage's Story of O —and elevated LGBTQ smut standards such as Patrick Califia's Macho Sluts. Over in the nonfiction aisle are more practical selections, a hefty cascade of volumes that explore kink from all angles: how-to, history, philosophy, psychology, memoir. The expansion of the genre tracks the broadening acceptability of erotic inclinations that were previously pathologized (and, at times, criminalized). The 2013 edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) hastened this shift by redefining certain practices, including ' BDSM, fetishism, and transvestic fetishism (a variant of cross-dressing),' as behaviors rather than illnesses, according to an Atlantic article: 'Consenting adults were no longer deemed mentally ill for choosing sexual behavior outside the mainstream.' As stigma recedes, the subculture meets the marketplace. While fiction continues to revel in fantasy and the forbidden, nonfiction is bending toward demystifying and normalizing BDSM. The latter form tends to emphasize the community credo of being 'safe, sane, and consensual.' It also participates in a broader project: staking out a claim to legitimacy by assuring the public that deviance is, paradoxically, normal. Redefining the transgressive as conventional might feel self-contradictory, but the pursuit of acceptance is as strong a human impulse as the appetite for risk. Call it a respectability kink. Fiction still offers more freedom to roam outside the bounds of propriety, and the most ambitious kink novels venture beyond titillation. The author Brittany Newell sails over the guardrail between fantasy and reality with her second novel, Soft Core, by centering it on a protagonist, Ruth, and a setting, San Francisco's sex industry, that are both lively and deeply believable. Ruth is known as 'Baby' at the strip club where she works, an ever-chugging factory of arousal in which wigs and fake names and alternative personas are accessed on the fly to suit customer caprice. All this quick-change artistry offers her a welcome distraction from her existential fears, including the anxiety that her master's thesis, on surveillance, ghosts, and reality TV, was a waste of time. Having started out as something of an accidental sugar baby at 24, she is now 27. 'Youth made my general aimlessness cute,' she thinks. 'Without it, I was just a bad investment.' As someone with professional knowledge of Bay Area strip clubs and dungeons—having worked in them during that same phase of my own life—I understood that although Ruth is haunted by many things, chief among them is the ticking of the clock. Slipping from Ruth to 'Baby' at the club gives her both an escape hatch from her Saturn-return blues and a whole new set of problems. Strip clubs aren't really on the kink continuum, but I'd argue that the customer-dancer dynamic is its own form of advanced, high-stakes role-playing. BDSM is definitely an element, for instance, in Baby's relationship with her client Simon, a lonely cipher who PayPals her $800 a month for outré sexual indulgences, then later beseeches her to delete him from her phone. Newell's gifts for sensory details (a dancer 'smelled like crème brûlée'; a woman's mouth is 'like a Slurpee: endless, red and wet') and for tracing the wavy contours of human connection make her work feel like that of a glitter-bomb David Lynch. Things get wavier still when she wakes one morning to find that her ex-boyfriend Dino, a dashing, fastidious ketamine dealer who loves his dogs and lounges around in elegant women's lingerie, has vanished from the Victorian flat they share. Within a week of Dino's disappearance, the gamine and eerily familiar Emeline starts dancing at Ruth's club. Like a pampered duckling, Emeline imprints on Ruth, even hunting down her signature perfume—the titular Soft Core, which, as a besotted customer once gushed, makes Ruth 'smell like a library in ancient Egypt.' Newell's story begins to simmer with noirish detail: mysterious notes appearing in Ruth's belongings; bizarre anonymous emails materializing in her inbox; fast drives on twisty streets; fog rolling in and out, an enigmatic character unto itself. Ruth keeps thinking that she spies Dino everywhere. But does she? To fill the empty hours without Dino, Ruth takes on an additional hustle as 'Sunday,' a dominatrix for hire at the Dream House, which is not so much a dungeon as 'a pea-green four-bedroom house in a quiet cul-de-sac.' There, she broadens her client base as a compassionate consort to men who prefer to indulge darker fantasies. These include Albert. In front of Ruth, he takes on an alternative persona, named 'Allie,' who claims that Albert is her sugar daddy. Ruth doesn't remark on the irony of tending to an affluent sex-work client who is cosplaying as a sex worker. Ruth assumes—incorrectly—that she can take Dino's disappearance in stride by overworking, given, as she puts it, her 'native ability to absorb any trauma like it was just one more step in my skin-care routine. Wake up at five, wash face, stare into void, moisturize.' (I snort-laughed in recognition.) She learns, as the days pass, that dissociative endurance is not necessarily a positive attribute, and that sadness can seep into any space—VIP room, dungeon chamber—as if rising through the floorboards. Although her rootlessness and sorrow originate from experiences that predate her lover's departure, Ruth wonders if these haunting feelings are exacerbated by her profession. 'Maybe my work was partly to blame,' she thinks. 'I'd been method-acting as a dream girl, and now I couldn't touch back down to earth.' Newell skillfully renders the exhaustion of sex work, especially the weird repetitiveness of trying to keep things exciting and new for clients. Years ago in Los Angeles, one friend of mine, a kink impresario who was winding down from a draining day of video shoots by sorting through a rucksack full of black and red leather floggers, sighed to me: 'It's not the sex; it's the work.' In interviews, Newell has shared that the scenes set at the Dream House are modeled on her own experience. As a Stanford graduate who published her first novel, Oola, an obsessive love story, when she was 21, Newell might strike the reader as a hyper-literate Persephone: equally adept at chronicling the velvety, narcotic appeal of the 'libidinal underworld' and the bell-clang wake-up calls that chase off the escapist high. Her admixture of emotion, intellect, and erotic perceptivity achieves what nonfiction writers—sincere sex positivists and edgy academics alike—often fail at: an explication of the psychology of kink that maintains the heat of intrigue. Soft Core is more a study in feeling-tones than a tightly plotted thriller. It's a trippy excursion down the rabbit hole into a particular substratum of culture, maintaining a tether to the 'real' world while burrowing out to the misty shoreline where it's hard to tell horizon from sky. Each subplot sounds a distant foghorn of loneliness. As Ruth turns 28, she begins to see that she can't be sustained by a hail of compliments and cash and evanescent male companions. That's not a life; that's a never-ending ghost hunt. This book's growth arc doesn't depend on Ruth/Baby/Sunday finding someone or something she's looking for; it lands on her figuring out what she herself lacks. Transactional fascination pales next to devotion—but you need the eyes to see it. Soft Core is also a novel about a city. San Francisco has always been a frontier town—a place to pursue an outlier dream. Before it became, as Ruth observes, a 'seasick city of data and drugs' that drew hordes of gentrifying tech evangelists, people came seeking queer liberation and a vibrant leather community. And before that: punks, hippies, Beats, and on back to prospectors panning for gold. Many San Francisco seekers find themselves contending with the sour note of the utopian quest. As a canny cartographer of want, Newell takes her place among the city's storied sexual intelligentsia. Though at times her eye for the awkwardness of interrelation points to Mary Gaitskill, she's more a descendent of Danielle Willis, the latex-clad poet whose Zeitgeist Press book, Dogs in Lingerie, gave voice to San Francisco's spooky, kink-conversant stripper narrators 30-plus years ago. Outsiders often deride kink for both its earnestness and its deviance. The same can be said of sex work. In the words of the San Francisco–based sexologist Carol Queen, 'Trashing other people's sexual vision is so common. It's the highbrow's lowest road.' But the elusiveness of something (respect, satiety, understanding) often only makes you crave it more, and Soft Core shows us the magnetizing, if at times humbling, pull of raw need. 'Nothing lasts forever,' Ruth muses. 'Except, of course, longing.' That is a frontier that some of us will always be chasing. I guess some girls are just kinky that way.
Newsroom
30-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Newsroom
She gets revenge on her ex with his dad, & other fantasies
A study has found that women who read romance or erotic novels have 74 percent more sex with their partners than those who ignore the literary genre. Research on sexual fantasies, published in Psychological Bulletin, further claimed that those who read romance and erotica also have better sex. The genre has always been popular. We all know about the massive success of the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy by E.L. James but there are many other blockbusters, such as It Ends With Us, by Colleen Hoover, which have sold over 10 million copies. Part of the appeal is the clear link between spicy literature and sexual wellbeing. An age-old argument about smut is that it promotes unrealistic fantasies for readers, and that living in these fictional worlds will leave women disappointed. But a large part of sexual wellness is fantasy, as illuminated in Gillian Anderson's latest book Want: Sexual Fantasies, a collection of anonymous sexual fantasies of women from around the world. In a personal essay for Pop Sugar, Chloe Dunn speaks about being able to explore your desires without shame when reading spicy books. Whether it be an array of kinks, or a situation that turns you on which you will never be able to experience in real life, the smut world will always have a book which will allow you to explore your wildest fantasies. Erotic novels are often seen as an empowering tool within the romance-reading community, but they are also an educational tool. Sex education at schools – when they are available – often focuses on the health perspective rather than on wants and desires. Erotic novels educate readers on how to practise safe sex in a spicy way. As Christina Bravar writes, 'Romance novels can serve two helpful purposes when it comes to your sex life. One, reading a romance novel of any heat level engages your largest sex organ, the brain. Thinking about connection and intimacy prior to getting physical can be stimulating, something particularly important for most vulva owners. And two, many steamy romance novels model ideas, techniques, and positions that may be new to you.' Readers are also likely to come across new positions, techniques and ideas. And then there is the prioritisation of female pleasure. Many popular books are being written by women, for women and therefore have a focus on the female main character's pleasure and their partner making sure their needs are met. This theme alone has been giving women more confidence to ask for what they want in bed. Alyssa Davis wrote an article for The Every Girl about how smut helped her sex life and her relationship. She spoke about having a low sex drive regarding all things sex, describing this as a 'task'. However, once she started reading smut it was like a flipped switch and her relationship with sex and intimacy was 'revolutionised'. Davis believes the main link between the two was that reading these books helped her become more confident and curious about her sex life. Women's sexual wellness is the subject of SmutTok, an online community of readers on TikTok who come together to discuss their smutty reads. Many are very open about what turns them on when reading various books. One trend which has started popping off on BookTok is couples reading copies of the same book together. A key aspect to improving sexual wellness is removing the shame and stigma around sex. Romance and erotic fiction liberate the reader. It gives women permission to explore their sexual selves. Here are seven especially spicy novels on the shelves of my Remuera romance bookshop Enamoured. The chilli-pepper ratings measure hotness. Your Dad Will Do, by Katee Robert: A scorching weekend where a gal gets revenge on her ex fiancé with his dad. 'I end up on his front porch in a short black dress and thigh-highs … He skates his hand up my side barely brushing the curve of my breast before he grips my chin just tightly enough to hurt. 'Is that what you want, Lily?' He presses two fingers to my bottom lip and I open for him.' 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ The Nanny, by Lana Ferguson: More Daddy fantasy: an Onlyfans creator goes to nanny for a hot single dad. 'I actually haven't ever lived with a hot guy before. Especially not one who attempts (and fails, but it's sort of cute) at pancakes and worries about how to connect with his kid. It's a job, I remind myself. It's just a job.' 🌶️🌶️🌶️ Consider Me, By Beca Mack: A romance between professional hockey pro Carter Beckett and teacher Olivia Parker. He's arrogant, self-centred, and dates an endless string of women. But Olivia is determined to resist his charms, and says, 'I have the solution to all my sexual frustrations in a drawer at home, and it's far less complicated than Carter Beckett … Then I start letting my guard down, and he starts showing me pieces of himself I had no intention of seeing.' 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Pucking Around, by Emily Rath: Another hockey romance – and it's got everyone talking. Just when you think it's gotten as spicy as it can, it turns up another level. 'My name is Rachel Price, and two months ago I walked away from The Perfect Man – sweet, funny, and so sexy he should be illegal. We shared one magical night. No names. No strings. I never thought I'd see him again. I was wrong. As it turns out, Mr. Perfect is the playboy grinder for the NHL's hottest new hockey team … and thanks to the ten-month fellowship I just landed, I'm his new physical therapist.' 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ His Girl Hollywood, by Maureen Lee Lenker: An elegant yet filthy read set in glamourous 1930s Hollywood. The author based her lead male character on legendary dancer and actor Gene Kelly: 'I think he's one of the hottest men who ever lived.' 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Saint, by Sierra Simone: A queer romance about Aiden Bell, a former playboy who became a monk, and his forbidden love for Elijah Iverson, who is now engaged to someone else. 'I want the memories to be worth the sins.' 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ My Dark Romeo, by L.J Shen and Park S. Huntington: This story tells Romeo and Juliet like you've never been told before, in a tale about an arranged marriage between a cruel billionaire heir and a feisty heiress unafraid to fight back. Incredible line: 'I would let him ruin me as thoroughly and impressively as Elon Musk destroyed Twitter.' 🌶️🌶️🌶️
Daily Mirror
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mirror
Fifty Shades director James Foley dies after 'years-long' brain cancer battle
Fifty Shades of Grey director James Foley has died. The American film director, who worked on the E.L. James franchise, as well as Glengarry Glen Ross and the Netflix hit House of Cards, died "peacefully in his sleep earlier this week" at the age of 71 at his home in Los Angeles. While no cause of death has yet been confirmed, his publicist stated he had been battling brain cancer for several years. As well as his cinematic work, James also worked with Madonna on her Live to Tell, Papa Don't Preach and True Blue music videos under the name Peter Percher and was best man at her wedding to now-former husband Sean Penn in 1985. After graduating from New York University and then USC in Los Angeles, he was able to jumpstart his career thanks to a chance meeting. He told Film Freak Central: "I was very lucky, and in the perverse calculus of Hollywood I was in the last year of film school and shared a house with a guy. There was a woman who was pursuing my friend so we had this film school party, which consisted of people projecting their student films onto a white wall and getting stoned. "And this girl came. Hal Ashby was pursuing her — she was pursuing my friend and Hal was pursuing her — and Hal called her up and asked to come to this party full of film students. Just as he walked through the door, my film was showing on the wall. I'll never know whether he was being polite or anything, but he told me he liked it and stuff and he was going to form a company that was going to produce other people's movies and what did I want to do? I could write something and direct it." This is a breaking showbiz news story. Join The Mirror 's WhatsApp Community or follow us on Google News , Flipboard , Apple News, TikTok , Snapchat , Instagram , Twitter , Facebook , YouTube and Threads - or visit The Mirror homepage.
