I have this very good friend of mine whom I met a couple of years ago through a social network and eventually we got to meet.
What exactly drew us together I don't know but I think it was her kung pow, cowboy-ninja approach to life that made us become very close friends.
No, not friends with benefits sort-of-a- way..... but real friends.
Yaca as we always like to call each other came to me with a revelation the other day. She wants to marry Christian Grey. I was so dumbfounded. I asked her, "Yaca I thought you already married!"
Without answering my question, she said she has found her perfect man.
Who the hell is this Christian? And what the hell is he doing to my bestie?
And I soon found out that she is head over heels over a man who doesn't exist. Well, literally. For Christian Grey is the protagonist of a book called Fifty Shades of Grey, a book that has had more than 40 million women - and of course some men too - around the world, swooning over it.
Even Harry Potter has got nothing on this book as the J.K. Rowlings final book of the Harry Potter series Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows being outsold as the UK's best selling group of all time.
The book is a paperback novel authored by British author E.L. James about a relationship between a 20 year-old college graduate and a young billionaire Christian Grey.
In the book, the graduate Anastasia Steele signed a contract that allows Grey to have complete control of her life, including fulfilling Grey's sexual desires which is mainly domination, sadism and masochism.
Through my partner I was able to procure the book, in fact, all three of it - Fifty Shades of Grey, Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades Freed from Australia. It is not widely available in Fiji though.
After reading through it (more like skimming and then some reading, then more skimming...you get the picture) I was taken aback by my Yaca's insinuations that this was her perfect man.
I had actually thought of her getting hooked onto some TLC by some sort of dashing and handsome gentleman.
Yes, Christian too has that billionaire-buy-you-anything kind of thing going on. That much I would have understood, but a man whose sexual desires are all erotic and kinky sexapades? I thought that was our kind of world. The male dominated world of pornography. But Yaca's calmness in explaining it was very much unnerving. At first.
She said: "To feel disgusted would also mean to feel ashamed and I'm not...I was fascinated that the author could write in such detail that could make you almost bust with anxiety. It was detailed with care and with such honesty and left myself and many other readers out there if they dare to be honest, hot and sated... even leaving us breathless."
But it is practically porn! Women don't do porn. And not only my Yaca who has any reply to that question, which incidentally has been posed to millions of her and other women around the world too.
Many are claiming that this book and Christian Grey has introduced them to a side of loving making (as they love to call it) that they feel they have always possessed but had shut away.
Mills and Boons novels come nowhere to this Fifty Shades of Grey with its graphic and explicit description of the sexual encounters between Grey and Steele.
"The sexual encounters didn't disgust me to the core. I think it even taught me and most other women out there some new pleasures and maybe even desires. The sexual escapades as you put it - now that's laughable almost tangible. With every being inside of me made me jealous (wishing I was Ana Steele). In some ways I see myself as her long ago, naive lost in the aura alluded by lust," Yaca says.
Naive? I don't think so because many of the proponents of this New York Times bestseller are highly motivated and career women and mothers who are still raising their children. Maybe they feel for the young Anastasia Steele whose world has to be sated by a man who was abused as a 15 year old by an older woman.
"And by young, you mean in her sexual experiences. Well, I say I take my hat off to Christian after all the first time with him for any young girl would have been the best experience to any female that I know. If anything she should be thanking him for whole experience and the gentle way he conducted himself with her for her first time and taking her innocence. Men need to read this book and take note," Yaca advised.
Recently, my partner shared with me that a male co-worker was introduced to the book by his wife and over a bottle of wine they had a debate about the book. They never got over the first two glasses and wine was spilled over the bed sheets by the time they finished the debate. What a waste.
But to look at it from my Yaca's point of view, we have to get the message the 40 million or so women around the world are trying to tell us with their infatuations with Mr Grey and his Fifty Shades of Grey.
Lisa Gray, a columnist of the US liberal website, the Huffington Post says that social conditioning does not allow women to address the issue of sex, in fact giving them mixed messages where the churches and schools teach that sex is sacred and yet, it sells everything from web domains to hamburgers to car parts. She adds, and I agree, that "TV and movies have led us to believe that only thin and beautiful people are sexually desirable."
"It's no wonder that women often don't know what to say about sex. And, when, if ever, do we just talk about sex for the thing that it has always been... an intimate act that, when you are with someone you trust, can be quite fun?
"Fifty Shades of Grey" has reacquainted
people, especially women, with their individual sexuality and it has certainly provided them with plenty of things to discuss," Gray wrote.
I know my Yaca would be smiling right now, but unlike Gray, she said it in her kung pow (brutally honest) ways.
She summed up: "I find I had a very mixed bag of emotions from fear - like - hate - hurt - love- sexual loss - sorrow - pain and longing. Even to a point where I found myself laughing, crying, feeling his anguish, her excitement, her pain, his suffering and I could go on and on ... But to be honest I fell in love with Christian Grey no I'm in absolute awe with his being as he takes my breath away. (I fell in love with him from the first chapter) I just want to cuddle him and not let go...."
I finally yielded to her reasoning as I still don't see the difference between pornography and this book which has made my bestie become a stranger. But I didn't tell her out loud or otherwise I might not get to hear the end of it as she would surely launch into another verbal tirade that would surely turn my headache into a migraine.
And to follow that up with the audacity of thanking me for seeking her opinions to which she said: "To have asked me is a blessing but you know me brutal and honest. And with this trilogy I am bias as I'm in love with story that much that I read two books in one night (by the way it was a 12-hour sitting).
To sum up the story - to me it left me sad, happy, enlightened, hot, heavy, sexually lost in love. But hey it's just a story and like all good things....."
Yes, like all good things, we need to snap out of it!