The answer to this question would seem to lie in understanding why well over one hundred million (mostly, but not all) women have bought, and multiple times that read on- or off-line and or are now queuing round the block to see the movie of, 50 Shades of Grey which itself seems set to break a string of box office records. If you don’t know already (planet, on, anybody?) it tells the story of how Washington literature graduate Anastasia is seduced/ensnared/tames/resists (delete as appropriate) Seattle tycoon Christian Grey. The book turned into trilogy 50 Shades Darker (cue stalking, careers, vengeance and marriage) and 50 Shades Free (here comes baby). All three books are well known to constitute some of the worst writing, erotic or not, in literary history. The film by and large is better but not without its own problems. Nevertheless this still begs the question of what has compelled so many women to read or watch what, more critically, appears to amount to little more than a pile of tripe.

Having found the books too palpably badly written to read, I watched the film with more interest and less, though still some, horror. What seems to be at work here are three competing, contradictory, and confused discourses on women, love and sex. The first of these is centuries old and centres on how the heroine tames a haunted and wounded man-beast where his vulnerability simultaneously excuses his behaviour, renders him irresistible, and reassures women of the power of their love. The second is also rather archaic but focuses on more contemporary tropes of predominantly North American male sexuality as powerful, wealthy and indeed steeped in material consumer culture from suits and offices to cars (or helicopters) and apartments. This both seduces women and invokes security in the form of man as provider. The third though is the oldest of all. Anastasia is cast as virgin and ingénue set on a journey of sexual discovery with her physically handsome yet emotionally scary hero. Thus, as in rape, man possesses woman. Yet – despite feminist protests – neither the film nor the writing here ever truly eroticises dominance as Ana resists, says no, and is repeatedly acceded to on multiple occasions. The difficulty is however that this still renders her sexual subjectivity as entirely the knock on effect of his, no more no less.

The casting here is curious. Jamie Dornan, Irish model turned actor and star of The Fall is pitched against Dakota Johnson who is cast in much the same mould as Anne Hathaway in The Devil Wears Prada (indeed early scenes in the film are almost identical – geeky girl in bad clothes blunders around designer dressed mannequins in chrome laden office). In The Fall, Dornan is an equally seductive but predatory serial killer Paul Spector yet is pitched against Gillian Anderson as the Detective Superintendent Stella Gibson who stalks him – the erotic tension between them is immense. That the film has none of this is down to Ana’s passivity – she has none of Stella’s silk bloused and stiletto wielding sexual power – it is Paul and Stella we want to see in the Red Room not Ana and Christian. Similarly, the BBC’s famed female lead from Pride and Prejudice, Jennifer Ehle, who fell for Colin Firth in THAT shirt is cast as the heroine’s mother reinforcing the sense in which this is just the latest in a long line of romantic corset rippers and Christian Grey is really Mr Darcy with whips. Ultimately then the entire phenomenon that is 50 Shades of Grey tells us nothing of what women want other than, it seems, an endlessly reconstituted soup of ideas of what others (one could say men but I wouldn’t – both writer and director here are female) think they should want.