RE: Saturday Rant!!! (Don't worry, if you miss this one, there will be more)
I refuse to read 50 Shades. I got sucked into reading Twilight (and it sucked) and from what I gather, 50 Shades reinvented Twilight's protaganists and put them on steroids. I've read the same thing about the man treating the woman badly and that she has major self esteem issues, etc....Now what's kind of thought provoking about that scenario is that 1. There are indeed real life situations in which a woman with low self esteem idolizes a man who treats her badly and mistakes his use of her as "love"...but 2. books like 50 Shades idealize that instead of exposing it. I've seen people hotly argue that point about the Outlander series as well.
There is definitely a huge variation in what constitutes a "romance" novel, I totally agree with that.
I didn't read Twilight, but I did see two of the movies I think. I'm not sure at all how they and 50 Shades of Gray correlate, other than I guess abuse. The big draw of Twilight were sparkly vampires and handsome werewolves, whereas 50 Shades seems to test the limits of the mainstream readers' tastes in less than mainstream sex. Or at least, that's how I'm interpreting it.
At any rate. it's a genre that could stand plenty of subcategories at least, if not flat out reclassification into other kinds of genre. Is Garbage a genre? :)
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/340987215
^^ I just about cried with laughter the first time I read that. The author shows the correlation when she says "Yeah, like we haven't seen that before" about Ana and then when she crosses out "Edward" and "Jake" to show how the guys correlate to their corresponding Twilight characters. But like I said, they're on steroids in 50 Shades :))) The reviewer really hammers the point home about the glorification of a destructive relationship--dysfunctional in Twilight, but ratcheted up to abusive in 50 Shades.
Either way, I'd delightedly fling both series into a newly created Garbage genre.