50 Shades of OH MY GOD!!

So, unless you've been living under a rock, you know that all the latest rage in books these days, is the 50 Shades series by E.L. James.

These books scare the living shit out of me.

Now, I haven't read them.  And I'm pretty sure I'm not going to.  The premise of the book is a young virgin, Ana, who falls in love with Christian, a powerful billionaire (OK, I do love a billionaire) with some wacky sexual perversions and bad issues resulting from his childhood (but I do NOT love a damaged freak).  Christian and Ana spend much of this series, from what I understand, doing the nasty - and not exactly your run-of-the-mill, day-to-day nasty, either.  We're talking bondage, domination, sadism, masochism, and the like.  The series falls under the genre "erotic fiction".  Critics call it "Mommy Porn".  I call it, "Holy SHIT, they do WHAT in this book!??"

The fact is, I AM A TOTAL PRUDE.  I made the mistake of looking the book up on Wikipedia, just to kind of see what it was about, and I nearly passed out just reading the description.  I was like, WTF is BDSM??  This book is EROTIC FICTION?  Christian Grey has a 'Red Room of Pain??'  What in the bloody hell is THAT?! That sounds terrifying!!  I literally couldn't handle it.  My friend D was talking about the series at a gathering a couple weeks ago, and when I told her I felt I was too prudish to enjoy it, she said, "oh, you could do it, it's really not so bad."  Three days later, in the parking lot at school, she came running at me like a freaking rocket yelling something along the lines of "OH MY GOD, I AM FURTHER INTO IT NOW, IF YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE SMUT THEN FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, DON'T READ IT, YOU WILL TOTALLY DIE!!!!!"

My friend M, on the other hand, thinks I am totally missing out by not indulging in this series.  After admitting to her that I'm pretty sure I can't handle the heat, she suggested a few tamer (yet still porn-ish) titles by a different author, then told me to call her after I finished my "required reading" and she'd let me know if I was ready to take on 50 Shades.

I'm about halfway through my first assignment.  So far, I can handle it.  It's kinda like a Harlequin on steroids.

But I still don't think I'll ever be able to squirm my way through 50 Shades!

Have YOU read it (you dirty girl)?!  What did you think??