50 shades of cinza

Sometimes it's fun to see which pop culture trends cross borders.

But most of the time it's not.

Most of the time you wonder if pop culture everywhere is just a big international crap salad. Hot turds from England, dried deuces from Australia, dingleberries from Spain, squirts from Mexico. And embarrassingly, the heaviest slab of mudbunny is usually from my homeland.

This time England wins.

In hindsight I guess it makes sense that 50 Shades of Vag-Wrecking Orgasms hit it so big in the US. The US is kind of weird with sex, all bashful and PC and repressed, yet persistent and porny and rapy about it all at the same time. So it computes that a book that makes a whole lot of confused women masturbate would catch fire.

But here in Brazil, where the air screams SEX! SEX! SEX! FUCKING! SEX! APHRODISIACS! SWEATY DANCING! CATCALLS! WOMEN ARE SO BEAUTIFUL! MEN HAVE BIG MUSCLES! SEX! IS IT HOT ENOUGH FOR YOU? SEX! SEX! (and these are just the names of some of the stores on Avenida Santo Amaro), I don't know, I guess I thought these people would laugh at a lame-ass book about a virgin who gives her shit up to that idiot American female fantasy creature, the mythical Asshole With a Heart of Gold.

But i think every livraria i went into for months on end had what looked like a fort made out of those glinting silver-and-black tomes. (and they are tomes. the shits are loooong. but if you want to laugh, open one. the font  is huge, making it look creepily as though it's for toddlers. )

One shop had a 50 Shades pyramid. Another, what looked like a large family dinner table stacked a foot high with nothing but 50 Tonas de Cinza.

Don't get me wrong, I love reading trash and I'm all about people everywhere having fun. And the books are harmless. It's just… I don't know. They're so lame.