Just saw the Women's fiction section in my supermarket - WTAF?!

[GothAnneGeddes]

At least three books on sale with fluffy "chick-lit" covers called something like Confessions of a Lapdancer, Secret Life of a Madam and Night-time Call Girl. As being a prostitute is super glam and marvellous as we all know

Then there's the big clump of 50 Shades rip offs which are all women in submissive role type rubbish.

This is dreadful, really depressing that this kind of anti-feminist bilge is being served up to women.

What is the best way to fight this kind of dreck?

[Fanjango]

Best way..walk away and buy something better. I hate this trend but it has ever been so ( Catherine Cookson was well published and not to dissimilar in genre!).

[dummad]

I object to all this kind of stuff becoming accepted as mainstream for women, but it looks like it's rubbing off having clocked the garb of the young women in the bar I went to tonight. It's what they seem to aspire to.

[FloraFox]

Which supermarket is it? They may have some kind of corporate guff diversity or social responsibility statement that you could use to make a complaint. Or just generally you could complain to the head of marketing. Although there's always been the Catherine Cookson sort of women's genres, I don't think this sort of crap has been mainstream before.

[joanofarchitrave]

Supermarkets wouldn't stock them if they weren't selling in their millions.

What do we do? Reinstate a sense of sexual shame?

I have to say that if I were a man who had been castigated by my partner for looking at porn, I would be pretty cheesed off right now at the 'it's so sexeee!' marketing of old Fifty Shades.

[FloraFox]

Sorry, I didn't mean to suggest complaining about the books being sold, it's the categorisation of this as "Women's Fiction" that I think can be legitimately complained about.

[joanofarchitrave]

I'd agree - would love to see these categorised as 'Crap Porn' instead

[PlentyOfPubeGardens]

Reminds me of something I meant to post about before christmas when I was shopping - WHS non-fiction bestsellers section. About half the titles were 'true life' 50 shades style 'diary of a submissive' titles, all jumbled up with misery tales of abusive childhoods. It made me feel ill.

[TheDoctrineOfSciAndNatureClub]

Guerilla campaign of posting "Crap Porn" logos over the sections sounds good

[BertieBotts]

The "abuse porn" genre does appear to have replaced the "child abuse memoir" genre as the current trend. The last one lasted for about ten years so I think we're stuck with this one :(

Very disturbing trend, though. And in films there's been a massive mainstream growth in torture porn type horror films too - that started with Saw, so 2004 - again almost ten years ago. What happened? I'm sure that mainstream, popular books and films of the 90s weren't so filled with rape, abuse and torture? Or maybe I was just younger then and didn't notice it?

[BegoniaBampot]

I always thought Catherine Cookson wrote about very strong women (out myself as CC fan a long time ago). Agree in general though, especially about all the misery/abuse literature - who reads all that stuff.

[Charlizee]

As someone else pointed out- supermarkets exist to make money. They will stock whatever people are buying. Even if you hate what they stock it's obvious there is a tonne of people who love it.

[Charlizee]

Saw is a torture horror film series yes but I failed to find any porn within them?

[drjohnsonscat]

It's like the way that any book by women and about women is called chick lit. I bloody hate that phrase. Men write for everybody and they write literature but women can only write chick lit - unless they are writing in a man's voice and then they can win the Booker.

[BertieBotts]

It's a saying. You know, like food porn for example. Just means to show/focus on that for no other purpose than to do so. The torture isn't included because there is a particular reason in the story, the whole storyline is centred around the torture. It's disturbing.