The Toronto Star takes the opportunity to remind their readers that Toronto tastes are so much more refined than those louts in the 905 who haven’t even heard of the Fifty Shades books:
Feeling strangely sadomasochistic these days?
It turns out you’re not alone.
Just ask Concetta Tucciarone, manager of the Greenhawk Harness & Equestrian Supplies store in North York, where sales of riding crops have mysteriously doubled during the past year or so.
The question is: why?
And the answer, apparently, has nothing to do with horses but owes everything to a sexually adventurous university student named Anastasia Steele and her dark, brooding passion for the mysterious young entrepreneur Christian Grey, “a man who is beautiful, brilliant, and intimidating.”
Plus: pretty handy with a riding crop.
Or, as the Marquis de Sade once wrote: “It is always by way of pain that one arrives at pleasure.”
This is a story about pain, pleasure — and equestrian goods.
Steele and Grey, as many readers doubtless know already, are the central characters in the decadent Fifty Shades trilogy of novels, a chart-topping publishing phenomenon penned by American writer E. L. James, a woman who has brought bondage and sadomasochism — and riding crops — into the North American cultural mainstream.
The in-crowd in Toronto are apparently thrashing away at one another in the approved style, but the peasants in the rest of the GTA still haven’t clued in:
“We have not noticed an increase at all,” says a sales clerk at the Picov’s Horsemen Centre in Ajax, who identifies herself only as Diane. “I guess in Durham Region, they’re not aware of those books.”
The same seems to be true at The Equine Emporium in Mississauga.
“Generally, we just sell to riders,” says sales clerk Jennifer Babos.
Ditto Carmen Griscti, owner of Baker’s Harness and Saddlery in Markham, who hasn’t detected a recent spike in riding-crop sales, either — but wishes he had.
“I wish I was downtown,” he says. “Can you imagine? I’d make a killing.”
