Are you a Wharton MBA candidate who thinks Fifty Shades of Grey would’ve been much hotter if the author had thrown in a few references to the 1986 repeal of the General Utilities Doctrine? Meet Erotic FinFiction, a Fifty Shades parody that caters to the G+T-swilling, collar-popping, Patrick Bateman-idolizing set.
The Tumblr, which has been circulating among Ivy League MBA students for the past few weeks, marries Fifty Shades’ steamy, cliche-ridden prose with obscure financial jargon, resulting in passages such as the following:
Alexandra’s eyes opened wide as Robert (Wharton MBA class of 2008) slowly revealed the terms of the contract, line by line. She gasped.
The interest was enormous.
She could picture herself compounding it, non-stop, year on year. It was a variable rate loan, and she licked her lips in anticipation, thinking about how it would grow slowly before her eyes.
And this:
Maximus (HBS MBA class of 2012) groaned as he bent over his desk. He knew that during the turnaround, he would be pummeled by creditors, and have to pump his investors for more liquidity. He gripped the edges of the desk and hoped he had enough stamina left to give them the returns they desired.
According to a Q&A with Bloomberg Businessweek, the Tumblr was created by a group of MBAs and non-MBAs, after one of their friends boasted they had a knack for writing XXX-rated mortgage stories.
“We’re surrounded by people who worked, or will work in finance, some [of] whom take themselves very seriously,” says one of the Tumblr’s authors (they’ve asked to remain anonymous, for fear of isolating future potential employers in the industry). “We thought we’d make finance sexy for them, in a tongue-in-cheek sort of way.”
For those outside Wall Street, particularly if you fulfilled your undergrad quantitative reasoning requirement by writing a math-themed limerick (holla!), some of Erotic FinFiction’s financial references might be a little inside baseball. Still, anyone with at least a passing familiarity with Fifty Shades will likely find the juxtaposition of finance-themed innuendos—pump and dump, anyone?—with oddly charged stock photos of business meetings amusing.
Photo via Victor1558/Flickr