Dave Barry may or may not be heading to movie theaters this weekend to catch the Fifty Shades of Grey movie, but last year he admitted that he’d read E.L. James’ bestseller to comedic results.

Dave Barry On ‘Fifty Shades’

Barry, a humor author and columnist, decided to read Fifty Shades after hearing so much about it – and how positive it was for many of his male friends’ sex lives with their respective wives. At the time, he thought that it might provide him with insight into what women want, but he was sorely disappointed to learn that much of what the book taught him was what he already knew – incontestably good looks and a large bank account could be attractive.

“This woman falls in love with a hot billionaire. A twenty-seven-year-old hot, billionaire,” Barry told uInterview in March of last year, recalling the plot of Fifty Shades. “[Anastasia] tells you every three sentences how hot [Christian] is and how billionaire-y he is. But here’s the thing: he wants to tie her up and hit her.”

Curious if this appealed to his own wife, who didn’t read the “mommy porn” novel, Barry asked her what she thought about some S&M. “At the end of this book I read all that, and I said to my wife, ‘Do you secretly want me to tie you up and hit you? And she said, ‘No!'” Barry told uInterview. “So I learned nothing from that book at all, except that maybe it’s good to be a hot billionaire, but I knew that before I started.”

While the book’s dominant-submissive role play didn’t appeal to Barry’s wife, there were many women out there who couldn’t get enough of James’ erotic romance trilogy.

“Why was this book so incredibly popular? When so many women get so emotionally involved in a badly written, comically unrealistic porno yarn, what does this tell us? That women are basically insane?,” Barry wrote for Time last year. “No. Of course it does not tell us that. What it tells us is this: Women are interested in sex.”

Fifty Shades of Grey, starring Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson, is currently in wide release.