Forbidden Fruit Is the Sweetest
WHEN I WAS ABOUT seven years old, I was at my very best friend Elizabeth’s house when she took me aside and told me a secret: her mother had a stash of Playgirl magazines hidden somewhere in the house. “There are pictures of naked men in them!” she whispered.
When her mother said she was going to the supermarket and would be back in half an hour, we promised we’d be good. The moment the door closed behind her, the hunt was on: we ransacked that place like federal agents acting on a hot tip. And we found the magazines! Oh, the mysterious male anatomy, finally revealed … I think we even sneaked one of her mom’s cigarettes to double the decadence.
We had only a limited time to fill our eyes and imaginations before Elizabeth’s mother was due back, and almost as good as the discovery we’d made was covering it up. We ran around, giggling with nervous hysteria, as we tried to put the magazines back as we’d found them, then opened the window and fanned out the cigarette smoke. We might have gotten away with it all if we hadn’t been standing stiffly in the living room, side by side, like two good little soldiers, when Elizabeth’s mother returned.
That was my first sample of the unique and luscious flavor of a guilty pleasure, and understanding the ingredients—harmless naughtiness, mixed with a hint of secrecy—that went into one. I’ve been addicted to guilty pleasures ever since.
I’d read erotica before Fifty Shades of Grey, and each time I remembered the lessons I learned that day with Elizabeth: pleasure is fun, but a pleasure that gently tests the conscience and remains covert is even better. So I kept erotica, which sometimes overflows into mainstream popularity, as a hidden indulgence, one for me to enjoy in private. Especially when partaking of erotica that was rough.
Erotica has always been present in books and films, just out of view of the public eye. But every few decades, BDSM comes out of the dungeon (or, in this case, the Red Room of Pain) and has its moment in the mass market sun. Regular folks whose preference for whipping items usually extends only as far as a whisk for cream will line up to see Kim Basinger handcuffed in 9½ Weeks, or to buy brutal and sexual versions of fairy tales by Anne Rice, writing as A.N. Roquelaure. And now everyone and my godmother have read Fifty Shades of Grey.
Why does BDSM have that mass moment? Maybe because we reach a saturation point with vanilla sex, as Christian Grey would call it, and we want a little … more (though not the “more” Anastasia asks Christian for, meaning a real relationship). If our society perceives sex as being naughty, and it does, then BDSM is the naughtiest of the naughty. BDSM is more than sex; it is potentially dangerous, not just physically, but emotionally. BDSM is sex with paddles and floggers, with handcuffs and clamps, and what truly makes traditional sex pale vanilla in comparison is the understanding that one person holds the flogger and the other is being flogged. In BDSM, sex is secondary to the true game of seduction: power and trust. The submissive must trust the Dominant to employ bondage, to administer corporal punishment, and, most important, to play by the rules: when the safeword is uttered, the submissive must have faith the play will stop.
But—and that is a big safeword in this scenario—BDSM is not generally considered completely unacceptable in the way that something truly harmful might be. Christian’s own list of hard limits could have been taken directly from a romance publisher: no puppies or kitties, no kids, no fire, no unmentionable acts. Such high moral standards from a man who has a special drawer filled with whipping canes of varying lengths and widths.
Christian is also a man who knows the value of a guilty pleasure. Is he proud of the fact that he gets off on flogging the ladies? Not really, as Dr. Flynn’s surely impressive therapy bill might suggest. But Christian isn’t truly hurting anyone. Therefore, that guilt doesn’t stop him from luxuriously kitting out an entire room for the discerning Dominant with taste and means, purely to indulge his, yes, guilty pleasure.
There’s guilt, and then there’s shame.
Shame can scare us off an action for life, or turn it into a hidden activity that can lead to obsession, which usually ends in remorse. Anyone who’s been made to feel ashamed about the natural exploration of sex as a child has hopefully undone the damage with his or her own version of Dr. Flynn.
Guilt, though, is a lesser emotion, on just on the right side of that fine border between pleasure and pain that Christian tells Ana about. The difference becomes clear in the way Ana feels about her exploration of Christian’s lifestyle. “Why does this feel so good?” she asks herself—usually right before asking for more.
In theory, being tied up and flogged by one’s lover shouldn’t feel good; in practice, however, it may. Even if it does, though, one generally doesn’t admit it, for fear of being judged. The social stigma against such acts keeps them behind closed doors, safe in Red Rooms. (And think about it: if BDSM were acceptable enough to be spoken about over bagels at brunch, would it be as much fun?)
What keeps women who swap their bracelets for handcuffs quiet about it is the thick skin required to withstand not just a good spanking, but the withering stare that follows such admissions. Conventional society’s judgment of anyone who likes painful games? They’re weird, crazy, depraved, sick, and setting feminism back to the Stone Age. That nondisclosure agreement isn’t the only thing that keeps Ana from telling her best friend, Kate, about what Ana and Christian do in private. Christian’s binding (pun unavoidable) contract notwithstanding, Ana still can’t bring herself to tell Kate, or anyone else, about what Christian wants to do to her … or why she wants him to do it.
Part of her silence may be due to embarrassment; Ana knows what people will think and is afraid of people talking her out of her own investigation. Another part may be the scandal that would ensue if word got out about what Christian, a well-known businessman and philanthropist, has going on in that Red Room of Pain.
Mostly, though, I like to think that Ana doesn’t talk about what she does with Christian, or, more to the point, what Christian does to her, because she likes having a secret. Yes, my boyfriend is a Dominant—and I think I like being his submissive. Not exactly a line heard at most dinner parties. If it is, chances are good that the ante will soon need to be upped, because pleasures that come easily and become commonplace also get dull fast.
A few months before my wedding, I went on a diet. High fiber, low calorie, no fat, zero fun. Caning had nothing on this regime.
When the wedding day finally came, I had my first piece of cake in months. This was the best cake I’d ever eaten. This cake was like mind-blowing drugs in IMAX, it was so good. Deprivation had done more than get me thin; I’d developed a taste for forbidden fruit. To a mind trained to diet, the cake was still technically verboten. A cheat.
After the wedding, with a renewed hunger for sweets and no big event to diet for, I ate sugar with abandon. Chocolate craving in the afternoon? Have some. Want dessert? You bet. But when I gave myself permission to eat what I wanted without thought of consequence, that treat wasn’t as good as when it was a cheat. The missing ingredient? The sweet taste of mild guilt, of doing something that I “wasn’t supposed to do,” and of having to hide my deed.
This is the problem with permissiveness; it’s just not that much fun. In high school, the most messed-up kids I knew were the ones whose parents smoked pot and drank with them. How can a kid engage in rebellion—necessary for growth—against that?
My parents weren’t terribly permissive, but there were some disappointingly easygoing moments. Every week I’d get together with my biological father, who my mother divorced when I was young. On one such visit, I remember finding Story of O in his bookshelf. (It wasn’t even hidden.) He’s an artist, so the version of O my father had was illustrated—what would now be called a graphic novel—by Guido Crepax. My father had a tendency to treat me, his teenage daughter, like an adult in matters of culture, so he didn’t see why I shouldn’t be allowed to look at a graphic novel about graphic sex. Graphic, sadomasochistic sex.
Well, I was thrilled. Not only was I being treated like an adult, I was being given free rein to look at penises and sex—very artistically rendered, of course. Fantastic! And yet … there was something missing from this transaction: everything that had been so fun the day Elizabeth and I found her mother’s Playgirls. The sweetness of doing something naughty, the mild guilt of harboring this secret from authority figures, like my parents—hell, one of my parents had very nonchalantly given me permission to read it. Sure, I was going to look, but some of the thrill was gone before I even opened the book.
We love rules and boundaries. They keep order, but they also keep forbidden fruit sweet.
Women have a rich history of cheating on diets, starting with Eve. There was only one thing she couldn’t have, and that was the only thing she wanted. I like to think of her in exile, wearing her fig leaf minidress, and saying to Adam, “Yeah, but it was sooooo gooooood. If I find more of that stuff, I’m making an entire pie out of it.”
Pandora also had a craving. Only one thing she wasn’t supposed to do. Only one thing she wanted to do. Cue the sound of a box being opened—consequences, shmonsequences. Which was more alluring for these women: the taste of the apple and the satisfaction of knowing what was inside that box, or doing these things despite the thou shalt not? There’s something so bright and shiny about the thing you can’t have or shouldn’t do.
The recipe for a delicious guilty pleasure, then, is:
Naughtiness. For a guilty pleasure to work, it must have a piquant hint of being taboo. Remember, though, the guilty pleasure must be only slightly forbidden and not outright harmful. Anything that would harm you or another being is not a guilty pleasure, but something destined to bring on true pain. Conversely, if a relatively harmless action brings on too much internal agony, then an appointment with Dr. Flynn is in order.
Secrecy. Telling everyone about a guilty pleasure nullifies the guilt. The people who love you will say there’s nothing to feel guilty about. Some people may admit that they do the same thing, in which case you’re no longer the heroine of your own story; if everybody’s doing it, what makes you special?
Yet what makes a guilty pleasure even better is telling someone what you’ve done. You need some sort of accomplice, even if it’s only a diary. For Ana, that accomplice is Christian, who is deep inside his lifestyle, yet is brought outside of it by Ana’s questions of how he became this way.
Long before Fifty Shades of Grey was discussed on the Today Show, my friend Donna said, “Have you heard about this book? All the girls in my office are whispering about it.” Whispering. Not discussing it openly, but speaking in hushed tones so the boss didn’t hear them talking about how sexy a book about bondage could be. They knew how to keep a guilty pleasure good.
Recently, I was on the train and saw a woman who exuded an air of permissive entitlement. She was a person of size, possibly because she ate what she wanted, weight be damned. She defied societal norms by letting her hair go gray. Under her somber charcoal business jacket, she wore vibrant batik patterns. She was fierce.
The woman was reading Fifty Shades of Grey. I knew this because she had a paper copy instead of an e-reader in her hand, and she wasn’t even attempting to hide the cover. A man was watching her read; he’d clearly heard the hype, knew what the book was about, and couldn’t help a tiny Tee-hee, you’re reading lady porn smirk from forming on his face.
The woman shot him a defiant look. She was going to read her erotica in broad fluorescent trainlight, and to hell with anyone who tried to imply that she couldn’t.
Of course she could. But I felt like taking her aside as my friend Elizabeth had done with me many years ago and whispering an important bit of information: Madame, you’re missing the point. I’m reading Fifty in public, too—but on my iPad, so no one can tell. Not because I’m ashamed, but because it’s more fun this way. There’s nothing more delicious than a guilty pleasure. The sauce, my dear, is in the naughty secret.
SUZAN COLÓN is the former senior editor for O, The Oprah Magazine. She is the author of the inspirational memoir Cherries in Winter: My Family’s Recipe for Hope in Hard Times (Random House); three young adult novels based on the hit TV series Smallville; Catwoman: The Life and Times of a Feline Fatale; and What Would Wonder Woman Do? An Amazon’s Guide to the Working World. She has written for O, Jane, Details, Harper’s Bazaar, and many other magazines. Her essays have been featured in three O, the Oprah Magazine anthologies: O’s Big Book of Happiness, Dream Big!, and Love Your Life! Suzan’s novel Beach Glass will be published by BelleBridge in spring 2014.
Visit her at www.suzancolon.net.