The McDonald’s of Lust
E. L. JAMES’ Fifty Shades trilogy is a by-product of feminism and women’s equality. It’s porn for women, and that’s why it’s so popular.
Porn and its softer cousin, erotic romance, are like the Dollar Menu at McDonald’s. They’re addictive, and what satisfies a craving one day just won’t cut it the next. If you buy a hamburger today, then tomorrow you’ll need a double bacon cheeseburger with large fries and a supersized Coke.
If male porn addiction arises from dopamine-oxycontin releases during orgasm, then the same is true for female porn addiction. In the best of times, repeated orgasms with the same person leads to bonding. Repeated orgasms based on porn or erotic romance means bonding with the fantasies. Male or female, the brain becomes neurologically hooked.
Today’s women are overburdened. Single mothers struggle to earn a living while raising children alone, managing the home, paying the bills, and hoping they can cover college tuitions that cost more than houses. The workplace is infected by outsourcing, minimum wages, and no benefits. Despite so-called feminism and women’s equality, single mothers are still in cages.
In the meantime, many stay-at-home mothers with college degrees don’t know what they want or how to cope. They feel guilty if they leave their children at day care, feel guilty if they pursue careers or if they don’t pursue careers. They worry that their husbands will leave them, because after all, the divorce rate just keeps skyrocketing, doesn’t it?
Men also cope as best as they can. It’s not that they’re evil or hate women. Everyone’s simply coping, and the focus has shifted from substance to whatever-gets-me-through-the-night. Jolts of Snooki and Mob Wives, dashes of Kardashians, a blip of fake-forever love on a dating show followed by two minutes of a sex tape. In 2012, life is an endless stream of 1980s MTV sleazed down to limp meaning and jacked-up excess.
As men turn to porn and away from reality, women become sexually frustrated. The women feel unappreciated, unloved, unattractive even in their youthful prime, and almost sexless. For a porn-addicted man, a real woman can’t measure up, and increasingly, young girls and women find themselves with men who would rather have sex alone in the glow of a computer screen. For examples, just read any number of recent articles about the subject, such as, but certainly not limited to, Davy Rothbart and Alex Morris’ 2011 New York magazine articles.5
Early feminists considered porn as something evil leading to rape. Gloria Steinem, who famously exposed Playboy in 1963 as a sexist empire when she became a bunny, labeled sadomasochism as pornography. One of feminism’s earliest leaders, Steinem probably would have pegged Fifty Shades of Grey and the rest of the trilogy as porn. And she would have been right.
The difference is that Fifty Shades is female porn.
When men choose porn over their wives, why shouldn’t women choose their own forms of erotica? This is exactly what women are doing with Fifty Shades and similar books, all of which are topping publishing charts.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I was a fan of Steinem’s back in the day. An elder stateswoman of feminism, she led the charge for equality. She came along in the ’60s, a glamorous yet intelligent and strong female. But by the time I was a young woman in the late ’70s and early ’80s, many men equated feminism with “lesbians who hate men,” or so they told me in the office. They made it clear that, if I was a feminist, I could lose my job. I didn’t want to burn my bra. I didn’t hate men. In fact, I rather liked men. Given that I worked for engineering companies where I was the only female professional in a sea of men, it was best for me to tell the truth, that I was working for the same reasons the men worked: I needed the money.
At first, I wanted a college education because I wanted to be a geneticist. I’d been a straight-A student in school. But my family had humble resources and told me that girls didn’t need college. I should become a secretary, a teacher, or a nurse.
I didn’t know anything about feminism or women’s equality, but I did know that I was incredibly bored. Starting at seventeen and earning minimum wages, I wrote medical newsletters, technical manuals, and a book about poverty, and I also programmed in a variety of languages and studied engineering and circuitry. I somehow got lucky and had a couple of terrific bosses who promoted me into management. They only cared that I did a good job; my gender wasn’t an issue. They liked the fact that I needed the money and had to support my family, that I had no choice. It meant that I worked all the time and did my very best for them. But being the only woman, I knew I was lucky.
In the late ’70s and ’80s, female professionals were supposed to dress like men. Shoulder pads in blazers hanging below our thighs, tentlike skirts hanging to our mid-calves, short spiky hair. Women’s magazines told us to climb career ladders and break glass ceilings.
But I liked being a girl.
No shoulder pads for me. No drooping blazers and tent skirts. I didn’t care about career ladders and glass ceilings. I was working to take care of my child, and I preferred intellectual stimulation to boredom. I remembered Gloria Steinem, who retained her femininity while projecting strength and intelligence, and I had no other role models. I forged my own path and made my own rules. I wore pants, simple button-down shirts, and loafers. I kept a casual blazer—short, without shoulder pads—on hand for meetings.
But after twelve to fifteen hours at work when I finally came home to my husband, I just wanted to be a girl. A physical entity, pure female, and with my brain switched off.
In those days, being a major breadwinner in pants could jeopardize a woman’s relationship with her man. What if he stopped seeing her as a sexual object? What if he turned his back on her and fell in lust with Playboy centerfolds? My God, what if he became addicted to porn? Worse, what if she had to make do at a minimum-wage job with no benefits while raising three kids on her own?
Oh, wait. These are today’s problems, only they’re widespread and much worse.
Luckily, today’s woman can do more than cry all night. If her man’s grooving to porn in a dump somewhere, she can sit in her own dump and groove to Fifty Shades. She can stock up on all forms of erotica and download whatever-gets-her-through-the-night fantasies. If she wants, she can fantasize about a very rich bad boy who lusts after her, who finds her sexually attractive—one who has his hang-ups, all of which she’s able to overcome, winning his heart. This is the potency of classic romance.
Anastasia Steele feels appreciated, desired, attractive. She has multiple orgasms. Her guy is consumed by angst. She must help him. It’s classic.
And yet we live in the age of porn, and so modern romance novels come in all forms—cowboys, aliens, threesomes, paranormals, kinky, kinkier, and kinkiest. If yesterday, a woman got turned on by one subgenre—say, paranormals—today she might lust for other kinks. She might lust for a rich bad boy who’s into BDSM and who ultimately finds himself and falls in love with her.
There’s really nothing new here. It’s traditional female sex fantasy, except hamburgers will no longer do. Today’s woman demands a triple bacon cheeseburger with extra sauce.
LOIS GRESH is the New York Times bestselling author (six times), Publishers Weekly bestselling paperback author, and Publishers Weekly bestselling paperback children’s author of twenty-seven books and fifty short stories. Her books have been published in approximately twenty languages. Current books are dark short story collection Eldritch Evolutions, Dark Fusions, and The Hunger Games Companion. Lois has received the Bram Stoker Award, Nebula Award, Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, and International Horror Guild Award nominations for her work.