Kink and Condescension
Fifty Shades of BDSM Backlash
TO HEAR SOME CRITICS TELL IT, Fifty Shades of Grey is bad for bondage, BDSM—and women. The bestselling erotic trilogy is being held up to a standard we don’t ask of most fiction: to single-handedly portray a whole subculture, kink, accurately and in a good light. Instead, it’s being excoriated both for causing the downfall of feminism and for making a poor case for BDSM.
First, let me be clear that I am not endorsing the trilogy as the second coming of erotica. There are plenty of erotic books and stories where both parties are actively interested in BDSM, proud of being kinky, and ready to take their desire to the next level. And there’s plenty to criticize about the writing found within.
I’m also not arguing that James presents BDSM in a positive way. Did I find the story line, in which the sole reason Christian Grey is kinky and has never had vanilla sex is because his crack whore mother died when he was four, he was beaten by her boyfriend, and then was seduced by a family friend when he was fifteen, over the top? Of course. Who wouldn’t? And the books are far more about Christian’s penchant for dominance in and out of the bedroom than Ana’s budding interest in submission.
However, the books are fiction, and should be critiqued as such, not as social commentary. On the kinky social networking site Fetlife, user bumblebee wrote in a thread in the Submissive Women group, “I wish they wouldn’t portray BDSM as some sick twisted thing broken people do—but can grow out of with enough love and support! We don’t need that kind of publicity.” It’s this last sentence that is at the heart of my critique. Fiction writers, and artists generally, would have very little to work with if all we were trying to do was create good PR for marginalized groups. Furthermore, the idea that BDSM needs “publicity” in order to attract newcomers, like it’s running a popularity campaign, is ridiculous.
I understand the impulse—if Fifty Shades is a reader’s first introduction to BDSM, and they find it not to their liking, they may never read another book about the subject or think it would ever be of interest to them. But while fiction can be a catalyst for social change, and can indeed incite discussion about social issues, that’s not its primary job, and to claim that it requires us to assume that readers are so gullible and naïve they will take anything an author writes at face value. It assumes that readers will get so lost in the story, they won’t be able to differentiate it from real life.
When I attended an E. L. James luncheon, I didn’t find women so swept away by Christian Grey that they were trying to turn their husbands into his real-life counterparts. Most of them simply found the books a form of sexy, escapist fantasy. They were more than able to differentiate between the extremes of James’ universe and their own bedrooms.
In romance, as in any story, there needs to be a conflict, and the central conflict between Ana and Christian is, in fact, that she wants a traditional, loving, monogamous, vanilla relationship—albeit with hints of spanking and BDSM play—and he has never considered this type of relationship before. James is heavy-handed with pretty much every aspect of her plot, but her job is not to convince the public that BDSM and love can go hand in hand. Imagine if it were—surely she would then be criticized for painting too rosy an image of kink, sans any thorns!
Another way media critics have condescended to readers is to assume that those who are interested in bondage, fictional or otherwise, are simply deluded. They, too, assume that simply because James wrote a story featuring a female submissive and male Dominant, that’s all there is to BDSM, rather than room to play with both gender and power in creative, intelligent ways. When Gina Barreca writes that “maybe ‘bondage’ is just a sexy word for ‘degradation,’”6 she not only insults everyone who’s ever shown an interest in bondage, but anyone who’s read or considered reading Fifty Shades. She not only makes it sound like Ana simply offers up her wrists to be cuffed upon her first glance at Christian, she also assumes that the women flocking to read the series are being dictated and dominated by James, as if she has some agenda intent on grooming them all to become kinky docile subs.
Barreca also writes, “Just when we thought our daughters’ futures would be defined, stronger positions in the worlds of the culture, the workplace, the family, and politics, it turns a lot of women are soaking up this message, ‘You want me to make choices? OK, then! I am choosing to be submissive to a man who has a playroom of pain and who wants to decide what I eat, where I go and purchases my electronic devices.’” Not only does she misread the plot, in which Ana grapples heavily with Christian’s interest in BDSM, trying to puzzle out what makes him tick, how his previous relationships have played out, and whether she is that kind of girl, she misreads the basic tenet of BDSM: consent, and desire along with it. Women are not simply “soaking up” this message, but analyzing it, debating it, discussing it, with their friends, family members, and lovers. Many are reading a book of this genre for the first time and discussing it with their peers. Because it’s now reached critical mass in terms of popularity, it means there are going to be countless friends and strangers with whom to discuss both the plot points and larger issues. This makes it even more ridiculous to claim that there is a single, simplistic takeaway from the books.
Barreca is not the only one making arguments like this. In the Sydney Morning Herald, Pamela Stephenson Connolly argues not only that “Christian Grey is a sexual predator with a dungeon,”7 but also that, “All the work that has been done to establish that BDSM is not a pathological symptom, but one of a wide range of normative human erotic interests, is in danger of being undermined by the success of Fifty Shades.” The only way that could be true is if we devalue readers to such a degree that we assume they will take everything they read as gospel.
Sex educator Tristan Taormino, editor of The Ultimate Guide to Kink, lamented to the CBC8 that, “The inherent mistake in the book is Anastasia’s question really early on, which is, ‘Why is he this way?’ I think it really flies in the face of everything I know about sexuality.” I agree with her that your average kinky person is not coming from a similar position and that Ana’s approach is not necessarily the key to a lifetime of happiness, since their fundamental goals, at least at the start, appear different. But again, if this is a mistake, it’s a mistake in terms of plotting; if in the end Ana is still trying to de-kink Christian, it would mean that the end result, where they live happily ever after, married with children, wouldn’t make sense. But to say that this is somehow “bad” for BDSM as a whole gives much too much credence to James’ power as an author, even an author of a 20-million-plus bestseller.
On the other hand, there are some places we’d expect to see these kinds of words. Christian blogger Dannah Gresh at Pure Freedom9 wrote about why she’s not reading the trilogy, causing an uproar among some of her readers. Among her reasons, aside from it inciting lust in its readers, is, again, kink (in the comments she rails against the use of the acronym BDSM for sanitizing what she sees as simply “pain and humiliation”). Gresh writes, “It seems to me that in our emasculating culture there is a hunger so great for strong men that women will stoop to bondage, dominance, sadism, and masochism for just a taste. Do yourself a favor, don’t!” Once again, it’s assumed that Fifty Shades and James, without trying, are imparting some instantaneous form of wish fulfillment in hungry, horny readers, who will instantly be so overcome with desire for a Christian Grey–like character they will try to turn their vanilla partners into sadists.
But the more disturbing examples employ a fundamental misreading of the nature of fantasy and reading. They assume that women are so easily gullible, far more so than Anastasia Steele, willing to be blindfolded down the path to complete sexual submission simply because the heroine of a novel was. They assume that the simple fact that readers are enjoying a story featuring an extremely kinky alpha male hero dominating a virginal heroine means that these caricature characters are exactly who we all, deep down, want to be.
Fifty Shades of Grey is not an instruction manual, though it has spawned several sex advice guides, with names like Fifty Shades of Pleasure: A Bedside Companion and 50 Ways to Play: BDSM for Nice People. Many have hyped (I suspect overhyped) the degree to which Fifty Shades has invaded our bedrooms, with the New York Post touting a run on rope at city hardware stores,10 imbuing this work of fiction with nearly superhuman powers.
I believe that fiction is vital to us, both for entertainment and to tell us certain truths that extend beyond the bluntness of nonfiction. As Lisa Cron writes in Wired for Story, “Stories allow us to simulate intense experiences without actually having to live through them.” Readers can and are living vicariously through Ana, but that doesn’t mean they’re checking their brains at the door, and if it did, it wouldn’t be E. L. James’ fault. Cron gives insight on her blog11 into why Fifty Shades of Grey has been such a success: “There’s something that prose gives us that nothing else does—not real life, not movies, not plays. Prose provides direct access to the most alluring and otherwise inaccessible realm imaginable: someone else’s mind.”
We can appreciate, or even talk back to, Ana’s mindset and journey, without trying to hail her as an ambassador to BDSM. Neither she nor any hero or heroine could live up to that vaunted role. However, when we look down on readers by assuming they are taking their erotic fiction so seriously that they are even more entranced by the spell of Christian Grey than Anastasia Steele, we have a problem.
Reading is an active task, and while I doubt people are studying Fifty Shades with a highlighter, we need to separate our critiques of the plot and writing with our critiques of BDSM. E. L. James didn’t invent kink, and it’d be tough to argue that she’s espousing it as a lifestyle, considering Ana’s ongoing quest to tame the kinky beast that lurks in Christian. You don’t need to be a fan of the series to recognize that it’s not about being a cheerleader or detractor of BDSM, but of telling a story, where BDSM is a vehicle to carry the plot. Fifty Shades of Grey has clearly set the publishing industry on its head, but let’s give it credit—or discredit—in concordance with its role as fiction, not as some grand manifesto being obeyed without question.
RACHEL KRAMER BUSSEL (rachelkramerbussel.com) is a New York–based author, editor, and blogger. She has edited over forty anthologies, including Spanked, Bottoms Up, Fast Girls, Orgasmic, and Dirty Girls, and is the Best Bondage Erotica and Best Sex Writing series editor. She edits the weekly sex diaries for New York magazine’s blog Daily Intel, and has written for Bust, The Daily Beast, The Frisky, Inked, the New York Observer, Penthouse, Salon, Time Out New York, xoJane, and other publications. She blogs at Lusty Lady (http://lustylady.blogspot.com) and Cupcakes Take the Cake (http://cupcakestakethecake.blogspot.com).