A Queer Leather Reluctant Support of Fifty Shades
AS A CRUSTY PUNK KID just barely eighteen, I walked down SW Broadway St. in Portland, Oregon, past the now erotically famous Heithman Hotel, bruises forming on the beaten, warm flesh of my shoulders and ass and a leather cuff tight around my wrist. Everyone I knew were other homeless and precariously housed queer kids. Living lives filled with leather, we were having play parties in punk house basements and collaring each other in the shadows. We didn’t know anything about international title contests and barely had seen a book that talked about kink.
It never would have occurred to me that a little over a decade later a book with explicit BDSM themes would top the New York Times bestseller list and outsell the famed Harry Potter that was just becoming a phenomenon as I found leather. I’ll admit that I’ve been a little snarky about Fifty Shades of Grey and its success. I may have even been quoted that writing this critique/exploration of the book was “more painful than the six strokes that Ana Steele took by the end of the book.”
A key issue that continually arose for me while reading Fifty Shades was Ana Steele’s construction as a character who is the ultimate reluctant submissive. To make her attractive and relatable for straight mainstream women, it seems as though she can’t appear “too freaky” or somehow too eager for the sensation-based experiences she’s having with Christian Grey. The result: a character who I imagine is somewhat safe for sexually repressed readers to identify with. Because ultimately she isn’t responsible for the experiences she’s having, she’s able to maintain her “good girl” identify while getting fucked or tied up with Mr. Grey’s tie. But she is also a character who lacks sexual autonomy, which, given the profound reach of these books, makes me nervous.
Ana is presented as weak, naïve, and ultimately susceptible to being led into the darkness of Christian’s “fifty shades” instead of a willing explorer eager to push herself toward new experiences. As a leather person and as an author, I found it disappointing that in this moment of representation, which had the potential to reach so many people and give them the opportunity to perhaps gain a better understanding of our culture/community, readers are shown a duped submissive who is essentially manipulated and feels abused by the situations she consents to being part of.
Similar to my concerns and critiques of Ana as the reluctant, manipulated submissive are my frustrations with the construction of Christian Grey as a childhood abuse survivor. As a survivor myself and someone who speaks and writes regularly about the intersections of kink and childhood abuse, I believe that it’s extremely important to bring abuse out of the shadows, and I’m eager for it to emerge as a publicly discussed topic. However, what we witness in the pages of Fifty Shades is not a representation of abuse survivors who take their bodies/experiences/sexuality back and make empowered decisions. Instead, abuse survivorship is conflated with kink. Specifically, Ana routinely presents as fact her perspective that Christian is the way he is (read: kinky) because of a difficult, troubled childhood and the sexual abuse he experienced as a teenager. This tired argument is levied at many of us in the leather community on a daily basis, and the idea of it being perpetuated in such a public way is disappointing. All through Fifty Shades, we get glimpses into Christian’s troubled past—his biological mother the “crack whore,” how he “knew hunger,” and then the “darkness” (read: kink) that began to surround him as a teenager. Especially because he is positioned next to Ana, who is practically the epitome of wholesomeness, Christian’s relationship to kink is essentially presented to mainstream readers in a way that furthers larger cultural stereotypes that only “damaged” individuals have kinky desires.
Of particular interest to me, and one of the more complicated plotlines within the book, is the relationship between Christian and Mrs. Robinson and the debate within the text between Christian and Ana about the ramification of their relationship. Over the course of the book, we learn that as a teenager he was collared by Mrs. Robinson, who initially exposed him to BDSM. From his perspective, it was healthy, consensual, and set him on a positive track in life that kept him from following the dysfunctional path of his biological mother. I found especially compelling the fleeting moments where we learn about Christian’s collared submissive past, which were the most nuanced moments of the book. In particular, when describing his own journey into kink, Christian discusses how Mrs. Robinson had loved him in the only way that was “acceptable” to him at the time, and how their dynamic had saved him from following in the dysfunctional path of his biological family. This was the first moment of Fifty Shades that I could personally really identify with.
I came to leather very early, barely eighteen, homeless, and trying to make sense of the abuse and abandonment I’d experienced. It was through leather that, for the first time, I learned to really allow someone to get close to me. It was how I could allow myself to be loved and how I was able to find myself.
I was disappointed that Ana only reacts with anger toward Christian’s submissive past and Mrs. Robinson. It seems to be her mission to convince Christian that he was abused as a teenager and that Mrs. Robinson is a dangerous pedophile. Conversely, Christian’s abusive and specifically stalker behavior toward Ana receives little comment and gets somewhat looped into their dynamic despite any real consent. I fear that this has the very real possibility of leaving kink novice readers with the impression that kink and abuse truly are one and the same.
One of the queerest moments—and simultaneously one of the more troubling aspects of the text for me—is Christian’s aversion to touch, thus presenting what in the queer community might be referred to as stone: a sexual way of being that doesn’t involve being physically touched. In queer trans and leather dyke communities, this is not uncommon, and it is respected as simply another way of relating to our bodies. However, within Fifty Shades of Grey, Christian’s boundaries are treated like an obscure damage, a result of his childhood abuse. Ana continually sees his boundaries around touch during sexual activity as abnormal and unacceptable, despite how happy and satisfied he is with his embodied reality of sex/play and his ability to clearly articulate those boundaries to a partner. Regardless of his clear articulations, the virginal “good girl” repeatedly strikes deals to “normalize” Christian. She strives to convince him that he should want to be touched, even if the sensation is traumatic and unpleasant for him. At the end of the first book, Ana even goes so far as to convince herself that if she takes the “as bad as it gets” six-stroke beating, he will let her touch him, and so she actively pushes against his hard boundaries. We’re swept into Ana’s crisis and left with no room to question her intensely manipulative actions.
Every day while riding the New York City subway, I look around and see at least one woman reading Fifty Shades of Grey. While I may not find the books the best-written or most engaging texts, I experience a powerful moment as a pervert, and a former sex educator, to take a peak over someone’s shoulder and see “safeword,” “contract,” and “negotiate” jump off the page. Friends in the community who work at sex and leather shops report an increase of women coming in after reading the book and feeling comfortable discussing kink-oriented fantasies for the first time. I used to work at a leather shop down the street from the Heithman Hotel and remember vividly the struggle many women experienced stepping through our doors, let alone talking about even the tamest of fantasies they’d had. If a book can help them consider the possibilities of what is erotically available to them, then who am I to criticize?
But as someone who lives a life in leather that extends far beyond my bedroom or any “Red Room of Pain,” I struggle with the worry that perhaps the women I see reading these books are being indoctrinated into thinking that perhaps it’s okay to be a little sexually adventurous so long as you resist a little bit, aren’t too turned on or too excited—so long as you don’t take it too far. Basically, so long as you don’t create a life that looks like mine or the lives of those in my community, because then you’d be “fifty shades of fucked up.”
While I might personally feel disconnected from Fifty Shades of Grey, and while I don’t feel it offers a reasonably accurate representation of any aspect of the leather community, I would be lying if I said the book was without merit. As backwards as it sounds, the book’s greatest strength is its popularity, and the possibilities that popularity suggests. We, as leather folk, are poised at a cultural turning point. The outcome may be unclear but what is clear is that, at this particular moment, we have an unprecedented opportunity. Millions of people are being exposed to BDSM, providing a gateway toward a moment of education.
In trying to draw my thoughts together for this piece, I went where I always turn: to my leather community, to the people and the culture that have built me up and saved me. A friend reminded me that this is not a new fight, that both the fear of my culture and the misrepresentation of my community are very real, but that this has happened before and that, if we are strong, we will succeed. It happened in the online community when the internet became widely available and panic ensued over a perceived flood of wannabes. But BDSM became less shadowy and with more recognizable shades of darkness then. Perhaps, for this new generation, Fifty Shades of Grey is our new internet, even more insidious in that it comes with a prescriptive story line.
The book certainly isn’t an accurate portrayal of our community, but at the same time, it isn’t really meant to be. As a reluctant and skeptical tentative supporter of the novel I hope that Fifty Shades of Grey will serve as a gateway to our world. I must believe folks who are truly called to the lifestyle, who are called to live a life in leather, will find us—perhaps, thanks to Christian and Ana, a little sooner than we all expected.
SASSAFRAS LOWREY is an international award-winning queer author and artist who came into a gutter punk leather community a decade ago. Ze is the editor of the two-time American Library Association–honored and Lambda Literary Award finalist Kicked Out anthology. Sassafras’ first novel, Roving Pack, will be released in the fall of 2012, an excerpt of which earned hir an Honorable Mention in the Astraea Lesbian Writers Fund for Fiction, and ze is currently editing Leather Ever After, a BDSM fairy tale retelling. Ze tours colleges and community organizations across the country, facilitating workshops that support LGBTQ and leather people telling their stories. Sassafras lives in Brooklyn, New York, with hir Daddy, two dogs of vastly different sizes, and two bossy kitties. You can learn more about Sassafras and hir work at www.sassafraslowrey.com.