Fifty Shades of Stories
THE SUCCESS OF FIFTY SHADES OF GREY may seem sudden, but like many “overnight sensations” the apparent suddenness is the result of two forces: one, the cultural blindness that makes books like this invisible until they reach a tipping point into mass consciousness, and two, the many sociological and commercial forces that have been continuously at work in the background in the years previous. I want to examine one of those forces, the still-burgeoning but long-established world of fanfiction, or “fanfic” for short.
Most folks know the story by now. Fifty Shades began life as a piece of Twilight fanfic, but an “alternate universe” version in which Edward isn’t a vampire, but merely a mysterious rich man, and Bella isn’t a high school student, but in college. What most people may not know is just how incredibly common it is for preexisting characters and/or universes to be used as a vehicle for intense erotic fantasizing onto the page (or screen) by women all over the world. Fanfiction.net, an online archive, has 25,000 Twilight-based stories alone, and if the site allowed explicitly sexual stories, there would be even more. The Archive of Our Own (AO3), a fanfic archive begun in 2008, has over 400,000 fics archived, with more being added every day. In December 2010 the site drew almost 250,000 unique visitors. As of June 2012, that monthly number had grown to 1.5 million. That is, simply put, a lot of stories and a lot of readers. And that’s only at one of hundreds of websites where fanfic can be found.
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While not all fanfic is romantic or erotic, a huge portion of it is: about 20 percent of what’s on AO3 is marked “explicit” and another 20 percent or so is marked “mature.” Three of the tags most frequently applied to stories at AO3 are “romance,” “relationship(s),” and “sexual content.” Which means thousands of writers and millions of readers are participating in an online culture that produces huge volumes of sexy stories. And the vast majority of both those writers and readers are women.
This hotbed of female-driven expressions of lust and love is not new. It predates the internet. Fanfic’s modern roots are in the 1960s and the growth of Star Trek fandom, whose write-in campaigns famously kept the TV series on the air. Camille Bacon-Smith published one of the defining works on the subject of Star Trek fan writers and the fanfiction community twenty years ago: Enterprising Women, a 1992 University of Pennsylvania Press book. In it, she calls the world of fanfiction “a conceptual space where women can come together and create … outside the restrictive boundaries that men have placed on women’s public behavior.” She also names the writing of fanfic “a subversive act, undertaken by housewives and librarians … under the very noses of husbands and bosses who would not approve and children who should not be exposed to such blatant acts of civil disobedience.” And women banding together to read and write love stories about pop culture icons was a highly subversive act. Which was more subversive in its time: the fact that fan writers used copyrighted characters as the vehicles for their fantasies, or that they wrote and shared such vivid fantasies about sex and romance in the first place?
Today, a new generation has grown up from that same community and has proliferated wildly in the hothouse of anonymity that is the internet. Is reading and writing sexual stories and romance still seen as civil disobedience? Is it still something to hide from the genteel sensibilities of the menfolk? I would say yes, at least in some quarters, judging by the number of fans who feel the need to use pseudonyms. But many others are much more empowered. And the breakthrough of Fifty Shades of Grey presents an opportunity not only for fanfic writers and readers to come out of the closet, but also for female readers of erotica and erotic romance to, as well.
Romance has long been the biggest selling segment of all published fiction, and yet for all the decades that it has topped the moneymaking genres list, it is still thought of by some readers to be a “guilty pleasure” and a source of shame instead of a source of pride. Shouldn’t something “everyone” is doing be a cultural norm? Perhaps one of the best things about the runaway success of Fifty Shades of Grey and its pervasiveness is that it blows open the closet door, at least in terms of itself. I saw no fewer than three women reading the book while waiting to board an airplane recently, and none of them were making any attempt to hide it. And who knows how many others, in that same airport terminal, were reading it on their Kindle or smartphone invisibly? And how many beyond them read it in its original fanfic form?
There is no longer a compelling reason to hide writing or reading fanfiction, and there are fewer and fewer compelling reasons to hide enjoyment of erotic books. Fear of being judged by others for what we read remains the main one, but fewer women suffer that fear now than in the past. And some readers are empowered enough and uninhibited enough to feel entitled to their fantasies. They want their erotica and they want it now. They will be the tastemakers who define what flourishes in the “post–Fifty Shades” marketplace.
Since fanfic is not bound by the strictures of commerce, creativity flourishes in infinite diversity. No fan writer is being steered by an editor toward what stories “sell” best to bookstores. Instead, the fan writer answers only to the audience itself. Erotic fanfic topics encompass not only BDSM, but “kinks” as varied as bubble baths, healing sex, male pregnancy, frenemies, comfort sex, bromance, and much more. Which will be the next hot trend? Fan writers will know before book publishers do. Fan writers receive instantaneous feedback on whether their stories succeed in moving the audience or not. Since feedback from readers, in the form of comments, is the only “payment” or validation a fanfic author receives, comments are highly prized. A fan writer knows immediately whether a story accomplished what was intended. Did the readers cry, sigh with ecstasy, or reach for their vibrators?
By all accounts, the fanfic originally known as “Master of the Universe” (MotU) had many English-speaking women the world over reaching for their vibrators and eagerly awaiting the next chapter. It is not alone in this regard, as there are many thousands of stories like it. (AO3 shows over 3,000 current stories tagged with “BDSM.”) Also not unique to MotU is the fact that it was eventually collected as original fiction with the “serial numbers filed off” and published by a small press specializing in such “filed off” fiction. Did you know there are numerous small presses doing exactly that? Writers Coffee House Press, the house that originally published Fifty Shades, is but one. Omnific is another. (And more are certain to spring up in the wake of success.) Even before the runaway success of Fifty Shades of Grey, these publishers recognized two key things. One, that the readers of fanfic have their erotica-loving analogs in the non-fandom world: women who may not be clued in to fandom but who share the same desire for sexy stories. And two, that there are many fanfic stories just waiting to be cherry-picked where, although an established story, character, or universe served as the initial inspiration, the fan writer ended up quite far from the original.
So it was with “Master of the Universe,” which used Edward and Bella as a kind of virtual Ken and Barbie, merely familiar vehicles for the writer’s fantasies. Some might complain that Fifty Shades of Grey is not the best-written piece of literature. Some might feel it isn’t deserving of the attention it receives when there are literally thousands and thousands of erotic fanfics out there that could be considered more original and better written. But the fact remains: this fanfic was incredibly popular among online readers. Whatever one might argue about E. L. James, the popularity of the original fanfic proved that her writing touched a nerve. It moved readers. That’s the ultimate test, and in the seething underground of female lust that is the fanfic world, where thousands of other choices are freely available for just a mouse click, MotU passed that test. In its “filed off,” professionally published form, it continues to do so.
CECILIA TAN is “simply one of the most important writers, editors, and innovators in contemporary American erotic literature,” according to Susie Bright. Tan is the author of many books, including the groundbreaking erotic short story collections Black Feathers (HarperCollins), White Flames (Running Press), and Edge Plays (Circlet Press), and the erotica romances Mind Games, The Prince’s Boy, The Hot Streak, and the Magic University series. She discovered how much fun it is to write fanfic in recent years and is a supporter of the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW).