The Professional Poster Child
I’M NO STRANGER to provocative topics. I’ve been an advocate for lots of “controversial” subjects before. To name a few: sexuality education, talking to kids about sex, condoms, vibrators.
Despite my training as a sex educator and sexologist, I didn’t anticipate that we, as a culture, would make such a big deal over a fictional book trilogy, or that the love of such a series would incite an extensive public discourse about women, fantasies, sex, and—dare I say it—feminism. And I never thought that I would be a part of this firestorm of commentary, as the effective professional poster child for Fifty Shades of Grey.
This is not to say that I am a novice to the erotica genre. At my all-girls sleepaway camp in the late 1980s, I was charged with buying Judy Blume’s Forever …, Nancy Friday’s My Secret Garden, and Penthouse Letters. Sure, Forever … isn’t really erotica, but it was all about a budding sexual relationship. For many of us who had never had any sexual experience before, the sentiments and descriptions were highly erotic. As for the other books, I remember reading them aloud with my girlfriends, and I remember the electrical charge surging through my body. I remember watching my girlfriends squirm on their beds. Clearly they, too, felt something; they felt pleasure. It was thrilling to know that my body was capable of producing those types of feelings without having to do anything physical. Though I didn’t know it then, it was the moment when I discovered how powerful my body was. Most of us would give anything to get back to that time when those feelings were new and anything was possible.
Fast-forward to 2012. Early this year, my husband and a close friend told me about a book they had heard about (and, knowing my line of work, thought I’d be interested in). “Fifty something,” my husband said.
“What’s it about?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Sex, I guess. I was told you would like it,” he replied.
We were about to go on vacation and would be living on a boat with three other couples in the middle of the ocean; I needed some books to read anyway and downloaded what I soon learned was titled Fifty Shades of Grey onto my Kindle.
We got on the boat on a Tuesday around noon. By 2:00 P.M. I had begun the book. One of my friends on the trip, Amy, was reading Fifty Shades Darker. Within twenty minutes, clearly motivated by what we were reading, we grabbed our respective partners and headed down to our rooms. Our girlfriends had seen this interaction and in the middle of the Caribbean Sea, thanks to technology and cell service, downloaded their copies, too. Needless to say, there was a lot of swaying on the boat that week that had nothing to do with the waves. There was sex—lots and lots of sex.
Suffice it to say, I loved these books. I loved what they did for my libido. But also, almost as much (dare I actually say as much?), I loved what they did for my friendships and the conversations that my girlfriends and I had with one another. We talked, we laughed, and we shared untold stories from our lives. It was like summer camp all over again—only this time as an adult in a marriage. And these conversations were right on par with all of my professional media messaging: sex is good, pleasure is important, communication is essential. I was officially a Fifty Shades fan.
When I got back to land, it turned out the whole country was reading the trilogy. Imagine how happy I was, then, when I was asked to appear on the Today Show to talk about the Fifty Shades phenomenon. I had been on the Today Show several times, but they had never put me in the 8:00 A.M. hour. Sex and other “fluffy” stuff get pushed to 9:00 or 10:00 A.M., when it’s Kathie Lee Gifford and Hoda Kotb, and there are usually cocktails somewhere on the set. But not this time. This time I was booked for an 8:13 A.M. segment to talk about Fifty Shades of Grey with Dr. Drew Pinsky, celebrity psychiatrist, television host, and a longtime professional friend.
It was this segment that ended up inciting a wild and irrational discussion about female sexuality, fantasies, and erotica. The anchor, Savannah Guthrie, said the book was demeaning to women. Dr. Drew said that the book’s concept disturbed him and that Fifty Shades of Grey was more than the swept-away fantasy; it was violence against women. (He also said that he had not read the book.) I said that Fifty Shades didn’t disturb me at all; it was a romanticized version of a particular community and an absolutely consensual relationship. (And I’d read all three books. In forty-eight hours.) What could have been a conversation about how our culture’s unhealthy portrayal of sex has fueled women’s desire for sex on their own terms (and in their own voice) evolved into a debate about whether the Fifty Shades zeitgeist perpetuates violence against women.
Let me be clear: I have no tolerance for violence against women (or violence of any kind). However, the assumption that Fifty Shades perpetuates crimes against women trivializes real violence against women. Fifty Shades of Grey and other types of nonvanilla erotica have nothing to do with this. And that’s what this is really about, right? Nonvanilla sex. Nonheterosexual-man-on-top sex. Consensual BDSM. And women who get off on having (or thinking about) lots of it.
We don’t like to acknowledge that female sexuality doesn’t always present itself in the package of the “good girl”; it forces us to reevaluate everything we’ve been taught about sex. It forces us to challenge preconceived notions of men and women. Because there’s no such thing as the good girl. We can be good, bad, or anything in between. We can be aggressive, demanding, or we can want our partners to take charge and tell us exactly what to do. We are not the same sexual person every day. It depends upon our mood, the context of our relationship, and our partner. It may also depend upon how big our bed is, and whether or not we are at sea—but I digress.
Women can be aroused by things that may be politically incorrect—like falling for a bad boy and believing that you can change him, or wanting a wealthy man to take care of you, or wanting to take a pair of silver balls out for a test drive, or wanting to be submissive. However, we don’t control how and if we turn on to something or someone. We may not desire to have fantasies about losing control, but many of us do. It doesn’t make us bad women or bad people. It doesn’t even say anything about our psyche or whether or not we want to “lose control” in our daily lives. We may not have even known that we could turn on to a particular scene or experience until reading about it. There’s no underlying psychological issue here. This is not about feminism or the demise of the women’s movement. But that is what it has become. Our fantasy lives, our personal lives, the things that are innately ours, have become pathologized, politicized, and publicly demonized. Our culture can’t handle women who own (and embrace) their sexuality. It hasn’t been too kind to women who want sex (or merely talk about it). We have a word for them: “sluts.”
Consider the effects of this hideous judgment. The inability to be our authentic sexual selves greatly hinders our ability to have fulfilling sexual and emotional experiences. It’s why we don’t speak up. Why we don’t demand pleasure. Or protection. Or why we don’t carry condoms in our purses. Why we don’t share our feelings and admit that those feelings are very strong. Or why we don’t admit that we’re only interested in having no-strings-sex. Or that we want to use a vibrator or watch a little pornography or experiment with BDSM. Or just read a book about it.
Which leads me back to the Today Show. Do you know what is really demeaning to women? Telling us who we are supposed to be and what we are supposed to turn on to.
Anyway, I said all of this that morning on television. Though maybe not so eloquently; it was only a four-minute segment. (But I actually used the phrase “kink community” on the 8:00 A.M. hour of the Today Show, which for me says “success”!) I received an avalanche of feedback to my response; tens of thousands of viewers have watched the video on my YouTube page. People have lots to say about Fifty Shades. For me, this goes back to the liberation and fun I felt when I first read those books, first experienced the uptick in my libido, and laughed hysterically with my girlfriends. That is what sex and sexual health should be about: pleasure, fun, and communication.
As it turns out, I am actually thankful to Fifty Shades of Grey for giving us material that has brought women’s sexuality back into the public discourse. But I am convinced that we’re missing the big picture. There is an aspect to the Fifty Shades phenomenon that no one has mentioned. It’s what makes me proud to be associated with this trilogy. For me, when it comes to Fifty Shades of Grey, it’s not about the sex, the relationship between Ana and Christian, or the real-life drama or controversy. The Fifty Shades phenomenon isn’t about the content: it’s about the readers. The success of Fifty Shades of Grey represents women at our best. Sure, the Real Housewives are entertaining, but we’re not all gossipy and catty backstabbers. We’re friends, we’re sisters, we’re mothers, we’re partners, and we want to support each other. And if we find something that enhances our lives—even our sex lives—we share the information. That’s what Fifty Shades of Grey is all about. Women talking to each other. Women talking to their partners. All with the goal of bettering our intimate lives, because as we all know, it’s very easy to put that part of our lives on the back burner when we have so much going on.
So sure, Fifty Shades has some seriously good sex. Sex that many of us have never experienced or even dreamed about. But it’s also about love and it’s also about becoming that inner goddess inside all of us. Because we all have her. We all are her. But sometimes it takes a while to remember that she’s there, waiting for us to find ourselves again. Because we need that. We need to remember that we are more than just someone’s spouse or mother. We have names; we are sex goddesses. We are definitely not sluts.
I will be the poster child for that message any day.
DR. LOGAN LEVKOFF is a nationally recognized expert in the field of human sexuality. She encourages honest conversation about sex and the role that it plays in American culture. As a thought leader in sexuality and relationships, Logan frequently appears on television as a pundit and sexual health contributor. She is the host of CafeMom’s Mom Ed: In the Bedroom and the author of Third Base Ain’t What it Used to Be and How to Get Your Wife to Have Sex with You. Logan is an AASECT-certified sex educator and received her PhD in human sexuality, marriage, and family life education from New York University and an MS in human sexuality education and a BA in English from the University of Pennsylvania. She lives in New York City with her husband, son, and daughter.