Raising the Shades
“I MEAN, MELLY,” my mother’s voice emitted from the phone, “it’s really a phenomenon.”
I heard her clinking pots in her kitchen.
“Have you read it?” I asked, turning onto my Brooklyn street.
“I’ve read all three!” she laughed, both delighted and embarrassed by the confession. “And, honey, you could have written these in your sleep. Not that you ever would.”
“Nope,” I agreed, suddenly wanting the conversation to be over.
Friends were startled that it took me so long to hear of Fifty Shades of Grey. Not me. I had spent the past two years talking about my own experiences with S&M—a part of my life that ended (in practice) six years ago. I am not drawn to similarly themed subject matter. As a drug addict who has been clean for nearly a decade, I am similarly bored and repelled by most stories about active addiction. I’m over it—that part of it, anyway. But facing Fifty Shades was, of course, inevitable.
As a twenty-one-year-old college student in Manhattan, I’d answered an ad in the Village Voice and spent the next four years performing all the practices described in Fifty Shades (and many, many more) upon men who paid $200 per hour to see me. For the first two years, I worked out of a Midtown “dungeon,” which provided the space, equipment, and administrative work necessary to cater to the fantasies of these men. The last two years, I worked freelance, teetering on my stilettos to hotel rooms and lavish homes with my tote bag full of rope, dildos, clamps, and floggers.
And then I wrote a book about it. Whip Smart began, as my experience had, with an anthropological experiment, followed by my immersion in the commercial realm of S&M fantasy, and ended with the surprising and inevitable realization that my most profound motives were based on neither finances nor curiosity.
I had never intended to write a memoir about my years as a Domme, nor the twists that landed me on the bondage table instead of my clients, nor any kind of memoir for that matter. But I was a writer, and it turns out that I can only engage the big questions by writing my way into their answers.
At twenty-one, or twenty-two, or twenty-three, I could not reconcile my feminism, my self-conception as an intellectual, with my desire to relinquish power. And I was curious, adventurous, and drawn to experiences outside of social prescription. So I stuck with that story, and the flimsy idea that I was fundamentally different from my clients and the women I worked with. I was also a secret heroin addict, and so already a master of compartmentalization and denial.
The abridged conclusion is that I was, and am, fundamentally interested in power dynamics. The eroticization of this, for me, was an effort to divorce my submissive desires from my “real” life. I had no interest in submitting to the mores of our sexist culture, but still had been socialized by them—and repressed tendencies have a way of creeping out in fantasy, in sex. Most of my clients were also committed to an outward life of empowerment: they were Wall Street types, cops, politicians, and child abuse survivors. Repression of impulse and trauma had worked well for them—my clients were successful by mainstream measures—but their desires could not be erased. They paid me to scratch their hidden itches, and also created a space for me to scratch mine.
The experience of those years, and of writing and publishing the book, taught me how to integrate my desires into my life. I got honest with myself, and then with anyone who cared to read my story. I learned to accept the seeming contradiction of my beliefs and my fantasies. They were not at odds; they were working out a balance between what was and what I wished. If our society’s pressure to fit myself into a submissive, sexualized female ideal were not insidious, I might not be so convinced of my feminism. These parts of myself exist not at odds but in tandem. What a relief it was to figure this out.
But there is a curious dynamic between having learned a hard-won truth and observing that process in other people. As a recovered heroin addict, I have deep compassion and love for other addicts. Still, I often find myself more repelled by them than any other class of people. I think it is somewhat universal, the instinct to judge most harshly those people in whom you recognize some vulnerability of your own. That kind of recognition on a national scale is no different.
I avoided Fifty Shades of Grey for as long as I could. Every day for a month I fielded phone calls, emails, and requests for comment. I avoided most articles analyzing the phenomenon. I cut my own curiosity off at the knees, and resisted indulging in others’ proclamations of the book’s terrible writing. I wanted it to be bad. I wanted it to be good and feared it wasn’t. I feared what feelings bubbled in me every time the book was mentioned.
And then I bought it. I read the first half of the first book in bed next to my sleeping girlfriend. The writing was indeed terrible. But I still masturbated three times, iPad in one hand, the other tucked under the waistband of my pajama bottoms. With zero shame. My own experience had given me that freedom.
I didn’t finish the book. Not because I was disgusted with it or myself. Not because I didn’t find it compelling, despite the poor writing. I was simply trying to revise my own novel and am easily influenced by the voice of whatever I’m reading. I need to stick to works in possession of craft and nuance to which I aspire.
I’m not interested in condemning the book. I think it’s my obligation, as a writer, to inform myself of what people are responding to. Especially women. My most important goal as a writer is to acknowledge truths that readers already know, however inchoately. My greatest pleasure as a reader is not to digest completely foreign information, but to identify my own experience articulated as I have not yet seen or thought it. Writers are mirrors more than guides. For me, honest self-appraisal has been the best guide.
I read the Twilight series, and I read most of Fifty Shades of Grey. These books have not found success based on tricks or mirage—or at least none that do not already operate in the psyches of their readers, or the cultures that raised them. They are not great works of art, but they are great mirrors. They name what we are afraid to name within ourselves.
I do, however, believe in the responsibility of writers to also show us what can be. My own experience has shown me that I can accept my submissive fantasies and remain an empowered, intellectual woman. I can still wear my stilettos and expect to be taken seriously. I need not be defined solely by my own eroticism, nor our culture’s eroticization of my body, my femininity, and its invented ideal.
I think it’s likely that Fifty Shades could have named the desire to submit to another’s power without endorsing the more complex and dangerous fantasy that one must be a naïf to do so. Need Christian Grey have been a wealthy businessman? Need Anastasia have been a virgin incapable of naming her own vagina? One can submit one’s body, to another human being, can submit to one’s own desires, without submitting all their worldly knowledge. I know this for fact.
This equation is a dangerous one: that we must sacrifice our maturity to obtain our fantasies. That we must have all the power or none of it. The myth lifts a curtain with one hand and drops another with the other. Women have been negotiating this shitty deal for a long, long time. If there is an illusion here, it is that we must continue doing so.
But the book is just a story—millions froth at every corner of our culture. There is no inherent threat posed by this book, per se; its pages boast no invention. And in that sense Fifty Shades of Grey is the most accurate mirror we have. The book has not revealed our deep-seated belief that women’s sexuality threatens our independence, or that we are incapable of containing multitudes. Our reaction to the book has revealed this belief. E. L. James’ choices evidence this as well. The products of our culture are often simply its symptoms.
I am glad that Fifty Shades was published because we need to see our secrets named. Because we need to make public a conversation of how this can be done without promoting our disempowerment. Empowerment does not come in reading this book; it comes in seeing what we are, and what we are not. Accepting our fantasies comes at a price, but that price is not the forfeiting of our intellect, our wisdom, our politics, or our dignity. Rather, that price comes from bravely deciding that there is enough room for all of our selves. And there is.
MELISSA FEBOS is the author of Whip Smart (St. Martin’s Press), a critically acclaimed memoir about her years as a professional Dominatrix that Kirkus Review said “expertly captures grace within depravity.” Her work has appeared in Glamour, Salon, Dissent, The Southeast Review, the New York Times, Bitch Magazine, BOMB, and the Chronicle of Higher Education Review, among many others, and she has been profiled in venues ranging from the cover of the New York Post to NPR’s Fresh Air to Dr. Drew. A 2010 and 2011 MacDowell Colony fellow, and 2012 Bread Loaf fellow, she teaches at Sarah Lawrence College, Purchase College, New York University, and privately, and holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence. She lives in Brooklyn, and is currently at work on a novel.