INTRODUCTION
Fifty Ways to Look at Fifty Shades
EVERYWHERE YOU GO people are talking about Fifty Shades of Grey, from the supermarket (where it is on sale!) to the airport to PTA meetings and even church socials. It is the book of the year, if not the decade.
You all know the stats. It has sold more copies than the Harry Potter series in a mere six months. It has dominated the New York Times bestseller list since April 2012. As of this writing, 32 million copies have sold this year in the US alone.
So the real question is: Why did this book, and its sequels, capture our attention now?
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I WANT TO MAKE IT CLEAR THAT, as a literary agent who has toiled in the erotica fields for decades, I love the Fifty Shades trilogy. Its success has shown the world that a strong market exists for erotic fiction written, edited, and purchased by women.
To me, Fifty Shades is smut for women. I consider myself a “feminist pornographer,” which always raises a few eyebrows. But I believe this movement of women claiming their own smut is part of the evolution of feminism—proudly owning your sexuality is a big part of equality.
When I was a young feminist, I was given Story of O by a lover, and I was offended by it—not because of its overt subject matter but because I knew that I was not a submissive woman (I didn’t know the terminology back then; now every young woman will!). I’ve wrestled with this my entire life in my personal relationships, and I assumed that the submissive woman fantasy was a male one and part of the patriarchy.
Until I became an editor of erotic literature. I quickly learned that the fantasy of complete surrender to an alpha male is the leading daydream of the majority of American women.
As a young feminist, I equated all romance with submission, and I looked down on them both. I didn’t think it was possible to be submissive and a feminist, just as old-school feminists were appalled that their well-educated daughters wanted to stay home and be mothers or learn to knit and bake. In a recent review of The Hunger Games movie, a feminist reviewer complained about the apparent need for “romance” in what is otherwise an action-based dystopian story. I used to decry this kind of “unnecessary” addition of romance, too, but I secretly went to romantic comedies alone so no one would see me cry. I was ashamed of my romantic side.
Until I came to see that you can be a feminist and a romantic. It’s okay. And it’s really okay to want, and believe in, a happy ending—even when you know that in reality 50 percent of all marriages fail. These movies and books are an escape, and a hope.
We’ve been saying for the past several decades that feminism is about having choices, and one of those is the freedom to indulge in our erotic fantasies. Everyone wants to fall in love and be swept away by its power, even men. But they don’t have the emotional freedom women have. They don’t have the emotional choices we have. In Western culture, you will never see a story about a man being swept away by love, unless it’s a comedy or a cautionary tale.
Fifty Shades brings all these issues and more to the surface. But more than that, it has proven, once and for all, that women love to read smut with a happy ending.
Looking through my erotica reader and writer lens, I foresee that this phenomenon means that a whole new marketplace awaits these stories. Story of O is fifty years old and the current edition is a dated translation (I’d love to see it in contemporary language). We need new fantasies, which E. L. James has given us. I am awed to see the birth of a new erotica classic. (I had the same feeling when I watched Harry Potter become a children’s literature classic in my time.)
Some have wondered how a “classic” can be so “poorly written.” But I contend that it is not poorly written, but rather written in an everywoman’s voice, a necessary part of its success. I once worked with an author who used plebian language (bringing me my first experience with the phrase “Holy crap!”). When she returned my edits, she told me that she did indeed know the word “simultaneously,” but when she was fantasizing, she always used the phrase “at the same time as,” and she knew that her readers did as well. When she saw the word “simultaneously” in fiction, she knew it had been edited up to New York Times standards, which was all well and good, but not the way she spoke in her head. These books are about being drawn into the fantasy—and E. L. James expertly takes her readers on that journey.
I hope Fifty Shades will be the tip of a rather large iceberg of erotic empowerment. And I hope that these books will usher in a publishing tidal wave of female-centered commercially successful erotica, giving women a new voice for sexual, political, and financial choices. It’s what we should’ve had all along.
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THIS IS THE WAY I look at Fifty Shades. But there are many, many others, from what its story says about us as a society to the role of women in and out of relationships to our hidden fantasy lives. This book offers fifty of those ways, from readers who love it and a few readers who don’t, because their voices are important, too.
Is Fifty Shades literature? Postfeminism? Or just the end of civilization as we know it?
I hope you will find all of those answers in here.
And then continue discussing amongst yourselves.
Lori Perkins
August 2012