Fifty Writers on Fifty Shades of Grey (15 page)

RACHEL KRAMER BUSSEL

T
O HEAR SOME CRITICS TELL IT,
Fifty Shades of Grey
is bad for bondage, BDSM—and women. The bestselling erotic trilogy is being held up to a standard we don’t ask of most fiction: to single-handedly portray a whole subculture, kink, accurately and in a good light. Instead, it’s being excoriated both for causing the downfall of feminism and for making a poor case for BDSM.

First, let me be clear that I am not endorsing the trilogy as the second coming of erotica. There are plenty of erotic books and stories where both parties are actively interested in BDSM, proud of being kinky, and ready to take their desire to the next level. And there’s plenty to criticize about the writing found within.

I’m also not arguing that James presents BDSM in a positive way. Did I find the story line, in which the sole reason Christian Grey is kinky and has never had vanilla sex is because his crack
whore mother died when he was four, he was beaten by her boyfriend, and then was seduced by a family friend when he was fifteen, over the top? Of course. Who wouldn’t? And the books are far more about Christian’s penchant for dominance in and out of the bedroom than Ana’s budding interest in submission.

However, the books are fiction, and should be critiqued as such, not as social commentary. On the kinky social networking site Fetlife, user bumblebee wrote in a thread in the Submissive Women group, “I wish they wouldn’t portray BDSM as some sick twisted thing broken people do—but can grow out of with enough love and support! We don’t need that kind of publicity.” It’s this last sentence that is at the heart of my critique. Fiction writers, and artists generally, would have very little to work with if all we were trying to do was create good PR for marginalized groups. Furthermore, the idea that BDSM needs “publicity” in order to attract newcomers, like it’s running a popularity campaign, is ridiculous.

I understand the impulse—if
Fifty Shades
is a reader’s first introduction to BDSM, and they find it not to their liking, they may never read another book about the subject or think it would ever be of interest to them. But while fiction can be a catalyst for social change, and can indeed incite discussion about social issues, that’s not its primary job, and to claim that it requires us to assume that readers are so gullible and naïve they will take anything an author writes at face value. It assumes that readers will get so lost in the story, they won’t be able to differentiate it from real life.

When I attended an E. L. James luncheon, I didn’t find women so swept away by Christian Grey that they were trying to turn their husbands into his real-life counterparts. Most of them simply found the books a form of sexy, escapist fantasy. They were more than able to differentiate between the extremes of James’ universe and their own bedrooms.

In romance, as in any story, there needs to be a conflict, and the central conflict between Ana and Christian is, in fact, that
she wants a traditional, loving, monogamous, vanilla relationship—albeit with hints of spanking and BDSM play—and he has never considered this type of relationship before. James is heavy-handed with pretty much every aspect of her plot, but her job is not to convince the public that BDSM and love can go hand in hand. Imagine if it were—surely she would then be criticized for painting too rosy an image of kink, sans any thorns!

Another way media critics have condescended to readers is to assume that those who are interested in bondage, fictional or otherwise, are simply deluded. They, too, assume that simply because James wrote a story featuring a female submissive and male Dominant, that’s all there is to BDSM, rather than room to play with both gender and power in creative, intelligent ways. When Gina Barreca writes that “maybe ‘bondage’ is just a sexy word for ‘degradation,’”
⁶
she not only insults everyone who’s ever shown an interest in bondage, but anyone who’s read or considered reading
Fifty Shades
. She not only makes it sound like Ana simply offers up her wrists to be cuffed upon her first glance at Christian, she also assumes that the women flocking to read the series are being dictated and dominated by James, as if she has some agenda intent on grooming them all to become kinky docile subs.

Barreca also writes, “Just when we thought our daughters’ futures would be defined, stronger positions in the worlds of the culture, the workplace, the family, and politics, it turns a lot of women are soaking up this message, ‘You want me to make choices? OK, then! I am choosing to be submissive to a man who has a playroom of pain and who wants to decide what I eat, where I go and purchases my electronic devices.’” Not only does she misread the plot, in which Ana grapples heavily with Christian’s interest in BDSM, trying to puzzle out what makes him tick, how his previous relationships have played out, and
whether she is that kind of girl, she misreads the basic tenet of BDSM: consent, and desire along with it. Women are not simply “soaking up” this message, but analyzing it, debating it, discussing it, with their friends, family members, and lovers. Many are reading a book of this genre for the first time and discussing it with their peers. Because it’s now reached critical mass in terms of popularity, it means there are going to be countless friends and strangers with whom to discuss both the plot points and larger issues. This makes it even more ridiculous to claim that there is a single, simplistic takeaway from the books.

Barreca is not the only one making arguments like this. In the
Sydney Morning Herald
, Pamela Stephenson Connolly argues not only that “Christian Grey is a sexual predator with a dungeon,”
⁷
but also that, “All the work that has been done to establish that BDSM is not a pathological symptom, but one of a wide range of normative human erotic interests, is in danger of being undermined by the success of
Fifty Shades
.” The only way that could be true is if we devalue readers to such a degree that we assume they will take everything they read as gospel.

Sex educator Tristan Taormino, editor of
The Ultimate Guide to Kink
, lamented to the CBC
⁸
that, “The inherent mistake in the book is Anastasia’s question really early on, which is, ‘Why is he this way?’ I think it really flies in the face of everything I know about sexuality.” I agree with her that your average kinky person is not coming from a similar position and that Ana’s approach is not necessarily the key to a lifetime of happiness, since their fundamental goals, at least at the start, appear different. But again, if this is a mistake, it’s a mistake in terms of plotting; if in the end Ana is still trying to de-kink Christian, it would mean that the end result, where they live happily ever after, married with children, wouldn’t make sense. But to say
that this is somehow “bad” for BDSM as a whole gives much too much credence to James’ power as an author, even an author of a 20-million-plus bestseller.

On the other hand, there are some places we’d expect to see these kinds of words. Christian blogger Dannah Gresh at Pure Freedom
⁹
wrote about why she’s not reading the trilogy, causing an uproar among some of her readers. Among her reasons, aside from it inciting lust in its readers, is, again, kink (in the comments she rails against the use of the acronym BDSM for sanitizing what she sees as simply “pain and humiliation”). Gresh writes, “It seems to me that in our emasculating culture there is a hunger so great for strong men that women will stoop to bondage, dominance, sadism, and masochism for just a taste. Do yourself a favor, don’t!” Once again, it’s assumed that
Fifty Shades
and James, without trying, are imparting some instantaneous form of wish fulfillment in hungry, horny readers, who will instantly be so overcome with desire for a Christian Grey–like character they will try to turn their vanilla partners into sadists.

But the more disturbing examples employ a fundamental misreading of the nature of fantasy and reading. They assume that women are so easily gullible, far more so than Anastasia Steele, willing to be blindfolded down the path to complete sexual submission simply because the heroine of a novel was. They assume that the simple fact that readers are enjoying a story featuring an extremely kinky alpha male hero dominating a virginal heroine means that these caricature characters are exactly who we all, deep down, want to be.

Fifty Shades of Grey
is not an instruction manual, though it has spawned several sex advice guides, with names like
Fifty Shades of Pleasure: A Bedside Companion
and
50 Ways to Play: BDSM for Nice People
. Many have hyped (I suspect overhyped) the degree to which
Fifty Shades
has invaded our bedrooms,
with the
New York Post
touting a run on rope at city hardware stores,
¹⁰
imbuing this work of fiction with nearly superhuman powers.

I believe that fiction is vital to us, both for entertainment and to tell us certain truths that extend beyond the bluntness of nonfiction. As Lisa Cron writes in
Wired for Story
, “Stories allow us to simulate intense experiences without actually having to live through them.” Readers can and are living vicariously through Ana, but that doesn’t mean they’re checking their brains at the door, and if it did, it wouldn’t be E. L. James’ fault. Cron gives insight on her blog
¹¹
into why
Fifty Shades of Grey
has been such a success: “There’s something that prose gives us that nothing else does—not real life, not movies, not plays. Prose provides direct access to the most alluring and otherwise inaccessible realm imaginable: someone else’s mind.”

We can appreciate, or even talk back to, Ana’s mindset and journey, without trying to hail her as an ambassador to BDSM. Neither she nor any hero or heroine could live up to that vaunted role. However, when we look down on readers by assuming they are taking their erotic fiction so seriously that they are even more entranced by the spell of Christian Grey than Anastasia Steele, we have a problem.

Reading is an active task, and while I doubt people are studying Fifty Shades with a highlighter, we need to separate our critiques of the plot and writing with our critiques of BDSM. E. L. James didn’t invent kink, and it’d be tough to argue that she’s espousing it as a lifestyle, considering Ana’s ongoing quest to tame the kinky beast that lurks in Christian. You don’t need to be a fan of the series to recognize that it’s not about being a cheerleader or detractor of BDSM, but of telling a story, where BDSM is a vehicle to carry the plot.
Fifty Shades of Grey
has clearly set
the publishing industry on its head, but let’s give it credit—or discredit—in concordance with its role as fiction, not as some grand manifesto being obeyed without question.

SASSAFRAS LOWREY

A
S 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.