Fifty Writers on Fifty Shades of Grey (9 page)

HOPE TARR, PHD

A
LL LOVE HURTS. At one point or another, it just does. How could an emotion so exquisite, so transporting, so complex and utterly consuming not be balanced by a shadow side?

The newly in-love are especially vulnerable, uniquely at risk. Be we sixteen or sixty, it is in forging the dark, unknown, and sometimes dangerous terrain of a new love that we are at our most blind and, yes, our most vulnerable. And yet arguably what makes new love so titillating, so entirely thrilling, so obsessively captivating is its very uncertainty, its implicit and, in the case of
Fifty Shades of Grey, explicit
danger. Will s/he hurt me? Is
this going to work out? Can I possibly be …
enough
, whatever enough may mean?

Regardless of our sexual appetites, our kink, our desires in and out of the bedroom, when we’re newly in love, we flog ourselves with feelings, excoriate ourselves with doubts. We may appear flawless and totally together on the outside but on the inside … we are raw, we are
bleeding
. What E. L. James accomplishes in
Fifty Shades of Grey
is to invite us inside a world where those inner hurts can be manifested in a very real, very tangible, very sexy way: BDSM.

In
Fifty Shades of Grey
, mega-mogul Christian Grey offers the young heroine, Ana Steele, an “indecent proposal” in the form of a three-month contract wherein she will be his submissive, his sex slave, and he her Dominant and tutor. Much later in the book (chapter 22), Ana eloquently expresses her internal conflict about their proposed arrangement to Christian.

“What you are offering is erotic and sexy, and I’m curious, but I’m also scared you’ll hurt me—physically and emotionally. After three months you could say good-bye, and where will that leave me if you do? But then I suppose that risk is there in any relationship.”

Yes, I suppose it is.

Love without some risk is like champagne without the fizz—flat, bland, and ultimately discardable. But how much risk is too much? And who in
Fifty Shades
really has the lion’s share at stake?

The obvious answer is Ana and certainly on the surface that is so. It is Ana who starts and ends the first book as the vulnerable ingénue to Christian’s jaded sophisticate. It is Ana, after all, who must cope with being whipped and trussed, blindfolded and belted. It is Ana who will require Advil and aloe and cuddling to recover from their encounters. It is Ana who is making all the concessions in their relationship. Or so it seems.

“I do it for you, Christian, because you need it. I don’t,” she says in the final chapter.

She may not need to be dominated, in fact she doesn’t need it, and yet she likes it—and likes it fifty shades of a lot. Her true pain isn’t found in the physical discomfort but in her emotional confusion, the cognitive dissonance she feels in being, on a very primal level, aroused by the punishment Christian inflicts. In the aftermath of her first light spanking, she bursts into tears, not because it hurts—of course it hurts!—but because she
liked
it. In contrast to Christian, who expects to enjoy their kinky encounters, Ana has no cognitive paradigm for interpreting her unanticipated sexual and emotional pleasure. Pain should be purely painful, and so it has always been, at least in her world. Pleasure-pain is a nuance she spends the entirety of the first book in the trilogy struggling to wrap her psyche around. Many of us struggle vicariously with her.

And yet if there is a true sadist in
Fifty Shades of Grey
, it isn’t Christian Grey. It’s Ana, or rather what she refers to as her “subconscious.” Embodied as a pinched-faced, glasses-wearing librarian, Ana’s “subconscious” acts much more as a flogger than a wake-up call to self-preservation.

“
Try to be cool, Ana
, my tortured subconscious begs on bended knee,” Ana says to herself when Christian turns up in the hardware store where she works and coyly purchases cable ties.

Ana’s is the most
conscious
subconscious of which one can possibly conceive. More properly, it’s her masochistic
superego
that’s doing double duty to sabotage her relationship with Christian, with any man, from their very first meeting when she nearly does a face plant inside his office doorway. The self-flagellation continues throughout the book with internal monologue such as:

“I still don’t understand what he sees in me … mousey Ana Steele—it makes no sense,” she silently laments, while continuing to covet her roommate Kate’s attributes. “She is irresistible, beautiful, sexy, funny, forward … all the things that I’m not.”

Ah, Ana …

Clearly it’s not Christian’s perennially “twitchy palm” that’s the punisher here, let alone his sophisticated array of BDSM devices, but Ana’s own insecurities and cognitive conflict, more properly the ongoing battle between her killjoy “subconscious” and her pleasure- and power-seeking “inner goddess.”

Posed in direct contradiction to her “subconscious,” Ana’s “inner goddess” is a lush, Venus-like libertine who urges her on in furthering her sexual explorations with Christian, not only for the exquisite fifty shades of pleasure-pain to be had but, above all, for the power. Indeed, Ana’s “inner goddess” grooves and gorges on the increasing servings of feminine sexual power she derives from each subsequent sexual encounter. As the book progresses, it is Christian who loses strength and Ana who gains it. Ana may strike the posture of a submissive within his “playroom” but at the end of each and every encounter, he is driven to his knees, not only sexually sated but emotionally helpless and in her thrall.

“You’ve completely beguiled me,” he admits fairly early in the book, and while Ana still holds onto her doubts, we readers do not.

But then, as he rightly points out in one of their many email exchanges, in a BDSM relationship, the submissive holds the true power. This is news to Ana but not to us who have been watching Christian weaken progressively. Even the initially all-important contract governing their BDSM arrangement, which he sets out to impose but never quite does, isn’t a protection for Ana so much as it is a protection for him, a presumed fail-safe in the face of the fear he feels in entering into a relationship, even a master-slave relationship, with a woman.

Christian may tie up Ana physically with an impressive array of cuffs, ropes, and chains, but he is the one who is bound emotionally and spiritually. He, not Ana, is the one in increasing danger of losing himself in their relationship, as evidenced by their ongoing negotiations over the contract, the terms of which weaken progressively in sync with Christian’s weakening will.

The contract terms, such as the rule against her looking him in the eye and the insistence that she address him as “sir,” are designed to enable him to objectify Ana both within and without his “playroom.” Only Ana isn’t the only one of them who rebels. Increasingly Christian, or rather his heart, rebels as well. By the end of the first novel, he relents on having Ana sign at all, too afraid of losing her to press for more than an informal understanding, a toothless tiger. Screw “hard and soft limits,” not only are the “rules” all negotiable, they’re no longer rules at all.

“Mercurial man” though he may be, as well as “fifty shades of fucked up,” still he is willing to chart the scary, previously unexplored and unimagined path of “more” with her, where “more” presumably means a relationship that extends beyond playrooms and scripted BDSM scenarios and twitchy palms, a future that may as yet embrace darkness but also embraces light. Nor does Christian’s willingness to try at having more come off as any kind of concession. Toward the book’s end, he admits that the rigid power dynamic of their BDSM relationship isn’t entirely satisfying his emotional needs, either. “I’ve never wanted more, until I met you,” he tells Ana after their giddy day of gliding.

Christian Grey may be “fifty shades of fucked up,” but he is also, perversely, something of a postmodern Prince Charming. Even the Red Room of Pain, as Ana calls his “playroom,” is so lushly opulent and painstakingly well appointed that it seems more a backdrop for a Victoria’s Secret catalog than an actual dungeon room.

Set aside Christian’s proclivities toward dishing out punishment and what emerges is a portrait of a pretty princely boyfriend. Welts and whips and her own moribund insecurities notwithstanding, there were times when I found myself envying Ana. Scratch any “almost,” I
did
envy her.

A man like Christian Grey is not trying to keep you off-balance or otherwise in suspense. He is not going to
not
call. Christian Grey will call, all right—as well as email and text
message and even show up unannounced and uninvited in your very bedroom if he feels the situation warrants it.

Christian Grey is also not going to cheat on you. Once he chooses you, he is not going to take anyone into that Red Room of Pain but you. You need not doubt that those Ben Wa balls are shiny-new and bought just for you. He may insist on being the Dom to your sub, he
does
insist, but he is also unapologetically monogamous. And if in the past his monogamy has been of the serial sort, we’re inclined to give the guy a break.

He
is
all of twenty-seven.

Obsessive and controlling as he is about your food intake and safety, traits rooted in the horrors of his early past, there is also something almost endearingly old-fashioned, even chivalrous, about such unwavering care and concern. When you drunk dial him, he’ll not only come to your rescue but, unlike beta would-be boyfriend José, he’ll also hold back your hair while you vomit. Post spanking, he’ll voluntarily rub baby oil into your blistered bottom. Outside of bed, he’ll shower you with first-class plane seats and first-edition books.

Christian is neither a hypocrite nor a liar. You
know
he’s going to hurt you. The only issues in question are when, how, and where—all of which you ultimately get to decide.

Christian isn’t afraid to commit. He won’t blink about introducing you as his girlfriend. You will meet his mother on the Morning After, albeit by happenstance, and find yourself dining
en famille
with his parents, brother, and baby sister before the week is out. Sure, he’ll try to finger you beneath the table linens and pitch a pouty fit later because you snapped closed your thighs, but then again, nothing in life is perfect.

Lastly but in no way least, he works for a living. He’s not some trust fund brat with endless time on his hands to pursue his perverse passions. We’re not precisely certain of the nature of his work but it involves overseeing a great many varied business interests and taking a great many 24/7 phone calls and
employing a cadre of A-list lackeys, most of whom, like him, seem to have no need for sleep.

True, Christian may not be the most … emotionally available man, yet neither is he playing hard-to-get. Not only does he admit to being “beguiled,” but later, in chapter 23, he goes much farther. “I don’t want anyone but you. Haven’t you worked that out yet?”

Only apparently Ana hasn’t worked that out yet, certainly not by the end of the first book. Her final flight is not so much a response to the brutality of the belting, which she expressly demands, as it is a rejection of her “inner goddess” in favor of her safely familiar “subconscious.” Above all, her decision to leave is a reaction to her own pervasive anxieties about not measuring up.

But then, whether we’re newly minted college graduates or mega moguls, almost-virgins or sexual sophisticates, “love makes fools of us all,” as Shakespeare pointed out centuries ago. Fortunately, E. L. James has given Ana and Christian—and us—not a single book but a trilogy in which to work out a better balance between dark and light, punishment and reward, vanilla and BDSM—and selfishness and selflessness.

Because while love will always hurt, for Christian and Ana and, indeed, for most of us, it will always be worth it.