Easier to say you wanted it and convince yourself it's true. Let's first establish that the appetite for the Fifty Shades franchise is huge. By , the first volume of E. James' trilogy alone had sold million copies. There's no denying the massive appeal of James' opus about a virginal college senior, Ana Steele, trying to handle the something billionaire, Christian Grey, who wants her to submit unconditionally to him. That the vast majority of consumers are women — and that the material isn't exactly literary because it's porn!
But dismissing a phenomenon this powerful as "mommy porn" is a gigantic mistake; it denigrates and dismisses both a genre and a demographic to which we ought to be paying particular attention. It's also inexact. A analysis of the Fifty Shades readership found that fewer than 30 percent of people who bought these books had kids at home.
The truth is, we don't really know who's reading Fifty Shades. What we do know is that the bulk of consumers are women, that a significant enough proportion are Christian and married to warrant an astonishing amount of religious blogging on the subject, and that the main factor driving sales is word-of-mouth.
Women are recommending these to friends. So if we want to understand why Fifty Shades became a billion-dollar industry, let's just state the obvious. Millions of women are reading these books to help them climax. These are onanistic aides.
That's fine and healthy and worth admitting, because look: Most of what critics say about this franchise is true.
It's not great. Much of what happens in it is abuse cloaked in the language of consensual BDSM, i. The dialogue is amusingly clunky. The references to Ana's battling superego and id as her "subconscious" and "Inner Goddess" age fast.
The worshipping of Christian's wealth are off-putting. And the fact that he's a manipulative stalker is treated as not just charming but correct — every time Ana defies him by doing something he says not to, his reasons for controlling her turn out to have been right. And much of what happens in the series is genuinely, though unintentionally, funny: It's amusing that Ana was promoted to editor a week or so after being hired at her first job — on her own merit , we are assured.
It's funny that the arch-villain expertly sabotaging Christian's helicopter turns out to be the disgruntled ex-editor of Seattle's smallest independent publishing house.
There's a lot of silliness here. But it's hot silliness, with oodles of plot compared to most porn. And its appeal actually is much more complicated than the summary suggests. Take Christian: He isn't just gorgeous and rich, he's also well-groomed and well-dressed. In a culture that's decided a that women aren't worth turning on visually and b that men prove their heterosexuality by not caring about how they look, that's pretty novel.
Then there's the fact that he plans. He plans erotic scenes and fancy dates and takes care of all the details and logistics. The viral success of this GQ article advising men that the best Valentine's Day gift is to "make a plan" suggests this might be appealing to women who are simply exhausted of doing all the planning.
Then there's the fact that Christian actually spends a lot of his time in the book attending carefully to Ana. He's an able and dedicated reader of her emotions and moods and a consummate and deeply appreciative reader of her body. That matters for reasons having to do with both pleasure and pain. The pleasure angle is simple: Rather than focusing grimly on her genitals, Christian's "kink" in practice means that he dedicates a lot of erotic attention to the rest of Ana's body.
The pain side is more complex: One of the more curious features of sexual pain is how lonely it is. There's a very particular sadness to watching a partner especially one you love, like a husband, who ostensibly cares about you take pleasure in your body while you're in agony. Particularly when he knows you're in pain and continues anyway.
Even if you've consented. Fifty Shades offers an appealing alternative: If pain is going to be an aspect of your sexual experience anyway, here's someone who a perfectly reads your body's pain and pleasure signals b understands exactly how physical sensations connect to emotion and c knows how to translate pain into pleasure. And there are chemical reactions going on here as well.
We start comparing ourselves or our relationship to the characters in the book. Despite it being completely misogynist and unrealistic, we get sucked into a romanticized ideal. The book accesses our paradoxical longings of wanting to be in control and relinquish control. The idea and struggle of control is pervasive throughout the novel and makes us reflect on our own lives and desires.
By Elite Daily Staff. Click To Tweet. Want to read more? Notify me of follow-up comments by email. Notify me of new posts by email. We want to be desired. Wanted to the point of distraction? Wow … We feel powerful. Fantasy is easier than real life. Our sex-soaked society numbs us to the reality of porn. I believe the first to come up was Matthew McConaughey. No one enjoys being unfavorably compared. What we choose to look at affects how we see. We want to save the bad boy from himself.
Anastasia Steele is stalked, manipulated, intimidated, and isolated. By an abuser. Click To Tweet Want to read more? A study of predominantly heterosexual, college-age men and women found that both sexes preferred fantasies of being dominated by the opposite sex, rather than dominating others themselves.
That last point is especially significant, given that a sexually explicit story about BDSM-ish sex is now making the transition from book to movie. In general, men watch porn and women read erotica, says Catherine Salmon, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Redlands who studies pornography.
These kinds of images are much more familiar now—for both women and men. Feminists have long been divided on the question of whether this is good for women.
In the s, sex-positive feminists defended pornography as a form of free sexual expression, while others, like Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, argued that pornography inevitably represents and propagates violence against women—largely because it dehumanizes them. And if not, what is to be done with them? This is not an easy question, but the answer offered by Fifty Shades is insufficient.
By and large, the conversation about sexuality in the liberal public sphere has become a conversation about individual rights and freedoms: the right not to be compelled to have sex without giving consent, the freedom to have sex in whatever way and with whichever partner you choose. There are many benefits to a rights-and-freedoms approach to sexuality, but there are also drawbacks. On college campuses and elsewhere, not everyone fully understands and embraces the importance of consent—or gets the basics of sex.
And even when people have a sophisticated understanding of sex, American culture offers little to model healthy sexual encounters beyond the threshold of consent. Because the U. The characters negotiate line items, and she verbally agrees to many of the stipulations listed in the contract. We regret the error. Skip to content Site Navigation The Atlantic. Popular Latest. The Atlantic Crossword. Sign In Subscribe. If I were a member of the Christian right, sitting on my front porch decrying the decadent morals of working American women, what would be most alarming about the Fifty Shades of Grey phenomena … is that millions of otherwise intelligent women are willing to tolerate prose on this level.
He hits me again … this is getting harder to take. He strokes me gently and then the blow comes. I cry out again. This evening, he actually hit me. What have I gotten myself into?
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