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A Valentine from Hollywood: Whips, Leather, and Luv
Today is Valentine’s day and Hollywood has risen to the occasion by releasing the first of three movies that will be based on the Fifty Shades trilogy penned by Erika Leonard (better known by her pen name E. L. James). If you measure the significance of movies by the money they make, this one is a sure-fire winner. The books, which were issued in 2011 and 2012, have been translated into 52 languages and have sold 100 million copies worldwide. If you ponder the cultural significance of the trilogy’s success, it should give you pause.
The first volume, which forms the basis of the movie now in release, was entitled Fifty Shades of Grey. It had its origins in a series of episodes published on a Twilight fan fiction website. Leonard took as her first nom de plume Snowqueen Icedragon; she called her work Master of the Universe and conferred on its characters the names borne by Stephenie Meyer‘s characters in Twilight, Edward Cullen and Bella Swan. When readers objected to the sexually explicit character of what she wrote, Leonard left the site, rewrote the pieces, renamed the chief characters Christian Grey and Anastasia (Ana) Steele, gave the work the name it now bears, and began publishing it in dribs and drabs on her own website FiftyShades.com. In time, Leonard’s work was licensed by The Writer’s Coffee Shop, a virtual publisher in Australia; and, despite the fact that there was no marketing budget, the trilogy quickly took off. Eventually Vintage snapped it up.
No one with any taste or judgment describes Leonard’s work as well-written. As Tim Robey observed in The Daily Telegraph, its “prose style might charitably be described as unspeakable.” But despite the fact that the books are trite, treacly, and tedious, the trilogy nonetheless struck a nerve, and it clearly meets a felt need — which is puzzling. For the subject is bondage, domination, and sado-masochism (BDSM), and the audience is for the most part made up of married women over 30 years in age. In short, the Fifty Shades trilogy is porn — but not ordinary porn. This is Mommy Porn. Men, hitherto the usual purchasers of porn, have shown next to no interest.
I have not seen the film — though I have sampled the trailers and I have read reviews in a host of outlets including The Daily Telegraph, The Hollywood Reporter, The Baffler, Pravda-on-the-Hudson, Forbes, The Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, and Newsday. By all accounts, it is a toned-down version of the novel — which makes sense. It is one thing to read about the infliction of pain. It is another thing to watch it. On the screen, at least, Mommy Porn has to be soft porn. The movie Fifty Shades of Grey differs from run-of-the-mill porn in only three particulars. The sex scenes are more frequent, the female lead is more often nude than is the norm, and one is repeatedly induced to anticipate her being lashed.
As Tim Robey puts it, the challenged posed to the screenwriter, Kelly Marcel, and to Sam Taylor-Johnson, the woman who directed the film, “was to please the books’ legion of (predominantly female) fans without allowing the film to become a soft-pornographic laughing stock.” She had this advantage, he tells us: she could dispense with Anastasia’s “bubblehead stream of consciousness,” by which he means “literary inner monologue such as this: ‘My heartbeat has picked up, and my medulla oblongata has neglected to fire any synapses to make me breathe,’ which Ana declares in one of the early chapters, as Christian announces he’s having a shower.” And she could have “the camera . . . occupy Ana’s point of view,” which was for the most part “a view of Jamie Dornan, the Northern Irish actor best-known for playing a hot serial killer in BBC Two’s The Fall.”
In Robey’s view, the enterprise has worked out “almost shocking well, considering.”
It proves that age-old saw that great books rarely make great films, whereas barely-literate junk can turn into something ripe and even electric on screen. The lead performances and sleek style choices sell it almost irresistibly to the target audience, but the film has the confidence to end bruisingly unresolved, with the structural equivalent of a slap in the face.
Meanwhile, for anyone who struggled to wade through the gruelling mire of James’s verbiage, it’s almost a form of revenge to watch the filmmaking slice through it, cleanly stripping off the fat. Great art it’s not – but it’s frisky, in charge of itself, and about as keenly felt a vision of this S&M power game as we could realistically have expected to see.
The film’s single biggest asset is [Dakota] Johnson [daughter of Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson], who has worked hard with [screenwriter Kelly] Marcel and Taylor-Johnson to perform a three-woman salvage job on the character of Anastasia. Gone is the book’s blithering simpleton, with her arsenal of “holy hell”s and “double crap”s and “oh my”s. Her inner goddess is, thank goodness, nowhere to be found or heard. She is at no point a quivering, moist mess, and doesn’t make the ruinous error of thinking the word “f___” is an epithet.
Instead, she projects an instantly compelling blend of vulnerability and spiky resistance – qualities that sometimes remind you of Griffith in her early roles. There’s more fight in this Ana than you’re ever expecting, and it raises the stakes during each stage of her seduction by Christian, from the moment she meets his eyes during an interview for her college paper.
Grey, for obvious reasons, is much more vividly described in the book than she is. Dornan, with his tousled hair and chunky build, is a precise physical match for this ludicrous fantasy-hottie-Bluebeard role, and somehow manages to render it only intermittently absurd. A good kind of absurd.
On purpose, he’s a little inexpressive at first: cold slate, with questioning eyes. The film doesn’t ever get totally under his skin and doesn’t want to – it needs to recoil, with a shiver of uncertainty, as we get to grips with his predilections.
The sex scenes clamber up the scale in intensity, without ever really threatening to get white-hot, and feature a lot more of Johnson than they do of Dornan. You could say she’s submissive to the point of baring all, from most angles, whereas he’s dominant enough to keep the camera from straying down where he doesn’t want it. Even when Grey, with his riding crops and cat-o’-nine-tails and Red Room of Pain, would claim otherwise, these sequences stay well within the bounds of vanilla mainstream taste.
And they offer an easy answer to the following question. Would you rather read an assortment of appallingly organised words describing two stick-thin characters yelping on the page, or watch two very attractive young stars going at it, in images filmed by Seamus McGarvey? This great cinematographer . . . is a ready-made cornerstone for the flatly indisputable argument that Fifty Shades is a far better film than it was a book.
Anastasia is no walkover here and sometimes gives as good as she gets, if not better. The funniest scene – debatably the sexiest, too – has the duo sitting at either end of a glass boardroom table, while Ana whips through the contract for their experimental relationship scratching out everything she won’t consent to. The script isn’t afraid to call a spade a spade here: “Find anal fisting. Strike it out.”
Johnson’s timing and verve are terrific, and manage to upend the more distasteful indignities of the book in gold-spun-from-straw ways. It’s her rebellion, not just her submission, that this version of Christian finds attractive, which gives Dornan something more interesting, human, and contradictory to play as well. If Taylor-Johnson and James bitterly tussled for control over this material, it’s a relief and even a bit of a thrill that the director came out on top.
Most of the other reviewers are less enthusiastic. Some think Jamie Dornan wooden. Some regret the absence of hardcore porn. More than one thought that the sex scenes should be a lot more steamy. Richard Lawson at Vanity Fair quite liked the movie but, with a hint of the regret that others voice with greater vehemence, he did acknowledge that
if the sex were more intense, Fifty Shades might actually become the transgressive sex fable it kind of wants to be, one that genuinely challenges our square notions of what is and isn’t deviant sex, that questions our perhaps rigid ideas of how power dynamics should function in a relationship. Free of full-frontal nudity and excessive thrusting and, well, orgasming as this movie is, it never gets to that envelope-pushing place.
By and large, however, even those who dislike the film confirm Robey’s depiction of Dakota Johnson’s portrayal of Anastasia Steele.
Next to no one, however, questions whether it is appropriate that Hollywood treat us on Valentine’s Day to a toned-down, soft-core version of bondage and submission on screen, and no one asks what Hollywood is up to, why Universal Pictures is seeking to mainstream sadomasochism. And no one at all ponders the larger significance of the fact that bored housewives fall for this stuff.
Sheri Linden at The Hollywood Reporter does remark:
Both on the page and in the glossy, compellingly acted screen adaptation, one of the more perverse aspects of their zeitgeist-harnessing story is the breathless way it melds the erotic kink known as BDSM with female wish-fulfillment fantasy of a decidedly retro slant. Hearts and flowers are barely concealed beneath the pornographic surface, and as with most mainstream love stories, an infatuated but commitment-averse male is in need of rehabilitation. . . .
The movie . . . wants to have it both ways: Informative and nonjudgmental about bondage and discipline, it distances itself from such pursuits with shard-sharp slivers of backstory, indicating that Christian’s desires are expressions of trauma-induced pathology. He’s supremely dreamy damaged goods, ripe for the saving. And so the moonlit postcoital sonatas he plays at his piano — interludes of self-conscious melancholy that are among the most laugh-out-loud schmaltzy in the book, transplanted whole to the screen.
But that is as far as it goes, and one is left with the impression that Linden is less bothered by the “erotic kink” than by the “female wish-fulfillment fantasy of a decidedly retro slant.” In her outlook, like virtually all of the other reviewers, she appears to be resolutely nonjudgmental — which is another way of saying amoral.
The only real question anyone poses is whether the movie is somehow sexist. Here is the answer that Scott Mendelson provides in Forbes:
Yes, the film concerns young, naive, and impossibly attractive Anastasia Steele (Dakota Johnson, who sells the hell out of this film) being seduced by the slightly older, insanely wealthy, and ridiculously good-looking Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan, stuck with the worst lines but doing everything he can to sell it too). And yes the relationship quickly becomes one that involves domination, control, and periodic bouts of soft-core BDSM. But through it all, Anastasia Steele (which is a really great name for a James Bond villain or an Ayn Rand character) not only is awakened sexually but also finds herself completely in control of this unorthodox relationship. The only “sexist” thing about the overwhelmingly sex-positive picture is that we see so much of Ms. Johnson’s naked body but so little of Mr. Dornan’s.
Because Mr. Grey insists on explicit consent and will not proceed until Ms. Steele provides it in writing, it is the virginal would-be flower who calls the shots for much of their relationship. The highlight of the film is a matter-of-fact and rather blunt contract negotiation as Ms. Steele details what she will and will not consent to should she agree to be Mr. Grey’s “subservient.” Not only is it deliciously entertaining and an “I’ve never seen that before” moment, it features Ms. Steele at her most confident and thus her most attractive. Considering how much ink has been spent discussing the notion that fans of the book got off on the notion of being dominated and/or being controlled, it is worth noting that the most potent fantasy to be found is one of a single, sexually liberated woman being in control of her body and her relationships without judgment or scorn from either herself or any outside forces.
It seems to me that, if one wants to get to the bottom of this phenomenon, one must go back to the most politically incorrect article ever published in The American Spectator. I have in mind the piece, entitled “In Defense of Rape” and available online, that appeared in the 1 June 1976 issue (Volume 9, Issue 9) of that puckish journal. The author — who was, if I remember correctly, the director of the library system at the University of Iowa — chose for herself the pseudonym Helen S. Clark.
The title and the first couple of paragraphs were intended for shock value. What came after was serious. Ms. Clark, as she called herself, was no friend to rape, but she was interested in rape fantasies, and she knew that she was not alone. “A glance,” as she put it,
at any paperback bookstand proves that the publishing industry relies heavily on novels of romance. But this, lust and mush, is the only genre which does not attract both sexes. As any librarian will attest, cowboy novels and tough-guy adventures are read by women as well as men. But only women read romances — an interesting observation since it hints that the rituals of love which are reaffirmed in both every romance and every reader’s heart are peculiar only to women, that the mystery of the female (which is really quite simple) is, all protestations aside, really not too fascinating to men.
But lest you misunderstand, let me tell you briefly about myself. I am a woman executive — I hire and fire. I handle grievance procedures. I go to business lunches, and even on occasion (now get this) pick up the tab. My salary hovers in the top five percent of female workers in the country. I still receive enough proposals of marriage not to worry about it, and I am very pretty. And I read these books. I positively cannot put them down, and I must even ration them out to my seething soul, lest my mind turn to gray slush, and my sensitivity to throbbing tastelessness.
Later, lest we misunderstand, she tells us a little more about herself:
I was raised by two homesteading parents in the Alaskan woods. We — my mother, sisters, father, and I — pulled stumps every year. We cut down trees and dragged them from the woods to our home. We shot moose and packed in the carcasses. We built cabins. My father called us “you guys.” My mother lamented when we discovered lipstick. So you must realize, all you skeptics with suspicions of social indoctrination, I was not conditioned to be a female — I was simply born one. And it would be as foolish for me to deny this as it would be for a man to deny that he would really rather be a cowboy.
Helen Clark did not pick up the bodice-rippers she reads at K-Mart. She learned about them from her colleagues and friends. “I know from first-hand experience,” she adds, “that scratch any female, and you will find flutter: we all wear French cambric and scalloped lace with much more grace than we wear sweatshirts and blue jeans, and we waltz ever so much better than we march in street demonstrations.” In the regency novels that she and her friends prefer,
there is a stock plot which no reader would ever want altered. The novels are usually written in the third person, since things have to happen to the heroine which she does not understand, and the restrictions of the first person strain the naivete. She is generally misunderstood, or at least underestimated, by her family and associates and is always a virgin. She can on occasion be a hellion, but if so, she has a basic sensitivity which pulls her through. She always has a mind of her own and is more intelligent than all men, save one. She does not have to be beautiful — a significant point, considering the vulnerabilities of the audience. She frequently has eyes too far apart and a mouth a bit too wide. One [Georgette] Heyer heroine was a real dowd and got away with it.
On the other hand, the hero is always handsome. He may have cruel eyes, but we will take care of that. The veteran reader knows instantly when the hero comes on the stage because he sneers a bit and has gray eyes. . . . The man is jaded from years of high living and too many women. He has met no one whom he has loved — ardent affairs may splotch his past but not real love. He is wealthy and titled, preferably a duke. He knows hunting, horses, and boxing. He gambles but not to abandon, and is not above a duel now and then.
As you can see, the Fifty Shades trilogy is treading familiar ground — albeit in a new fashion. Helen Clark’s favorite writers — Georgette Heyer and Barbara Caitland — are not coarse. The kissing is generally left to the end. The subject is “the excitement of seduction.” We hear a lot about “the smouldering eyes of the hero.” He may touch the heroine’s arm, and this has a powerful effect on her. That which is genuinely obscene is kept “off stage” in keeping with the etymology of the word.
Clark’s article is aimed at the feminist icon Germaine Greer — “a woman who ought to know better” but “isn’t smart enough to understand what’s going on here” — who devotes an entire chapter of The Female Eunuch to the phenomenon and who claims that, “if women’s liberation movements are to accomplish anything at all, they will have to cope with phenomena like the million-dollar Cartland industry.” Greer’s answer to the challenge posed by “romantic trash” is “hard-core pornography.”
The titillating mush of Cartland and her ilk is supplying an imaginative need but their hypocrisy limits the gratification to that which can be gained from innuendo: bypass the innuendo and you short-circuit the whole process.” I and my friends swapped True Confessions back and forth because we were randy and curious. If you leave The Housewives’ Handbook [on Selective Promiscuity] lying around your daughter may never read Cartland or Heyer with any credulity.
Clark thinks that this is utter nonsense: “There is no ‘short-circuiting’ at all. Prurient interest and romantic urges are as far apart as are, say, Increase Mather and Jacqueline Susann.” In her opinion, “Novels of romance are not a flirtation with pornography and in fact are just the opposite since the purpose of pornographic literature is to describe reality for those who aren’t fully enjoying it.”
Miss Greer should realize that one just cannot get around the truth that romance is more important to women than to men, and since women are so strikingly unique in maintaining this interest, she should begin to wonder why. With apologies for the obvious, I must say that it is the primary purpose of all animals to perpetuate themselves and that furthermore it is the responsibility of the female to see to it that the job gets done. It conveniently happens that every little cell in her body is attuned to this charge, and, as with all the really big things in life — God, growing up, death, etc. — intelligent beings have a tendency to ritualize the things their cells, nerve endings, and hormones so disturbingly tell them to do. The programming is there, nagging and insistent, and I wouldn’t dare, for the sake of my insanity, attempt to defy all my little cells when they tell me to cast a commensurate sidelong glance. The ritual merely lends grace to the task and disguises the enormity of its truth.
Helen Clark is aware that there are romance novels in which violence and even rape loom large. One such work — Lola Burford’s Vice Avenged — she discusses at length, noting that it is dedicated to Heyer and arguing that Burford “has merely translated the respectable flirtations” described by Georgette Heyer and the like “into rape and the final physical act into spiritual conquest.” She is “not necessarily more honest than Heyer. She is merely more direct.” In her opinion,
Rape as a ritual of love exists in the fantasy world of every woman. It is a man saying to a woman that she is so desirable that he will defy all rules of honor and decency in order to have her . . .
Male violence is outward-directed — posses go after bandits, people get shot, battles roar. Female violence is inward — torture, beatings, rape. Males do things to other bodies. Females have things done to their own. I cannot recall one female novelist who described a beating, for instance, that happened outside of her own character. . .
Women use violence in fiction for the same reasons men do. They are playing to a common human quirk that is a little more than the yen for excitement. It is the attempt to exploit emotion through physical action, and since the most physical thing that can happen to a body is, with the exception of lovemaking, pain, it is inevitable that violence finds its way into all sorts of fiction.
When I first read Helen Clark’s essay almost 40 years ago, I found it shocking. That was without a doubt the author’s intention. Even today, I find it disturbing. But about it I have always been inclined to say this: It is the only serious attempt I know of to make sense of an aspect of feminine conduct that I have always found puzzling. The other discussions of the phenomenon that I have encountered are, like that in Greer’s Female Eunuch, preachy and therapeutic. They all insist in the manner of Henry Higgins that a woman should be more like a man.
It is sometimes said that art imitates life, and sometimes it does. What can be asserted with greater confidence is that life frequently imitates art. Juliet accuses Romeo of kissing by the book, and many an American Romeo has learned to kiss from watching movies. The folks in Hollywood understand this — which is why it is worth asking what they are trying to do, apart from making money, with the movie Fifty Shades of Grey.
I suspect that, if the lady librarian who published a shocking essay nearly 40 years ago under the pseudonym Helen S. Clark were in a position to have her say today, she would tell us that Hollywood has appropriated the conventions of the Regency novel for the purpose of moving us ever so gently from romance to the hard-core pornography treasured by Germaine Greer and her twisted sisters. This year on Valentine’s Day we get Fifty Shades of Grey. Next year my bet is that we get Fifty Shades Darker, and I suspect that we will be treated to Fifty Shades Freed the year after that — and step by step the soft-core pornography of the first film will give way to the hard-core pornography so prominent in the later volumes. Stay tuned.
Published in General
This bit may be even more interesting than all the rest. Will the film audience reflect the countless matrons who read the book?
Speaking only for myself, I’m relieved to have a husband who, when presented with options, chooses the one he really wants rather than dithering.
If I ask him, “Chops or chili for dinner?” he’ll simply tell me which one he’s more hungry for. Same if we’re dressing for a night out: if I ask him about what I plan to wear, he’ll tell me what he likes better, rather than worrying that whichever one he chooses might be the wrong one. And that I can do little things like this to please him at little cost to myself also makes me happy.
My husband, though, is the champion of not being a martyr when he does me a favor. He appears to get much more pleasure out of doing me favors than I had thought was even possible.
Of course, our life hasn’t yet been invaded by very small barbarians forever shoving their fingers into inappropriate places and shoving inappropriate things up their noses. When that happens, it might become harder to enjoy doing favors for each other and appreciating the favors done for us. I sincerely hope it doesn’t, but suspect realistically it probably will. Perhaps if we’re vigilant, we won’t lose too much of it.
Midget Faded Rattlesnake:
Before we go on with this, please recount the evidence for this conclusion. How do we “know” this? Who came up with the marketing numbers? Let’s be sure of each step before we go on to the next.
Who is Helen Clark and why should I care?
Desire is one thing, assault is another. How stupid can people be?
Virility is terrific and wonderful; assault is damnable. How stupid can people be?
This reminds me of Ayn Rand discussions that have taken place here. She is complex and her writings are mixed and complex. The same goes with Heinlein. Heinlein is complex and so are his writings. This guy, who has his characters enjoy “plural marriange” and “consensual incest,” also and in the same lifetime has one of his most beloved characters, Mama Maureen, say something very like this:
“People who put sex and pain together ought to be locked up and kept away from normal people.”
Now I am sure that others can correct any errors in this recounting. And be sure, Mama Maureen was thinking in terms of actions, not thoughts or opinions. The important thing is to figure out how to fight against this rot in civil society.
I would like to do that. How can I contribute to that?
For what it is worth, with four of these barbarians on hand, I find that the favors the two of us do for one another often have to do with dealing with them.
Helen Clark had one virtue. She took seriously the task of explaining women’s interest in bodice-rippers. . . . not all women, mind you. But lots of women. And not necessarily women who wanted pain and difficulty but women who enjoyed fantasizing about it.
Following the Potter/Hunger Games/Twilight models, the last book will probably be split into two films. (Surely for artistic rather than financial motives.)
Indeed.
But what never activated my “Ewwww” reflex in the slightest, are any novels by Georgette Heyer (cited as one of the favorite authors of whats-her-name in the Defense of Rape article).
So I feel compelled to write something in defense of Heyer.
I’ve read all her books, romances and mysteries (between the ages of 15 and 21, I should think). I’ve bought reprints of four or five that I especially liked, more recently, and read them again. Never once did it occur to me that they embody or promulgate the realization of a ‘rape fantasy’ (whatever that is). And you’ll have to look hard to find much of a ripped bodice of any sort, anywhere in them.
More often than not, I thought that their lesson was that an somewhat older, cynical and embittered, world-weary man, when confronted with a frumpy blue-stocking, spirited young woman who had usually passed what the Regency considered her ‘marriageable’ age, would come to enjoy the sparring of wits with each other, would eventually recognize how well-suited they were, and would eventually get married.
If that’s what you call a ‘rape-fantasy,’ then I think you’ve got noodles in your brain.
The books are well written and literate. I think so, and so does no less a writer than AS Byatt, who, in 1969 penned an article called “Georgette Heyer is a Better Writer Than You Think” (It’s somewhere on the web, but I can’t find it at the moment).
Heyer’s books are genteel novels of manners. They are witty. They assume a reader’s intelligence. They are really good escapist (romance and or mystery) fiction. They were, for me, the next best thing to Jane Austen.
(You know, Elizabeth Bennett. Mr Darcy. Colin Firth. That whole rape fantasy thing).
As is to be expected, much rubbish is being written about this subject. If you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If you’re a certain type of obsessive issue-pusher, everything looks like rape.
PS–Barbara Cartland? A train wreck, personally and professionally. Let us pray that EL James doesn’t try to break her record of over 700 novels published during her lifetime, and over 100 published posthumously. Cartland’s aeronautical exploits are of much more interest than her ‘literary’ ones.
Some of the other authors cited in the Defense of Rape article, particularly Joan Aiken and Jane Aiken Hodge? Sisters. The daughters of poet Conrad Aiken. Both excellent writers.
I can’t speak to the rest of them. If a book isn’t penned, from the start, in what I regard as a reasonable facsimile of well-written English, out it goes.
50 Shades of Grey? Umm. No, thank you.
There is nothing new here. It’s the same old conundrum that has plagued good men for thousands of years. Why do beautiful, desirable women shun “good” guys over the “bad” boys?
There has always been something that attracts women to guys who live on the edge of propriety or carry an aura of danger about them.
This mystery of the self selection of mates may have do to with physical attractiveness. Good looking men and women can drift in and out of relationships more easily. If the man and the woman are equally attractive and find it easy to attract suitors they start to look for something else to hold their attention. That’s where the “danger factor” kicks in. It’s the adrenaline kick.
The only other factor that’s as strong is the ultimate aphrodisiacs of money and power.
The best review I have seen of this book is from the Victory Girls Blog.
The point of her review: These books celebrate rape and abuse and perpetuate the myth that all the victim of abuse has to do is ‘love’ just a little more and the abuse will stop.
The left just spent the better part of a year decrying ‘rape culture’ and ‘patriarchy’ on our college campuses then a lovely feminist comes along and gives us “50 shades of grey, (soft porn) edition” (don’t worry, though, they rehabilitated Ana for the movie).
Read the Victory Girls Blog review. It opened my eyes.
I think Fifty Shades speaks to two things that many- not all- women like: saving/reforming a tortured soul, and assertive men. Take away the BDSM and it’s a romance novel like any other at the drug store. The story follows the bodice ripper formula: beautiful, naive girl attracts the attention of aloof, hot bad boy. They start off having steamy but emotionally devoid sex. The girl is put in harms way, and the aloof bad boy realizes how much he loves her, going to extremes to get her back and keep her with him forever. At the end of the story, the girl is always pregnant, they’ve gotten married, and everyone is happy. This is exactly what happens in Fifty Shades, but there is the S&M factor that bothers people. Still, take that away, and it speaks to women’s desires to find someone that will go to the ends of the earth for them and love them passionately. Spoiler Alert!- at the end of the books, they’re married, Anastasia is pregnant with their second child, and they live happily ever after.
I actually see Fifty Shades as being less subversive in some ways than other romance novels. At least in this series, Anastasia is consensual in what happens to her sexually. She is 100% willing, and she walks away when it’s too much for her. In a lot of romance novels, the “heroine” is often coerced or blackmailed into being the aloof bad boy’s mistress, and she’s held hostage at his house under the watchful eye of a bodyguard of some sort. Yet there isn’t really the outcry against the Harlequin romance novels anyone can pick up at Walgreens. Perhaps the Fifty Shades series has gotten so much attention because it piggybacked on the success of Twilight. I guess I don’t see why everyone is so upset about this particular series when there are many, many more romance novels out there that are much more violent and damaging to women.
Will do — and you are right about the schizophrenia of the left.
Women are attracted to confident guys. “Bad boys”, unlike “good guys”, have no moral qualms about cultivating unwarranted self-confident. It’s the extra confidence, whether warranted or not, that’s attractive, not the badness per se.
Good guys do themselves no favors when they assume it must be the badness, not the confidence, that attracts women. Believing that what makes bad boys attractive is a quality good guys by definition cannot possess only undermines good guys’ confidence in themselves, sabotaging their ability to attract women.
A long time ago-long before Fifty Shades-I actually knew a woman who was into BDSM. A close male friend of mine fell deeply in love with her, without knowing much about her. He was trying to win her away from a guy who didn’t treat her well; my friend believed her problem was low self esteem, and he did everything in his power to treat her well and make her feel loved and valued. It seemed to work for about two weeks, and then she started begging him to hit her across the face during sex. (I know they shouldn’t have been having sex, but they were) He refused, but the issue wouldn’t go away, and it started to become clear that she would leave him unless he agreed to hit her. He really felt that he was in love with her, but he steadfastly refused to hit her even though he knew it meant he would lose her. She ended up leaving him for a guy who had no qualms with hitting women.
Some would say that this is a case of a woman choosing a bad guy over a good guy, but having known the people involved, I don’t see it that way. The guys who hit her were wimps who would never consent to getting into a fight with another man; my friend who refused to hit her got into fights with other men all the time, and usually won. I was impressed with him for refusing to hit her; if he had agreed to it, I would definitely have broken off our friendship.
Someone told me once that men who get violent with women are wimps who cannot hold their own with other men. That isn’t always true, but I suspect that it is almost always true.
I read the Victory Girls Blog Review, and it leaves me horrified. The author was almost murdered by her ex husband, and women-fans of Fifty Shades-are telling her that maybe she could have worked it out with her abuser if she had just loved him more? I have to seriously re evaluate my opinion of some women.
I have never read Fifty Shades, and don’t plan on seeing the movie, but this whole Fifty Shades thing might actually turn out to be a good thing. If the women described in the Victory Girls review are any indication, it will put a spotlight on just how insane some women are, and how insane feminism is.
Paul and All,
This is what happens when human sexuality is divorced from the holy bond of marriage and children before Gd. This is a fantasy alright. Marriage and children resulting from a completely perverse relationship. What are the odds that this would happen to any young woman in this society right now. One in a thousand, one in a hundred thousand, one in a million, one in a billion…
Wake up. There are no short cuts. The 30 somethings who are reading this garbage will blow the relationship they are trying to have right now with a guy who isn’t perfectly handsome, isn’t fabulously wealthy, and doesn’t feel like treating her like a piece of garbage even if she likes it.
Those 30 something women are going to wind up 40 something and still single. Then the doctor will tell them the truth that all the magazines try to lie about. They will be taking a risk getting pregnant. This factor will make the chances of a permanent real marriage relationship even more distant. Soon they will be 50 something and children no more.
This disgusting culture’s perversity is destroying good people’s chances for real happiness and making a profit by the destruction of their lives.
Gd will know.
Regards,
Jim
Oh Kay. I saw the pictures and – like you – was angry. Paul Rahe’s response was rationale and I understand his point about the why’s and wherefores of his post . . . but still . . . .
When I come to Ricochet it’s jarring to be confronted with a picture of woman in bondage.
And the title. C’mon.
Paul A. Rahe: “This year on Valentine’s Day we get Fifty Shades of Grey. Next year my bet is that we get Fifty Shades Darker, and I suspect that we will be treated to Fifty Shades Freed the year after that — and step by step the soft-core pornography of the first film will give way to the hard-core pornography so prominent in the later volumes. Stay tuned.”
If there is money to be made, then the remaining parts will be filmed because they’ll know that there is an audience for it. (We do know that there is an audience for pornography which is willing to pay for pornographic materials.) To be sure, the film industry will use attractive men and women to display this particular set of wares, and sex sells.
Since bondage was noted above, one might ask how many women have to be beaten before women in general get the idea that being beaten is not a good thing? Yet we’ve heard of these women returning to their captors for more. What kind of personality finds that flagellation makes sex better?
It would be an interesting sociological exercise to find out more about the personalities attracted to this kind of literature / film. I wonder how they would feel about their young daughters being involved?
Follow up: Box Office Mojo sees this as the biggest film this weekend with more than $81 million in the US, and another $158 million overseas. Something is selling.
Rather than focus on sex in particular, may I make a more general observation?
Counter-irritation and counter-stimulation are time-tested methods for relieving discomfort. We may rub irritants onto our skin to relieve arthritic pain, dig our fingernails into our palms in order to alleviate a bout of sneezing, or consume irritants (like horseradish or hot peppers) to relieve the symptoms of, say, a stuffy nose or feverishness.
There has long been speculation that some people eat uncomfortably spicy food in order to get an endorphin rush. There is likewise speculation that self-harmers self-harm because the endorphins released temporarily ease their misery (not that this makes self-harming healthy – it merely, if true, makes their behavior more understandable).
While we should be wary of attempts to reduce every human behavior to a cascade of chemicals, neither should we ignore the fact that we are physical beings, influenced by the chemicals our bodies produce in response to irritants. If some people find that counter-irritation helps them feel better in other scenarios, is it so implausible that counter-irritation might make it easier for some people to get “in the mood”?
Very interesting……
I agree entirely that the whole rape/BDSM fantasy world is NOT connected to romanticism.
Women are romantics, because they love the idea of being loved, of the process of wooing, of someone else being interested, or even very, very interested.
As I wrote here:
Women want REAL MEN – and because of all the flaws in our society, that requires BDSM (or vampires or other non-normal interactions between men and women) in order to get there.
Slightly off topic, but Hollywood doesn’t lead: it follows. If Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance were to sell 100 million copies in three years, Phaedrus would shortly be donning his leather jacket at a theater near you.
You got it. 50SoG is the new vampire genre for women.
Thank you for this. It is informative.
I think I agree with this. Self confidence in men is an attractive trait.
But I also think that it’s hard for ‘normal’ men to be self-confident around women in this day and age. Because the suspicion is that any sort of masculine self-confidence is suspect, and may lead in an unfortunate direction, because, you know, everybody knows that all men are rapists, secretly, inside, somewhere (cf. “all women have rape fantasies,” above).
So, Pajama Boy.
I think may be sort of like guns.
When self-confidence among good boys is outlawed, only outlaws and bad boys will have self-confidence. And thus we define deviancy down.
Neither did I. Hope I never do.
I have now — finally — found a moment to read the piece on Victory Girls. It deserves attention.
Whoever wrote that 50sog was just drugstore romance novels with BDSM thrown in was right, except that James’ depiction of BDSM is absolutely wrong. She writes of a very mentally disturbed person who emotionally and sexually abuses his victim/lover for his own sexual gratification. Ten seconds on Google will demonstrate how outraged actual practitioners of BDSM are over this story because it violates the three tenets of the practice which are safe, sane, and consensual, all of which Grey ignored repeatedly. All the other criticism of the books/movie are valid, but this also must be included in why it’s trash.
Sex and pain have long been intertwined. It’s in the Kama Sutra and the works of the Marquis de Sade. The French even refer to orgasm as Le Petite Mort, the little death. If it’s a sign of decay we’ve been decaying for a very, very long time.
Some men seek dominating women because they tire of being the hunter or it makes them feel desired. (Hey! This woman wants to possess me!) Women today are expected to be more like men. Maybe they seek the same release?
No it isn’t! I read this book because I read everything and don’t always pay as much attention to book reviews as I should.
This is a story of deeply disturbed people who suffer from total insanity. No mentally sound man or woman would engage in this type of behavior and I am surprised that I have to make this point on a supposedly conservative web site.
BTW, I have a library consisting of nearly 1,000 books but I didn’t hesitate to throw this one in the garbage.