Fifty Shades of Grey commentary: Chapter 6

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Jun 012012
 

Christian flies Ana in his private helicopter to his private building in Seattle. Christian keeps dangling his Gothic secret before Ana, who keeps batting at it like a not-terribly-bright cat pawing at a string.

They also talk about Thomas Hardy’s novel Tess of the D’Urbervilles, which is supposed to be familiar to both of them. Not only do I not think either of them have actually read it, I wonder if E.L. James the author has read it either.

Tess is not a romance. It’s not like Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, in which the steel-hard Mr. Darcy turns out to have a heart of soft, squishy gold. The title character is a peasant woman seduced, chewed up and spat out by socially and economically privileged men, and the entire society they represent. If anything, the novel is a bitter, pessimistic critique of the fantasy of a woman’s social advancement through marriage.

A woman who had studied Tess would be well aware of the ways of inequality, not just of men and women but of rich and poor. She would know that inequality is still a part of our world, just as it was in 1891, when Hardy wrote his book. That Ana apparently sees no parallel between herself and Tess, and is not aware that she can suffer the modern-day equivalent of Tess, strains credibility.

Over wine, Christian brings out a nondisclosure agreement, which she signs without reading, despite Christian’s objections.

I had to stop reading after that. My eyes were rolling so hard that I couldn’t see the words.

This is the point at which I stopped holding out any hope that Fifty Shades of Grey would in any way be a good teaching text for BDSM, a way to introduce people to concepts in a easy way.

If Ana had any common sense, she would at least read the NDA that is presented to her by this weird, uptight, stalking billionaire. In fact, if she was a good submissive, she would be careful to read it, to understand what she’s getting into.

BDSM is built on contracts, sometimes quite literally. It’s all about reciprocal trust and informed consent. Everybody involved knows what is going to happen, and everybody has brought up their limits, physical and psychological. You always read the contract. (There are people who talk about TPE, total power exchange, but that’s another topic.)

If Christian was a good dominant, he would realize that Anastasia’s actions indicate she has serious problems in her judgment, and stop or at least slow down. He might at least order her to read the nondisclosure agreement. You’d think an uptight control freak like Christian is supposed to be would insist on it. He does none of these things.

Instead, he accepts her signed NDA and takes her immediately to see his penthouse’s play room.

This is not sexy, or romantic, or passionate, or daring, or anything resembling good BDSM. This is an overly aggressive, experienced dominant combined with an insufficiently defensive, completely unaware submissive. In reality, this would be a train wreck.

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Fifty Shades of Grey commentary: Chapter 5

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May 312012
 

Ana wakes up in Christian’s hotel suite the next morning. Christian not only had her undressed, but sent his bodyguard off to buy her a complete set of new clothes.

Um, wasn’t Ana’s friend and roommate Kate nearby when Ana passed out, and wouldn’t she have been a more natural choice to look after an unconscious Ana than a relative stranger like Christian?

Let me call process for a moment. I started thinking about the previous chapter’s commentary while I was still reading the text, and I was going to talk about how this wasn’t supposed to be a snarky commentary. That is, no cheap shots, no snobbishness, etc. Accept it for what it is, and understand how it fits into the world.

However, as I read about Ana’s utter helplessness and passivity, and Christian’s controlling, remote ways, I became more and more annoyed. I just don’t like Fifty Shades of Grey on several levels. As a writer, I don’t think it’s very well written. As a kinky person, I don’t think it’s giving people a good idea of how to do good BDSM.

So, I keep veering into snark, and frankly the Internet has more than enough of that. I’m doing my best to avoid it.

Over breakfast, Christian continues his approach-avoid pattern, admitting that he is attracted to Ana while at the same time warning her to stay away. In the source-text of Twilight, this is because Edward is a vampire and he has to struggle with his urge to consume human blood. In this version, Christian says he won’t kiss her without her written consent, baffling her. This sets up another date between them in another city, where he teases that he will reveal all. “Once you’re enlightened, you probably won’t want to see me again,” he says. Ana agrees. (You’d think a woman whose thesis was on Tess of the D’Urbervilles would be a little more suspicious of a wealthy man who promises to whisk her away to new places.)

One of Dan Savage’s recurring pieces of advice is, “If you’re going to introduce your partner to your kink or fetish, don’t begin the conversation in the same tone as, ‘I have a contagious fatal disease.’ Be up front and direct and don’t pressure the other person with it.” Christian seems apologetic on the surface, but really he’s teasing Ana with his deep, Gothic secret, another example of his mixed messages. He’s already dominating her, long before any negotiation has taken place between them.

This conversation over breakfast, in relatively neutral territory, is actually a good time to bring it up, to have some transparency and straightforward communication. Instead, Christian micro-manages her eating.

When Christian says, “Oh, fuck the paperwork,” and has a session of rough sex in an elevator, it’s a relief. Finally something people do.

It’s no secret that rejection hurts, nor that it feels good to be know one is desired. Ana’s situation, of being adored just for existing while not having to take any risk herself, is an appealing fantasy (and not just for women). I think a lot of people have some kind of initiation fantasy: that some other person will take the responsibility of the sexual encounter. The hope is that somebody will recognize us as desirable: the dominant woman or man who will take us, the same-sex partner who will seduce us out of our closeted lives. It’s preferable to the slow, stumbling process of articulating one’s own sexual identity, of coming out as gay or kinky or even as a sexual person. Unfortunately, such initiators are rare in the real world, and most of us have to stumble along, making mistakes and dealing with rejections and breakups.

Not so Ana. She gets Christian Grey, handsome, wealthy, powerful, with the mind of a forty-year-old man in the body of a twenty-five-year-old model, to guide her from never-held-hands-in-public to BDSM. Compare that to the disappointment that colors real human relationships, and no wonder this is so popular. Submissives want to believe that their dominants are trustworthy and infallible, but they need to remember that they’re human beings too.

Again, I come back to the fear that this book is harmful. Fifty Shades bothers me more than, say, Anne Rice’s Sleeping Beauty trilogy, because the latter is clearly set in a completely fantastic world, and the former is supposedly set in our world. It even bothers me more than Story of O because the latter is raw masochism, completely divorced from any conventional idea of romance or marriage-plot. The problem with pink fun-fur lined handcuffs is believing that they can’t hurt you like the real thing if used improperly.

Maybe this is for the best. Maybe that our hypothetical newbie kinky woman who reads Fifty Shades will recognize the exaggerated fantasy for what it is, and if she ever goes to a munch or play party, she’ll know better than to model herself on Anastasia Steele. Maybe I’m underestimating people’s ability to distinguish fantasy from reality, and general common sense.

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Fifty Shades of Grey commentary: Chapter 4

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May 302012
 

After saving Ana from the vicious bicyclist, Christian holds onto her tight. Ana practically has some kind of stroke at his touch, silently begging her to kiss him. She does ask him to kiss her, and certainly doesn’t move to kiss him herself. “Kiss me damn it! I implore him, but I can’t move.”

Christian Grey responds, or rather says, as she has neither done nor said anything to respond to:

“Anastasia, you should steer clear of me. I’m not the man for you,” he whispers.

He rejects her. And what does he do to make her go away? Mails her a set of vintage books that cost five figures. This level of mixed messages indicates either a high level of manipulation or a moderate level of schizophrenia.

After exams, Ana goes out with her friends, gets drunk for the first time in her life, and drunk-dials Christian. Under the influence of champagne, tequila and beer, she is assertive and even teasing to Christian, for the first time since she met her.

In Freudian psychology, there’s a long-standing bugaboo over women can have fetishes, based on old theories that only men have paraphilias (i.e. sexual arousal by nonsexual objects.) One school of thought says they do, another says they don’t, a third says that they do but they are so radically different from the fetishes manifested in men that they are illegible, unrecognizable. Louise J Kaplan, in her book Female Perversions, argues that fetishes are basically ways of escaping from gender roles while not being completely excluded from them. For men, in her theory, their arousal by a fetish (high heels, large breasts, diapers, what have you) is actually a kind of dodge or decoy. The man turned on by being in a maid’s uniform actually wants to be in the female servant gender role; his erection is proof, to himself and to the world, that despite this he is still a man where it counts. The man’s imperative to be virile, sexual is satisfied in spite of the lowered state he currently in, even if he choreographed the entire scene himself.

Kaplan says that female perverts do the same thing, but for them the imperative that must be satisfied is to be pure. The classic “rape” fantasy is a way of having it both ways: experiencing sex without the responsibility of being the sexual gatekeeper, without the shame of abandoning her imperative to maintain her purity.

By that theory, Anastasia Steele is a grade-A pervert. She just can’t come out and ask for what she wants (attention and physical contact from Christian) because that would violate her rule, her denial of her own desire, her own purity. Instead, she subconsciously creates convoluted situations to get what she wants, which always have an excuse (she’s clumsy so she falls and needs help, she’s drunk so it’s okay to call Christian).

Christian is, perhaps unfortunately, a perfect match for her. When she drunk dials him, he immediately assumes she’s in danger and rushes to her aid. To put the cherry on the sundae, Ana’s supposedly platonic guy friend is making a drunken pass at her just when Christian shows up. Ana gets another hit of “rescue” from this whole situation. “He notices my dizziness and grabs me before I fall and hoists me into his arms, holding me close to his chest like a child.”

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. BDSM is full of this kind of Rube Goldberg machinery of desire. TE Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia, had a very strong masochistic streak. In his later years, he re-enlisted in the British Army as a private and told friends in the service that he had been forced to do so because he had stolen money from a fictional uncle. Lawrence would write letters to his friends in the persona of the uncle (known as “R.” or “the old man”), describing in minute detail how he (Lawrence) was to be ritually beaten. In the same letters, Lawrence also begged Lawrence’s friends to persuade him (Lawrence) to stop doing this. Masochists are, paradoxically, highly controlling people.

The problem with the kind of interaction is that Ana can’t just come out and express her own desires. She can’t acknowledge to herself or anywhere else that she wants to be desired, that she had tremendous difficulty saying what she wants, that she gets off on being rescued. She can’t say that to other people because she doesn’t know that about herself.

No wonder she’s 21 and never been kissed. Even if she’s not as plain as she believes herself to be, she’s never flirted with any man. No man has ever figured out what she is tacitly, secretly, unconsciously demanding, or maybe they have and decided she just isn’t worth the effort.

Luckily for her, Christian Grey is so into rescuing people that he interprets her drunk-call as a distress signal and comes to get her.This is either a match made in heaven or a folie a deux.

And then she passes out. Oh, Ana….

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Fifty Shades of Grey commentary: Chapter 3

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May 292012
 

Ana’s internal exclamations of “Crap!” are becoming tiresome. She doesn’t even swear like an adult.

After the photo shoot (and why does Ana have to be present for that?), Christian asks her out for coffee. Maybe I’m paranoid, but Christian’s actions still seem a little suspicious. For example, he makes a point of separating Ana from her friends and being alone with her, instead of, say, meeting with all of them for a little post-session lunch.

Money changes things, particularly when one person in a relationship has a lot of it and the other has a lot less. A woman I know once told me about working as an interior designer, which involved lunch and dinner meetings with the men who owned deluxe offices and mansions. When you’re a woman having dinner with a guy who thinks nothing of $600 dinner-and-drinks bill, there’s a tension in the air, and sometimes there are… expectations.

On the way to coffee, Christian takes Ana’s hand. This seems a little forward between two people who barely know each other. Again, my “to catch a predator” radar was pinging a bit. The thing is, if the book wasn’t constantly reiterating how virginal and innocent and inexperienced Ana was (we’re told that nobody’s ever even held her hand in public), I wouldn’t be as concerned. I’d be confident that Ana could set some boundaries and exert some control over this interaction, as most early-20s women would at least have some idea how to do. But Ana is a babe in the woods, we are repeatedly told, and she seems to have no defences or boundaries or bullshit detector. Her low self-esteem also leaves her vulnerable to manipulation.

While nobody has yet brought up anything overtly BDSM, this is a good time to bring up protocols for meeting people in the Scene. In this case, Ana and Christian are in a public place, a coffee shop, which is far safer than having the initial meeting in a private place.

When Ana admits she finds Christian intimidating, he says, “You should find me intimidating.” A dominant who is always “on”, who can’t step back and take off the pressure even with a total newbie sub, is worrisome. He follows this up with eliminating the possibility of any boyfriend and then grilling her about her family.

I should emphasize that this kind of safety-conscious thinking is not only necessary for female subs. Male subs can get screwed over too. (And doms of any gender need to be cautious when meeting new people, too.)

One paradox of BDSM (and there are many) is that to be a good, healthy and happy submissive, you have to be assertive. You must know your emotional, physical and mental boundaries, communicate them clearly to your play partners and enforce them. Ana, who gives up her family history and intimate emotional details to Christian with only the slightest encouragement on a second meeting, doesn’t.

In keeping with this book’s Twilight ancestry, Ana apparently can’t even cross a road without stumbling and needing Christian to catch her in his arms. Again, there’s this strange disavowal of Ana’s desire. Instead of taking a risk, being assertive, and making some move towards greater physical intimacy, Ana stumbles into a moment of physical intimacy with Christian. The disengenousness is laid on so thick you could spread it on toast.

“And for the first time in twenty-one years, I want to be kissed. I want to feel his mouth on me.”

We’re supposed to believe that not only is she a 21-year-old virgin, but that she’s never even wanted to be kissed until now? (Let alone want to kiss someone else.) Not even a little adolescent experimentation? Never even played doctor as a pre-teen? I know there are asexual people out there, but I find it highly unlikely that a woman of this day and age could reach the age of 21 without any sexual desire whatsoever and then suddenly be overcome with lust when she meets the right man.

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Visiting Scholar program at the Leather Archives & Museum

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May 292012
 

I got the “thin envelope” from the Leather Archives & Museum, after I applied for their Visiting Scholar program a while back. I didn’t get it.

However, they did say:

…the committee was impressed with your proposal, specifically the wide scope of sexuality study you will visit in the text. The LA&M is inspired by your work and its potential contributions to sexuality scholarship.

….

In the mean time, if the Archives can support your project from a distance, please feel free to contact me. The selection committee has authorized a $50 photocopy duplication fee / postage credit for your project to be used by the end of 2012.

That’s nice of them. Not even sure what I will do with the micro-grant.

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Fifty Shades of Grey commentary: Chapter 2

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May 292012
 

Chapter 2 goes into some exposition on Anastasia’s background, such as her field of study, English Lit. She’s doing a paper on Tess of the D’Urbervilles (I guess Wuthering Heights would have been too on-point). It also introduces Jose, Ana’s platonic friend, and I believe he’s supposed to be the Jacob analog in this parallel universe.

The sibling-like relationship between Ana and Jose is another reiteration of the theme of Ana’s (figurative and perhaps literal) virginity. Again, it’s so strongly emphasized that it becomes a little suspect.

We also learn that Ana works part-time at a hardware store in her university town, where Christian Grey unexpectedly pops up, once again discombobulating her. He asks her for cable-ties, masking tape and natural fibre rope.

This shopping list is actually an interesting list of pervertables, common items from ordinary stores that can be used in BDSM play. Christian’s items would all be usable for bondage.

I should also mention that cable ties are not necessarily a good bondage device. In bondage, the big risk is making the rope, handcuffs, leather cuffs or whatever too tight and pinching off nerves or blood vessels, causing numbness or loss of circulation. Any form of bondage must have some method of not getting any tighter, and cable ties may or may not provide that. (Most handcuffs, for example, have buttons that lock them so they can’t tighten. The other kind aren’t recommended.)

The same goes for rope. I’ve noticed that over the last few years that Japanese-style rope bondage has vastly increased in popularity, even with people who have no previous interest in BDSM. I suspect this is because of the perception that rope bondage isn’t “nasty” in the same way as leather bonds or handcuffs, or other toys. Actually, improperly used rope can harm a person just as much as metal handcuffs. I strongly recommend that you take some kind of instruction or do research on bondage before you bind someone or let someone bind you.

Ana’s meeting with Christian takes a turn for the worse when another platonic male friend of Ana shows up, and Christian reverts into an icy, jealous snit.

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Fifty Shades of Grey commentary: Chapter 1

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May 262012
 

It’s generally a bad sign when a book written in a female character’s first-person POV opens with her looking at herself in a mirror. In short order, I knew more about how Anastasia Steele looked and dressed than anything else about her. To be fair, this may be attributed to EL James’ background in television, in which visuals, dialogue and action tell the story, instead of introspection or exposition.

Anastasia goes to interview enigmatic (and improbably young) billionaire Christian Grey. Correction: she’s actually filling in for a sick friend, a journalism student. Thus, she goes to meet Grey with no research, no preparation, no professional boundaries, and no agenda.

The first time Anastasia and Christian see each other, she is literally on her hands and knees after tripping on his way into his office. Like her quasi-mother, Bela Swan in Twilight, she’s a klutz. In the subsequent interview, Christian Grey comes across as a narcissistic, controlling, high-performing jerk, the classic steel hard man. Anastasia comes across as as hard as a pile of talcum powder.

The most annoying aspect of Anastasa has to be her alleged innocence. This is a woman who literally does not recognize her own sexual arousal. While she knows she is embarassed by Christian, she dismisses her other responses to the environment.

Again, the narrative goes out of its way to emphasize Anastasia’s innocence. Not only does she have no job, and no agenda in meeting Christian, she has no awareness of her own sexuality. She’s a lamb being lead to slaughter. It’s so strong that it starts to feel like a disguise so forced that it makes one wonder what it is concealing.

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Fifty Shades of Grey commentary: Introduction

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May 252012
 

So, why a read-through on EL James’ Fifty Shades of Grey? And why should anybody listen to what I say about it?

I’ve been involved in the BDSM culture for twenty years. I’ve organized parties, served as communications coordinator for organizations, and was a founder of Metro Vancouver Kink, and then served on the board for three years.

I have a parallel career in studying the history of BDSM, since at least 2005. I also have a BA in History and a certificate in journalism. This blog is to document my research towards a finished book on the subject.

I’ve also been writing BDSM erotica for about the same time, including a story in the Circlet Press anthology S/M Futures, entries in several other Circlet anthologies, and a collection of steampunk erotica short stories, The Innocent’s Progress & Other Stories.

I’m writing this series because, first, this book is a matter of historical interest. This is a book that has bridged the gap between the mainstream and BDSM erotica.

Second, for better or for worse, this book will be a lot of people’s first exposure to BDSM, and past experience has taught me that people tend to “imprint” on whatever they encounter first, and retain those ideas later in their BDSM careers. Fifty Shades needs to be scrutinized and, if necessary, corrected in order to properly educate people new to BDSM.

So, come and join me as we walk through the story of Anastasia Steele and Christian Grey.

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1930 fetish magazine “Legs and Attitudes”

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May 102012
 

Gloria Brame posted scans from “Legs and Attitudes“, a leg fetish magazine published in July 1930, Paris.

1930s images of woman sitting and showing her stockings

In 1930, women’s legs and lower bodies were a relatively recent discovery, having been hidden away in Western fashion for centuries. The photos posted seem based on the idea of glimpsing a stocking top or bare thigh in an unguarded moment (in a boudoir, after tripping on the street, a woman carelessly sitting to let her skirt slip), not a brazen display.

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