Fifty Shades of Grey magazine: the gateway to cuddling

If you need more evidence that the Fifty Shades trilogy is actually an anti-kink book, look no further than the Fifty Shades one-off magazine, probably on a newsstand near you.

Apart from cocktail recipes, and an onion-skin deep introduction to kink history, there is an actual article by “Chloe”.

The article, “Sub? Domme? Neither!” has the subhed “Chloe took a journey of self-discovery that had her on both sides of a paddle before she decided that she just wanted to cuddle and make out”.

There are people who take a pass through the kink world before deciding that it isn’t for them. But if we take this magazine as a didactic instrument, i.e. one that teaches about kink, then this multi-page feature article seems pretty clear. The telos is vanilla sex, and implicitly heterosexual monogamy. The land of kink is where you visit for a week, and never leave the resort, before heading back to the mainland of cuddling and making out.

I’m sure people are arguing that Fifty Shades is normalizing BDSM (I’m more concerned about it normalizing abusive relationships), but this particular artifact shows just how deeply conservative a text it is. It creates a system of heterosexual vanilla monogamy that fences BDSM into a ghetto.