The Curious Kinky Person’s Guide to Fifty Shades Freed, Chapter 6

We’re heading into another BDSM scene between Ana and Christian. (For these people, car chases are foreplay.)

“Do you have anything in mind?” Christian murmurs, pinning me with his bold gaze. I shrug, suddenly breathless and agitated. I don’t know if it’s the chase, the adrenaline, my earlier bad mood—I don’t understand, but I want this, and I want it badly. A puzzled expression flits across Christian’s face. “Kinky fuckery?” he asks, his words a soft caress.

Christian is asking Ana to take some degree of control. Ana still can’t articulate her desires, probably due to her embarrassment. Even though she’s seen the gear in the playroom, she can’t pick out something she wants to try.

I nod, feeling my face flame. Why am I embarrassed by this? I have done all manner of kinky fuckery with this man. He’s my husband, damn it!  Am I embarrassed because I want this and I’m ashamed to admit it? My subconscious glares at me. Stop overthinking.

“Carte blanche?” He whispers the question, eyeing me speculatively as if he’s trying to read my mind.
Carte blanche?  Holy fuck—what will that entail? “Yes,” I murmur nervously, as excitement blooms deep inside me. He smiles a slow sexy smile.

Oh, that’s a bad idea, saying yes to something when she doesn’t even know what it is. That’s exactly what she said at the ending of book 1, and look where it got her.

It’s a peculiar paradox of submission that to do it safely and pleasurably, you have to be assertive. Ana is still way too inhibited to participate in her own scene, and if Christian were a responsible top, he wouldn’t do anything with her until she was more experienced. He definitely shouldn’t even ask for carte blanche. No limits play only exists theoretically.

In the playroom, Christian again asks her to be an active participant, and she refuses.

“What do you want, Anastasia?” he asks gently.
“You.” My response is breathy.
He smirks. “You’ve got me. You’ve had me since you fell into my office.”
“Surprise me then, Mr. Grey.”

Christian has apparently been purging his toy collection, leaving only a few items.

Deftly, he unbuckles my sandals one at a time while I lean forward, balancing myself with a hand on the wall under the pegs that used to hold all his whips, crops and paddles. The flogger and the riding crop are the only implements that remain.

I’m still struggling to figure out EL James’ position on BDSM. She seems to draw an arbitrary line between two categories of sexual acts: acceptable kinky fuckery, and unacceptable abusive pathology. Note that the distinction here is between the acts, when the guiding principle should be what the bottom finds acceptable. The idea here seems to be that the flogger and the riding crop represent an acceptable, non-pathological degree of kinkiness, which Ana should learn to handle. Instead, Ana should learn to articulate her own level and kind of BDSM play, and pick the toys to suit that.

This, BTW, was the underlying philosophical flaw of SSC (Safe, Sane and Consensual): the idea that you could divide activities into safe and unsafe. Really, the degree of risk in a given interaction has as much to do with the people involved as it does the acts. There are people I know whom I wouldn’t trust to hit me with a feather duster. RACK (Risk Aware Consensual Kink) accepts that.

Christian does know how to pace a scene, giving plenty of time for anticipation to build and for Ana to relax. He also checks in with her, a particularly good idea with a rookie sub who probably hasn’t got a good grasp of safewords.

“Rough, you say, Mrs. Grey?” he breathes in my left ear.
“Hmm.”
“You must tell me to stop if it’s too much. If you say stop, I will stop immediately. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“I need your promise.”
I inhale sharply. Shit, what is he going to do? “I promise,” I murmur breathless, recalling his words from earlier: I don’t want to hurt you, but I’m more than happy to play.

Christian proceeds with a little spanking and a little anal stimulation.

“What are you going to do?” I ask, breathless. Oh my . . . is he going to fuck my ass?
“It’s not what you think,” he murmurs reassuringly. “I told you, one step at time with this, baby.” I hear the quiet spurt of some liquid, presumably from a tube, then his fingers are massaging me there  again. Lubricating me . . . there!  I squirm as my fear collides with my excitement of the unknown. He smacks me once more, lower, so he hits my sex. I groan. It feels . . . so good.

Ana still talks about her body the way a child would; no wonder she can’t articulate her desires. Christian proceeds to lube her up, an absolute necessity with anal play; at least FSOG does not have the mythical self-lubricating anus common in badly written erotica.

“Something rough? Tell me if I’m too rough. Understand?”
“Yes,” I whisper, and he slams into me and pulls me onto him at the same time, jolting the plug forward, deeper . . .
“Fuck!” I cry out.

Then it’s doggy-style over the table, punctuated by a few ass slaps.

I imagine I come across as a little jaded when describing these scenes. I just think that if you’re going to write a story about a kinky billionaire with his own private dungeon, why not push the envelope beyond vanilla? Break out the full-body latex suits,  suspension frames and bullwhips, I say. OTOH, that would probably push the story beyond what its readers want.

Anyway, we have another BDSM scene that does not leave Ana in tears, and Christian does due diligence in aftercare, so let’s put that in the “win” column.

After recovering, Ana actually does part of the post-scene cleanup, like washing the butt plug. She’s still terrified when she hears Christian chewing out one of the security goons, and scurries away. She also puts off dealing with Christian’s objections to keeping her surname at work.

Ana unloads the honeymoon pictures from the camera she bought for Christian, and discovers it was full of pictures he took of her, many of them of her sleeping, even sucking her thumb. (See what I mean about her being childish?) This goes over the line from cute to creepy.

When Ana goes to Christian for company, she sits in his lap and he kisses the top of her head. (Girl’s got daddy issues.) She also identifies a guy in the security camera footage of the arson as Jack Hyde. Dun dun DUN!