At long last we get to the infamous contract. It’s pretty lengthy, and I suspect that like a lot of legalese, such as website terms of service, the readers of this book just breeze through it.
The problem with BDSM contracts is that they aren’t legally binding (unlike the NDA which Ana signed earlier). They’re social agreements, not legal documents. Like a lot of BDSM, master/slave contracts are about the trappings, or signifiers, of authority, but divorced from real authority. A person may be addressed by a title, but that title doesn’t matter to anybody except the submissive. Quite literally, the power of the government depends on the consent of the governed. All of this legalese is interesting, and adds to the mise en scene of the interaction between Ana and Christian, but it isn’t really necessary.
