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.
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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.
I should also mention that I have not read any of the Twilight books, or seen any of the movies, or even read the Twilight fanfiction, “Master of the Universe”, upon which Fifty Shades of Grey is based.
So, come and join me as we walk through the story of Anastasia Steele and Christian Grey.
Research in the previous post brought my attention to Venus in Fur, a Broadway play adaptation of the classic of male masochism, Venus im Pelz by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch.
Judging by the description, it’s strongly metafictional, as the two leads play a director and an actress auditioning for a stage adaptation of Venus. This presents an interesting angle on the story, in which Severin has an image of the cruel woman in his mind before Wanda appears and slots herself into it. This is very much a story about roles and scripts.
As I’m nowhere near Broadway, I have little chance to see this. Hopefully it will tour. I’m curious to know how this play was adapted for a mainstream audience. If female masochism is regarded as a problem, male masochism is regarded as a joke at best, and rarely if ever a sexually desirable trait to heterosexual women, at least not in mainstream media.
A new, highly kinky novel called Fifty Shades of Grey, by E.L. James, which is getting play in surprisingly mainstream publications, few of which have anything good to say about its literary merits or gender/sexual politics. (The first book in the trilogy has over 6,600 ratings on Goodreads.)
What interests me in this book is that it apparently began as a fanfiction of the paranormal romance Twilight, called Master of the Universe with the two leads named “Bela” and “Edward”, and Edward’s Byronic flaw being ridiculous wealth and kinkiness instead of vampirism. (Bela’s still masochistic, virginal and co-dependent, and generally a clumsy twit.) This was rewritten for a pro-sale with the characters’ names changed to something else; basically, the serial numbers were filed off. (The original(?) text is still online.)
I don’t object to this kind of derivative work (see Harold Bloom’s theory of “strong misreading”), but I am curious what this means for erotica/romance publishing and writing. Female masochistic fantasy goes back at least as far as Wuthering Heights, but we seem to be getting closer to the core of it through a process akin to repeated distilling, resulting in the alcoholic syrup of pure masochism, but sold as romance. The problematic gender politics of Twilight become even more disturbing when removed from the world of vampires and werewolves and placed in the world of extremely wealthy and emotionally unstable men.
The Slate article on Fifty Shades ponders the prevalence of female masochism in this day and age, though in a narrow-minded way.
James has created perhaps the most relatable dominant and submissive couple to date, the Ross and Rachel of BDSM (for bondage, discipline, sadism, masochism) fiction. When faced with a room full of cables and hooks, Ana has the same reaction any average woman would have. She decides that Christian is a freak and a pervert with serious problems. Over the next few chapters her “thinking brain” is at war with her “subconscious,” which wants her to relent. “Stop thinking so much Ana,” Christian warns, sounding like an inspirational life coach, or Tim Gunn, and eventually she gives in, and of course, she is more “sated” and empowered than she’s ever been.
The article ends with the author reassuring the reader that men are far more likely to be masochists than sadists, “…proof that women have nothing to fear.” I’m not sure what to make of this statement. Is she reassuring the reader that men are really masochistic twerps?
Psychology Today has a more optimistic view, seeing the book as a good modelling of BDSM negotiation and also that the book should not be taken too literally.
The subject of this book should not be viewed through a socio-political lens since it lies in a realm that is beyond in a psychological, emotional and sensual world. It is an adult form of play that many people would rather just keep in their fantasies. Therefore, just because the book has become a hit in the suburbs, does not mean that all these female readers want to enact these roles. Some may and some may not, but you have to open up the topic with yourself and your partner in order to find out what you might want to try.
So, is fanfiction ready for the mainstream? Will there NYTimes bestseller lists be full of slash, hurt-comfort and Mary Sue stories and other tropes of bad fanfiction? If it does, I confidently predict it will be critically scorned. Does it need to be? There is a kind of rawness in fanfiction, that makes it a kind of outsider art, fiction written without any influence of criticism or commerce, and what it expresses is unfiltered, insatiable emotional need for affection, or even just attention, wrapped in complex manoeuvres to avoid being seen as being as powerful.
PS: is “E.L. James” supposed to echo “E.M. Hull”, author of The Sheik?
I tend to cringe at depictions of BDSM in mainstream media, as it is usually flubbed in one way or another. Sometimes, however, a good (not necessarily “positive”) depiction appears in unexpected spots. For example, look at two films by Canadian director David Cronenberg.
A friend in Rostock, Germany, is producing and directing a stage play based on Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s classic (or it should be) novel of male submission and female domination, Venus in Furs, or Venus im Pelz.
The play stars Dino Gebauer as Severin and Meike Faust as Wanda, and directed by Florian Dedio. There are two shows, on September 11th and 15th.
Wish I was in Germany, and could understand German.
I’m glad to see this kind of project as I believe Sacher-Masoch is much neglected as a historical and literary figure, and his work deserves wider exposure and his life more academic study. For a man whose name was attached to an entire realm of human behavior and emotion, he is curiously forgotten. Freud’s two essays on masochism make no mention of Sacher-Masoch or his work
Gawker has an email exchange between Ryan Tate and Apple head honcho Steve Jobs that’s partially about the technical/business issue of why Flash won’t be allowed on the iPad, but also about the issue of porn on the net.
Jobs:
Yep, freedom from programs that steal your private data. Freedom from programs that trash your battery. Freedom from porn. Yep, freedom.
…
And you might care more about porn when you have kids…
Aha, I thought, here’s the nub of it. Jobs employs the old “won’t somebody think of the children” canard, situating the iPad in a purely domestic environment where children are central, and nothing that could potentially or purportedly harm them must be allowed it. As Walter Kendricks pointed out in The Secret Museum, censorship requires the idea of the “vulnerable person” who must be protected from the influence of pornography.
From a strictly business point of view, this attitude may hamstring the Apple iEcosystem. If the goal is to create a walled garden, people may simply not show up and go elsewhere because they like their porn, among other things.
While I personally have little interest in virtual BDSM, it does merit study as an aspect of the history, as an example of creating shared fantasy worlds. There’s a new academic paper studying this particular sub-subculture, Topping from the Viewfinder: The Visual Language of Virtual BDSM Photographs in Second Life” by Shaowen Bardzell.
From the abstract:
Photographs were sampled from thousands of user profiles of Second Life users who explicitly associate themselves with one or more BDSM communities or groups. Using visual analysis and social semiotics, I describe the visual language of these images, and with them, the grammar and symbolism of power and submission, of individual and institution, and of photographer and viewer.
(Via BoingBoing)
From Protein Wisdom via Racialicious comes this charming glimpse into the American political discourse:
Despite the poster’s disclaimers (“I made it a cartoon and not a photoshop and the “woman” is green. Deal, people.”), this image hits hard on one of the biggest hot buttons in the American unconscious: a black man raping a white woman. In this particular case, the scenario appears to be one of acquaintance rape. The setting appears to be the Statue of Liberty’s bedroom, and the Obama-caricature refers to “consent.” The implication seems to be seduction that became rape, that Obama is violating America by trickery and lies, but outright violence is the end result.
This goes into the tradition of war propaganda, harem fantasies based on the Greek-Turkish war, the Nazi-exploitation genre, les femmes tondues of post-WWII France, etc. : the analogy of political deviance with sexual deviance. In this case, Obama’s policies with interracial, black-male-on-white-female rape. Just because it happens a lot doesn’t mean it is a good part of political discourse.
Collective sexual fantasies accumulate around public figures, particularly political figures. Back in 2008, much was made of Obama’s youth, handsomeness and charisma, compared to McCain’s age and less telegenic personality. (Of course, even more was made about Sarah Palin’s body and sexuality, but that’s another post.)
Anyway, this cartoon goes right to the American hindbrain, the same tangled mass of race, gender and class that makes interracial porn so popular. I’d go so far to say that for every white person who gets his or her dander up about the thought of Obama symbolically raping the Statue of Liberty, there’s a white guy jacking off to the fantasy of some big black stud having rough sex with his wife. That’s the American collective anxiety, the same way that back in the 1820s Englishmen thought about Turks invading Greece.
As a side note, writing from Canada, I’m truly astonished at the vehemence of resistance to Obama’s policies, particularly universal healthcare, and to Obama as a person.
