The Curious Kinky Person’s Guide to Fifty Shades of Grey, Chapter 9

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Jun 092012
 


The morning after, Christian’s hangups about wasted food come up over breakfast with Ana. Kate calls and checks up on Ana.

This is another worrisome moment. Because of the non-disclosure agreement she signed without reading, Ana isn’t sure how much she can tell Kate about her night with Christian. It’s hard not to feel that there is a subtle process of isolation at work, with Christian introducing Ana to this new world with new rules, and Ana being legally prohibited from talking about them with anybody else and getting a second opinion or reality check. Again, there’s a creepy sense that Ana just doesn’t know enough to be at all concerned about the patterns of this relationship.

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The Curious Kinky Person’s Guide to Fifty Shades of Grey, 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.

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Glenn Marcus’ forced labor conviction affirmed

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Dec 082010
 

The United States Court of Appeals, Second Circuit has made a decision about the Glenn Marcus case:

For the reasons set forth below, we affirm Marcus’s forced labor conviction and vacate his sex trafficking conviction. The case is remanded to the district court for proceedings consistent with this opinion.

Most of the decision involves various legal points that I only vaguely follow (the closest I’ve ever had to legal training is watching lots of Law & Order reruns), but I noted that the court says on several occasions that Marcus’ relationship with Jodi “became nonconsensual”, meaning that it was consensual at some point. This means that the court is judging the Marcus-Jodi relationship in terms of the consent or lack thereof between them, rather than looking at the particular activities they performed.

Slavery, seduction and consent: Scenes of Subjection, by Saidiya Hartman

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Apr 072009
 

Hartman, Saidiya V. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Centry America Oxford University Press, 1997 Google Books Amazon

I’m still looking into the relationship of real-world slavery and BDSM slavery.

Hartman starts her (?) book by quoting a letter from noted abolitionist John Rankin to his slaveholding brother, struggling to convey the horrors of slavery. He employs shock tactics to get through the reader’s comfortable remove, “to rouse the sensibility of those indifferent to slavery”.
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