Christian does call Ana on her childish attempt to make him jealous, all the while dragging her into a restaurant and ordering a full meal for her, plus haranguing the server. (This guy deserves the Tyler Durden special sauce on his order.)
In the first book of the Fifty Shades trilogy, an emotionally damaged one-percenter attempted to coerce a college graduate into an abusive relationship (which she had no understanding of or desire for) through a combination of seduction, bribes, deception, stalking and emotional blackmail. She finally realized that she was neither submissive nor masochistic, returned his gifts, and left him. The end.
Hopefully Anatasia Steele would have realized there are other men in the world, that there are other options than a false choice between slut and old maid, and perhaps she might even experimented with BDSM with some other person who is not so deranged and compulsive.
Except it wasn’t the end.
Brooten, Bernadette J., ed. Beyond Slavery: Overcoming Its Religious and Sexual Legacies. Palgrave MacMillan, 2010.
Although Jewish, Christian, and Muslim religious leaders have always recognized the difference between slavery and marriage between men and women, they have sometimes applied concepts from slavery to marriage.
Pg. 8, “Introduction” by Bernadette J. Brooten
The second panel I attended on Sunday morning was “Learning from Master-slave fiction”, with David Stein, Laura Antoniou, Anneke Jacob and Reid Spencer.
Most people encounter BDSM fiction before they encounter BDSM in real life, whether in the form of narratives or online encounters. This means that people tend to imprint on those fictions and receive ideas like: Masters are (or should be) wealthy, sadists, men, leather wearing, etc. Slaves are (or should be) without limits, make no decisions, etc. These assumptions cause problems later on. So what is the proper relationship between BDSM fiction, particularly Master-slave relationships, and actually living them?
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.
While trying to learn more about the Orientalist slave paintings I’ve been posting on Tumblr and Pinterest, I found there are a lot of these kinds of paintings. There’s the slave market set on Flickr, the entire Orientalism tag at Onok-Art, and a collection of slave market paintings on Tanos.org.uk.
From Crushable.com, about a new BDSM/supernatural novel called Devil’s Brand by Casea Major:
At first glance, it seems to merely be inspired by E.L. James‘ bestseller with its questionable BDSM and lip-biting heroine. In fact, this protagonist Marci Lowe sounds like she might have some more agency than Anastasia since she’s a bankrupt heiress, so at one point in her old life she was maybe successful?
[…]Here’s where I might be starting to lose you, where you think, So what if there’s a brooding businessman with a taste for BDSM? That’s not my Christian Grey. Wrong. Devil’s Brand began its life as The Darkest Shade, a Fifty Shades fanfic.
I didn’t have high expectations of this book when I started. If anything, now that I’ve read it, my low expectations of Fifty Shades of Grey were too high.
BDSM is about rules, which are there to regulate the interaction so that all parties involve benefit. Christian presented Ana with a contract, but that has been completely abandoned by now. Christian pays lip service to concepts like consent, negotiation and rules, but he’ll go beyond them on the thinnest of excuses. Ana just doesn’t understand them at all. Put them together, and you get a disaster.
