[content note: discussion of rape, abuse, and really politically incorrect porn][commenting note: suggesting that people choose to be abused because they like it will get you banned.]
Let’s talk about video porn.
A lot of video porn depicts, to put it lightly, poor sexual behavior. Condom use is rare. Nonconsensual sex is often depicted as sexy without an awareness that in real life this is rape (see Bangbus or Brazzers’ Porn Star Punishment series). Members of marginalized groups are treated poorly: consider “big black cock” porn, lesbian porn that is under the impression that lesbians are just waiting for a man to have sex with them, or trans porn that calls trans women slurs.
And yet in my sex-positive circles, most people are broadly okay with video porn. Critiques of the sexism within porn films are often met with “it’s just a fantasy! It’s not real life!” And I think that’s generally correct. I have met many people who appreciated porn without condoms but were careful to use condoms in real life, liked poorly labeled nonconsent porn without wanting to rape anyone, enjoyed the fantasy that lesbians were salivating for their cock while simultaneously being respectful of actually existing lesbians. Humans are capable of understanding the difference between fantasy and reality.
Of course, we should worry about vulnerable people. For a lot of teenagers, video porn is literally the only way they learn about sex, and the messages video porn teaches are often horrifying. (People who want sex education to cover this gap: please consider how much attention teenagers pay to abstinence-only sex education, and then ask yourself why they’d care more about your preferred sexual ethics.) Furthermore, things like not using condoms in porn normalize lack of condom use. It is legitimately a Hard Problem to figure out how to both accommodate people’s perfectly reasonable desire for condomless porn (and porn stars’ desire not to use condoms) and to depict condom use as a perfectly normal part of sex.
So, let’s talk about Fifty Shades of Grey.
Exactly what is different here?
If you think that most people are basically capable of understanding that James Deen pretending to rape Stoya is hot, and actual people committing actual rape is horrifying, then presumably most people are also basically capable of understanding that Christian Grey stalking and emotionally abusing Anastasia is hot, but actual stalking and emotional abuse is bad. If you think that most people are not basically capable of making this distinction, you should really get upset about video porn. If you think that people should boycott Fifty Shades of Grey because it’s abusive, then you should also be in favor of boycotting almost all video porn.
Furthermore: a lot of feminist criticism of Fifty Shades tends to be like “it is abusive! And rapey! And stalkerish! Why do women like this? It is terrible!” And of course sometimes that produces hilarious criticism (Pervocracy’s Fifty Shades review is a delight), but I feel like that is sort of… lacking.
Millions of women have read a sexy book about a man abusing a woman. It seems conceivably relevant to feminists to ask why this is sexy.
Like… it just seems to me that that might conceivably teach us interesting things about female sexuality and gender socialization! If we assume, as feminists, that women’s lived experience is the best source of information about women’s oppression– which we do– we can’t be like “except for this lived experience! This lived experience is politically inconvenient and the women who have this lived experience are Bad and probably destroying feminism forever! I don’t understand them and my lack of understanding makes me morally superior!”
The problem is that as soon as I say “many women think a book about a man abusing a woman is sexy,” some assholes will conclude that women stay in abusive relationships because they think it is sexy and that actually abusive relationships are some kind of 24/7 safewordless unnegotiated BDSM. This belief is approximately as plausible as the belief that people who enjoy Grand Theft Auto deliberately seek out gunfights because they enjoy being shot at and therefore no one should be concerned about gun violence, and we shall address it no further.
Unfortunately, I mostly can’t provide insight into why people enjoy the book, because to me Mr. Grey is approximately as attractive as a potted plant. He’s in that Uncanny Valley between where he is neither Michael Cera or Jesse Eisenberg (sexy!) or Hannibal/Darth Vader/Jack Slash (also sexy!), where I just want to give the heroine the number of a DV hotline. (I propose we call this uncanny valley the Grey Valley, due to the tendency of horrible fictional doms to be named Grey.)
One thing I do get is the stalking. Many fanfics I enjoy (cw: fanfic is about real people) include a stalking element. The thing is that fiction provides safety that real life doesn’t have. In fiction, you know the stalker is a decent person, the stalkee loves him deep down, and the two of them are going to get together, by genre convention. Even if the stalkee protests, in reality they are flattered and appreciative. In real life, none of those things are true (except in the mind of stalkers). In the safe, controlled environment of fiction, stalking works as a fantasy: “this guy loves me so much he’s willing to overcome any obstacle, including, uh, my stated objections.”
I am interested in the experiences of people who appreciate characters within the Grey Valley! Why do you think those characters work for you?
Thing of Things 
I’ll be the Bad Fictional People apologist for once, and say that I really felt for the sad weird insanely hot domineering control freak guy in Secretary…
The specific combination of “sympathetic sad weird person who needs hugs” + hitting so of my hotness buttons makes me into the quietly obsessive fangirl who has trouble admitting how dangerous and abusive this character would be in real life. Instead I’m all like “HE NEEDS UNDERSTANDING AND LOVE AND I CONSENT TO ALL THE WAYS HE WOULD TREAT ME”.
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(I have trouble writing coherently, because I’m embarrassed at how much I’m always turned on by him.)
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Also: female subs, I am deeply sorry for how nastily this (criminally hot) movie stereotypes your personality and driving impulses. …I dare say this has to be one of the few “mainstream” d/s stories where a sadist is portrayed in a more respectful light than a masochist.
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(good actor, offensive and patronizing writing)
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IDK I liked how the sub was presented, she was very #Relatable, I just wanted to rescue her from her horrible (and horribly unsexy) dom.
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The problem is not her demeanor or the self-harm, the problem is the stereotyping IMO. For example, how about sad mentally ill women who are submissive/masochistic NOT because they are mentally ill?
(I felt so sorry for Lee, I could not get sexually attracted to her as a character, not at all. All the kink things are *right* up my alley, but I kept wanting to just rescue her too.)
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IDK I liked that there was a crazy masochist who was a masochist because she was crazy and she could just BE A MASOCHIST as opposed to having a bunch of people clutch their pearls about how ~~self-destructive she’s being.
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I have neither watched nor read it, so I may not have been following closely enough, but wasn’t there an entirely separate criticism of 50 Shades from BDSM circles, to the effect that 50 Shades treats BSDM itself as a mental illness, and that the masochist is eventually “cured” and becomes more vanilla?
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(idk how much of my feelings are just the jarring sensation between how sexual I would normally find a character in this role played by as good an actress, and how I can only actually feel heartbroken/protective. Like, I’m a complete freak who loves emotional sadism/masochism in the right context, but here…. no, it’s just heartbreaking.)
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I found both characters in Secretary sad, and the plot a bit disturbing. After reading the short story it was based on (also called Secretary, in Bad Behavior by Mary Gaitskill), I don’t understand how Shainberg decided to turn it into a romantic movie.
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People who aren’t porn stars can have a perfectly reasonable desire for condomless sex too.
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Yep, aside from a tendency to bond strongly as a result of sex, this is another reason I’d much prefer to find a single stable long-term partner over casual sex. Condoms aren’t a minor inconvenience; they largely ruin sex.
I speculate that the sensation loss due to condoms must vary widely among individuals, and maybe it really is only a minor inconvenience for other people, in which case it’s not surprising that they don’t understand this.
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Stupid question, but… have you tried ribbed condoms? I’m rather fond of the sensations produced by the Trojan brand ones…
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Can’t speak for anyone else but no, ribbed condoms are still shit. Some men just aren’t cut out for latex imo.
Of course you can’t know that for sure until you’ve made sure the fit isn’t an issue though. This website (http://condomsizeandfacts.blogspot.com/) is helpful for figuring out those issues although I suspect they’re shilling for one of the custom condom companies they mention.
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FWIW, condoms cause very little loss of sensation for me, aside from one ill-advised purchase from a gas station bathroom dispenser. I swear that thing was made out of an inner tube.
Have you tried the ultra-thin ones?
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The initial criticism in this post I find uncompelling. Most anti-porn sentiment is aimed at video porn and people pretty much ignore literary porn. 50 Shades is the rare exception.
That and some sex-positive feminists aren’t in favor of all porn just porn that they consider to be feminist or women friendly. And even those who are in favor of porn featuring rape they often feel that 50 Shades is an especially egregious example for romanticizing it.
Even though slash fan-fiction and yaoi dojinishi is often over flowing with rape, including even pornographic fan art. Most people are largely unaware that porn made by and for women is often rapey. So when its revealed to them they are shocked and horrified by it.
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I have seen a fair number of people who reblog things criticizing 50 Shades and also have porn blogs or otherwise express their appreciation of video porn, and this post is about those people. If you are not those people, then you already have a consistent position. Good for you.
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Right now in my green little island we are having an extremely lurid murder trial involving BDSM, mental illness/mental difficulties, and how likely are “My fantasies are about stabbing women to death” to be true, rather than acknowledged by both parties to be fantasy?
Strangely enough, nobody has raised or made any mention of “Fifty Shades of Grey” in this context, I would have thought the newspapers couldn’t resist, but apparently they take it to be complete fantasy with no relationship to this trial or indeed to actual BDSM.
BDSM fic is completely uninteresting to me, since I am not one bit interested in pain or exploration of those sensations. I am interested in the power-exchange side of it but since most stories/movies/what have you revolve around “Bwahahah, I am going to tie you up and spank you till you are begging me with tears in your eyes to stop (both of us having negotiated and agreed to this beforehand and you actually enjoying pain being fully understood)”, I just go “Nope, not my thing”.
So “Secretary” and “Fifty Shades” and so forth – I don’t get it. People like that kind of thing? Okay, fine for them, I hope they’re happy and horny. But it does nothing for me and I am not one bit interested in being a sub, or find any attraction in the notion, and being a domme looks too much like work – now, if I could get a horde of attractive, submissive men who’d scrub the bathroom tiling and do the dusting and dig out the flowerbeds for me without needing all that “yes mistress no mistress” stuff, that might be a different thing 🙂
I think people do understand that “Fifty Shades” is completely fantasy, but like porn, there will be some people who get their understanding of ‘how things work’ from it, and who will imagine that that is how it is supposed to go.
And things do cross over into the mainstream from porn all the time – the fad, which is now (apparently) a requirement that women shave their pudenda; heterosexual female anal sex (“Cosmopolitan” articles on how to do it) and the like. The range of “Fifty Shades Bondage Beginners” stuff in sex shops (er, not that I ever do any online sex toy shopping, no no no, it was all for fanfic research purposes, honest!) shows that there is at least some mainstreaming of BDSM and it’s because of “Fifty Shades” (where something like “Gor” didn’t manage it), and so the question has to be asked – I suppose – is it good that at least the topic is coming out into the open, or will people try imitating at home what they see on the screen under the illusion that that is how it’s done – complete with lack of/fuzzy consent and bullying under the guise of domming?
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Perhaps the responsible thing for E. L. James to do would oe to put a big, brightly coloured warning on the book saying: ‘If you’re doing BDSM like this IRL, you’re doing it wrong. Please consult: ++list of good sources on healthy BDSM++.’
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I think most of the hatred for Fifty Shades of Grey comes from the fact that it is something like the Justin Bieber of Hollywood movies. It started out small and relatable but then, without anybody really understanding why, gained a lot of popularity, which for some reason causes a lot of (justified, of course) aversion in many other people.
The Criticism about the depiction of sexual relationships in the book/movie is, I believe, in many cases just an attempt to rationalize ones negative emotions. (Of course, this has to fail. The real problem is that it sucks and yet everybody loves it.)
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As a complete outsider to all of this, it’s looked like a totally different phenomenon that is basically unrelated to porn: when there is an opportunity to write a #thinkpiece, the #thinkpieces will be written. 50 Shades was a Big Deal and so people wanted to have a hot take.
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I’m not sure that works. The incentive in writing thinkpieces is to be iconoclastic, not follow the herd. Don’t thinkpieces trashing 50 Shades substantially outnumber defenses?
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The key to being a good thinkpiece is to reassure the members of the heard that they too are special snowflake iconoclasts.
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Hmm… I actually think that most people are capable of making the distinction when it involves rape but not when it involves abuse. I think people don’t know what abuse actually is, they don’t understand the signs nor can they recognise it, and I think the narrative of “person stalks love interest”… does not actually raise red flags for most people. Like, I think the problem with 50 Shades is exactly that people don’t know that what Christian Grey is doing is, in fact, stalking and emotional abuse – sort of like how they don’t know that having sex with a passed out drunk person is rape. They know rape is bad, they know abuse is bad, but as general categories, and they don’t actually have a mental model of what abuse and stalking look like.
I furthermore think that these beliefs are reinforced by the BDSM theme: people think that in BDSM that kind of thing is normal.
So I object to 50 Shades for the same reason I object to Lucy: even though it’s obviously fictional, it reinforces a narrative or stereotype that people do not actually know to be false or bad.
Like, I think you’re typical minding, here, because to you it’s very clear that stuff like what Grey does or Cullen does is bad and should not be done in real life, whereas my model of real life humans is that they don’t know this thing.
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I keep seeing this claim in feminist circles, and… wow. Perhaps it’s typical mind fallacy, or associating with the right type of person all my life, but I have literally never heard anyone defend or advocate having sex with passed-out drunk people. I find it really hard to imagine how that could be construed as anything other than rape.
My guess is that anyone who would defend it is employing the type of threadbare rationalization people use for pirating movies. If so, the way to attack the problem is not to attack the rationalization. Just say “We find your excuse ridiculous, have fun in prison.”
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Eh, maybe so. I myself have not encountered this, I’m just going by anecdotes describing this kind of mentality. Most of the anecdotes weren’t of the form “someone arguing that it’s not rape,” though, but rather of the form “someone talking about it like it’s no big deal without the word rape even crossing their minds,” which is how it seems the problem of 50 shades’ abuse is seen/treated.
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My experience is that there are those who have no qualms about conscious-but-very-impaired, but I’ve never heard anyone talk this way about someone unconscious.
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did you compare hurting an actual existing person to “hurting” a big rich company by downloading a movie I would never buy? Geez, I hope huge soulless conglomerates have access to good therapy and support groups 😥
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Plenty of actually existing people work for those big rich companies that make movies, and if the “soulless conglomerates” start to lose money because, say, a bunch of people pirate movies instead of buying them, it is generally the people that are lower on the corporate foodchain who will end up getting downsized.
And I have to wonder how easily you would say that you would never buy a particular movie (that you still want to watch) if there was no easy way available to watch it for free.
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Why doesn’t that apply to video porn? I have no beefs with consistent porn-critical feminism, only with selectively porn-critical feminism.
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Well… how much video porn actually depicts emotional abuse? How much video porn actually lasts *long enough* to show emotional abuse? It’s my impression that even feature-length video porns include so little time for a plot that it can’t really depict something like that. Video porn depicts physical abuse, sure, and I don’t doubt the average person’s ability to recognise that.
Besides, the people who will look for video porn that contains abuse will generally be people who… are looking for porn that contains abuse. And will probably not be the average human. 50SOG is a best-seller book and a mainstream movie that’s being thrown around everywhere to the average human, who according to my model has a good grasp of what (most, violent) rape is, and what physical abuse is, but not of what emotional abuse is, or what a healthy relationship is supposed to look like, or what BDSM is like.
So what I’m getting at is that… video porn doesn’t get shown all around the world in movie theaters to the average Joe, and for you to find video porn that contains emotional abuse… well, you have to look pretty hard, I think? And you have to probably not be a(n average) man, who will skip all the talking and the blowjob and go straight to the penetration and might even mute the sounds if the talky bits get too annoying.
So, again, same objection I have to Lucy: it’s being shown to the average Joe, who doesn’t have the skills to identify it for what it is, who didn’t *actively* seek it out but stumbled upon it anyway.
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While I have not actively sought out video porn (being critical of it as well as personally repulsed), it is my understanding that the situations and dialogue can often promote abusive dynamics alongside the violent actions. For example, a stepfather concludes his stepdaughter is “asking for it” by wearing attractive clothing and, without seeking assent, approaches her. Or a man calls a woman a worthless cum dumpster. Though these may not depict an extended grooming process, don’t these themes have negative repercussions on self esteem and expectations? And furthermore, aren’t these themes actually about as common as violence? Finally, even simple violent scenes can contribute to expectations that sex should be e.g. initially painful for women.
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Prodding myself, my brain *does* seem to have a problem with video porn of this kind, but it’s a much smaller, proportional to the fact that video porn is still no blockbuster or bestseller, and also to the shortness of these.
But yes, I do still have a problem with the reinforcement of negative cultural norms/assumptions/biases.
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I agree – the claim that “oh, they all know it’s not how real life works!” falls apart under the evidence of fans telling/writing again and again that no, they actually do dream of someone exactly like GRey and there is nothing unhealthy in their relationship, no sir, what rape? do you dare to criticize my precious hero? oh noooo! I mean, people honestly identify with Hannibal too, but at least the taboo over cannibalism is much more existent around us; but emotional abuse is rarely mentioned and even rare-er taken seriously. I don’t know what would be reasonable to do, then, I am just talking about your teories, Ozy.
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“If you think that most people are basically capable of understanding that James Deen pretending to rape Stoya is hot, and actual people committing actual rape is horrifying, then presumably most people are also basically capable of understanding that Christian Grey stalking and emotionally abusing Anastasia is hot, but actual stalking and emotional abuse is bad. If you think that most people are not basically capable of making this distinction, you should really get upset about video porn. If you think that people should boycott Fifty Shades of Grey because it’s abusive, then you should also be in favor of boycotting almost all video porn.”
I do think there is one significant difference. For people who know and understand essentially nothing about BDSM, I think it’s a lot easier for lines to get blurred by the “Oh it’s okay because that’s just how BDSM works” line of thought.
More of a difference of degree than of kind, but I think for me personally, it’s the reason I tend to be less comfortable with 50 Shades than other similar porny/erotica-type things. I think it’s a lot easier for people to think “It’s fine, it’s just how BDSM works” about something like 50 shades than to find an excuse like that for real-life justifications for what goes on in Deen/Stoya rape porn. I think it’s correspondingly easier for people to create or justify harmful dynamics with “This is just how people do things in BDSM”, than with other similar media.
I’m not sure I think this makes a difference with respect to how censorious our reaction ought to be (I don’t think we’re likely, as a society, to develop immunities to those justifications by disallowing similar stories), but for me, at least, I think that’s why it *feels* different. As someone who took a while between getting into the BDSM community and developing an ability to discern the difference between abuse and not-abuse in that particular context, it makes me worry for others going through the same thing.
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>why they’d care more about your preferred sexual ethics
Because… my sexual ethics value having a lot of good sex? Teenagers are still into that, right?
Sex being safe and being good seem to obviously go hand-in-hand. Like, I’m currently in the middle of learning how to tie people up properly, and the material naturally intersperses parts of “this is how you tie up someone so they can’t escape/you have access to their sexy parts” with “this is how you tie up someone safely.” It’s not impossible to have the latter without the former, but the only way that’d ever happen was if you were trying to teach people how to bondage safely without actually teaching bondage, and even then, safety would be learned more effectively in the context of “this is how to tie people up for not-escaping/access.”
And I contend that the situation is analogous for vanilla sex. Sure, you can teach about safe sex in absence of any discussion of actual, you know, sex, but not only is that super stilted, if education about how to have sex safely is embedded in “here’s how to have the best sex for you/partner(s)”, I suspect most teenagers are going to learn more about safety.
(I once heard a Joss Whedon Q&A where he was asked how the crew of the Serenity had such good gender relations, and Whedon said something about the men respecting the women’s power and that a large driver of sexism is that men aren’t okay with women having power. If we accept that people like Whedon have great insights into how people work and that there’s something to this claim, the first thing that jumps to my mind is that colleges should offer a bondage elective where students spend a semester in opposite-gender pairs taking turns tying each other up, essentially practicing surrendering power and experiencing no negative repercussions, essentially exposure therapying the men (and possibly women) into not being sexist.)
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zz: Yes, but abstinence-only sex education also claims that it is advice about how to have good sex (i.e. wait until marriage). That’s a huge part of True Love Waits’s pitch. Why do you think teenagers would listen to your ideas about how to have good sex more than the abstinence-only position?
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Because the abstinence-only position requires teenagers to deny their sex drives in a way that zz’s position doesn’t.
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My personal experiences with abstinence-only education is that it has nothing to do with any ideas about good sex, it just teaches the bare minimum of how to become pregnant and what kinds of STDs you can get, and leaves it at that.
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To be fair, there are people for whom optimizing the goodness of sex means waiting for marriage, and since Typical Mind Fallacy is a thing, you can wind up legitimately thinking that the sex ed best for sex is abstinenc-y. If you additionally believe that educating about safe sex is going to cause teenagers to not wait until marriage, you can arrive at abstinence-only is sex ed optimized for good sex.
This is, of course, kinda very wrong. For most people, waiting until marriage produces less-good sex, and I doubt that teaching the wait-for-marriage types about safe sex will induce them to have sex. Buuuut… I’ve claimed that we should teach sex ed for good sex, and Ozy’s point—that there exist people who genuinely believe that’s exactly what abstinence-only is—stands.
(To be clear, I support having sex ed be opt out, but primarily teach how to fuck well, which includes consent and STDs and birth control, but is primarily concerned with things like where the damn clitoris is and what it’s for, much like learning about bondage includes stuff about safety (have EMT shears!), but’s primarily with things like “here’s how to tie someone spread-eagle such that they can close their legs.”)
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Hmm…I mean, the experience I’m working from here is myself and people I knew in high school, but I remember caring quite a bit about sex ed in as far as it related to having good sex–looking up info about safe BDSM practices and such. And I’m queer, I had mostly queer friends, I’m probably somewhat atypical, but I kind of doubt that I’m -grossly- atypical.
Anyway, I don’t like to write teenagers off by saying that, you know, whatever you teach them about sex, they’ll tune out. Some probably will–some will get their sex ed from other places, good or bad. But my memories from high school sex ed are that, basically, I didn’t trust the people teaching it to give me accurate information, and a more sex-positive approach might fix that problem for at least some teenagers.
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Flat out disagreeing with the post. First, I agree with what pedromvilar says about the recognition of abuse vs rape (if not with the example they gave, where I find myself agreeing with stillnotking). The BDSM wrapping does not help at all, for example, Cliff’s coworkers:
(the rest of the post and the comparison with horror movies is relevant IMO)
I had a very similar dialogue with a family member who talked to her kids of both genders about consent and the existence of abusers, and she also said something similar.
There is in your post an assumption that it is obvious and clear for the reader that this is a fantasy, and I do not think it holds true. Discussions in other places on the Internet are light (at best) on the “consent problems” (see this relationship counselor for example, or the answers on this quora thread). There are countless praising articles about C. Grey’s behavior as caring, devoted outside the bedroom, etc, with not a word about the abuse and non-con. The marketing was heavy on the “what women want”, not “this twisted fantasy is so hot“.
I think it is obvious why the same argument is not tenable about violent pornography, which is exactly what is written on the can, in the titles, in the descriptions, and in the tags on popular websites (see for example the comprehensive tag system on bdsmlibrary.com).
On top of that, there may be a double bias in your vision of the 50sog vs violent pornography. It is easy on the Internet to fall into a echo chamber where it looks like everyone is bashing 50sog (except fairly recently where in sex-pos circles came some defenses or neutral pieces, mostly following the release of the movie), while social acceptance is very high. And on the other hand, it is easy to have a social circle where everyone can admit with no shame that they enjoy porn, including violent porn, despite the fact that it would not be a smart move to admit to such tastes in mainstream society.
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Sure, my social circle is not a representative sample of America’s views about sex, but my blog posts are also mostly read by my social circle, so of course I’m going to target inconsistencies present in my social circle.
Also in my viewing of YouPorn or RedTube there seem to be quite a lot of videos with titles like “Cock Sucking Whore Rides Hard For Her Come” and quite an absence of videos with titles like “You Shouldn’t Call People Whores For Enjoying Sex Outside Of A Negotiated Context, But Fortunately This Is One.” (Kink.com is commendable for bucking this trend.)
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Speaking of Kink.com, they’ve started a series “50 Skills of Grey”. From what little I’ve seen thus far, it seems a good place to start for someone who’s just finished 50 shades and is looking to start BDSMing.
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you didn’t answer the most important point – your theory hinges on what the fans think, and the fans express overwhelmingly that they think something else.
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Yeah, I intuitively agree with the “it’s just fantasy, not real life” argument, except for the fact that a significant number of readers, marketers, and the author all seem to think that it’s totally consensual because BDSM.
I’m also super uncomfortable with video porn that includes humiliation, etc without the Kink.com “but this is only fantasy” framing, so I’m not sure how much I agree that that sort of stuff in video porn is intuitively, obviously fantasy. But that might also be my personal taste talking.
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Thing is, I’ve met actual real-life women at BDSM gatherings who were new to the scene and had only read 50-shades — and dammit these women had some very unrealistic notions about what kink is all about and what they could expect from dom-sub relationships. I worry about these women. Abusive people exist.
It’s very easy to get wrong ideas about how kink works. Which is to say, it took me a while to fully understand how BDSM negotiation works and why it is important. In my fantasies, BDSM would work according to a “guess culture” mode, cuz that’s what is hot. However, in real life *THAT DOES NOT WORK*! Someone needed to explain that to me.
I have no objections to 50-shades in principle, nor really any kinds of non-consent literature — after all, I don’t want a literary presentation of actual BDSM, the same way I don’t want to read about not-really-desperate people pretending to commit crimes and not-really-cops pretending to catch them. Plus, closing the book is the safe word.
In other words, for smut to work, it has to portray the content that turns us on, not people safely exploring a facsimile of the content that turns us on. Obviously.
But still, 50-shades as a cultural phenomena has hit in a troubling way, not cuz its content on its own, but cuz the people reading it don’t have the context they need.
Few people read a detective book and say, “Hey, I should murder my spouse and then try to outsmart the people who come to catch me.” But many seem to be making that kind of error with 50-shades and BDSM.
The answer is to explain to them how BDSM works. The wide critique of 50-shades is thus probably a good thing.
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“Plus, closing the book is the safe word.”
Thinking of which, it would be really nice to have a self-aftercare app (help reflect upon and sort out the user’s feelings, provide input-driven commentary and advice.) Media creators or community members could even provide plugins for specific themes or works too!
This is, like, the Platonic Form of what horrible anti-capitalist/anti-consumerist leftist snobs always rant about regarding apps. Would give them nightmares. Which means that I’m all for it.
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Note:
Most of the discussion (here, at least) is not about 50sog per se, but people’s reaction, particularly ignorance, towards it. The problem is not with 50sog, but with 50sog & mainstream western society?
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“lesbian porn that is under the impression that lesbians are just waiting for a man to have sex with them”
I once saw a porn video labelled something like “two lesbians rape a man”*, which, … Wuuuh?
*That was the title on the website, I don’t know if it was the official title of the video.
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I think the big difference is that it’s pretty hard to mistake video porn as anything other than what it is. Even with text porn, if I’m reading a story on Literotica or something, it’s pretty clear that I’m getting a piece of fiction that is intended to titillate, and all other concerns are largely irrelevant. I would assume that many people are fairly OK with a lot of content that they might find objectionable in a more traditional book/movie/whatever. Fifty Shades, especially since being made into a movie, is straddling the line between porn and traditional media, so I think people are not inclined to cut it as much slack as they would something that was clearly labelled “hey, this is supposed to be for masturbation purposes and not intended to be taken seriously.”
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The difference between most video porn and Fifty Shades of Grey is that most video porn is pretty clearly fantasy (and I’d argue this is sort of the default assumption for porn), and Fifty Shades of Grey breaks that assumption by being explicitly about BDSM.
Most porn, including most video porn, is set in some sort of contrived or fantastic scenario (pizza guy magically has sex with his customer, schoolgirl magically has sex with her teacher, maid magically has sex with her master) that the viewer accepts would not happen IRL as a genre convention. One of the ways you can break this genre convention and set porn “in the real world” is to make a BDSM story about BDSM. Because Fifty Shades of Grey breaks this genre convention and claims to be not fantasy it’s subject to much harsher standards than most porn.
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Yeah, I think that this is the difference.
Video porn is generally a *genre* where it’s pretty much accepted that either all logic is totally suspended, or where it’s not even a story but just a performance. At least that’s my perception. And the goofy (even when not fucked up) titles are part of that.
I don’t think that romance novels fall in that genre. They are their own genre, and are supposed to obey some semblance of logic. Porn with plot, if it be porn, and since the narrative reacts to actual pressures, it’s more visible when either the narrative is forced (the reason for much of the contempt for 50SOG) or is immoral.
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Honestly, I don’t take issue with the book so much as with the response to it. When I read it, I had only really seen criticisms of it, and not fans talking about it, and I had basically the same opinion you do. It’s erotica, so it doesn’t have to be realistic or healthy. My opinion changed when I saw fans responding to criticism of the book by saying, not that it was fantasy, but that it is totally healthy, and if you don’t think so you just don’t understand their passionate love for one another or are discriminating against people who like BDSM. The articles about how it was so feminist because it showed a woman taking agency in her sex life did not help my opinion any, either.
Basically, if everyone just looked at it as porn, I would agree with you. The fact that people keep claiming “No, it’s not just sex! It’s a beautiful romance!” is what bothers me. Maybe it’s just the whole “I read Playboy for the articles” thing, but I’m not sure.
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I’m not going to attempt to defend or explain the popularity of 50 Shades, as it is not my cup of tea so I have no particular insight.
But it did start as fanfiction. Fanfiction is a major strand of writing featuring sex written mostly by and for women. There is no dividing line in most fanfiction between dodgy unethical sex scene and long meandering plot with it’s own internal logic. The women who read it want both together. You can’t separate the two things and it be satisfying for most readers.
So I agree with the people saying it is not just sex. It isn’t a beautiful romance either though. I think that fanfiction type writing has to be looked at as a thing in itself, with its own rules, and is not directly comparable to porn, erotica or romance.
Mostly 50 shades was just a lot of hype and being sold at a very cheap price in supermarkets to a general readership to whom a book with explicit sex in was fairly novel. It doesn’t say any more about anyone’s attitude to sex than people having sex with goldfish in the Lace novel in the eighties did.
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as a member of the fanfiction subculture: hell no, there is a strict culture of tagging and warning which leads to putting abusive shit in its own box – a sexy box, maybe, but never to pretend that it is healthy. As the Hydra Trash Party slogan says (which means works in which the Winter Solider from Captain America is brainwashed, tortured and abused by the evil organization Hydra): … damn I can’t find the actual slogan, but it’s like “thou shalt not judge the trashiness of thy neighbor’s kinks unless thy neighbor is trying to pass off their rotting banana peels and half-eaten pizza crusts as a healthy romantic dinner for two”.
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So, I was ranting to myself:
“But it romanticizes abuse, combining unhealthy behavior with a happy ending without the slightest hint that something might be wrong! It explicitly shows shitty, coercive “negotiation”, whereas video porn shows none, which at least allows me to imagine proper negotiation off-screen! And the author doesn’t even like BDSM, and it shows — what kind of porn is th–”
— and then it dawned on me. What if some people have weird, disturbing* romance kinks, rather than sex kinks? What if stalking genuinely pushes their romance buttons in a way that healthy/ vanilla expressions of passion can’t?
* not judging here — some of my sexual kinks are pretty disturbing
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Various d/s fetishes can definitely be a disturbing romance kink rather than a (relatively more tame in that context) sex kink for me! Like high protocol, casual use of charged language, expecting/giving ritualized service, and other things…
The more “normalized” and low-key and sustainable these things are, the more they are in the “romance” territory to me – and also the more relatively disturbing/boundary-pushing they are made by the romance context.
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^ (forgotten to add at the beginning: these are the romance kinks I want to do in real life, in a perfectly mutual and consensual way, that would STILL come across as disturbing or out of the norm even with good consent)
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Disturbing romance kinks? Yes, they exist.
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I’m a bit late to this post, but I wanted to say that yes, the weird, disturbing romance kinks are real and I have them. Reading about relationships with purely healthy, interpersonal dynamics is almost always uninteresting to me.
For a romance (or romanticized abuse, as some would see it) story to really draw me in there needs to be at least a bit of unhealthiness to it, and up to a point, more unhealthiness is better. Stalking, obsessive love, one person not taking no for an answer, manipulative behavior, etc, all of these sound great (in fiction) to me!
I’ve never actually read 50 Shades of Grey, so I have no idea if I’d like it, but I definitely understand why some women (and men) would prefer reading stories about an unhealthy, non-consensual BDSM relationship rather than a healthy, safe, consensual one.
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> In fiction, you know the stalker is a decent person, the stalkee loves him deep down, and the two of them are going to get together, by genre convention
I always get mad when people forget this. There are lots of behaviors that are creepy, not because there is something intrinsically wrong with them, but rather that a person who engages in them is likely to be dangerous.
In fiction you often have access to the contents of a character’s head. This access provides you with overwhelming evidence that the character is not dangerous, evidence that is far stronger than the evidence their outward behavior provides.
Yet some people insist on not updating on the information they get about the character’s thoughts. They judge a character to be “creepy” based only on their outward behavior. The only reason that I can think of for them doing this is that they mistakenly think that creepiness is a property of certain behaviors, rather than a property of the personality traits those behaviors suggest a person might have.
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No, that doesn’t quite work. An inclination to relentlessly pursue the other person, or to force kissing or sex on them, despite having zero evidence that they want you to do so, is a bad character trait in itself.
Actually, seeing this behavior by an ostensibly “nice” character usually kicks me out of the story because I can’t make sense of it and start to wonder about the author’s ethics.
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I dunno about that. If it’s HPMOR, than sure. But in most fiction, characters have moral plot armor. Information that the author knows leaks into the heads of characters.
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I was hoping to read more perspectives of the “I find 50 Shades really sexy and here’s why” variety, but I guess the readerships of Ozy and E. L. James don’t have much overlap. (BTW, Ozy, I’m not seeing a lot of actual praise in this post!)
My defense of it would simply be that it’s fiction; there isn’t evidence of fictional abuse causing real-world abuse, which has been declining sharply in recent decades, despite the increasing acceptability of 50 Shades-like material. It seems most adults are fully capable of understanding the difference between reality and fantasy.
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I agree that many adults are capable of reading fiction (including that set of fiction, which, being well-written does not, imo, include FSoG) and recognizing that it is not reality. What I am less confident of is *any* reader’s (or viewer’s) ability to reject *all* the information they get from a work of fiction – after all, there is no reason for the sun to rise in the east, in fiction, so a given work might have the sun rising in the north, for the sake of the story.
Or have all the homosexual characters be predators of small children. (It doesn’t matter that this isn’t true, it’s just fiction, you know.)
Our understanding of history, biology, culture and the world around us are shaped to some degree by fiction. (If this is not the case, then the work done to increase and shape the portrayal of fictional non-heteronomative and non-caucasian characters in fiction is nothing but a huge waste to time, and any attention paid to increasing ‘representation’ in fiction should cease immediately.) How *much* it is shaped will vary by work of fiction and by the reader.
To the degree that FSoG makes an abusive manipulative relationship look like something that the abused partner *wants*, it’s problematic. Some people will see it as fiction, and still find themselves repulsed. Others will see it as fiction, and not connected to reality, and enjoy it without any bit of the story tainting their pov of reality.
And then there are those of us who can be shaped by art, who read that story, and a seed of doubt is placed in our heads – “maybe this is actually okay.”
I’m not at all saying “we should ban these kinds of books (or movies, or comics, or whathave you).” I am saying that consumption should be considered a bit more risky than we might think.
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50 shades of grey
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