alfreda89 | About Fifty Shades of Gray...

I haven't read the book. I probably will, just for the sake of knowing what everyone is talking about, when I can pick it up second hand somewhere.

It sounds a bit like a Gor book without the fantasy trappings, and I suspect the author's intent was to write erotic fantasy, not to make deep social statements. Lots of us, myself included, find things erotic in fantasy, that we would sensibly reject in reality. Are we, as a society, really so confused and lacking in critical thinking that we can't enjoy our fantasies while realizing that they aren't, and in many cases, shouldn't be real? The implications that we may not be, or that our leaders, both cultural and political, think we aren't and thus need to be protected from our fantasies, are profoundly disturbing.

As for the essay, I was a bit put off by the discussion of fairy tales at the beginning. I think we're all together too willing to look at fairy tales and folk tales in the context of modern society, pointing and laughing at the surface features without thinking about where their roots lie and what they said to people in their original context.

I haven't read it yet, either, so this is a general comment. On the whole, I think you are right -- there are plenty of things that I enjoy for a couple of hours that I would reject categorically in real life.

Ilona Andrews did a fun thing with this in one of the Kate Daniels books. The man Raphael is very interested in her friend Andrea, so Kate tells him that she loves a certain series of books -- hard to find -- and sends him off looking for the two missing volumes of the series. Being an intelligent man in the throes of first infatuation, he reads one of the books -- and asks Kate if Andrea really wants someone to act like a "masterful" pirate. Kate asks him if he has a little dress-up fantasy he enjoys. He admits that French maid costumes do something for him. Kate suggests that Andrea likes the idea of a costumed pirate, but if he tried to act that way with her, she'd knock him through a wall (literally, since they are both were-hyenas.)

The reason I'm personally appalled is that this, not as a brief fantasy, but as a trope of convincing women that anything a man does to or for her "in the name of love" should be all right with her, is a horribly damaging societal meme I have personally seem nearly destroy women, young and mature. A version of it nearly destroyed me, and I am still recovering from it. That I could have cut my wrists to try and make the situation better was not a healthy stage to be reduced to -- and I was raised to be a people pleaser.

So I guess I've found that someone can take the fantasy of a man wanting to do anything he can to prove to a woman that he loves her and push it too far for me. I also don't care for kink, so that's me studying a foreign language out of curiosity, not leaning what should have been my language.

I have friends who enjoy bondage play, so I know that there are people that this works for them in their life. But I try not to extrapolate from my small sampling of friends, because every woman I know well enough to have *discussed* the hobby has been sexually assaulted sometime in their life. So I am not certain how that dovetails with the bondage fetish. I don't know that everyone who likes this fetish has abuse issues - that just happens to be the sampling I know about. That has to color why this book appalls me.

I don't have any statistics on how the percentage of people who are attracted to BDSM and have an abuse history compares to the number of people in the general population who have an abuse history. I'm a bit dubious that they would be meaningful in any case, because you'd need to break the BDSM-attracted group down into sub groups. What's going on in the head of someone who is turned on by submissive behavior (either doing it or receiving it) is very different from the person who is turned on by bondage and pain play. However I do think that your sample is not representative. There are plenty of people in the community who have no abuse history.

These books have seriously annoyed a large number of people in that community because they present such an inaccurate and unhealthy image of the kink/fetish community to a lot of people who many never have had contact with it, and may be mislead into thinking this is how it works. That's a different, and also potentially very damaging trope.

You're right about the meme of giving up your sense of self when you get married being pernicious. That doesn't require BDSM, and in fact, I think it's more dangerous when cloaked in suburban respectability. There it can sneak up on you, and take years before you realize something is wrong.

You're right about the meme of giving up your sense of self when you get married being pernicious. That doesn't require BDSM, and in fact, I think it's more dangerous when cloaked in suburban respectability. There it can sneak up on you, and take years before you realize something is wrong.

Exactly. It's dovetailing something that is already a dangerous sub-meme, if you will, onto the latest sensation, thus guaranteeing that legions of people will read it. And be subtly influenced by it?

I can understand that members of the kink/fetish community would be seriously annoyed by this book series. It only makes their job harder of explaining their hobby. I think that you're quite right about the ratios of abuse/rape in a sub-population versus the general population. I believe it is like children of alcoholics -- seriously underestimated, in both numbers and long-term effects.

check out the links in the comment I posted below -- Stoney321 does a thorough (albeit super snarky) job of pointing out all the creepy ways that Edward stalks & controls Bella in Twilight, so there may be something specific in that audience (which would thus include the Grey fanfic base) that somehow welcomes tales of creepy "sweet" controlling men.

woops! posted this to another post that was unrelated...

hmmm.
haven't read the novel, but that essay brings an awesome book to mind, one that cracks open the unconscious Western cultural bias of that (otherwise good) essay:
http://www.amazon.com/Femininity-Lost-Regained-Robert-Johnson/dp/0060920637

Basically, he lays out in clear, logical detail how Western fairy tales put women in really awful positions for their love, sort of no-win situations .. contrast with India's similar tales, where women face equally huge challenges for their Lover, but their love and sacrifice DO win the day. It's a great, short read.

Since Shades of Grey is Twilight oriented, you might enjoy this somewhat long set of reads about just how truly awful the Twilight series is, for it's egregious use of Mormonism and other cheap writing:
http://stoney321.livejournal.com/317176.html
http://stoney321.livejournal.com/317857.html
http://stoney321.livejournal.com/318658.html
http://stoney321.livejournal.com/319735.html

(note, Stoney's analysis is years old, but still hilarious, and worth looking for all the animated SPARKLE images she uses!)

(And I think we know that Bella and Edward don't do that because Bella isn't picking glitter out of her teeth come morning.)

At the risk of using a cliche -- ROFLAO!

Good heavens these books sound boring. But they make perfect movies, because there's only a short story's worth of plot!

I will say this -- no book will satisfy everyone, and a bestseller means someone will hate the book. So I am cutting Stephenie some slack here. A lot of people enjoyed these. Just not my thing.

The more I read about these books, the less I want to read them.

I heard that they were "Mommy porn" so I thought, at first, that they were books about kids and husbands doing laundry.

All right, I'm laughing, you have done your good deed for today!

;^)

Thanks for the link to that article, it was well written. I have to confess, I only made it partway through the first book (after their initial sexual encounter and the gift of the rare book). I couldn't see what everyone was raving about but just chalked it up 'to each his own'.

Roxanne Gay's article points outs a few very interesting facts about human nature and the disservice this books does to people who are in the BDSM lifestyle.

For me, I just thought 50 Shades was crap so I stopped reading. I have hundreds of books in my TBR, why waste time on something that is not engaging me!

I take the same view, now. Once I had to finish books, but no more. I will give a book a bit of time, if there's anything there intriguing me -- but if I'm fifty pages in and we're not clicking, the relationship is over before it's truly begun!

I thought the article was very informative and opened up other avenues for thought.

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