About Fifty Shades of Gray...

[alfreda89]

Is THIS what this book is about?

I am speechless. I thought the book was merely derivative, mildly erotic, and poorly written. This is appalling.

At the least, this is a well thought-out analysis of FIFTY SHADES OF GRAY. So what do you think?

Comments

[alfreda89.livejournal.com]

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.

[aishabintjamil.livejournal.com]

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.

[alfreda89.livejournal.com]

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.