Fifty Shades of Grey & Why I Keep Defending Women’s Trash

In this fantasy he shows up at my boring job and we have an awkward but meaningful conversation. In this fantasy he just happens to walk by my house when I’m outside reading a Victorian novel and wearing a really flattering top. In this fantasy he shows up at the bar and I don’t accidentally have my first kiss ever with the wrong guy. In this fantasy he wants me so much that it drives him insane. In this fantasy he can barely control himself.

I went to see Fifty Shades of Grey in NYC’s Union Square at noon on a Tuesday. It had been out for ten days. The Internet had said the stars had no chemistry and obviously hated sex. A lot of my Facebook friends had said I should boycott it because it romanticized an abusive relationship. Rory and Alison had told me the sex scenes were incredibly boring, but the paperwork scenes were delightful. Marisa had posted a photo on Instagram of her and Matt looking sad after they watched it. So I basically knew what to expect.

I was pretty uncomfortable. Not because it was too sexy, not because I was offended, not even because I was a mom going to see some mommy porn by myself on a Tuesday afternoon. The actors were so uncomfortable! Poor Jamie Dornan’s Christian Grey was the saddest, most vanilla boyfriend in the world. Like a nice stockbroker or a lawyer or something that your college roommate is dating, and you tailgated with them at the Yale/Harvard game and he was, like, totally nice but you had nothing to talk about. You think he’s a good guy, though. He has beautiful sweaters. Your roommate implies that they really connect sexually. Jamie Dornan’s Christian Grey is what would happen if that nice vanilla boyfriend’s mom got kidnapped by the Jigsaw Killer and the Jigsaw Killer made him hit a girl with a belt to save his mom. That’s how Jamie Dornan looked when he was hitting Dakota Johnson with a belt, like he was glad this was all going to be over and he hoped the Jigsaw Killer would give him his mom back but he really, really wished he didn’t have to hit anyone with a belt, that’s not how he was raised. He mostly likes kissing.

The audience made me uncomfortable, too. There were three other women, all sitting alone, scattered throughout the theater, and one middle-aged bearded guy with something in his lap that made a rustling sound. It might have been popcorn, and he had every right to be there, but I wish he hadn’t been there. I wish I had just watched the movie with three other anonymous women; we would have made a painfully cheesy ad for the franchise’s universal appeal to women, we were so diverse in age and race and sartorial style and probably in the reasons we were free on a Tuesday at noon and maybe in the reasons we wanted to go see Fifty Shades of Grey in Union Square. A 2015 version of a 70s Times Square porno, with the genders reversed. Just some moms and grandmas eating popcorn and watching Jamie Dornan look uncomfortable and Dakota Johnson gasp and writhe and throw back her head and otherwise look sort of dorky and kind of cute.

In this fantasy I have always been the most beautiful woman in the world, I just didn’t know. In this fantasy really loving a few Victorian novels is enough to get me an amazing publishing job. In this fantasy I never need to finish this dissertation because my love of Victorian novels is as good as a dissertation. In this fantasy I love Jane Eyre so much that the idea for a wildly popular and lucrative fantasy franchise just comes to me in a dream. In this fantasy I love Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Twilight so much that I become rich beyond my wildest dreams and make millions of women come.

All this discomfort—mine and Jamie’s—says a lot about how Fifty Shades works, what it does, who it’s for. Whether or not you think E L James’s trilogy of novels is good for women, it’s undeniably a women’s text, written by a woman for women, in imitation of another text written by a woman for women (Fifty Shades began its life as Twilight fanfiction), as part of a long tradition of women’s popular fiction that includes mass-market bodice-rippers about reformed rakes; edgier women’s erotica; and the Brontë sisters’ obsession with bad boys.

I’m sure they could have cast a more enthusiastic actor to play Christan Grey. And I’m sure there are lots of men, straight and queer, who do find Fifty Shades of Grey at least kind of sexy. I mean, there are sex scenes, and boobs, and men’s and women’s sexy butts, so there’s something for everyone! And in real life, men are as interested as women in exploring and subverting gendered power dynamics. In real life, BDSM is not specifically about masculine dominance and feminine submission. But that’s exactly what Fifty Shades is about. As many brilliant women have pointed out, including Arielle Greenberg right here on WEIRD SISTER, Fifty Shades is a terrible misrepresentation of the BDSM community; Christian Grey is abusive, manipulative, and dysfunctional. The idea of a straight cis man being turned on by that dynamic makes me uncomfortable. You probably don’t belong here, bearded guy. You probably don’t belong here, Jamie. But I’m really interested in the Fifty Shades novels as a space where women are trying to work something out among themselves, however clumsily. Something about desire and violence, and violence and reality, and what is okay to want, and whether there are real-world consequences to fantasy, and what is our imagined relationship to power, and what is our real relationship to power, and how is power expressed through sex and mobility and money and stuff.

On New Year’s Eve, 2013, I had a delightful drunken argument with another WEIRD SISTER contributor about the Fifty Shades books. She was disgusted and saddened by the clumsy materialism in them, all the middlebrow brand names: Twinings Tea, MacBook Pro. We were both convinced Christian wore some specific middlebrow brand of body wash.

I admit to being just enough of a bohemian, just enough of a liberal elitist, to stand at an amused distance from middlebrow brand names, hamfisted prose, “mommy porn,” moms. I’m a cool mom, you guys. I’m barely a mom. I admit to chuckling deliriously at lines like “Double crap!” and “I don’t make love. I fuck. Hard.” I’m charmed by all this charming mediocrity, which is shitty and elitist of me, but I’m also charmed by the outsider position these texts take on sex, power, capitalism, wealth, America. The E L James who wrote Fifty Shades as Twilight fanfiction doesn’t seem to know what it’s like to be rich, really rich, and neither do I. On one level the text’s pathetic fetishization of Wealth and Power is just another example of ordinary people failing to understand how power actually works, daring to dream they could actually get power, letting the rich people continue to make all the decisions and believing it will somehow work out for the best. On another level I can’t help but be moved by that yearning to understand power, by the distance between these fantasies (women’s fantasies, my fantasies) and the sad, boring violence of reality.

I’ve written elsewhere about how, in the Twilight novels, vampirism is a strangely disappearing metaphor: it starts out as a stand-in for the destructive effect of male desire on women’s bodies, but as the novels progress Stephenie Meyer systematically removes every danger a vampire might pose to his human lover/victim. The Twilight vampires are literally, laughably de-fanged; the metaphor of bloodlust for sexual lust dissolves; the vehicle merges with the tenor; Edward’s desire for Bella rapidly becomes a metaphor for a boy’s desire for a girl, and then, due to Edward’s superhuman gentility and restraint, it’s barely even that. And then in her fanfiction version E L James replaced this non-metaphor for male violence with an even more literal non-metaphor. With, like, straight-up male violence. Holy crap, I don’t know what to do with that. I don’t think you do, either. Double crap!

In this fantasy he anticipates my every need. In this fantasy he can just tell which brand of tea is my favorite. In this fantasy he knows exactly which dove-gray chiffon halter dress will make me look the most exquisite. In this fantasy he knows exactly which dove-gray Italian tie will make me have the most powerful orgasm. In this fantasy I don’t have to lift a finger. In this fantasy he has a lot of experience. In this fantasy it’s the first time for both of us. In this fantasy he knows exactly what he’s doing. In this fantasy it all just comes so naturally. In this fantasy he has a Dark Secret. In this fantasy he needs me to make him whole. In this fantasy he can hurt me. In this fantasy he will never hurt me.

I’m glad people have pointed out that Christian and Ana’s relationship, like Edward and Bella’s, is unhealthy. I’m glad members of the BDSM community have made it clear that real-life BDSM doesn’t work the way it does in Fifty Shades of Grey. I’m glad people have pointed out that this stuff doesn’t turn them on, that the movie is a Valentine to materialism, that your love can’t fix an abuser. We need to talk about this stuff. But let’s also remember that Fifty Shades of Grey is itself another way of talking about this stuff. What if, rather than an inaccurate representation of BDSM, the Fifty Shades novels are trying to do the same work as BDSM: provide a space where people (in this case, specifically women) can safely, guiltlessly, ethically, pleasurably work through their complicated relationship to patriarchal power? In her Buzzfeed piece on the movie’s “sly capitalist seduction,” Anne Helen Petersen cautions us against the assumption that

“a film, book, or song is a hypodermic needle that, once injected in its viewer, reproduced its values in its new host. Instead, women — and some men — are watching Fifty Shades and processing how that vision of surrender, and Ana’s ultimate rejection of it, meshes with their own ideas of freedom. That’s how we consume media: We digest it.”

Sure, the wild popularity of the Fifty Shades of Grey franchise might be a symptom of a diseased culture, in the same way that rape fantasies are surely symptoms of rape culture. If our culture were healthier there would be fewer rape fantasies. But we understand that having a rape fantasy is fundamentally different from wanting to be raped. We understand that smart, healthy women can have rape fantasies. The problem posed by Fifty Shades of Grey, maybe, comes from its flip-flopping back and forth between pure fantasy and an uncertain realism. It’s uncomfortable with its own status as fantasy. It can’t fully relax into pornography.

I love what Arielle Greenberg says in her WEIRD SISTER post: “What we need in this culture are non-pathologized representations of masculinity, and healthy, non-misogynist depictions of masculine desire in action.” I think that’s how we make new fantasies: by imagining archetypes for desire that don’t turn every text into a palimpsest with layers of real/fake/tamed/eroticized violence. I love that so many women have figured out how to do that already. I hate that we still have to ask questions like, “Do housewives love all this submissive stuff because they feel like they don’t have control over their lives? Do Career Women love all this submissive stuff because they feel like they have Too Much Control?” Oh shut up. But I do still also kind of love that the whole world had to sit up and pay attention to thousands and thousands of words of crazy, dirty Twilight fanfiction.

In this fantasy power is always in the right place, always flowing in the right direction. In this fantasy all of this is for my own good. In this fantasy there’s no conflict between my submission to a higher power and the possibility of my own free will, the possibility of free choice, individualism, my Inner Goddess, my feminism. In this fantasy I can have it all. In this fantasy that includes the kind of sex I’ve dreamed about having with Mr. Darcy, Mr. Rochester, Alec d’Urberville, Angel Clare, Tea Cake, Edward Cullen, Leo-as-Gatsby, President Fitzgerald Grant, the kind of sex I’ve read about on the Internet, the kind of sex Sherlock has with Watson, Picard has with Kirk, Harry has with Draco. The sex that (straight, white, cis) men get to have with each other, sex between equals. 

In this fantasy my lover has been blinded in a fire, my lover has been bitten by a rabid dog, my lover has been burned by cigarette butts, my lover has been shot by an assassin, my lover floats face downward in a pool, my lover has been wounded by madwomen, by the proletariat, by drug dealers, by my mother, by his mother, my lover never had any power after all, women and poor people are the only ones with real power, I am an angel who can fix everything, I am driving the yellow Rolls-Royce, I am aiming the gun, I am lighting the fire, I am holding the riding crop, I am my lover’s eyes, I am his hand, I am his voice, I am the wounded lover, I am the wounded landowner, I am the wounded imperialist, I am the wounded CEO, I am the wounded Republican President, I am the most beautiful girl in the world, I am a terrorist, I am what is wrong with America today. In this fantasy if I could just suffer enough for him I could save him. In this fantasy if I could just suffer enough for America I could save America.

When I started writing this piece, I wondered why I feel such a fierce need to defend all this trashy stuff: Twilight, Fifty Shades, Gone Girl. Surely some of it is just straight-up bad for women. Actual trash.

For example: In the fall of 2013 everyone was upset about Miley Cyrus. Watching the “Wrecking Ball” video, I nursed my newborn daughter and sang “You wre-e-ecked me.” This is what I decided:

When I worry about what’s going to mess up my daughter’s relationship to sex and her body, I don’t worry about stuff like Miley’s twerking. I worry about casual, unexamined assumptions and inoffensive images and offhand comments about women’s bodies and beauty and agency and consent. That stuff will be everywhere: in the media, at school, in our house. I do worry about what Miley’s twerking could do to my daughter’s understanding of race. In her messy, over-the-top performances of her own sexuality, Miley was really grappling with the contradictory messages our culture sends to young women. That’s something I had to do all the time, still have to do. My daughter will need to work through that stuff, too; how can it be bad for her to see another woman trying to figure that out? Marking it as a problem? Miley’s appropriation of Black culture as part of those performances, though, seemed uncomplicated and thoughtless: of course that dance, those dancers, were hers for the taking. It’s going to be so easy for my kid to accept that kind of gesture as natural, as the way things are.

Is it really 80s of me to be most afraid of the unmarked, the unexamined, the natural?

I’m less afraid of big showy disasters like Fifty Shades of Grey, texts whose confused metaphors and confusing narrative logic mark them as urgent and contested and problematic, texts whose bulky knots of questions and justifications and doubts and reassurances make them feel unwieldy, unnatural. Maybe because that’s how I think (have you noticed, gentle reader?). Maybe because in not fully surrendering to this punishing culture we love so much, but still loving it so hard, these works arouse my sympathy and my frustration and my shame. Those big clumsy bulky knots can’t, like, cut off your circulation. They just make you a little uncomfortable, show you where the ropes come together, make you wonder if you might even be able to get out.