50 Shades of Grey
Jul. 23rd, 2012 11:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackI haven't read this, but I read a bunch of people ranting about it, and talking it over with Liv, I think I got a handle on what people object to.
The trouble is, it's not supposed to be a book about BDSM. It's supposed to be a book about Beauty and the Beast: "young innocent girl has infatuation with rich, important, good looking guy WHO HAS A TERRIBLE SECRET and they can't be together BECAUSE HE HAS A TERRIBLE SECRET, so in the end she tragically LEAVES HIM / ACCEPTS HIS TERRIBLE SECRET [delete whichever is innapropriate]."
And "was abused as a child, so can only enjoy sex while hurting people" is a proxy for TERRIBLE SECRET: from what I hear, the sexual dominance in the book is a lot more about traditional romance novel "he buys her things and tells her how to run her life" and his kink is mostly treated as a weird abhorrant thing, not an excuse for porn. In other words, it's ironically not a BDSM porn novel, it's a non-BDSM porn novel about BDSM...
But this obviously polarised the demographics. People who think "Eek! He is so depraved!" and enjoy his characterisation as a very dominant sexy man with a TERRIBLE SECRET, obviously don't care whether the BDSM shown is safe or incredibly dangerous, they think it's ALL dangerous stuff that's good for fantasies but you shouldn't try in real life, so it doesn't matter whether you show the less-dangerous stuff or the more-dangerous stuff, in fact, you shouldn't try to pretend it's safe. I think the author is in this category.
But unsurprisingly, writing a book where subculture X is used to mean "evil" is incredibly offensive to anyone who is actually involved with or accepting of subculture X in real life. (Imagine how offensive the book would be if it equated "sex with people of race X" with "evil" instead of equating "sex with spanking" with "evil").
It's not specifically unrealistic: in real life, there are plenty of people who, knowing or unknowing, DO practice unsafe, abusive activities from ANY lifestyle. But it's problematic that the book sets up the expectation that he IS representative.
And people who know anything about BDSM also think that some people might read the book and find that they are interested in BDSM even if they didn't realise it before, but it's unfortunately possible that because the book conflates everything between "stuff which is perfectly safe for people who mostly like vanilla sex to try to spice things up on occasion" and "stuff which is physically and emotionally abusive", they may think a safe and sensible first foray into BDSM not be something like roleplaying token bondage, but an example from the book of things suggested to a sexual and BDSM virgin, such as:
* Tying someone's wrists with something likely to cut them
* Bullying someone into agreeing to something, and then forcing them to go through with it, even when they're showing immediate and dramatic signs of distress
* Bullying someone into signing an illegal and unenforceable "you own me for the rest of my life" contract as a precursor to any form of sexual contact whatsoever.
The trouble is, it's not supposed to be a book about BDSM. It's supposed to be a book about Beauty and the Beast: "young innocent girl has infatuation with rich, important, good looking guy WHO HAS A TERRIBLE SECRET and they can't be together BECAUSE HE HAS A TERRIBLE SECRET, so in the end she tragically LEAVES HIM / ACCEPTS HIS TERRIBLE SECRET [delete whichever is innapropriate]."
And "was abused as a child, so can only enjoy sex while hurting people" is a proxy for TERRIBLE SECRET: from what I hear, the sexual dominance in the book is a lot more about traditional romance novel "he buys her things and tells her how to run her life" and his kink is mostly treated as a weird abhorrant thing, not an excuse for porn. In other words, it's ironically not a BDSM porn novel, it's a non-BDSM porn novel about BDSM...
But this obviously polarised the demographics. People who think "Eek! He is so depraved!" and enjoy his characterisation as a very dominant sexy man with a TERRIBLE SECRET, obviously don't care whether the BDSM shown is safe or incredibly dangerous, they think it's ALL dangerous stuff that's good for fantasies but you shouldn't try in real life, so it doesn't matter whether you show the less-dangerous stuff or the more-dangerous stuff, in fact, you shouldn't try to pretend it's safe. I think the author is in this category.
But unsurprisingly, writing a book where subculture X is used to mean "evil" is incredibly offensive to anyone who is actually involved with or accepting of subculture X in real life. (Imagine how offensive the book would be if it equated "sex with people of race X" with "evil" instead of equating "sex with spanking" with "evil").
It's not specifically unrealistic: in real life, there are plenty of people who, knowing or unknowing, DO practice unsafe, abusive activities from ANY lifestyle. But it's problematic that the book sets up the expectation that he IS representative.
And people who know anything about BDSM also think that some people might read the book and find that they are interested in BDSM even if they didn't realise it before, but it's unfortunately possible that because the book conflates everything between "stuff which is perfectly safe for people who mostly like vanilla sex to try to spice things up on occasion" and "stuff which is physically and emotionally abusive", they may think a safe and sensible first foray into BDSM not be something like roleplaying token bondage, but an example from the book of things suggested to a sexual and BDSM virgin, such as:
* Tying someone's wrists with something likely to cut them
* Bullying someone into agreeing to something, and then forcing them to go through with it, even when they're showing immediate and dramatic signs of distress
* Bullying someone into signing an illegal and unenforceable "you own me for the rest of my life" contract as a precursor to any form of sexual contact whatsoever.
no subject
Date: 2012-07-24 04:50 am (UTC)Here is my half-joking response of "I thought that's how the wait-for-marriage crowd was doing it all along..."