Beastly Reviews: Fifty Shades of Grey

Beginner kink for straight people.

I'm already tired of the Fifty Shades of Grey franchise and we're just getting started. I want to write a book someday and it's a bit disparaging to see how brilliantly bad writing sells.

E. L. James is making bank. Like millions of people, I paid fifteen dollars to read Fifty Shades, book one. I couldn't finish it. The writing was awful: "I'm not sure Wanda, my old VW Beetle, would make the journey in time. Oh, the Merc is a fun drive, and the miles slip away as I hit the pedal to the metal." It doesn't get better from there.

While sub/dom relationships are fine and healthy, it's a little problematic that Grey is a very rich and powerful male CEO and Ana is a poor female student — someone who is already dependent on a number of people in positions of power over her (parents, teachers, boss). Their relationship calls to mind the many real-life cases of powerful men exploiting young women with impunity. It doesn't really help that Jamie Dornan, who plays Mr. Grey, first drew attention for his role as a serial killer of women in the fabulous crime drama series The Fall, which ended in 2016. This role feels uncomfortably similar — both characters like extreme domination.

I tried reading the book to prepare for the movie after reading Buzzfeed articles and angry Facebook posts about how the franchise purportedly gives people the wrong idea about BDSM. I see why some people have made that accusation, but I'm not sure it's completely fair. There are, in fact, live-in submissives in our community who do sign contracts like the one Mr. Grey repeatedly urges Ana to sign, but in real life, any contract for a BDSM relationship is not a binding legal document and cannot really protect anyone. Many people make and sign contracts for sexual theater, to make the BDSM agreement seem more official, but it's nothing you can involve a lawyer with.

The bigger problem than the contract is the fact that Ana Steele is simply not kinky. She is pushed, wooed, and pressured into this BDSM relationship by a wealthy, powerful man, and therein lies the problem. Submissives enter into kinky sex willingly — many of us seek out our dominants. There's nothing technically wrong with a poorer woman submissive seeking a BDSM setup with a wealthy male dominant, but Ana is decidedly not, and she is frightened by Grey for most of the book (and movie). Her naiveté is presumably what makes Grey attracted to her — a delicate, innocent, corruptible thing — but that's also what makes her easily manipulable, and it's what makes the book (and movie) feel a little rapey.

One criticism I've heard from kinky people is that the series romanticizes an abusive relationship under the guise of BDSM. I'm not certain this is true either, and I would remind kinksters that BDSM encompasses a range of scenes, practices, interpretations, and lifestyles, some of which are quite extreme. There are some BDSM relationships that I myself would consider bordering on abuse which some hardcore kinksters enjoy and deem healthy and sustainable.

Forgive me for this, but...it's a shade of gray. Would I consider being caged and collared for six months and fed in a doggy bowl psychologically damaging? Maybe even abusive? Yes, totally. But some people spend years hunting for a master who will do just that.

In the real world, where people's kinky limits can be clearly listed on a website profile or discussed at a casual sit-down, Ana and Christian would have realized quickly that they are just sexually incompatible. Grey wants a weekend submissive into hard S&M, who likes being punished, controlled, and ordered around — and Ana is a virgin who is definitely not seeking that. You just can't do all that with someone who knows nothing about sex. Asking Ana to be that person is like asking a first-time gym user to be a personal trainer — you can give them the tools, but they still have no idea what they're doing and you won't get good results.

Ana has no clue what she wants, but whatever it is, it's not this, and as a virgin to sex, she has no business getting into kink before learning the basics. She truly knows nothing — and knowing nothing makes her easy to take advantage of. See the problem?

Another issue: the book and film present inklings of a "mystery" around the origins of Mr. Grey's kinkiness, which is presumably explored in the following two books (and in the regrettable films that will follow this one). It's hinted that his current sex life is the result of some earlier abuse or trauma, at the hands of a past relationship. This suggests that kink is only experienced as a byproduct of trauma — that it belongs only to damaged people with baggage.

Kink is healthy. Even if it "comes" from bad experiences, even if it comes from trauma, kink itself is not the sole purview of society's wounded masses. I don't have a great history with my dad. I'm also really into older men and often have sex with men who are my father's age. A psychotherapist may link the two, but so what? Being attracted to older men has not disrupted my life — if anything, it's enriched it. Kink isn't trauma, nor is it traumatizing — it's simply what some people do to get off. There are many kinksters who have managed to live mostly trauma-free lives and just happen to be into nasty shit. If anything, kink usually helps people mend their wounds, sexual and otherwise. Many who have experienced real trauma in the past find kink an empowering space where they retake their power and agency in profound and beautiful ways.

I don't know for certain why E. L. James wants to pathologize Grey's kinks, and by extension demands us to do so, but I have an idea. E. L. James' depiction of kink is what someone would write who has no real experience in BDSM. It reads like the fantasy of someone who did enough research to know what flogging is but has never gone to a fetish gathering or BDSM play party or navigated a consensual BDSM relationship. I posit that E. L. James is not kinky. Non-kinky people are shocked by kink and try to pathologize it — authentic kinksters know better. I can't presume to know James' inner life, but that is, at least, how the book reads. Take from that what you will.

In the end, Christian and Ana's onscreen playtime is what I call "vanilla kink" — the most basic stuff to shock non-kinky, heterosexual people. The whole thing feels like a made-for-TV movie designed to sell a line of cheap sex toys to people who think a velvet blindfold is hardcore. And although it has a theatrical release, that's exactly what it is. I went to a local sex shop recently and there is already a dedicated section of 50 Shades merchandise: plastic paddles, furry handcuffs.

I liked the slowed-down, sultry version of Beyonce's "Crazy In Love" but overall rolled my eyes. I lamented the whole thing for what it was — a decidedly unsexy movie riding on the preassumed shock value of kink to fuel interest. If blindfolds don't scare you, you'll yawn.

Love, Beastly