Fifty Shades of Grey: A Good Thing

Warning: this post contains potentially upsetting and triggering imagery, and discussions of upsetting and triggering topics. Caution is advised.

When news that E.L. James' infamous erotic novel was heading toward the big screens, I did not believe it. Quite frankly, I did not want to. I had taken one look at the book, read its reviews, read responses to those reviews, and been thoroughly disgusted. This disgust was only hammered home all the further when I cautiously took a look at a few samples from the book, to see it for myself.

I was disgusted. As, it turns out, were many others. Fifty Shades of Grey, as fast as it became a bestseller, also became infamous as the worst thing to happen, not only to erotic novels, but to erotic fiction, women in fiction, and even in feminism, almost overnight.

However, one has to look closer at the much bigger picture in order to see that, actually, Fifty Shades might just be heralding something truly wonderful.

I am not going to be dealing with the details of the sexual politics and practices taking place in this book - the BDSM community is far better qualified in those examinations than I will ever be, and while what I wish to discuss is not entirely divorced from the problems discussed here, it is not with those exactitudes that I wish to tangle today. 

Female-oriented erotica is hardly a new phenomena, and nor is its general treatment. One only has to take a skulk about the lower shelves of your local Oxfam's books section to see hundreds of schmaltzy romance titles featuring bare-breasted maidens in the arms of hunky boytoys clustered among the dust bunnies, relegated to the shadows by disgruntled interns who would rather not recognise the existence of the dreck their poor employer has been saddled with.

Herein lies the metaphor for female sexuality as viewed and expressed by the public majority of readers. It's not that books about the subject don't exist, or that they are not wildly successful - it's just that they're clearly absolute rubbish, enjoyed only within the circles of sad, lonely women with no standards for plot, characters or writing quality. Nobody expects to walk into a bookstore at see something likeMaster of Desire or Tender Is The Storm sitting on public display in the New or Bestellers lists of your local Waterstones.

While Fifty Shades of Grey certainly doesn't hold up much better on any of these fronts, it does prove something very important - that female sexuality can be, and is, popular and portrayable in mainstream erotic fiction. However dubious and warped the execution, E. L. James has essentially proved that a book whose sole premise is based around the sexual encounters, desires, and experiences of a woman is not something that is excluded from the public consciousness on the grounds of any intrinsic indecency.

The importance of this proof is massive. Whether or not you agree with the graphic portrayal of sexual relationships in books or film, the politics behind it cannot be ignored. 

Fun fact: a film featuring any graphic sexual content must be rated R. However, if a film's sex scenes focus more than usual on the pleasure of the woman, it is almost automatically upgraded to an NC-17 in the new MPAA ratings. Examples include The Cooler, a violent flick which had to cut a scene featuring consensual oral sex on a woman in order to drop back to an R rating, and Boys Don't Cry, which had to cut a shot of a female orgasm to miss an NC-17 rating, with no comment being passed on the rape and murder of another female* character in the film's climax. 

Think about the ramifications for this for a moment - portrayal of overt female pleasure is more highly restricted than graphic violence, sexual assault, and murder. 

Fifty Shades of Grey, of course, cannot be mentioned without touching on the fact that it, too, contains its fair share of abusive treatment wrongfully portrayed as the fulfilment of a romantic fantasy.  It is a deeply troubling specimen of a book - the rearing head of an undercurrent in a deep, dark sea at the bottom of female-oriented erotic literature. It is regressive in its message, poor in its written execution, and in my opinion a new low in the depths of shlocky, unpleasant, ill-educated erotica. 

But that does not mean that there may not be better books. Books who, thanks to the success of this lumpy, mis-shapen goliath, may find the walls broken down in its wake, and be able to come dancing through with stories and messages of their own. 

Books where female pleasure is explored, and celebrated. 

Books where non-conventional sexual practices like BDSM are portrayed with interest and accuracy.

Books where authors and readers alike can push through new avenues of erotic exploration and create little revolutions of their own.

Fifty Shades of Grey is not a good book, not by any stretch of the word. But what it has done, and proved, and what may rise from its legacy, are undeniably wonderful.

~ Charley R

* - the character in question is actually a female-to-male transsexual, with female genitalia. Not female identifying, but physically female-sexed - hence the issue.

I Hate Female Characters - And It's Yoko Ono's Fault

As most of you will probably be aware, The Beatles are the most famous thing to come out of the UK since cholera, and have been just about as ubiquitous in their effect on society and culture, in music and beyond.

For many years they ruled the world, a sextet of talented, intelligent, memorable individuals universally adored by the public and critics alike. Though they went through their difficulties - everything from artistic disagreements to religious disaffection as well as the standard substance abuses and attachment to gag-inducing haircuts - the band remained united by a friendship that endured through all the ups and downs of their rise to superstardom.

But then, from the blackest pits of hell, came disaster. Onto the scene of this triumph of platonic endeavour burst a flapping, shrieking, malevolent force that singlehandedly brought about the end of an iconic age of music and brotherhood.

And that, according to popular belief, is how Yoko Ono ruined the world.

While neither a fan of The Beatles or Yoko Ono myself, I am more than familiar with the story, and the feelings that lie behind it.

In the figure of Ms Ono I have come to recognise that which, without a doubt, I despise most in all of book-dom: the nagging wife, the overbearing mother, the petulant daughter, the spiteful fiancée, the sexy seductress, the wailyweepy damsel-in-distress, the scheming sister. She whose very existence seems to have been to ruin a relationship I have come to love and treasure, and on whom descends the full force of my deep, burning, utterly irrational hatred.

Such was the cultural impact of her involvement in the last months of their existence, and the interpretation of her actions, that Yoko Ono has since come to be demonised on a level I do not think I would be exaggerating in saying was comparable to Hitler. The aftershocks of Yoko Ono's story are still being felt today.

However, the story of Yoko Ono is also a story of me - and how I came to hate female characters.

Yoko Ono was to fans of The Beatles what a female character came to mean to me, subliminally, through much of my reading life. She was an intrusive force, an interruption to the lives and adventures of the characters I had come to love and feel for throughout the course of the story. Her arrival signalled a threat to the relationships in which I had invested myself, a halt to the story while she sank her claws into one of my beloved characters and devoured their life and soul, neccessitating a complete reconfiguration of priorities, circumstance, and strategy.

What guise she came in did not matter - she was always there, waiting, just waiting to get her claws into my story and drag it into the woeful pits of forced romance that made me want to throw the book across the room in frustration. Oh, she might look innocent now, riding under the guise of a side character, or a mentioned relation, or (gods preserve us) a fellow protagonist, but sooner or later she would show her true colours. And I, full of suspicion and vitriol, would be waiting for her.

I was, of course, wrong. Just as wrong, in fact, as the fans of The Beatles were, in becoming so focussed on one element that the wider aspects of the whole completely fell off the radar.

Yoko Ono was not the only reason that The Beatles broke up. And not every female character is a narrative saboutage waiting to happen.

What is at fault here, rather, lies at the throbbing, tumorous heart of the greater issue that these irrational mistakes are born from - that one mistake can have far wider ramifications than anyone could have expected.

I do not consciously seek out to regard every female character I encounter with mistrust and suspicion. I would love nothing better than to be dementedly excited at the sight of their skills and interests, to chew my nails and claw at my hair and laugh and cry and shriek along with the ups and downs of their narratives, to treasure their relationships as I do those of the other characters... but, just as the die-hard fans will forever dig up new revelations regarding Yoko Ono's meddling with the vision and direction of The Beatles in their last months, current trends in writing refuse to let up in the slew of female characters who prove my every suspicion is grounded in truth.

The greatest injustice in this matter, and the greatest subsequent tragedy, falls upon the hated few. Yoko Ono was, and is, a visionary artist, musician, thinker, writer and individual, before and after she met John Lennon. Every female character, too, has a story of her own, completely apart from the role she takes upon being introduced to the established dynamic.

But nobody cares, because her story is not the one they are reading.

Nobody knows, or cares, about Yoko Ono herself. Nobody cares to realise that she had a following and a reputation and a life of her own, that it was John Lennon's interest in her that brought them together, or that it was he who invited her to provide feedback on the direction of his failing band in the hopes it could be saved.

Nobody cares, either, why the female character has come into the story, or acts the way she does, or why her introduction must neccessitate such a change. Things were fine the way they were before she came in, after all. Why should she have to come in and shake things up, pull things apart, ruin everything that we have come to know and love? Why is she even here?

Why do I still believe this, even when I know I'm being foolish?

Because of bad writing? Because of sloppy characterisation? Because of tropes, conventions, and endemic habits of writers who need a cheap conflict to keep their story interesting? Because the neccessity of the romance plot has yet to be challenged? Because the love interest is treated only as an accessory to the hero? Because blaming a woman has been a cultural practice from as far back as pre-history? Because heteronormative phallogocentrism is so pertinent that clearly a female character has no other purpose in a story than to Get Her Man by any means possible?

All may be true, or false, to a lesser or greater extent. But, really, it all boils down to one, very simple, reason.

Because her story is not the one we are reading.

Because nobody cares enough to write it.

~ Charley R