Fifty Shades of Grey Is a Virgin Mary

By Walter Donway

February 28, 2015

I can’t write about Fifty Shades of Grey, but I can’t not write about it.

After seeing the movie on its second weekend, my companion, a woman who had insisted on going, emailed her friend: “It’s the worst movie I ever saw!” And got the prompt reply: “Yes, me too!” That, folks, covers a lot of movies seen by two women in their late sixties.

I can’t write about Fifty Shades because it is not a complex, hard-fought failure; it is so banal that I guffawed at some lines of dialogue and some scenes. What can you say? There is not one moment of effective suspense, not one arresting line.

The unfortunate actress and actor who perpetrate this thing, Anastasia (Ana) Steele (Dakota Johnson) as a college virgin with a sexy body and barely adolescent pretty face, and Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan) as a tech billionaire a few years older, also with a hot body and a handsome face—used in this film exclusively for penetrating gazes of minatory command—are enacting a story known to more than 100 million people who, since 2011, have bought the book or its two sequels, now translated into 56 languages.

I can’t not write about this book because I know pornography, damn it, including the vast historical sub-genre of dominance-submission, sadism-masochism, and this isn’t it. The Bloody Mary you ordered is Virgin Mary. Shades of Grey isn’t a shadow of the Victorian classic, A Man with a Maid, or the 1950’s cultural shocker, The Story of O.

As I left of the theater, I realized that E. L. James is not writing about BDSM (the overlapping abbreviation of “bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, sadism and masochism”). I could have kicked myself, right then, for not realizing sooner that this literary phenomenon, initially self-published, then occupying and defending the best-seller heights for months and years, had to be just a variation on the theme of all romances for women that clog today’s book shelves. Fifty Shades, of course, is a fantasy about a very ordinary young woman (an English lit. major working in a hardware store), with prospects for a probably ordinary life, who suddenly wins the Romantic Lottery, i.e., is discovered by a powerful, wealthy man who is consumed with lust for her. And, because she—yes, li’l ole she—is discovered to be so desirable, she becomes his princess. In some romances, the peasant girl becomes an actual princess—or duchess or countess—but, in many versions is transported by a merely rich man into a world of unimaginable luxury—all problems, planning, and struggle now behind her.

A review in the Economist puts it well: “…The film, like the book, often seems more of a paean to the aphrodisiac powers of fast cars and trips in helicopters and gliders than anything more outré.”

For their first date, it is Christian’s helicopter, piloted by him, whizzing low over downtown Seattle at night, literally laying the world at her feet. But, even earlier in the courtship, he had sent her some first editions of Thomas Hardy and Jane Austen novels, and, later, surprises her with a red sports car (having whisked away her li’l ole white Volkswagen).

You understand half of everything about Fifty Shades if you understand that the prince with the $26,000 Omega watch, private helicopter, and fleet of chauffeured Bentleys carries the peasant girl back to his penthouse/castle. I emphasize this because much commentary on Fifty Shades is wrangling over the sexual conflict, and Ana’s charged-up sexual experiences, as though that were the novel’s appeal.

This peasant girl’s daydream, which defines the romance novel, which, sitting beside thrillers, detective stories, fantasies, and horror novels, fills shelves at every airport convenience store, drugstore, grocery store, and hotel shop, says something about how women view the role of romance and their sex appeal in their possible futures. And that has not changed in a long, long time. Just as secret-agent thrillers, war thrillers, cowboy stories, and hardboiled detective stories say something about how men view the ideal of masculinity. (As though nothing happens without meaning, the preview in the theater before Shades of Grey was the brand new Walt Disney version of Cinderella.)

Fifty Shades of Grey, however, offers an unusual and (so it would seem) highly appealing variation on what every romantic fantasy must supply its readers: an answer to the question “Why me? How could I possibly deserve this?” Of course, the peasant girl is beautiful and sexy; she also is innocent, unspoiled, and open-hearted, qualities that the prince in his struggle to triumph in the hard world has lost but finds charming. Okay, but there are scads of pretty, sexy, even virginal college girls—and not nearly enough handsome powerful billionaire tech titans to go around.

Thus, the struggle that Fifty Shades does dramatize—indeed, erect into its engine of conflict—is intended to answer that question. Christian gets off on sexual dominance, the power to take what he wants from a woman, including submission to the rope, flogger, and riding crop. So you see? Li’l Anastasia does have something to offer in return for eternal ease and luxury, and the exchange is formalized, and dramatized, in an unfortunately unintentional satire on BDSM. The “contract” becomes the third actor in this drama; perhaps it will be nominated for an Oscar as best supporting paperwork. Christian’s contract, in many pages and clauses, specifies what Anastasia must accept in the elaborately equipped “playroom” (I actually blushed upon seeing this prurient emporium, a porno cliché on department store scale). Ana never does sign it, at least not in this first of the Shades of Gray trilogy, but step by step she goes along with Christian.

The device of the contract achieves two things but blows one big one. It gives the story credentials of consent (as in “consenting adults”), not that that will cut any ice with feminists who say the movie is about “abuse,” not sex; and it shows Ana painfully weighing how much she will give to be a princess. What the contract device sacrifices, unfortunately, is any plausible appeal of the erotic genre of BDSM.

The classics of sexual bondage, domination, infliction of pain and humiliation, and torture—within a genre stretching back at least to ancient Rome that has produced literally tens of thousands of books and stories—are never about consent. Christian’s meticulous legalistic demand for Anastasia’s consent at each step, which she gives, a little fearfully, has nothing to do with the tradition of BDSM literature, which does not have “safe words” (agreed signals to desist) or heartfelt, sensitive preliminary negotiations.

Not that all BDSM fantasies are about physical force, rape. Many are about other forms of coercion. A modern novel about coerced sex acts, A Spy in the Family, by Alec Waugh, once dubbed “the cleanest dirty book ever written,” involves a British politician’s wife caught in a fatal indiscretion and then blackmailed into sexual submission. Indeed, the literature of dominance and submission is shot through with psychological subtleties about how “dominance” is achieved.

Predictably, Ana tearfully confronts Christian with the questions: Why do you want to do it? Why do you want to hurt me? And he only mutters that he is “all fucked up.” In other words, at least here, in the first part of the trilogy, there is no attempt whatsoever to delve into the psychology of BDSM, although we do hear tidbits about Christian’s past (he was the sex slave at 15 of an older woman, his mother’s friend) that sound promising to investigate. I have not read the novels, but an extended summary seems to suggest that at the trilogy slogs on Christian’s kink is finally merely accommodated and he and Ana live HEA.

Nor does what Christian and Anastasia actually do, even in the movie’s final playroom scene, qualify as more than playing at BDSM (if one can play at playing). When Ana tearfully requests that Christian “do his worst” so she may discover “what he really wants,” he merely gives her half-a-dozen brisk whacks on the butt with his belt—each delivered in an agony of hesitation. (The film did not reveal if Ana had a realistically bright-red ass as she stormed out of the playroom.)

No, there is nothing unpleasant about watching Anastasia stripped by Christian; her body is sublime late-girl/early-woman, but, then, the prime age for female sexuality is between 14 and 18. And nothing unappealing in watching her body’s arousal at Christian’s delicate touch and kissing. It is a wonder that I sat watching this, knowing more was coming, yet yearned to walk out of the theater. The answer, I reason, is that the situation had lost credibility and so the sex had lost it, too. (Christian never comes, my companion pointed out.)

In the end, the sheer gruesome predictability of Fifty Shades eviscerates it. I read with interest that the movie, dominating its first weekend, so to speak, and setting records, experienced a plunge in attendance the second weekend. It remained first, but attendance was a shadow of the first weekend. One commentator suggested that the build-up, and then the first weekend blow out, stole potential audiences from this weekend. I suspect too many emails saying, “It’s the worse movie I ever saw.”

Time Magazine ran a feature on the novel and trilogy entitled: “Top 10 Racy Novels.” It called the book “S&M heavy” and compared it with Lolita (a brilliant stylistic triumph, but portraying little explicit sex), Fanny Hill (a Victorian classic with plenty of sex, but not much BDSM), The Story of O (the BDSM classic of the mid-20^th Century), and made still less illuminating comparisons with novels such as Peyton Place and Couples.

Yes, Fifty Shades is “S&M heavy” for a mainstream popular best-seller bought, read, and openly discussed by millions of women. So I may hope that the second and third novels are about BDSM and raise serious questions. Why is that important? Because whatever human drives and psychological needs cause men and women to be excited by sexual domination and submission–and their expression in fantasies of inflicting or accepting pain and humiliation as part of peak sexual arousal—have persisted since the ancient civilizations and flared into cultural obsessions in such periods the Restoration (the “Restoration rakes”) and the Victorian era. The Romantic poet Algernon Charles Swinburne wrote of S&M in his poems, in the longer Lesbia Brandon, and in contributions to The Whippingham Papers (1888). Today, unimaginably explicit BDSM erotica is the fare that tens of millions of Americans seek in books, comic books, movies, and, above all, on the internet.

The Kinsey Institute reports that more than half of all spending on the internet is for sex and that “porn revenues” are estimated to exceed the combined revenues of ABC, CBC, NBC, and other networks. Kinsey does not categorize the content of what it calls “explicit online sites,” but, although simple nudity and films of intercourse are common, there also are thousands of sites, some with huge followings and immense profits, that specialize in BDSM. There is no shortage of beautiful young women ready to partake of total, unlimited submission, and the “dominants” are both men and women. That is not surprising. Nancy Friday in her bestsellers, Women’s Sexual Fantasies and More Women’s Sexual Fantasies, reported that the most common fantasy of women was to be involved in some sex act against their will.

Since at least Sigmund Freud and the rise of psychoanalysis in the 1880s, psychologists have struggled with the existence of sadism and masochism, although it was the German psychologist, Richard von Kraft-Ebbing, who earlier had coined the two terms and defined them as personality disorders in which bodily punishment becomes sexually pleasurable. Freud defined masochism as a disorder of women, sadism of men, and attributed both to pent-up violent energy. Later, British psychologist Havelock Ellis argued that the two are merely complementary emotional states—and both can be used to express love. Alfred C. Kinsey in his once-sensational, now routine surveys of sexual behavior reported that 12 percent of female respondents and 22 percent of male respondents reported erotic response to a sadomasochistic story.

Here arises a confusion. Christian desires to act out his dominance and (mild) sadism on Anastasia, whereas Kinsey is reporting erotic reactions to a story. It is near to self-evident that people in real-life sadomasochistic relationships are a tiny percentage of those who enjoy fantasies about such relationships. This is why thousands of poems, stories, and books have woven fantasies of BDSM—some selling, as we know, 100 million copies. Is the personality that is excited by fantasies of BDSM the same as the personality that carries out the real thing?

Modern psychologists, in the famous Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) of psychological disorders, have struggled with whether or not to classify various manifestations of BDSM as “personality disorders.” It has become less common to do so. In any case, such categories refer to sadistic and masochistic sex—not to fantasies never acted upon or intended to be. In the same way, those who savor fantasies about being a criminal mastermind, and write or read stories that glorify them, have no intention of committing a crime. Well, all right, but are BDSM fantasies part and parcel of BDSM behavior only “less bad” because not enacted?

Perhaps, though, fantasies of enacting dominance and submission reveal differences in masculine and feminine sexual psychology: how each sex characteristically responds to the other sex in a purely sexual context? With this hypothesis, we find ourselves on the battlefield of today’s culture wars, where the suggestion that any differences in male and female sexual anatomy and sexual response might be the foundation of any significant and persistent psychological differences is anathema to many post-modernists.

And yet, to deny such psychological differences between the sexes, including a subtle but pervasive psychology of initiation versus response that is limited to the romantic-sexual realm, you must dismiss the evidence of much human experience in every culture and historical era for which we have records. Not least, you must dismiss the attraction of millions of readers, the great majority of the mature women, to Anastasia’s erotic response to Christian’s dominance, even as she gropes for a precarious handhold on the fashionable doctrine of women’s “complete sexual equality.” It is true I have said this appeal is secondary to the appeal of the Cinderella fantasy, but the S&M appeal has made this particular Cinderella fantasy a historic publishing phenomenon.

That is why it is a shame that the movie I saw this weekend holds out little hope that Fifty Shades will evolve from a Cinderella for consenting adults to exploration of masculine and feminine psychology and their manifestation in the search for erotic ecstasy in sexual dominance or submission.

Still, it has established beyond doubt that the issue is interesting!

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About the Author: Walter Donway

Walter Donway has written and edited for Savvy Street since its inception in 2014. His essays and interpretative commentaries on breakthrough books have dealt with philosophy, politics, literature, science, history, psychology, and personalities. His new novel, "Retaking College Hill,” became Amazon’s #1 bestseller in political fiction. This year, the Atlas Society published his Pocket Guide to The Fountainhead and Romanticism Reborn--essays on the Romantic movement in literature and its 20th Century revival in Ayn Rand's novels. His collections of essays and short stories and his "Collected Poems" are available on Amazon. He lives in East Hampton with his wife, Robin.

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