Fifty Shades of Grey

Before you ask why, here’s why.

A while ago, I edited a manuscript written by a dominatrix. I had never read Fifty Shades of Grey but was aware of its popularity at the time it was published. I asked my client why she thought that it had become so popular. After having read it, she simply said that the writer, EL James, had made the B&D and S&M mainstream. Nothing more, she said. We’re slowly breaking the taboos around all sorts of things, and this is one of them, she told me. I found a copy in the bargain bin at a bookstore (there were three copies. Doesn’t that tell you something?) and read the whole book. Yes, it is poorly written, embarrassingly so. It is repetitive, has character depictions as shallow as the Murray-Darling Basin, childish dialogue, and generally immature, one-dimensional portraiture of the leading players.

Those elements, however, are not the reasons I detested this book. Nor is the subject matter. Whatever floats your boat between consenting adults is fine. This trilogy (as if one wasn’t enough) retards the advancements that we, as women, have made and continue to make in modern times. The hard-fought battles of the feminist years and the concept of a woman having her own agency over her body and her mind are ongoing. They are not helped by the mainstream media, social media influencers and advertising, all domains where a woman’s value is diminished if she is not sexy. In Fifty Shades, she has to be sexy and subservient.

This book deals in outdated stereotypes and constructions that are anathema to the progress of women everywhere. There is the old trope of every woman wanting to be swept off her feet by a knight in shining armour. This man will make all her dreams come true and fulfil every fantasy she has ever had. It’s Cinderella on steroids. Quiet, demure, virgin journalist (because that’s believable!) meets billionaire, handsome Grey, who has an athlete’s body, can fly a helicopter and a plane, sail a boat, and work the share-market. You get the picture. I wondered if he could stack the dishwasher but, then again, he’d have hired help.

There has always been literature that explores women’s sex lives, from early erotic poetry, the Victorian sensation novels through to modern novels. Many of these novels followed the cultural conventions of the day in that a woman who dared to go beyond the boundaries (whether consensual or not – think Tess of the D’urbervilles) was usually punished by society or by fate. The vestal virgin Postumia, in AD Hopes, Advice to Young Ladies, was punished because her personality was too joyful, ‘her eyes, her walk, too lively.’ Woe betides a woman who enjoys what she does. In many novels of the Victorian era, ‘fallen’ women could only be redeemed through a ‘respectable’ marriage. Later, more modern novels often objectified women for their choices, their focus being on male desire with the women as a means to an end. The male gaze was never too far away.

Women don’t need a Christian Grey to explore their desires. The protagonist in this book didn’t need him either. The passive-dependent nature of her relationship with Grey is insulting. There is nothing equal about their relationship. For those who say Ana is exercising her choice to be a slave, there can be no argument. However, the power imbalance here needs to be considered. A narcissistic man who has complete control over a young girl who doesn’t know how to navigate her own sexual world, and who succumbs to his need for a sex slave for vacuous reasons that are never quite explained in this book beyond superfluous attraction make this a misogynistic tome and dangerous role modelling for young women who may want to explore their needs. It is ironic that Ana takes control of her choices, and one of those choices is to surrender complete control to a toxic man like Grey.

It’s pathetic, my client told me. And not believable.

El James has done nothing here but to perpetuate the tired, outdated fairy tales of women needing a man to control them, rescue them, educate them and, in doing so, bring them happiness.

If all of that wasn’t bad enough, there was worse to come. I refused to read the second book and went to a bookshop to skip through to the last pages of the third book. After all the B&D and S&M, suddenly, right at the end, there it was. Ana is having his baby. Redeemed by motherhood. Purified by pregnancy. Sanctified by sex. This polarisation of women’s identities harks right back to Damned Whores and God’s Police. There’s not a lot of grey (no pun intended) in this book. This dichotomous condition leaves no room for the fact that women can be and do a variety of things but, in these books, there is no integration of the many facets of a woman’s personality and preferences. They are neatly distilled down to a stereotype of every man’s fantasy. Girl next door or profligate. You’re one or the other, and if you’re the first, then you must make amends by getting married and procreating. And you will live happily ever after, except you will be too sleep-deprived to go down into the dungeon and lie on that torture rack, and your partner won’t like the look and smell of baby vomit on that lacy, no sorry, maternity bra. Truly awful.