Tag Archives: 50 shades of grey

Thinking About BDSM

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There are a lot of journalistic misconceptions spaffing their way round the press and social media in the week that the “50 Shades” film is being released. It’s always nice to find something that is the exact opposite of those articles. Here’s a snippet from Thinking About BDSM, by Alison Bancroft:

“…We live in a world where kink is criminalized, and sexual autonomy is circumscribed by law and pathologised by medical orthodoxy. People who practice BDSM can and do lose their jobs, their homes, and even their children, because of their sexual preferences, in a way that previously was reserved for gay men, and unmarried mothers. Under the circumstances, it’s hard to see why anyone would choose it as a lifestyle.

Except, they don’t choose it. Sexuality – what gets you off, and who and how you fuck, or not – is not a choice. It’s not just an activity, something you do. It’s something you are. Sexuality is neither genetic, nor a conscious decision. We know from psychoanalysis that sexual desire is instead a developmental process that takes place from the minute you are born, that never stops, and that occurs in the deepest, darkest and most inaccessible recesses of your mind. It is created through the encounters we all have as individuals with the world around us, with our parents initially, and later with broader social injunctions, and these encounters then mould our unconscious in ways that no-one as yet fully understands, and shapes, amongst other things, our erotic desires…”

Read the full post here.

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Books

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Here’s a chunk of a fascinating article from Litro about written erotica, and how it has become gendered – and is therefore no longer perceived as having the power to shock and corrupt in the way that visual images of sexuality do:

“…The idea of young people’s unfettered access to online porn is here presented as eclipsing numerous (unwanted?) pregnancies and even the transmission of STDs in terms of its impact upon the health of the nation. If we take cultural unease and attempts at censorship as a barometer of a text’s status as pornographic, then it would seem that the image has largely superseded the word.

This idea is to some extent reflected by the mainstream media response to theFifty Shades phenomenon; its explicit depictions of Ana Steele and Christian Grey engaging in BDSM-inflected sex are not described as porn per se, but as “mommy porn”. The introduction of this prefix mitigates and qualifies, suggesting that these written texts are not dangerous or inflammatory, but banal, acceptable, domestic. Even within a contemporary culture that loves to vaunt the supposedly radical possibilities of sexual transgression, the books fail to meet some standard of appropriately pornographic naughtiness. Of course, the “mommy porn” label may simply be meant to characterize the books’ readership – the Collins English Dictionary defines it as “a genre of erotic fiction designed to appeal to women” – but the terms also conflates ideas about gender and form. It may be that linguistic pornography is perceived as being less culturally problematic (that is to say, less pornographic) than its image-driven counterpart because it is more typically associated with an adult female audience. After all, as Jane Juffer points out in her book At Home With Pornography, “erotic fiction” has historically been particularly accessible to (and associated with) women.

Written forms of the sexually explicit are seen as being for women, whose sexuality is not perceived as posing the same kind of social problems as that of the corruptible child or the potentially violent male, and whose enjoyment is assumed to be predicated upon the pleasures of a conventional, Mills & Boon-style romance narrative. As the “mommy porn” label suggests, a woman’s desire – especially a mother’s – is not seen as predatory or transgressive, but as cosy and possibly slightly laughable. Even James’s focus on the supposedly taboo pleasures of BDSM fails to inject any sense of danger into proceedings…”

Please do read the whole article here. It’s ace.

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Femsub, Femdom and Feminism

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Last week’s pseudo-scientific load of arse came courtesy of Newsweek. Its cover story presumed that it’s the advancement of feminism that has led to the increased popularity of femsub fiction, television and film. Well, yes: Feminism allows individual women to explore and embrace whatever their own sexual peccadilloes may be, whether femsub, femdom or any range of possible scenarios. However, the article appears to assume that a woman’s natural role is that of the submissive, and that the presumably amorphous hive-mind of female sexuality has embraced these sexual surrender fantasies to counter the rise of those eeeevil feminazis and their man-crushing, cock-blocking, ball-busting, misandrist bids for gender equality at work. ‘It is perhaps inconvenient for feminism that the erotic imagination does not submit to politics, or even changing demographics,’ writes the article’s author, Katie Roiphe. Oh dear.

In response to this article, Dana Goldstein wrote a brilliantly sensible article for The Nation on Feminism and Sadomasochistic Sex, and here’s a snippet:

‘…Why assume, as Roiphe seems to, that some authoritative brand of feminism was ever supposed to lead to human beings losing their curiosity about power play during sex, which is, after all, a physical act? And while more women than men may tend toward submission—in part because Western culture fetishizes male strength and female fragility—one certainly can’t generalize. People of all genders harbor the fantasy of, as one sex researcher put it, “the wish to be beyond will, beyond thought”—thus surrendering power to a trusted partner. And there is anecdotal evidence that publicly powerful people of both sexes are especially prone to these fantasies, as a release from the stresses of their day-to-day work lives. Here’s how one professional dominatrix describes it:

“I like to find out what a man does for a living. I see a lot of Wall Street types who go for bondage and humiliation. Lawyers, actors and entertainment executives never shut up. I have to gag them right away if I’m to have any peace. True masochists are rare—they’re usually police and ex-military. These men are such show-offs about how much pain they can take. I end up acting the role of a sadistic drill instructor, breaking canes and riding crops on their backs, which gives me a certain confidence in our armed forces.”

I will admit that feminism’s forward march contributes to some people’s interest in S&M. Gender roles are more fluid than ever, and there are no longer strict rules about how men and women should act in the realms of dating and romance. There is certainly an appeal to retreating to a sexual space in which roles are much clearer.

Sadomasochism is problematic if one partner is doing it just to please the other and feels hurt by it. But I don’t think truly consensual S&M complicates women’s demands for full equality, or provides evidence of some anti-feminist backlash among the urban educated class that is consuming work like “Girls,” “Secretary” and Fifty Shades of Grey. Because many women now assume a certain level of egalitarianism at work and at home, they feel more comfortable experimenting sexually…’

Read the full, very-bloody-good article here.