I've talked about this in here a few times over the years but I don't think I ever made an actual post about it. Bear with me, this is going to get really nerdy, but I think it's interesting and relevant to PPD.

Welcome to my TED Talk. Today I would like to talk about 50 Shades of Grey, and how it actually says a lot about female sexuality, but not for the reasons most people think it does.

I've heard it a thousand times. "Look at the sales of 50 Shades of Grey! It's about bondage and women being tied up and spanked and dominated and it's the best selling book ever! That means all women want to be tied up and spanked and dominated!"

To make my argument against this commonly held misconception of what is actually going on, we're gonna need to take a few steps back. Buckle in, I'm about to take you down a deep rabbit hole. My apologies in advance.

First and foremost, I would put good money on the fact that many people who hold the above opinion about 50SOG have not read the three books. Not the movies, the books, and honestly I don't think that many people have seen the movies either. I only did because I come from the world I'm about to take you through, and the whole thing is fascinating to me.

To anyone who doesn't know, 50 Shades of Grey was a fanfiction before it was a published book. Specifically, it was Twilight "alternate universe" fanfic, in which the characters were all plucked the original stories setting (high school, a small town in Seattle, woods and shit I guess) and put into a new one, in this case a plot where a rich playboy falls for plain jane and he also has a secret rich guy sex dungeon tee hee. This type of setting swap is a popular genre in fanfiction. Maybe in an Avengers AU (alternate universe) story all the hero teams are rock bands! Captain America is the lead singer, Hulk is the drummer obviously. Who would Tony Stark be, the brooding bass player? Oh, Pepper Potts could be a groupie who falls in love with him. Nick Fury could be their manager! The Guardians of the Galaxy are the opening band... I'm just making this shit up right now but you get my point it's fun, and these sort of "alternate universe" things are super commonplace in fanfiction. All the character's personalities and relationships to each other are roughly the same, their jobs and circumstances are just different and it's a fun "what if" experiment.

So we have the Twilight characters in this new setting. Anastasia is obvious Bella, Christian is Edward. Ana's vaguely ethnic friend who likes her but obviously doesn't a chance with her at all was Jacob, so we clearly see where the author landed on the great Edward/Jacob divide within the fandom. To anyone only vaguely familiar with Twilight, Edward was the hot vampire and Jacob was the hot werewolf and all four books are just this hemming and hawing over which one the main character is gonna get with. And even though it was pretty obvious it was gonna be the vampire the fans took incredibly firm, vocal stances about which boy deserved the girl. Anyways.

So the original audience of 50SOG were Twilight fans who already were familiar with the characters, more than familiar they were superfans who not only lived and breathed the source material, they were also readers of fanfiction and had pairing preferences and ways they thought the characters should be represented, and what I'm trying to get at is that they were heavily emotionally invested in the characters, as was the author of the story. So 50SOG was written with that built into the prose, the absolute given of the deep emotional connection between the two leads, the insane sexual chemistry between them even from the get-go. That is implied from the very first time the characters meet, and it is deliberately slow burned to their first time having sex, which is also Ana's (or Bella's, depending on which version you're reading) first time, so it's like super special. Keep in mind that fanfiction is written by women for women, and those women are often lonely, inexperienced, super nerdy and socially awkward in addition to being super horny. They don't want to have meaningless/casual sex, they're often but not always too weird to have or want actual relationships, so they mostly have online social lives where their friends are other fanfic authors and they just talk and blog and create all day about whatever show/book/movie they're into. They get their sexual jollies off via fanfiction.

So even though 50SOG is not very well written (in my opinion) it is still crafted to make women horny in a way a female author from the culture of fanfiction understands. It is a slow burn. They don't have sex until maybe halfway through the book? There's lots of build-up, tension, flirting, teasing, suggestive language used in the prose to make your brain go there. The guy is crazy about her, and even though he's an asshole lots of the time it is an underlying surety that he is utterly devoted to the female lead.

So here's the funny part. All the marketing, all the buzz, it's about the hot bondage stuff, right? Here's the actual plot of all three 50SOG books/movies. So ~SPOILERS~ I guess after this lol

Ana is a journalist. She's just some average girl (even though she's portrayed very beautifully, she has super low self esteem and it's supposed to be both flattering and relateable to the reader who is assumed to be imagining herself as the lead) and she's a virgin at 21 and for whatever reason she's been chosen to interview this hot young billionaire. He has some actual job title I'm sure but I don't remember it and it doesn't matter, he never actually does any work, his job only comes into play as a plot device. Even though she has no idea why and the reader isn't given a good explanation either, Christian becomes obsessed with her. He's fascinated by her. Finds her to be the most beautiful, interesting woman in the entire world, and it's established he could have literally anyone, but he wants her. That's the fantasy, same as Twilight. He's impossibly desirable, she's clunky and nervous, but he must have her, he must. He flies her to Paris for dinner, they helicopter around and shit, he wines and dines the fuck out of her to impress her with his wealth and status. My goodness, she's just a poor college student/young professional with a roommate in a small apartment who thinks Olive Garden is fancy! And now she's being taken out to do rich people stuff and she's just swept off her feet.

But oh no, she's worried that he'll hate that she's a virgin. In fact he isn't stoked about it. Because as he explains to her during that conversation, he's into bondage, and he can only enjoy sex when the woman's tied up and stuff, he's so naughty. She kinda freaks out and he ultimately caves and says he'll do non bondage sex with her, but only to take her virginity. After that, if she wants to be with him, she has to do it his way. So she's really into him and really wants to have sex with him so even though she's not interested in the bondage stuff, she says yes anyways and they have normal sex, hoping that maybe he'll see how nice it is and be okay with normal sex with her. Nope, he still wants the bondage stuff. So basically the bulk of the first book is him laying out his terms, he wants her to sign a "consent contract", a list of things he's interested in doing to her and she says yes or no to each one then after she's signed he's allowed to do any of the yes stuff whenever he wants. She's so naive that when she's reading the list, she doesn't know what a butt plug is, tee hee. So they don't actually do any of the stuff, she just has anxiety about it all and as she starts to get cold feet and pull away he gets freaked out and aggressive which makes her pull away more and that goes on for a while. Then the first book/movie culminates with her being like "Fine! I'll give you the bondage sex since that's what you want if it will shut you up!" basically. And he "ties her up" and "spanks her" in the most vanilla, wannabe BDSM scene ever and she freaks the fuck out and runs out of the house crying, end of book.

Then in the second book she's still mad at him but they ultimately start seeing each other again because of that implied, constant, unyielding, never-in-question-by-the-reader connection and chemistry between them, so they're obviously not going to stay apart. What kind of Twilight fanfic would not have Bella and Edward make up after a fight, especially only a third of the way through the story. So she doesn't take him back because she ~craves his dominance~, it's because the plot calls for it, as does the nature of the medium. In this relationship, they deeply love each other beneath any fight, so it's understood to not be an abusive dynamic, because the reader knows Edward isn't a bad guy, he isn't in the Twilight canon, so he wouldn't be here either. Unfortunately, this doesn't translate well, and it can potentially give the reader a super fucked up view of relationship dynamics. As well as BDSM. As I said in another thread today, 50SOG is about a horny but inexperienced nerdy girl's idea of what she thinks BDSM is like, based on I don't know, other fanfiction probably. So in 50SOG it's actually all wrong and dysfunctional. A good Dom would never try to coerce someone into the scene who isn't already into it. Consent is the most important part of BDSM, there are rules that have been well thought out and argued by the community into place over the years. His "consent contract" would never fly, simply because she's being pressured into it. I don't actually think she ever actually signed it? Or if she did one of them eventually rips it up? Something like that.

But moving on, the second book mentions his tortured past. It turns out he was sexually abused as a teenager, an older woman (I think a friend of his adoptive mom's) seduces him and makes him her submissive in a pretty unhealthy relationship. He doesn't consider it abuse though, and he thinks he turned out totally normal, even though he's now a sadist who can't get off without what he considers bondage sex and wants all of his girlfriends to sign consent contracts and he gets super unhinged and jealous and aggro about stuff. So Ana learns all this about him and starts to understand why he is the way he is and now she's more willing to do bondage-y stuff maybe because she now sees it as an outlet for his trauma and a way to feel like he's in control of things. He opens up to her. He makes himself vulnerable. Oh and there's villains floating around, either women who want to be with Christian and are jealous of Ana and hate her and fuck with her, or other men who also want Ana and Christian has to save her from their unwanted advances. Like, Ana's boss becomes obsessed with her and stalks her and at one points grabs at her and she gets him fired for sexual harassment. There's never any real actual threat, all conflicts are resolved quickly after they arise, and the potential rivals are there to be villains, not ever actually tempt one of the leads away from the other. Their devotion to each other is never in question, and the quickly arising mini conflicts are excuses for them to rescue and/or worry about each other.

The final book/movie starts with Ana's dream wedding and Christian buys her a big mansion and they have a wonderful honeymoon. Just as alluring and satisfying to the implied female reader as the sex scenes. It is provider porn. There's a few more conflicts that pop up and are immediately resolved. Oh my god I almost forgot the best part, the main conflict of the final book is that she's pregnant, and he gets pissed off about it when he finds out. Because apparently these idiots got married without talking about kids first and she just assumed he'd want kids but he doesn't, not for a while anyways. Because, as he explains, he knows he would be jealous of the baby and doesn't want to share her. But she just assumed without talking to him that since they're married now, she should go off birth control, so surprise, she's pregnant. The ex boss who sexually harassed her comes back as the final villain in this one and tries to blackmail her and ends up kicking her in her pregnant stomach. When that happens Christian is overwhelmed with emotion and fear that she'll lose the baby and he realizes he wants to be a dad after all. He subdues the villain until he can be arrested and Ana is magically okay, so is the baby, no consequences and yay, now Christian wants to be a dad! And at some point Christian breaks down and says he's a broken person and he hates that he gets off on hurting women and he doesn't want to do it anymore and he'll even sub for her if she wants, just please please don't leave him. Ana ultimately gets everything she wants and lives happily ever after. Oh and it turned out the villain ex boss not only was obsessed with Ana, he was also separately obsessed with Christian because they were both orphans together and Christian got adopted into a wealthy family and he didn't. Even though he also went on the become a successful billionaire playboy. Brilliant writing.

In conclusion, women do not like 50 Shades because of bondage, they like it because it is the ultimate shy female fantasy. An average girl tames an Alpha playboy, she brings him to heel despite his desire to dominate her and he one by one caves to her every demand, giving up his player lifestyle, his sex dungeon requirement for their intimacy, his fear of commitment, his mommy issues, his stance on kids. She gets out of him everything he swore he would never give: normal sex, marriage, a big house to raise a family in and fatherhood. He submits to her. The bondage stuff is just the backdrop, merely the flavoring on top of this much deeper, larger, overarching female fantasy. By the third book/movie it's more of a background element than a driving part of the plot. Readers are much more invested at that point about the baby and will Christian ever come around and see things her way?

Yes, he will. He always does after all.

edit: This post has been up for a few days now but I was rereading it and I got to thinking about the “Jacob” character, and how funny the fanfiction aspect of this all is to me. So I’m adding this for any latecomers because it explains part of why some of the auxiliary characters and plot lines are so hilariously weird and bad in the 50 Shades series.

The only characters who really matter in the story are Ana and Christian. Everyone else are just weird fleeting background characters with little depth. The previously mentioned vaguely ethnic guy who likes Ana but then immediately backs off. Ana’s roommate. Her creepy boss. Christian’s exes. But when it was a Twilight fanfic all those characters were other canon Twilight characters with fully fleshed out personalities and relationships to each other.

So the random guy who knows Ana and is kinda shown to have a crush on her but quickly disappears entirely from the plot until the third book was Jacob, a hugely important Twilight character. Readers of the fanfic would already know him and have reasons to like him, so none of that needed to explained. Only yes it did, because his character comes back out of nowhere in the third book so that it can revealed he gets a happy ending too, he’s now dating some friend of Ana’s, who was also only briefly mentioned and has no established character, but was also a canon Twilight character who a fanfic reader would know about and care about. The reader has been given absolutely zero reason to care about this character, I legit do not even remember his name in 50 Shades. But it makes total sense if you’re a Twilight fan and it’s Jacob, of course you’d want one of the three main characters to have a happy ending too. Just thought I’d dig into that a little more, it’s fucking hilarious to me.