Fifty Shades of Grey: a grey area for feminism

Reading snippets of Simone de Beauvoir’s ‘The Second Sex’ alongside E. L. James’ ‘Fifty shades of grey’ was not a conscious decision, but a happy co-incidence. De Beauvoir speaks of a woman’s “temptation to forgo liberty and become a thing”, which is an idea, it seems, that both protagonist Anasatasia Steele and the many, many female readers of ‘Fifty Shades’ have been toying with.

I had always found it strange that erotic fiction isn’t talked about as much as other genres, and that sex, something so central to our society and the media, has not been deemed a worthy topic for novel-writing. So when I heard that a book like ‘Fifty Shades’ was doing so well, I was pleasantly surprised. But when I heard and read about the specifics of the sexual relationship between characters Anastasia Steele and Christian Grey, and that it was a sadomasochistic one, I was in two minds about it.

It’s been said by some that the book is revolutionary and liberating for women, whose medium for pornography is rather more limited than the vast, visual, online porn viewed almost entirely by men. Of course both means of pornography, the verbal and the visual, have probably just as ambiguous psychological effects on their partakers, tampering with people’s expectations of the opposite sex as well as of sex itself. But as it is unlikely that pornography is going to disappear any time soon, surely both sexes should dabble in it to somewhat equal degrees? If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, and so forth.

However, is it and can it be liberating to read about a female arts student, who doesn’t seem to have any real life ambitions whatsoever, be so completely (sexually, emotionally, even nutritionally) dominated by a wealthy, successful and headstrong businessman? And one has to wonder, are sexually imbalanced relationships unhealthy for those involved, and does it lead to romantic imbalance or even social imbalance? Is it dangerous in a non-exciting but actually quite serious way that this young woman with no life plans, with an obvious inferiority complex from page one (“I scowl at my reflection in the mirror”), should let herself be completely degraded by a very manipulating and very powerful man? E. L. James’ inscription to her husband also seems strange in light of this: “To Niall, master of my universe.”

And then, okay, Christian Grey’s desire to control and dominate everyone around him clearly stems from, or perpetuates, how he runs his business; but how strong is the link between what people want in the bedroom and what people want socially or in everyday life? If I wanted to dress up as Wonder Woman one kinky evening with a partner, would I then go around for the rest of the week feeling empowered? Would it show that I have a secret desire to be out on the streets saving people? What is the link and how strong is it?

And if these things do have a direct impact on how one lives their life generally, is this okay, and should it continue? And is reading about male domination just feeding into an already-present female desire to be dominated, or is it actually planting the seeds of really rather anti-feminist feeling?

Perhaps the book just works on novelty and the hype is actually nothing at all to do with female-male domination and would be just as popular as a raunchy novel about some mutual, even-handed fetish? Perhaps it’s only become so popular because it’s one of the first well-known novels of its kind?

And then, you might say, when has literature ever been moral, or healthy? Some of the highest praised literary works, Nabokov’s ‘Lolita’, Browning’s ‘Porphyria’ and Yeats’ ‘The Swan’, focus on and somewhat glamorise paedophilia, femicide and bestiality respectively. And this would be a fair point to make if E. L. James’ writing was not so distractingly bad. Steele’s first-person narrative often has the air of a middle-aged woman struggling to fully grasp the lingo of a twenty-one-year-old. And the connections to the ‘Twilight’ series, which inspired E. L. James to write ‘Fifty shades’ are obvious and off-putting; when Grey tracks down Steele’s whereabouts on a night out and protects her from her friend Jose’s approaches, the whole thing just screams Stephanie Meyer, and also makes Grey seem ridiculous, and like a stalker.

So, claiming artistic license as a means of justifying the subject matter of ‘Fifty shades’ is not a totally legitimate point.

But even so, despite the dodgy prose and the questionable implications of ‘Fifty shades’ on twenty-first century feminism, it has become the fastest-selling paperback, surpassing the Harry Potter series (according to Wikipedia), and it does seem to be tapping into something that women seem desperate to read about. I guess only time will tell whether a new age of popular erotic fiction is upon us, or whether a metaphorical gag will be placed back on the voice of E. L. James’ sadomasochistic craze.