Driven by sheer willpower, I have chewed my way through the first two volumes of the Fifty Shades trilogy. It has been a traumatic experience. Now, before I get accused by the likes of Edwina Currie of being a prude, feminist spoilsport, I feel I should disclose that erotica written by women for women is something I’m actually reasonably qualified to talk about: I have been reading it since I was 17, I’ve read over a million words of the stuff over the last six months alone (not counting Fifty Shades), and have written somewhere around 50,000 words myself over the last ten or so years, all across different genres and kinks.
Some reviewers have been particularly disparaging about the trilogy’s origins as a work of Twilight fanfiction. I am willing to bet that neither of the above commentators have actually read much fanfiction – and neither have most people reading Fifty Shades. As a longtime reader and writer of fanfic, it worries me that this is the first impression mainstream cultures get of fandom.
At its best, fanfiction is a great space for exploring issues that mainstream media won’t touch with a bargepole, or will do badly. Non-heteronormative sexualities are a popular theme, but far from the only one. Fed up with the tokenisation of non-white characters? Pick up your favourite black character from a book, a TV show or a movie and give them a real personality and a life of their own. Dissatisfied with the representation of disabled characters? You can do it better. Of course there is some incredibly poor writing in fanfic – just as there is in every editor’s slushpile; but the fact that anyone can write and publish anything without having to think about what will sell well means there is a wealth of extremely good, challenging and thought-provoking material produced by fandom.
Fifty Shades, alas, is not an example of that. Rather, the trilogy reads like BDSM porn written by the marketing department, and this is where the root of many of the problems with the books lies. In order to gently induct more nervous readers into what ends up being fairly mild BDSM anyway, the author makes two particular choices about her main characters which create an incredibly creepy and abusive relationship dynamic between them: Anastasia is a 21-year-old virgin who has never been in a relationship or even masturbated; Christian’s BDSM tendencies are “explained” by a background of child abuse and sexual abuse in his teenage years. What could possibly go wrong? Where do we start?
Do a quick Google search for “signs of abusive relationship”, pick an arbitrary list, and you will find that on average Christian Grey meets between half and three quarters of the criteria. Let’s look at some of them.
Extreme jealousy: There isn’t a man in Ana’s life who Christian isn’t jealous of. Her best friend, her housemate’s brother, her first boss’s brother, her second boss – if Christian had his way, Ana would never see any of these men again. He goes as far as buying the company she works for so he can sack her boss.
Controlling behaviour: Christian wants to control what Ana eats and when, how much exercise she does, how much sleep she gets, where she goes and who with, what she wears. Some of this is ostensibly part of the BDSM arrangement he is proposing; some is allegedly for Ana’s own safety. On about day two of their relationship, he presents her with a BlackBerry, pretty much stating outright that it’s so he can keep tabs on her. What it adds up to is Christian controlling every minute facet of Ana’s life. This is despite his protestations that “[o]utside the playroom, I like that you challenge me. It’s a very novel and refreshing experience, and I wouldn’t want to change that.” Yet when Ana’s friends see her again after only two weeks apart, they all remark on how changed she is.
Quick involvement: By the end of the second book, Christian and Ana have known each other for about a month, and they’re engaged. He proposes halfway through an argument, while Ana is still trying to get her head around yet another revelation about his past. Speaking of which, Ana never gets a chance to get her head around anything: every time she tries to gain some distance to think things through, he follows her, distracts her with sex, or completely changes the game with another of his revelations.
Isolation: Christian starts his relationship with Ana by asking her to sign an NDA. Even when she raises the objection that she’s a virgin who’s never been in a relationship and might want to talk about some of these things with her housemate, he says she should talk to him instead. Combined with the extreme jealousy, this means that over the four weeks of their relationship Ana practically loses touch with all her friends. At one point she is even told off for being friendly with Christian’s driver.
Blaming others: Christian blames Ana for being sexually assaulted by her best friend, blames her refusal to obey him for his outbursts of anger and his controlling behaviour, blames the fact that he overstepped her boundaries on her failure to use a safeword. By the second book, Ana is automatically justifying his abusive behaviour for him.
“Playful” use of force in sex: Let’s get one thing straight here: It is perfectly possible to have a non-abusive BDSM relationship. What Christian and Ana have isn’t it. Here’s a description of their first kiss – before the NDA, before he’s even talked to her about boundaries, or contracts, or the kinds of sexual activities either of them like (emphasis mine):

“Oh, fuck the paperwork,” he growls. He lunges at me, pushing me against the wall of the elevator. Before I know it, he’s got both of my hands in one of his in a viselike grip above my head, and he’d pinning me to the wall using his hips. Holy shit. His other hand grabs my hair and yanks down, bringing my face up, and his lips are on mine. It’s only just not painful.

From that point onwards, Ana’s boundaries are systematically destroyed. By the second book he actually rapes her. Oh, he doesn’t jump out of the bushes with a knife, but he keeps going after she’s withdrawn consent, telling her not to “overthink” things. Once he’s got her back under control he checks if she wants to stop, but it’s way too late by then.
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: Ana’s word for this one is “mercurial”, but that doesn’t even come close to describing Christian’s mood swings. She is continually forced to second-guess herself, to adjust her behaviour to his moods, to try to work out what will and won’t upset him – often with very little success.
Add to all of this the financial control (he repeatedly tries to persuade her that she doesn’t need to work), the constant manipulative behaviour, the stalking which is pretty much how their relationship starts, and the emotional blackmail which is a key tool for destroying Ana’s sexual and personal boundaries, and you have a textbook abusive relationship which has nothing to do with the BDSM aspects of their sex life.
Now, what does a good, innocent young girl do when she finds herself in an abusive relationship? She sticks around to “save” her abuser from themselves. Ana’s view – which is never challenged in the text – is that it is the abuse in Christian’s past that has given him his taste for BDSM and some of the more quirky (read abusive) sides of his personality, and that if only she could somehow fix that, she can fix him. This conflation of past trauma, psychological issues, abusive behaviour and BDSM is both damaging and insulting on several levels.
First, there is the implication that if you’re into BDSM, there must be something wrong with you, you must need fixing in some way; second, the implication that you can “fix” a lifetime of abuse and mental health problems by meeting the right ingenue with an innate talent for deep-throat blowjobs; and finally, what is perhaps the most damaging message of the book is that if only you could become enough of a doormat, you can change an abusive partner. Yet what has actually happened is not that Christian has changed – he is still manipulative, controlling, jealous and isolating. Rather, it is Ana who has completely changed by the end of the second book, with her self esteem utterly dependent on Christian and her boundaries thoroughly pushed and destroyed.
If you can get over or ignore the abuse issues, there still remains the problem of the incredibly poor writing. There is EL James’ tendency to reach for the thesaurus a bit too much: nobody actually ever “says” anything in the books – mostly they “mutter”, though sometimes they “gasp” or “exclaim”. Plot, structure and pacing are not concepts James is familiar with. Most irritating, though, are the sex scenes. They are repetitive both in terms of content and language used. You only need to tell us once that Christian smells of Christian. There are probably more ways to describe the female orgasm than “I explode around him”, more ways to describe the male orgasm than “he finds his release”.
What is even more distracting is the complete and utter lack of realism. My body doesn’t work in the way EL James describes, and statistically speaking neither do most women’s bodies. 75% of us don’t orgasm from penetrative sex (that’s all the slamming and pounding, in Fifty Shades parlance) alone, and I suspect over 90% don’t come from just… well, being told to come. Neither does the “exploding around him” and the “finding his release” generally happen at the same time. I also suspect men reading the books may find a similar disconnect with reality and be absolutely horrified at the thought that their partners might now expect them to get it up three times within an hour. I find it hard to get turned on by something which is asking me to identify with feelings and actions that in no way come close to any sexual experience I’ve ever had. Fantasy sex is great – it can turn us on, give us ideas, allow us to explore our sexuality; but to do that we have to be able to relate to it on some level. Fifty Shades is not so much fantasy as it is farce.
Finally, there has been some discussion about the Fifty Shades effect of getting women to read erotica in public (or at all, really). Is it creepy? Is it socially acceptable? Having shared plenty of public spaces with men engrossed in FHM, page 3 of the Sun or Nuts magazine, I’ve absolutely no problem with reading Fifty Shades in public. At least people would have to make a conscious effort to work out whether I’m reading the juicy bits, unlike page 3 which everyone in a ten-foot radius has to endure. On a more general level, I do think women should consume erotica and porn (see above comment re fantasy sex). We should explore our sexuality more, seek out different experiences in fiction and in real life, talk about it more and figure out what we as individuals do and don’t like. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the issue is not porn, the issue is that objectification and exploitation of women is the only socially and culturally sanctioned expression of sexuality – for both men and women.
So if Fifty Shades worked for you, great – though I’d encourage you to think about some of the abusive aspects of the relationships depicted and not take the books as a bible on that front. If it didn’t – go find something that does work for you! There’s plenty of free erotica on the Internet, fanfiction and otherwise. Just ask Google. Personally, I’m tempted to direct you to Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s Lost Girls which is not only fabulous porn but also challenges some of our preconceptions about women’s sexuality and the relationship between sexual fantasies and sexual reality. Give it a go, and explore from there!