Fifty Shades of Grey: actually very good
The common criticism leveled at romance novels is that it’s the easy fantasy of women. I want to break down this critique by looking at Fifty Shades of Grey, which I had the pleasure of watching last week during our Big Straw movie night. In popular critique, Fifty Shades of Grey was a notable movie for women. It was especially considered so because men didn’t understand what women liked about it, but seemingly were also able to say that women would like a movie like Fifty Shades of Grey. When I described what I found about the plot so fascinating, my friend noted that it sounded like the kind of thing women would want, which is interesting because both of us are women. Does that mean we both implicitly understand the pull of the story, even though both of us are able to create distance from parts of the fantasy at the same time? Or does it mean that we’re both different from other women, the women that this is supposed to be a fantasy for?
I almost like to think of romance like a hermit crab essay, where we’re co-opting the conventions of the genre to tell a story within its “rules.” This creates a sort of fantastical nature to the story at hand because we expect things to be a little unrealistic – we are, after all, acknowledging to some extent that this is just a simulacrum of reality. We make our story with these tropes and rules because we want to focus on the intricacies of romance between people. While I’ve never been a fan of genre writing in general, I’ve been trying to challenge myself to see if any of my critiques of the genre are actually true. Is it true that tropes are lazy? Or can they be used as a tool for something more?
Fifty Shades of Grey is interesting because it has widespread appeal despite dealing with a topic that is seemingly impossible to talk about frankly - sex. It also talks about romance and the way romance is intertwined with sex. How many other rom-coms do you see good, enjoyable sex as an important part of a relationship? Sex is one of the most vulnerable things you can do with another person.
And in Fifty Shades of Grey, while sex is an important part of the fantasy, the narrative challenges us by making the fantasy also stand for many different ideas: consent, kindness, revenge, spite, repression.
Anastasia is supposed to be this clueless, infantile girl who knows nothing and is brought to sexual fruition into womanhood by Christian Grey. She’s an English Literature major with no ideas for what jobs she wants to go into, fresh out of undergraduate, entering the real world for the first time in her life. Christian rushes to go save her at a party where he tells her that she’s drinking too much, and she takes the moment to faint into his arms like a blushing bride. She is, also, literally a virgin.
However, their romance starts on equal ground. There’s not much difference between their two power positions because their flirting relies on implicit consent via attraction. The chemistry is crazy in the first thirty minutes of the movie. It had me blushing and shit. It’s an absolute masterclass in rizz. And rizz only works if both people are willing to play the flirting game!
But when Christian and Anastasia first have sex, their romance is tilted from equality, opposing figures, to the traditionalist idea of the nurturing male figure in a relationship and the naive female figure who needs guidance into learning about this adult world. Think submission to your husband in the evangelical Christian worldview, the post-WWII housewife who gives up her job to learn how to guide her own children under the husband who replaces the father figure. Christian is already trying to dominate their relationship, before he asks Anastasia to sign a sex contract (an actual thing that happens in the movie, please stay with me, I know it sounds ridiculous and it is).
Christian then begins to attempt to take control of the rest of Anastasia’s life. When she tells him that she’s not interested in what the sex contract outlines after researching what BDSM actually is, he finds her in her new house, somehow gets in, and then seduces her to convince her to continue looking at the contract. Is this crazy? Yes, obviously. But his actions are allowed within the realms of the romance movie because his actions stand for not literally being crazy, but as someone who is trying to transgress boundaries. He is trying to embody his expected role as a teacher by forcing her to learn what he thinks she needs to learn in sexual maturity. And at the beginning, Anastasia goes with it.
Christian shows Anastasia his Play Room (where he does not have an Xbox) and attempts to force his contract onto her. She asks him to sleep in the same bed with her after sex and he refuses, instead choosing to indulge himself in some after-sex piano playing (not joking). He offers to GO ON DATES WITH HER (generally considered important in relationships) so that she’s more willing to sign his contract. Anastasia has a business meeting with him and creates some boundaries on the contract, but is unwilling to actually sign it. She meets his parents. She goes to visit her mom to talk about the relationship but Christian shows up uninvited to the restaurant she and her mom are having brunch in (to her mom’s DELIGHT, that psychopath). To try to get on her good side again Christian takes her flying in a glider, which seems successful. Anastasia comes back home and when Christian refuses to discuss any of their issues, she tries to physically touch him (against the rules of their conduct) and he lashes her as punishment.
While this scene seems to be caused by her refusal to use safe words and play along the rules that she’s agreed to (as one could argue is supposed to happen in BDSM), we can understand as viewers that her lashing out (haha) is because she understands that the lashings he’s giving her are not from play punishment.
It is from a need to invoke the power he wants to have in the relationship onto her, a way to pretend that his real anger and hatred are not real.
These are the intuitive things that we understand during sex, that even if in words we are play-fighting, playing at anything at all, the underlying emotions are what sets the true tone of the actions we are taking. But Anastasia understands the implicit hatred for her in his actions. And in that moment she realizes that despite her being submissive, she is the one with the power and control in the relationship. Christian doesn’t have power or understanding over her. He doesn’t even have those things over himself.
Anastasia is failed by almost every single person in this movie. Her friend is instantly charmed by Christian and his dogged chasing after her. Her father is the same, having heard Christian give a talk for Anastasia’s graduation, what a successful young man he is! What a suitable replacement for her current male retainer, her dad. Her shit mother who refuses to even come to her graduation because her boyfriend broke his knee (who cares) is DELIGHTED when Christian finds where they are having brunch across the US and comes up to them as a surprise. Anastasia’s understandably upset reaction isn’t even seen by her mother, who is more fixated on what a handsome young man he is, I’m so lucky to meet him in person, the next parent I’ll be passing you onto.
But Anastasia wasn’t drawn to major in English literature because of Jane Austen and her fatherly husbands. She was drawn to it by Thomas Hardy and Tess of d’Urbervilles, a story about a girl who struggles through bearing a child out of rape, getting rejected out of the fact that she isn’t pure. Tess takes her story into her own hands, even if it means that she has to face execution for killing her rapist.
Because Christian refuses to realize Anastasia’s power in the relationship, because he is so fixated on this idea of projecting power, of dominating her when the relationship relies on her consent, on her acceptance of his power, Anastasia leaves. That’s the ending of the movie, Anastasia looking at everything Christian is pretending to be, looking straight past him and through him, final eye contact through the elevator doors that close on him and she leaves.
In this way this movie does embody BDSM as a kink but also a culture – after all, the submissive is supposed to have the real power. They are the one who decides what the dominant can or cannot do. They are the one receiving pleasure and who really controls the game of sex. So they are also the ones that can terminate sex entirely. The dominant does not exist without having a submissive. Their role in sex doesn’t make sense without the submissive, while the submissive can enjoy pleasure on their own. The entire time they’re having sex, Christian is focused on Anastasia’s pleasure. The sex is about her. She never gives him head, and they only have sex for maybe five minutes of the entire movie. The rest of it is foreplay, and she holds the power to say whether she enjoys it or not.
If holding power in a relationship is a female fantasy, then shouldn’t we question why that’s such a fantastical idea in the first place?
Is Fifty Shades of Grey sex positive?
The first half of the movie is almost an instructional guide for someone who has never heard of BDSM before. But if we then assume that the narrative is supposed to be didactic we would lose the criticisms we can hold against Christian Grey. Could you read Christian Grey’s interest in BDSM as a reaction to abuse and trauma that he went through as a neglected and then adopted child? I suppose you could. But isn’t it also true that the level at which Christian Grey has leaned into his role is a little atypical? Generally (and while this is based on my limited personal experience), people don’t own a full room of BDSM toys with a key that you keep on you at all times. People in the BDSM community aren’t big on creating legal contracts that you have to sign before you get into a relationship with them.
Instead of asking whether Fifty Shades of Grey is sex positive, I think we have to focus on sex as a characterization of people in the narrative. Sex is a tool to create the movie’s narrative; the movie isn’t a tool to define what sex is.
Christian Grey himself as a character encapsulates a male archetype that I’ve seen so often in movies recently. He’s what characters like Patrick Bateman, the guy from Fight Club, Ken in Barbie aspire to be in their respective movies. The idea of the alpha male.
But the alpha male isn’t a person. It’s a loosely combined aesthetic of ideas that these people try to simulate.
We can tell this because when you examine the ideas closely, there seems to be no actual meaning or depth in thought for the images these men play at. And I don’t mean like, deep philosophical meaning. I mean like Christian Grey’s job seems to be “business.” Same with Patrick Bateman. He also works in “business.” So does the guy in Fight Club, until he moves onto cult leader, which arguably he’s not even doing, that’s his alter ego. Ken tries to move up from “beach” to “man” in general, which is also not really very specific. Not that they need to have specificity, but how can you personally like being in something like just “business?” You can’t even ask if these men get any joy out of their jobs because they don’t have any real definable job in the first place. They’ve rejected their personal selves in favor of some sort of “successful” exterior. How painful that must be! What do they do for fun? One of my co-watchers noted that Christian Grey seemed to have decorated his apartment based on what would come up in Google for “rich person apartment.” I mean, of course! His persona as an alpha male doesn’t come with instructions on how to do interior design. If he tried to be an actual person, his apartment might be ugly, but at least it could be unapologetically him.
This male pain is also based on the simultaneous rejection and need to attract the “feminine.” As the masculine character has no emotional needs or wants, a feminine character must be his dual to provide these inferior (but ultimately required) feelings. Christian Grey understands that he has this lack of actual personhood, and he is simultaneously repelled and attracted to Anastasia because of her femininity. The only interests he has beyond his alpha male persona is his Play Room, which is why it’s absolutely crucial that Anastasia accepts that part of him. But Christian doesn’t realize that that too is just an extension for the need of control and the character he plays as a dominant. That’s why Anastasia rejects him in the end. She can see through all of his bullshit romance of himself as this awesome, powerful businessman.
But Anastasia wants to believe that she can change him. Don’t we all want to change men in our lives when we see them falling into this lack of humanity that will ultimately make them unhappy?
But we can’t! In the end Christian has to choose to go beyond what he has decided to be in conformity with society. But it’s a fantasy because in this universe we can touch someone’s heart and ask them to look at us as people, as people who understand their pain and can be talked to, not parented and taken care of.