Fifty Writers on Fifty Shades of Grey

by Lori Perkins

  Mind you, I don’t expect Christian to be a perfect Dominant incapable of error. Neither do I expect him to be a knight in shining armor, there to give Ana a perfectly princessly existence. I simply want Christian to be less messed-up. I want him to be a whole human being and reasonably well adjusted.

  More of the BDSM artifice surrounds Christian than Ana and, although Ana quickly realizes she has a complicated Dominant on her hands, she doesn’t sacrifice too much of her autonomy in loving him. If anything, her autonomy grows over the course of the trilogy. But I often found myself wishing she’d had a few trustworthy go-to submissive friends. Few people engage in BDSM in a friendless vacuum and I too often imagined how James might’ve employed a submissive women’s discussion group to provide occasional didactic reality checks.

  I was, however, impressed by Ana’s self-awareness at the end of Fifty Shades of Grey, after she urges Christian to use the belt on her. Yes, the aftermath’s a maelstrom of emotional confusion, but she astutely realizes how entrenched their individual limits are, how those limits prevent them from truly bridging one another’s deep-seated needs, and, seeing no way out of the impasse, chooses to leave.

  Looking back over my reading experience, Ana clearly became an acquired taste for me. She’s not a highly perceptive person at the start of Fifty Shades, but she does learn quickly from concrete experience. Experience becomes her avenue to insight, and immediate hindsight is her GPS. She finds a way to navigate life, no matter how messy the route. She gains life skills and a stronger sense of self as she goes. In fact, Ana redeems herself well enough that I almost forgave her initial ignorance.

  Perhaps I’ve forgotten the tenuous nature of first love’s discovery, how difficult it is to chart a course when you’ve never tested love’s waters before. We learn as we go in our first relationships, building our skills and competencies. Complicate a first relationship with Dominance and submission and the learning curve becomes all the more profound, the journey more arduous. Even if you come into BDSM with sexual and relationship experience, you’ll still face a learning curve.

  Perhaps it’s easy to forget those early lessons once we’ve integrated our experiences and transformed them into personal competencies and proficiencies. It’s easy to castigate the beginner when we forget our own long-ago neophyte struggles.

  While I came close to forgiving Ana her ignorance, I remained hard on Christian Grey’s shortcomings. Christian remains locked in a pathology that’s too nineteenth-century sex-negative for far too long into the trilogy. His sexual tastes strike me as a Krafft-Ebing paresthesia, a misdirected sexual desire. Combine this poorly constructed BDSM scaffold with an already brooding character and Christian becomes far too restricted in his ability to maneuver as a character—too unrealistic, as well. How can someone as brilliant and successful as Christian be so self-unaware? How can he be completely blind to the fact that he’s stuck, repeatedly acting out his broken BDSM scenario? That’s just too big a blind spot to ignore.

  Thank God the good Dr. Flynn hands us a deus ex machina near the end of Fifty Shades Darker. When Ana seeks his opinion of Christian’s psychological makeup, the doctor explains that Christian had used BDSM as a coping and compensation avenue, somewhat successfully, too, until he met Ana. With Ana, according to Dr. Flynn, he “found himself in a situation where his methods of coping are no longer effective. Very simply, you’ve forced him to confront some of his demons and rethink.” At this point, James moves the trilogy beyond its shades of fucked up—convincingly, too, despite the artificial ploy.

  Much to my dismay, however, Ana and Christian turn away from BDSM as Christian resolves his inner turmoil. I was keenly disappointed that James adopted a “he’s fixed now and doesn’t need this deviant stuff anymore” direction for her trilogy. Certainly people’s sexual tastes can change over time and their erotic repertoire can grow or diminish through the years. And I’m inherently enough of an erotic romantic that I can’t help but hope that sexually fulfilled and self-aware people find their happy ending in continued sexually rewarding experiences, whatever those experiences may be.

  But I’ve also seen what happens when people turn away from their deep desire for BDSM because they can’t resist a competing, as-deeply-ingrained anguish that they’re wrong to want this and they stuff their need for BDSM away. They suppress and sublimate, sometimes succeeding for long periods of time, only to have the erotic need burst like a dam stressed by too many days of torrential rainfall. Often, they go on the down low, hunting down BDSM encounters outside of their marriages. Christian is, in my view, very much at risk for this behavior—and I want better for him and Ana.

  So let me imagine them celebrating their silver wedding anniversary as I’d like to see it. Christian’s hair is graying at the temples. The lines of his youthful intensity have etched themselves in his face, giving him a distinct gravitas. Ana remains beautiful and breathtaking but youth no longer defines her looks. Grace and wisdom do. Coming into her own over the course of the trilogy has served her well beyond its pages.

  They’re sharing a private candlelight dinner, Christian in a three-piece suit, Ana stark naked. Elegant silver handcuffs encircle her wrists. A length of silver chain connects them but allows enough leeway that she can feed herself. We’re treated to a sweet nostalgia as they harken back to nascent times and charmingly address one another as Miss Steele and Mr. Grey like the British Avengers television characters from the 1960s.

  Somewhere in their marriage, Ana and Christian rediscovered their kinky tastes and integrated it into their lives, where it serves as a healthy means to a passionate end. Yet they employ it for more than sexual pleasure; they use it to express their deep love and appreciation for each other and all they’ve shared through the years. They honor each other with it.

  And when Christian takes Ana to bed later that night, he’ll bring out that necktie, now ratty and threadbare. This time, he’ll know the proper way to tie together Ana’s wrists—he’ll apply a bit of Japanese rope bondage technique and wrap the tie a couple of times between her wrists.

  Finally, orgasms for everyone. Through good times and bad, for better or worse, until death do them part. Yes, I love a happy ending. Especially if, in this case, it brings Christian and Ana fifty shades of sexual wholeness.

  DEBRA HYDE has four erotic novels and dozens of erotic short stories to her publishing credits. Her lesbian BDSM novel, Story of L, won the 2011 Lambda Literary Award for lesbian erotica. A modern retelling of the classic Story of O, it updates the original tale to reflect the contemporary lesbian leather world and the women in it. Romantic Times Book Reviews magazine named it and her heterosexual novel, Blind Seduction, to its “Fifty Hot Reads Beyond Fifty Shades of Grey,” calling Blind Seduction “a story about what happens after the BDSM seduction.” When not writing, Debra cocurates the monthly New York City reading series Between the Covers, bringing erotic storytelling to curious and avid audience-goers alike.

  MASTER R

  A Requested Evaluation of the Mastery of Christian Grey

  Or, A Week Spent Observing Fifty Different Shades of Grey

  I RUN THE WORLD’S oldest BDSM training chateau, La Domaine Esemar. Masters, Mistresses, and slaves from around the globe come here for training and evaluation. This week, I did my first evaluation of the mastery of a fictional character: the coldly fascinating, impressively erotic Mr. Christian Grey. I divided the book into a week of reading, exploring his character as if each day were one day of a weeklong visit by a young Master.

  Day One: My initial assessment is that Mister Grey, based on his early interactions with Anastasia, appears to be arrogant. Arrogance always strikes me as an indicator of insecurity. It is a trait that has little to do with dominance, and in fact is often antithetical to that purpose. However, as day one’s reading progresses, I begin to see a man who enters my world of BDSM with reasonable modesty.

  As I look more closely at his character, I realize that he uses his eyes to manipulate ot
hers: I surmise that if he were to meet another Master he would—slightly and almost imperceptibly—lower the level of his own gaze. I suspect that, if Christian Grey were to actually come to La Domaine for training and evaluation, his first words to me would be spoken with a soft voice, one well controlled, and I would encounter in him a great desire to find warmth that can be both given and taken simultaneously. I am reasonably certain I would find, in his character, a great desire to reveal his own courage and need. I sense he would want his very private soul mercilessly examined. Although this would not be enough to indicate his level of either mastery or self-understanding, I consider it to be a positive sign.

  At the end of day one, I find Mr. Grey hard to fully conceptualize. Christian appears to have polished his reticence as one would polish a fine gemstone. He clearly is plagued by a great inability to reveal himself. Of course, I wonder why the author has done this, particularly in regard to what that implies about Mr. Grey’s ability to be as open and honest as a great Master needs to be. After all the comments on his “powers” I had heard from real women who had read the book, this certainly was not the level of self-mastery I had expected to find. I also wonder what that will mean regarding everything that will follow as I read through all fifty shades.

  At La Domaine, we believe a Master should reveal himself as completely as he reveals his slave’s self. I will have to pay attention to this process of revelation as the book progresses and see if this first impression is warranted. And I find myself thinking that, if this character were real and was actually visiting Esemar, I would undoubtedly have the great pleasure of opening Christian Grey.

  Day Two: On day two of reading, I start to see that Christian possesses a powerful magnetism, one that would allow him, with relative ease, to put any driven slave firmly in his control. Mr. Grey clearly has the makings of the Master he wishes to become. My only serious reservations about the potential of his mastery, after my first reading of his Red Room of Pain “dungeon abilities,” are based on his lack of warmth and his continued avoidance of revealing himself, not only to his slave, but to himself.

  Christian Grey is a character that cannot let go; the result is that he has a psychological perimeter that contains far too much. On my second day of reading, it is becoming clear that he needs to learn how to fully accept and explore his drives, his fears, his need to give, and his desire to trust and be trusted.

  At La Domaine, we teach that it is not about how much you can take; it is about how much you can give. It is evident that Mr. Grey understands this when the value exchange is directed from slave to Master. However, it is not at all evident that he grasps the emotional implications regarding his own mastery: as Master, he must also give of himself.

  I observe an inherent sense of inequality between Master and slave, in the way Christian conducts his relationships. This is an inequality entwined with the character’s understanding of giving and taking in our sexuality. Will this be a consistent current in Christian’s dominance, or by the book’s ending, will he have opened up and be giving, if not freely, then with the passion and compulsion found in greater self-acceptance?

  Day Three: Christian certainly knows how to submit. Even before we learn that Christian had been trained for several years, it was evident to me that he had submissive experience—and a great deal of experience at that. Clearly, his former Mistress had him well trained. If the depth of his submissive abilities is any indication—and of course it is—then Mr. Grey has a remarkable potential depth still to be discovered in his powers of dominance. I hope we’ll see that depth before the book’s end.

  Today I observed how personally fulfilling his early training was. Clearly it introduced him to the richly rewarding path he is now walking. It also seems that somehow, hopefully yet to be revealed, the submission he learned, the submission he has mastered, is a large part of what is driving him to become the incredible Master Grey I, as a reader, envision. Day three’s reading has led me to the conclusion, perhaps premature, that Christian has not been able to fully accept this submissive part of himself, or at least nowhere near as thoroughly as the vastness implied in his previous submission. Clearly he has been deeply moved and shaped by the depths of that experience, yet it does not appear to strongly impact his dominance. I wonder if his character is past that intensely submissive period in his development or if submission still holds a place of desire and honor for him. I hope he is not past the former; maintaining his own submission would certainly serve his needs well in addressing the latter. The question that is becoming apparent as I read further is: Will Grey show any substantial level of respect for his own passions, both past and present? For without the successful inclusion of his past, his present relationship will not be as fulfilling and rewarding as it could be.

  By the end of the day’s reading, I feel that, unquestionably, Christian Grey needs to proudly accept and value what his previous Mistress accomplished with him and allow this to be a cherished area of his growth. Yet I feel some other ethereal element that I cannot yet comprehend, which is preventing this. Perhaps Christian holds a belief that he should feel disdain for what he did when he was young? If so, he surely will need to embrace his past.

  That seems to be a consistent challenge within Mr. Grey’s character: the ability to embrace. Specifically, he needs to learn to embrace his sexual dominance as a successful metaphor for his wants and needs. Perhaps then Mr. Gray will be able to allow Ana, and others, to touch him.

  Day Four: Today’s reading has me wondering about the boundaries Grey has established between his Ana and his heart, and the boundaries he has established around himself that contain him and keep him from accepting and enlarging his capacity to love.

  Christian is gradually coming to understand that he is in love with Ana. It is clear that he has never loved any of his slaves before. He has merely possessed them. The voice of his character has the hollowness of a man who thinks he may be so alone because he is undeserving or, perhaps even worse, incapable of love. It could be that he believes both to be true. In any case, it is evident that he is madly in love with his new slave, as well as extremely overwhelmed and confused by this love. I wonder: Does this confusion belie his mastery? Does it, like some outside force, control his ability to master others, or does it show that his mastery is simply nonexistent?

  I am starting to see that, in some as yet unclear way, the intensity of his love is currently interfering with his ability to be “Master.” Will his virgin slave continue to unwittingly amplify the already observed conflict between his arrogance and his potential as a Master, or will Christian submit to these new currents that are flowing within him now, not melt at her every fear and whim, and actually see this relationship through with a commitment to who he is and what he feels is right for his life?

  Part of this will depend on how firmly he trusts his own dominance, his own development, his own sexuality. If he stays within his arrogance (if he fails to extend his love of her into his love of himself—and others—in a more day-to-day way), then I fear he will not find the trust in, and commitment to, his own belief system that would allow his love with his Ana to remain a power-filled BDSM love. As I read further, I begin to think this may well depend on whether or not he gains a firm understanding that there is nothing wrong with his sexuality, that he has a healthy sexuality and that his desire to share this with his Ana is a positive one. That should allow his mask of arrogance to be removed and replaced with the stunning confidence he shows in so many other areas of his life. However, I fear high-altitude winds here.

  Day Five: Today’s reading finally clarified the issue for me. Ana feels that Christian’s sexuality is not healthy. She mocks him through that, and he allows this disrespect. He feels that he is “fucked up” and that she “tolerates” him because she loves him. Yet, whether or not they both recognize it, her character is extremely aroused by his Dominant sexual persona. This reveals that BDSM sexuality must also reside deeply within her. Every time they approach t
his together, she comes as much as he does, often far more. As I explore this problem in his mastery, I can see that for his character to become fulfilled, he will have to face the inevitable, and absurd, line of thought that people who are into our sexuality are there because they have been abused as children. After seeing literally thousands of individuals and hundreds of couples here at La Domaine in the past two decades, I am convinced that the assumption that childhood abuse correlates with BDSM sexuality is a false premise. In this specific fictional case, it is obviously false as well, as Ana, the innocent, gets as wet as Christian gets hard. Their sexual prowess together is based on their compatibility and resonance. All readers need to see that his shades and hers are very similar, even though one has an “abused” background and the other does not. As much as Christian needs to recognize this, I feel that Ana needs to see it even more, or else socially induced misconceptions, and Grey’s fear that “she might be right,” will inevitably undermine the compatibility and resonance between them, just as it does with the couples we see here at La Domaine.

  As I read further, I find that I have taken a great liking to Christian. I like his technical skills, such as flying, and I like how he delegates authority to his workers (although the lack of thanking them indicates a further lack of mastery), as well as his techniques in the Red Room. He does confuse generosity for giving, but through Ana, he is gradually learning to give. However, the more that Ana shows her growing care for Mr. Grey, the more Christian’s veils and shadows appear. It is almost as if any approval of his dominance, coming from his chosen slave, leads to a lack of mastery, or at least an avoidance of it. I wonder how this will affect his growth with Ana as the story continues.