Wednesday, April 25, 2012

"mommy porn," fanfiction and bdsm

The media continues to be abuzz about the Twilight fanfiction slash "mommy porn" bestseller Fifty Shades of Grey, in particular for the book's BDSM themes. Yesterday, BlogHer Love & Sex section editor AV Flox posted a critique about the book's troubling messages about BDSM. Firstly, the idea that all who practice BDSM are "fucked up" the way the male protagonist Christian is portrayed to be; and secondly because of how dangerous this said male protagonist is: "the world — with all its old cars and commercial airlines — is nowhere nearly as dangerous as Christian is himself, not because he practices BDSM but because he's a terrible dominant." She explains in detail.

Earlier this week, I posted a longer post at Love, Sex, and Family about the psychological underpinnings of submission & domination where I give examples of good dominants who provide the form of sensitivity and "aftercare" of which Flox points out the absence in Fifty Shades of Grey. And for whom those who practice BDSM is a safe, healing and empowering journey and not something from which they need to be "cured." As explains feminist BDSM pornographer and performance artist Madison Young:
Before I engage in kink of any kind with another person, we talk: communication and negotiation around limits, turn-ons, physical assessment and ability, an assessment of the level of trust and intimacy that I'm willing to share with the individual. ... When engaging in BDSM, an individual is opening themselves up, making themselves vulnerable and ready to receive and give energy. Imagine a time in which you were vulnerable with your partner and revealed something intimate about yourself. In BDSM you are creating that level of trust, intimacy, and vulnerability with your partner and then creating space for the receipt of energy and the flow of energy back to your partner.
This is a very different approach to BDSM than the one featured in Fifty Shades of Grey between a "terrible dominant" and a woman who wants to "save" him. As wrote Katie Roiphe in her Newsweek cover story about the female protagonist, Anastasia:
One of the salient facts about Fifty Shades of Grey’s Anastasia Steele is that she is not into sadomasochism, she is just in love with Christian Grey (“Deep down I would just like more, more affection, more playful Christian, more ... love”), so she is willing to give beatings and leather crops the old college try. This is important for a mainstream heroine appealing to mainstream readers: she indulges in the slightly out-there fantasy of whipping and humiliation without actually taking responsibility for any off-kilter desires. She can enjoy his punishments and leather whips and mild humiliations without ever having to say that she sought them out or chose them. It’s not that she wants to be whipped, it’s that she willingly endures it out of love for, and maybe in an effort to save, a handsome man.
Find my longer post on this at Love, Sex, and Family here.

photo credit: art slant | madison young
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