I had heard a whole lot of things about the book before I had even cracked its spine: that it was fantastic/terribly written, that it was a huge step forward/backward for feminism, that it was harmful/liberating to the mental states of women/men, that it was the true dawning/deathknell of the ebook. It's not often that some work of art comes so quickly, fully, and multi-controversially into public view, and even less when that thing is a book. So I felt that I had to give it a try.
I don't think it's my place to tell you here whether 50 Shades, in and of itself, is good, bad, sexy, or offensive. It's one of those things that personal beliefs and taste figure into even more than usual, so for me to attempt to tell you what you're going to think is kind of pointless (I felt the same way about The Passion of the Christ, which is perhaps the weirdest comparison you’re bound to hear someone make about either of these things). I also realize that, being a man, I'm not even in its target audience. But what's really intriguing for me is the way it's made me address a dichotomy in my own head that has been there for a while, and which I wasn't even truly aware of.
When I was a kid, my mother owned a bookstore. If I'm remembering this correctly, there were a pair of shelves that were dedicated to Harlequin romance novels. I think the order-seeking part of me liked the way they were set up... all the same color, all the same thickness, so different from the riot of colors and sizes that were in every other section. It was as if hundreds of copies of the same book had been neatly lined up. I had only a vague idea of what these books were about, or why they all looked the same, but the thought was implanted that they were just as they looked -- nearly identical, completely interchangeable.
This stereotype was perpetuated when I worked at the local public library during high school. There, we had an alcove where the romance novels were stored. While there was a little more variety in their color and size (this was in the late 80s), they still weren't managed the same as other books. There was no order to the way they were shelved, and when the patrons checked them out, we didn't even keep track of which titles they took, just the number of books. There was at least one woman who, every week or so, would faithfully bring in a shopping bag full of them, only to leave with it filled again. The lesson was consistent: these are disposable. They barely even qualify as literature.
I remember telling one of my fellow Borders employees how so many romance novels seemed "predatory" to me -- I actually used that word. It's hard to argue that books with titles like "The Oil Tycoon's Secret Love Child" were created by people doing anything other than looking for women who wish that some rich, powerful man would fall helplessly in love with them just for being exactly who they already are. I saw it as a completely unrealistic view of adult love, and not only that, but it might actually damage the person reading it. Wouldn't some women, after immersing themselves in such a fantasy, I thought, end up closing off to real-world love and affection, just because it couldn't hope to live up to the dreams concocted for them during a Harlequin board meeting?
So this is the prejudice I found myself fighting against when reading 50 Shades. But then I realized something... you could make (and I have actually heard) the same argument against pornography. While I realize that I'm starting to speak in generalities, it seems to be for men what romances are for women. At their worst, both forms of entertainment gravely underestimate the intelligence of the sexes. In truth, these two genres really are means to the same emotional end, and play out surprisingly similar fantasies: someone suddenly appears and sweeps you off your feet, who exists only to provide intimacy to an idealized avatar of you, removing all your worldly cares, allowing you to live in the moment, and making you feel alive.
What it's taken me over 200 pages into this story of dominance and submission is to figure out exactly how the story does what it does. And, to my surprise, I've found that it's really not all that far from what romance novels -- and pornography, for that matter -- have been doing all along. It's a clever melding of the two, in fact.
To figure out what the reception of 50 Shades really has to tell us, let's take a look at how that new sensibility is used in this book, as well as the flurry of BDSM-themed romance novels that have come out in its wake. In a traditional romance novel, you've got to find a way to get your characters together and realistically build their relationship, in both the physical and emotional senses. Now, If BDSM is the backdrop you set your story against, you can effectively drop all pretenses. No meet-cute is necessary, nor any extraneous plot devices. As an author, you can take the quickest short cut to the reason romance readers come back to the genre time and again: intense relationship moments between characters. Issues of trust immediately need to be questioned, insecurities revealed and worked through. In this sense, 50 Shades and other BDSM novels are like a concentrated distillation of other romances. They skip nearly all the preliminaries and kick in with a starting gear of what usually amounts to two months' worth of relationship.
The really fascinating part is that I never even realized that I still unconsciously look down on this whole genre of literature. But when I compare this new, more hardcore style of romance with the identical, disposable Harlequin romances of yesteryear, I've got to say the new stuff at least feels more honest in its intent. Really, it’s just like any other kind of “genre” fiction: it puts real, accessible feelings against an unrealistic background in order to draw attention to them and help us process them in our everyday lives. And when it comes to learning the landscape of such a tricky, complicated landscape as ourselves, that's not necessarily a bad thing. So here’s my formal apology to the romance readers/writers/lovers out there… I’m sorry, and while I’m still not going to start reading it regularly, I think I’m closer to understanding it now.
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