Like many others, I refused to read the book. My initial reaction as a fifty something woman with a few romantic entanglements under her belt was, been there, done that.
There are decades of reading a fair amount of erotica, the requisite ‘spice up the relationship’ primers and goo gobs of Cosmopolitan magazines, which I eventually outgrew for their redundancy. The ‘secret tricks’ that promised to drive one’s partner to epileptic fits were well known and have been shared, discussed, debated and practiced to perfection since Eve gave Adam the first come hither look. There really is nothing new under the sun. I was reading Anaïs Nin in high school.
So based on reports that the book had been written as spin off fan fiction from the Twilight sagas and that the prose was tortuous reading, I passed with nary a regret. There’s no surprise that despite this, FSOG has spawned rabid fan sites, celestial book and merchandise sales, international fame for the author and the inevitable movie deal. Along with every other medium that used to require actual talent to merit success, the literary world now also has it’s version of reality tv.
Like everything else whose quality has been compromised and replaced with vacant quantity, I blame this on the dumbing down of our culture overall and the pedestalization and pursuit of the youth market in particular.
The author, E.L. James is in her fifties and there are millions of horny same aged romantically challenged and sexually bored under serviced men and women, same sexed couples and heterosexuals, singles and marrieds who sopped up her words like biscuits and gravy.
Apparently there are hoards of people who are having bad sex, boring sex or no sex at all. And there are still pockets of women who are ignorant and abhorrent about their own bodies, as suggested in the Netflix show, Orange Is The New Black. One of inmates revealed in a scene that took place in the prison bathroom that she had never seen her genitals, was given a mirror by the transgender character and encouraged to take a look.
This reference literally mirrors the reality of many uninformed women not only in this country but globally. It’s very telling that a story that’s been told ad nauseum has been repackaged yet again and has several nations of mostly marginally sophisticated women, those who find cheesy romance novels compelling, with their panties aflame and their pulses quickened.
Also, as I have observed on confessional blog sites such as Scary Mommy and the like, there are a lot of needs, desires and fantasies going unmet. Simply, the FSOG franchise fills a void, like candy to a diabetic or heroine to a junkie. No one said it had to be healthy or even good as long as it’s something.
We’ve become so hungry and starved for substance that anything smacking of the avant garde, the edgy, even if it’s a pale imitation, rehashed and regurgitated, is inhaled like cocaine in West Hollywood on a Saturday night. No matter that this subject matter was addressed much more artfully and skillfully in vehicles like 9 1/2 Weeks and Eyes Wide Shut ions ago. There’s a new wave of consumer just waiting to be seduced.
The danger of this particular mass appeal opiate is not the abovementioned older demographic but the aforementioned Millennials. This vehicle and the Twilight tomes that bore it, are aimed at those who are most likely to identify with the characters who are all in their twenties, save for parents that are usually marginalized, permissive or non existent.
Of course this isn’t the first glorification of an abusive relationship in literature or on film. As the rise in college campus rapes is revealed including the Vanderbilt case and Bill Cosby, a once powerful presence in entertainment has a continuing number of women accuse him of drugging and sexing them, I ponder the fallout that FSOG will behold.
How many young men and women will or have already sought out the exact thing that had Anastasia Steele confused, tearful and angry when she wasn’t being swept away by Grey’s good looks, charm and sexual virility?
How many people regardless of age are going to end up in therapy, emergency rooms or worse because they played a dangerous game of bondage, in every since of the word, and lost.
The BDSM community is in an uproar because of the influx of amateurs into a world that requires extensive training and understanding of not only the many complex levels of the scenarios but how to technically handle the equipment so as not to cause injury and permanent damage. As I write this, there’s a story on the TV show 48 Hours about Lizzie Marriott, a young woman who met with her demise at the hands of two other youngsters who used her as an initiate in a poorly executed BDSM session.
I confess that I went to see the movie but only as research into how well the director, Sam Taylor Johnson, a Brit woman, would cinematically portray this tale which is essentially one of control and the power issues that rear their ugly heads in any relationship.The fly in the ointment here is that though Anastasia does realize and implement a bit of control it’s still mainly Christian’s game. I also wanted to see if there were the similarities I suspected would mimic my own experiences.
Even though the third FSOG book, Fifty Shades: Freed portrays this dysfunctional couple as healed, whole, married and with a baby, that is seldom the true outcome of such a pairing. This to me is just further evidence of how deadly this twisted fairy tale is to those who would be susceptible in real life and the total stupidity, selfishness and naivete of the author. Clearly her fantasies were just that and she never had to grapple with the emotional trauma that dealing with a real life Christian Grey, a complete and total sociopath and narcissist, brings with all the initial excitement, attention and charm.
My Own Shade of Grey
I met him online. In my late forties, I thought I’d had enough experience with men and specifically creeps to discern when one crossed my path. Having grown up in a big city and on my own since the age of sixteen, I was certainly streetwise and keenly perceptive. A career in marketing had provided me entre into the human psyche and people’s motivations.
I didn’t realize at the time that the most important tool in his repertoire was to appear enticing and extremely normal. Anything but harmful, menacing, weird or the image of the Stranger Danger we were taught to fear as kids. He appeared open, friendly, funny, extremely well educated, a marketing executive with spotless credentials .When I Googled him, business news stories with his quotes appeared from the Wall Street Journal and Forbes. His ability with words would serve him well and he put Don Giovanni to shame with his seduction techniques.
I was an older version of Anastasia, growing up very sheltered and living a moderate and unexciting adult life of parenting, working and trying to figure out what to do with myself. Save for a couple of years of substance abuse attributed to the excesses of the late Eighties, if there were a road map of my experiences it would pretty much be flatland, with a few hills here and there. I was ripe for the picking, low hanging fruit and he knew it.
The first red flag should have been the speed at which this alliance took off. We met at the end of October and though I had vowed to take it slow this time and protect my heart, by December I was comfortable at his home and he had come to mine and met my twenty something daughter.Though I insisted we didn’t have actual intercourse until I was ready and we’d both been tested, and we didn’t until February, everything else was fair game fairly quickly.
Even with this stopgap in place, we were definitely going faster than I wanted but it was like being on a bullet train. He was the conductor, I the passenger. I used to hate texting but before I knew what had hit me, there were flurries of them, back and forth, every day. It was enthralling yet exhausting but they began to be dangerously addictive.
His story was that he was fleeing a cold fish of a wife who had survived cancer and decided to kick him out of their retirement home in Mexico. He retreated to Chicago and I became his saving grace, or so I was led to believe.
He had expressed that we should conduct our relationship within the confines of “the whole truth and nothing but the truth” and I complied with the innocent trust of a child. I later discovered that apparently that solemn vow was meant only for me, as he lied about practically everything either blatantly or by omission.
He, as with Mr. Grey, had the ability to recognize a person’s vulnerabilities and simultaneously exploit them while seeming to fill a void. I thought I had found the shining prince that I’d been conditioned and coached to expect since childhood. I had always been well read, with diverse interests and felt that my life had been a dress rehearsal and now here was actually the real deal. Apparently my Cinderella complex was working overtime. How wrong I had been in my judgement would be a thing that I grappled for a long time to forgive.
I had to chuckle at the various similarities between real life and what unfolded on the movie screen. Antonio was much older than Christian but nevertheless attractive in that silver fox sort of way. He wasn’t a billionaire and there wasn’t a helicopter or glider plane to be had but the feather, the bathtub scene among others and a laptop all figured prominently in our drama also.
There were lots of other red flags that were acknowledged but just as quickly ignored. The subject of the wife that he had sworn he was separated from was off limits. The promised permanency of such seemed always just on the horizon for various age old reasons that men have been telling women for centuries. By the time my displeasure at this situation began to be voiced regularly and he gave up a half hearted plea to end our dalliance, he already knew that I wouldn’t call his bluff because I was hooked.
The glider ride that Christian and Anastasia take in the movie was not only a metaphor for their affair, but equalled the tie-up that I found myself in as well. I was inducted into the mile high club right in my seat of an American Airlines flight to South Beach. We wrote passion drenched prose on our cell phones and tucked each other in by the same each evening.
We dined at the best restaurants, took road trips and had intensely libidinous and exhilarating sexual encounters.. He introduced me to Rimbaud, Argentinian wine, Vosges dark chocolate and Django Reinhardt.
There was a particularly memorable overnight train trip to New Orleans. Our amorous adventures didn’t involve nearly the level of physical pain or bondage that happened in the cinematic version. In fact, it was quite tame by comparison and though I had always wanted to explore areas such as tantric sex and light BDSM with a trusted partner, that said trust slowly eroded over time and I was never able to gift him with that part of myself.
The cause of said erosion was with the level of control and Jedi mind games that were lobbed at me, building slowly over time to a crescendo. The once amiable fellow that had said he wanted to be a better person for me had finally revealed his true nature; I never knew when the storm would blow in or at what strength or duration, nor whether it would rear it’s head in quiet passive aggression or all out cruelty and meanness.
He asked me to move with him to the suburbs of Chicago and acted hurt and rejected when I expressed that I couldn’t accept his offer because my clients were all located in the city and I didn’t want to commute two hours each way for every appointment. I later learned that just as Christian implored Anastasia to live with him in their sex without love contractual agreement, this was a ploy of control and isolation to get me away from my family so that he could be the sole focus.
He fled to Dallas after being released from his position and once again was angry and impatient when I couldn’t pack up my life and join him immediately. Yet whenever I would attempt to make arrangements towards his request, he refused to find us a suitable place to share and expected me to go from living in a house with a full basement to a one bedroom apartment. Never really wanting me to follow through, as I would learn later, it was all just a game.
He controlled how and when we communicated, when and how often we saw each other, and sometimes even what we discussed. I stopped telling him when something good happened in my life for surely he’d find a way to diminish it or bring the focus to himself and his problems. Soon, that’s all we seemed to talk about and I found myself an unwilling therapist in his daily dramas. I never knew when a shouting match would erupt and turn to verbal pugilism.
He slowly deconstructed us, brick by brick, just as he had created our “bubble” as he called it. It was a warm cozy womb designed to suffocate. Though he could be extremely generous, there was always a price to pay. On one of my visits to see him, he became angry and sullen when I decided to stop in Louisiana and visit my daughter afterwards, instead of returning straight to Chicago from Dallas, as if I needed his permission. I was forever apologizing and explaining myself.
A particularly difficult Fourth of July weekend culminated in him yelling at me to do his laundry, a fight about the still attached wife and the fact that I looked on his ever secretive laptop to try to glean the truth of their relationship, and finally him slipping into his so called “depression” and refusing to participate in anything most of the time that I was there.
One of the last eye opening incidents was twofold. I had planned to drive down to see him and to move some of my things to the cramped apartment as a show of faith and a losing battle to show this man that I was truly committed to trying to make it work. This would mean a feat of almost a thousand miles of road time.
The night before I was to leave, I received yet another inflammatory and cryptic email advising that trouble lay ahead if I were to come. I tried repeatedly to reach him by phone but he played hide and seek all too well. What the fuck? I actually hadn’t packed much in anticipation of such antics and detoured to a cabin in the Ozarks to try and make sense of it all and collect my thoughts.
I couldn’t understand why he kept derailing us. But eventually I learned that none of it had been about me, that like Christian’s fifteen previous submissives, I was one in a long line of playthings that had handed my heart to a psychopath.
By this time I had learned to anticipate the mental lashes and floggings which substituted for Christian and Ana’s bodily servility but were more lasting and painful.
The final straw and my personal FSOG: Freed came when I finally made the move to Dallas to try to resurrect what I thought we had been. By now as he correctly predicted, the move wasn’t so much about him or us as it was me trying something new and in the process hoping to put us back together.
This is where the movies and the trilogy does a huge disservice to men and women that find themselves involved with these fascinating but deeply flawed individuals. There is no happy ending. They cannot be fixed. You cannot love them into wellness, there is no such thing. If Anastasia had any sense, as my grandma used to say, she would cut her losses, thank her stars it wasn’t worse, and run like hell as far away as humanly possible.
These types will only suck at your soul, drain you dry emotionally and dump you like yesterday’s trash when they are done. Interesting that both the FSOG and Twilight trilogies end with the couples in wedded bliss, riding off into the sunset. The hapless wives that are unfortunate enough to get caught in these con artist’s web of lies and deception are rarely happy and fulfilled in their marriages and can expect to be in for a long haul of infidelity, emotional and perhaps physical abuse.
Looking back in hindsight, the most perplexing part of this equation is that in this day and age of Sheryl Sandberg telling women to lean in and Beyonce telling girls that they run the world, emotional abuse is still being glamorized and produced for mass consumption, this time ironically by women.
The saddest thing is that unlike Casanova who actually had real skill and the chutzpah to return to seduce again women whom he had previously conquered and who hated him, the Christian Greys and Antonios of the world are basically unskilled bullies and cowards. They will never have the courage to face themselves nor their dastardly deeds head on and will never have the pleasure of knowing what an honest relationship feels like. After all, how much expertise is needed to take the proverbial candy from a baby or a heart that is given freely?
What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger and the payoff in all of this is that I will never allow myself to be in that position again. Game over, I win.
©2015 JhanKnoble/TheVivisectionist
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