Fifty Shades, and why I am not a fan

It deserves credit for one enormous thing and criticism for most of the rest. A lot of people found their way to this subject because of it, so this sets out what it got right, what it got wrong, and which of the wrong parts will hurt you if you copy them.

Consenting adults only. Everything on this page is about adults over 18 who have freely agreed to it.

Written from first-hand experience or extensive research by the editor.

I have lost count of the number of conversations that began with a woman saying, slightly apologetically, that she started thinking about this properly after reading that book. So it earns a page, and the page has to be honest in both directions. Like everything on this site, it concerns consenting adults over 18.

What it genuinely did

It broke a silence. Before 2011 the only places you found this written down were pornography, clinical literature that treated it as a symptom, or a scene you had to already know about in order to find. Then a novel about it was on the shelf in Tesco, in a supermarket carrier bag on the train, being discussed in a work kitchen by people who had never used the word kink in their lives.

For a lot of women that was the first evidence that the thing in their head was not unique to them and not disqualifying. It gave them a way to raise it with a partner that did not require confessing anything: have you read this, what did you think of it, would you ever. I have been on the receiving end of that opening more than once, and it is a kind, sideways way to ask a frightening question.

Any account of the last fifteen years that does not credit it with that is being snobbish. The scene got a wave of curious, sensible newcomers out of it, and a great many happy arrangements started with a paperback.

Why I am not a fan

Because underneath the fantasy, the relationship it describes is one I would tell a friend to walk away from, and the reasons have nothing to do with the spanking.

Start with consent, which is the part that matters. A negotiation appears, which is more than most fiction manages, and then it is treated as an obstacle. He wants terms, she resists them, he keeps pressing, and the story frames that persistence as devotion.

In a real arrangement, somebody who keeps returning to a limit you have already declined is not courting you, and the correct response is the one on red flags: you have learned what you need to know and you can stop there.

Then the surveillance and the control of ordinary life. Where she goes, what she eats, who she sees, what she wears, tracking her movements, turning up uninvited. Presented as intensity of feeling. Read that list again outside the frame of a romance and it is the pattern described in section 76 of the Serious Crime Act 2015, which is a criminal offence in England and Wales and needs no violence to be made out. That is set out properly at consent and coercive control.

Then the thing that irritates me most, which is the diagnosis. His interest is explained by damage, and the story's arc is that love will cure him of wanting it. That is the oldest and most insulting idea in this whole subject, it is not what the evidence shows, and it lands on readers who are already frightened that wanting this means something is broken in them.

There is a whole page on that at am I normal and another at does wanting this mean I was abused.

And it misrepresents the people who actually do this. The competent dominants I know are, without exception, unglamorous about it: they ask a lot of questions, they write things down, they stop early, they check in two days later, and they take the safe word as a piece of information rather than as a wound.

Wealth, brooding and a locked room have nothing to do with any of it. A man whose authority rests on money and secrecy is not demonstrating dominance, he is demonstrating leverage, and the two get confused constantly to everybody's cost.

The prose, which is its own argument

I should say something about the writing, because it is relevant rather than snobbish. In my opinion it is dreadful. Not uneven or workmanlike, but a genuine slog: the repetition, the tin ear for how people speak, and above all the tics. Ana's inner goddess turns up so often that by the third appearance you begin to feel the monotony physically. I have joked that it is enough on its own to send a reader looking for a spanking, purely for the variety.

The reason that is worth mentioning is not literary. It is evidence. Millions of people pushed through three volumes of that prose, and they did not do it for the sentences. They did it because the subject underneath had a grip on them strong enough to survive the delivery, which tells you something about the size of the appetite that nothing else in this discussion demonstrates half so well.

It also explains the peculiar defensiveness the book attracts from people who liked it. A great many readers knew perfectly well it was badly written, felt caught out for reading it anyway, and concluded that the wanting was the embarrassing part. It was not. The wanting was the only reliable thing in the whole business.

Why it worked anyway

Fairness gets you further than sneering here, because millions of women are not idiots and something in it was doing real work.

What it caught, accurately, is the appeal of being the total focus of somebody's attention. Not the contract and not the equipment: the sense of being studied, thought about, planned for.

That is a genuine part of why people want this and it is written about far too rarely, because it is harder to describe than an implement. It also caught the relief of not having to decide, which is the engine of most of what is on this site and is covered at power exchange.

The trouble is that the book attaches those real feelings to a man who would be a disaster to actually meet. The feelings are available without him. That is more or less the thesis of this entire site.

If that book is how you got here

Then you are in good company and there is nothing to apologise for. Being moved by a story is not a statement about your judgement, and the fantasy that a novel produces does not have to match what you would want on a Tuesday in a real house with a real person.

What I would do is separate the two. Keep whatever it woke up. Discard the method entirely, and read negotiation, safe words and vetting a partner instead, which are duller and will serve you considerably better. The version of this that works in real life is slower, more talkative and much less cinematic than anything in that book, and everybody I know who does it would not swap.

If what you want is another novel, the bibliography and further reading page lists books and films that do this better, with a note on each about how it handles consent.