Fifty Writers on Fifty Shades of Grey (33 page)

DR. LOGAN LEVKOFF

I
’M NO STRANGER to provocative topics. I’ve been an advocate for lots of “controversial” subjects before. To name a few: sexuality education, talking to kids about sex, condoms, vibrators.

Despite my training as a sex educator and sexologist, I didn’t anticipate that we, as a culture, would make such a big deal over a fictional book trilogy, or that the love of such a series would incite an extensive public discourse about women, fantasies, sex, and—dare I say it—feminism. And I never thought that I would be a part of this firestorm of commentary, as the effective professional poster child for
Fifty Shades of Grey
.

This is not to say that I am a novice to the erotica genre. At my all-girls sleepaway camp in the late 1980s, I was charged with buying Judy Blume’s
Forever
…, Nancy Friday’s
My Secret Garden
, and
Penthouse Letters
. Sure,
Forever
… isn’t really erotica, but it was all about a budding sexual relationship. For many of us who had never had any sexual experience before, the sentiments and descriptions were highly erotic. As for the other books, I
remember reading them aloud with my girlfriends, and I remember the electrical charge surging through my body. I remember watching my girlfriends squirm on their beds. Clearly they, too, felt something; they felt pleasure. It was thrilling to know that my body was capable of producing those types of feelings without having to do anything physical. Though I didn’t know it then, it was the moment when I discovered how powerful my body was. Most of us would give anything to get back to that time when those feelings were new and anything was possible.

Fast-forward to 2012. Early this year, my husband and a close friend told me about a book they had heard about (and, knowing my line of work, thought I’d be interested in). “Fifty something,” my husband said.

“What’s it about?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Sex, I guess. I was told you would like it,” he replied.

We were about to go on vacation and would be living on a boat with three other couples in the middle of the ocean; I needed some books to read anyway and downloaded what I soon learned was titled
Fifty Shades of Grey
onto my Kindle.

We got on the boat on a Tuesday around noon. By 2:00
P.M.
I had begun the book. One of my friends on the trip, Amy, was reading
Fifty Shades Darker
. Within twenty minutes, clearly motivated by what we were reading, we grabbed our respective partners and headed down to our rooms. Our girlfriends had seen this interaction and in the middle of the Caribbean Sea, thanks to technology and cell service, downloaded their copies, too. Needless to say, there was a lot of swaying on the boat that week that had nothing to do with the waves. There was sex—lots and lots of sex.

Suffice it to say, I loved these books. I loved what they did for my libido. But also, almost as much (dare I actually say as much?), I loved what they did for my friendships and the conversations that my girlfriends and I had with one another. We talked, we laughed, and we shared untold stories from our lives.
It was like summer camp all over again—only this time as an adult in a marriage. And these conversations were right on par with all of my professional media messaging: sex is good, pleasure is important, communication is essential. I was officially a Fifty Shades fan.

When I got back to land, it turned out the whole country was reading the trilogy. Imagine how happy I was, then, when I was asked to appear on the
Today Show
to talk about the Fifty Shades phenomenon. I had been on the
Today Show
several times, but they had never put me in the 8:00
A.M.
hour. Sex and other “fluffy” stuff get pushed to 9:00 or 10:00
A.M.
, when it’s Kathie Lee Gifford and Hoda Kotb, and there are usually cocktails somewhere on the set. But not this time. This time I was booked for an 8:13
A.M.
segment to talk about
Fifty Shades of Grey
with Dr. Drew Pinsky, celebrity psychiatrist, television host, and a longtime professional friend.

It was this segment that ended up inciting a wild and irrational discussion about female sexuality, fantasies, and erotica. The anchor, Savannah Guthrie, said the book was demeaning to women. Dr. Drew said that the book’s concept disturbed him and that
Fifty Shades of Grey
was more than the swept-away fantasy; it was violence against women. (He also said that he had not read the book.) I said that Fifty Shades didn’t disturb me at all; it was a romanticized version of a particular community and an absolutely consensual relationship. (And I’d read all three books. In forty-eight hours.) What could have been a conversation about how our culture’s unhealthy portrayal of sex has fueled women’s desire for sex on their own terms (and in their own voice) evolved into a debate about whether the Fifty Shades zeitgeist perpetuates violence against women.

Let me be clear: I have no tolerance for violence against women (or violence of any kind). However, the assumption that Fifty Shades perpetuates crimes against women trivializes real violence against women.
Fifty Shades of Grey
and other types of nonvanilla erotica have nothing to do with this. And that’s what
this is really about, right? Nonvanilla sex. Nonheterosexual-man-on-top sex. Consensual BDSM. And women who get off on having (or thinking about) lots of it.

We don’t like to acknowledge that female sexuality doesn’t always present itself in the package of the “good girl”; it forces us to reevaluate everything we’ve been taught about sex. It forces us to challenge preconceived notions of men and women. Because there’s no such thing as the good girl. We can be good, bad, or anything in between. We can be aggressive, demanding, or we can want our partners to take charge and tell us exactly what to do. We are not the same sexual person every day. It depends upon our mood, the context of our relationship, and our partner. It may also depend upon how big our bed is, and whether or not we are at sea—but I digress.

Women can be aroused by things that may be politically incorrect—like falling for a bad boy and believing that you can change him, or wanting a wealthy man to take care of you, or wanting to take a pair of silver balls out for a test drive, or wanting to be submissive. However, we don’t control how and if we turn on to something or someone. We may not desire to have fantasies about losing control, but many of us do. It doesn’t make us bad women or bad people. It doesn’t even say anything about our psyche or whether or not we want to “lose control” in our daily lives. We may not have even known that we could turn on to a particular scene or experience until reading about it. There’s no underlying psychological issue here. This is not about feminism or the demise of the women’s movement. But that is what it has become. Our fantasy lives, our personal lives, the things that are innately ours, have become pathologized, politicized, and publicly demonized. Our culture can’t handle women who own (and embrace) their sexuality. It hasn’t been too kind to women who want sex (or merely talk about it). We have a word for them: “sluts.”

Consider the effects of this hideous judgment. The inability to be our authentic sexual selves greatly hinders our ability to
have fulfilling sexual and emotional experiences. It’s why we don’t speak up. Why we don’t demand pleasure. Or protection. Or why we don’t carry condoms in our purses. Why we don’t share our feelings and admit that those feelings are very strong. Or why we don’t admit that we’re only interested in having no-strings-sex. Or that we want to use a vibrator or watch a little pornography or experiment with BDSM. Or just read a book about it.

Which leads me back to the
Today Show
. Do you know what is really demeaning to women? Telling us who we are supposed to be and what we are supposed to turn on to.

Anyway, I said all of this that morning on television. Though maybe not so eloquently; it was only a four-minute segment. (But I actually used the phrase “kink community” on the 8:00
A.M.
hour of the
Today Show
, which for me says “success”!) I received an avalanche of feedback to my response; tens of thousands of viewers have watched the video on my YouTube page. People have lots to say about Fifty Shades. For me, this goes back to the liberation and fun I felt when I first read those books, first experienced the uptick in my libido, and laughed hysterically with my girlfriends. That is what sex and sexual health should be about: pleasure, fun, and communication.

As it turns out, I am actually thankful to
Fifty Shades of Grey
for giving us material that has brought women’s sexuality back into the public discourse. But I am convinced that we’re missing the big picture. There is an aspect to the Fifty Shades phenomenon that no one has mentioned. It’s what makes me proud to be associated with this trilogy. For me, when it comes to
Fifty Shades of Grey
, it’s not about the sex, the relationship between Ana and Christian, or the real-life drama or controversy. The Fifty Shades phenomenon isn’t about the content: it’s about the readers. The success of
Fifty Shades of Grey
represents women at our best. Sure, the Real Housewives are entertaining, but we’re not all gossipy and catty backstabbers. We’re friends, we’re sisters, we’re mothers, we’re partners, and we want to support each
other. And if we find something that enhances our lives—even our sex lives—we share the information. That’s what
Fifty Shades of Grey
is all about. Women talking to each other. Women talking to their partners. All with the goal of bettering our intimate lives, because as we all know, it’s very easy to put that part of our lives on the back burner when we have so much going on.

So sure,
Fifty Shades
has some seriously good sex. Sex that many of us have never experienced or even dreamed about. But it’s also about love and it’s also about becoming that inner goddess inside all of us. Because we all have her. We all are her. But sometimes it takes a while to remember that she’s there, waiting for us to find ourselves again. Because we need that. We need to remember that we are more than just someone’s spouse or mother. We have names; we are sex goddesses. We are definitely not sluts.

I will be the poster child for that message any day.

MELISSA FEBOS

“I
MEAN, MELLY,” my mother’s voice emitted from the phone, “it’s really a
phenomenon
.”

I heard her clinking pots in her kitchen.

“Have you read it?” I asked, turning onto my Brooklyn street.

“I’ve read all three!” she laughed, both delighted and embarrassed by the confession. “And, honey, you could have written these in your sleep. Not that you ever would.”

“Nope,” I agreed, suddenly wanting the conversation to be over.

Friends were startled that it took me so long to hear of
Fifty Shades of Grey
. Not me. I had spent the past two years talking about my own experiences with S&M—a part of my life that ended (in practice) six years ago. I am not drawn to similarly themed subject matter. As a drug addict who has been clean for nearly a decade, I am similarly bored and repelled by most stories about active addiction. I’m over it—that part of it, anyway. But facing
Fifty Shades
was, of course, inevitable.

As a twenty-one-year-old college student in Manhattan, I’d answered an ad in the
Village Voice
and spent the next four years performing all the practices described in
Fifty Shades
(and many, many more) upon men who paid $200 per hour to see me. For the first two years, I worked out of a Midtown “dungeon,” which provided the space, equipment, and administrative work necessary to cater to the fantasies of these men. The last two years, I worked freelance, teetering on my stilettos to hotel rooms and lavish homes with my tote bag full of rope, dildos, clamps, and floggers.

And then I wrote a book about it.
Whip Smart
began, as my experience had, with an anthropological experiment, followed by my immersion in the commercial realm of S&M fantasy, and ended with the surprising and inevitable realization that my most profound motives were based on neither finances nor curiosity.

I had never intended to write a memoir about my years as a Domme, nor the twists that landed me on the bondage table instead of my clients, nor any kind of memoir for that matter. But I was a writer, and it turns out that I can only engage the big questions by writing my way into their answers.

At twenty-one, or twenty-two, or twenty-three, I could not reconcile my feminism, my self-conception as an intellectual, with my desire to relinquish power. And I
was
curious, adventurous, and drawn to experiences outside of social prescription. So I stuck with that story, and the flimsy idea that I was fundamentally different from my clients and the women I worked with. I was also a secret heroin addict, and so already a master of compartmentalization and denial.

The abridged conclusion is that I was, and am, fundamentally interested in power dynamics. The eroticization of this, for me, was an effort to divorce my submissive desires from my “real” life. I had no interest in submitting to the mores of our sexist culture, but still had been socialized by them—and repressed tendencies have a way of creeping out in fantasy, in sex.
Most of my clients were also committed to an outward life of empowerment: they were Wall Street types, cops, politicians, and child abuse survivors. Repression of impulse and trauma had worked well for them—my clients were successful by mainstream measures—but their desires could not be erased. They paid me to scratch their hidden itches, and also created a space for me to scratch mine.

The experience of those years, and of writing and publishing the book, taught me how to integrate my desires into my life. I got honest with myself, and then with anyone who cared to read my story. I learned to accept the seeming contradiction of my beliefs and my fantasies. They were not at odds; they were working out a balance between what was and what I wished. If our society’s pressure to fit myself into a submissive, sexualized female ideal were not insidious, I might not be so convinced of my feminism. These parts of myself exist not at odds but in tandem. What a relief it was to figure this out.

But there is a curious dynamic between having learned a hard-won truth and observing that process in other people. As a recovered heroin addict, I have deep compassion and love for other addicts. Still, I often find myself more repelled by them than any other class of people. I think it is somewhat universal, the instinct to judge most harshly those people in whom you recognize some vulnerability of your own. That kind of recognition on a national scale is no different.

I avoided
Fifty Shades of Grey
for as long as I could. Every day for a month I fielded phone calls, emails, and requests for comment. I avoided most articles analyzing the phenomenon. I cut my own curiosity off at the knees, and resisted indulging in others’ proclamations of the book’s terrible writing. I wanted it to be bad. I wanted it to be good and feared it wasn’t. I feared what feelings bubbled in me every time the book was mentioned.

And then I bought it. I read the first half of the first book in bed next to my sleeping girlfriend. The writing was indeed terrible. But I still masturbated three times, iPad in one hand, the
other tucked under the waistband of my pajama bottoms. With zero shame. My own experience had given me that freedom.

I didn’t finish the book. Not because I was disgusted with it or myself. Not because I didn’t find it compelling, despite the poor writing. I was simply trying to revise my own novel and am easily influenced by the voice of whatever I’m reading. I need to stick to works in possession of craft and nuance to which I aspire.

I’m not interested in condemning the book. I think it’s my obligation, as a writer, to inform myself of what people are responding to. Especially women. My most important goal as a writer is to acknowledge truths that readers already know, however inchoately. My greatest pleasure as a reader is not to digest completely foreign information, but to identify my own experience articulated as I have not yet seen or thought it. Writers are mirrors more than guides. For me, honest self-appraisal has been the best guide.

I read the Twilight series, and I read most of
Fifty Shades of Grey
. These books have not found success based on tricks or mirage—or at least none that do not already operate in the psyches of their readers, or the cultures that raised them. They are not great works of art, but they are great mirrors. They name what we are afraid to name within ourselves.

I do, however, believe in the responsibility of writers to also show us what
can
be. My own experience has shown me that I can accept my submissive fantasies and remain an empowered, intellectual woman. I can still wear my stilettos and expect to be taken seriously. I need not be defined solely by my own eroticism, nor our culture’s eroticization of my body, my femininity, and its invented ideal.

I think it’s likely that
Fifty Shades
could have named the desire to submit to another’s power without endorsing the more complex and dangerous fantasy that one must be a naïf to do so. Need Christian Grey have been a wealthy businessman? Need Anastasia have been a
virgin
incapable of naming her own
vagina? One can submit one’s body, to another human being, can submit to one’s own desires, without submitting all their worldly knowledge. I know this for fact.

This equation is a dangerous one: that we must sacrifice our maturity to obtain our fantasies. That we must have all the power or none of it. The myth lifts a curtain with one hand and drops another with the other. Women have been negotiating this shitty deal for a long, long time. If there is an illusion here, it is that we must continue doing so.

But the book is just a story—millions froth at every corner of our culture. There is no inherent threat posed by this book, per se; its pages boast no invention. And in that sense
Fifty Shades of Grey
is the most accurate mirror we have. The book has not revealed our deep-seated belief that women’s sexuality threatens our independence, or that we are incapable of containing multitudes. Our reaction to the book has revealed this belief. E. L. James’ choices evidence this as well. The products of our culture are often simply its symptoms.

I am glad that
Fifty Shades
was published because we need to see our secrets named. Because we need to make public a conversation of how this can be done without promoting our disempowerment. Empowerment does not come in reading this book; it comes in seeing what we are, and what we are not. Accepting our fantasies comes at a price, but that price is not the forfeiting of our intellect, our wisdom, our politics, or our dignity. Rather, that price comes from bravely deciding that there is enough room for all of our selves. And there is.