by Lori Perkins
Time magazine nominated E. L. James as one of 2012’s “100 Most Influential People in the World.” This happily married mother followed her dreams and in doing so became one of the most talked-about authors—and women—of the year. Fifty Shades of Grey, Fifty Shades Darker, and Fifty Shades Freed went “viral,” so to speak, putting ladies everywhere into a perpetual orgasmic coma! While breathlessly turning pages, we tuned out the world, escaped reality, and tapped into a typically forbidden world of sexual intensity. Women’s conversations have been consumed by this modern-day love story; our voices have been loud and our voices have been heard—Random House and Universal Studios are hearing us loud and clear! People who call the novels “mommy porn” simply have not yet fallen under the spell of Christian Grey. But they will. I’m sure of that.
LYSS STERN is the founder and president of Divalysscious Moms (www.divamoms.com), the luxury lifestyle company that caters to New York’s well-heeled and trendsetting moms. After eight years, Lyss’ company database boasts 380,000 members. Lyss is also the coauthor of If You Give a Mom a Martini: 100 Ways to Find 10 Blissful Minutes for Yourself (Clarkson Potter), which was recently optioned to be made into a feature film, and is the cocreator of the new NickMom short-form series Storytime for Moms. Lyss lives in New York City with her husband, talent manager Brian Stern, and their two sons, Jackson and Oliver, and spends her summer in Atlantic Beach and Southampton with her family and puppy, Jedi.
ARIELLE LOREN
Imagining a Black Fifty Shades
YANKING. SPANKING. Dominating. Submitting. Orgasms. Shaking. Pleasure. Strokes. Moans. Screams. Control. Release.
The sex scenes in Fifty Shades of Grey have penetrated the imaginations of women across the world, challenging them to explore their sexual curiosities.
Anastasia “Ana” Steele is every woman, kind of. She’s strong, yet vulnerable. She’s smart, yet still learning. She’s independent, yet dependent. But she’s also different from me. We’re both young. We’re both sexually adventurous. We’re both stubborn in relationships. However, she’s pale, brunette, and beautiful. I’m caramel brown, kinky-haired, and gorgeous. We both have our own sex appeal, but her image sells to a wider audience.
Beyond urban and black genres, multifaceted stories of black sexualities have barely penetrated the fiction publishing market. It’s difficult to attract nonurban or nonblack readers to the most frequent narratives of black American sex lives for a variety of reasons, but it’s primarily due to the cultural specificity of the stories that are currently available.
There are two recurring scenarios in black and urban erotica. However, these common plots have made books successful in their own right without the mainstream nod. First, there’s the story of the classic urban vixen who physically resembles a contemporary hip-hop video girl. She’s usually participating in male pleasure–centered sexual intercourse, halfway getting her needs met and having to pleasure herself. Meanwhile, she’s constantly in danger due to her sexual relationship with a drama-ridden rapper or drug-dealing man.
On the flipside, there’s the Christian-centered story line in which the black female protagonist deals with the guilt trips of the Black Church. If she’s single, she’s experiencing the too common reality of black women being ashamed of satisfying their sexual needs outside of marriage due to their Christian beliefs. If she’s married, she’s either going through a lack of sexual fulfillment due to a cheating male spouse or having an affair herself.
The cultural specificity of these frequent fiction narratives of black female sexualities makes it more difficult for these books to cross over and gain recognition outside of the black and urban book markets. Authors like Zane and Eric Jerome Dickey have experienced wider audiences and longevity in terms of their careers, but that’s because they’ve stepped outside of those story lines. Yes, authors like Noire and Kimberla Lawson Roby, whose books have plots similar to the ones listed above, have experienced popularity as well, but their popularity has been more limited to the urban and black publishing markets.
In general, it’s rare to read about the diversity of black female sexual pleasure in literary works and mainstream media. When conversations do occur or books are written and published, they usually end up as a slight remix of the story lines listed above, even in black and urban erotica. There are few stories of black participants in pleasure lifestyles such as kink and BDSM that get any mass literary traction or media attention. Thus, it’s not unexpected that most Americans would expect and easily imagine the main characters in book like Fifty Shades—a book that includes BDSM—as white.
A black Ana would require the acknowledgment that black women are into more than just vanilla sex and plain-Jane desire. While the stories of black women’s diverse sexualities are limited in mainstream media, some like handcuffs, bondage, a bit of spanking, dominating sex talk, and submitting to their partners. Others might prefer to stay in control in the bedroom, dictating the actions of their lovers and guiding their every move. Or they might prefer something entirely different. That’s the beauty of being human.
On paper, many black women are Ana. They’re college-educated, career-driven, self-sufficient, and independent. Thanks to Michelle Obama and other intelligent, ambitious black women shining in mainstream media, very few would blink twice at the idea of a black Ana in terms of academic profile and social class. It’s the sexual nature of her character that would give many people pause, as black women aren’t known for doing those types of things or exploring certain approaches to pleasure.
Additionally, what about the controlling, yet oh so sexy, Christian Grey? Would a reader believe a young (white) American billionaire is sexually attracted to a black woman? Or even more brain twisting, could a young American billionaire be black?
While there are plenty of white men and black women in interracial relationships, there aren’t any young black male billionaires even in the age of President Barack Obama. The white Christian Grey has Facebook cofounder Mark Zuckerberg as a real-life billionaire reference. A black Christian would be a total product of the imagination, which could be problematic for mass book sales, particularly outside of the black and urban publishing markets.
Part of what sells books is the balance between imagination and believability. Could two black characters, one with a believable social class and the other rich beyond the imagination, engage in kinky sex and have it appeal to the world? Would a black Ana make white American and British women fawning over Fifty Shades of Grey feel the same inspiration to explore and express their desires? Would a black Mr. Grey still make the majority of female readers moist down there and ready to get on their knees in a play dungeon?
Arguably, the whiteness of Fifty Shades of Grey was necessary for mainstream success, as the imaginations of many readers aren’t prepared to embrace a black version of the book. Not to mention, many white writers are petrified to bring characters to life that don’t look anything like them, so it would’ve been daring for E. L. James to describe her characters as brown.
Truth be told, there is a double standard when it comes to the appeal of brown bodies having mind-blowing sex versus white ones. For a society that’s supposed to be “postracial” or able to see past color, Fifty Shades of Grey is just another reminder that there’s much work to be done in order for us to really see ourselves in each other.
Black couples yank, spank, dominate, submit, orgasm, shake, please, stroke, moan, scream, control, and release in bedrooms and play in dungeons as well. With a bit of extra curiosity, mainstream readers would find that sex is a universal experience and how we do it isn’t limited by race but rather personal interest.
We need more sex stories of characters that look different than Ana and Grey. We need more sex narratives by black women, because there is power in the variety of black women’s desires, and it’s important that they tell their many sex stories, too. And we need more examples of high-achieving black men to put to rest the stereotype of a young American billion
aire automatically being white. Achieving this diversity doesn’t have to be an “Affirmative Action” style initiative, but rather something that stems from our creative values as diverse erotica fans and readers.
ARIELLE LOREN is the editor in chief of Corset Magazine, the go-to magazine for all things sexuality. Embracing human curiosity, honoring sensuality, and celebrating sex, the downloadable publication caters to an international community of sex-curious readers. Learn more at Corset-Magazine.com.
DR. LOGAN LEVKOFF
The Professional Poster Child
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 f
our-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.
