by Lori Perkins
I will be the poster child for that message any day.
DR. LOGAN LEVKOFF is a nationally recognized expert in the field of human sexuality. She encourages honest conversation about sex and the role that it plays in American culture. As a thought leader in sexuality and relationships, Logan frequently appears on television as a pundit and sexual health contributor. She is the host of CafeMom’s Mom Ed: In the Bedroom and the author of Third Base Ain’t What it Used to Be and How to Get Your Wife to Have Sex with You. Logan is an AASECT-certified sex educator and received her PhD in human sexuality, marriage, and family life education from New York University and an MS in human sexuality education and a BA in English from the University of Pennsylvania. She lives in New York City with her husband, son, and daughter.
MELISSA FEBOS
Raising the Shades
“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.
MELISSA FEBOS is the author of Whip Smart (St. Martin’s Press), a critically acclaimed memoir about her years as a professional Dominatrix that Kirkus Review said “expertly captures grace within depravity.” Her work has appeared in Glamour, Salon, Dissent, The Southeast Review, the New York Times, Bitch Magazine, BOMB, and the Chronicle of Higher Education Review, among many others, and she has been profiled in venues ranging from the cover of the New York Post to NPR’s Fresh Air to Dr. Drew. A 2010 and 2011 MacDowell Colony fellow, and 2012 Bread Loaf fellow, she teaches at Sarah Lawrence College, Purchase College, New York University, and privately, and holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence. She lives in Brooklyn, and is currently at work on a novel.
APPENDIX
Fifty Shades of Reading
THERE ARE A WHOLE LOT OF BOOKS mentioned in these pages—some are smutty, some are literary, some are educational. We’ve distilled them into a big reference list for you, so you can put them on your favorite reading device and become an expert on smut.
We left out the mainstream classics—we figured you could find Gone with the Wind and Pride and Prejudice on your own (and if you haven’t, you should!).
We also divided the list into fiction and nonfiction. The fiction list is almost a best-of guide to the erotica of the past decade, plus a few BDSM standards.
Erotica expert Susie Bright put her own list together on Amazon’s Listmania (where you can find many of the same titles) in which she summed up what it is about these books that makes them so compelling:
Every once in a blue hot moon, a novel comes along that captures women’s erotic fantasies. The female heroine is plucky, headstrong, a little naïve—but with a sexual appetite that’s never been tapped. When she finds a lover who is confident (alright, masterful!) and persuasive enough to push her over the edge—wow, just send all your messages to voicemail and lock the door, because readers will not be torn from these pages.
We hope you’ll find something here whose pages you won’t be torn from, either.
Fiction
Bared to You: A Crossfire Novel, by Sylvia Day
Best Gay Erotica 2009, edited by Richard Labonte and James Lear
Black Feathers: Erotic Dreams, by Cecilia Tan
Blind Seduction, by Debra Hyde
Blue Boy, by Rakesh Satyal
Candy, by Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg
Carrie’s Story, by Molly Weatherfield
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, by Lord Byron
Edge Plays, by Cecilia Tan
Exit to Eden, by Anne Rampling (Anne Rice)
Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, by John Cleland
The Flame and the Flower, by Kathleen Woodiwiss
Forever …, by Judy Blume
Gabriel’s Inferno, by Sylvain Renard
Gabriel’s Rapture, by Sylvain Renard
The Image, by Jean de Berg
Jonah Sweet of Delancey Street, by Ryan Field
Juliette; or, Vice Amply Rewarded, by Marquis de Sade
Justine; or, The Misfortunes of Virtue, by Marquis de Sade
Lip Service, by M.J. Rose
Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov
Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert
Magic University series, by Cecilia Tan
The Marketplace series, by Laura Antoniou
Mind Games, by Cecilia Tan
Mr. Benson, by John Preston
Natural Law, by Joey W. Hill
Nine and a Half Weeks: A Memoir of a Love Affair, by Elizabeth McNeill
No Adam in Eden, by Grace Metalious
Peyton Place, by Grace Metalious
The Prince’s Boy, by Cecilia Tan
Return to Peyton Place, by Grace Metalious
Roving Pack, by Sassafras Lowrey
Secrets anthology series, by Red Sage Publishing
Seducing the Myth, edited by Lucy Felthouse
The Sleeping Beauty Trilogy, by A. N. Roquelaure (Anne Rice)
Smut by the Sea, edited by Lucy Felthouse
Smut in the City, edited by Lucy Felthouse
Story of L, by Debra Hyde
Story of O, by Pauline Réage
Sweet Savage Love, by Rosemary Rogers
Switch, by Megan Hart
Taking a Shot, by Jaci Burton
Tarnsman of Gor, by John Norman
The Top of Her Game, by Emma Holly
The Vagina Monologues, by Eve Ensler
Velvet Glove, by Emma Holly
Venus in Furs, by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
The Whippingham Papers, by Algernon Charles Swinburne
White Flames: Erotic Dreams, by Cecilia Tan
The Wolf and the Dove, by Kathleen Woodiwiss
Nonfiction
50 Ways to Play: BDSM for Nice People, by Don Macleod and Debra Macleod
Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth, by Camille Bacon-Smith
Fifty Shades of Pleasure: A Bedside Companion: Sex Secrets That Hurt So Good, by Marisa Bennett
Inside Peyton Place: The Life of Grace Metalious, by Emily Toth
The Joy of Writing Sex: A Guide for Fiction Writers, by Elizabeth Benedict
Letters to Penthouse, by Editors of Penthouse
Master: The Unauthorized Autobiography of Master R, by Master R
My Secret Garden, by Nancy Friday
Natural History of the Romance Novel, by Pamela Regis
New Perspectives on Popular Romance Fiction: Critical Essays, edited by Sarah S. G. Frantz and Eric Murphy Selinger
The Passion of Michel Foucault, by James Miller
Pleasure: A Woman’s Guide to Getting the Sex You Want, Need and Deserve, by Hilda Hutcherson
Psychopathia Sexualis, by Richard Krafft-Ebing
The Ultimate Guide to Kink: BDSM, Role Play and the Erotic Edge, edited by Tristan Taormino
Wired for Story: The Writer’s Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence, by Lisa Cron
Women Constructing Men: Female Novelists and Their Male Characters, 1750-2000, edited by Sarah S. G. Frantz and Katharina Rennhak
ABOUT THE EDITOR
LORI PERKINS is the publisher of Riverdale Avenue Books, a digital-first e-publisher. She was the cofounder and former editorial director of erotica e-publisher Ravenous Romance and has been a literary agent for 20 years. She is the author of The Insider’s Guide to Getting an Agent (Writer’s Digest Books) and has edited twenty erotica anthologies and more than one hundred erotic novels, as well as published erotica under a pseudonym.
1 Yes, I did read the Twilight books, too, and no, I’m not a closeted romance fan. I suppose I’d gotten used to the movies’’characterization of Bella and had forgotten just how wimpy and annoyingly naïve she was in the books. I reread the last book recently and realized I greatly preferred the screenwriter’s version of Bella. But I digress: Ana is just as annoyingly naïve as Bella was, except it’s worse, because she’s graduating from college with a high school girl’s
experience and sensibilities—a very immature high school girl’s experience and sensibilities.
2 As you may imagine, Ana was not the character with whom I, personally, identified.
3 For a lot of erotic romance folks, you need an alpha male to sweep the main character off her feet. A submissive man who craves the application of a woman’s itchy palm applied to his needy backside, among other acts, is not as romantic as the reverse, it would seem.
4 A lot of romance purists don’t think there should be any sex in romance, much less the amount ladled into the Fifty Shades books.
5 “He’s Just Not That Into Anyone” and “They Know What Boys Want.”
6 “Women Falling for Fifty Shades of Degradation,” Gina Barreca, the Hartford Courant, May 3, 2012.
7 http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/fifty-shades-of-grey-giving-bondage-a-bad-name-20120709-21rm3.html.
8 http://www.cbc.ca/news/arts/story/2012/07/10/f-50-shades-of-grey-bdsm.html.
9 http://www.purefreedom.org/blog/?p=320.
10 http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/ny_gals_learning_
the_ropes_at_fifty_sVWWKeksj9WKUto2ITg1KK.
11 http://www.wiredforstory.com/fifty-shades-of-story-vs-%e2%
80%9cwellwritten%e2%80%9d/.
