Romance Porn for the Hookup Generation

Rumor has it that it’s the hottest of hot books. Reviewers say that it is implausible, poorly written, with unrealistic characters… but they can’t put it down. It's the publishing phenomenon called Fifty Shades of Grey.

To be blunt, it has more in common with pornography than with romance novels or erotic fiction like The Story of O.

Originally published as an ebook it seems to have great appeal to modern liberated women who are juggling family and career. Someone has called it Mommy Porn.

I would call it romance porn for the hookup generation.

For the record, I have not read the book and do not intend to do so. Thus parts of my description will be inference. If I infer wrongly, please feel free to correct me.

In the book a virginal college senior named Anastasia Steele has gotten through college untouched, by herself or by any male.

She eventually enters into an unsigned sexual contract with a billionaire sadist named Christian Grey and loses her virginity to him.

  

As everyone knows, there is no such thing anymore as a college senior who has never been touched. Thus, Steele's character lacks verisimilitude.

If she is not real, then she must be a coed’s wish fulfillment.

It’s almost as though her college experience is going to be retroactively profaned by her sadistic billionaire. Whether you see this as a profaned Immaculate Conception—which also involves retroactive cleansing—or feeling “like a virgin” the character appeals to many women.

One cannot fail to note that “Steele” must, by definition, be a “strong” woman, and that Christian must represent Christianity as well as the 1%.

I am led to understand that Steele does not quite sign the contract that will make her Grey’s sex slave, but she acts as though she did. I would add that a contract is like an arrangement. As everyone knows, marriage is also a contract. What starts as an arrangement will end up as a marriage.

In the past virginal girls graduated from college and got married. Now virginal girls graduate from college and involve themselves in arrangements that will provide an enormous amount of pleasure for both parties and that will lead to marriage.

Maureen Dowd describes the contract:

But he does want Anastasia to sign a contract to be a weekend Submissive, to always keep her eyes cast down, call him “Sir,” stay “shaved and/or waxed” and not snack between meals (except fruit). The contract stipulates that “the Dominant may flog, spank, whip or corporally punish the Submissive as he sees fit, for purposes of discipline, for his own personal enjoyment or for any other reason, which he is not obliged to provide.”

I will mention in passing that contracts are a staple of literary masochism. The original version was written by the godfather of masochism, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch in his book Venus in Furs.

Since Anastasia has grown up in a feminist culture she and Christian always use protection. He cares about her pleasure and always provides her with incredible orgasms.

According to modern sex therapists, this is the acid test that proves eternal true love.

Steeley as she is, Anastasia finds sexual ecstasy in submission, in being bound and chained and whipped, in being used and abused as a sexual object. Since she consents there is no moral problem with her behavior.

It should not surprise anyone that the story turns out well for all involved. Anastasia gets the guy. Christian Grey is cured of his sexual sadism. The whole game is therapeutic.

Dowd explains the genre:

A mousy, virginal girl who is spirited beneath her shy demeanor falls in love with a rich, arrogant man. She learns that he’s damaged, but decides to persevere and heal him through her transforming love. H.E.A., as they say in romantica: Happily Ever After.

Of course, innocent love is going to cure sadism. Representing the 1% and Christianity, Grey must be a highly defective creature. Women today deserve our sympathy for having to deal with such wrecked men. 

According to the story, Steele has only entered into the game in order to release Grey from the hold of past abuse.

You see, in the book’s psychology, Grey was damaged by an abusive woman. True and pure love rescues him from the sadism that she visited on him.

Obviously, this is an illusion. Don't try it at home. True love does not cure sadism. Most sadists do not want to be cured anyway.

It is also fair to note that most sexual sadists are nowhere near as charming or as innocent as Christian Grey.

Sadists get off on inflicting pain. Redeeming them with love might make a good story, but no one should ever imagine that a sadist is going to be cured. Psychopathy is not really subject to a cure-by-love.

Of course, the book has not made movement feminists very happy. The notion that women want to be submissive, not in the socio-economic sense of depending on a man, but in the fetishistic sense of wanting to be beaten and bound displeases the feminist matriarchs.

More so since the book suggests that the submissive woman manages to win the rich husband… the better to be provided for and protected the rest of her days.

Sexual submissiveness in a woman is a fetishized version of femininity.

Feminists associate femininity with the dreaded feminine mystique. They have largely succeeded in teaching young women to abandon the trappings of femininity in favor of what they call independence and autonomy, of not having to depend on a man for anything.

Feminists want women to be in control and on top. If the success of Fifty Shades of Grey is any indication more than a few women do not exactly get off on being tops.

Even though femininity and masculinity are not social constructs, they do define social roles, social rules, and social obligations.

A woman who acts and functions in the world as though she were a man cannot recover her lost femininity by waving her magic wand. Her only recourse will be to adopt a more fetishized version of it: masochistic submissiveness.

In a sense it’s also adaptive behavior. Many of today’s young men are broken, though not in the same way that Christian Grey is. Many of them have been beaten down by an educational system that favors women and have been unable to establish enough of a career to become marriage material.

Young American men have been the primary victims of the feminist revolution. They are now being told to get used to the brave new world where women wear the pants and the spanx. Feminists are now telling them to get with the program.

I don’t know what these feminists have been smoking, but it is surely illegal.

If young women imagine that they can cure young men of the problems that feminism has visited on them by showering them with love, they are flat-out wrong. Again, love does not cure psychopathy.

And yet, this is as unrealistic an expectation as the one that has Christian Grey saved by Anastasia Steele.

Most girls are not going to be as fortunate as Anastasia Steele. Most of them are forced to deal with a cohort of disaffected young men who will be far more interested in cheap and easy sex than in relationships, romance, and marriage. If they read this book and conclude that by participating in the perverse games that men need they will be helping to cure these men, they are deluding themselves.

In a world where women rule men become surly, ill-kempt, unmotivated, aggressive, and eventually violent. In America’s inner cities, when young men live in matriarchal cultures and cannot find jobs that would allow them to be breadwinners, they often turn to crime and gangs.

Historically, matriarchal cultures where men cannot function as providers have produced cults to machismo. See Michael Carroll's book: The Cult of the Virgin Mary.

The feminist crusade to overthrow the patriarchy and to empower women is fast producing the kind of machismo culture that feminists say they abhor.

Worse yet, the women who have been the primary beneficiaries of this revolution are now seeing that they have purchased it at the cost of their femininity and that femininity, once sold, is very difficult to recover.