How 50 Shades of Grey Should Have Ended
So I’ve been reading the excellent, entertaining and informative review of 50 Shades of Grey on The Pervocracy. The Pervocracy is a kink blog, (and thus Not Safe For Work) and Cliff is an experienced kinkster who brings a lot to the table discussing the book. This post would be worthwhile just to share that link, really. Though I suppose I should warn you that the book under review contains an awful lot of abuse. Seriously, unless Cliff is making stuff up and deliberately lying about the story, I’m a little shocked that these books made such a big splash because of the sex and not the abusive relationship!
Anyway, I was reading the comments on the latest installment and an anonymous commenter provided this link to a fan(?)fic. It’s short and very good, and I recommend it after you’ve caught up on Cliff’s review. Soon after reading it I remembered that the trailer for the 50 Shades movie is out, and decided that if and when the people behind How It Should Have Ended get around to that movie, they could do a lot worse than take inspiration from that! Though I suspect they’ll go the route of suddenly reverting to the sparkly vampire source material….
That’s really all this post was for, sharing some links and a random thought. Since I’m thinking about it, though, how in the world is this whiny, tantrum-prone, abusive, petty rapist Christian Grey supposed to be sexy?
Posted on August 18, 2014, in Daily Post and tagged 50 Shades of Grey, glorifying abusive relationships, How It Should Have Ended, kink, Lucky Number Thirteen, nsfw, The Pervocracy. Bookmark the permalink. 5 Comments.
The Adventures of Leo Tarvi 
The answer is really sad: our media and our parents teach girls to value hopeless romantics (stalkers), men who will never let them go (stalkers/abusers), passionate men (angry abusers), and bullheaded men (self-centered assholes). We also teach girls that men are always right, that women apologize and forgive, that women can change their man for the better, and that women always *always* give men the benefit of the doubt. Then we refuse to teach girls what consent is, teach all children that physical boundaries that they want to set don’t matter, and blame women for crimes committed against us– in the view of girls who may have similar things happen to them in the future. For girls who don’t have parents with a functional relationship or who have a parent that fits one of those “romantic ideals,” the media reinforces that these are men to be desired. Girls in that situation have no basis for knowing to avoid those men; boys in that situation strive to become them when they grow up.
If girls follow that training, we may never realize that what’s happening to us is wrong. Or if we’re lucky, we may reach a breaking point and run like hell. If we’re super lucky, we may eventually become able to detect those tendencies in men and prefer men who don’t display them.
The only thing that I needed to know about 50 Shades of Grey is that the plot features a “BDSM contract,” something that upstanding people in the BDSM community know violates consent. IRL, these contracts are typically used to gaslight kidnapped or confined sex slaves so that they believe that they do not have a legal right to escape. Contracts are super blech.
Thank you for that detailed and depressing comment.
The contract part interests me more than it depresses me, so I’ll talk about that.
I hadn’t really thought about it before, but a contract is an adversarial thing to begin with, isn’t it. It makes sense in a lot of friendly contexts, just in case things stop being so friendly, but I can see how it could be used this way. I do think there’s something to writing out boundaries and other such details, but then that’s why we have things like the Want! Will…Won’t. charts.
Those look like negotiation worksheets, which I’ve done (although typically through the guide in SM 101, IIRC) and which are very different from a “slave contract.” Slave contracts were one of the first items that made people want internet censorship and the defense was that they were just for fantasy, not intended to be used. Here’s an example (not explicit, read to the end to see the problem): http://www.milism.net/cache/336816/slave336816contract.htm The person who wrote it says that it’s legally binding, which is not true if it coerced or if it is signed in a state where it is impossible to sign away a right (like CA).
The following is not the only case, but it is the most notorious case: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kidnapping_of_Colleen_Stan I’ve seen interviews with Stan where she discussed the contract, the coercion to get her to sign it, and her conviction that it was, as her captors told her, legally binding. IIRC, her kidnapper got the contract on a BBS. There are also groups on Second Life who do this kind of play, which sometimes spills into real life. I know people who have met their SL owner for a play weekend and come out ok, but even they have told me stories of previous slaves meeting with the same master, in which the slave ran away and never spoke to him again. That sounds like boundary crossing and assault, but she can’t report that. Who would believe her, a woman who flew into town to be a sex slave for a weekend, especially one who signed a contract indicating permanent consent without limits? Contracts coerce victims of crimes to not report those crimes at any point in the future.
So the idea of a book including a woman signing a slave contract, and having that treated as porn? That’s cause for an extremely long, completely non-sexy shower.
Well, she never actually signs the contract, or at least hasn’t two chapters from the end of the book. But that’s okay, Asshole McRapist has made it clear that he ignores the rules whenever he feels like it anyway. Because he’s such a domly manly dom man.
Ew.
Something that really isn’t taught as well or as completely as it should be is legal concepts like what makes a binding contract and what rights people have. The whole reason “I know my rights” is such a cliche is that most people don’t.
This web site really has all of the info I needed about this subject and didn’t
know who to ask.