MASO(S)CHISM

"What big key you have!"

Eh bien, just so to get the facts straight. Fifty Shades of Grey is the modern-day rendition of Bluebeard and it goes something like that: There was once a very wealthy, very handsome dominant who fell in love with a virgin. She fell in love with him. Yet turned out he had this Bloody Chamber Red Room of Pain where he brought his wives subs to torture and kill fuck them. It was all a game of sort with rules and hard limits and NDAs. The virgin only had to get over her aversion to ex-sub femme fatales and his controlling manic tantrums. So she sort of did and they lived happily ever after. [1] 

Erika Leonard James (E.L.James for short) is no Angela Carter [2], but you can't really expect artistic subtlety of someone with a mortifyingly virile pen name like that. Actually, initially I Did. Expect.Subtlety of Mrs. James because rumors have been circulating that she's written the above-delineated S/M fairy tale for (post)pubescent teenage girls and their mothers. However, it's also been called "porn for mummies" (for those wondering - that's just tautonym for female porn nothing at all) so having established generic diversification, I basically had no other choice than to sit and enjoy this hyped-up, teratoid spawn of contemporary philistinism and pornoromantic concupiscence for what it is. I need to stress, and that's my first and the mildest assessment about the writer and her publication, that guessably the main problem with James's trilogy is the fact that it fails, meritorically and formally, to support its eclectic expectations. Feminists don't like it because, among other things, it sanctifies the main characters as the perfect products of sex marketing (e.g. a young and insecure yet deluxe babe in the throes of ultimate and constantaneous orgasms); S/M readers don't like it because it unnecessarily demonizes some aspects of their subculture through the eyes of one of the most nitwitted submissives in the history of literature(I'll elaborate on that later); porn readers don't like it for the melodramatic redundancy and linguistic infantilism (agreed); as a romance it's just too unbelievably eerie and emotionally omnivoreous ("You.Are.Beautiful.I.Love.You"s and "You.Are.Mine"s punctuate your skull until you're somehow spellbound to believe that this book is really about spiritual possession or something). Last but not least, it's much too long for a fairy tale - over 1500 pages of anfractuous, ridiculous plot that leads to no convincing moral at all. [3] Unless it's the one that endorses mariage d'amour, specifically between virgins and gold-hearted predators. It's not just romance anymore, it's adult romance or paranormal romance. Teenage pregnancies, hardcore sex and spouse abuse may break your bones, but S/M and vampirism (50 Shades of Grey was initially Twilight fan fic piece) will never hurt you. E.L.James is apparently unfamiliar with the works of Camille Paglia who wrote: "Sex is power. Identity is power. In western culture there are no nonexploitative relationships." [4]. In other words, sex is cthonian.[5] Yet, contemporary fairy tales like Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey purge sex of its cthonian descent with a masquerade of affections, rituals and post-decadent idolation of authoritarian, quixotic Apollonian male beauty. The Picture of Christian Grey mirrors the impossible female erotic fantasies in the pornified late romanticism AD 2011.

I'm going to focus on the merchandised BDSM/porn/erotica aspect of Fifty Shades of Grey, because frankly I'm not that much interested in others, Plus, it might as well serve as an excuse for the long-gestating exegesis of literary masochism in a few BDSM gems and flops. As for the characters. Undoubtedly, the James's books are nourished by simplistic psychologism which attempts to explain S/M preferences by means of childhood trauma. Well, that's easier for the explication of the gruellingly long-winded narrative, one only needs to look up "masochism" and "sadism," in online medical dictionary to know where both of these paraphilias come from. Furthermore, the main purpoted sadist of the book (he admits at one point that he likes whipping brunettes because they remind him of his crack-whore mother) makes a point of being painstakingly expiatory throughout his love affair. Implyingly, what Christian Grey did to his other submissives was deplorable and stemmed from the troubled past which led to the developmnent of sadistic personality disorder. The masochism of minor characters, like Leila, is a deranged form of a craving for pain and self-debasement. Once she's abandoned, Leila becomes a pitiful depressive stalker. In the world of E.L.James, BDSM predilections are inherently implicated with emotional damage, depravity and self-hatred.Worst yet, James supplements her asthenic heroine with a faux identity of a carpenter daughter, a strong and principled young lady, well-read in English literature, a morosoph of sorts, but that's beside the point. The important thing is she illuminates the problem of the emptiness and evil of Grey's prior relations with women. Anastasia Steele, like the princess in The Frog Prince, playfully clutches onto her little gold ball of purity and simpleheartedness only to release it for the pleasures afforded by her Apollonian god. Yet, the generation of readers who envy her is not one of batrachophobes.That's when the porn/erotica aspect comes in. It's been said that the sex in the Shades books promptly becomes dull and mechanic, with little variation on top-bottom roles, not to mention the lack of linguistic alteration, from Steele's perspective every intercourse is a blissful experience of pouring his soul into her centre of the universe, with the obligatory cuddling afterwards. At one point she compares herself and Grey to figures from an Old Testament Baroque painting - I 'm thinking Roman Charity by Rubens but she couldn't possibly be kinkier than she's stupid. Why is the sex so soporific? Reaiteration is not a problem in pornography (apart for those who don't like it), but pornography doesn't pretend to be something it isn't. It doesn't turn decadence into romanticism, or force meaning onto gaping carnal spaces. Its primal appeal eludes explanation. E.L.James is the most pretentious when she affords verbal expectations which she later fails to deliver. Mostly, S/M elements are subjugated unless they serve spicing up vanilla erotic scenes or reinforcing teenage romanticism, as in this fragment: "I relive telling Christian that I'm pregnant and fantasize that he falls to his knees with joy in front of me, pulling me into his arms and on to his lap telling me how much he loves me and our Little Blip [that's how she calls their baby]. Yet, here I am, alone and cold in a BDSM fantasy playroom." (Freed 634) I fantasize about Anastasia Steele in another century sharing the fate of her favourite heroine, Tess d'Uberville, or one of the wives of Cunmar the Accursed. Turns out her husband is jealous over the baby. He's basically jealous about everything that might come in or out of her vagina, in other words, he's a typical child of a negligent mother - another behavioral anamaly miriculously solved for you by the expert psychologist, Mrs.James. The exorcism of mental damage goes hand in hand with the antiseptic lovemaking. Sadean chambers of torture have been replaced by silky pornotopias of fake American beauties and beasts replaying acts of pleasure and soap drama as expected by debilitated mass consumerists. The threat of rape lingers over the heroine like a whip that never actually falls. The bedroom is exactly where the beast trades his domineering streak for the love of the sexed up schoolgirls and their mothers. Filiarchy (Grey) is not of importance here because it eventually becomes emasculated by bored and rapacious Western matriarchy, lethargically dreaming up new mythologies of resurrected and restrainted Master/Dom.[6] Sadism and sexual violence perpetuated as exciting masturbatory possibilities remain innocuous concepts in literature [7], yet all the more pestilent for their narcoleptic power.

Deleuze, in his essay on Sacher von Masoch, pointed that masochism is grounded in the art of contractual coldness and suspension of pleasure. Artifice, not passion, is indeed a prevailing trope in Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades Freed (that's after the devirginizing tutelage of Steele), but its nauseous hyperestrogenic candiness is much worse than any staged masquerades of a tormented whipping boy. Masoch's fantasy turned the tables on the male fetishist, in the end he learns that the contract was a distortion of fancy, and both he and his mistress come back to their true natures (or better to say, nature eventually has her way with them). The protagonists of Shades learn nothing, except that her love is his salvation. Oh, and very early Steele comes to a "relevatory" realization that she has this lurking need to please her lover in every way he wishes and she "want[s] him to be damned delighted with [her]". But Steele is no masochist. She's a maso(s)chist [8], a meagre residue of the strong-willed and self-consuming O from Pauline Reage's classic story. Inevitably, other French masochists come to mind - the young and subservient Anne in The Image by Jean de Berg or the transfigured Victoria in Whip Angels by Dianne Bataille, neither of whom is exculpated for obsequiousness by love or Freudian babble. Steele and Grey are one and the same person - pop love dummies uttering high-pitched platitudes about nothing, ventriloquized by the latent and sterilized desires of a middle-aged housewife whose sexual fantasies came belatedly. 

Typically Hollywood cold-blooded sadists tend to be the epitomes of male beauty

 Some people have been wondering about the kinky stuff in James's trilogy, like what's with Grey constantly feeding his mistress, or the tampon scene. Well, my guess is E.L.James sort of "borrowed" ideas from Elizabeth McNeill and her "Nine and A Half Weeks. A Memoir of A Love Affair", although maybe that's too much of a presupposition considering the quantity of realism the former injected into her novels. Better to say, maybe E.L. snatched some pieces and then she ruminated for a while and regurgitated profusely onto her electric keyboard. Nine and A Half Weeks the book is nothing like its dulcified movie version, but it's consistent with the maso(s)chist scheme.The nameless male character, a businessman, and female narrator, an executive for a New York corporation, engage ina  toxic and abusive relationship grounded in his slowly emerging sadistic and manipulative leaning. Here's what he does: he cooks and feeds her, washes the dishes, dresses her in the morning and undresses in the night, reads to her, washes, dries and combs her hair, buys her tampons and inserts/extricates them, asks her to crawl around his carpet in stilettos, coerces her to dress as a man and then sodomizes her, pressurizes her into stealing a man's wallet, ties her to the couch and coffee table, ties her to a hook on the ceiling so that she stands on tiptoes for sixty minutes until she goes numb and then he makes her come, forces her to masturbate for him, asks her to dress up as a prostitute and then has a threeway with her and a real prostitute, beats her repeatedly in the face until he draws the first blood. On the whole, the authoress leaves no doubt as to the fact that he extorts obedience in an impassively cruel way until she becomes his plaything, reaches her limits and experiences an acute mental breakdown. Nothwithstanding, until the final episodes, she visibly enjoys the pain, both as a form of escapism and for its reaffirming carnal authenticity. She's much like O, but unlike the submissives in fairy tales and fantasies, she ends up prosaically, the lukewarm sleeping beauty who's lost her impossible chance for happiness with a beast. She a maso(s)chist I could believe in.

[1] There's a direct reference to Bluebeard in Fifty Shades of Grey on page 108 in my electronic copy, so I'm assuming that the authoress has been familiar at one point or another with the original story.

[2] See The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories.

[3] The same could be said of Anne Rice's The Sleeping Beauty Trilogy but then perhaps the marriage in adult fairy tales is a politically subversive narrative ploy which is supposed to positively conclude consensual participation of the female in a BDSM acts for the sceptical readers.

[4] Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae, p.2.(New York: Vintage Books, 1990)

[5] Paglia uses this term to denote "[w]hat the west represses in its view of nature ... which means 'of the earth' - but the earth's bowels, not its surface", "a substitute for Dionysian" (ibid, p.5)

[6] That's affirmed by skimming the covers and titles of a goodread's list of popular BDSM fiction which displays the oppressive amount of schmaltz written by women (and sparingly men) for emotional and sexual gratification of the readers.

[7] Or better yet, they're demilitarized in the fairy tale convention. All the more remarkably from social perspective taking into consideration the roaring statistics of rape and sexual violence against women in the US. As such, Slavoj Zizek's insightful comment on rape here may shed some light on this oddity: "For standard feminism, at least, it is an a priori axiom that rape is a violence imposed from without: even if a woman fantasizes about being raped, this only bears witness to the deplorable fact that she internalized male attitudes. The reaction is here one of pure panic.The moment one mentions that a woman may fantasize about being raped or at least brutally mishandled, one hears cries: This is like saying that Jews fantasize about being gassed in the camps or African Americans fantasize about lynched! From this perspective, the split hysterical position (that of complaining about being sexually misused and exploited while simultaneously desiring it and provoking man to seduce her) is secondary, whereas for Freud, it is primary, constitutive of subjectivity. Consequently, the problem with rape, in Freud’s view, is that it has such a traumatic impact not simply because it is a case of such brutal external violence but because it also touches on something disavowed in the victim herself. So, when Freud writes, 'If what [subjects] long for most intensely in their phantasies is presented to them in reality, they none the less flee from it,' his point is not merely that this occurs because of censirship but, rather because the core of our fantasy is unbearable to us." (Slavoj Zizek Organs Without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences, Routledge: 2004, p.55)

[8] My term for submissives in the Anglosaxon literature in general, but especially since around 1960s. The "schism" relates to the fact that agolagnic proclivity is mitigated or altogether negated in the progress of narrative in favor of a felicitous closure, imposed political reading or other extratextually motivated stratagems.