A month ago, I mentioned Fifty Shades of Grey in a post about expressions of eroticism. As you may know, the novel centers on an evolving BDSM (bondage, discipline, sadism, masochism) sexual relationship between a recent college graduate, Anastasia Steele, and a wealthy young businessman, Christian Grey. The novel was enormously when it came out, in 2011, had two sequels, and was adapted into a film in 2015. The audience was largely women.
I was puzzled, and curious. So, I took the book out of the library and read my way through 220 pages or so (out of 500). Yes, the sex is explicit, involves bondage and discipline, and the scenes are fairly long, eight or nine pages. I can’t imagine that such a book would have been a best seller in my youth, the 50s, 60s, and 70s, Inn some sense that is neither here nor there. Obviously, though, times have changed. What had me a bit puzzled was that this sexually explicit book depicted kinky sex. How popular is that?
I did a bit of looking around and found an academic article from 2015 reporting the results of a study in which 1,519 adults were asked to report on their sexual fantasies: What Exactly Is an Unusual Sexual Fantasy? It turns out that submission and domination themes are common for both men and women, at least in this sample, which was self-selected. In particular:
The proportion of women acknowledging submissive fantasies is not negligible. Being sexually dominated (64.6%), being tied up for sexual pleasure (52.1%), being spanked or whipped (36.3%), and being forced to have sex (28.9%) were all reported by significant proportions of women. Interestingly, the same sexual fantasies were also reported by significant proportions of men (53.3%, 46.2%, 28.5%, and 30.7%, respectively).
That settles that. Fifty Shades of Grey plays to the fantasies of a large part of the population.
But why? I found some remarks in a 2021 article by Jill Schildhouse in Oprah Daily that spoke to that:
Looking for a Christian Grey to your Anastasia Steele? Nearly 65 percent of women fantasize about being dominated sexually, according to a survey of more than 1,000 people that was published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine. “There's a reason 50 Shades of Grey made such an impact!” says Channa Bromley, a relationship and dating coach. “BDSM is alluring because one partner relinquishes all sense of control. They’re submissive to the person touching them, but subconsciously give themselves permission to be wild, to be orgasmic in response—she doesn't need to hold back.”
I can understand that. And the following video lets me feel it. No, it doesn’t depict sex, but rather shows a woman, Madison Young, testifying about a particular sexual experience:
The experience is about being an actress in a bondage film, her first. Here is what she says starting at about 10:40:
And my body starts to shake and I can feel myself riding these waves of total ecstasy. And I am melting into this rope. This rope is holding me, it is saying you are safe to let go, it is safe to surrender. Just do it. You are home. And all of a sudden it starts rushing back to me. Home, home, the best parts of home. The smell of autumn leaves and the first time that I felt rope in my hands, working in a summertime with my father, doing landscaping for Madison Tree Service, our family business. And I knew, Madison. Madison I am, I can feel it through my body, and the ropes, they were holding me. And it was a safe place. I was becoming Madison. I was grinding my cunt into that nice vibrator, and I felt it, I felt it, I felt that energy flowing, flowing, flowing, flowing, flowing, flowing through my body, up through, my crown, into the whole [??] I lost myself. I lost myself and I found myself at the same time, right there.
This is not the world I grew up in. That world would not have had a public venue where stories like this could be told. For that matter, such venues are certainly not common now. But YouTube is available everywhere.
Young obviously was talking about an experience she had. I wonder how many of those men and women who reported such fantasies have actually enacted them in whatever degree?
For some loose corroboration you might want to look at these posts from a few years ago:
- Women posing for a photographer and having (delicious) fun [#naked] (December 28, 2017)
- Araki and His Models (August 16, 2013)
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