Can there be (sexual) pleasure and freedom in bondage?

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. In 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)

Notes on the erotic: Pole dancing, ballet, Fifty Shades of Grey & a conversation with Claude 3.7

Back in February I posted, What is it about depicting sex in writing? From shared knowledge to common knowledge. That line of thought led me to take Fifty Shades of Grey from the library so I could evaluate the sex scenes against those in The Story of O, which I read back in the late 1960s. And that led me to a conversation with Claude about those two books, women, and romance novels. Perhaps I’ll post bits of that conversation in another post, but not here. Then, a couple of days ago, YouTube fed me a video featuring Aurora. I’ve just posted about that video.

So, what’s going on? What’s going on is that I am once again looking into things that have interested me off and on throughout my entire intellectual career, from my undergraduate days at Johns Hopkins to the present. It looks like things are on again.

Since Aurora’s dance was the ‘trigger’ for the Claude conversation I report below, I want to start with some remarks about ballet in a paper by my teacher and colleague, the late David Hays, The Evolution of Expressive Culture (1993). Hays spent the last decade and a half of his life in New York City, where he became interested in the ballet. He bought season tickets to performances by the New York City ballet. While his article is about expressive culture in general, he takes ballet as his central example.

He asked:

Why and how does ballet achieve its powerful effect? At a typical performance of the City Ballet, a large part of the audience are naive. They are not familiar with the pieces being danced; many have never seen them before (the intake of breath that can be heard when the curtain rises on an effective stage set is evidence enough). They are not much expert in the art; the accounts that tie published in newspapers and magazines are generally superficial, often in my judgment missing the essence of the work altogether. Audiences give ovations for performances that seem to me mediocre. Yet the difference in the crowd between entrance and exit is almost tangible. Watching the ballet has changed their mood in a favorable way. Is such a change to be seen between those entering and leaving a great museum of painting or sculpture?

A clue appears in a work that is highly idiosyncratic in both substance and form, Peter A. Bucknell’s (1979) Entertainment and Ritual 600 to 1600. He deals only with England, and says (p. 189):

The ‘magic’ contained in these dances was something that even the dancer could not explain or understand. Because there was something outside the world around him which only dancing seemed to contact–like private prayer–so dancing was pursued in secret.

In secret, but not in solitude. The people of a village would go into the woods at night to dance together, as the people of bands and villages have danced, probably, through the whole history of our species. Bucknell quotes Stubbes (Anatomy of Abuses, 2nd ed., 1583) to the effect that two-thirds of the girls who spend the night in the woods around the Maypole are “violated” (p. 185). Such activities are not acceptable to Catholic religion, or to the Anglican Church that followed it in England; and the Church was inordinately powerful in England at the time. But, reports Bucknell, the Church could not stop these dances (p. 186).

My intention is not to emphasize the sexuality; ‘magic’ is what I think is most important. Balanchine captured that magic, brought it under artistic control, and the New York City audience came into contact with something “outside the world around.” For an audience that probably cannot achieve that contact by prayer, the effect is truly spectacular. Without the artistic control, and the creative genius, Balanchine’s predecessors and contemporaries achieved effects of a much lower order.

Hays then asks, “what is that ‘magic’, what is it outside the world around us” and how can we bring it under artistic control? Good questions. Hays spends the rest of the essay answering them. I recommend it to you. But I want to quote one more passage, the opening and conclusion of a paragraph about Balanchine:

The recognition that Balanchine holds about the same place in the history of ballet that Michelangelo or Leonardo holds in the history of plastic arts came quickly. [...] To put the matter more directly, he converted a somewhat disreputable amusement into an art. (After all, the female dancers are practically nude, and frequently take positions with their legs spread far apart, the bodies grossly exposed.)

That’s what interests me, the way ballet walks a fine line between the artistic and the pornographic, a line that is under continual revision.

That’s what the following conversation with Claude 3.7 is about. As always, my prompts are set in bold face while Claude’s responses are plain, though some subheadings will be bolded.

* * * * *

What can you tell me about the demographics of the audience for ballet?

Ballet audiences tend to have some distinctive demographic characteristics, though these can vary by region and type of performance.

Key demographics of ballet audiences typically include:

• Predominantly female (often 60-75% of attendees)
• Higher education levels than the general population
• Higher income brackets
• Older age skew (typically 45+ years old)
• More likely to be white/Caucasian in Western countries
• Often have personal experience with arts education

There are several notable trends in ballet audience demographics:

1. Aging audiences: Many traditional ballet companies struggle with attracting younger audiences
2. Urban concentration: Ballet attendance is higher in metropolitan areas
3. Digital expansion: Streaming performances have somewhat broadened demographic reach
4. Education correlation: Those with advanced degrees attend at higher rates
5. Cross-generational patterns: Ballet attendance often follows family traditions

Ballet companies are increasingly focused on audience development strategies to diversify their demographics, including educational outreach programs, community engagement initiatives, and digital content to attract younger and more diverse audiences.

Would you like me to explore any particular aspect of ballet audience demographics in more detail?

OK. Now let’s switch to a different topic, though one that’s still about dancing. I believe that there’s been a trend of women taking lessons in pole dancing. What can you tell me about that? When did it start, what’s the motivation, the ideology, and demographics (married, single, ages)?

Aurora, exploring & extending the limits of the erotic in dance

 

Art video: Grande Duello Dance by Aurora. EDSA content

Description from the YouTube page:

Prepare to be captivated by this artistic dance performance set to Unholy - Sam Smith, Kim Petras. 💃🔥 With every graceful move and expressive motion, this choreography brings the raw emotion of blues and rock to life. The haunting guitar melodies and soulful rhythms guide the dancer’s fluid yet powerful storytelling, evoking passion, pain, and resilience.

I believe that this is the first video I watched by Aurora, only a couple of days ago. I've since watched another half dozen or so across her three channels.

I was struck by a number of things: her ballet technique and costume, though her legs are not covered with a leotard, but also the obviously erotic nature of some of the poses and moves. “They allow this on YouTube?” I thought to myself. After all, some people are likely to consider this pornographic and report it to YouTube – I’m assuming YouTube does not host pornography; I’ve certainly never seen any there, nor looked for it.

That’s obviously what the “EDSA content” designation is about. It stands for “Educational, Documentary, Scientific & Artistic” content. If you scroll though YouTube’s help system – there is no direct link that I can see – you’ll get an explanation. For example:

How content gets an EDSA exception

We assess whether content gets an EDSA exception on a case-by-case basis. First, we check if there’s a Community Guidelines violation in the content. If there’s a violation, we review if there’s enough context in the content to make an EDSA exception. We review WHAT context is present and WHERE the context is.

And so it goes. There's more if you keep scrolling.

Watching Aurora's videos prompted me to have a discussion with Claude 3.7 about pole dancing, ballet, and Fifty Shades of Grey, which I will post a bit later. & here it is!

 

* * * * *

 

ADDENDUM 3.12.25: This video is no longer available: “This video has been removed by the uploader.” Aurora's channel is empty. I don't know what's going on. 

Later in the day: It seems that YouTube thought her “videos are too spicy” and so banned her for two weeks. I suspect that implies that people complained. She's opened another channel that currently has one video.

What is it about depicting sex in writing? From shared knowledge to common knowledge.

Just around the corner at 3 Quarks Daily, Gary Borjesson had an interesting post about love: Can Love Last? A (mostly) encouraging story about the fate of romance over time, which dealt with love and sex, security and adventure. Here’s a comment I made:

Western culture has worked very hard to integrate these things. As a quick example, start with Pride and Prejudice early in the 19th century. Sex is just barely there. You have to look hard to find it. But why do you think Lydia ran off with the handsome charming soldier? Late in the century we have Tess of the D'Urbervilles, which seethes with sexual energy, a peasant seduced by her master, a birth out-of-wedlock, a just-married husband who deserts his wife when he learns that she'd been with another man, a reconciliation...and then Tess is hanged in the end. Yikes! But we don't see sexual activity depicted on the page. That's confined to under-the-counter pornography, which was plentiful. Then, early in the 20th century we have Lady Chatterley's Lover. At last, sex on the page, but rather tame by today's standards. When the unexpurgated version of that book was published in 1960, the publisher was tried for obscenity in the British courts.

And now! Now, dear reader, I blush to think about it.

Think about that for a moment – and that trial is hardly the only obscenity trial the 20th century has seen. The courts are an instrument of the state. The state was asked to make a determination about whether or not the verbal description of sexual intercourse should be permitted to become common knowledge.

Here I’m using “common knowledge” as a technical term in game theory. Common knowledge is knowledge, not only that everyone has, but everyone knows that everyone else knows it. It is thus distinct from shared knowledge, which is knowledge that everyone has, but they don’t necessarily know that everyone shares that knowledge.

The distinction between shared knowledge and common knowledge is important in the folktale, “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” When the naked emperor proudly parades his “new clothes” before his subjects, all of them can see that he is naked. They share that knowledge. It isn’t until the little child blurts out, “he’s naked!” that the knowledge becomes common knowledge. Everyone hears the child’s cry and everyone knows that everyone else has heard it. Above all, the emperor has heard it. If the kid hadn’t cried out, the charade could have gone on indefinitely. But once he blurted out the truth, the deception was finished.

Getting back to those novels, let us assume for the sake of argument[1] that everyone who read Pride and Prejudice was aware of sexual intercourse and so everyone knew that, upon marriage, Elizabeth Bennett would have intercourse with Fitzwilliam Darcy, just as they knew that, when Lydia ran off with Wickham, they would be having intercourse. So why not put it on the page?

I think that question requires a more subtle answer that I am prepared to provide, more subtle and certainly longer. In Elizabeth’s case, the marriage doesn’t happen within the compass of the story (why not, pray tell?). But why not Lydia and Wickham? Tricky. It’s possible that they had not actually “done it” within the compass of the story, how convenient, but maybe they had, who knows? On the one hand there is the actual effect that reading such a depiction would have on readers. That’s one thing. That’s beyond the scope of this post.

What this post is about is the difference between shared knowledge and common knowledge. If Jane Austen had actually written such a scene – would she have been capable of doing so? (are you? are you sure?) – that act would have transformed shared knowledge into common knowledge. That’s what interests me.

By the time we get to Lady Chatterley’s Lover the act, sexual intercourse, is there on the page. We have no choice but to acknowledge it. And the state was forced to ratify that knowledge. Tess of the D’Urbervilles is intermediate between the two, but much more can be depicted than was in Lady Chatterley. Think of Henry Miller, heck, think of Fifty Shades of Grey, which I hear is quite explicit, but I’ve not read it – though I must admit that I’m now curious, you know, like I used to buy Playboy for the interviews (Bertrand Russell, Jean Paul Sartre) and not the pictures.

One of these days I’m going to have to think and write about this at greater length. This is enough for now. I just wanted to put the issue on the table.

How many degrees of sexual detail and explicitness are there? When have they shown up in fiction? I suppose one could write about those millions of sperm swimming toward the egg – and surely someone has done it, as Woody Allen has put it into a movie – but that would kill the eroticism, wouldn’t it? 

* * * * *

[1] Back in the previous millennium I read all five volumes of Peter Gay’s The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud (1984-1998). I have a vague recollection that some (middle and upper class) women may not have known about sexual intercourse by the time they got married. Alas, my library is in storage so I can’t provide a citation.

* * * * *

My post on sexual shame is relevant here: In which I ask Claude 3.5 about sexual shame and confusion in humans.