Hi! I thought I would respond to this. Do I agree that the sex portrayed in 50 Shades is abuse, not kink? Absolutely! However, it is not the responsibility of an author to educate. If this were nonfiction, that would be a different story. Authors of course should feel free to provide educational resources, provide content warnings, all sorts of stuff, because that does help people make informed decisions about what they read. That is why ao3 encourages such measures. (And trigger/content warnings in classrooms is also incredibly important.) But still, the responsibility for making sure that people research how to practice kink IRL is not the job of an author. What readers do with fiction is not the fault of that fiction or the person who wrote it. If people have hurt themselves doing kink incorrectly because they read 50 Shades, does that mean they can sue the author? The publisher? The store or library where they got the book?
This is a tricky situation, I know. I know that people with no other frame of reference might not know to research, or might not have that available to them. To me, this is in the same vein as social media sites providing fact checking. Yes, it helps people who might otherwise get duped, but I also do not trust companies to make those judgment calls (or the services they hire) in our best interest. I guess I should say that I am an anarchist and don’t trust any corporation or state system to do that, as truth is easily constructed and contextual.
There are so many books that contain harmful or misleading information. I absolutely agree. Instead of forcing authors to frame this just so we readers know exactly what they think on something, or how we should think, I would hope that instead these books could spark wider discussion and debate. “50 Shades portrays abuse disguised as kink.” Okay, so what do we do about that happening in the real world? When we focus all our attention on media representation solving all our problems, it removes the responsibility for us to actually do anything of substance. Host a local safe kink workshop (especially online, now that we are in a pandemic). Distribute all the information you can.
I don’t need Nabokov to frame the incest in Ada as bad for me to know it’s wrong. But if I’m worried that it might encourage those behaviors, or that abusers might use it for grooming? I can do what I can to support organizations that help real life victims of incest. I don’t need John Steinbeck to frame the murder of Lenny in Of Mice and Men as ableist in order for me to know it is. Instead, I can support activism for the rights of disabled people.
What is a problem is authors espousing those views in real life. I don’t need an author to condemn what is written in their books, but if their actions clearly support it, that’s a problem. We should be very careful not to mind police people, assume their moral positions based on fiction they’ve written. That doesn’t mean the contents of the book are a problem, but it opens the author for criticism and should make people reconsider supporting them. That’s also not a clear line and is up for each individual person (or retailer!) to make. I refuse to support Woody Allen, but I still love the works of Thomas Mann and Christopher Isherwood, both of whom were men who wrote fictional accounts of older men having attraction to younger men (and sometimes young teens) while also in their actual lives exhibiting that same behavior. Why? Well for one, both those guys are dead and don’t get money anymore. Two, I like their books. Sometimes, we are hypocrites.
Who is to say that an author would provide information that is actually correct? Who is to say that a publisher would allow accurate information? We already know that the author of 50 Shades doesn’t view the kink in her books as abuse, and has said that calling it as such is an insult to women who follow this lifestyle. She, of course, is wrong.
The answer is always always always education and information literacy. This is one reason we have librarians. Granted, not all librarians are created equal and libraries in the United States at least have been tools of white supremacy and neoliberalism since their inception, but in general they are able to help people do research and evaluate information sources.
I am, of course, aware that not every person has access to librarians.
So this is why we need to fight for proper sex education in schools. This is why we need to fight for library funding. This is why my fellow librarians and I need to do right by our patrons and seek to dismantle the white supremacist, capitalist, cisheteronormative structures and attitudes in our libraries.
I also want to stress that this is not me having vocational awe about librarianship. Librarians cannot save the world, and to think that we can is also an idea that stems from white supremacist thinking.
Because if we don’t, people are going to continue to get hurt through sex, no matter if they read 50 Shades of Gray or not. All sex is about harm reduction, because there is always risk.
Use these books as jumping off points for discussions and activism. Don’t redirect your own responsibility and the responsibility of systems onto authors. Fiction is not abusive and harmful, real people are. 50 Shades is a book that contains depictions of abuse, but it itself as a book is not. It is, to put it bluntly, p*rnography, and nobody should be learning how to have sex from p*rnography. When we try to police what happens in p*rn (and not the working conditions and lives of sex workers), it turns into anti-sex feminism very quickly. And once again, it doesn’t hold our education systems accountable for the terrible sexual education they provide.
I’ve had some bad relationships in my life. I’ve had sex that hurt me physically on accident because I had false information on how to do something, especially when I was younger. Was that the fault of the media and p*rnography I consumed as a teenager and new adult? No, it was the fault of my public school’s abstinence only sex education that didn’t even acknowledge that queer people existed, and it was the fault of my parents who, even though my father has always been sex positive with me, still didn’t do enough to show me what a healthy relationship should look like or how to have safe sex. It’s sorta like how I know that I should use condoms/dental dams for oral sex if I’m also going to use them for penetrative sex with someone whose status I’m not sure of because it is possible to spread STIs through oral sex, even though p*rn rarely shows that. But I know this because of sex education resources that are actually good, and especially those that focus on queer people.
I get why the kink community (which I don’t really consider myself a part of actively even though I do kinky stuff including BDSM, I feel much more affinity with leather communities) is upset about 50 Shades. Really, I do. I don’t like it either. So let’s take responsibility for educating people in real life, and let’s hold systems accountable that are supposed to already be doing that.
Stop demanding morality from art. At the end of the day, people are responsible for how they react to it in reality, and education systems are responsible for informing those reactions.
When we demand that certain conditions must be met for transgressive or misleading art to exist, then those conditions can be weaponized and manipulated by those in power. A publisher could very easily force leftist authors to frame their fiction in a way that condemns direct action techniques that include violence, or to frame fictional depictions of Black Lives Matter activism as racist and dividing. This is still not censorship as it is not done by the state, but it silences and limits the venues for marginalized authors.
I’m going to finish by telling a story. When I was 6 years old, the Columbine massacre took place. Do you know who was blamed? The band Marilyn Manson. The news media fabricated the story that the band’s violent lyrics and imagery inspired the shooters, that the boys had been fans of the band and were even wearing the group’s merch when they shot up their school. These claims were later proven false. But the result is that the conservative news media could use a band they already didn’t like as a scapegoat to redirect blame from a system which allowed those teenagers to get guns, that encouraged toxic masculinity, racism, sexism, hom*ophobia, and classicism. What ended up happening is that conservative lawmakers urged the FTC to investigate marketing practices aimed at teenagers. While that seems innocent, it very quickly turned into a “think of the children” moral panic. Only a few years prior Tipper Gore brought about our music rating system because of the song Darling Nikki by Prince. Often, this type of “well this song/movie/book is gonna hurt people and give them bad information” moral panic is used to silence media and art produced by queer people, people of color, and basically anything containing sex or “bad language.” There’s an entire documentary about how flawed this is when put into practice by the MPA and how they rate films, as often the sexual pleasure of women and queer people is deemed near p*rnographic while films rated PG-13 can have intense violence in them. This code was created to replace the Hays Production Code and all ratings are given by a very small board of people, with little hard and fast rules. These are not enforced legally, but they are so pervasive that it’s almost impossible for a film to get distributed without submission to this board.
Imagine what this would look like for fiction books. We already have enough problems with book challenges.
If somebody gets hurt doing BDSM, is it really a book that is responsible, or is it a society that silences nonnormative sexual practices and proper sex education?
