Chains & Whips

The Fifty Shades of Grey franchise brought kink and BDSM to the forefront of American pop-culture. Although it was an explosive time for conversations on sex positivity, I remain unsure if our culture was ready to have those conversations, especially through the conduit that ill-written book provided.

I read this series for the first time when I was 15 years old and obsessed with all the sex I was not having. It was a bad influence and I, along with many others, was intoxicated by the fantasy. I was lucky to have educated and critical sexual educators in my life who understood what Fifty Shades really was, and the harm it perpetuated.

To be frank, Fifty Shades is an awful representation of kink. Domination and submission were made into an intoxicating power fantasy for inexperienced readers and a living nightmare for folks existing in kink communities. BDSM is more than fantasies of traumatized billionaires leading helpless virgins to their beds and we should engage the topic more deeply than the forbidden desires that turn us on. Kink and BDSM are much more than just the fantasies we indulge when no one’s watching, they entail a culture and a community that we continuously do a disservice.

What is kink and bdsm?

Kink: a “bend” in one’s sexual preferences and desires; non-conventional sexual practices and fantasies.

BDSM: an acronym for bondage, domination, submission/sadism, and masochism; a range of sexual practices centered on psychological and physical control/restraint, pain, and power.

Fetish: a form of sexual desire where gratification is tied to a particular object, part of the body, piece of clothing, etc.

**Kink and Fetish are often used interchangeably but kink centers the action while fetish centers the object of sexual desire

There are a lot of preconceptions that exist around Kink and BDSM practices; we tend to gravitate towards illicit mental images of leather-clad, deviant bodies inflicting pain upon one another. Kink is much broader than that.

People have kinks and fetishes for a wide range of things, and people who would count themselves as vanilla have kinks that our society has normalized. Foot fetishes have made their way into the mainstream and sucking toes has become somewhat commonplace. Many derive immeasurable pleasure from giving cunnilingus to partners, that’s a fetish. There are plenty of business men who like to have sex with their clothes on and housewives who want to be fucked with the windows open. Things like wanting to be on top/wanting your partner to be on top, fantasies of sex in the shower, a preoccupation with biting and back scratches: these all fall into the realm of kink.

BDSM is a little more specific, referring to sexual play involving power and pain. I won’t argue that we are all secret dominants and submissives, dreaming of rope burns in our free time, but the idea is much more attractive than most of us are willing to admit. Although we don’t all indulge ourselves in the full fantasy, rocking leather and ball-gags once we cross the threshold of our homes, many dip their toes into this sexual fantasy regularly. How many jokes and references have you seen about a little spanking between lovers? And how many friends have revealed that they love their partners a little rough and demanding? I’ve seen more than one person look longingly at the more destructive items in Priscilla McCall’s when they though no one was looking.

People who engage in kink and BDSM are more than your average Joe experimenting with spankings and dirty talk; they’re a community that engages with each other outside of sex. Online and in person these folks are talking, sharing, and forging connections based on shared sexual interests and desires. When we have conversations about BDSM and kink we should be centering that community and letting them lead as the experts on their experiences, desires, and the practical application of their fantasies. Otherwise our engagement lacks depth and the grounding of reality.

Punks, Bulldaggers, & welfare queens

Kink & BDSM practitioners have been working and living in community with Queer folks for a long time, since the first moves towards LGBTQ+ Rights in the United States. Queer scholarship, like Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics? by Cathy Cohen, argues that we should organize our queer politics against heteronormativity, forging connections and alliances to create an intersectional movement. Heteronormativity is defined as the ideology that cisgender heterosexuality is the default, should be rewarded, and is how people should orient their sexual and gendered lives. The article asserts that heteronormative structures don’t only punish and marginalize queers, they work against anyone whose sexual and reproductive lives fall out of the “norm”. This includes those who engage in kink, fetish, and BDSM in their relationships.

BDSM and kinky sex were diagnosed as mental disorders within the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) until 2013. Previously there was no distinction between the desire to inflict pain with consenting adults and the desire to do so to unwilling participants. Evidence that people were engaging in kink and fetish play could be used against them in family court, and people risked losing their jobs or facing major discrimination. The advocacy work of groups like the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom (NCSF) brought that important difference to the forefront of discussions on BDSM and the American Psychiatric Association eventually declassified kink, making it harder to discriminate based on the sexual habits of folks in BDSM communities.

Homosexuality was also classified as a mental disorder in the DSM up until 1973, but this isn’t all BDSM and queer communities have in common. Kink/BDSM practitioners have been a part of the Gay rights movement as early as the 1940s. According to this Insider Article, leather bars became a safe haven for Queer folks in the 50s and 60s. Pride pioneers like Silvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson, transgender women, were considered sexually deviant cross-dressers and had cross-dressing charges on their records. At the infamous Stonewall Riot of 1969 it was transgender women, queer people of color, houseless youth, and leather daddies who fought back against police brutality and discrimination. Allied by the ways they expressed their sexuality and engaged sex outside of the boundaries of normalcy, kinksters and queers worked and existed in community together against heteronormative societal demands.

Like a virgin

The most celebrated and normalized sexual situation is a married white man and woman, both well off and able-bodied, doing it in the missionary position (in the dark) without making any noise and specifically to create a baby.

In our mainstream culture enjoying sex isn’t a priority (at least not for everyone) and there is very little room for exploration with the boundaries set by this culture of sexual repression. Even heterosexual, cisgender married folks cannot escape the pressures and stigmas our society places around normative sexuality.

Purity culture places pressure on people, particularly girls and women, to maintain their virginity until marriage for their future husbands. The idea reduces women’s value to their perceived purity and makes them into sexual objects for ownership and consumption. Some who subscribe to this idea also emphasize sexual restraint for men and boys as a sign of mental/spiritual strength and resisting temptation, but a woman’s sexual purity is the most important thing about her. In this 2016 article from Good Housekeeping, the author talks about the links between the extreme culture of sexual purity she grew up in and the sexual problems she experienced in her marriage later. This isn’t a new or unheard of experience — this wasn’t the only article I saw about this specific topic.

For the author and several other women, their upbringing created an anxiety about sex that resulted in vaginismus: involuntary muscle spasms that make sex incredibly painful if not impossible. In a 2016 article published in Marie Claire, writer Lily Dunn talks about her experience as a product of an American Southern Evangelical Church. After waiting to have sex until marriage, she found that the shame of finally having had sex within her marriage was unbearable. Being a virgin was such a huge part of her identity before marriage and the sexual desires she had always rejected and vilified in herself were now at the forefront of her daily life, but the dissonant messaging she had been fed her entire life was painfully rewiring her brain:

"Eventually, I let go of my identity as a virgin and realized that I really liked having sex with my husband. It was great, but somehow it led to even more shame. I’d spent a great deal of time and energy programming myself to equate sexual desire with guilt and fear – this was how I kept myself in check throughout my single years. But that ‘red flag’ feeling I’d trained myself to obey didn’t immediately go away the day I spoke my wedding vows. I couldn’t automatically flip some switch and no longer feel guilty about expressing the sexual feelings I’d been ignoring for years. For weeks I fought that sick feeling of guilt that settled in the pit of my stomach every time I had sex.

None of it made any sense – I felt like I needed to be both pure and chaste without any sexuality of my own and to simultaneously be able to fulfill every fantasy. I needed to be the virgin and the whore all wrapped into one. I was doomed to fail.”

For women like Lily Dunn and so many others purity culture presents an unresolvable double-bind. Their sexual lives revolve around the duties of their marriage — their husbands’ sexual satisfaction — rather than their own desires. When it came time for these women to be sexually mature, satisfying, and experienced within their marriages they inevitably fell short. Relegated to the status of sexual object within their own relationships it took the deconstruction of this culture and everything they thought they knew about sex for these women to be free from shame, battling expectations, and objectification.

We, luckily, are coming to a place in the mainstream where we place less and less emphasis on sexual purity for young women but many social stigmas and mores around sexual freedom persist. Rather than emphasizing plain virginity, the conversation has shifted to shaming women for how many “bodies” they have. These conversations about the cursed “body count” take place in person and overwhelmingly on social media where young girls are incredibly susceptible to the miseducation of relationship gurus, femininity coaches, and other misinformed people with bad intentions.

Men aren’t the only ones engaging in this discourse, women buy into it all the time. At the center of the discourse lies ideas that women are too emotionally vulnerable to have multiple sexual partners throughout their lifetime, and that’s the gentle version that pretends to be concerned with women’s wellbeing. The blatantly misogynistic version is much worse: the idea that women who have too many partners are “ran through” or “passed around” permeates the discourse on women’s sexual behaviors. It places women solidly in the land of sexual objects where they cannot win and the double-bind of sexuality persists.

The same forces that disadvantage LGBTQ+ folks and BDSM/kink communities also keep straight, vanilla people in a box where according to gendered sexual mores their desires are confounded and unachievable. The cultural significance of virginity and sexual purity puts pressure on individuals to perform within the boundaries set for them and those same sexual values hold us back from being able to enjoy sex even within those rules.

The contradiction of the anti-sex/hyper-sexual nature of our normative culture is that it doesn’t make for good sex — our cultural rules actively disadvantage us when it comes to seeking pleasure and fulfilling sexual relationships, which in turn weakens all of our relationships. We are made to constantly think about sex and deny ourselves fantasy AND fulfillment. Having sex this way takes choice out of each of our hands and crafts our desires into a bland, colorless thing. This mode of sexuality creates inequality that would have us emphasize the desires of others so we can be deemed acceptable or worthy. In a society so obsessed with reproductive relationships, marriage, heteronormativity, and monogamy the type of sex we are told to want and restrict ourselves to is poisonous.

It is this cultural problem that kink and BDSM hold an answer for, and engaging sex through the lens of these practices leads us to question how we’ve been taught all our lives to think, feel, and fuck.

What kink has to teach us

So, when Fifty Shades entered the chat we should have been able to have this large-scale conversation about kink and BDSM that would reflect the culture that has always existed, bringing that community willingly and respectfully out of the shadows.

Nope, not even a little.

The main problem with the franchise is that it continues to play on the stereotypes that kept BDSM in the DSM until 2013. An attractive but deeply troubled young man with a traumatic past wanted to harm people because he had been harmed. He enacted that harm specifically against women who looked like his drug addicted mother — like a fucking serial killer. For some reason the author, and we as a culture, found it appropriate to romanticize that incredibly harmful idea. Instead of researching and pulling from actual kink and BDSM practices we as a culture came to obsess over this tale of sexual deviance that does so much harm.

According to this article by NPR, kinky sex is about more than just chains and whips, it centers consent as an ongoing conversation rather than a yes or no. Kinksters and BDSM practitioners, unlike the characters in Fifty Shades of Grey, emphasize the idea of explicit, informed, enthusiastic consent. People who are going to be engaging in BDSM and kinky activities with each other talk about exactly what they’re going to do, set and maintain boundaries, create safety measures, and continue that conversation through and after the act.

The use of the safe word is a great example. For those unfamiliar it just means that partners and groups share a secret word that means someone has become overwhelmed, needs a break, or wants to stop. It can be as simple as “red, yellow, green” or as specific as “astroturf” either way it’s a way for either partner to check in. Good practice means more than having a safe word: it means checking in with your partner intermittently to make sure they remember the word, have the capacity to say it, and even having a word or phrase to mean “go” or “continue” or “keep going, but slow down” this is why the stoplight system (red, yellow, green) works so well for some folks. A safe word doesn’t always have to be a word either, when folks prefer non-verbal communication or are unable to speak it’s essential to have a hand signal or something else to communicate.

There is a depth of dissonance between our mainstream sexual culture and the sub-culture that exists within these communities, thus we get Fifty Shades. Cherry-picking all the sexy and magnetic parts of kink and taking out all the “unsexy” parts, consent falls to the wayside and those lost in the fantasy continue to model their sexual lives after the puritanical culture of our forefathers with a leathery twist.

In light of the culture that kinksters have worked so hard to create, works of fiction like this present a danger to those communities as folks with little BDSM experience, thinking they know everything there is to know, enter those communities with the intention to harm others. Abusers have always existed in these communities and many work hard to keep these people out of their circles, but half-formed fantasies like Fifty Shades have them coming out of the woodwork. Modeling one’s domination style or sadism after Christian Grey is a huge red flag and is presenting a problem.

In this HuffPost article, Laura Hancock states:

“That is not at all how it works. Any dom/me who isn’t an actual abuser is fully aware that it’s the submissive who is in more control of the scene anyway. The scene is built around the submissive. The dom/me is obviously the driving force of the scene, but it’s the submissive who pulls the shots. They say stop, and you stop. It’s over.

The trouble with Fifty Shades is that then you get people believing that how Christian Grey does it is how it is supposed to work. Namely, by violating the boundaries of the submissive and basically being a dick-in-the-box who gets away with it because he’s handsome and rich.

…

The problem isn’t that Fifty Shades is unrealistic. There are plenty of unrealistic books out there.

The problem is that people think this is real.

And that’s dangerous”.

There’s no ambivalence about it — to really engage conversations about kink we need to engage the people who practice it and the reality, not our unrealistic fantasies. This means critically interrogating the ways that we fail to weave consent and boundaries into our everyday lives and our sexual practices. Vanilla, kinky, or somewhere in between, a healthy infusion of informed consent would do wonders for how we engage in sex. Although we find these conversations taboo or even downright boring they’re an important part of sex that we’ve spent centuries ignoring to our own detriment.

Kink and BDSM have a lot to teach us about the exploration of our sexual desires and deconstructing what we’ve been taught to want. There is so much valuable knowledge, experience, and practice to be adopted from this community and we can all benefit from engaging openly with our kinks.