"50 Shades": A feminist/BDSM Guide to Why it's Skeevy as Hell

[Luminous Animal]

48. It is a book about abuse, not sex. From a study of the book at Ohio State.

http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/jwh.2013.4344

Background: While intimate partner violence (IPV) affects 25% of women and impairs health, current societal conditions—including the normalization of abuse in popular culture such as novels, film, and music—create the context to support such violence. Fifty Shades of Grey, a best-selling novel, depicts a “romantic” and “erotic” relationship involving 28-year-old megamillionaire, Christian Grey, and a 22-year-old college student, Anastasia Steele. We argue that the relationship is characterized by IPV, which is harmful to Anastasia.


Intimate partner violence patterns
Our results distill the abuse patterns across Christian and Anastasia's 4-week relationship in the first novel, concentrating first on underlying emotional abuse patterns, and then on how the emotional abuse affects Anastasia, and culminating with a description of example sexual encounters that meet the CDC's sexual violence definition.63 We begin by discussing emotional abuse, because this type of abuse permeates all chronically violent partnerships, including nearly every interaction of Christian and Anastasia's relationship; the underlying emotional abuse in Christian and Anastasia's relationship also sets the stage for sexual violence to occur. To remain consistent with literary convention, we describe events in the present tense; “actual dialogue” between Christian and Anastasia is represented using italics and quotations, and Anastasia's “inner dialogue” is in quotations only.

Emotional/psychological abuse
Christian controls all aspects of the couple's relationship using the emotional abuse tactics of stalking, isolation, intimidation/threats, and humiliation.63 Emotional abuse begins immediately after the couple's first meeting when Anastasia interviews Christian for her college's newspaper, and continues through the couple's last interaction in the novel. Below we review three emotional abuse scenes; in each scene, the various types of emotional abuse co-occur and overlap, as is typically seen in abusive relationships.1,2 As an important caveat before describing the emotional abuse scenes, while BDSM can include power and pain exchanges outside of the bedroom (such as ordering a partner to eat or threatening to punish/harm), typically such exchanges involve consenting parties (those who have agreed to the power exchange) and those who have worked out an egalitarian process for negotiating such power exchanges.46–48 Within Christian and Anastasia's relationship, consent and egalitarian negotiation processes are not formally decided, and Christian uses a range of coercive strategies to control multiple aspects of Anastasia's behavior; as we will document, Christian's coercive control significantly erodes Anastasia's identity.

Emotional abuse example 1
Within a week after Christian and Anastasia's introduction during an interview Anastasia conducts with Christian for her college's newspaper, and without any additional form of communication, Christian stalks Anastasia, by “appearing” at Anastasia's place of employment, an independent hardware store located in Portland—173 miles from their original encounter in Seattle. As Christian asks Anastasia to help him locate various “odd items,” such as cable ties, masking tape, and rope, his “confusing double talk” (p. 29) and questions about “what else he might need” for his “do-it-yourselfer” home improvement project (p. 28) creates feelings of embarrassment and humiliation in Anastasia. Christian does not stop his innuendo after Anastasia's body shows physiological signs of embarrassment, including a “recurring blush” and cheeks the color of the “Communist Manifesto” (p. 27–28). During this interaction, Anastasia even has the “uncanny feeling [Christian] is laughing at [her]” (p. 27). Midway through the hardware store encounter, Christian's mood changes suddenly from “friendly” to “cold and distant” when Anastasia says hello to a male colleague; Christian “watches [Anastasia] like a hawk, his eyes hooded, his mouth a hard impassive line…his tone becomes clipped and cool…” (p. 30–31). In response to Christian's abrupt mood change, Anastasia worries “Damn…have I offended him” and attempts to “diffuse the antagonism” by introducing Christian to her male colleague (p. 30–31). Christian's anger and withdrawal during the hardware store interaction set the stage for future isolation of Anastasia from friends and family—specifically, his anger/withdrawal over Anastasia talking to a male colleague is an intimidation/threat intended to induce her withdrawal from connections with others. Later in the novel, after returning home from a night out with her friends, Anastasia finds an e-mail, five missed calls, and a voice message, in which Christian warns that she needs “to learn to manage [his] expectations” and he is not a “patient man” (p. 304). Anastasia panics in response and calls him immediately to express herself: “Double crap. Will he ever give me a break… He is suffocating me. With a deep dread uncurling in my stomach, I scroll down to his number and press ‘call’…He'd probably like to beat seven shades of shit out of me. The thought is depressing.” p. 304–305). As will be documented later, Anastasia begins to withhold information about her social whereabouts and her travel plans to visit her mother to avoid Christian's anger and ensuing consequences—a behavioral pattern that is pervasive in victims involved abusive relationships.60–62