The fantastic success of the books of the Fifty Shades of Gray trilogy occupies not only literary critics, but also psychologists, sexologists and sociologists all over the world. We share a fragment of a book devoted to the analysis of the popularity of these novels.
From the XNUMXth, and perhaps even from the XNUMXth century, the process of institutionalization began, the public recognition of private, private life, and hence the family, based not on property relations, but on feelings, and called upon to unite its members with these feelings.
From that moment on, romance novels began to increasingly depict a woman’s search for love and family happiness. Using a fascinating and reliable formula: the heroine meets an attractive but dangerous stranger, who, as a result of bizarre plot twists, finds himself in love with her and endlessly devoted to her.
Jane Eyre can be considered a classic heroine of this kind, and one of the founders of the genre is the novel Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded. Fifty Shades of Grey, in that sense, is almost a caricatured version of gothic romance novels.
There are all the same familiar themes here: a virtuous and innocent, but self-confident young woman working for a rich man who behaves towards her strangely, and sometimes as if cruelly.
But the development of the plot reveals his difficult past, and his vulnerability, and his finally found devotion to the heroine.
There is another feature of the novel that makes it exclusively feminine. These are images of sexual scenes, which, for all their frankness, still fit into the framework of socially not rejected heterosexual relationships that are acceptable for women who lead a rather traditional lifestyle (“mother porn”).
This genre should be seen in the context of the general “pornification” of culture (the transformation of pornography into a phenomenon generally accepted in works of art) and the apparent increase in porn consumption by women.
Without a doubt, the sex scenes in Fifty Shades are part of this worldwide trend. But the term «mommy porn» clearly does not take into account the complex structure of female sexuality itself. Sexuality, which serves not only the realization of aspirations for pleasure, freedom and power.
Female sexuality has to do with trying to influence the behavior of a partner, exercising control over close, intimate relationships. And if the novels of the XNUMXth century told about a woman finding herself through true love, then in modern popular texts a woman seems to be asking herself the question: what can be gained and open in relation to herself and other people through an active sexual life, free from restrictions and the need for marriage. ?
The process of sexual emancipation provided women with the opportunity to «declare» sexuality as a positive and moral aspect of their own identity. A direct «statement» of this kind can be considered, for example, the play by the American playwright Yves Ensler «The Vagina Monologues» and its worldwide success.
Hence the questions that have haunted women-centered popular culture for six decades now: what forms can this freedom take, where are its limits, and what is its true value?
Thus, the phenomenon of the worldwide popularity of «Sex and the City» is entirely built on attempts to find this «feminine view» of sexuality. On how compatible the desire for old-fashioned monogamous love is with the principles of the era of victorious feminism.
And in this sense, «Fifty Shades of Grey» is also unconditionally a female novel.
Sexuality serves his heroine at the same time as a field of self-realization, and an opportunity for self-identification, and a source of problems.
For the modern woman, much more so than for the man, sexuality is a zone of high tension, where the lines of force of the individual desire for pleasure converge and the still strong social institution of the family. The desire for freedom and the need to perform the functions of a «cell of society».
For this reason, it would be wrong, even naive, to view Fifty Shades of Gray as nothing more than «mommy porn,» as an attempt to «pack» sexual content into a pink wrapper of love experiences.
In reality, everything is exactly the opposite: it is sex that serves as a pink wrapper, and a sentimental love story is packed into it. It is a fantasy and a dream of pure love in an era of sexual independence, when it becomes almost embarrassing to admit to striving for pure love.
About the author: Eva Illuz is an Israeli sociologist.