50 Shades of Heterosexual Scripts?

After reading the Weiss article, I could not help but immediately think of the Fifty Shades of Grey series. What started as a single novel soon developed into a trilogy. The books have since spiraled into a full blown franchise with a film rendition set to come out this Valentine’s day. It seems as though this series has gotten constant media attention across varying outlets. What strikes me most about this franchise, however, is the polarizing response it has gotten. On one side, the books have topped best-seller lists around the world and major companies, such as OPI, have tied their brand to the films and everything the stand for by creating things like Fifty Shades of Grey nail polish collections (yes, that's a thing). On the other side, there is shock and awe over the content these books have placed in the mainstream media. The film faced major production set backs as it was near impossible to find actors and actresses who would sign on to play these roles. And, perhaps more relevant to this class, the content and themes presented in the books have struck a nerve with many women who consider themselves “feminists."

I came across a very interesting opinion piece in The Guardian written by a woman named Sophie Morgan who proudly claims to simultaneously be a feminist and a sexual submissive. The points she makes in her article greatly relate to the concepts Weiss discusses about SM becoming problematically mainstream as opposed to politically progressive (2006). Her article counters many points that Weiss makes which suggest that often times BDSM is only understood in terms of pathologizing or understanding S&M behaviors as a kind of sickness (2006).  Sophie writes, “The first thing to say is that I’m not broken. I grew up in a nice middle-class home…there is no deep-seated trauma in my past that has exacerbated my love of being degraded” (Morgan, 2012). She counters Weiss's argument which states that being submissive denotes a type of person and not a practice when she says, “But being submissive is only one facet of the person I am” (Morgan, 2012).

In discussing being submissive as only part of the person that she is, Sophie also divulges into a discussion surrounding the problematic gender scripts that BDSM representations are enforcing as they become more prevalent in mainstream media. She notes that one of her biggest frustrations with the success of Fifty Shades of Grey is, “that there is so much of the main relationship that plays into the misconception that a sexual relationship based around BDSM is, at its core, an abusive one” (Morgan, 2012). Her argument is in line with Weiss’s ideas is that Fifty Shades of Grey is accepted across the majority of audiences because it presents these kinky concepts inline with the heterosexual scripts that are so dominant in our media. Kim et al. discuss these scripts that portray women as submissive, passive partners, and men as aggressively pursuing sex (2007). In the book, main character Ana is passive, sexually innocent, and looks to Christian Grey as this all powerful sexual god to teach her everything and anything there is to know about sex all the while waiting for him to make every first move. What Sophie interestingly points out is that the SM is framed in a way that forgets to consider that women are “enjoying rather than enduring” these sexually submissive acts. I think we need to cut the ties between depictions of BDSM in the media and the heterosexual scripts that seemingly always accompany them and thus, normalize them. Perhaps if depictions of BDSM in the media were framed in a way that showed women in power and as deciding who to submit to and enjoying rather than enduring, we could reach the sexual freedom stage that Weiss discusses on her timeline and avoid pathologizing submissives as “sick.”  

References

Kim, J. L., et al. (2007). From sex to sexuality: Exposing the heterosexual script on primetime network television. Journal of Sex Research.

Morgan, S. (2012, August 25). I like submissive sex but Fifty Shades is not about fun: it’s abuse. The Guardian,            http://www.theguardian.com/society/2012/aug/25/fifty-shades-submissive-sophie-morgan

Weiss, M. (2006). Mainstreaming kink: The politics of BDSM representation in U.S. popular media. Journal of Homosexuality, 50(2/3), 103-132.