The “Fifty Shades of Grey” movie is receiving a lot of bad press, but what did you expect, people?

“Fifty Shades of Grey” brought soft porn to the masses on Valentine’s Day weekend, and ever since, bad reviews have been splashed everywhere: Everything from “It’s as stimulating as a cold shower” to “The entire movie is about as sexy as a root canal” to my favorite “A few might get off on knowing that in the theater next door the kiddies are watching SpongeBob.” And while yes, I’ve seen chocolate commercials that are more erotic, at the end of the day it was everything I expected it to be (cue sad trombone).

The thing is, the actors, director and especially the screenwriter were fighting a losing battle from the start. When you base a movie on a book that’s debatably plotless with dialogue that sounds like it was written by a toddler, you get a movie that’s debatably plotless with dialogue that sounds like it was written by a toddler.

And there’s no way around it: In order to turn the movie into… well, an actual movie, the screenwriter would’ve had to veer off into her own direction, keeping what works and fixing what’s broken—but would you want angry, screaming “Fifty Shades” superfans showing up at your door with protest signs and pitchforks? I think not.

The sex scenes (if you can call them that) were watered down so as to not offend anyone, making them about as sexy as a colonoscopy. I’m assuming this was in an attempt to reach as large an audience as possible, but that’s where the movie loses me. As far as I’m concerned, go big or go home. If you have a smutty book in your hands that’s meant to shock and awe, you turn it into a smutty movie. You give viewers something to talk about that brings them back for the second and third installments, and you give them something—anything—to make up for the lackluster dialogue, repetitive scenes, and nonexistent chemistry. I mean, this really is nothing more than fancy porn.

Again, this isn’t Dornan or Johnson’s fault (and hopefully, the hair wasn’t either). They did the best they could with the weak source material they were given. But you can’t offend no one yet make a statement at the same time. Get off the fence and pick a side. Between the annoying lip-biting (do any of us really do that?) to the first spanking not showing up until the movie was practically over, I almost left to watch the rest of SpongeBob.

Here’s the thing we reviewers seem to be forgetting though: The book is based on a woman’s fantasy that she was brave enough to share with the masses, and all fantasies are terrible and cheesy with lackluster dialogue. Think about the fantasies you’ve had as a woman—about that hot guy at work, your favorite actor or even the character he plays on TV. Your fantasies get you off, which is all that matters. Now, picture how they’d play out on the big screen. Pretty bad, right? Like “Fifty Shades of Grey” bad, right?

There’s also a lot of talk that people are only going to see this movie out of curiosity and now that they’re inevitably disappointed, it’s hard to say how the next two installments will pan out. But judging by the fierce loyalty of the “Fifty Shades” fan base, I say they’re a slam dunk even if they’re worse than the first flick. Because really, who cares if the general population likes them? As every writer knows, it’s keeping your core fans happy that matters. Without them, you’re nothing.

But you know, Jamie Dornan naked, so whatev. Oh, and the soundtrack is bangin’.

Have you watched “Fifty Shades of Grey”? Hate it, love it, or leave it?

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ColumnThe entire universe knows that the “Fifty Shades of Grey” trailer was released last week, so if you don’t – where on Earth have you been?

I chatted with Rachel Kramer Bussel, editor of “The Big Book of Submission: 69 Kinky Tales,” about kink, BDSM, and how we can go beyond “Fifty Shades”. You know you want to.

Stefanie Weiss: What’s your quick and dirty definition of BDSM?

Rachel Kramer Bussel: I usually just define the acronym – bondage/discipline, dominance/submission, sadism/masochism, which can involve eroticizing power and control as well as eroticizing the giving and receiving of pain, pleasure, and other kinks. It’s such a wide term that it can be hard to define.

SW: How and why can it be liberating for women — especially those who have only been exposed to “vanilla” sex?

RKB: I don’t think BDSM is for everyone, but for many women, it’s a way to explicitly play with power in ways we can’t always do in our daily lives, whether because we are expected to be “good girls” or are simply bound (no pun intended) by societal and workplace rules. There are also rules in BDSM, but once you’ve agreed on those, it can be anything goes in terms of exploring and possibly pushing your own limits, by choice. For example, you can be “bad” and get a spanking or other “punishment,” but you’re playing by rules you’ve agreed to, and very possibly fantasized about.

SW: I’m loving your new book “The Big Book of Submission: 69 Kinky Tales“. The characters are in all positions (literal and figurative) in the submission/dom context. Women are dommes, subs, and everything in between. How is your vision different than the standard “Fifty Shades of Grey” narrative? (Which I will admit now I could never bring myself to read.)

RKB: With an erotica anthology, especially one with 69 stories, there’s much more room for variety. I wanted to give readers a range of entertainment as well as possibilities for reasons characters may enter into BDSM relationships and what they get out of them. I think something we as a culture don’t tend to think about as much are the doms; when someone wants, say, to be tied up, it’s expected that the other person, especially if they are a man, will want to. Not all kinky men are dominant, nor are all kinky women submissive, so I wanted that to come across in the book. I wanted there to be playful as well as more intense examples of kink, and show the mental as well as physical side, which is why my story is called “Reverse Psychology.” The narrator is devoted to his domme and does things to please her, not because he’s inherently into delivering pain.

SW: What myths about BDSM have been inspired by “Fifty Shades”?

RKB: I believe the main myths came from the media around the books, claiming, essentially, that women wanting to try submission are anti-feminist and that this was somehow a setback for women. What that idea misses is that what we do in the bedroom is not a direct mirror of our lives outside of it. There’s a world of difference between choosing to temporarily give up control (while still having ultimate control and a safeword) within the context of a voluntary, chosen BDSM relationship to further your erotic life and living in a world where women so often lack control over our safety.

SW: Follow up: Do you think some good things have come out of the “Fifty Shades” craze in recent years, or are you more concerned with the myths it’s perpetuated?

RKB: I think that like “Sex and the City”, “Fifty Shades of Grey’s” popularity has opened major discussions about women’s sexuality and BDSM and given women access to erotic reading materials, sex toys and information they had to hunt harder for before. Now, “Fifty Shades” is for sale at drugstores and pretty much every bookstore. Sex toy stores are reporting great rises in sales. The way “Fifty Shades“ became popular was by women sharing the book with each other, so I think the barrier of talking about your kinky predilections and feeling they are something to hide has also lessened. Whether you want to try what’s in the book or not, it’s made it not just okay, but accepted that women are having their own fantasies and embracing erotic books written with them in mind.

SW: Any reason you think our culture embraced this now? I’ve heard theories about powerful women needing to be controlled in the bedroom, because they’re “always on top” at work. But I find this to be anti-feminist BS. What do you attribute the BDSM boom to?

RKB: I agree that that’s not the reason for its popularity. I think we’ve been moving toward a point where something like “Fifty Shades”could break out, and it happened to hit at the right time. I think it’s more about our culture embracing an openness to explore, to not have to keep sex toys a secret, to talk more freely about sexuality. Women are passing the books on to their friends and even family members, not necessarily because they think they should try kink, but because they connect with the story.

SW: How can BDSM change our self-perception? Can it help us to heal deep-seated sexual shame?

RKB: BDSM can show you sides of yourself you’d never considered before. Maybe you’re the shy, quiet type, but are with a lover who wants to be ordered around, told what to do, yelled at, who is at your service in every way. That’s heady stuff and a power trip that can surprise you with how you react. Similarly, if you are exploring submission for the first time, it can be both exhilarating and scary; you have to truly trust the person you’re with, and trust yourself. You can test your mental and physical stamina and emerge awed by the power of your mind and body to, say, transform pain into erotic pleasure, or process something we’d hate in our daily lives into something incredibly erotic. For example, I love being “ordered” to do things in the bedroom, but in my regular life I despise it. I don’t know why exactly that’s how I’m wired, but it’s a wonderful feeling to realize how turned on I can get when I’m with someone I trust who then taps into that and can play off of that element.

SW: If a woman wanted to introduce BDSM to her very-vanilla husband or partner, how would you suggest broaching the subject?

RKB: Firstly, you need to be comfortable with talking about what you want, and making room for the other person to talk about what they want. You can just go in and demand, “Tie me up, gag me and torment me,” even if that’s what you’re fantasizing about, especially if you’ve never discussed it with your partner. I’d suggest having that first discussion outside the bedroom, and while you don’t need to make a PowerPoint presentation of what you want, offer some examples of what you’re interested in. Perhaps you two can browse online or watch an erotic movie involving some of the things you’re intrigued by and then discuss what you may or may not feel comfortable with. You may want to explore kinky social networking site Fetlife.com, where you can read about what other people are into and join groups such as The Newbie Spot for subs and Dominants.

Before you start playing, agree on a safeword, which means if one of you wants to call things off or pause, you can say the word and automatically halt the action. Consider making a yes/no/maybe list of things you do want to try, things you definitely don’t, and things you might be into; Charlie Glickman has helpful resources on that.

SW: So many people have dark associations with the concept of S & M — they believe that everyone that engages in it is damaged — care to counter that stereotype?

RKB: There are some people who, like Christian Grey, may be working out mental demons via BDSM, and there are ways to do that safely as well as ways to do that not safely. You could say that we are all “damaged” on some level so I think it’s not necessarily a problem unless you’re being unsafe in your BDSM practices. But the idea that everyone who practices BDSM is automatically suspect is a problem. People come to BDSM from a range of backgrounds and experiences, as many people as come to, say, marriage. Maybe a partner is into it and that’s your entree, or you read about it watch a movie about it or discover a club or party or event. It’s such a personal journey and there’s no one size fits all element.

SW: For all the psychologically-stable BDSM participants merely exercising their fantasies in real life, there are people out there who are using it the wrong way. How can those interested in experimenting with BDSM — outside the context of an established relationship — find safe people to play with?

RKB: Try going to a munch in your town, which is a casual gathering, usually at a restaurant, to meet like-minded people. There’s no pressure and it’s a non-sexual environment where you can talk and chat and get to know people, who may be able to help you steer clear of people known to be unsafe as well as guide you toward safe spaces. You want to be extra cautious and if you are going to be in private with someone you don’t know, tell a friend where you are going. Vet them as carefully as you can because you want to make sure they have your best interests at heart, will listen if you use your safeword or have concerns and won’t pressure you to go further than you’d like, and also knows what they’re doing. For instance, there are parts of the body that you shouldn’t use a flogger or other tools on, and they need to know that to keep you safe, as do you if you are the one in charge.

SW: Can BDSM just be about physical, sensual pleasure — or is there always a psychological component?

RKB: It definitely can. There’s so much variety; some people combine mental and physical play, for some people it’s more one or the other. Some people enjoy the sensation of being flogged or beaten or spanked or straining against bonds but they don’t want to do it as “punishment” or as part of a dominant/submissive dynamic. It may be an endorphin rush or simply part of how they get off.

Join Stefanie on a journey to the authentic heart of your sexual self with Project 40: Sadism, Masochism, Sexuality & Shadow, an online 40-day tour through the heart of your psyche via intensive journaling, ritual, and guided daily emails. 

Got a question for Stefanie? Email stefanie at ecosalon dot com, and she’ll answer it in the next Sexual Healing column.

Keep in touch with Stefanie on Twitter: @ecosexuality

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ColumnRead a book. Sustain your mind.

I confess that I knew where this was going when I bought Fifty Shades of Grey. One of my rules for this column is that I don’t write bad reviews (if I don’t like a book, I leave it be) and while I hoped to maybe have some fun with the BDSM bodice-ripper, I doubted that I would muster enough like to write about it here. (Having finished the book—the first of the phenom trilogy—I’m proved right. Nothing really to say about it that you probably haven’t already gathered.) But now that I have your attention, here’s the bait and switch: You want hot? Let’s talk Anaïs Nin.

Anyone who’s read Nin’s erotica likely has a vivid memory of their “first time,” as it were. I encountered the work when I was 14 years old. By then I had seen my share of dirty magazines and pre-internet (pre-cable, even) porn and was thus as misinformed and misinspired as any young person would be given such mostly poor data in. Then, in my father’s library, I found an advance copy of Delta of Venus. I read a few pages. Then I read more. This was different. This was beautiful and deep and, yes, perverse—and it was hot. I’ve been a fan ever since.

Most acclaimed for her magnificent and comprehensive diaries, Nin is almost a genre unto herself. Her life and career traversed continents (Europe to North America), cultural and social movements (bohemian Paris in the 1920s to the U.S. feminist movement in the 60s), and featured intimacy with many literary giants (most notably her one-time lover, confidante and friend Henry Miller). For better or worse, her erotic writings—released primarily in two volumes of short stories published posthumously in the late-1970s (Delta of Venus and Little Birds)—have eclipsed her other work in terms of bringing her international notoriety. For many, in fact, the mere whisper of her name—Anaïs—is synonymous with erotica.

She completed the majority of her work in this genre during difficult financial times in the 1940s. A mysterious “collector” contracted her, Miller and a small cadre of their contemporaries to write pornography for him on a fee-per-page basis. All told, Nin claimed she received $100 for these stories. At the time, she was uneasy with the effort, which by order required the group to “leave out the poetry” and “focus on the specifics.” (“Didn’t the old man know how words carry colors and sounds into the flesh?” she laments in the preface of Delta.)

Regardless of the collector’s instructions, Nin was incapable of writing “clinically.” Her language flourishes as, both individually and as a body of work, her erotic tales swerve and soar in and out of the body and the soul, exposing countless emotions while always circling back to a titillated heartbeat. In Nin’s world, roles and role-play do more than arouse the characters and the reader alike—they also beg questions about fantasy and identity. Perversions—exhibitionism and voyeurism, blurred lines between pleasure and pain, and other unmentionables—exist on a razor-thin line between playful light and borderline psychotic darkness. Shades? Nuance? It’s all here.

Conversely, some of the stories depict the suppression of sexual thought as exploding into inhuman violence. (In one very difficult piece featuring a priest at a strict boarding school and his unfortunate charges, a rape is perpetrated in this context.) Indeed, in this work you’ll find a broad exploration of the psychology of sexuality (another story features a hyper-sexualized reaction to a Spanish Fly placebo). The effects of childhood experience, and issues around intimacy and objectification—and the relationship and opposition between them—are pried open. Additionally, in her very powerful short novel, A Spy in the House of Love, Nin focuses on adultery and its relationship to self-exploration.

None of this is to say that Nin’s stories aren’t erotic for eroticism’s sake. The circumstance of their writing is partly responsible for this, although not completely. The author is a woman who was clearly unafraid of not only her own observations of human sexual thinking and behavior, but of herself, as well. Her stories stare at sex. They don’t flinch and they don’t blush (although her characters might). And, perhaps most important, she does not judge.

A Woman’s Language

Despite the stories’ quality, for years Nin carried distaste for them and the patron for whom they were written, and “put the erotica aside.” (“Dear Collector: We hate you. Sex loses all its power and magic when it becomes explicit, mechanical, overdone. It becomes a bore.”) Later in her life, however, she began to see the work in a different light. Having once thought that her charge to “leave out the poetry” had resulted in a style that was “derived from a reading of men’s works,” she changed her mind, concluding, “My own voice was not completely suppressed… I was intuitively using a woman’s language, seeing sexual experience from a women’s point of view.” In the end, she seemed to see her own irrepressible voice (I’ll call it brilliance) shining through the perverted (I use the term advisedly) challenge. The collections, she determined, would be published.

Nin’s wrestling with her erotica begs all sorts of questions. As much as some of us might want to see great work as simply great, voice, theme and even plot are all inexorably (though I think too often seen as overwhelmingly) informed by gender—and certainly by individuality. Nin felt this was particularly true when it came to writing about sex:

I knew there was a great disparity between Henry Miller’s explicitness and my ambiguities—between his humorous, Rabelaisian view of sex and my poetic descriptions of sexual relationships… I had a feeling that Pandora’s box contained the mysteries of woman’s sensuality, so different from a man’s and for which man’s language was inadequate.

Indeed, there’s another story here, for another time, which explores why women and men handle erotica so differently (as writers as well as readers). In any case, legions of fans of every sex and sexual orientation will attest to that fact that Nin holds up well for anyone who wants to explore the genre—though each reader will, of course, experience the work through his or her own particular lens. (Now is a good time, I suppose, for “the warning”: Anaïs Nin’s erotica is not for everyone.)

With respect to E.L. James and her wildly successful Fifty Shades trilogy, it’s not really fair to make a comparison to Nin (and from what I understand, she makes no claims to literary gianthood). And to be more than fair (call it diplomatic), bravo to her for getting her novels out there—and if she has succeeded in stirring up a sexually languid reading populace, that’s no small accomplishment. And know this: Writing erotica is difficult. Describing the Big It and the Big O (et al) can challenge the most generous of vocabularies as well as the most fanciful style. But this once again speaks to Nin’s dominance in the genre: She somehow manages to never throw out single a line that will leave you laughing at its triteness. (If you laugh, it’s because she wants you to. There are no accidents in her work.)

Further, if you want to argue that Nin’s pieces are simply short abstracts when compared to the thrust (pardon me) of the bodice-ripper approach to the sensual, I have to say Nin scores here again—her collections are utterly absorbing. Intrigue abounds, characters appear and reappear throughout the work, themes are opened, danced around, poked at and examined from myriad angles. As short story collections, Delta of Venus and Little Birds really hold up well; these are books you will not skim.

Finally (and perhaps of course), Nin even circles back on the genre itself and explores the role of erotica in (some of) our lives. In Delta, her character Elena opens D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The description of Elena’s experience with the novel might have you believe that Nin was speaking directly to the audience that James’ Fifty Shades seems to have tapped into:

[Elena] discovered that she had never known the sensations described by Lawrence, and second, that this was the nature of her hunger. But there was another truth she was now fully aware of. Something had created in her a state of perpetual defense against the very possibilities of experience, an urge for flight which took her away from the scenes of pleasure and expansion. She had stood many times on the very edge, and then had run away. She herself was to blame for what she had lost, ignored.

It was the submerged woman of Lawrence’s book that lay coiled within her, at last exposed, sensitized, prepared as if by a multitude of caresses for the arrival of someone.

Yes. Yes.

Delta of Venus, 1978, and Little Birds, 1979

The two celebrated collections written for the infamous patron who famously instructed, “Leave out the poetry,” are nothing if not poetic. Infused with sexual philosophy, moral ambiguity and emotional exploration, perversion accompanies the lovely, objectification dances with intimacy, and sensuality erupts from both the loving and the painful. Whether strong and rich archetypes or bundles of unpredictable subtlety, the characters are riveting as we watch them dare to push themselves—and us as willing voyeurs—to the edges of sexual exploration.

A Spy in the House of Love, 1954

The novel emerges from the mind of Sabina, a married woman involved in a number of adulterous affairs, who sees herself a “spy” or witness to her own experiences. Nin’s dreamy, yet unflinching style (that also lends itself so well her erotic writings) creates an intense psychological atmosphere, where the reader crawls inside the thought processes and sensitivities of a woman as she betrays the man she loves in order to explore her own personal nuances. An ethereal, semi-autobiographical tale that offers an intimate view into a woman’s complicated life. (Excerpted from “10 Must-Read Books for Girls and Boys, by Boys and Girls.”)

Editor’s note: News & Culture contributor Scott Adelson’s biweekly column, InPRINT, reviews and discusses books new and old, as well as examines issues in publishing.

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