“He’s hard and soft at once, like steel encased in velvet, and surprisingly tasty — salty and smooth.” —E. L. James, Fifty Shades of Grey
The key question posed by Fifty Shades of Grey, as sociologist Eva Illouz recognizes in her brilliant 2014 book on the topic, Hard-Core Romance: “Fifty Shades of Grey,” Best-Sellers, and Society, isn’t why a poorly written BSDM romance novel would capture the imagination of millions of women. Poorly written and slightly rapey romance novels have been firing the erotic imaginations of millions of women in the book-buying West for more than a century, ever since the romance genre became a mass market phenomenon.
The question is why this novel and its two sequels — the bestselling romance novels in human history, by a factor of five — blew up in a way that previous bestsellers in the genre hadn’t. What was so special about Fifty Shades that it became not just a bestseller but a mega-bestseller, a cult object, the sun around which a passionate new fandom came into existence? Why did its readers care so damn much about it?
The high-level conceptual answer, Illouz argues in Hard-Core Romance, is that when a cultural object achieves this kind of staggering popularity, it’s because it does a particularly good job raising to the surface, dramatizing, and narratively resolving core existential tensions that its fans experience but can’t acknowledge to themselves or others. “A book resonates,” she writes, “when it articulates — sometimes directly and sometimes in a roundabout way — a social experience that is baffling, that presents itself as a repeated cognitive and emotional challenge.”
When high culture stages these kinds of dramas, it can offer satisfactory resolutions to its individual characters but it tends not to resolve things at the structural level, because the structures are intrinsically unresolvable. The culture just does present us with conflicting imperatives and priorities. The human psyche just is constituted of a host of drives, urges, fears, reflexes, and impulses, some number of which will be in conflict at any given time. The overall landscape of norms, values, manners, narrative tropes, and institutions will certainly change radically over time — the dilemmas of 11th-century China are not those of 21st-century America — but every different culture produces incommensurability; there is never a stable escape from tension.
There can be temporary relief in fantasy, though, which Illouz, following Freud, defines as that which “works around reality, incorporates it, defends the self against reality, and yet helps one live with it.” This is one of the core sociological functions of pop culture, which at its most compelling resolves that which can’t be resolved. In pop culture, unlike in life, evil is permanently vanquished. The star-crossed lovers get together and live happily ever after. The devastatingly handsome but frustratingly aloof alpha male who likes to erotically torture you to multiple orgasms while withholding his love and commitment eventually falls deeply in love with you, pledges his heart only to you, and provides you endless emotional safety along with endlessly novel forms of orgasmic pleasure.
These texts can be deeply satisfying but the satisfaction is fleeting, which is why the consumption of them can have such an addictive quality. You need another fix, and another, because the sugar rush of resolution is so good but the actual tension that drives the desire for resolution remains stubbornly unresolved.
One way to understand the whole vast edifice of genre content — romance novels, cop shows, superhero movies, reality TV, anime, Harry Potter, even self-help literature — is that each genre is solving for a distinct problem, offering temporary fixes to different core tensions that structure social and psychological existence in modern life. If you could decode it all, you’d have not just a comprehensive map of the psychocultural terrain of our collective existence but a useful legend to what your personal cultural diet says about the internal tensions and contradictions that you need help managing.
Illouz doesn’t try to give us the whole map. Her terrain is love, which she has charted over the past few decades with an extraordinary series of sociological analyses, starting with Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, in 1997, and including Oprah Winfrey and the Glamour of Misery, Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism, Saving the Modern Soul: Therapy, Emotions, and the Culture of Self-Help, Why Love Hurts: A Sociological Explanation, and Unloving: A Sociology of Negative Relations.
Illouz has been deeply influenced by Freud, but a core goal of her project is to weaken the influence that he and his descendants have had on our understanding of love, relationships, and romance. They’ve individualized what Illouz would like to see socialized. Where psychiatry and psychology were, for Illouz, there sociology shall be.
“Precisely because we live in a time where the idea of individual responsibility reigns supreme,” she writes in Why Love Hurts, “the vocation of sociology remains vital. In the same way that at the end of the nineteenth century it was radical to claim that poverty was the result not of dubious morality or weak character, but of systematic economic exploitation, it is now urgent to claim not that the failures of our private lives are the result of weak psyches, but rather that the vagaries and miseries of our emotional life are shaped by institutional arrangements.”
From this angle, Fifty Shades of Grey is a brilliantly printed relief of the negative tensions that shape our experience of love and relationships. You get the resolution of the tension between modern women’s egalitarian values and their atavistic desire for masculine dominance, which is one of the core tropes of the romance genre. You get resolution of the conflicts between autonomy and dependence, the marketplace and the home, sexual desire and desire for security. You get the consumerist fantasy that buying the right things (lingerie, fine wine, sex toys, sports cars, fine art, rich Corinthian leather furniture) will bathe your life in pleasure and ease. And you get self-help too, for all the things you don’t yet know how to do: instructions for readers on precisely which sex toys to buy, how to use them, what kinds of lingerie to wear while using them, how to decorate your “red room,” and what wine the man should be serving you in the run-up to your perfectly curated erotic encounter.
Perhaps the most potent of Fifty Shades’ strategies, for Illouz, is the integration of self-help and romance. Self-help tells us that if we desire a change in our lives badly enough, we can make it happen through self-directed emotional and practical effort. And erotic fantasy promises a resolution to the contradiction between our desires for dependence and safety and our dreams of novelty and autonomy. Add them together, and you have not just a story that temporarily allows you to live in the intensely satisfying resolution of your romantic agonies, but a practical-seeming roadmap for how to enact that resolution in the world.
One of the ironies of Fifty Shades, Illouz argues, is that at its red hot core it’s as much about old-fashioned sentimental romantic love as it is sex. The titillation is important on its own terms; no doubt it’s an erotic accelerant for many women. But the BDSM sex is also a misdirection; it gives the reader the frisson of violating an explicit taboo while obscuring another, more powerful taboo. Women aren’t actually so embarrassed about being turned on by kink, particularly the relatively soft kink of Fifty Shades. It’s already part of the armature of our contemporary sensibilities. What its readers are more embarrassed about is how desperately they yearn for love and devotion.
“One naively assumes,” writes Illouz, “that the romance is the ‘pretext’ to wrap the sex in the pink paper of sentiments. In fact, the opposite is the case: it is the sex that is the pink paper in which the love story is wrapped.”
The BDSM wrapping allows women to embrace that old school desire in a way that feels modern. Because of the nipple clamps and anal beads, of course, but even more because the heroine, Anastasia, an ostensible submissive in her relationship with the arrogant Christian, is the real agent of the narrative. It’s her voice, her choices, her desires. What readers identify with, consciously or not, is that she’s topping from the bottom all along. At the start she is innocent and Christian is sophisticated. She is eagerly desirous of intimacy and he keeps his cool distance from it. She only wants him (and per their BDSM contract is only allowed to sleep with him) and he has a whole stable of sexual partners. She’s a virgin. He ain’t. Christian is rich and she’s not. And in their actual sex play, he’s calling the shots. He seems dominant. He is dominant, but fueling the dominance is an ego that is far more fragile than Anastasia’s. His sexual voraciousness is a trauma response, the product of an emotionally desolate childhood. Ana is young and innocent but her core self is much stronger. Her kink may involve surrendering control, but it’s her kink, and not only does she get to indulge it, she gets to do so while fulfilling additional layers of fantasy. First hot sex, then love, then commitment, and then hot sex again. She conquers him, but in precisely the right way, so that he doesn’t forfeit his masculine power and she doesn’t cease to inhabit the feminine, submissive role when needed. The building and release of tension can continue to play out forever.
“Christian’s immense social and sexual power,” Illouz writes, “is matched only by his intense and permanent need for symbiosis; Ana’s love is tempered by her genuine need for autonomy. The narrative thus follows a three-pronged movement: it encodes strong gender differences, systematically blurs them in offering us the spectacle of a struggle of two androgynous wills (they constantly fight with each other on the questions of his softness and of her autonomy), and ultimately reconciles these struggles in intense sadomasochistic sex, which re-enacts their gender identities and stabilizes their differences, but also makes these differences acceptable because it’s pleasurable (to the characters and to the reader).”
After their first torrid night together at his apartment, Ana wakes to find Christian gone from bed. She pads into the living room, the sun not yet risen, to find him playing a mournful song on the piano. Although Ana has just lost her virginity, it’s Christian who seems more vulnerable.
“How long have you been playing?” Ana says to Christian. “You play beautifully.”
“Since I was six.”
“Oh.”
Christian as a six-year-old boy . . . my mind conjures an image of a beautiful, copper-haired little boy with gray eyes and my heart melts — a moppet-haired kid who likes impossibly sad music.
“How are you feeling?” he asks when we are back in the room.
He switches on a sidelight.
“I’m good.”
We both glance down at the bed at the same time. There’s blood on the sheets — evidence of my lost virginity. I blush, embarrassed, pulling the duvet tighter around me.
. . . He puts his hand under my chin and tips my head back, staring down at me. His eyes are intense as he examines my face. I realize that I’ve not seen his naked chest before. Instinctively, I reach out to run my fingers through the smattering of dark hair on his chest to see how it feels.
Immediately, he steps back out of my reach.
“Get into bed,” he says sharply. His voice softens. “I’ll come and lie down with you.” I drop my hand and frown. I don’t think I’ve ever touched his torso. He opens a chest of drawers and pulls out a T-shirt and quickly slips it on.
“Bed,” he orders again. I climb back onto the bed, trying not to think about the blood. He clambers in beside me and pulls me into his embrace, wrapping his arms around me so that I’m facing away from him. He kisses my hair gently, and he inhales deeply. “Sleep, sweet Anastasia,” he murmurs, and I close my eyes, but I can’t help feel a residual melancholy either from the music or his demeanor.
Christian Grey has a sad side.
The writing isn’t sophisticated, but there’s a real power here, in its toggling back and forth between sex and emotion, hardness and softness, her vulnerability and his. It scratches a lot of itches. Fifty Shades is immensely repetitive — even in this brief scene you get four separate reminders of Christian’s vulnerability — but the repetition, Illouz argues, is precisely what the readers crave, novelty in some of the details but predictability in the formula. They want the recurrence of the same emotional dynamics over and over again, structured into the same kinds of set pieces, within a plot arc that inexorably bends toward a predictable resolution.
It reminds me a lot, as it happens, of the fantasy novels that provided so much solace to me when I was growing up. The set pieces that I binged were battles with orcs, or the young protagonist’s discovery of a new magical aptitude, rather than a steamy sexual encounter, but the compulsion was much the same. I read hundreds, maybe thousands, of these novels between the ages of about 11 or 12 well into my mid-20s. And these weren’t short books. Many of them topped 600 or 700 pages, and if you got really lucky, as a reader, you’d get a series that contained six or seven such doorstops. My attachment to them was addictive. When I was immersed in a series, I’d stay up too late reading. I’d read in the car, on the toilet, while walking through the halls of my school. I’d also, I realize in retrospect, have an excuse to withdraw emotionally from my family. Even today a good novel or series — one that has a crackin’ good plot, and that strikes the right balance between novelty and formula — can temporarily alter my phenomenological relation to the outside world.
There were even a number of “romantasy” series, as we’re now calling them, that hit the right soft pornographic beats for me, where some of the set pieces had to do with a young swordsman’s lusty encounter with a doe-eyed maiden coming into her own erotically. Fifty Shades, of course, famously began its existence as Twilight fan fiction, which the author posted to fanfic websites under the pen name “Snowqueen Icedragon.” Christian was originally Edward Cullen, immortal vampire, and Anastasia was Bella Swan, a teenage girl coming into her own erotically.
More than a bit familiar to me, too, is the fascination with rules and systems that Fifty Shades exhibits. In the fantasy novels I read as a kid and teenager, it was rules of magic that had to be mastered rather than contracts of dominance and submission, but at least some of the satisfactions, I suspect, served similar structural purposes. They were about fantasies of control and clarity where, in the real world, uncertainty and insecurity prevailed. The spell book, or the wizarding academy, lays down the rules for how the young magician can acquire status among his peers and respect and power in the adult world; it’s a structure that can be immensely compelling to kids and teenagers struggling to survive on the Darwinian playgrounds of youth and adolescence. In the BDSM contract, you get definitive answers to the otherwise immensely vexing questions of how a man and woman should relate to each other emotionally, sexually, and morally. These are both solutions, in different realms and for (mostly) different audiences, to what Illouz describes as “the collapse of an ordered moral cosmos . . . plagued with the problem of ambivalence, uncertainty, and indeterminacy.”
These narratives compel us because they resolve, for the moment, one or more of the major wave functions of cultural-psychological-moral indeterminacy that haunt modern existence. And they re-instantiate them too, generating the very anxiety they promise to assuage. And so we binge in order to live.
Daniel Oppenheimer is the author of Exit Right: The People Who Left the Left and Reshaped the American Century (Simon & Schuster) and Far From Respectable: Dave Hickey and His Art (University of Texas Press). His Substack newsletter, Eminent Americans, chronicles the contemporary American intellectual scene.
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