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8. Porn & romance: holy cow, it's 50 Shades of Grey!

As seen in the previous chapter, my very first post on my blog was about romance heroines. I felt compelled to write it after reading a number of erotic romance novels and detecting a pattern of heroines being sexually abused by their heroes. I began to wonder why and, among other reasons, concluded the authors—all of them women—had been colonized by male porn to such an extent that they were reproducing it in their stories. Readers, colonized as much as the authors, bought the idea and created the demand to make that sort of material thrive in mainstream erotic romance.

At the time, I was surprised but hadn't really paid close attention to porn. Now that I have, I can understand the reason why male porn is so pervasive in romance novels written by women for women: it is the major reference for sex available across the world, and it has already expanded to pop culture as I've mentioned in another post. Here I will analyze some of the stories I came across.

Fifty shades of female frustration

I will start with Fifty Shades of Grey, by E.L. James, the erotic novel whose success inserted male porn in mainstream romance and opened the gates to a deluge of similar stories. It's all about female submission, exquisite pleasure mixed with pain and the notion that a woman is a man's property. Female readers found the novel to be empowering and liberating for women. I'm not so sure about that. Fifty Shades more likely provided women with an outlet to their sexual fantasies and a titillation of transgression, since BDSM deviates from regular sexual practices—when the novel first came out in 2012, BDSM wasn't prevalent in pop culture as it is today. In that sense, the novel validated women as sexual beings entitled to have pleasure and break free from the boundaries of convention. Finally, women had found their own porn in mainstream.

If you strip off Fifty Shades of its sexual content, however, what's left is a very traditional love story, with conventional male and female roles of dominance and submission. But the novel didn't stay at that: when it reinstated the notion that a woman is the property of a man, it actually took women's rights and freedom backwards, making us go back a few hundred years. In old times, women were indeed the property of men, with their sexuality tightly controlled to protect property and make sure they didn't generate illegitimate heirs.

Moreover, I can't see how a heroine can be empowered when she's afraid of the hero, begs him not to hurt her, and is subjected to sex as punishment solely for his pleasure. Christian Grey, nevertheless, is rich, handsome and emotionally damaged, so all is forgiven. Ana can't resist him, and in spite of her reluctance, she always experiences glorious orgasms no matter what he does—here, we have the typical male porn scenario, when the man imposes acts the woman doesn't want and doesn't like, but eventually enjoys.

There's something else going on with Fifty Shades. In his own words, Christian Grey is a sadist. Why would any woman in her right mind find it so hot to be around a sadist? Yet readers rave about the novel. As I mentioned, Grey is very handsome. I doubt women would be so excited to submit to his whip if he looked like an ogre. And what's with the contract he wants Ana to sign in order to become his property? That doesn't make any sense. Imagine a lawyer in real life writing such contract. Wait: a lawyer wouldn't write a single line because that's slavery and, according to the Constitution, it's illegal.

So that begs the question: why, oh women, why are you so drawn to Christian Grey and the damn contract? I have a guess. Maybe women are tired of decades of double shift, working hard to make a living and then going back home to take care of endless household chores. In that light, the thought of having someone free them of that burden is appealing. Let alone someone handsome and filthy rich like Christian Grey.

There's an archetypal dynamics in romance novels with alpha males that goes like this: the abusive hero resists his budding love for the heroine and mistreats her as she endures it and quietly gets under his skin. Maybe that goes to teach female submission or the lesson that love conquers all? There's also the irresistible appeal of a damaged hero that makes his bad behavior forgivable: it speaks to the feminine nurturing nature while tickling it with the challenge of winning the hero's heart.