I read Fifty Shades of Grey and I really, really wanted to love it, or at least appreciate its contributions. I forgave the fanfic-quality prose. And the spontaneous orgasms. And the helicopter.

But dude.

The narrator spends most of the novel trying to decide whether the eponymous Grey's kinks are sexy and fucked up or merely fucked up. (They're connected, we're told, to his irrational rages. And the abuse he suffered as a child. And some other shit he likes to brood about mysteriously while playing the piano.) In the last chapters, she asks him to go ahead and do his worst. He says he doesn't need to do those things with her. He says he doesn't think she'll like it. She assures him she wants to see what it's like. He checks in with her carefully. He reminds her about her safeword. Then he canes her, unties her, and offers her aftercare.

Response? "You're fucked up," she tells him. "You need to sort your shit out." Then she walks out. The End.

I couldn't bring myself to read the sequels. But I asked around, and apparently there's a happy ending. Because in Book Three, he sorts that shit out. Deals with his demons, doesn't need to do those fucked-up things anymore.

Fifty Shades of Grey isn't kink-positive, Dan. So I'm afraid you got it wrong in your column this week. It's the opposite. It's kink-toxic. It's kink-hateful. It's anti-kink. It teases us by suggesting it's okay to put up with a little light bondage, maybe enjoy it in spite of yourself... but if you actually LIKE that stuff, well, then you've got a problem. Which true love might eventually help you fix.

I'm sorry, Dan, I'm getting angry all over again. You don't have to read it. If I were you, I wouldn't. But please don't recommend it for having its heart in the right place.

Safeword Fan

My response after the jump...

Did I recommend Fifty Shades of Grey?

I mentioned the bestseller in the same breath with "2 Girls, 1 Cup," the infamous shit-and-puke fetish video that left skid marks all over the interwebs in 2007, and I said that I've avoided reading it because "I'm easily nauseated." Not much of an endorsement. I did say that the book was "inspiring a whole new generation of American women to get their kink on," and described that development as "wonderful." But I wasn't calling the book wonderful, SF, I was calling American women getting their kink on wonderful—a sentiment with which I'm sure you would agree.

Sorry about the confusion. And if everything goes down in Fifty Shades of Grey the way you've described it—I still have no plans to read the thing—then Grey is ridiculous, it got kink all wrong, and, well, I just can't quite bring myself to describe it as kink-hateful or kink-toxic. What it sounds like to me, SF, is plain ol' kink-stupid.

Kink, particularly BDSM, is almost always framed negatively in mainstream literature and films—even when (particularly when!) filmmakers and writers are trying to titillate average (read: non-kinky) audience members. Lazy "artists" can be faulted for this, of course, and they should be faulted. But most filmmakers and writers are aiming for a mass audience, i.e. a mostly non-kinky-to-begin-with audience, and the overwhelming majority of non-kinky filmgoers and readers can't seem to relax and allow themselves to enjoy a good kinky fantasy unless they're told—unless they're reminded over and over again—that this kink shit is crazy and that kinksters are fucked up. It's kinda pathetic: In order to set aside their anti-kink attitudes and enjoy trash like Fifty Shades the average reader first needs to have her assumptions about kink confirmed—crazy! fucked up!—and only then is she able to get down to the business of furiously masturbating about what she's just read.

There's no shortage of works of fiction out there that get kink right—there are books and there are massive online archives of kink stories written by people who know what they're talking about—and yet Fifty Shades of Grey takes off. I can see why that annoys smart and informed kinksters like you. But Fifty Shades didn't take off despite getting kink wrong, SF, it took off because it got kink wrong.