Hurts so good?

Getting back to that one woman’s comments on why she loved 50 Shades of Grey, there were two key points that speak to today’s topic. One is that while some people were condemning the reading of titillating material as something that triggers lustful thoughts, especially when your desire is only supposed to be to your husband, her desire for her husband was doing just fine. I know that some women are reading passages in the book and then sexing up their significant others with whom they are in a loving and committed relationship.

Well, how can you criticize that, right? They aren’t sleeping around or cheating, they are just injecting some extra fire into the existing framework. Still, I suspect there might be a problem, and her other point may help me get there. This was that NotEdward was into the bondage because he had been abused, and that NotBella’s love was part of what healed him, making it a beautiful thing.

(Although if I understand correctly, the healing was that they no longer needed a contract, but they were still going to do the same things. If I am wrong about that, I can live with it. Even just reading the summary for the one book was amazingly tedious.)

My concern here is twofold. The darker part is that I don’t think giving into your deepest impulses is necessarily healing. Let me just say, I can see where people are coming from when they are interested in bondage. In what I have already freely shared about myself, I have serious trust issues where I kind of expect people I love and people who love me (if they can) to hurt me, and I often would really like someone else to just take over. On a day like today, what I really want is for someone to take over all home maintenance responsibilities for me, but yes, I can see the allure of having someone take control in other areas. Apparently most of the time NotBella did not have to do much, and didn’t really have the option to do much, what with being tied up and all.

Here’s the thing though—even merely in the realm of home maintenance responsibility, I can see where giving up my share could be harmful. As tempting as it is sometimes to not want to be the grown-up, ultimately we know there is value in adult responsibilities.

Also, even when a fantasy is understandable, it may clearly be something that would not really be desirable. Romance novels will do some interesting things to make the scenarios not rape, but with a lot of those overtones. I think part of it is just the dominance theme, but also I think it comes from an attempt to have the sex happen but to not have the heroine be slutty. Well, if you think she would be slutty for willingly sleeping with the guy, then don’t have her sleep with him, or write her as a slut, but trying to have it both ways is dishonest in a way that I think is really harmful.

I think I may have just lost coherence, but the point I am trying to get at is that if you want your lover to hurt you, and that works it, it may be convenient but still not good, safe word or not. Maybe it would be better to learn that you don’t deserve to be hurt, and there are people who don’t want to hurt you, and to kind of progress in that direction instead of just enabling each other’s dark sides.

This is a point where people will be offended, because if both parties are satisfied with it, who has a right to judge? First off, I am not judging any specific relationships. I generally do not know details of anyone’s relationships, and that’s just fine. Also, I think of it this way. If someone has an eating disorder, and you are worried about that, that’s not really judging—you just want them to be healthier, and you are worried they are hurting themselves. That’s where I’m coming from, but we get weird about sex.

Wanting people to be healthier leads to the second concern. Often with some things, the issue is not so much that it is terribly bad, but that it keeps you from something better. A woman totally can read about NotEdward and NotBella, and then use that buzz on her husband, and they will probably both enjoy that, but could there be something better if the foreplay occurred with the husband instead of with the book.

I remember a psychologist friend once telling me about a colleague. I can’t remember if the colleague was specifically a sex therapist or just a marriage counselor who had sex come up a lot, but either way 90% of the sexual issues were communication. More recently there was an excellent blog post that was making the rounds about a gay man who is married to a woman and they have a great relationship and are very happy with each other, and they have a great sex life. The can’t rely on raw lust to get there, though, so they have to communicate and think about what they want and what the other one wants, and it ends up working out really well.

This reminded me of an episode of Everybody Loves Raymond, where Ray and Deborah tried playing a game called Sensuopoly, and Ray thought that he was great with the sex, but that she wanted more romance, but actually she did need different things in the bedroom, but she had a really hard time telling him, because it was embarrassing. Yes, but not as embarrassing as finding out that you’ve been doing it wrong for all those years. I thought it was really well-handled, and a good point.

Anyway, so yes, I will not be reading 50 Shades of Gray, and it does have something to do with my religious beliefs, but there’s more to it than that, and I hope I did not come off as sanctimonious or anything like that. I will try and lighten up a little in the next post, but I can't guarantee it.