I keep seeing these posts about how Fifty Shades of Grey is giving BDSM a bad name…how it’s not accurately depicting a healthy BDSM relationship. To all the critics who are of this opinion, I offer mine: NO SHIT, SHERLOCK.
Fifty Shades of Grey is absolutely not a healthy depiction of a BDSM relationship in much the same way that Hotel Rwanda is not a depiction of healthy government processes. If the intention was to shed a little insight into what a healthy, consensual BDSM relationship would look like, Fifty Shades would be a miserable failure. However, I don’t believe this is truly what this story is all about.
A little background about me: I was in a very unhealthy relationship for over a decade, and it was what I consider abusive for at least the last three and a half years. My ex experienced every kind of child abuse imaginable: physical, emotional, sexual, verbal. He is a survivor in every sense of the word. Truly, it’s a miracle he is still alive, as he should have been dead many times over. At the onset of our relationship, I never knew the extent of the abuse in his past, and, to be honest, had I known how much he had endured there is a chance that I probably would not have chosen to pursue a relationship with him. In the words of Christian Grey, his experiences had left him “fifty shades of f**ked up.”
So, as I read the Fifty Shades trilogy, I obviously experienced the story through my own lens of past abuse. I read the books just after I walked away from a decade-long relationship fraught with verbal, psychological, and emotional abuse and a much shorter period of other forms of abuse. I left a man who had experienced so much pain and anger and sadness and loss of control as the victim of abuse, and he perpetuated the devastating cycle of abuse through controlling me and mistreating our child. And, as I read the Fifty Shades trilogy, I saw my ex in Christian, and in the young, naïve Anastasia, I saw myself.
I went to watch the movie yesterday on its opening day, and I have to tell you…those who say that this movie does not accurately show what a healthy BDSM relationship is all about? You’re exactly right. Can I tell you what I saw when I watched this movie? I saw the real, painful, incredibly destructive long-term effects of childhood abuse. I saw in Christian a very, very flawed character – a control freak and an abusive, sometimes cruel man who was coping with the abuse of his youth using methods that hurt some of the people closest to him. And, yet, Christian was not all bad. In fact, he was alluring and sexy as hell and charismatic and even lovable. In short, I saw my ex.
Change the sexual domination techniques to other forms of control, and this movie is a completely accurate depiction of what the past decade of my life was like. It is so, so hard to live with and love a man who was destroyed in infancy. It is both terrifying and exhilarating to be the life partner of a man who is incredibly good at making you feel like you are vitally important to him, whilst simultaneously shutting you completely out of his private thoughts. It is terribly, terribly confusing to recognize that your lover truly loves you, and yet feels a compulsion to hurt you. It is devastating to know that the one you love derives satisfaction from your pain.
All of this is to say, I think Fifty Shades of Grey, while perhaps not the best written book or movie ever made, has more depth than most critics admit. I appreciated the development of the characters and the way they were at once flawed and lovable. So often we want to put relationships into neat little black and white boxes: healthy or abusive, loving or toxic, good or bad. But, most relationships are not all good or all bad. The trick is finding your limits and maintaining your boundaries. Sometimes you can stay with and love someone who hurts you terribly; sometimes you realize that they will never be able to love you in the way you need to be loved, and, although there is still love between you, you have to walk away. Abuse experienced as a child is an obstacle to healthy relationships for a lifetime. It never goes away, and it manifests in strange ways sometimes. As an adult abuse survivor and the ex wife of a child abuse survivor, Fifty Shades of Grey was not a movie about BDSM for me. It was about seeing the long-lasting effects of child abuse, and watching a flawed but lovable character try to cope with the residual effects of that abuse in unhealthy, abusive ways. And it reminded me again that people are not all good or all bad, and that life is truly lived in shades of grey.
*This post was written by an fMh blogger posting anonymously to protect her family*