50 Shades of Grey: The Next Mainstream Bondage Romance?

First published 3/1/2012
It's been a long time since there was a breakout bondage romance in mainstream media, and it looks like the drought is over: Fifty Shades of Grey by E L James, a London television executive who got published by a small Australian publisher and who is not getting wall to wall buzz for her book.

It's the story of a hot young woman seduced by a bondage-loving billionaire and all the deliciously naughty things he does to her. It's doing tremendously well in terms of sales and it has the buzz machine going on overtime. How successful is it? Well I linked to the Kindle version of 50 Shades because the paperbacks, which were printed in a small run initially, were going for $105.00 each on Amazon when I created the link. The Kindle version is only $6.95, so ... I figured most would prefer it. It's being called everything from Pornography for Mommies to Twilight for adults.

Now, there's an interesting story there. Fifty Shades of Grey apparently started out as Twilight fan fiction. And the Twilight fanbase adopted it as a tribute to the wonderful Twilight books (you know, Stephenie Myers' series about a vacuous high school girl who is inexplicably attractive to vampires). Then, the narrative goes, she somehow sneakily rewrote it as her own creative work, USING the Twilight fandom community to promote her book.

By all accounts, it's hard to see how 50 Shades is Twilight fanfic, so I'm not sure I buy this narrative, though it's apparently true that James wrote fanfic in the Twilight community as Icedragon Snowqueen. I really don't know enough to have an opinion, having read neither book. (Oh, I'm gonna read 50 Shades!) But it's some great gossip!

It's interesting, almost always, when a bondage story breaks over into the mainstream, it's a romance. Spicy romances, to be sure, with plenty of sex, but the feel of the genre is unmistakable: Story of O, 9 1/2 Weeks and 50 Shades all are about women who have relationships with a single man who brings out the submissive in them, while they bring out the dom in him. Secretary would be the film equivalent, I suppose.

I'm always interested in bondage that makes it into the mainstream, maybe 50 Shades will be the novel that becomes the gateway fiction that leads readers to find all the great erotic bondage fiction out there. Fiction like: Karg!