The flying monkeys brought in a little semi-non 50 Shades of Gray news this week, a post on the Cinema Blend website that announced in breathless tones that Carla Gugino will get kinky in season two of a television series called The New Girl.
Well I had to check that out because Carla Gugino is an actress who will do a risky scene, she did the lesbian rape scene with probable panty gag in Jaded, after all, one of only two scenes in the history of television with probable panty gags. Link to a vidcap from the scene showing the gag. (They're "probably" panty gags because they look like panties stuck in the women's mouths and in the Gugino scene, there wasn't a lot else out there on the beach to gag her with but her panties. It would be a certain panty gag if the whole scene had not been shot in extreme chairobscuro).
Reading the post, Gugino will play an executive that forces a subordinate to sign a contact that will "bind his body and his will" to her. The article describes this as "going all 50 Shades on him."
No. No, no and no. Two major problems here. One, doesn't sound very consensual -- sounds like straight-up abuse of power, whereas 50 Shades was all about the consensual -- and two, the genders are all wrong. The women who enjoyed 50 Shades enjoyed a fantasy about a woman submitting sexually to a man, not a fantasy about a man submitting sexually to a woman.
Let me be very clear here: there are women who enjoy fantasies of dominating men, and there are men who enjoy fantasies of being dominated by women, and that's fine. They are as entitled to their fantasies as anybody else is. I'm not entertaining any notions that maledom/femsub is the order of nature or other such bullcrap. It's all good.
But I am saying that the vast majority of 50 Shades readers like maledom/femsub themes, after all, that's what 50 Shades is, and they also don't care for femdom/malesub themes. After all, the popularity of 50 Shades sprang straight from romance readers ready for some hotter action. And while there are thousands and thousands of romance novels about bold pirates capturing spirited wenches and finding love instead of a quick roll in the captain's lounge, there a very, very few romance novels about bold pirate wenches capturing spirited young studs and finding love, etc.
That's because the romance readership doesn't like them. Romance novels, except for that explicit sex thing, have always slavishly followed their readers' tastes, which is why they are now by far the top selling variety of adult fiction. And their failure to get it on with the explicit maledom/femsub kink is why they have lost so many readers to erotic romance ebooks like Karg. (And, well, OK, 50 Shades as well. It has outsold Karg by ... a lot. I'm not at liberty to divulge numbers here, as it would be too embarrassing for the publishing industry, by which of course I mean "me." Not that any other ebook writers' numbers look that good next to 50 Shades.)
Now there is no reason for The New Girl not to chase after the relatively small demographic of women who like femdom/malesub kink, it's their show, they can do as they like.
But my suspicion is that they are introducing this "50 Shades" theme to attract more viewers (television is a numbers game after all) and if THAT'S their goal, they're doing it all wrong. They need to go after the big demographic that likes maledom/femsub themes if they want numbers.
I suspect the reason that they are doing it wrong is that they haven't caught up with the paradigm shift that 50 Shades represents. Most mainstream TV and movie producers will reflexively prefer a femdom/malesub theme over a maledom/femsub themes because they fear offending feminists, and women who are pro-feminism. And they think they can get away with it in terms of attracting viewers because they think anyone who likes anything kinky will like anything described as kinky. If you like bondage, you like nuns and schoolgirls and whipped cream and dwarves and, well, anything. Which is world-class dumb of them, but hey, there's a reason network television is hemorrhaging viewers every year, and it ain't intelligence.
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