Seven Reasons Everyone Wants To See Lindsay Lohan As Ana in Fifty Shades of Grey

Over the last six or eight months, the ballyhoo over "Fifty Shades of Grey" the book has mostly quieted down. It's been replaced by ballyhoo over casting for the Fifty Shades of Grey movie. In fact, the ballyhoo started off full steam last summer and has hardly lost a beat all the way the present.

I have studiously, perhaps stupidly, ignored these stories (except for my April Fools post) since it was all baseless speculation. You can tell it's baseless speculation because practically every actor and actress in the United States and Europe has been put forth as a likely lead for the movie.

But I have finally encountered a speculation I can't resist: this report that Lindsay Lohan may be, or perhaps should be, interested in being the female lead for Fifty Shades of Grey. And the reason I can't resist it is there are SO many reasons for wanting Lindsay Lohan to be the lead.

Seven Reasons Everyone Wants To See Lindsay Lohan As Ana in Fifty Shades of Grey

1) From the viewpoint of the producers, actors, etc., involved in the movie, if it's a bomb, they can just blame it on Lindsay. At this point, who wouldn't believe it?

2) With all the drugs she's done and all she's gone through, she's probably be willing to do ANY kind of scene, we're talking right up to and including a full double-dildo Savage Fold with flaming dachshunds and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

3) She's probably ENJOY doing such scenes, and her enjoyment would probably show through and make the role work for her.

4) Even if you don't think she's hot and you hate her for all the weird stuff she's done, you STILL might want to see her in handcuffs and a ballgag with a butt plug up her ass.

5) If you DO think she's hot, you ALSO might want to see her in handcuffs and a ballgag with a butt plug up her ass.

6) If you hated the book and hate the very IDEA of the movie, you might just want her in the lead in the hopes that she'd fuck the movie up royally with some stupid new antic. The insurance premiums alone ...

7) Americans love comeback stories, and dammit, a comeback story with Lindsay Lohan triumphing in a role that has her tied up and fucked senseless is JUST what this country needs, dammit!

Teagan Rand's Slave Harems of Xhagia Series Could Have Been The Natural Successor To Fifty Shades ... Except For All That Bukkake ...

Chained, collared and wearing a boustier ... soon to be a very sticky boustier! Image source: Cover of "A Slave Girl for the Emperor" the first book in the four-part Slave Harems of Xhagia series.

I am a sucker for combining fantasy/science fiction themes and bondage themes, let's just put that right out there. Anybody who has read almost all of the Gor novels can reasonably be suspected of being that.

THAT must be why I've read all four of Teagan Rand's “Slave Harems of Xhagia” books, because I DEFINITELY never intended to read all of them. I just planned to buy that first book and move on. Well to be honest, the REAL reason, and as an erotica writer I'm almost ashamed to admit it, but it's true and I gotta keep it real … I got hooked on the plot. Between an arresting and interesting plot, an intriguing universe and a smooth writing style that makes turning the pages very, very easy, I got hooked.

Set in the not too distant future, Slave of the Emperor and its successor books deals with the adventures of Christine Berenger, one of many women who have been kidnapped by slavers of a vast interstellar empire known as the Xhagian Empire, to serve as slavegirls in the harems and bordellos of Xhagia.

OK, I hear you already … I thought the same thing myself … “Another damn story of aliens who want our Earth women … what the hell … well it IS porn … er, erotica ...”

But here is where Teagan Rand proves she is made of better stuff than your average pornifier. Tuns out the Xhagians and humans are both descendents of an ancient race called the Valk who died out about 25 million years ago, and seeded the galaxy with a variety of humanoid races for some mysterious reason that's essential to the plot – and no, this review will not contain any spoilers, this is all established early on.

So the cross-species attraction is understandable, as is the fact that Xhagian males are taller, handsomer version of Earthmen … they're basically both subspecies of the Valk.

What's more, Valk males and Earth females find each other tremendously sexually attractive ... also for reasons that are essential to the plot.

This is what really made me sit up and take notice of Rand's books. Instead of using the science fiction background as the thinnest of tissues to hold together her story of the romance between Christine and the Xhagian slaver Dalgaz Tav, and all the hot slavegirl sex that she and the other slaves have with him and other handsome Xhagian men, Rand thought her background through in such a way that it's essential to and supports the story, making it stronger.

This is a good thing because although the "Slave in the..." series is FULL of submissive slavegirly goodness, and includes some bondage, its central fetish is, well ... bukkake. Bukkake is not a fetish I enjoy, nor is it ever likely to become one, I mean .... YECH! But it seems that the sperm of Xhagians has some property that renders Earth slaves orgasmicallly ecstatic for prolonged periods, and it only takes contact with the skin to make this orgasmy goodness manifest itself. And the Xhagian men produce lots and lots of sperm, much more than Earth men. They also have a very short refractive period and like to have sex a LOT.

Think of them as the the male equivalent of the big-breasted bimbos who want to have sex with everyone as soon as possible who show up in male porn. And the sperm of Xhagian men is so powerful and effective on human female psyches that its effects are ninety percent of what it takes to transform the captive Earth women into lust-bedazzled sex sluts, reduced to panting wanton slavegirls without much need for lashing or punitive treatment of any kind. It's all about the sperm, baby!

What's more, the Xhagian men find the Earth women VERY attractive, more attractive in fact than Xhagian females, who are only interested in sex when they are fertile and ready to conceive children. And instead of being jealous, the Xhagian women are pleased that the Earth women are keeping their men from being all sexually wound up when the Xhagian women are not interested in sex, which is basically, most of the time.

And of course, these books are essentially romances. Dalgaz Tav, the male lead, is that rarest of all creatures, a slaver with a heart of gold. He might be charged with picking out the prettiest Earth women kidnapped by Xhagian slavers for the Emperor's harem and transforming them into total hose beasts for use by the Emperor, but he CARES about those women, by gum. He and Christine soon develop strong feelings for one another, but can a romance between the top slaver in the Xhagian Empire and a lowly human slavegirl really work out? I'll never tell … read the books if you want to find out!

Keeping the Emperor's and others' harems and bordellos full is why the Xhagian slavers constantly raid Earth for women to stock their harems and bordellos, but it's germane to the plot in more than one way, for there is a mysterious relationship between Earth humans and Xhagians that plays out over the course of the four books in the series that is essential to the plot.

This is what really impresses me about Rand's writing. There are a lot of erotica writers who can write a convincing sex scene, but most miss out on the tremendous potential of science fiction and fantasy to make erotic stories more powerful and believable. She worked out the way the genetics and customs of the Xhagians and humans affect her characters and her story and makes it work FOR the story, sometimes in surprising ways. This is a hallmark of good science fiction and fantasy writing, when the writer does not use their fantastic or futuristic plot elements merely as props for the story but works out how they would affect their world.

Larry Niven is a great example of this. He predicted flash mobs before they happened, because he envisioned a society that had instant communications and instant transportation because they had teleporters, and he wondered how that would affect how ordinary people behaved. He decided they'd use them to form crowds out of nowhere just for fun and parties. And of course, flash mobs are people who use cell phones out of nowhere, they just use more mundane transportation.

Niven's thinking-through of his futuristic ideas even on aspects that aren't central to the plot is what characterizes really great science fiction, it adds a very nice density and richness to your story.

And Rand's thinking through of the different sexuality and genetics and culture of the Xhagians add nicely to her story. I wish she had thought the Xhagians through in other respects, they're basically technically advanced ancient Romans in outer space in other respects, which does make the story seem a little thin at times.

There's just one element where Rand falls down in terms of world-building, and its' a pet peeve of mine, so I'm going to have to bring it up though I doubt it will matter much to most readers. Rand's Xhagian Empire is pretty much ancient Rome in outer space, with a heredity emperor presiding over a court full of nobles who scheme to become Emperor themselves, generally without success.

Now, see … interstellar empires and heredity aristocracies just don't go well together. If you are going to have an interstellar empire ruled by an hereditary aristocracy set in the distant future, you need to explain why a civilization so technically advanced is being run by a type of government that is clearly archaic even to a bunch of planetbound types like us contemporary Earthlings.

I mean, believing that the best man to govern is automatically going to be the firstborn son of the current ruler implies a certain ignorance of genetics, y.know?

I'm not saying you can't HAVE aristocracies running interstellar empires, I'm saying gimme some handwaving, baby. You know, something along the lines of “although the Xhagians were well aware of the problems posed by succession in an hereditary aristocracy, all other forms of government had proven unworkable due to the Xhagian males' fierce competitiveness, which quickly transformed any government based on merit, popularity or other objective standard into a festering hellhole ruled by paranoid warlords. Aristocracies were stupid, but they weren't as stupid as chaotic hellholes full of rival warlords. It was a matter of government by lesser evil.”

Was that so hard?

In addition to all this, there are hints that Christine is not the simple kidnapped slavegirl she seems to be. She has memories of her childhood on Earth, but she has no memory of how she came to be captured in the raid of the Xhagian slavers, or of the days leading up to those events, though there are disturbing dreams that may point to an answer. And there's a religious cult that is gaining power that thinks the way the human slave girls are being treated by the Xhagians is all wrong … they think they should be treated considerably worse!

Rand, in short, really knows how to stir a plot and keep it going, and can write a pretty good slavegirly submissive sex scene. To be fair, for about half of book three and almost all of book four I kind of skimmed the sex scenes, because1) I'm not into bukkake and 2) there's little or no bondage and 3) not all that much slavegirliness stuff to interest me and 4) the plot had cut in big time and that was what I was really interested in.

Frankly, the Xhagian sperm has the effect of making all the slavegirls so happy and eager to have sex with Xhagian men that you kind of get the impression they'd be paying the Xhagian men to have sex with them if they had any money. This eliminates some of the dramatic tension you have in bondage and BDSM, which was especially a problem in the first and second books when the plot had not fully cut in, and so the books were kind of dull until the plot really got rolling in the last half of the second book. (The set up for the world, the society, Christine's situation, etc., keeps you going easily enough through the first book).

I guess what I am saying is, I would have liked to have seen Christine and the other harem slaves struggling more with their new status as slavegirls, despite the effect of Xhagian sperm on their psyches. Hell, have them seriously puzzled and disturbed by what is happening to them. (Christine does have issued with her enslavement, as do the other harem slaves, but not enough to make the harem girls' experience seem all that slavish … it's more like they are a bunch of happy consensual bukkake fetishists who occasionally have a brief doubt about what they are doing. Not exactly the stuff of sex slavery.)

That said, it's still a fine series of erotic books. They cost just $2.50 each in their Kindle editions, and they run to about 2000 Kindle pages, which of course are not the same as paperback pages. I'm not sure if it was a long novella or a short novel I read, but I definitely didn't feel shorted, because it was a fun ride and it took a while.

I would say that if you like bukkake as a fetish, buy this book NOW. You could not spend your entertainment dollar more wisely.

If you like generally sexy science fiction, also a very good use of your two bucks fifty, because these books are that. On a stick.

If you like sexy slavegirl themes with a strong element of romance, but aren't into the whole heavy bondage thing, these books are also likely to be winners for you. (The slavegirl themes are undoubtedly what kept me reading because …)

If you like bondage, the books are more problematical, there just isn't that much of it. True, the slavegirls are often thoroughly bound and gagged when they are transported from one location to another, and a couple of passages make it clear that the slavegirls are taught to serve while in restraints, but they don't do a hell of a lot of serving while in restraints or being restrained while not serving. I'd still risk the $2.50 on the first book. The sexy slavegirliness might work for you, too.

If you like bondage with a strong element of drama, with the slavegirl fighting it all the way, including fighting her own feelings … these books might not be your cuppa.

All that said, I may not be the best guide for this books' intended audience, as they are definitely romances and I'm a guy. But they're definitely sexy enough to be in the zone of erotica a guy would enjoy reading. I've given you my honest reactions to the books to the best of my ability, which is about all I can do. Read the books and decide for yourself!

And for Teagan Rand, I've got just one bit of advice, perhaps self-serving but I think absolutely accurate: Bukkake just is NOT that popular a fetish. If you want to sell more books, try working a more popular fetish. May I suggest bondage? Fifty Shades of Grey sold seventy million copies, and your books could be the books all those women turn to when they look around for more Fifty Shades of Grey sort of fun reading. You are definitely a good enough writer to grab that brass ring. But you will not succeed by flogging a fetish that has most of your readers going "Eeeew!" and wanting to take a shower.

Another Writer Prefaces Comments On Fifty Shades of Grey with "Have Not Read It"

The Wall Street Journal's Speakeasy section has a post where an indie moviemaker, Kieran Evans, compares his indie film, "Karen+Victor," which apparently has a femdom/malesub relationship, to Fifty Shades of Grey ... which he prefaces by saying, "I've never read Fifty Shades of Grey." But ... he's heard a lot about it, so that's all right.

I wrote a response to his post, because I'm really sick of all these people who never read the book confidently going out there and making fools of themselves by getting their facts all wrong and, of course, drawing wrong conclusions. So I straightened him out on a few points:

I have not seen your film, know very little about it, so I can't say if it's any good or not, and won't. If only you would be as fair to Fifty Shades of Grey. Anyone who says they have not read the book and then makes pronunciations about it loses all credibility, in my opinion. You get basic facts wrong: you said, " While the sex act may be viewed by outsiders as “S&M,” unlike “50 Shades” these two people have never before been involved in BDSM culture." Well the fact is that Ana is a virgin at the start of Fifty Shades of Grey and had never had ANY experience with BDSM. So ... poor comparison

Also, Fifty Shades is not ABOUT a maledom/femsub sex. Both Ana and Christian enjoy the sex, but the central story of the relationship is how Christian tries to set up their relationship as a purely contractual relationship, and how Ana refuses it, and it evolves into something more like a regular romantic relationship. That's really what it's ABOUT, the sex, while important, is not the central element because there's no conflict over it ... they both like it.

Now all you need to have said to make the point that your movie is different from Fifty Shades is that the relationship in your movie is femdom/malesub (i.e., it's Karen who does the tying-up) whereas in Fifty Shades it's maledom/femsub. Gender makes a huge difference to MOST (not all) who like BDSM, and for the readers of the romances and erotic romances, who enjoy maledom/femsub stories. You're in a different genre already. But I get the impression you don't know that, which is another strike against your credibility.

Domestic Bondage On SMBC Theater

First published on 2/17/2013

A Youtube channel called SMBC Theater has come up with an actually funny bit about sexual bondage play. They called it 50 Shades of Domestic Gray but I think that's just to attract visitors, the skit actually has little or nothing to do with the book Fifty Shades of Grey. Point is: it's actually funny. Lighthearted and fun. Enjoy!

The S.E.C.R.E.T. of No Success

First published on 2/6/2013

This one was so predictable that I am surprised it has taken until now for it to happen. Publishers have decided that then Next Big Thing after Fifty Shades of Grey will be a sexy, sexy novel with lots and lots of vanilla sex and not all that problematical kinky sex, and they've found their book, they think: S.E.C.R.E.T., a relentlessly vanilla sexy novel by Canadian author Lisa Gabriele (writing as L. Marie Adeline).

At the Frankfort book fair, publishers bid the novel up to a six-figure advance against sales in 30 different territories worldwide. The widespread success of Fifty Shades has clearly left publishers hungry for a repeat, but these particular publishers are clueless gits. I predict that S.E.C.R.E.T. will go just as far as the publishers' marketing machine can push it, there'll be no worldwide cascade of interest. After the marketing machine push is over, it'll drop like a lead balloon, going only so far as its astroturf runway permits.

It was the kinky sex, specifically the dominance/submission relationship between Ana and Christian, that made Fifty Shades of Grey so popular. The importance of the kinky sex is so freaking obvious that even the mainstream media reviewers sometimes saw it, but I can just SEE the publishers wishfully thinking, "Well this book has plenty of sex, and none of that problematical kinky sex!"

Fools. If S.E.C.R.E.T. were a stock and I were a stockbroker, I'd wait til it hit a hundred thousand copies sold (the outer limit of where its astroturf sales will go) and then I'd short it like crazy. Of course, I would be foolish to bet actual money on its failure, as I have a personal animus toward the book and would LOVE to see it fail so hard that its publisher's grandchildren wet themselves every time they heard the word "secret."

GQ Fifty Shades of Grey Inspired Photo Spread Features Actual Bondage ... Of A Woman!

First published on 2/6/2013

The flying monkeys brought in news that GQ Magazine's Spanish edition has a hot "Fifty Shades of Grey"-inspired photo spread. I checked it out dutifully, certain I'd see no bondage at all, or a dude in bondage. Because that's fashion bondage for ya. So my eyeballs bugged out a little when the photos included SEVERAL images of a couple with the WOMAN in chains, cuffs, etc. And blindfolded, of course. Good lord, has Fifty Shades become such a powerful media force that even the dunderheads who do fashion photo shoots are starting to get it?

Hmm. This could be an outlier. I'm having trouble giving up the notion that fashion is run by idiots. I'll wait for further evidence. Yeah ... it's gotta be an outlier.

Fifty Shades of Grey Seedlings

First published on 1/24/2013

Kink.com is not the only bondage-related thing that is getting mainstreamed of late. "Soft" bondage, whatever that is, is also taking off according to a report in Entertainmentwise.com, which is not exactly a fetish site, as you'll note.

The article, basically a fluff piece, interviews James Deen (known well from Kink.com) who is fast becoming the go-to guy as bondage's most well-known star and a manufacturer of a line of sex aids/toys called Liberator (There may be some sexism going on here, there have been MANY well-known and successful women who have promoted and advanced sexual bondage over the years ... Midori, Lorelei Imboch, Chanta Rose, the list is very long indeed, yet James Deen is the go-to source for the press. Well at least they are going to someone who actually does bondage.)

The Liberator people obligingly ascribe the upward boost in sales of their products to an increase of awareness of "soft" bondage and interest in it, created by "50 Shades of Grey." And they're probably right. I'm seeing other articles in which bondage is being matter-of-factly described as a culture phenomenon rather than some bizarre fetish, like this one on celebrity bondage looks from Hollywoodife.com, which asks which actress looks best in leather "bondage" fashion.

What I see happening is that the effects of Fifty Shades of Grey are beginning to appear in our culture. Fifty million seeds have been planted, their effects are invisible as they grow in our collective unconscious, now we see the first tiny shoots poking above the unconscious into mainstream media. Gonna be interesting to watch and see what grows, and how it grows.

Filthy Shades of Grey?

First pubished on 1/13/2013

Kelly Marcel, the screenwriter for the upcoming 50 Shades of Grey movie, says the movie is gonna be RAUNCHY, that they are going for an NC-17 rating. The news is all over the entertainment blogs.

I'm kind of amazed, and surprised, and frankly, cynical. There is a long distance between a screenplay and the final movie. Frankly, to have the movie come out as raunchy as some of the scenes in the books, you'd need some hardcore scenes indeed, because there ARE scenes in the books where Christian ties Ana up thoroughly, gags her and fucks her.

I'm betting the studio execs will get cold feet at the thought of trying to make an NC-17 hit franchise film. If the film is NOT raunchy, it will be a flop, because the readers clearly liked the raunchy elements of the books. But the conventional wisdom is that NC-17 does not produce blockbuster hits. You gotta get the kids in there! And even though the thought of Fifty Shades of Grey that's clean enough for the kiddies is patently ridiculous, well, anybody who ever read the Gor novels would have said the same thing about a Gor movie ... and look what we wound up with.

Warning Tremors

First published on 1/9/2013

Found an article on Alternet wondering when BDSM became so wildly popular. The interesting element of the article was its date: it was published in June 2010, well before the advent of "Fifty Shades of Grey."

The people at Alternet definitely showed some prescience in running such an article just ahead of Fifty Shades of Grey, clearly someone at the progressive site was feeling the advance tremors of the cultural volcano that is Fifty Shades of Grey.

The tremors were as nothing to the explosion, of course. What the article cites is things like the success of Kink.com and kink no longer being considered a mental illness and Christina Aguilera's kinky outfits she wore in music video, and Aguilera's predecessor, Madonna with her Sex book back in the 80s (which if I recall, was a bomb).

All in all it is weak beer compared to Fifty Shades of Grey, the equivalent of the filler material my flying monkeys brought in for posts to jam in between the tons of stuff they brought in about Fifty Shades this summer -- only scattered over a couple of decades instead of a few months, because there just wasn't that much going on in the mainstream wrt BDSM.

When you got the top three books on the New York Times bestseller list containing a story of bondage, dominance and spanking, fifty million copies sold mostly to soccer moms, and James Deen (see above) an idol of teenaged girls in America, well you are in a WHOLE DIFFERENT BALLPARK. But to be fair, Alternet's contributors knew SOMETHING was up, more than you could say about a lot of the mainstream media.

Of course, some people, such as me, were feeling the tremors six years ago. What can I say? Prescient!

Fifty Shades of India

First published on 12/15/2012

A report in The Times of India announces that the Fifty Shades of Grey phenomenon is sweeping through country, sparking interest in BDSM in this one billion strong nation. The Times is reporting on the formation of The Kinky Collective a Delhi-based 15-person strong group that provides support for lovers of BDSM.

Wait ... 15 people? India? In India, 15 people is an empty room! Good lord, this is a trend sweeping the nation? Really?

One sense that the author fervently hopes so. If it were, they might have something sexy to report on in a nation that the story admits has a reputation for being very conservative sexually. To wit, it's prudish.

In addition to being prudish, Indian society is sexist and violent. So the search for good news about sex in India that's not completely bad probably gets kinda desperate at times. Here's a good article on all the sexism and violence toward women in India. Most of the violence and sexism appears to be in the rural and poor elements of India, which despite the rise of a detectable middle class in India, still constitutes one hell of a lot of people, the majority of that one billion. Jezebel recently got in on the issue, but Times of India does a much better job of covering it, as you might expect.

In an overwhelmingly violent, sexist culture like the ones many Indians live in, all sexual relationships are going to be profoundly affected by the sexism and violence. I guess if you are wealthy enough and sufficiently privileged, or sufficiently alienated from Indian society (the Kinky Collective was started by a couple, one of whom is transgendered -- hmmm) you might be able to figure your only sane path is to just go your own way, but most women are probably too afraid that men will tie then up and rape them for real to enjoy pretending that a man is tying them up and raping them for consensual kinky fuckery.

I don't know, it's a knotty problem, figuratively speaking. It's tempting to feel cheap moral superiority from the outside, but probably a bad idea, which is why I'm not gonna do it. I suspect that the only reasonable path is to take on the sexism and violence and put an end to it, which is what most reasonable people can agree on. How? Gonna be hard, gonna be a rough slog, as many of the originators of the sexism and violence are illiterate, young, poor and male, a hard group to reach. But most of them have mothers and sisters, and with the same kind of full court press that has been applies in other societies, they'll learn. Sadly, they will almost inevitably learn ... eventually, which will do little good for the women being victimized now.

In the meantime, maybe Fifty Shades of Grey will provide a nice fantasy of kinky, romantic love for those Indians that are at liberty to enjoy it, and perhaps it can preach the subversive message that pretendy sexual submission is all fun and can last throughout a lifetime, while the real thing is nasty, short and brutish.

Fifty Shades of Lame Party Game

First Published on 12/72012

As Fifty Shades of Grey the book has spread out into mass culture, one of the things I've envisioned happening to it has happened: in at least one instance, it has had the kink bowlerized right out of it. I mean, completely: let me introduce you to the Fifty Shades of Grey party game, a game that has no kink in it whatsoever.

Basically, it's a card game in which people are asked a series of vanilla questions and then they try to guess most accurately who would be a good match for the answer, or something along those lines. It's generic embarrassing sexy-ish party drivel. As one commenter on the Cafe Mom post but it, "It's one of those games designed to be a gift you give someone to embarrass them at a party, but which will never be played."

I've tried to figure out why anyone would sell a "Fifty Shades" branded item that is sure to disappoint all of the 50 million people who have bought the book, and all I can figure is a combination of greed, short-sightedness and cynicism. The game-makers objective is to sell as many units as possible, that's all. And they figure that having branded the game "Fifty Shades" they've done all they need to in order to attract people who read the book, so now they are after the dollars of people who have not read the book and probably don't even like it's subject matter. So they squeeze the bondage content right out of the game, so Aunt Sarah in Dubuque who doesn't like sex at all won't find it too offensive.

Of course, word of mouth will kill this game dead, and I'm happy to report that all three reports I've read about the game in various media point out that it's very vanilla, in varying degrees of subtlety. (CafeMom is the most blunt of the group, but then, they've got an active group of readers and responders who won't let them get away with crap.)

There IS a Red Room Expansion pack, totally undescribed in any report I've read, which MAY have kinky content, but really, if there is a more classic case of throwing good money after bad than buying the Red Room Expansion Pack, I don't know what it might be.

Celebrity Bondage Safety Tips

First published on 12/2/2012

The Celebrity Cafe, a big fan of Fifty Shades of Grey, or at least publishing posts about it, is doing what is very much the right thing by publishing a set of celebrity bondage safety tips by practicing submissive and erotica author Joey Hill. We're passing the tips along to you. A lot of the imagery of bondage you'll find online is very complex tie ups by the folks like those at Kink.com. They know what they are doing, both tier-uppers and tie-ees, so don't try this stuff at home unless you've had some training. Emergency room visits will suck the fun right out of any bondage session.

The other reason we're posting about it is, more evidence of a sea-change brought about by Fifty Shades, when a blog entitled "The Celebrity Cafe" is publishing BDSM safety tips. How long before we have celebrities giving bondage safety tips? Oh, about as long as it takes for the Fifty Shades of Grey movie to hit the theaters, and the cast to be doing publicity tours. Will they be as good as Hill's? Doubtful in the extreme.

By the way, the post's opening line is worth quoting:

There is a growing interest in bondage in the bedroom, and many of my readers are giving it a try in an effort to spice up their sex lives. It’s fun and feels a little bit dangerous, like a roller coaster, right? But you know why a roller coaster is so thrilling? Because deep down you – the rider – know you’re safe, and the designer and operator intend to keep you that way from beginning to end.

Good BDSM practices are the same.

Why There Will Never Be Another Fifty Shades of Grey

First published on 11/23/2012

I didn't like Fifty Shades of Grey as a read. Not because it was badly written, it struck me as well written in many respects. I didn't like it because it was a romance, and I generally don't like romances. Too much characterization and plot development, not enough sex. I'm a guy, what can I say?

I was pleased, however, that the kinky sex was quite kinky, I had feared that the kink would be watered-down stuff ... you know, blindfolds and eating strawberries off the tummy, etc., ... the old 9 1/2 Weeks treatment. But it was not. Cuffs, chains, gags and ben wa balls, oh my! Also, the characters really loved and enjoyed their kinky sex, and James did a great job of portraying that, something she did not get much credit for, among other things.

Also, I don't read a lot of kinky fiction, since I write kinky fiction, thus, reading other people's kinky fiction is a busman's holiday kind of thing.

That's why I read the book, not recreationally, but because I realized it was an IMPORTANT book, part of several important breaking cultural phenomena, the most important of which was the more widespread acceptance of BDSM sexual fantasies among women (“mommies") but also the rise of fanfic as an acceptable form of writing, and hopefully, the demise of traditional big publishers in favor of self-publishers and small publishers that actually serve their authors and readers' interests. (it's hilarious the way the big publishers are now trolling the Twilight fanfic community for "the next 50 Shades of Grey").

I also think much of the criticism is incredibly superficial, concentrating on minor stylistic errors ("Oh my!" and dancing inner goddesses) which bothered me not at all when I read Fifty Shades. Or they criticized Fifty Shades for having a male protagonist and a relationship which were not poster children for good BDSM practices. (HELLOOOOOOO! It's a work of FICTION! It's supposed to be DRAMATIC! If Ana and Christian's characters and relationships had been role models for BDSM, NO ONE would have read the books because they would have been TOO FRICKING DULL!!!!)

Also, the critics have left out some VERY GOOD ASPECTS of Fifty Shades of Grey in terms of social responsibility that are not present in most romances. The topic of contraception comes up early in Christian and Ana's relationship, plans are made and carried out, it's not ignored or neglected as in so many romances. There is also much emphasis on communication and trust in the relationship. Christian almost always is very careful to get Ana's explicit, enthusiastic permission for whatever high-jinks he is up to. It's something that NEVER happens in your average bodice ripper (which is OK, they're FICTION, they aren't sex eduation manuals, just as Fifty Shades of Grey is fiction) but it's nice to see it happen in Fifty Shades. The WHOLE STORY is about the way Christian and Ana build a real, trusting relationship instead of the superficial paid sub/dom contractual relationship that Christian initially offers Ana.

(Ana NEVER signs the contract in the book, you have NO IDEA how many times I've read posts by writers who inadvertently revealed themselves to be lazy, lying idiots because they say at some point that Ana signed the contract. It's a KEY point and they missed it … probably because they never read the book. Of course some admit straight up that they never read the book when they write articles dissing it, and that's all kinds of sad. Do your homework, people.)

Reading all the stupid, stupid criticisms of the book has been tough. I set up news agents to bring me articles about Fifty Shades of Grey and related topics early in 2012 (like, February or so) and I would estimate I have read well over 300 articles a month (a conservative estimate, probably more like 1000 a month in late spring and summer when the media finally caught on to the phenomenon) on the topic of Fifty Shades of Grey, and the vast majority are incredibly stupid and superficial. I realize that that's largely because big aggregator sites like the Huffington Post, Gather and the Examiner hire whatever stupid-ass word monkeys they can get to write for them for the glorious sum of … NOTHING … and the ones who DO pay, pay so little it wouldn't keep a budgie in sunflower seeds so they get intellectual mouth-breathers writing for them, too … but still, it's MADDENING to see so many thousands of displays of stupidity and butt ignorance displayed as if it were intelligent, insightful commentary, completely missing the key points about Fifty Shades time after time after time.

It's exactly like being a progressive and watching Fox News, only Fox News is everywhere and nobody knows it's Fox News. Whenever I find intelligent, insightful analysis of Fifty Shades I post it to my blog immediately because, at last, a pony under all that horse manure!

Still, I am glad I did set up those news agents and read all those articles (OK, the obviously stupid one like “who will they cast to be Christian Grey in the movie?” got no more than a glance, and they constitute the majority of the posts I've seen) because it's put me in a catbird seat to see the way the media responds to a big cultural phenomenon.

I first became aware of it via publishing sites which started taking note of this former fanfic ebook that was THE best selling ebook, selling hundreds of thousands of copies despite the fact that it had virtually no marketing muscle. Fifty Shades was beating the books that the big publishers were hawking with ALL their marketing muscle, primarily because the Twilight fandom from which it arose were completely behind it. The Obsidian Wings website still has the best coverage of this part of the phenomenon.

The early articles tended to be more intelligent and accurate and on point than what came later, mainly because they were looking at Fifty Shades as a phenomenon. One thing the early articles didn't do that later articles DID do, massively, is miss one of the KEY issues of Fifty Shades, which is that it was ALREADY an ebook bestseller when Vintage Books bought the rights to it in a fierce bidding war. THAT'S why James got a six-figure advance for the rights to the book -- they were buying a book that was already a bestseller, all they did was buy the right to print it in paperback and hardback and put their marketing muscle behind it. Publishers don't have bidding wars over books that are not sure things.

It's kind of suspicious that so many reviewers, posters and commentators missed the importance of the fanfic community in promoting Fifty Shades and making it what it was: it gives the impression that it was just another instance of the traditional publishing meme of a Wonderful Big Time Publisher giving an Unknown But Deserving Writer a shit-ton of money for being so good at what she does, when it was actually Big Time Publishing using money to muscle in on a sure thing created by Internet fandom.

Once Fifty Shades started selling in the millions, the coverage immediately got dumber. It started off with a lot of posts showing genuine bewilderment: what were all these “mommies” doing liking hardcore BDSM porn (which was how Fifty Shades was portrayed, and to be fair, it did have strong BDSM scenes and content)? There was a combination of prurient interest (“Soccer moms wearing ballgags, oh my!”) bewilderment (“Women are reading … BDSM porn? Bwuh?”) and some but not much viewing with alarm (“Women are reading porn! The sky is falling!”)

Once the book was selling in the tens of millions and showed no sign of slowing down, the viewing with alarm increased, and people started coming up with reasons why Fifty Shades is a phenomenon, most of them shallow and bogus. And people started bandwagonning furiously. Every erotic romance that any publisher bought the rights to was “The next 50 Shades” (and still is). Every poster on every blog had to call at least ONE post “Fifty Shades of (fill in the blank)” no matter how unrelated it was to the book. I mean, I think there was some kind of Internet law, or maybe a contest.

Criticism of the book cranked up, as the author's copious use of “Oh my” “inner goddess” and lip biting apparently rendered Fifty Shades unreadable for many delicate souls – but it was NEVER (well, rarely ever) the BDSM content or the romance novel elements that bothered any of them, they had NO ISSUE with those, oh, no! These delicate souls could HANDLE BDSM.

This is when viewing with alarm started happening, as many did not welcome the trend toward mommies reading BDSM porn. Religious types didn't like it because of the sex. Prudo-feminists didn't like it because maledom/femsub was not one of their approved sexual modes. And there were also the people who think that bestsellerdom is a meritocracy, so they viewed it with alarm too, because it had all those stylistic errors and it was a romance, let's face it. It's been going on since, but has never really drowned out the overwhelming message of surprise that greeted Fifty Shades and continues to be its main message: “Mommies like kinky porn!”

Plus, as the sales figures indicate, those who dislike Fifty Shades have not made any noticeable dent in its success.

Another thing that happened when the book really cranked on the mainstream media is you started to see how the media machine was working on the Web. With traditional print media the machine's work is seamless: stories get placed, planted, picked up, often in conjunction with advertising. There's never a quid pro quo, of course, but everybody who plays the game knows how the game is played. Favors get done, deals get made, the wheels of commerce spin and the big publishers, distributors, etc., get their products publicized as they like and are willing to pay … how else do you think Snooki's book got on the New York Times Top Ten bestseller list?

But the Web is different, not everybody is part of the traditional media machine, and even those that are sometimes don't behave like they are. But it was interesting to see the big aggregator sites like Huffington Post, Gather, Patch, etc., and the online versions of traditional media, picking up the stories about Fifty Shades like they were on a schedule. Or more likely, passive receivers of whatever came in on the transom, and the agents and publicists were making sure that what came in on the transom was Fifty Shades stuff.

Whereas the way independent, weird sites like Politically Sexy covered Fifty Shades was much more random, because nobody was trying to place stories (or, sigh … ads) with us.

Over time the surge of stories directly about the book Fifty Shades of Grey have lagged. They have been replaced by endless speculation about the movie, mostly who will be cast in the lead male role. (There has been speculation about who will play the lead female role as well, but I think it's fair to say that the vast majority of people who read the gossip blogs that are totally covering this story are primarily interested in the male lead.) There has also been plenty of bandwagon-jumping, and an increase in prudo-feminist and social conservative viewing with alarm.

Oh, and a huge proportion of the bondage-related scandal and crime stories that deal with female submission/enslavement have had Fifty Shades tied in with them. The most egregious: a recent story about a wealthy female banker in Britain who sued to divorce her husband because he would not give her any Fifty Shades type fun, and a women's shelter, also in Britain, which plans to recycle copies of Fifty Shades as toilet paper. (Well if you can't distinguish between consensual BDSM and domestic abuse. I can see how Fifty Shades might alarm you if you ran a women's shelter.) Basically, any story about human trafficking has a potential Fifty Slaves hook, however inappropriate, and it gets used very often.

It's obvious to me that the media buzz for Fifty Shades is being expertly milked by the publicists for whatever movie studio has the contract to make Fifty Shades, they've stretched out the casting of the leads forever. And of course there is also news of a new book being written, almost certainly new books, because as the James Bond movies show, if there's one thing those Brits know how to do, it's milk a franchise.

So I don't expect news of Fifty Shades to ever become RARE, certainly not in the next few years. Even if the movie flops, and just on general principles it probably will (see: Nine and a Half Weeks, the Gor movies and, well, everything based on a kinky book except Story of O, which was a French film) there will always be new books.

What there WON'T be, I feel confident in predicting (which generally means I am wrong) is that there will not be ANOTHER Fifty Shades of Grey. There will be other kinky erotic romances that do well in terms of sales, though probably not as well as Fifty Shades did. But there will never be another book that makes the same kind of splash that Fifty Shades did, because its success was the product of time and tides.

My theory, which is worth exactly as much as you are paying for it, is that Fifty Shades succeeded because it was a romance which featured the hot, kinky sex that most readers of the bodice-ripper species of romances have always enjoyed. However, traditional publishers like Harlequin have long acted as a brake on romances. Oh, sure, they've published “spicy” romances but there were no butt plugs, ben wa balls, ball gags or other fun stuff in them because, “Oh no, too kinky for our readers.”

Well, the readers did a student body left on the publishers and started reading ebooks which, being self-published or published by small publishers like the one who initially published Fifty Shades, were just as raunchy as they wanted to be, and what was more important, just as raunchy as their readers wanted them to be. That phenomenon cannot be repeated, though it may continue to create surprises for traditional publishers. It may be that the new model for writers will be to grow from fanfic communities and succeed on ebooks and then get bought up by traditional publishers as James did. We shall see.

But Fifty Shades will always be the book that broke the traditional publishers' stranglehold on bestsellerdom and brought BDSM relationships (as opposed to BDSM scenarios disguised as damsel in distress stories) into mainstream romances. There will never be another Fifty Shades of Grey.

Fifty Shades of Good Communication

First published on 10/31/2012

Scanning through the stuff my flying monkeys bring in from the Interwebs, particularly about "50 Shades of Grey," is a task not for the weak of heart. Most of the stories are complete fluff, or are completely stupid, thus suitable only for mocking (see previous post).

So when I come across a SMART story about 50 Shades of Gray, I gotta share. This one's from the Psychology Today website, and it is head and tails above the rest because it appears to have been written by someone who has actually read the books with an open mind, instead of having them described to them by a junior high school boy forced to read Fifty Shades of Grey against his will.

The key point of the article is that Fifty Shades is a book where the characters go to a great deal of trouble to communicate their sexual feelings. It's a key point of the book, and the focus on feelings is a hallmark of romance novels. The author notes that people may be attracted to each other purely physically, which are triggered by reading stuff like the sex scenes in Fifty Shades of Grey, but it's the play/joy circuit involved in communicating your feelings (as often occurs in sexual roleplay) which combined with trust, can lead to deeper feelings, like love. As the story says:

In 50 Shades, Ana (the main character) constantly battles with the competing urges of approach-and-avoidance, emotions that are controlled by the most ancient parts of the mammalian brain. But Christian Grey (the wealthy male character who fears close intimacy and attachment) tries his best to be gentle and kind. These genuine displays of affection stimulate the caring circuits of the brain which allow the couple to slowly build a mutually loving relationship.

Hell, yes! It's interesting that professionals like the sex educator cited in a previous article and the psychologist cited here tend to like Fifty Shades of Gray, whereas most critics are generally run of the mill bloggers, such as this bit of drivel on something called Cognescenti.com ... though it's nice to see readers giving the author a few well-deserved non-consensual kicks in the ass for confusing BDSM power play with abusive relationships.

Mainstreaming Bondage: Halloween 2012 Brings On The Gimp

First published on 10/3/2012

If you go to Target and ask them if they have a Gimp suit for Halloween, you'll probably get told "No.' But if you go to Target and ask them if they have a "Rubber Suit Man" outfit, they'll tell you yes ... and the costume you will find will be a gimp suit. Don't believe me? Check it out!

"Oh my!" as Anastasia Steele might say, and she'd be the one to say it, because you have to believe that the success of 50 Shades of Gray just might have gotten this particular outfit green-lit for Target. Now that's going mainstream!

We'll have to see if there's a backlash against the suit, now that it's being "noticed" by online media it'll probably hit the mainstream media soon.

The flying monkeys have been bringing in a LOT of negative stories about 50 Shades of Gray of late. The social conservatives never liked it, some feminists never liked it, and a lot of literary types never liked it, even a lot of bondage fans never liked it, and now that the books aren't making headlines by topping the bestseller lists week after week after week, the naysayers are trying to get some traction. And a backlash against 50 Shades could very well be accompanied by a backlash against kink. I hope the hell it doesn't happen, and if it does happen that it gets no traction in the media or the culture, but let's face it ... there's a lot of people out there who hate kink, 50 Shades of Gray and sex generally.

As always, I'll keep you posted.

Fifty Shades of Pearl Scratching

First published on 10/1/2012

Bandwagon jumping on the 50 Shades phenomenon has hit a new low. A post on the Babble blog (a parenting blog) by Carolyn Castiglia describes an item for sale on Ebay through October 8: a used copy of Fifty Shades of Gray. And we mean THOROUGHLY used: its being auctioned off by a trio of Brooklyn wives described as "MILFs." They all enjoyed it VERY much, the ad copy assures us, but the blog post makes sure, saying:

Get it? Three hot white girls scratched the pearl to this book!

There are SO MANY things wrong with this. The cringe-inducing metaphor of "scratching the pearl" ("petting the pearl" or even "poking the pearl" work so much better), the notation that it's "white chicks" (why would it matter if they were hottie black chicks?) but most of all, the fact that if you bid on that book, you are pretty much on par with a Japanese businessman stopping along the way home to buy a pair of used girl's undies from a vending machine.

I still got my old copies of Playboy and Bondage Life stacked away somewhere, and my Gor novels are right on the shelf ... I wonder ... (/me checks his paypal account for income from his ad for the secret to making slavegirls stop drooling, notices there has been none) ... naaaaaaaaaaah.

All that said, here's the ebay listing. Never let it be said that I stood between the equivalent of a lonely, perverted Japanese businessman and fulfillment.

Fifty Shades of Grey: Suitable for Television Only?

First published on 9/26/2012

Another heartening sign that the people are smarter than the media comes from an article on booksnreview.com, which asks the question, "'Fifty Shades of Grey' Movie: Too Kinky for Film? Fans Rather See Anastasia Steele and Christian Grey on TV Show, HBO Series'.

Hell, yeah! Sometimes you see indie movies that do sexually challenging stuff right, but mainstream movie makers almost never get it right. They always tone the sexy way down. With 50 million in sales, the book clearly has huge potential to be either a monster movie a la "Gone with the Wind" or a franchise a la Star Wars. The studio heads are going to be so hot to protect their monster movie's profit potential that they are going to absolutely avoid doing anything too risky.

Remember the hash they made of "9 1/2 Weeks"? Of "Exit to Eden?" The only reason they didn't fuck up "Story of O" is that it was done by the French. So the odds on a good movie version of Fifty Shades? Low ... way fucking low.

TV cable channels like HBO and Spartacus, however ... different story. They have got some kickass writers and producers who have proven that they know how to handle the raunchy. Game of Thrones and Spartacus are some of the hottest mainstream sexual imagery going right now, combined with topnotch dramatic stories. This would be the best shot Fifty Shades has at a good film adaptation, but it's not happening. Going to be a freaking movie. And almost certainly, a fucking failure.

We shall see.

Fifty Shades of the Big 12

Fifty Shades of the Big 12

With football season well under way, I thought some of you might enjoy this link, a parody of Big 12 football as written by Anastasia Steele. Enjoy! Also, in the same vein, a parody of Big 12 football as written by Cormac McCarthy. I don't even follow Big 12 football, but these parodies had me cracking up. Good fun!

A Brilliant Analysis of Fifty Shades of Grey From Feministing

First published on 9/1/12 I'm fascinated by the 50 Shades of Gray phenomenon, that's why I follow the news media about it. Otherwise I couldn't manage it, because by FAR the majority if the articles I find are absolute dreck. I've learned to scan and dismiss them in seconds.

So you can imagine my pleasure when I find a really good, insightful article, like the one I found on Obsidian Wings months ago, or the one I found on Alternet more recently.

I've found another really great analysis of 50 Shades of Gray on the Feministing Community site, entitled "Unconventional Sex Ed Lessons from 50 Shades of Gray". It's written by Mimi Arbeit, a feminist educator who teaches sex education to teens. She says she expected to find the book a huge disappointment because of all that she'd heard about it, but was pleasantly surprised by it, finding it a welcome change from the dominant themes about sex and romance in the media.

By that she means the book covers a lot of things that other books do not. Most importantly, Ana and Christian communicate clearly and honestly with one another about sex throughout their relationship. Christian is always careful to get Ana's informed consent before he has any kind of sex with her. They discuss and plan for contraception before they have sex. And the book directly and powerfully portrays Ana's experiences of sexual pleasure and desire. As I've noted repeatedly, James does a REALLY good job of conveying how much Ana and Christian enjoy their sex play.

Wildly popular books about sex read by teens NEVER have any of this stuff, says Arbeit, so she is enormously grateful to see an erotic romance that mentions all of the lessons she is trying to instill in her teen students, whose media experience does not include ANY of it.

Mind you, Arbeit's opinion of the book is not wholly positive -- she says she could just as easily write a list of ten things she finds problematical about the book, and I believe her. But she is glad of the book as a chance to open up a dialog which allows her to convey the importance of some of these themes to her teen students. And I think that's what opens her up to the positive aspects of the books that a lot of other readers missed. She saw what was there because her experience teaching teens had sharpened her eye to it.

Sadly, Arbeit is one of the relatively few non-romance reviewers of the books who has the guts to say they like elements of it. Most non-romance reviewers project a sort of arrogant, snotty attitude, often confessing that they read very little of the book or that they did not read it at all, following up by condemning it wholesale on the basis of all the stuff they did not read. Clearly, such reviews are all about confirming their status of not being the sort of person who reads 50 Shades of Gray or anything like it, rather than an honest examination of the book.

Here's a great example of what I'm talking about, a post to a fantasy message board called "The Black Gate by someone named "Theo." A choice quote:

So does 50 Shades of Grey go too far? Not on the surface, as according to its description it is little more than John Norman’s Gor brought back to Earth, minus the sword battles and the awesome tarn birds. And it’s not a question I can legitimately even try to answer, since I haven’t read 50 Shades of Grey, nor do I have any intention of doing so.

Didn't read it, so of course he makes a completely wrong comparison of 50 Shades with the Gor novels, which as a guy who read 20 or so of the Gor novels, the slavery was of the distinctly nonconsensual kind (the Gorean slaves just loved it because they were natural born slavegirls) which makes it WAAAAAY different than 50 Shades, which is all about the consensual.

But then Theo goes and accuses 50 Shades of being stealth pedophilia, based on the accusations of an anonymous poster on another message board who relates the story of a purported child psychologist who read the book and decided that Ana is written as a 12-year-old for some reason, possibly the "oh my!"s "Inner goddesses" and suchlike. It smells like one of those classic put-up jobs with a made-up friend who is an authority (child psychologist) is used to attack something to make it seem awful (pedophile porn) with vague evidence (even though Ana is identified as a twenty-one year old college grad, she's "written as a child") hoping it will stick.

Fortunately, a couple of posters on the Black Gate board who responded saw this piece of shit for what it was and gave it a thorough going-over.

To be honest, the Black Gate post is about an order of magnitude worse than any of the other posts which have dissed the book. But there are still plenty who will hate it based on a verbal description and a lot of social prejudice. You can see why I liked the "Unconventional Sex Ed Lessons" article so much ... it was a real breath of fresh air compared to much of what I read on the topic. And "Unconventional Lessons" is a real antidote to the dreck post from the Black Gate.

Fifty Shades of Grey Gets Fifty Shades of Weird

First published on 8/8/2012 Time for more news of 50 Shades of Gray, the erotic juggernaut of modern publishing. How much of a juggernaut is it, you ask? It's so bad that Penguin Books's profits are down, way down, like down more than 50 percent down, and they are complaining that Fifty Shades of Gray is at fault ... it has "distorted the overall books market" with its 30 million and counting in sales. Sounds like that analogy I wrote about here was quite accurate. Not surprising ... my hindsight is 20/20.

Some of the hoopla around 50 Shades of Gray has an almost forlorn, desperate quality, like this article claiming that the sales boom in books and sex toys spurred by the novels might "save the economy." I guess it IS a stimulus ... but not THAT kind of stimulus. It's better than all the nothing and WORSE than nothing that our government and business leaders have managed to do, of course, and you can be sure that if Fifty Shades of Gray DOES help the economy, those selfsame leaders will line up to take credit for it. Though Mitt Romney has been telling the social wing of the Republican Party he'll censor the hell out of everything if elected, which I guess would include Fifty Shades of Gray. Sadly, that's the sort of promise Republicans generally DO keep.

We're starting to get some oddballs jumping on the bandwagon, too. The British energy company npower has started a promotion called "Fifty Shades of Green" to encourage energy conservation. Well, perhaps that's not too odd. They're an energy company, they are all about forcing their customers to submit. Old hat for them, really.

Even the little guys are getting in on it. An amateur theatrical group in the village of Llanrwst, North Wales (that's in Great Britain, in case you are wondering) has created a theatrical presentation based on Fifty Shades of Gray. It has the local theater packed every night as the participants "talk about their sex lives as if they were talking to a qualified therapist." I guess the book MAY have a huge ripple effect in England with stuff like that going on. Question is: will there be a Fifty Shades of Gray bubble?