Fifty Shades of Consent

I've written a number of posts discussing classic smutty novels, knowing that eventually I would get to the elephant in the room:  E.L. James' Fifty Shades of Grey and its sequels.

I'm not a snob about these books.  Sure, they were silly and badly written, but they kept the publishing industry alive and profitable in much the same way that the Harry Potter books did a decade earlier.  They also turned lots and lots of people on to kink, and many of those people have gone on to have happy, kinky lives.

The books did not have much direct influence on me personally.  By the time they were published I was well into writing Mindgames, my dirty book about naked sex slaves.

But critiques of Fifty Shades did influence me a great deal.  Mindgames was always going to be a  story about slavegirl Mariah's increasing ability to exercise power over her own life.  She accomplishes that through a combination of her strength of will and the influence of her love interest, Gabriel.

Although I began writing Mindgames for a self-proclaimed BDSM story website, I never pretended it was a true BDSM story.  BDSM requires consent.  For most of the book Mariah had no power to grant or deny consent.

Fifty Shades, on the other hand, does advertise itself as a BDSM love story.  But as many critics have pointed out, it is actually about a rich, powerful man who coerces a young, naive woman into a power exchange in which she has no interest.  (My favorite critique of the books is Fifty Shades of Why, which provides a hilarious and hilariously true line by line analysis of the books.)

Those criticisms of Fifty Shades led me to bring to the forefront of Mindgames the theme that there can be no love without consent.  Doing so made my book better.  I owe E.L James a debt of gratitude for the discussions she inadvertently started.