Fifty Shades of tragic

'Fifty Shades of Grey’ is still selling faster than Scotch at a Republican convention. This is despite being terribly written. Part of the reason it is doing so well is that it is being bought by the Twilight generation, who are now coming into sexual maturity. This concerns me a little, as both the Twilight Saga and the Fifty Shades trilogy are tapping into a Fantasy that discourages empowerment and feeds anxiety.

Let’s start with Twilight. One of the central pillars of Jungian psychoanalysis is that neurosis often occurs when there is a ‘clash between a requirement of adaption and the individual’s constitutional inability to meet the challenge’. A common but very mild neurosis is the depression that often assails adolescents when they realise they must grow up.

This feeling of disconnection is often accompanied by an increasing fondness for vampire myth. The vampire is symbolic of the disinclination to grow up. Instead the individual would like to remain in the darkness (night) forever, where the darkness represents childhood (a state of lesser consciousness). The vampire burning in the sunlight (often owing to suicide) represents the cathartic transition to adulthood. It is telling that in almost all of Anne Rice’s books (a forerunner to Twilight) the suicidal tendency was very strong among vampires.

Such is not the case in Twilight, which is not about growing up but about staying an infant. Bella is an utterly average individual with almost no prospects for making her life interesting, fun or fulfilling (like many teenagers, I suspect). She meets a devastatingly attractive eternal teenager — Edward Cullen — who gives her eternal adolescence and enough power to resist anyone who would force the outside world upon her (such as the Volturi). They form an intensely private, eternal bond and withdraw from the world.

Twilight plugs into the fantasy of many an average person — to find someone who accepts them for you they are that they can then withdraw from the world with. The world is competitive. The world always wants you to get better. The world only values people who work and people who excel. But with an accepting partner you wouldn’t have to work (existentially) anymore. There would be someone who is perfectly happy with you with all your current faults.

In my ideal relationship, whether it is a relationship between friends, lovers or colleagues, your partners respect and appreciate who you are now, but they also encourage you to be more. They like your potential as much as your actuality. Because you have the same attitude, together you can motivate each other to become even more awesome. This is the opposite of Twilight, where Edward likes Bella for completely arbitrary reasons (she smells nice) and his symbolic role is to protect her from the outside world. Add vampire to this mix and you’ve got a situation where all the emphasis is on actuality and not at all on potential.

This might strike some people as perfectly healthy, but I disagree simply because of the timing — adolescence. It is crucial for your long term psychic health that you overcome the initial challenges of becoming an adult and not retreat from the difficulties of life. Obviously people who vindictively prey on your insecurities aren’t people you should be hanging out with, but neither are people who tell you it is okay to be scared, fragile and weak.

This is especially the case given the teenage propensity to be insecure. The healthy way to cure insecurity is to diligently overcome those aspects of yourself that you feel insecure about. For example, and I only use this example because it is so common, if you think you are fat, lose weight. Be sure you do it in a safe, sane and rational manner. Look at your BMI for example, and pursue a healthier lifestyle, don’t go on the lemon detox diet. Through this process of identification and effort you build a frame of reference through which to make sense of yourself and your inherent worth. Then when someone tries to manipulate you through your weight or appearance you can assess yourself and say, ‘no, actually, I know exactly where I’m at and this is exactly where I want to be. I am secure; you’re a douche’. 

It is often important to take the opposite approach to insecurities — to rationalise them from the outset; to say you are actually fine with whatever it is that you are insecure about. But this is usually only possible if the root cause of the insecurity is irrational. For example, some extremely wealthy people are often insecure because some even more wealthy people outstrip them. This is irrational, especially if you are at your capacity and otherwise happy. The ‘fix’ for your insecurity is not to become wealthier but to deconstruct the insecurity and crush it in your mind vice. If, however, you are insecure because you have dangerous cholesterol levels you are going to have a hard time rationalising your behaviour. It is tough to make being unhealthy seem logical. You can’t rationalise something that is irrational. 

Now fortunately Twilight is an expression of a fantasy and apparently everyone is moving on into adulthood. Unfortunately they are moving onto Fifty Shades. Let’s use Freudian Psychoanalysis this time. In Freud’s discussion of Sadomasochism he explains that the submissive wants to be subsumed into the dominant, who in turn wants to affirm his power over the world by controlling another person. This can be healthy. The dominant can get a confidence boost, for example, and the submissive can existentially relax for a while.

But it is only healthy if the desire for a BDSM relationship is not simply a continuation of infantile insecurities, a fear of responsibility and a ludicrous fantasy of being swept off your feet by an extremely high calibre individual despite the fact that you are utterly mediocre. Unfortunately, this appears to be close to the case in Fifty Shades.

Fifty Shades starts off really bad but gets better. In the early chapters we are bombarded with Anastasia’s insecurities: ‘damn my two left feet’, ‘crap’, ‘double crap’, ‘damn my clumsiness’, ‘I’m uncoordinated, scruffy, and I’m not blonde’. The very first line of the book is ‘I scowl at myself in the mirror’. But then things get better. Anastasia is a top student and she doesn’t let Grey walk all over her when it counts. She even has a talent for snappy back-chat.

So it seems Fifty Shades is not so bad after all. If I was reading it without knowing it was Twilight fan fiction I would think it was terrible but harmless. It is only in the context of people who think Bella’s life is attractive reading Fifty Shades that I become worried. ‘Fifty shades’ connects the withdrawal from life, world and responsibility romantic fantasy with a submissive and masochistic sexual fantasy. Pursuing these fantasies could easily bring someone into contact with abusive, manipulative, bad people who take advantage of them. In the case of a well-adjusted person they would simply dodge or else deal with these bad people. They would not get trapped in something unpleasant. But in the case of someone without the requisite willpower and strength to face up to adulthood and responsibility it strikes me as very much possible that they will get stuck in something destructive.

I am worried about our society. These books are bestsellers! Millions of copies. Does that mean that we are producing millions of scared, insecure young people who feel powerless?

Does this also mean, to return to an earlier theme, that a stack of young people can’t see the connection between dating a high calibre person and being a high calibre person? Neither Cullen nor Grey are high calibre on objective measures. Numerous commentators have pointed out that both books describe relationships that meet the criteria for ‘abusive’. Grey’s courtship practices in particular are a bit worrying. But I do think it fair to say that these characters are presented as the bees knees. They are just so haaawwwwtt. Grey is also rich and presumably intelligent. Yet in both books the male leads develop an interest in the female protagonists seemingly out of nowhere. In Cullen’s case it is explained away through the power of perfume, but in Grey’s case it is never engaged with. The implication is that you can get the partner you want so long as you are enough of a doormat. Let someone take care of you and everything will be alright. Be submissive and everything will be alright.

This is toxic, and not just because it makes out that being pathetic is okay and even attractive. In life you usually need to be what you want to fuck. If you want a partner who is hot, smart, funny, sophisticated, rich and classy then chances are you need to have all those qualities as well, or comparable ones.

It’s great to see sex that is ‘a little bit strange’ kink explode into the mainstream with Fifty Shades. But I am terrified that its manifestation there is indicative of disinclination on the part of our young folk (my peers) to grow up, take life by the balls and make something interesting and valuable of themselves. Thankfully, there are plenty of popular books for young people at the other end of the spectrum, like the Hunger Games, which celebrate strength, tenacity and personal development, so perhaps I don’t need to worry too much.

P.S. I think it a travesty that these books (including the Hunger Games) are selling so well while really high quality, accessible literature — like Tim Winton or Isaballe Allende — goes largely unappreciated.