Ella Jacobs – author

A reader asked me whether I thought 50 Shades portrays BDSM accurately. I had to comment three times to answer that question and still felt like I could say so much more, and so I will. 

I read Fifty Shades when it came out. I was nineteen, had just moved in with my first boyfriend, and had never heard the word BDSM before. The most kinky thing I’d tried was a pair of fluffy pink handcuffs that I had bought for my boyfriend as a gift, hoping he’d take the hint and use them on me (it didn’t quite go over as planned, which I’ve written a whole post on). I knew there was something kinky inside me—an urge to try something beyond the regular—but I didn’t know enough to explore further.

What Fifty Shades first and foremost did for me was to present me with this whole new world, opening my eyes to its very existence. I went from having some urges I couldn’t quite name or put my finger on to having a whole vocabulary and knowledge that gave form to those vague cravings.

50 Shades opened a whole new world to me. It did the same for the rest of the world too. It put BDSM on the map after BDSM had been hidden deep in the shadows for a long time, secret and forbidden. Now, it jumped out, straight into people’s faces, refusing to let anyone ignore it.

Such exposure brings both positive and negative things.

The haters (haters in general, people who can’t tolerate new and different) had a lot of negative things to latch on to, and a lot of bad light was brought upon BDSM. Unfortunately, this seemed to be the sole focus when someone brought up the book in the community when I dipped my toes and ventured into the lifestyle a couple of years later—still is. Some people in the lifestyle love to hate this book, some having not even read it.

If you look at BDSM from an educational POV, it’s a really, really bad manual. BUT, what some people seem to forget is that this book is not a manual. It is fiction.

That being said, I can understand why the community seems to repel the book. It does reinforce the age-old notion that people who are into BDSM are sick. Not only does Christian Grey use kink as an outlet for past traumas, but he does it in a very unhealthy way, without aftercare and lacking proper communication.

I’m lucky to live in an age and a place where BDSM is widely accepted, but the memory of times when being kinky was considered a diagnosable illness is still fresh in the community. There are people in the lifestyle who were actively practicing BDSM at the time when sadomasochism was removed from the official list of psychiatric diseases. So I can understand why the community as a whole needs to reject the book. If we collectively embraced it, it would be like confirming all those prejudices that have made the world look upon us as freaks.

Despite the negative attention Fifty Shades has brought upon the lifestyle, it has, in my opinion, done a lot more good than it has harmed. As the saying goes, bad publicity is better than none. I think that holds true in this case too. The way I see it, those people who used the unhealthy parts of the book to criticize a whole community were people we would never have won over in the first place. On the other hand, Fifty Shades made all the “right” people notice BDSM too. People, like me, who had it in them but couldn’t name it or people who were curious and wanted to try something new.

More so, it put BDSM on the map, brought it into our bookstores, cinemas, and even regular supermarkets in the form of blindfolds and handcuffs when the hype was at its highest. It has taken the taboo out of BDSM in a way nothing else ever has, brought a lot of new people into the clubs, and taken us one huge step closer to acceptance.

Personally, I’m forever grateful for having found this book that became a gateway into a much bigger world of books and kinks and self-discovery.