What Explains Women's Fascination With BDSM Fiction?
Every generation or so (i.e., roughly every 25 years) a woman (it’s always a woman) writes a book about kinky sex—and a very specific type of kinky sex.
There comes a time in every behavioral scientist’s life when they feel the need to complete the following sentence: “Humans are the only animal that…”
Over the years, attempts to complete this sentence which have come (and gone) have included “make tools,” and “use fire.” These offerings of human uniqueness, and dozens like them, have been, one by one, summarily knocked off their perches by ethologists studying critters in the wild. Chimps make tools. Kites use fire. And, while we are on stronger ground for species exclusivity when it comes to “use language,” we are only unique in our complexity at this—not in the existence of communication. Still, in the teeth of all this failure, I am going to offer my own completer to the “human uniqueness” challenge. It is this: “Humans are the only animals that pretend that they are not.”
This denial that the rules of biology apply to us is a theme I will come back to again and again. However, on the plus side, it means that, for a (human) behavioral scientist such as me, there is often a lot of low-hanging fruit in the form of overlooked animal versions of otherwise paradoxical human behaviors to look to for models of why such a behavior might evolve, and be maintained, in the human population. What do I mean by “paradoxical”? How about the following:
It cannot have escaped your notice that the best-selling book series of recent years was E. L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey, also made into movies. The books (in case you have been living under a rock) detail the kinky relationship between a college student and a businessman with predilections towards bondage, dominance, and sadism (BDSM, where the M stands for “masochism”). At least one commentator has described these as a female “rape fantasy,” and that immediately raises a puzzle for behavioral scientists with any knowledge of biology.
Rape is the ultimate subversion of female choice mechanism, and female choice mechanisms are normally protected fervently by females. Why would females actively (and pleasurably) fantasize about their removal?
And it’s not as if Fifty Shades is unique in this regard. Persistent female sexual fantasies for strong, dominant males, even to the point of fantasizing extreme forms of sexual control, exist across time and space. (There are male versions of these fantasies too, but one thing at a time.) What is going on here? Is it really a male fantasy projected onto unwilling women? Internalized patriarchy? Some strange by-product of the modern internet age?
It does not have to be any of those things. Sexual conflict, in which one sex reproductively benefits at the expense of the other, is ubiquitous throughout nature. Some obvious examples include sexual coercion—usually (though not always) of males over females—and fooling about paternity, leading a male to invest in offspring not his own. Both sexes are in potential conflict with not only members of their own sex but also the sex with whom they want to mate. Consequently, they evolve mechanisms to thwart the costly strategies employed by the opposite and to sharpen their own strategies. This creates an endless state of warfare—an evolutionary arms race.
For example, across species, males do things like leave behind bits of their penises in mates as a sort of chastity belt to prevent other males from mating (bees) or evolve complex vaginal tracts to fool the sperm from forced copulations (ducks). It’s a jungle out there. I would know!
But it’s also a jungle in here. And by “in here” I mean inside human minds. Humans haven’t evolved exploding penises or maze-like vaginas. Instead, they have evolved complex social strategic options, which manifest themselves in behaviors, customs, and fantasies.
So, back to the paradox of why the most popular selling book series of recent years seems to offer a complete subversion of female sexual choice? The simple answer is that it doesn’t. These books have nothing to do with rape. They are about mutually agreed upon power exchange.
Despite the apparent power imbalance heavily favoring the man in the Fifty Shades scenario, a more nuanced and biologically informed view reveals a somewhat deeper truth. One solution to the between-sex conflict is to agree on a strategy of mutually assured genetic destruction. In this setup, neither partner can abandon the other for fear of complete reproductive loss for both.
One obvious version of this is socially imposed monogamy. This increases paternity certainty (favoring the male half of the equation). But this “monogamy” can itself be subverted and become one-sided. For instance, we have a host of practices that signal that the woman cannot stray, but no comparable ones imposed on male desertion. Obvious examples of such cultural practices have included various types of physical interventions to prevent or minimize possible female promiscuity, such as Chinese foot binding, the mobility-reducing rings around the necks of the giraffe-necked Karen tribe, or the attempts to reduce female sexual desire with female genital mutilation to make a daughter marriageable.
But these are not practices that women fantasize about, and this should alert us to the fact that the BDSM solution to possible sexual conflict is not being imposed on women but is generated from the bottom up by them. Let’s have a closer look at the details of this so-called “rape fantasy.”
Every generation or so (i.e., roughly every 25 years) a woman (it’s always a woman) writes a book about kinky sex—and a very specific type of kinky sex. This book is often released under a pseudonym or privately, or both. It is a huge underground success, often eventually making it to film status. Its release is often accompanied by critics who, deliberately or accidentally, totally fail to understand it, for example, often presenting it as a male fantasy. And a generation later, pretty much the exact same story gets released again.
Sometimes this work is well written, and a literary classic; sometimes it is a piece of pulpy junk—but the themes get rehashed to a degree that can seem spooky if you are not expecting it. For example, the main (male) protagonist—invariably a rich, powerful, borderline sociopath to whom normal rules do not apply—often lacks a full name, and more often has just a title. When he does have a name, it is (literally and figuratively) typically “Grey.” This man is invariably strong, cultured, and ruthless, capable of brutality even if he never behaves this way to the female protagonist. He is tall and broad-shouldered but not bodybuilder huge. He dresses well, and he spends money carelessly. He is usually a nobleman, if European, and the American equivalent of nobility—some sort of entrepreneur or financial wizard—if not. The sexual themes will be bondage, submission, and dominance (shortened to BDSM). And, further, talk between the couple about what all this means and how it is to be negotiated.
When the book hits the public sphere, there will be found some critics to claim—in the teeth of all the evidence—that this is the result of a male writer at work. It is true that men fantasize about having such qualities as dominance, status, ruthlessness, and lack of moral accountability. They do, indeed (as the popularity of, say, James Bond, attests). But the typical male take on this fantasy, with multiple attractive females and no commitment, is entirely different to the female version. Males benefit reproductively from multiple partners, in ways denied to females. A key female reproductive requirement, on the other hand, is to find a man who could have had anyone and make him want only you.
Finding this hard to believe? Let me bring on exhibits “A” through “D.”
Fifty Shades of Grey, published in 2011 and written by Erika James, went on to sell over 50 million copies and was made into several movies. The head of Anne Summers sex shops in the UK, which cater almost exclusively to women, reported a “Fifty Shades effect” where female partners were emboldened by the book to drag husbands and/or boyfriends into the store to buy kinky props to recreate BDSM scenes.
Nine and a Half Weeks, published in 1986, and written by Elizabeth McNeill, was made into a successful movie with Mickey Rourke as the ruthless kinky banker (another “Mr Grey”) and Kim Basinger as the supposed ingenue getting up to high jinks involving BDSM and the contents of Mickey Rourke’s fridge.
The Story of O, by “Pauline Réage” (actually Anne Desclos) came a few years before that, in 1954. This book was much more extreme in its bondage and discipline themes than the other books mentioned so far but is one that occasionally gets mentioned as having literary merit. The male protagonists get single names or titles only (such as “René” or “The Count”) and they carry out extreme BDSM rituals, involving the permanent marking of bodies in exotic castles.
Delta of Venus was written in the 1940s (although it was only published privately until 1977) by Anaïs Nin (and others). Delta of Venus is slightly more complex, partly because it is a short story collection and partly because it was written—by more than one person—for a male collector whose sensibilities were not those of women. In the introduction (taken from her diaries) Anaïs Nin addresses the paying patron thus: “Dear Collector: We hate you. Sex loses all its power and magic when it becomes explicit, mechanical, overdone, when it becomes a mechanistic obsession. It becomes a bore. You have taught us more than anyone I know how wrong it is not to mix it with emotion, hunger, desire, lust, whims, caprices, personal ties, deeper relationships that change its color, flavor, rhythms, intensities.” There is a lot of interest for a sex researcher to unpack here, but let us just note for the sake of this essay that, among the stories, we find characters such as “The Baron,” and in stories like “The Basque and Bijou,” themes of BDSM.
We are not doing lit crit here, but if you did want erotica that is “Explicit, mechanical [and] overdone” then your go-to BDSM writer would be the Marquis de Sade, not a female author.
What does all this mean?
Men often complain that women won’t tell them what they want, but it is closer to the truth to say that they don’t really believe it when they hear it. Or, possibly, fear that they could not live up to the expectations of it. Women are under no obligation to provide static targets for male ardor. One key reason for this is that such static targets can be gamed.
When the fuss over each book is over, we forget about it until the next version. It is as if a collective amnesia settles over the culture a couple years after each book’s publication.
Whatever else Fifty Shades is, it is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a “rape fantasy.” For one thing, there are endless (gawd help me, I had to wade through them because it is my job; no, seriously, it is) pages of contractual negotiation between the couple. This also fits with the repeated observation that a lot of BDSM-oriented clubs are matriarchal in nature. Single men are usually not welcome in them at all, and any who make the women uncomfortable are shown the door with no ceremony or appeal.
In addition to this, and contrary to popular belief (which in this case amounts to little more than anecdotal evidence) the openly kinky are not more likely to brutalize their partners than the non-kinky. On the contrary; not only are members of the BDSM community typically obsessive about things like consent and checking on partner preferences, there is solid evidence that those who can keep their rich fantasy life separate from reality are (typically) mentally healthy people. Play is psychologically good for us, as long as we know it is play. And this is play.
As noted sex advice columnist Dan Savage puts it: “It is cops and robbers with your pants off.” There are certainly people who try to pretend that their sexual brutality was wanted by a partner, but they are easy to spot. For one thing, consent means nothing to such psychopaths. That is one reason not to confuse the two things, but this will still leave some people scratching their heads over the idea that a female-led fantasy could possibly be about female sexual submission? Surely this is just more evidence of The Patriarchy™ or internalized misogyny, or some such?
Not at all, and such a response is, frankly, insulting to those women who have such fantasies.
It means only that certain desirable qualities of male sexual partners (including dominance, trustworthiness, status, desirability, and commitment) and certain patterns of response (i.e., the testing of such qualities in hard-to-fake ways) are part of the natural human female sexual toolkit. As we know, relative to males, females are picky because of the asymmetry in reproductive investment. Women can be left (literally) holding the baby, so how can they test, and even enforce, commitment from a partner? The BDSM scenario offers one set of solutions, that of mutually assured destruction in the case of desertion. And, as stated above, this happens elsewhere in nature.
Consider the hornbill. These magnificent birds live in tropical and subtropical regions. The mating female, like any sensible lady, has picked her beau over his rivals due to his loud calls and extravagantly colored beak. But loud calls and bright colors, sexy though they undeniably are, are not enough for the high-dependency offspring she is about to bear for him. So, the female makes herself dependent on the male by helping him to wall her up in a tree by placing mud with his beak before she lays their eggs. She also molts completely while sealed up inside. The male hornbill now has no choice but to provision both her and their eggs. If he were to split his resources with another female, then the first female would die, taking his genetic inheritance with her. This extreme dependence on the part of the female thus compels investment from the male. BDSM is, likewise, built upon foundations of trust, dependence, and power exchange.
Incidentally, it is worth noting that this superficially submissive female hornbill is no pushover in other ways. For instance, female hornbills regularly take on snakes and monitor lizards, which the males of the species back away from, and they actively connive in their own walling-up and dependence. Humans may have more elaborate ties, practices, and symbols of dependence and ownership, but the themes are not that different.
Not all (human) female-created erotica has such themes of dependence, dominance, and devotion, of course. However, these themes are perfectly easy to understand and accommodate, within the mainstream of biology. Not only that, but it should also be clear that any simplistic, unidimensional, analyses of power relations will struggle to make useful sense of them. Who is really in charge here? There is nothing inherently pathological about any of these activities as long as we are talking about consenting adults who understand the difference between fantasy and reality. And, if they do not—then they have enough problems already. Finally, keep your eyes open. In about, oh, fifteen years, there will be an underground phenomenon of a female-written book on BDSM themes that will make millions. Try to get in on the ground floor this time.
