It might look as if the bondage contract overturns feminist goals of equality and independence for women. it uses a taste of pain to strip off the swaddling wrap of habit that keeps us safe and half-asleep in our everyday lives.

So the contract here is really a script that’s thrilling because you pretend to cut loose and let it all hang out. This pain is really “pain,” a technique, and (ahem) comes with “safe words” to disguise the reality that the thrill of losing control is always under control-in particular, under Ana’s control. And it manages to wink at you while sounding breathlessly earnest. Fifty Shades walks readers through the sex play in a sort of “self-help eroticism.” It introduces and explains techniques of pleasure the way Cosmo does. They excite hypervigilance and sensitivity, making you more acutely aware of your body and your partner with the whip. In bondage (BDSM) sex, pain and submission overthrow everyday self-protective inhibitions. Nominally the novel dramatizes the partners’ search for extraordinary sexual fulfillment. Their relationship is based on a contract in which Ana agrees to become Christian’s “submissive,” willing to be beaten, spanked, and tied up, to lower her eyes in his presence, and to let him dictate her sleep, food and dress.

In the novels’ Seattle, a virginal college student named Anastasia Steele (Ana) discovers exceptional sexual pleasure and eventually idealized romantic devotion in a rich, handsome young man named Christian Grey. Just as some parties and carnival frolics call for fanciful masks, so does James’s bondage/sadomasochistic (BDSM) trilogy. James’s best-selling soft-porn romance Fifty Shades of Grey (2012). You might not think of being nude, tied up, and tingling as a disguise.

Fifty shades of grey contract rules