It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time

Why "Fifty Shades" is Shady. Or, What Mainstream Society Can Learn From Kinky Folk

I have a shameful confession.

I read the Fifty Shades of Grey books…all three of them.

I just read them for the mystery, honest!

For the most part the writing was the sort of over-done, yet simultaneously shallow, cotton-candy fiction that tastes sweet in the moment but leaves one feeling nauseated, hollow, and sticky in a not-good way.  In retrospect, however, I’m most ashamed of having enjoyed the sex scenes.

“Well, duhhhh,” you say.   That’s the whole point.  The sort of “kinky” sex sensationalized in the books is supposed to provoke shame, to titillate with taboo.  That’s why the upcoming movie has gotten so much hype I keep forgetting it hasn’t even been released yet.  The sex portrayed in the books and movie is the fictional version of a multi-car pile-up or reality TV.  After all, the whole point is to tease our darkest fantasies while reassuring us that unlike those characters, we are “normal,” “not sick.”

And that is why I’m ashamed.  Like so many out there, I fell prey to the sensationalism.  I equated the sexual relationships depicted in the book with actual kink and like many others, was happy to level judgment before returning to my vanilla world.

And therein lies the danger of these books and of similar movie and TV scenes – the sex so luridly described bears about as much resemblance to actual BDSM (the acronym stands for Bondage/Discipline, Dominance/Submission, Sadism/Masochism) as the “Real Housewives” of Whatevertown bear to any of our friends, neighbors, or selves.

But, BDSM, like any culture or practice that doesn’t fall under the middle of the societal bell-curve we call “normal” makes for an easy media target.  Many of the elements and practices commonly employed in BDSM touch uncomfortable places in the collective psyche.  Cuffs, rope, whips, clamps, hoods – these things have become societal symbols for horror and even torture.  The common narrative then, is that anyone who enjoys using or receiving any of these things is sick or troubled.

What if I told you that mainstream society could learn a lot about healthy relationships – mental, emotional, and, yes, sexual from BDSM practitioners?

I can’t speak to all societies, but at least in the U.S., we do a terrible job of acknowledging and accepting our own fears and darknesses.  We so desperately fear the shadow-self – our inherent violence, wildness, and uniqueness – that we live lives of pallid conformity.  We confine ourselves in matching, stucco boxes with manicured lawns and granite countertops.  We avert our eyes from the “different” – the ones who stick out, who talk to themselves, who dress outside the rules of gender conformity.  And we hide in the darkness, consuming diets of shame, corn syrup, and clandestine porn.  We don’t discuss the things we want.  We don’t admit our deepest needs, even to ourselves.  And we certainly don’t negotiate in our relationships to meet those needs.

Consent and Communication

This is why I’m ashamed of having enjoyed the Fifty Shades books.  I’m not ashamed that individual elements spoke to some of my fantasies.  I’m not ashamed of having been turned on by descriptions of bondage.  I’m ashamed of not having recognized the portrayal of an abusive relationship for what it is.  Like so many others, I assumed that coercion was just part of the sex, that all “kink” was essentially abusive.

And that is where I was terribly wrong.

BDSM is a partnership that depends on clear communication and explicit consent for the emotional and physical safety of ALL partners.  When you are playing with power, pain, or bondage, without a solid foundation for trust and a clear plan, things can go quite wrong quite fast – for both parties.  That’s why folks in BDSM relationships tend to negotiate and discuss details before anything physical ever transpires. 

“Do you like X?”

 “I’m really triggered by Y, so that’s off the table for me.”

 “I’m into D, but if you aren’t, that’s okay.”

 “Let’s use ABC if you need me to slow things down or back off.  Say XYZ if you need to end play.”

What if we entered ALL relationships with this sort of clear understanding of our own and each other’s needs and limitations? 

Think about it. 

How many of you have taken a job without negotiating a written contract in advance? (*raises hand*)  How many of you have had that same job go awry due to a lack of clear understanding on both parts? (*raises hand again*)

How many times do we send our children off to be taught without knowing the pedagogical approach of the teacher or having a clear understanding of the lines of communication in the school?

How many times in romantic relationships do we flounder around, waiting for a “signal” from the other person to direct our actions or responses?  How often do we hesitate to ask for what we need or give our partner honest feedback about what works or doesn’t work for us?

How often do we get into fights or feel resentment because neither partner really knows what the other expects or has a clear sense of “role?”

Before engaging with any of my BDSM partners –oh, don’t look so shocked; you didn’t really think I was writing all this from a purely academic perspective – I have a clear idea of their preferences and concerns, and I know that I have communicated my own likes and limits.  Each of us knows that there will be kinks (no, I couldn’t resist) to be worked out.  And we will have communicated enough to trust that if something doesn’t work quite right, we’ll work through it cooperatively rather than from a place of damaged ego.

If all this sounds like a pretty far cry from the villainous dungeon masters, neurotic submissives, and manipulative doms of TV and movie-land, it is.  Media tropes may be silly and seem harmless, but a message repeated becomes a pattern; clichés lodge in our brains until we lose the nuance.

I’ll be writing several posts on this theme.  I have no desire to convert anyone to kink (ewwwwww), nor am I looking for shock value.  Rather, my goal here is the same as with all of my writing, to normalize variation, and maybe, if I do it right, to help others see themselves and each other as individuals rather than tropes.

 

Failure and Success -- of a Man and a Mouse

Anyone who has ever visited Disneyland has probably read or heard the quote from Walt Disney that “It all started with a mouse.”  I’ll admit it, I was raised on a steady diet of Disney.  We took family trips to Disneyland; the Disney Channel was the first cable channel I remember.  My husband, who was raised in Anaheim, was even more immersed.  Yet, until this past weekend, I didn’t realize that the mouse would never have come into existence if his creator had not first failed.

Mike and I recently visited the Walt Disney Family Museum at the Presidio on an anniversary trip to San Francisco.  In the museum lobby, visitors are confronted with an impressive, and intimidating, array of awards – an entire case of Oscars, the French Legion d’Honneur, and a polyglot mosaic of certificates medals, and trophies.  By any fraction of these awards, the bearer would be judged a success.  However, as we entered the museum exhibits and wandered chronologically through the life of Walter Elias Disney, the thing that struck me over and over was not the mind-boggling success, but how often the man had failed.

We aren’t talking small, niggling failures.  His first animation company went bankrupt – the papers are posted in the exhibit.  In recorded interviews played near the exhibit, Walt says that when he arrived in California, he and his brother Roy (recently discharged from the VA Hospital) had more than brotherhood in common.  “We were both unemployed.  So we decided to start our own business.”  This second company, for which Walt and Roy encouraged friends from Missouri to relocate to California, flourished for a while – until some unfortunate business dealings with a distributor.  One letter from that distributor contained sentences like dagger thrusts.  The “gentleman” wrote that his company had seen no financial returns from any of the films Disney had sent them.  He then followed with the excoriating phrase “you should be heartily ashamed.”  Words to make most of us curl under the covers and hide, words to make us flee from that which we had failed.  Yet, Disney kept making films.  Ultimately, this distributor wrested away the rights to Disney’s main character, a rabbit named Oswald. 

Disney and his wife traveled back to the east coast in an attempt to retain the rights to Oswald.   On the train trip back to California, after their efforts had failed, he didn’t drink himself into a stupor, apparently didn’t moan to Lilly about his failures.  Instead, he started to think about mice.  Mice were “cute and could do anything” and until then had been supporting characters in animated work.  Walt began to sketch and soon developed a little guy he called Mortimer, a name his wife declared “terrible” and that was soon changed to …yes, you know.

Disney’s success may have started with Mickey, but it didn’t continue along a golden path from there.  There were other setbacks, other unscrupulous business colleagues, a union strike that bitterly divided the Disney studios, the second World War, films that were less than successful.

But the resonating theme of the museum was the extraordinary optimism of a man able to retain vision, ambition, and creativity in the face of failure and defeat.  That sort of optimism requires not naiveté, not simple-mindedness, not calculation, but raw courage.

We saw another offshoot of the Disney machine this weekend – the Disney/Pixar movie Brave.  For once, we saw a princess not only unwilling to submit to her fate, but one who chooses to change her fate herself. Merida recognizes the damage caused by her mistakes and, rather than waiting for someone to save her, works to right the wrongs herself.  In the end, she says of fate that it lies inside us, “you only have to be brave enough to look for it.”

Too often we see our failures and mistakes as negatives, as reasons to quit, as indications that we are “on the wrong path.”  We expect success to be golden and smooth, the soul-crushing patches to be magically edited out.  We envy the “luck” of those who appear to have achieved success easily or completely.  But, finding and fulfilling our destiny depends less upon luck than it does upon resilience and courage – and those are available to anyone.

One Lab Accident Away...

It’s a poorly guarded secret that our household is one of geeks.  Actually, given that my two oldest children have been known to harmonize the Imperial March from Star Wars, it’s not much of a secret at all.  We are geeks.  We embrace geekdom.  The family joke is that our oldest is “one lab accident away from becoming a supervillain.”  For anyone who has ever watched Caitlin’s hazel eyes go black as her brother pushes her too far, this doesn’t seem like much of a stretch.  But, she has a saving grace – humor.  For Caitlin, a joke from the right person or a funny chapter in a book is the “undo” button for anger.  “Undo” is a critical function, and one that we often seem to overlook. 

Think of your prototypical villain – Lex Luthor, Two-Face, Green Goblin, Darth Vader.  What distinguishes the supervillain from an ordinary, flawed person?  Evil?  Well, in many cases, the villain starts out as an okay guy.   Sometimes he’s a slimy political type or a petty criminal, but where does he start to devolve into supervillainy?  I’m not trying to be sexist here; the example holds for female villains as well – Catwoman, the evil queen from Snow White – not so much Cruella De Ville (what was up with that whole Dalmatian fetish anyway?).  The trigger is usually quite simple – a painful incident from which the villain is unable to let go.  The bad guy clutches the pain -- and its associated anger -- to the chest like a teddy bear, repeating the grievance as he falls asleep at night: nursery rhymes for evil doers. 

What our friend the villain fails to realize, is that the pain is a parasite.  When held close, the parasite burrows tentacles of anger into the victim, each tentacle releasing toxins.  The toxins begin to alter the victim’s mind, rewarding each negative thought with a surge of energy.  And the villain’s brain rots from within. 

Comic book hyperbole?  Sure.  But, the metaphor is pretty transparent.  And pretty pertinent.  Anger is tied to the release of chemicals within the body, epinephrine and norepinephrine.  Think about it.  How do you feel when you are angry?  Strong, right?  Powerful.  Nobody’s gonna hurt you and get away with it.  Well, of course.  Epinephrine in particular is the same chemical that gets released when you need to fight for your life.  That surge of power is a survival tactic.  Great response if you are being chased by a lion.  Crappy response for dealing with other humans.

Is anger natural?  Yep.  Can it be a productive catalyst?  Sure – moral outrage has led to some of the greatest changes in society.  And to some of the worst.  So when does anger lead to the Civil Rights Movement, and when does it lead to the Holocaust?  (Okay, before the outraged comments begin, yes, I deliberately picked extreme examples.) 

Here’s the thing about anger: it is often fear in disguise.  Remember our friend epinephrine?  It gets released when someone insults you and when someone threatens you.  Our brains aren’t always able to tell the difference between fear and anger.  In my opinion, this is where we need to find that “undo” button.  Call it what you will: humor, forgiveness, acceptance, grace.  The ability to let go of the pain, to unwrap the tentacles of anger from around our hearts, and to look openly into the face and the cause of the pain is what separates us from the supervillains.  It doesn’t take a lab accident or a volcano planet to corrode our hearts and minds – it only takes unresolved anger.  That surge of power is a trap.  It is the zombie virus that destroys our brains and bends us to its will.

Don’t let anyone fool you – not even me.  In the short term, letting go of pain doesn’t feel good.  It feels lonely and scary.  You feel weak, vulnerable without the iron mask of anger.  You miss the kickass power surge.  You miss the feeling of moral certainty.  When you put the pain down and look at it with honesty, you are forced to see how much of it was your own creation.  That sucks.

So why bother?  Why let go of the pain and anger?  After all, someone else caused this, right?  Why should you feel bad?

Well, for one thing, the cycle needs to break somewhere.  As it stands now, we are heading toward a society of villains.  And, besides, what happens to the villain in the end?

The Last Day

“Wake up!  Support your wife.  It’s her last day of work!”  Mike is not a morning person.  At 6:30 every weekday, I get up from my computer, walk into our bedroom, and spend the next 15-30 minutes convincing my husband that he must overcome gravity in order to contribute to his corner of the world.  As I chirped out this morning’s greeting, a sense of déjà ecoute wacked me on the head.  This sounded hideously familiar.  My hummingbird brain tracked the sense to the source.  Lethal Weapon (III?  IV?).  Great.  At 6:30 A. M., I channel Danny Glover.  ‘This is it,’ I thought.  ‘I’ve jinxed myself.  This is going to be the day my job finally kills me.’

Since I’m sitting here typing, it’s not exactly a spoiler to point out that I was wrong.  I escaped the last day alive, and with all limbs attached. 

The last day.  My last day as a practicing veterinarian (for the foreseeable future) and the last day for Bradshaw Vet’s Large Animal Clinic – forever.  It was a good day, pretty damn close to a perfect day.

It was the sort of day that makes you wonder why everyone doesn’t become an ambulatory vet:  St. Patrick’s Day green, chalk-pastel-impossible grass; white, puffy trees, azure skies, distant, snow-capped mountains; country roads rolling endlessly across hills; and grazing cattle.  It might have been easier to say goodbye had the hills been baked brown, or had chill rain soaked my windshield, but this was the sort of day that says, “You are alive.  Every end has a beginning.  Nothing is permanent.  This will all change, and therein lies the beauty.”

Seven years ago, on a February day much like this, a palomino mare stood beneath the fragrant almond blossoms of our orchard, munching stems of cartoon grass.  My friend, my horse.  Goldie died that day.  She was 36 years old, arthritic, and in liver failure.  I euthanized her and friends buried her in that orchard.  It sounds bare doesn’t it, matter-of-fact.  It isn’t.

Points in life stand out, stars that shine through the continuous fog of daily existence: places, events, people, animals, experiences.   These are the things that shape us.  I still love spring, but I do not see grass in that extraordinary shade of luminous, tender, green without remembering it passing the lips of my best friend, my best teacher just before I ended her life.  I felt relief that day too. 

Spring – humans celebrate new life, new beginnings in the spring.  However, in our most primitive places, we know that nothing begins anew without an end.   In the Christian tradition, Easter celebrates the Resurrection, but first you must have the Passion and the Death.  The legend of the Phoenix speaks of a bird reborn – from the ashes of failure.

Goldie was in my head today, because in many ways, she was the beginning.  My first horse: ornery, beautiful, challenging, dangerous, and loving – she taught me to accept pain and persist, that stubbornness could be a virtue, and that I was worth following – almost anywhere.  That spring that I let my mare and her aching joints and failing organs sink into the ground, I was also  letting the things of my childhood pass away, exchanging memories for motherhood, shifting friendships into adult status, working through old hurts and insecurities, finding my footing in a job that had been a bold adventure.

As that job ends, and as I let its bones sink into the soil, it is easy to forget how new and scary clinical medicine was, easy to forget the huge leap of returning to a field that I hadn’t touched since graduating vet school five years before.  The terror of cutting living tissue for the first time in years, and doing so without a protective net of residents and clinicians hovering over my shoulders, has receded.  The humiliating, soul-crushing pain of the first angry phone call from a client has dimmed with time and familiarity.  As clients called, hugged, and left tearful cards yesterday, it was strange to remember my first months in the practice, months when people asked “Isn’t there anyone else?” when they discovered that their appointment was with the new, woman vet, months when I heard, “You’re not Tom!” every time I stepped out of my truck.  As Lana and I headed out on our last ambulatory call last night, the last time a truck would leave that parking lot to treat an animal, memory hit.

It was late spring, blossoms on trees had given way to unfurled leaves, emerald grasses were streaking gold along the tips.  Cattle lowed in the corral behind us, and the smell of dust, oiled metal, and anxiety blew across the gravel drive.  The wife of the rancher looked at me, “I suppose you’re only going to treat horses.”  It wasn’t a question.

“Nope.  I’ll treat anything with hooves!”  I forced myself not to cross my arms or straighten my shoulders, shoved my body back into the sideways slouch of those who wear boots for a living.

She looked at Lana – poor Lana, torn between the automatic defense of “The Doctor,” a defense tattooed upon her brain in technician school, and the reality of her experience of a revolving door of associates – “So, how long is this,” the chin bobbed toward me, “one going to last?”

Lana hesitated, “I give every one of them a year.  Then we’ll see.”

I had originally given myself a year, but these words committed me to making this job work, to staying longer, to prove that I could do it.  That was May, 2001.

Yesterday, as Lana and I pulled out of the parking lot, I giggled and looked over at her, “Should we call Kathy and tell her I went down with the ship?”

A grin shoved its way past Lana’s tears.  “You sure made it past that year.”

I made it through that first year and through each of the subsequent nine largely because of Lana.  I haven’t written enough about our technician, my friend.  And I’m not sure how to.  Lana taught me the parts of my job that the university never mentioned.  How to drive a stick shift; how to remove a lariat rope from the neck of a rank steer without breaking fingers; that it is possible to finish gelding a horse as he recovers prematurely from anesthesia (“Just cut faster!”); that someone who has never been able to hear my voice could spend a decade reading my lips, and when she couldn’t see them, would read my mind.  Lana is the one person who, no matter how bad the situation (and some have been very bad indeed), would say to me quietly, “You can do it.  I have great faith in you.”  And because she did, I did.

The closure of the large animal clinic is removing the only job Lana has known in 25 years.  And so, she is going into the small animal practice, to be a surgery technician, using skills largely untapped in that quarter century.  She will be working in surgery – in a room full of people whose faces are covered by blue paper masks.  Lana reads lips.  But, I know that she will find a way to read their minds.  I know she can do it.  I have great faith in her.

Spring – new life, renewal, transition.  Death precedes new life.  Yesterday, I was Dr. Corp, the vet.  Today I am a writer.  I remain a veterinarian, and I have always been a writer, but there is a palpable shift into the unknown.  The writer sees pages of complete, edited text behind me, and reams of blank white ahead.  The trick is to remember that the chapters of the past decade were once empty paper. 

Respite

A brief break from the ranting today.  Triple digit weather, a case of shingles http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd-vac/shingles/dis-faqs.htm, and an on-call weekend punctuated with oddball emergencies have conspired to suck the indignation (not to mention the inspiration) from my soul.  Needless to say, the tick of the clock to 8:00 this morning filled me with joy as it signaled a day off.  Freedom!  Air-conditioning!  The shingles was, alas, still present but was rendered far less annoying by the previously mentioned circumstances.

Summer evokes childhood -- swimming, ice-cream, watermelon, flopping on a couch with a book, mosquito bitten games of hide-and-seek, and movies.  In the pre-video, pre-megaplex days of my childhood, the downtown movie theater played one movie at a time, and lines snaked along the baking sidewalk for blocks.  Around mid-July, doubtless sick of the cries of “I’m bored,” parents would load 5 or 6 of us into a van and drive us downtown.  Admission money carefully safety-pinned into change purses, and illicit brown bags of popcorn smuggled into pockets and backpacks, we were ready.  The oldest member of the group always had a dime for the pay phone, just in case.  The downtown theater in Merced looms grandly in my childhood memory.  The orange top of the white tower stood out for blocks.  I felt very grownup as I handed my money to the teller encased behind the sweeping curve of glass and stepped into the lovely cool of the lobby.  In those days, there was one screen that seemed impossibly huge, a grand staircase that led upstairs to a painted balcony that made me think of Cinderella’s castle.  Smells of popcorn, dust, and an obscure stickiness known only to movie theaters filled the air.  Movies on that screen seemed so real that I would look back to the light from the projector during the scary parts just to reassure myself that it was only make-believe.  The outside world vanished for a couple of hours into the cool, fantasy-laden darkness.  When the doors opened to the blaring heat and light, we would stand, blinking moles, on the sidewalk until a double-parked parent honked and waved us back to reality.

My heart broke when that theater was renovated and split into four smaller screens.  But, by then the VCR was common, and it had become increasingly difficult to convince our parents to shell out the time and money for a downtown movie excursion.  New digital technology and the mandatory blockbuster action scenes have somewhat revived the movie, but my children will never have the same feeling of movie-ness that permeated my childhood and that of previous generations.  Theaters are clean, well ordered, and completely generic.  Bag searches make greasy brown bags of home-popped popcorn impossible.  I may drop them off at a theater, someday – when they’re 15?

Today, however, I reclaimed a bit of my lost past.  I decided to celebrate freedom (and distract myself from the hideous rash on my shoulder) by taking myself to see Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince http://harrypotter.warnerbros.com/harrypotterandthehalf-bloodprince/.  I nibbled on my popcorn through the endless previews, unimpressed.  Then, it happened.  The mist rolled in, carrying the Warner Brother’s logo.  The movie was starting!  In that instant the whole sense of movie-ness, of being a solitary adventurer swept over me. 

Watching the adolescent forays into first love increased my sense of nostalgia.  The chairs grew smaller; I was old again.  That sense of uncertain excitement fled dimly into my past.  As the summer heat burst through the exit door, my feet stumbled mournfully away from youth.

I consoled myself with lunch at Tucos in Davis http://daviswiki.org/Tucos_Wine_Market_and_Cafe.  Between tiny spoonfuls of a dancing cucumber melon gazpacho, I sipped my wine, read The Language of Bees http://www.laurierking.com/, and lounged in the shade of an olive tree and green umbrella.  By the time the beef Carpaccio watercress salad had arrived, my consolation was complete.  Nibbling on the cheese course and sipping a glass of port, I realized that, perhaps, adulthood isn’t so bad after all.