In my years of working in and around the adult industry, I’ve met many people whose personal politics go out the window when it comes to enjoying smut. The world is full of feminists who are aroused by simulations of violent rape, racially tolerant people who find racial slurs titillating and – as anyone who’s followed politics can tell you – raging homophobes who just can’t get enough of gay porn. There’s a bit in Donald Glover’s comedy special, Weirdo, that plays on this erotic incongruity: in the heat of the moment, his paramour uses a racial slur. To Glover’s astonishment, he finds that introducing blatant racism into his experience only enhances his pleasure.



Arousal is a funny thing. It’s an involuntary response, one we have little to no control over, that also carries enormous social and psychological weight. Since the era of Freud, we’ve been told that the things that turn us on have deep significance when it comes to unraveling who, exactly, we are – which makes it that much more troubling when the things that turn us on run completely counter to who we want to be when we’re fully clothed and away from the bedroom.

To some, the incongruities between our politics and our erotics suggest a deeply buried secret about the true nature of the individual, but maybe they hint at something far, far simpler. Perhaps the easiest way for some of us to cope with the uncomfortable and unfamiliar is to subconsciously subvert it into an object of erotic fascination. Or perhaps the sheer taboo of the things we hate the most enhances their eroticism – a concept that’s certainly familiar to anyone who’s had an exciting sexual encounter with someone they normally couldn’t stand.

Fifty Shades upcoming theatrical premiere is re-starting conversations about the cultural significance of our obsession with the sexual exploits of Anastasia Steele and Christian Grey. For most, Fifty Shades is a harmless piece of trash that allows people with otherwise vanilla proclivities to open a window to a different sort of sex life; for others, it’s a damaging work that glorifies abuse under the guise of celebrating kink. Numerous BDSM activists have spoken out against Fifty Shades, arguing that it depicts a rather unhealthy relationship because Grey does not prioritize Anastasia’s consent or engage in proper BDSM protocols – making him a nightmare partner if he stepped off the page.

But the focus on Fifty Shades as a proscriptive guide is missing the point: perhaps everything that’s wrong about Fifty Shades as a relationship guide is what’s right about it as a piece of erotica.

Whatever the deep-seated origins of our publicly unseemly sexual desires, it’s clear that trying to reprogram ourselves or suppress our more subversive urges is a futile battle. As the inaugural episode of the Invisibilia podcast explained, the more we fight against erotic thoughts like these – the involuntary, upsetting and the seemingly out of character ones – the more we intensify them and create a feedback cycle in which the thing we most desperately want to escape becomes the thing that dominates our life (which, not coincidentally, is one explanation for the mechanism behind porn addiction). The more we try to deny our erotic urges, the more they take over our experience – while paradoxically, accepting those parts of ourselves as harmless, if occasionally upsetting, fantasy, allows them to fade into our unconscious and helps integrate them into our daily lives.



So, if you find yourself aroused by some of the more troubling aspects of Grey’s sexual demeanor, don’t fret too much about it. Getting aroused by what’s depicted in Fifty Shades doesn’t necessarily mean you harbor secret urges to abuse or be abused. At worst, it means you just happen to get turned on by some less-than-stellar writing.