How Fifty Shades lied to you about female sexuality

By Sangeeth Sebastian

If you are one among the 100 million readers who contributed to the global success of E.L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey, then you deserve an apology from the author.

James, it seems, was misleading readers with her depiction of Anastasia Steele, the heroine of her sadomasochist trilogy. The deception pertains to the way Steele’s arousal mechanism is portrayed in the book.

In one of the opening scenes on spanking, Steele moves away from her billionaire tormentor Christian Grey, screaming in pain, without showing any visible liking for what she is going through. Yet, she blindly believes Grey when he tells her that she likes sadomasochism by indicating the wetness of her vagina. This co-relation it emerges is wrong. Or in other words “being wet” for a majority of women, most of the time, is an automatic reflex of their body and has nothing to do with pleasure or desire to have sex, says author Emily Nagoski in her best-selling book Come As You Are (Speaking Tiger).

“Certainly there are women who are turned on by being consensually debased, but the whole plot (of the novel) pivots on the fact that Ana isn’t one of them,” writes Nagoski, mining decades of research and her own experience as a sex educator.

“There is not one word about her liking the spanking as it is happening,” she writes. Then why does she believe Grey? This, says Nagoski, happens because James like romance novelists before her, was guilty of interpreting female libido from a male point of view, mistakenly equating wetness with arousal, just like the way erections are linked to desire for sex in men. There is a scientific name for this desire discrepancy in women:arousal non-concordance.

While the discrepancy is relatively less in men, as a vast majority of them, about 75 per cent, experience an instantaneous desire for sex, the moment they see a hot looking woman, it is high in women with only 15 per cent experiencing what is known as “spontaneous desire.”

This occurs because, in women, the final call on whether to have sex or not is taken by the brain. And the decision is based on a host of factors including environment, surroundings and how comfortable she is at that particular moment. So how do you know if a woman is actually interested in sex? Listen to what she says, writes Nagoski.

This explains why the newly launched “female Viagra” flibanserin focuses on targeting the female brain, the most complex region of the human body, instead of simply increasing blood flow to the genitals, which often does the trick in men.

Just when you thought the entire world was a constant turn-on for men, Nagoski lets in on this little dark secret that even a good number of men don’t have the desire to have sex each time they experience an erection. Not convinced? Think about all those inconvenient early “morning wood” if you are a man.

She then directs her attack on scientific fraternity for propagating the fallacy that sexuality is a “drive” like hunger that pushes people to do things in desperation for survival.  “Nobody has ever died because of not being able to get laid,” she writes. Equating sex with hunger only feeds a man’s predatory instincts to look upon women as animals to be hunted for food, she says.

Yet, for all her feminist fervour in liberating female sexuality from a phallocentric world, what she conveniently overlooks apart from a brief reference to culture, is the extent to which both religion and culture have played a role in suppressing any scientific enquiry on sex for ages. Even now, living in a hypersexualised age, where everything you want to know about sex is available at the click of a mouse, the fact that a book on the subject made it to the New York Times bestseller list is in itself a testimony to how little we actually know about it.

Reading Come As You Are, a sexual self-help for women, if you are a man, like this writer, might feel like trying something as remote to your gender identity as a sanitary napkin, nonetheless you will be richer for the experience.

The review was published in Mail Today on November 8