Fifty Shades of Crazy?

Last week saw sales for E.L. James's erotic "Twilight" fan-fic Fifty Shades of Grey fall to tenth place on Publishers Weekly bestseller list.  Bolstered by strong internet sales in its early weeks, and then by selling her soul to the Devil (probably), Fifty Shades has continued to hold the top three slots in Top 10 Overall, Trade Paperback and the number two slot in Audiobooks for the year.  Amazon sales continue to maintain their juggernaut status, with the collected trilogy continuing to sell well.  The runaway bestseller has spawned numerous imitators, and left the rest of the world scratching their heads.  The camps of those who love it and those who find it less than rubbish seem as divided as the Tea and Democratic parties.

So what's going on?

In 1841 Charles Mackay wrote a book called Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, describing the paroxysms of stupid into which people sometimes work themselves.  His book popularized the strange phenomenon that occurred in the Netherlands in late 1636 and early 1637 when people went crazy for tulips.  Sometimes called Tulipomania, at its height a single tulip bulb could sell for ten times the average income of a skilled craftsman.  We recognize the phenomenon as an economic bubble, and we're still falling prey to it today.  Mackay continues by examining a number of popular delusions to which we're still (more or less) prey:  "alchemy, crusades, witch-hunts, prophecies, fortune-telling, magnetisers (influence of imagination in curing disease), shape of hair and beard (influence of politics and religion on), murder through poisoning, haunted houses, popular follies of great cities, popular admiration of great thieves, duels, and relics."

Now, while the tulip mania had some sort of basis in reality, and built on false hopes of government intercession, at its base it was an economic bubble.  People were getting rich, and hoped that they would continue to get rich.  So at least people were going dumb for something tangible.  The rest is simple superstition, which nonetheless motivates more people than we'd like to account for.  Recent statements by a Republican nominee seem to indicate that some people, as my training instructors liked to say, are still "stuck on stupid."

It would be irresponsible of me to conclude that fans of Fifty Shades are simply ill-educated or lacking mental faculty.  The epithet of "mommy porn" has been applied to these stories often, and not just by literary detractors.  Feminists have argued that this sort of depiction undermines much of their work over the last half century, relegating women to subservient positions.  Champions have responded that the book touches on deeply buried wants (some say needs).

Splitting an argument into a false dichotomy is one of those fallacies that logic teachers try to beat into our heads, and the dispute over Fifty Shades is no different.  Certainly, if you like it, you're not wishing for the return of women as chattel, or a diminution of hard-won rights.  But maybe there's something to the popularity of a book about BDSM.  Maybe women really do want to get a little kinkier in bed?

Every so often, sex becomes popular.  Wait, let me re-phrase that.  Every so often, talking about sex loses some of its taboo and the popular dialogue embraces a more nuanced approach.  Kinsey gave us his eponymous report.  The 60s taught us the joys and social dangers of lack of restraint.  AIDS made us all terribly aware that pleasure has its physical price.  While Fifty Shades certainly isn't a Kinsey report, it has unleashed a popular dialogue of sex that has been clouded by the book's abysmal quality.

Like the tulips' unqualified beauty was clouded by the avarice of short-sided men, perhaps the lesson we should learn from Fifty Shades isn't that people like to read really trashy fiction, but that they'd like to experience a fuller, deeper sexual experience.  But first we have to be willing to talk about it.