cosmopolitan businessman by accepting the role of his ‘submissive’ in a sadomasochistic relationship. Ye in her interview, she is cautious about selling the book on its pornographic content alone. It’s not so much about S&M as about Romantic Love, she claims. She seems to sense that women are more interested in a fantasy about an ideal relationship than they are in being tied up by their partner. In fact, she makes the book sound more like a selfhelp manual than a pornographic read more likely to stimulate masturbation than anything else.
Rosselini’s comments emphasize the way in which sex has been marketed since the 80s as something which is outside of people, beyond their reach and something they are supposed to be endlessly striving after. It’s something that is learnt from the experts, rather than something that the individual discovers through experiment, trial and error, in a fun way. It is a humourless grind, and hard, hard work. The notverygood firsttime is presented as a disaster to be avoided at all costs. Thus in Fifty Shades of Grey, heroine Anastasia enjoys a magnificent first orgasm by abandoning herself to the Dominant Christian. Not only does she experience multiple orgasms, she has time to reflect on what a bad first experience her best friend had. Under Christian’s direction, Anastasia also delivers the perfect blow job first time, without gagging or choking. With him, she just knows instinctively what to do. There is no room for tentative experimentation, for finding out what the other person might like to do, or what you might like to do to them. Christian presents Anastasia with a list of practices and asks her to sign a contract agreeing to them. Instead of experimenting with sex, Anastasia gains by
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negotiating a good contract. She rules out a few items, like anal sex, and this is presented as a victory. EL James accepted her interviewer’s assessment that she was telling young women that they had the ability to empower themselves, to lay down the conditions under which they would have sex. The age, class and gender differences didn’t enter into the matter at all, in spite of the fact that he was able to sell her own car in favour of a much more expensive model, offer her a personal computer and wine and dine her at luxury hotels. Nevertheless, James tells us, ‘she stayed true to herself’. The idea that controlling one’s image could give a woman power – as opposed to simply making her one more sex object – was increasingly accepted by radicals and feminists from the 1990s on. In 1993, American feminist Naomi Wolf published what could be called the power feminists’ manifesto: Fire With Fire explained how feminists needed to move away from a negative outlook and take power – to use their skills and assets to compete on an equal footing with men. Women needed to stop seeing themselves as victims, and to start using their advantages. This strand of thinking in the feminist movement gained ground at a time when women’s lives were changing as they had never done before. The struggles of women and the Left in the 1960s and 1970s meant that women could claim places previously reserved for men, and were entering the workforce in evergreater numbers. Positions were opened in the professions such as law, medicine, creating a new layer of professional middleclass women, but many thousands of lowpaid part time jobs sucked workingclass women into the workplace too. Images in the media changed accordingly.