Why does fifty shades of grey turn women on

I read the books upstairs alone in our guest bedroom. And if I showed up alone, that would be weird. Kate, 26, Michigan. Anne, 42, Texas. So we are thinking about it. It's not just lady erotica that doesn't necessarily reflect real life. Cathy, 49, California. No husbands are allowed. Too many of them would assume that because we are watching sex that we want to have sex. We do, but we want to have sex with Christian. Not our husbands.

Sally, 58, Wisconsin. I must be the color of 'The Communist Manifesto. We spoke to NYC psychologist and relationship coach Dr. Dardashti explores what facets of "Fifty Shades" that women are connecting to, fantasizing about and wanting more of in their own lives which in turn, has made this piece of fiction so popular and the underlying implications of those desires. Men in the movies are based off an almost-impossible mix of qualities, which are also all the characteristics that most women would appreciate in a man, explains Dr.

For instance, especially in the early stages of her relationship with Grey, Anastasia never questions his feelings. He always makes it clear he wants her. Reading about this fantasy-man-played-out-in-real-life is engaging, an uncommon occurrence we secretly want to encounter. Especially for readers who are in long-term relationships or might feel stuck in a routine, "Fifty Shades" was a way to re-live those initial stages of falling in love for the first time.

Dardashti, and guess what? From somewhere deep inside, I want to beg him to stop. But even though she ostensibly consented to this interaction, it seems like a thin kind of consent.

Eventually, Ana agrees to some of the activities listed in the contract, giving explicit verbal consent. This is not how experienced members of the kink community have sex.

No matter what, these guidelines are always explicit. Some parties you might go to might hand those to you as you go in. In other words, E. In interviews, practitioners said they like kink and BDSM for lots of reasons: For some, pain releases the same kind of endorphins you might feel after running 10 miles, or after orgasm.

Some enjoy the intense power dynamics involved in being completely dominant over or submissive to someone else. People might have fetishes for certain objects, like shoes or leather, which they feel the need to engage with in order to be sexually satisfied. But that is not how the kink is portrayed in Fifty Shades.

For all the talk of nipple clamps and butt plugs, BDSM is actually presented as a pathology, not a path to pleasure. Toward the middle of the first book, when Christian hands Ana a list of possible activities they might partake in, she reacts with shock—and, to an extent, a disgust that she never gets over. The thought depresses me. Although these kinds of desires can be related to other mental issues, the organization says in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders , merely having these desires does not justify clinical intervention.

With but a few swift strokes, he can get her to orgasm—loudly, frequently, in any position and any location—by intuiting what her body wants. Sex itself is portrayed as a comprehensive proxy for the emotions involved in their relationship.

Fifty Shades eroticizes sexual violence, but without any of the emotional maturity and communication required to make it safe. In the wake of numerous allegations of rape on college campuses— at Princeton , UNC Chapel Hill, the University of Michigan , and many more—school administrators, students, sexual-assault-prevention advocates, policymakers, and more have been having important conversations about what constitutes consent.

Particularly in booze-soaked college environments, full of relatively sexually inexperienced young people, what constitutes consent? Obviously, there are many clear-cut cases of sexual assault on campuses, and the people who commit those crimes deserve to be punished fully and harshly.

But the law is clearly limited in its ability to determine what healthy sexual norms are, much less establish them—especially in environments like colleges campuses, where most people are sexually and emotionally inexperienced. Sodomy, for example, was considered a felony in every state until , and until the Supreme Court ruled against sodomy bans in its decision in Lawrence v. Texas , it was still illegal in 14 states. Gushee also acknowledged the popularity of the Fifty Shades books within his community.

It somehow crossed the line to socially acceptable. According to several recent studies, what a lot of people want is to be dominated. A study of predominantly heterosexual, college-age men and women found that both sexes preferred fantasies of being dominated by the opposite sex, rather than dominating others themselves. That last point is especially significant, given that a sexually explicit story about BDSM-ish sex is now making the transition from book to movie.

In general, men watch porn and women read erotica, says Catherine Salmon, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Redlands who studies pornography. These kinds of images are much more familiar now—for both women and men. Feminists have long been divided on the question of whether this is good for women. In the s, sex-positive feminists defended pornography as a form of free sexual expression, while others, like Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, argued that pornography inevitably represents and propagates violence against women—largely because it dehumanizes them.

And if not, what is to be done with them?