Can submission be a good thing? The movie Fifty Shades of Grey has prompted this question.
The movie, a film that romanticizes violent sex known colloquially as BDSM or Bondage and Discipline, Dominance and Submission, Sadism and Masochism, was released on Valentine’s Day this year. It was the ultimate cultural snub of romance. It was also a giant f-you to feminism, which supposedly opposes sexual violence, especially when made to seem sexy and appealing. And yet there we were, Americans lining up to buy tickets to a sexual freak show on the big screen. The movie broke box office records, beating every single Academy Award winner this year, as well as the previous number one, The Passion of the Christ.
The film elicited a reaction that was especially pronounced among cultural and social conservatives. (My own reaction is here.) Perhaps most strange was the reaction that reaction garnered, a defense of BDSM from a lot of mainstream and surprising places.
The Atlantic’s Emma Green wrote a schizophrenic analysis of Fifty Shades and BDSM, assuring readers that, “there are healthy, ethical ways to consensually combine sex and pain. All of them require self-knowledge, communication skills, and emotional maturity in order to make the sex safe and mutually gratifying.” The Fifty Shades version of BDSM though, she writes, fails muster because its heroine is…shy? San Francisco news and culture site sfist.com ran a piece on the angry reactions of adult film stars and professional fetishists on the way BDSM is portrayed in Fifty Shades and has been demonized by society. The piece, for example, featured a woman nicknamed “Oprah’s porn pundit,” who argues that Fifty Shades does not represent BDSM but rather, “is ‘The Ultimate Guide’ to revoking all the hard work sex-positive sex educators have done over the past 30 years to create a culture of informed consent around kink.”
Indeed, in the war over Fifty Shades of Grey, an unwitting hero emerged, BDSM itself. Members of the BDSM community have rushed to defend the practice, arguing that what is presented in Fifty Shades is inaccurate and untrue to reality. Perhaps most chilling of these BDSM defenses was a serious piece written for Marie Claire, entitled, “The Joy of Submission: One ambitious, assertive woman describes how she became a submissive—and why it’s not as fringe as you think.” Like the schizophrenia that marks Green’s Atlantic piece, the author admits to being a needy and overwhelmed person, yet claims to consent to a (married) man beating her with a belt and telling her what clothing to wear. He abuses her sexually, but donates to a battered women’s shelter, so it all works out in her mind.
But the common denominator in the rush to defend BDSM is the claim that submission, when done with consent, clear communication, and trust, can be a good thing. An empowering thing, actually. This is a tragic and heartbreaking fallacy, begotten of a natural human inclination for submission.
Submission is not, in and of itself, a bad thing. It’s gotten a bad rep from feminists and a certain strain of obnoxious evangelicals who love to harp on about submissive wives (omitting context and the corresponding obligations of the husband), but the reality is that we humans submit all the time, in a good way. We submit to moral authorities at our churches, synagogues, and mosques. Those moral authorities encourage us to submit our passions and lusts to the greater good, to give away money we’d like to spend on ourselves to those who have less, to curb our eating and drinking, to live chastely. We submit to political authorities, who enforce a way of living that requires us to submit our passions and desires to the greater good. And we submit to one another in friendship and in love.
Arguably the most beautiful form of submission is that between a husband and a wife, because it involves the whole self in a profoundly intimate way, physically and emotionally. Family life is all about submission, spouses to one another in equality, children to the authority of their parents, and parents to their children, in the sense that they sacrifice greatly to make the whole enterprise possible.
Another beautiful form of submission is one only a woman can experience: pregnancy and childbirth. In that process, a woman completely surrenders her body so that another member of humanity might have life. She then submits her sleep, her independence, and often still her body to nourish and raise a child. It’s a beautiful submission, and a necessary one for the perpetuation of the human family.
But violence is never a part of any of these healthy forms of submission. When moral authorities encourage violence, they are encouraging evil. See, ISIS, for a current example. When political authorities permit or encourage violence, they abdicate a most basic responsibility to protect those under their authority. Spousal violence is abhorrent. Violence against children is vile. Sexual violence is a particularly grotesque violation of a person’s physical and emotional vulnerability.
Submission and violence are antithetical. A person in their right mind cannot consent to violence; that is the ultimate perversion of a properly ordered surrender of self. So don’t let BDSM become a hero. Peace and harmony hinge on nonviolent submission.
Submission can indeed be joyful. But only when it happens safely.
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