Brooke: In 1989, American feminist Catharine MacKinnon wrote: “It is not that life and art imitate each other; in sexuality, they are each other.” The unprecedented success of Fifty Shades of Grey might just be the most provocative new playground for that argument.

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Amid all the media fanfare surrounding the film release, there are debates over the movie’s power to shape sexual norms. Critics see the film as a pornographic portrayal of abuse. Others see it as a historic shift towards sexual expression and agency. In the middle is Amy Adler. Amy Adler is the Emily Kempin Professor of Law at the New York University School of Law, and her research focuses on obscenity law, feminist theory, and gender and sexuality.

Adler: We have this blockbuster book and now, what I gather will be a blockbuster movie, featuring what was once considered to be a fringe sexual practice, marketed to middle aged women in middle america, in a way that I think is unprecedented.

Brooke: And its kind of interesting because if you see this as a kind of bodice-ripper for the third millennium, harlequin romances have really declined in popularity and the thought has been that this basically is the bridge too far that harlequin didn't go, and there was a pent up desire for it.

Adler: On the one had we have this extreme worry about female sexual victimization, but at the same time, our culture is so much more explicit than it once was that things like harlequin just seem extraordinarily tame. What do women want? Women want egalitarian relationships, they want safe relationships, but apparently there's still some kinds of sexual desires this movie is tapping into that may look akin to scenarios that outside of sexual fantasy would be extremely disturbing.

Brooke: On the one hand, the book and the movie seem to be accepting a wider range of sexual practice. But they also seem to rub some feminists, especially some old line feminists, the wrong way...

Adler: There are fifty shades of feminism when it comes to these questions. And certainly one feminist school most closely associated with Catherine MacKinnon - the dominant school - from the 1980s, has been very critical of S & M pornography. So to those kinds of feminists, the release of this movie would be a triumph of patriarchal order which eroticses dominance and submission and marginalizes women. That said, many many feminists disagree with that account.There have been some feminists colloquially called "sex-positive feminists" who look at women's enjoyment of all kinds of practices including S & M as something to be celebrated as an example of women's freedom and agency.

Brooke: Isn't it just that we have to separate our sexual fantasies and our sexual practices from the rest of our life - that one doesn't have to be a mirror of the other?

Adler: I think that's often lost in discussions about 50 Shades of Gray. I mean just because some people might find it erotic to imagine sexual submission doesn't mean they want to be raped, doesn't mean they want unequal pay. As feminism calls for a more egalitarian vision of marriage, of relationships, what's left of the sexual desire that might be rooted in those outmoded ways of thinking about power. What do we do with them? There's a really interesting article in the Times last year about sexless marriages, and the egalitarian marriage is a less erotic marriage - this problem.

Brooke: You gotta be careful with New York Times trend pieces.

Adler: Right [laughs]. Who knows if its true or not. But its symptomatic of another moment of cultural anguish over what is sexuality going to look like in a more feminist era. What do we do with desires that might be politically incorrect?

Brooke: There has to be room in this feminist egalitarian vision for a few ropes and some molten paraffin.

Adler: [Laughs]. I mean some feminists would say that's precisely the point. Now we've come to a place where women can reclaim pleasure and freedom. Something that was long denied women. At the same time there is this instinct in our culture that our sexuality is somehow key to our true selves. Now this is something that we're left with certainly since Freud, this is something that Foucault wrote about. That our sexual desire is somehow at the root of who we are. It does suggest that there's something erotic about power dynamics. Particularly male dominance and female submission, that is something we can celebrate and play with, but also, to the extent that we think about our sexual desires as at the root our our identities, or a significant fact about who we are, then it suggests that structuring a society of equality and at the same time leaving room for sexual pleasure, might be more complicated.

Brooke: If there is discomfort, it seems to me it arises from the fact that people see this as inconsistent with equality and fairness. And I just don't see it as inconsistent because I see it as sex and fantasy and the big thing here is - here's finally some pornography - if you want to call it that - for women! And when has that ever happened before in any big way?

Adler: Its just interesting that this is what porn for women looks like! Right? That's funny - in a culture in which we've been so uncomfortable around the topic of female sexuality, this is it! Porn for women! What do women want? They apparently want 50 Shades of Gray. And that's surprising. Especially when you consider how bad the writing is, in the book.

Brooke: [Laughs]

Adler: And of course, mainstream sexual desire is shaped by pornographic culture and presumably shaped by other aspects of mainstream culture including the discourse around feminism. So mix it all together and out comes 50 Shades of Gray. That's a surprise to me. Okay? [laughs].

Brooke: Amy, thank you very much.

Amy: Thank you so much for having me.

Brooke: Amy Adler is a law professor at NYU School of Law, who focuses on obscenity law and feminist theory.

Having sold over 100 million copies worldwide, the mainstream media success of the book - and now the film - brought a somewhat shrouded BDSM subculture to the fore. A condensed acronym for bondage, discipline, dominance, submission, and sadomasochism, some in the “kink community” suggest that the film might be a crossroads in a civil rights struggle, a “Stonewall moment” that will soften the stigma of non-traditional sexual practices. Dr. Charley Ferrer, a sex therapist and founder of the BDSM Writer’s Conference in New York, understands intimately the debate.

Ferrer: For somebody that’s looking at it from the outside and going ‘oh my gosh, they’re just hitting each other’, well that’s not true. There's the idea of being able to increase sensation, being able to experience something a little more primal, a little more adventurous. A dominant is something that leads, takes care of their partner, then the submissive follows. So if we're looking at it from a vanilla perspective which is what we say for anyone who is not inside the DS community, you're looking at the old fashioned, Leave It To Beaver type family. Where you have the father leads, the wife follows. And the piece that the movie and the book really didn't talk about was that emotional connection that the couples do make. It's just like any other relationship in the vanilla world. Its just more intense.

Brooke: But it sounds like you're agreeing with Catherine MacKinnon, that sexuality is a perfect reflection of how you live outside of sexuality. And you know, I've known couples engaged in these kinds of practices and there's no passivity outside the sexual relationship.

Ferrer: But there is. Depending on what level of the lifestyle you live. If you're just at the BDSM level where you're just playing, doing some of the things that we do - flogging, whipping, things like that, then you're at one level. If you're going to a dominance and submissive relationship, its kind of the difference between having a boyfriend and having a husband. 

Brooke: The movie has been decried by groups like the national center on sexual exploitation and the American college of pediatricians. They claim it represents a disturbing trend in entertainment media that endorses abuse, threats, and physical violence. So the question is, if there is abuse in the film, or something that looks like abuse, how do you explain to those groups what is abuse and what is play.

Ferrer: First lets talk about the difference between dominance and submission and domestic violence. When you have somebody beating you, they're not going to stop. They're doing it to hurt you, they're doing it out of malice. When you're interacting with someone in the DS community, that's not done out of malice, its not done with the intent to injure you. It might be done with the intent to bring some pain into the play, but its not done out of malice. And the intent is very important. Consent is also very important because when you're interacting in a DS relationship there's a safe word. And the safe word is basically what will bring everything to a halt. I know that there is a scene in the movie where supposedly he whips her. And its a very unplanned, un-negotiated, unacceptable thing for her. In the DS relationship, there are punishments given in a designated way. Whatever you and your partner have agreed to.

Brooke: Do you think that the perhaps unprecedented success of 50 Shades of Gray is in fact a watershed moment?

Ferrer: I think its a wonderful opening. In a way, we are stepping into our own civil rights movement, because the BDSM community is right now, the same place that 20-30 years ago, the gays and lesbians were. Where they are being discriminated against, where they are losing their jobs, their homes, their family, their children.

Brooke: 50 Shades: good for the BDSM community, bad for the BDSM community.

Ferrer: I think its a little of both. It did bring it to the forefront where people are ok to talk about it. Where they always say, oh, all the soccer moms are talking about it. Instead of people going, "Oh, those freaks are doing something!" its now "Oh, that's that 50 shades thing, ok, no problem, I'm just not into that." The bad part is is that it talks about it out of context. Its continuing that misconception of - its only broken individuals who are in this lifestyle and only because they want to be abusive to their partner, and only because they don't have any control on themselves, and they need to be fixed. And that's not true.

Brooke: Charley, thank you very much.

Ferrer: Thank you.

Brooke: Charley Ferrer is a therapist sexologist and founder of the BDSM writers conference - we'll link to that on our website - and she's the author of the book BDSM: The Naked Truth.