“…the landscape in which “Fifty Shades of Grey” has found its audience, with a story almost perfectly suited to this dream: A fantasy of being…”

…our sexual egalitarians don’t want to shut down the party or end the bacchanal. They just want hookup culture to be governed by affirmative consent, for prostitutes to become empowered sex workers, for misogynistic porn to be balanced out by feminist alternatives, for dangerous patriarchal polygamy to give way to safe egalitarian polyamory, and for De Sade’s Justine to find happiness as a submissive protected by her safe words.

This is the landscape in which “Fifty Shades of Grey” has found its audience, with a story almost perfectly suited to this dream: A fantasy of being chased, seduced and whipped by an embodiment of the .001 percent, a man who’s dangerous but not too dangerous, thrillingly Caligulan but ultimately vulnerable, and who proves himself to be a caring spouse and father in the end.

Ross Douthat, “The Caligulan Thrill”, The New York Times (15 February 2015), SR11.