Beauty and the Beast and BDSM

by Julie Tetel Andresen | February 23, 2015 |

Among the trailers shown before Fifty Shades of Grey this past weekend was the upcoming Disney remake of Cinderella. And, by the way, Fifty Shades itself is a kind of retelling of Beauty and the Beast.

The question is: How many times can Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast be remade? The answer is: Infinite.

Such is the power of fairy tales.

Psychologists Sigmund Freud, Otto Rank, Carl Jung, and Bruno Bettelheim, among others, took fairy tales – these stories of abandonment, wicked stepmothers, witches, dwarves, princes, injuries, death – to be expressions of the collective unconscious, the human psyche projecting deep-rooted fears and desires onto developmental narratives.

Sleeping Beauty inducts girls into menstruation. Little Red Riding Hood warns girls about The Big Bad Wolf. The magic mirror held by the Evil Queen in Snow White represents not only the power of feminine beauty but also the threshold between the conscious and unconscious. And so on.

Beauty and the Beast is the tale of a beautiful young woman who volunteers to be imprisoned by a beast in order to save her father. The ugly beast is smitten by Beauty who, naturally enough, repulses his repeated offers of marriage. You know the story. Beauty must learn to love the Beast. When in the end she kisses him, he turns into his real self: a handsome prince.

Enter Fifty Shades with its massive popularity and equally massive criticism. Salman Rushdie’s take is the funniest. He said Fifty Shades makes Twilight look like War and Peace.

Leslie Morgan Steiner, author of Crazy Love, has a less amusing perspective. She says that Fifty Shades blurs the line between dominance and abuse. In a recent piece in the Washington Post, she writes:

“Consistent with its unusual mix of erotic and idiotic, the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy ends with Ana and Christian’s happily-ever-after marriage and vanilla sex – unlike real life, where most abusive relationships end with protective orders, blocked cellphone numbers, drawn-out court battles over children, or in the worst cases, death. The one thing the Fifty Shades plot has most in common with real-life abuse is its ability to present a psychological con as true love.”

Steiner says that one of the more confusing truths about Fifty Shades is “the way some women harbor stubborn fantasies about their power to heal a damaged man.”

I beg to differ about the confusing part. It’s not confusing. It’s the hook. It’s Beauty and the Beast. The handsome prince is rendered hideous by a wicked spell. Only true love can reverse the spell – heal him – and reveal his true nature.

In the case of Fifty Shades, Grey is already outwardly attractive: hot, handsome, musically gifted, and a billionaire to boot.

It isn’t his hotness and the kink that make the book so compelling to so many woman – okay, it is in part his hotness and the kink – it’s rather more his super-duper inner pained and damaged Beast that’s the draw. Along with Ana’s desire to heal him and her ultimate ability to do so, of course.

I do understand what Steiner is saying about the confusion. It’s the grafting of the kink onto this particular fairy tale that’s the psychological problem here.

The source of Grey’s desire for a certain kind of sexual relationship seems to come only from his place of pain and damage, and that’s where the line between dominance and abuse gets blurred.

A Dominant is a personality profile, one that is not shaped by an abusive childhood. The techniques of BDSM are all designed to heighten the pleasure of the submissive, which in turn is arousing to the Dominant.

Abused children grow up to be abusers. Abuse is not arousing.

Book I of my Forest Breeze trilogy, Tied Up (affiliate), is BDSM-inspired.

Nate, a Dominant, is a take-charge kind of guy, and his desire for control extends to his sexual practices. He has no personal history of abuse, and he is not an abuser. He also doesn’t need to be healed. If I were to identify the fairy tale arc of Tied-Up it would be Sleeping Beauty, since one of the plot lines is Sarah’s sexual awakening.

My medieval Simon’s Lady (affiliate) is a Beauty and the Beast story.

Simon is the farthest thing from a lady’s man one can imagine in King Stephen’s court. He’s forced into a marriage of political convenience with Gwyneth. He falls madly in love with her and yes, she saves him in the end. The sexual dynamic is one of love at first sight with lust not far behind. No BDSM.

So, it’s possible to have one – the Beauty and the Beast fairy tale and BDSM – without the other. Desirable, even, to have one without the other.

Steiner, a domestic abuse survivor, has a harrowing, enlightening TED talk on her experience. I hope she can further leverage the Fifty Shades phenomenon to keep spreading her message.

I don’t know to what extent Fifty Shades contributes to continuing misunderstandings of domestic abuse. I do know that most readers are able to distinguish fact from fiction.