“Fifty Shades of Grey” sparks marketing mania (Reuters)

Thanks to its inclusion in a My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic online video anthology, I’ve had the Lonely Island’s song “Threw It on the Ground” stuck in my head on and off for about a week. (Let me add here, as an aside, that I’m majorly bummed that I couldn’t make the pony con that’s going on in Ohio this weekend.) As I teach and encourage my students to question their assumptions, and not to let those who have power over them use that power unquestioned, I’m always conscious of the fact that I myself have power over them, as much as I work to disperse that power and empower my students to take charge of their education. Even though I openly encourage them to question my own authority — up to and including interrupting me to let me know if what I’m doing is boring them — I have to be aware of the fact that I’m encouraging them to question the system while I, myself, am part of the system. There’s been a grand tradition of parodying that sort of thing in popular media, and I think that’s why “Threw It on the Ground” has been a bit of an earworm for me lately, because here I am as a teacher saying, in effect, “You can’t trust the system” as a refrain in my classes.

This next week I’ll be discussing Lenny Bruce with them, in particular his use of racial and ethnic slurs, as a way of introducing the concept of linguistic relativity to them. I wasn’t introduced to this concept until relatively late in my academic career, and it can be a hard concept to grasp, but it’s something that the students can’t help but have a good deal of practical experience in before they come to my class. We’re kind of past the generation that was influenced so heavily by Chappelle’s Show, but the n-word hardly disappeared from popular culture along with Dave Chappelle years ago. Not only does exploring linguistic relativity help them relate to issues of language in their own lives — the words they’re not supposed to say for whatever reason — but it also helps them see more of the power dynamics in their lives that we’re not usually that conscious of, in terms of who controls public discourse and who gets to say whether or not a word or phrase should be verboten in certain communities.

Lenny Bruce was kind of before my parents’ time, so I wasn’t exposed to him like I was to George Carlin, and in general I’m not as well-versed in Bruce’s era as I am in what came afterwards, simply from what’s come down to me through my parents. However, you’ve probably guessed that I know a fair deal about one of Bruce’s counterculture contemporaries, Bettie Page. The fetish modeling Page did with Irving Klaw and Bunny Yeager was not only groundbreaking, but I can’t think of many other things that were as important in the development of kink culture and the kink community. Although Page was kind of subsumed into a broader swath of popular culture in the 1990s, and remains a solid influence there (just take a good look at Progressive Insurance’s Flo character), she still casts a larger shadow over the kink community. There’s a whole subculture within kink that’s devoted to the Page/Klaw/Yeager era, searching out vintage lingerie of the time and recreating the atmosphere that surrounded their work.

Over my lifetime I’ve seen public tolerance of kink grow a fair bit, although a distinction has to be made there between popular culture co-opting elements of kink and people being tolerant of kink. Certainly there had to have been a rise in the number of people doing kinky explorations when Madonna went through her Sex/Erotica phase, but it’s only been in recent years that it feels like there’s been a real breakthrough with issues of tolerance and acceptance. I think the portrayal of kink as a potentially healthy activity, started with Secretary  and continuing to a lesser extent in other media, is playing a big part in that. Certainly tolerance and acceptance are positive things on the whole, but as the marketing blitz around 50 Shades of Grey intensifies, and there are all these mainstream outlets opening up for kink, it’s hard not to miss some aspects of what it was like to be a part of the kink community in ages past.

Although the Internet obviously made all forms of erotica much more accessible, there was a period around the turn of the millennium, when digital cameras really started taking off, that you really saw a revolution in erotica, when both the technology and the distribution methods became accessible to a wide swath of people; Suicide Girls is probably the most well-known example of the sort of sites that came out then. There’s hardly been a major downturn in erotica production in recent years, but as advanced technologies become more accessible and affordable, it’s harder to find the “indie spirit” that pervaded so much of erotica and kink ten years ago. It’s kind of similar to how there’s been this big turn away from traditional recording methods in music in recent years, since every desktop computer that’s sold today comes with the capacity to record and layer music at a highly advanced levels. The days of teenagers laying tracks down on a four-channel recorder are gone now, and that realization is probably a good part of the reason I don’t go out searching for new music to listen to these days.

This coming November will mark the ten-year anniversary of the first class on kink safety I ever taught, and that field has changed dramatically in the past decade. In the past five years kink groups have opened their doors like they never could before, and my friends who do kink education are now basically handling themselves no differently than educators in other fields in how they present themselves to potential bookers and audiences. It’s become incredibly professionalized, and while there was a lot of that kind of thinking going on ten or twenty years ago among kink presenters, now it’s very formal and there isn’t much of an “indie” scene left except for those who present in “vanilla” (non-kinky) forums. With the hubbub around 50 Shades of Grey not showing any signs of diminishing soon, I have to believe that this trend will only continue.

On the whole it’s hard to be critical of the advantages of increased tolerance of kink, but on top of the safety concerns that come with so many new people trying all these risky activities, there’s still this temptation to romanticize what it was like to have both feet firmly across the counterculture line and be proud to be set apart like that. It’s hardly like the ladies of The View are going to start modeling the latest fashions in ballgags on their show — although I know some people who’d appreciate that — but as 50 Shades of Grey continues to be such a large part of our contemporary culture, identifying as a kinky person becomes a little less special every day. (Yes, there is the whole “I was into X before X was cool” hipster dynamic, but I try to shy away from that sort of thing.)

Still, I have to take a look at myself here and the things I do. I’m still hoping to get The Prostitutes of Lake Wobegon published my a mainstream publishing house, even though all the technology I need to publish and market it myself is right here in front of me as I type this. I get a feeling this shows that I shouldn’t be thinking so much about counterculture and trying to identify as outside of the mainstream. I know that it’s possibly to change things from within to work better for those on the outside (as well as the inside), and there’s nothing glorious in rebelling for its own sake, but maybe I shouldn’t trust myself on issues like these. After all, I am a part of the system. Man.