Fifty shades of feminist sneering at mummy porn

IN other big news, it turns out that plenty of women like kinky sex. At the end of a day's work, be it in a sleek city office, a factory or a hairdressing salon, when children have been bathed and are in bed, millions of women are fantasising about having their wrists tied together and having their bottoms slapped. Even whipped.

Hence the extraordinary success of Fifty Shades of Grey, a record-breaking tale of love and bondage in the Red Room of Pain, where a broodingly handsome Christian Grey educates young college student Anastasia Steele about her blossoming sexual appetite.

Almost as entertaining as the book has been the reaction to the book's success from a group of feminists. Like modern-day versions of the critics who were shocked by the sex scenes and dirty words in Lady Chatterley's Lover, these latter-day puritans are censorious about every detail of Fifty Shades of Grey. They mock the author, the S&M scenes in the book, the love story and, most of all, the book's millions of readers.

Many of these critics, educated in women's studies courses to critically analyse every aspect of modern life, see no irony in their paternalistic reactions. Their sneering attitude towards "mummy porn" is yet another reminder that feminism lost its legitimacy when it started censoring, rather than supporting, the full range of women's choices.

For these angry feminists, the greatest sin of Fifty Shades of Grey is to make erotica, the polite word for porn, mainstream. Seriously mainstream. So mainstream that it is now the fastest selling book of all time and topping bestseller lists. The book, written by E. L. James, a middle-aged mother of two and former television executive, is the first in a trilogy that has sold more than four million copies in Britain on top of 15 million books in the US and Canada. First published as an ebook in Australia, the later paperback version has also sold in droves.

Raging commercial success is a turn-off for many of the book's critics. For them, only pretentious porn books such as The Sexual Life of Catherine M. and art-house porn movies such as Secretary are acceptable. Even these niche porn offerings must be entrusted only to enlightened students and trusted teachers of women's studies.

Porn for the masses is as harmful as Coca-Cola; it ought to be banished from shops as bad for our health. Like Coke drinkers, your average consumer of female porn cannot be trusted to know what is good for her.

Honestly, you couldn't make this stuff up. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, writing in London's The Independent newspaper earlier this month, said that after reading the book, "I washed my hands with anti-bacterial soap, but couldn't cleanse my mind of rising rage and desolation. James has sheathed hard porn in a soft summer wrap, sold fantasies of sexual subjugation to vacuous yummie mummies and middle-class female singletons who are clueless about its implications."

Traumatised by the skyrocketing sales of bondage toys since the book's publication, Alibhai-Brown puts the success of Fifty Shades down to a sinister plot to subjugate women.

Women's liberty has challenged the "natural order" of things, she says in all seriousness, so women need to be reminded of their place by submitting to the sexual desires of men.

Dear Yasmin, your highly strung theory might even explain why men like a bit of S&M. But how does this half-baked argument explain why millions of women are happily reading about a young woman who plays the submissive role in the bedroom to the point of pain and, yes, sexual exhilaration? In the end, poor Yasmin has only one answer. She throws her copy of Fifty Shades on a pile of rubbish in her garden. "To be burnt," she writes. The last time she burned anything in protest was when she burned her "black lace bra, back in the 1970s".

Sadly, arguments filled with more emotion than reason are not restricted to the outdated 70s strain of feminism. Writing on the Fifty Shades of Feminist Criticism blog, Gabrielle Perez describes herself as "a social justice activist (and) a 'Fourth-Wave' feminist".

Two waves on from the bra-burning Yasmin, Perez wants to learn more about the book's author, James. When she is unable to find any information about James's educational background Perez is flummoxed. "Cause for alarms", she writes. You see where this is going. Perhaps James is uneducated; maybe she didn't go to university.

To be sure, James's prose can be worse than corny. But then this is porn, right? The snobbery of so many feminist critics may explain why the rest of us steer clear of the F-label. A few minutes a day fantasising about a little bottom spanking is harmless fun.

And the success of James's books suggests that she understands women much better than does a "social activist" or a bra-burning, book-burning columnist at The Independent.

It is more than passing curious that a certain group of men is equally confounded by the astounding sales of the Fifty Shades books. If you listened to ABC radio these past few weeks, you would have heard a few prominent metrosexual-type male radio hosts sound genuinely perplexed, asking, "Do women really like this kind of stuff?" Like feminists, the more these metrosexual men try to understand women, the less they really do. Like feminists, these metrosexual types seem bewildered by the thought that women might like to fantasise about being bound so tight, the ties leave marks on her body.

"It's sexy," says Anastasia as she stares at the woven indentation around her wrists.

In fact, the confusion among metrosexual types is no surprise given that the metrosexual male is best seen as a by-product of feminism. When enough women started to treat masculinity with disdain, it only made sense that many men who live and work with these women would adapt to the new surrounds.

The more politically correct the place, the more metrosexual the men who work there. This species thrives at our very PC ABC radio, where the real ball-breakers have long been women.

Alas, as iconoclast and author Camille Paglia has argued, when hectoring feminists neutered masculinity, they also wrecked sex. In the real world, sex is a very un-PC pursuit. Where raw masculinity still survives, you find "the reality of sex", writes Paglia, "of male lust and women being aroused by male lust. It attracts women. It doesn't repel them."

For the TV version of this inconvenient truth, try Girls, a new series about a group of winsome 20-something, post-Sex and the City girls in New York. One of the characters, Marnie, moans about her boyfriend Charlie, who is so busy respecting her, "he looks right past me and everything I need from him". It turns out she needs a sweaty session in bed, not clueless respect.

Drawing on the same show, author Kate Roiphe wrote in Newsweek recently that the success of Fifty Shades might show that "equality is something we want only sometimes and in some places and in some arenas; it may be that power and all of its imperatives can be boring". As Roiphe writes, "It is perhaps inconvenient for feminism that the erotic imagination does not submit to politics." In fact, it's not just our sexual fantasies that won't be tamed by feminism. The deliciously complicated, frustratingly messy truth about women's preferences -- be they about work, babies, men, sex or, for that matter, books -- has never conformed to feminist orthodoxy, whatever wave the feminists may have been riding. Long may that be so.