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Communication and Sexual Self-help: Erotica, Kink and The Fifty Shades of Grey Phenomenon

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Abstract

The success of the Fifty Shades trilogy signifies more than an uncovering of Bondage, Dominance/Discipline, Sadism/Submission, and Masochism sexual practices to widestream public audiences. It reflects a shift in values—what we value as a society, what we desire and fantasize about, how we talk about sex, what kinds of sexual practices we want to read about, experiment with, and watch. The underlying premise of sexual self-help in Fifty Shade’s helped it become one of the most widely read and discussed texts in generations. As the therapeutic ethos demands: If individuals have difficulty maintaining an exciting sex life, it must be their fault. People often turn to self-help to guide them. The sexual scripts in Fifty Shades provided women with these self-help tools. The ways that the Fifty Shades trilogy provide communicative sexual self-help and how that contributed to its explosive success are explored in this manuscript.

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  1. Northeastern University, Boston, USA

    Carey Noland

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  1. Carey Noland
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Correspondence to Carey Noland.

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Noland, C. Communication and Sexual Self-help: Erotica, Kink and The Fifty Shades of Grey Phenomenon. Sexuality & Culture 24, 1457–1479 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119-020-09701-z

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