Please Leave Fifty Shades of Gray Alone

I understand the frustration. I regret that I made statements against the book without even reading it. Its popularity led to it getting unfair weight, so I understand the urge to correct that impression people are left with, many of whom don't or won't know much else about power exchange dynamics in a loving relationship, but I keep reading these posts about abuse and I'm reading that BDSM educators are leaving pamphlets for movie goers. It smacks of desperation. We're talking about a work of fiction. Fiction is different from real life, it's a representation, it can take any number of forms.

Here's a story Joseph Campbell told me. In an ancient human society, they used to bring out four or five virgin boys and one virgin girl. Under a rigged contraption of tree trunks, the boys would one by one have their first sexual relations with the girl. When the last coupling was in the act, the contraption would be sprung. The couple would be crushed, cooked, and eaten by the community. That's not fiction, that's true. So we have two choices when we hear that story. We can condemn that practice as barbaric, or we can consider it from a different perspective and recognize it as a need for those societies to make sense of what they think of the world through myths and through metaphorical enactments.

Fiction is a means of making sense of different things in a similar, much more innocuous way. If you see a relationship portrayed in a work of fiction and determine it to be abusive, you're not wrong but when you're telling everyone else they should find it abusive you absolutely are wrong, because you're putting your interpretation on other people. How do we expect anyone, maybe taking a risk by openly enjoying this book or this movie, to make sense of what they're experiencing through these fantasies enough to incorporate it into a real life enjoyment when they're being told they're doing it wrong before they even get started?

I doubt any practitioner of BDSM, however healthy and loving they feel their real life relationships are now or have been through the course of their adult lives, can say every fantasy construction of BDSM they've ever experienced in their minds would play out in real life in that same healthy and loving form. And even now I'm still playing that game of what's healthy and what's not. Who is to judge these things? It's never ceased to amaze me, since getting on fetlife--a site many people would judge shouldn't exist at all from their narrow perspective--the number of people who feel comfortable stating that this is acceptable but this isn't. This is a healthy relationship but this is abuse. We can't know what the experiences of other people are unless we are those people. Which isn't possible, so what's the point? And when people start in on fictional representations, they sound like people who don't have a grasp of the difference between fantasy and reality. And I don't mean to rant against them, because I understand why. They're protecting something that others have harshly judged. So, that's fine, but use this connection with people, this influx of interest, as an opening to communication instead of dishing out the same judgment.

The Story of My Two-Star Review

Let me start by clearly stating that readers have every right to post what they choose to post in reviews and how they choose to rate books they've bought and taken the time to read. I would never and will never publicly comment on a reader review.

Professional reviews (and when I say professional I mean books received for free which leads to compensation in the form of exposure for a review site and/or the reviewer who in many cases is also an author with books for sale) ought to aim for a high level of objectivity. This is a difficult skill to acquire. Anyone who's had their work critiqued by fellow writers will probably tell you there are some talented writers whose critiques are primarily focused on pointing out how your work fails in being the story they wanted to read instead of how it could be improved in being the story you wanted to write. Truthfully I'm not sure how well reviewers accomplish this, I simply am aware the skill is difficult to acquire and how rare it is among critiquers, which leads me to guess there are reviewers who fail to meet a high standard of objectivity in reviews. As an author of femdom novels, which are generally less comfortably received, I am highly selective about sending my books out for review. I prefer to rely on generous readers who bought copies wanting the kind of book they knew they were getting and their reviews, which have been not numerous but favorable. I'd rather do that than send books out for review that would land in the laps of reviewers who would never by choice read a femdom novel, and then be left to hope in their ability to review objectively a book not to their specific taste.

I stumbled onto another option when I found a reviewer who stated in his review policy that he only reviewed books he felt comfortable rating three stars or higher. His stated reason was that it was a conflict of interest to rate fellow authors' books poorly when he had books of his own for sale. An admirable position, but for me it was appealing because it would prevent a reviewer reacting negatively to the nature of the relationship between my dominant heroine and her submissive lover, the portrayal of which is uncomfortable for some.

I contacted him with free review copies of both Courting Her and Serving Her, books recently released in tandem by my publisher, Pink Flamingo. He messaged back with a two-and-a-half star review, which included some legitimate criticisms but primarily was a judgment of the characters under the guise of a review. Kimberly was described as selfish, a psychopath, and I was told that the characters should switch, occasionally, or the relationship they engaged in was a form of abuse. He cited from Serving Her, the follow up book to Courting Her, a part where Kimberly observes the dynamic between a neighboring couple, perceives the man as too dominant in that relationship, and upon leaving a visit with them informs Alex she needs to spank him to feel better.

The reviewer defined feminism for me as equality between the sexes. If Kimberly is meant to be a feminist, it's news to her creator, the author. She's a fledgling female supremacist. She perceives misogyny in the world around her, is frustrated by it, and punishes her male submissive lover to alleviate that frustration. Is that fair? I would say no, it's not. I would say that's a flaw in her. Probably so would Alex. Rather than decry her for it, Alex enjoys supporting her by helping her work through it, by enduring punishments. Men enjoy women inventing less valid reasons for delivering punishment for enjoyment's sake. Alex is not complaining when Kimberly contrives reasons to punish him.

Kimberly has a chip on her shoulder. I know that. Alex knows that. I find her more interesting because of that; Alex finds her more courageous because she emerged with that weight from a misogynist influence to become the dominant woman he loves and adores, flaws and all. Now this reviewer caught that but rather than consider what that meant about their relationship, he went straight to assuming writer error. A reviewer completely airballing on the core interplay between two characters in a book and then reviewing it poorly is unfortunate for everyone and exactly what a review policy of only reviewing books if comfortable enough to review them three stars or higher would have avoided had the reviewer adhered to his own stated policy.

The books individually did well enough, were enjoyed by enough readers, that my publisher, Pink Flamingo, packaged them together and made them available at a better value, combined, as Ebooks and paperbacks. The two-star review remains attached to it despite my reminders to the reviewer about our agreed upon arrangement. That's unfortunate but is unlikely to affect sales. The people who are comfortable with themselves reading these books, the people who are comfortable with themselves writing them, are fully aware that there are people who are uncomfortable with them reading (or writing) these books and don't particularly care, would prefer those people not act sanctimonious. They're aware that books like this might have a poor review or two that aren't a reflection of the books' quality but a reflection of the reviewers' bias. So the books will still sell the same. They might lose one, here or there, which is sad. Sad for the reader who might have found a book to love and sad for the writer who might have lost an opportunity to connect with that reader. Reviews are meant to connect us. That doesn't mean they all have to be good reviews, that wouldn't work either, but they ought to be objective and in this case the review wasn't.

Worse there are people who aren't fully comfortable purchasing and reading books they enjoy on these subjects and are potentially upset by a judgment on their reading tastes disguised as a review. Slam my writing and I'll keep quiet. Attack my characters for their lifestyle and I'll defend them with everything in me. By defining feminism he clearly revealed his bias that books should portray his idea of feminism. It's hard to be objective but reviewers have to be held to a standard so that they strive to write and post reviews void of these judgments. When negative reviews lack objectivity and are essentially rants against a certain lifestyle choice characters have made they're far closer to a form of censorship.

(If you don't think this happens, some time read some of the one-star reviews of Freedom by Jonathan Franzen, arguably among the great prose writers of the day. Most of them are complaints about the ideology presented in the book. Now a complaint that a novel is too loaded with ideology is perfectly valid. A complaint about a specific ideology is useless to include in a review; it's a reviewer getting up on his or her soap box and spouting an irrelevant opinion, a clear bias.)

Start the review with 'This is a type of relationship of which I don't approve but' and then when you're done take out the 'This is a type of relationship of which I don't approve but' and hit post, because no one cares about your approval.

I'm not making this personal. The reviewer will be easy enough to find as long as the review remains posted. If he wants his name out of it, he can remove the review. By his own review policy, it never should have gone up. I doubt he will. He ignored my last message and unfriended me. He seems to have successfully rationalized violating his stated review policy, for these books, how I couldn't tell you. The explanation he gave me defied logic, in my opinion. I certainly won't miss his friendship. I would like for him to have kept his word and acted like a professional.

In one of our exchanges he mentioned that he could maybe edit the review and go to three stars. So was it two stars or three? Apparently three with my consent and two without it. Clearly this shows a lack of integrity in the review. It occurred to me that giving the go ahead to the three-star review would probably lead to good exposure. A dominant woman being described as "too selfish" is a fairly typical comment from a world deeply influenced by misogyny, and would have been unlikely to deter femdom readers. It wasn't about the stars, for me. Stars mean little. It was the biased attack on the characters that led me to thank him for the time he put into reading the books but that I thought we should move forward. I didn't want my books to become an opportunity for a reviewer to get on a pulpit and preach against a lifestyle some people engage in and enjoy and many other people enjoy having portrayed in the fiction they read.  

I don't expect writers to be on my side on this. It's deeply ingrained in us to keep quiet about reviews, but in this specific case, a clearly stated review policy was violated, essentially it was a breach of contract. I won't be kept silent by an internet bully. My concern is if speaking out hurts sales and my publishers, who invest time and money making my books available to readers in hopes of turning a profit to keep their business running. I'd be tempted to keep quiet for them, but I answer to a personal code of ethics above all. And the posting of this review was an injustice.

The books in question can be found here, for sale on Amazon, in paperback and Ebook form:  

http://amzn.com/1938897471

Both remain for sale individually, as well, in only Ebook form. At the Pink Flamingo site, both are available individually in paperback and as Ebooks.