THAT'S MEN: Submission is the fantasy of the powerful
THE OTHER evening I spotted three young women strolling along the street. One had her nose stuck in Fifty Shades of Grey and she was relying on her companions to keep her from straying into the traffic.
She seemed to be near the end of the book so I guess she was in a hurry to finish it and get onto the next volume. She had, I surmised, been dragged out of her comfort zone by her unsympathetic friends.
I’ve been too mean to buy Fifty Shades of Grey myself, even for research purposes, but thanks to the Daily Beast website I’ve been able to read some of the naughty bits.
That it is badly written hardly matters. What’s really interesting is that women, in suddenly deciding to openly buy and discuss erotic novels, are turning to stories of female submission.
It can be argued that most human beings have an innate need to submit – otherwise we wouldn’t follow the idiots we follow.
Back in the late 1930s the psychologist Henry Murray published a list of human needs which included, as you might expect, the need to be aggressive and to dominate. He categorised these as “power” needs. Interestingly, though, the power category also included abasement and deference.
This makes sense: if the need for aggression and domination existed without their opposites we would have torn ourselves apart by now. How could we have organised societies without abasement and deference on the part of large numbers of people?
The sort of dominance/ submission yarn that is Fifty Shades of Grey taps into basic human traits, needs and drives which we rarely think about but which determine much of what we do. And this genre of erotica includes stories of the submission of men as well as of women.
What is most significant about all of this, as far as I am concerned, is that women in the West were probably never more independent and less submissive than they are today. Why, then, should droves of them make Fifty Shades of Grey into a bestseller?
I think this is where the old psychological theory of projection comes into play. The theory suggests that we see in others characteristics that we ourselves possess but are unwilling to acknowledge.
So if I am unwilling to acknowledge my power as a person – perhaps it frightens me – I may idolise a leader in whom I see all the power I am afraid to see in myself.
The cliche of the adoring secretary is an example – she may be 10 times better able to run the organisation than her male boss but, denied permission to think of herself in this way, she sees her boss as charismatic, intelligent, capable and so on.
(If you get a chance to watch Twenty Twelve, the satirical series about the preparations for the London Olympics, you will see an excellent example of such a secretary).
But I don’t believe today’s women are projecting their power into the male characters in this spanking and babyoil saga. Women accept and acknowledge their own power – it isn’t an issue.
What they are projecting is an unwanted part of their personalities – namely the drive towards abasement and deference which is simply the other side of the human need for power and aggression, if Henry Murray got it right.
Oddly, then, the surge of female interest in erotic stories of sexual submission may be an outcome of the liberation of women. Instead of living as second class citizens, they act out of their own power and the old, unwanted submissiveness is exiled to sexy stories in books and movies.
That young woman walking along the street with her nose stuck in a book is a true daughter of the suffragettes and a living symbol of the success of feminism – whatever her pals might think.
You can read the extracts from the Fifty Shades trilogy at bit.ly/50shadesnaughtybits.
Padraig O’Morain (pomorain@ireland.com) is a counsellor accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. His book, Light Mind – Mindfulness for Daily Living, is published by Veritas. His monthly mindfulness newsletter is free by email.