This is an interesting time in publishing and other areas of the cultural industries, because the roles of gatekeepers are changing. Today, it is much easier to appeal to a niche audience than it was 10 years ago. Self-publishing is here to stay. Some people commend self-publishing as a great way to ensure that audiences can access a diversity of genres and voices that have traditionally been marginalized by mainstream publishers.
Others condemn it because of the lack of gatekeepers to assess the content being produced. A few consider it a get-rich-quick-scheme. However, these assumptions are based on a limited knowledge of contemporary self-publishing practices. The phenomenon of self-publishing is often linked to online book production methods, which allow authors to produce an ebook with a few strokes of the keyboard, making their work available to a global audience.
However, there is a much richer history of self-publishing that goes further back than its digital counterpart. A number of prominent authors started off by privately printing their work. Although self-publishing might appear as the new buzzword, it is not a novel phenomenon in the publishing industry.
Even though self-publishing was a practice some authors adopted in the 18th and 19th centuries, the distribution methods and number of copies were often limited. In the past 10 years, the phenomenon of self-publishing grew massively with the help of Amazon, Wattpad and other online publishing tools. The real game changer to self-publishing was Amazon when it introduced Kindle Direct Publishing in It became possible for authors to share their work worldwide through a convenient global distributor.
The thought depresses me. Although these kinds of desires can be related to other mental issues, the organization says in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders , merely having these desires does not justify clinical intervention.
With but a few swift strokes, he can get her to orgasm—loudly, frequently, in any position and any location—by intuiting what her body wants. Sex itself is portrayed as a comprehensive proxy for the emotions involved in their relationship. Fifty Shades eroticizes sexual violence, but without any of the emotional maturity and communication required to make it safe.
In the wake of numerous allegations of rape on college campuses— at Princeton , UNC Chapel Hill, the University of Michigan , and many more—school administrators, students, sexual-assault-prevention advocates, policymakers, and more have been having important conversations about what constitutes consent.
Particularly in booze-soaked college environments, full of relatively sexually inexperienced young people, what constitutes consent? Obviously, there are many clear-cut cases of sexual assault on campuses, and the people who commit those crimes deserve to be punished fully and harshly.
But the law is clearly limited in its ability to determine what healthy sexual norms are, much less establish them—especially in environments like colleges campuses, where most people are sexually and emotionally inexperienced. Sodomy, for example, was considered a felony in every state until , and until the Supreme Court ruled against sodomy bans in its decision in Lawrence v. Texas , it was still illegal in 14 states. Gushee also acknowledged the popularity of the Fifty Shades books within his community.
It somehow crossed the line to socially acceptable. According to several recent studies, what a lot of people want is to be dominated. A study of predominantly heterosexual, college-age men and women found that both sexes preferred fantasies of being dominated by the opposite sex, rather than dominating others themselves.
That last point is especially significant, given that a sexually explicit story about BDSM-ish sex is now making the transition from book to movie. In general, men watch porn and women read erotica, says Catherine Salmon, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Redlands who studies pornography. These kinds of images are much more familiar now—for both women and men. Feminists have long been divided on the question of whether this is good for women.
In the s, sex-positive feminists defended pornography as a form of free sexual expression, while others, like Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, argued that pornography inevitably represents and propagates violence against women—largely because it dehumanizes them. And if not, what is to be done with them? This is not an easy question, but the answer offered by Fifty Shades is insufficient. By and large, the conversation about sexuality in the liberal public sphere has become a conversation about individual rights and freedoms: the right not to be compelled to have sex without giving consent, the freedom to have sex in whatever way and with whichever partner you choose.
There are many benefits to a rights-and-freedoms approach to sexuality, but there are also drawbacks. On college campuses and elsewhere, not everyone fully understands and embraces the importance of consent—or gets the basics of sex.
And even when people have a sophisticated understanding of sex, American culture offers little to model healthy sexual encounters beyond the threshold of consent. Because the U. The characters negotiate line items, and she verbally agrees to many of the stipulations listed in the contract. We regret the error. Skip to content Site Navigation The Atlantic. Popular Latest.
The Atlantic Crossword. Sign In Subscribe. If I were a member of the Christian right, sitting on my front porch decrying the decadent morals of working American women, what would be most alarming about the Fifty Shades of Grey phenomena … is that millions of otherwise intelligent women are willing to tolerate prose on this level. The runaway success of Fifty Shades had forced the entire publishing industry to re-evaluate assumptions of what makes books sell.
What Fifty Shades — and more widely the whole self-publishing phenomenon of the last four or five years — has proved is that readers can have a completely different definition of good. It was important that publishing did not tell people what they should be reading for their own good, she said.
This is the public voting with its feet and saying this is the kind of thing we enjoy.
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