A PROFESSOR has written an academic analysis of the Fifty Shades of Grey phenomenon, finding that — despite containing “some of the worst writing I have ever seen and a plot that made my toenails curl” — the erotic novel “is less pornographic than it is a self-help book”.

Eva Illouz, sociology professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and president of the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, has just published her academic treatise Hard-Core Romance with the University of Chicago Press. The text, said the publisher, sees Illouz argue that EL James’s novels are “a gothic romance adapted to modern times in which sexuality is both a source of division between men and women and a site to orchestrate their reconciliation”, and that their graphic descriptions of bondage, discipline and sadomasochism are “as much a cultural fantasy as a sexual one, serving as a guide to a happier romantic life”.

Illouz, who is also the author of seven other books, was unimpressed with the quality of Fifty Shades — “I was speechless. It contained some of the worst writing I have ever seen and a plot that made my toenails curl,” she writes — but wanted to investigate why a trilogy of erotic novels about the sadomasochistic relationship between a domineering billionaire and a shy student has sold more than 40m copies around the world.

It’s a dramatic shift since Kate Chopin’s 1899 story of a married woman who discovers sexual desire with a lover, The Awakening, was greeted with “general moral disgust” on publication, Illouz points out. “That a soft pornographic novel dealing with the intense absorption of two individuals in sadomasochistic sexuality could become such a worldwide bestseller a mere 100 years after The Awakening gives us a glimpse at the immense change in values that must have occurred in western culture — as dramatic a change, one might say, as electricity and indoor plumbing”.

Bestsellers, writes Illouz, “are likely to be texts that encode problematic social conditions — that is, social conditions that threaten individuals’ capacity to pursue certain central goals, be they satiety, happiness, or material wealth”. In James’s case, the storyline of Fifty Shades “stages many of the aporias of the sexual relationships between men and women”, she believes, with the sadomasochistic relationship at its heart “both a symbolic solution for and a practical technique to overcome these aporias”.

And the book, she finds, is “less pornographic than it is a self-help book”. “Pornographic texts are intended explicitly to arouse sexually, usually, a male and solitary viewer,” she writes. “Fifty Shades, on the other hand, is written assuming the presence of a partner. The sexual scenes are not written to arouse the eye but meant to instruct men and women on inventive and efficient ways to improve their sexual pleasure.”A “caricatural version of a gothic romance”, the academic writes, Fifty Shades manages to intertwine “a commentary on the deprived condition of love and sexuality, a romantic fantasy, and self- help instructions on how to improve that life”.

“It encodes the aporias of heterosexual relationships, offers a fantasy for overcoming these aporias, and functions as a self-help sexual manual. This threefold movement of the narrative explains, at least partly, why it became a far-reaching bestseller,” writes Illouz.

The Millions called Illouz’s release the “first serious, book-length academic analysis” of Fifty Shades, while an essay in the New Republic by the author William Giraldi said that the sociologist had rightly described the trilogy as a species of self-help.

“If that’s true, and if you consider how lucrative the self-help racket is in our land, then what the commercial coup of Fifty Shades reveals about us is this: we’re an infirm, ineffectual tribe still stuck in some sort of larval stage,” wrote Giraldi. “Do I really expect Americans to sit down with Adam Bede or Clarissa after all the professional and domestic hurly-burly of their day? Do I expect them to appreciate the sexually terroristic satires of Sade, or the erogenous verse of Sappho and Catullus, or Nicholson Baker’s comical romp Vox? Pardon me, but yes I do.”

—By arrangement with the Guardian

Published in Dawn, May 29th, 2014