Why Self-Sufficiant Women Fantasize About Sexual Submission

As many of you know, I'm in the process of writing my first erotic fiction novel so it seems fitting that I weigh in on the subject that everybody, and I mean everybody else is weighing in on: the success of the Fifty Shades Of Grey trilogy. When it comes to Fifty Shades there are several angles worth examining. There's the whole fan fiction angle (Fifty Shades started as a Twilight fan fiction and was then rewritten without the vampire element) and there's the self-publishing angle, and the ereaders-have-inadvertently-further-popularized-erotica angle and so on. But the thing that has generated the most media attention is the why-are-so-many-women-into-a-story-that-depicts-female-submission angle.  While Fifty Shades may currently be the most popular of the genre, the theme can be found in the majority of erotica aimed to attract female readers. Some have called it Mommy-Porn, the suggestion being that this is the kind of thing middle aged stay-at-home moms are reading to spice up their otherwise mundane lives. The problem with that description (aside from its inherent condescension) is that a lot of the people reading this book series are twenty-somethings. They're not always mommys. They're frequently not married, their career oriented and their lives are not even close to being boring (and to be fair, there are some pretty wild and crazy stay-at-home moms out there too).

So why are these interesting women, living interesting lives, fantasizing about being tied to the bed?

The answer can be summed up in two words: It's easier.



Women today don't put their lives in the hands of the men they're involved with. 50% of adults are now single, 33% of adults live alone. According to the last census, there are 13.7 million single parents in America today and in 84% of the cases the custodial parent is a mom. What all this means is that women are frequently the primary or ONLY breadwinner in their home. They're making their own career decisions, they're walking into the dealerships and buying their own cars, they're dealing with their own home repair work, they're picking their own healthcare plans and if they have a kid they're making all the important decisions for that kid as well (what school will he go to, what doctor will he see, what financial provisions need to be made to get him through should something happen to mom and so on). There is no one to delegate to. No one to pick up the dry cleaning when we have to stay late at work.  No one to research which car gets the best gas milage and has the best saftey record. That's all on us. And there are some great advantages to having so much control. We get to pick which vacation spots we're going to. We get to decide on every detail of our home decor. We get to decide if we're eating brussel sprouts for dinner or Oreos. There is no need to compromise, placate or share the remote.

But having all that responsibility can also be stressful and overwhelming. Down time can be limited. Yes, we get to claim exclusive credit for every success but we also have to exclusively own every failure. It's a lot.

So is it really so odd that so many of us want to let somebody else make the decisions once we get into the bedroom? We, by necessity and desire, try to control almost every aspect of our lives.  Let somebody else control the sex part. Most of us would rather die than allow a man to tell us what friends we can hang out with, what kind of job we can have, what kind of books we can read and so on.  But we're more than happy to let them tell us what position to take once we're in our lingerie. Think of it as getting a good back massage. If you have to tell your masseuse exactly where the knots are and how to get them out that's okay but if that masseuse can just use her experience and skills to find the knots and masterfully massage them out without you saying a damn word that's better.

Of course Fifty Shades takes this concept to the extreme. Fantasies, by their very nature, are all about extremes. People don't fantasize about winning $50,000. They fantasize about winning $50,000,000. When people fantasize about eating anything they want without gaining a pound they fantasize about eating chocolate cake every night. But if we all did have miracle metabolisms we'd realize that even chocolate cake can become unappealing when eaten in excess. But the reality doesn't affect the fantasy.

And the great thing about sex is that, assuming you can truly trust your partner (and that's essential for ANY of this to work), it's the one place where it's safe and acceptable to live the fantasy without it screwing up the rest of your life. It's riding a roller-coaster vs. jumping out of a plane. You get the thrill of falling with the assurance that you get to walk away unscathed.

In the bedroom most women want men to be men in the most stereotypical sense of the word and in turn many of us want to be women in the most stereotypical sense. This is obviously a generalization. Some women don't want this at all, most women want to switch it up every once in a while (see the chocolate cake analogy) and a very select few want to be submissive all the time (in and out of the bedroom).  But don't be shocked that liberated, proudly self-sufficiant women have submission fantasies. It's not about lack of liberation or strength. It's about the thrill that comes when you finally, for a short time, are allowed to give up control.

And, not to put too fine a point on it, it's the exhilaration of riding a theme park thrill ride knowing that you eventually get to...um...get off and then get back to your day-to-day life which you truly love.


Kyra Davis 
Bestselling Author of:
The Sophie Katz Murder Mystery Series, 
and 
SO MUCH FOR MY HAPPY ENDING
Purchase Vanity, Vengeance & A Weekend In Vegas now for only $3.99!

The Immortality of Maurice Sendak

 
I sort of hate that I have two memorial blog pots in a row but it seems like the last 8 days have been a period of loss. First it was Adam Yauch (MCA of the Beastie Boys), then Wednesday we lost Vidal Sassoon, a man who raised himself up from abject poverty to incredible success due to his talent, creativity and marketing genius, revolutionized the hair industry and donated an enormous amount of money to charities. 

But today it's Maurice Sendak whom I want to honor.

It's hard to imagine there's a human being in this country over four who hasn't experienced a Maurice Sendak book. Where The Wild Things Are is what he's best known for but there are so many more stories to choose from. In The Night Kitchen, Outside Over There and so on. What I loved most about the books when I was a kid (and perhaps even now, as an adult) were the illustrations. They were sometimes dark, sometimes fantastical, and always enthralling. When I hear Sendak's name it's those images that come to mind first.

But although I did thoroughly enjoy his books as a kid it's the man himself that I grew to love. Over the last two or three years I've seen a handful of interviews he's done and I adore his irreverence, his complete rejection of the whole PC mindset, his nonconformist ways and I'm delighted that it was his refusal to conform that made his books so successful. Sendak gave us wild frolicking monsters rather than cutsie animals marching to a tame beat. He gave us kids who ran around naked in their dreams with pots on their heads rather than uniformed children learning to do their chores. He rejected the utopian depictions of childhood life in favor of stories that showed childhood as a time where fear and laughter, insecurity and audacity, independence and need all go hand in hand. Before I started watching those interviews I hadn't spent a lot of time thinking about what kind of man Sendak was and I hadn't picked up one of his books in ages. But those interviews made me realize that there may have been a subtext to his books that I either missed as a child or (more likely) understood but didn't bother to analyze. Which is how it's supposed to be. Children know how they feel, they don't have to over-think it. Sendak understood that and he expressed that understanding in his books in a way that children continue to understand and love. And instead of trying to break it down for a thesis paper we, as children, just pick the books back up and reread them again and again.

The way it's supposed to be.

So thank you Maurice Sendak. Thank you for being a nonconformist. Thank you for being true to your artistic vision despite all the naysayers. Thanks for being you. Although you may have passed on your legacy ensures that you will be with us in a very real way every single day.

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Kyra Davis Bestselling Author of:
The Sophie Katz Murder Mystery Series, 
and 
SO MUCH FOR MY HAPPY ENDING
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Goodbye MCA, Thanks For The Smiles

A lot has happened in the world during the last few days. France has elected a president who wants to take the country (and continent) in a new direction. Greece, which has been in dire straits for a long time now, has elected a cluster-f**k of extremists thereby proving the old adage "It can always be worse," Putin is no longer pretending that he's not the only real person in charge of Russia, Syria is holding a farce of an election, blind chinese dissidents are suddenly on everybody's radar and...well, the list goes on and on.

But I'm going to leave all that to the political pundits, human rights activists and economists. What I want to talk about is the great loss the world experienced on Friday, the loss of The Beastie Boys' MCA.

I know MCA's death doesn't even compare with the tragedy of what's happening to Syrian protesters or anything but the fact is that the Beastie Boys have been a part of most of our lives for decades now. I distinctly remember blasting them and Offspring at college parties. But while Offspring is now making a comeback, the Beastie Boys never left. From the moment they told us to fight for our right to party they have been hot. They were on my radio when I got my first car at 16. They were on my radio during my college years, their new releases were playing while I was planning my wedding, and also when I was filing for divorce. They were coming out with new hits when my son started kindergarten, when I was getting my first book deal and so on and so forth. Everyone between the ages of 12 and 50 thinks of the Beastie Boys as a band of their generation. If you think about it, that's pretty amazing. And I think their secret is that their music is just inherently fun. Not only is it catchy, clever in it's incorporation of bits of AC/DC and Led Zeppelin and cool to rock out to but their sense of humor is clearly present in each one of their singles. They never take themselves too seriously and that just makes us love them more. They don't have to be musical geniuses, they just have to make us smile. And they always do.

Saturday I went through yet another break-up (with the same person I've broken up with two times before...long, pathetic story). I went to my friend Robin's house to lament my state of affairs. She listened and said all the things friends are supposed to say in such situations; you know, the girlfriend-standby line:  "You're 100% right and he's totally crazy" Always good to hear regardless of the details of the situation. But it was what she did next that turned the day around for me. She pulled out an old Beastie Boys' CD and blasted it...and I mean blasted it at a nightclub/frat-party volume and she danced with me. We spent at least a half hour or more dancing around her living room screaming. "No sleep till Brooklyn!" and "Listen all of y'all it's sabotage!" and...well, you know the songs.

And suddenly the day wasn't so bad. It was silly and fun. As they had so many times in the past, Mike D, Ad-Rock and MCA made me smile.

So yes, I realize the loss of MCA doesn't qualify as a global crisis but I and so many others owe them for providing us much needed distraction from the world and its problems (as well as the problems of our own personal life).

MCA, you will be dearly missed.


Kyra Davis
 Bestselling Author of:
The Sophie Katz Murder Mystery Series, 
and 
SO MUCH FOR MY HAPPY ENDING

Purchase the $3.99 ebook of Vanity, Vengeance & A Weekend In Vegas today!