Illouz refers to women’s mass culture as a self-help culture, and judging from Oprah fiction to women-focused magazines to women-focused talk shows and movies geared toward a female audience, it seems clear she is right. And this realm — where women are meant to work on their relationships, their bodies, their psyches — is where 50 Shades got its start. What’s most interesting about Illouz’s reading of women’s culture is her sense that self-help has been staged against any sort of collective consciousness: although we are encouraged to help ourselves, because we are women, we are not encouraged to help other women. Instead, self-help seems like a kind of masculinized competitiveness, in a different and more anxious mode. It is all about self-improvement, about the attainment of happiness, which comes through individual achievement, not any sort of political or societal improvement.
Illouz, who has been writing on this subject for years, in books like Why Love Hurts: A Sociological Explanation to Saving the Modern Soul: Therapy, Emotions, and the Culture of Self-Help to Oprah Winfrey and the Glamour of Misery, knows this is how you derail movements: by turning societal problems into individual failures. In this mode, the source of inequity turns into psychological inadequacy: it’s your daddy issues that are keeping you from finding a mate, not a generally hostile dating culture and conflicting messages about sex and love; it’s your personal chemical imbalance that keeps you depressed, not a very real and unhealthy shift in the way we manage our families, our communities, our cities.
Freedom thus becomes simply anxiety. We can be theoretically grateful for our freedom to select a career path, but we may experience that choice as mostly fear and stress. We may be grateful that we can select our own sexual partners now, but we may nevertheless experience that selection process as a list of things about our own bodies that we need to fix in order to achieve the right sexual partner. And where exactly does sexual freedom intersect with intimacy? What if I do manage to have it all — the great career, the family, the house in the suburbs, the husband — and I am still miserable? It’s in this context, Illouz suggests, that we should read 50 Shades, which directly engages with these questions and offers this relationship between the two protagonists as an ideal. All you have to do is model their behavior and you can have this for yourself! Illouz rightly labels the trilogy as self-help rather than fiction.
Neither of these books is about "50 Shades of Grey," not really. They are about the state of women. How, they ask, is feminism working for y
