A while back you mentioned how Stephanie Meyer handled 50 Shades of Grey being an altered fanfiction of Twilight is not how you would have handled it. How would you feel if you were in Meyer's position and why?
First, let me give credit where credit is due and say I think Stephenie Meyer handled the 50 Shades news with incredible grace and courtesy. I have a lot--a lot--of problems with her as a writer, but I can honestly say that as a person she seems genuinely sweet, at least based on what I know of her.
With that said: I am not as sweet as Stephenie Meyer.
To start, Meyer is a Mormon, and the Mormon views on family, sex, etc. are very different and far more conservative than I think a lot of Americans are today. So I’m sure it came as a massive shock to hear “oh yes, by the way, someone wrote three books’ worth of very bad, hardcore kink smut about your characters.” For me, the “three books’ worth” and the “hardcore kink smut” wouldn’t be the hard parts to digest. Human beings have spent their entire existence watching other human beings have sex as a form of foreplay. Our closest genetic relatives, the bonobo monkeys, still do. So: it’s whatever. So is the concept of kink. My general take on it is “if everyone involved is breathing, human, adult, and consenting, go for it.”
No, for me it’s the “very bad” part.
E.L. James is actually proud of the fact that she did no research on BSDM for her ongoing tree genocide. She didn’t even look at a Wikipedia page. Never talked to kinksters, never thought critically about what Christian and Anastasia were doing. For me, this is a fine and uneasy line, and I still haven’t fully figured it out in my own mind: on one hand, I don’t expect someone writing BDSM to actually go to a dungeon and get spanked. God knows I’ve written about a lot of stuff I’ve never actually done. Right now I’m writing a story where the main character is a computer hacker and I’m personally lucky if I can check my email without breaking it. On the other hand, I also expect that if you’re writing about a subject that could do real people real harm--like drug use or sexually risky behavior or urban exploring--that you should do so responsibly, which means doing your research and portraying it in a balanced way. Like, you wanna write Edward and Bella getting down with whips and chains? Go for it. What-the-fuck-ever. Hell, they’re vampires. If you want to write shit that is extremely unsafe in real life, start your fic by having one of them comment that safe, sane, and consensual is a motto whose first two tenets are open to a lot of interpretation for dead people. Get creative. This is what fiction is for. But don’t go out there writing straight-up abuse--and that is what 50 Shades is, it is literally a handbook to abusing your partner and hiding behind a kink community--and call it kink.
For me, the line was crossed when she chose to go to print and still refused to do any research. The result is that she proudly put out an abuse manual, set back the fanfiction community by a good 15 years, and didn’t even credit the original author as inspiration until the fact that it was originally a fanfiction was leaked.
So, yeah. I would not be as sweet, or as kind, as Stephenie Meyer. If I inspired you, rad! But if you’re using my work as a springboard for abuse and being arrogant and horrible about it? Yeah, no. Miss me with that shit.
