If you’ve missed our Fifty Days of Fifty Shades event until now, you can learn more about it and our giveaway here!

The fourth section of Fifty Writers on Fifty Shades of Grey that we’ll be sharing quotes with you from is all about BDSM in the trilogy. We’ll update this post on November 2 with quotes from the eleven essays from the BDSM section. You can also catch the quotes daily on our Tumblr and Fifty Writers Facebook page.

Learn more about the fourth giveaway:

Until midnight CST on November 2, you can enter right here to win one of eleven copies of Fifty Writers on Fifty Shades of Grey, the fourth batch of the fifty copies we’re giving away between now and November 20!

To enter, just fill out the form below the quotes. U.S. and Canadian entries only, please. Good luck!

***

BDSM Quotes

“In romance, as in any story, there needs to be a conflict, and the central conflict between Ana and Christian is, in fact, that she wants a traditional, loving, monogamous, vanilla relationship—albeit with hints of spanking and BDSM play—and he has never considered this type of relationship before. James is heavy-handed with pretty much every aspect of her plot, but her job is not to convince the public that BDSM and love can go hand in hand. Imagine if it were—surely she would then be criticized for painting too rosy an image of kink, sans any thorns!” —Rachel Kramer Bussel, “Kink and Condescension”

“A key issue that continually arose for me while reading Fifty Shades was Ana Steele’s construction as a character who is the ultimate reluctant submissive. To make her attractive and relatable for straight mainstream women, it seems as though she can’t appear “too freaky” or somehow too eager for the sensation-based experiences she’s having with Christian Grey. The result: a character who I imagine is somewhat safe for sexually repressed readers to identify with.” —Sassafras Lowrey, “A Queer Leather Reluctant Support of Fifty Shades” 

“No matter how medicalized these terms [sadism and masochism] have become, however, it is important to remember that they derived first and foremost from literary representations, from writers who had the courage to share their fantasies—no matter how disturbing—with the rest of the world, shaping all future representations of those fantasies. Then, as now, literature functions as an outlet and a framing mechanism for sexual desire.” —Sarah S. G. Frantz, “The History of BDSM Fiction and Romance”

“A good lawyer would question whether Anastasia was of sound mind to sign a legal document when she was filled with desire and yearning. She barely read it and did not have representation or the advice of counsel. It was fully drafted by Christian’s lawyer and given to her in a nonneutral setting, in a nonbusinesslike manner. Anastasia was at Christian’s house on a date; sexual heat was in the air. I do not know if you could go as far as suggesting this was entrapment, but it was certainly enticement.” —Sherri Donovan, “The Legal Bonding of Anastasia and Christian”

“While the slow burn of erotic romance can be a delicious torment, keeping readers squirming while waiting for that yearning desire to flare into the fires of consummation, Fifty Shades’ flame took so long to ignite, I wondered if its pilot light had gone out. And while we waited, we weren’t teased and tormented with a convincing escalation of slowly unfolding attraction. Instead, E.L. James wooed us not with what I had hoped would be Christian Grey’s dominant nobility and Anastasia Steele’s smart innocence, but a showy parade of conspicuous wealth.” —Debra Hyde, “Wanted: Fifty Shades of Sexual Wholeness”

“My initial assessment is that Mister Grey, based on his early interactions with Anastasia, appears to be arrogant. Arrogance always strikes me as an indicator of insecurity. It is a trait that has little to do with dominance, and in fact is often antithetical to that purpose. However, as day one’s reading progresses, I begin to see a man who enters my world of BDSM with reasonable modesty.” —Master R, “A Requested Evaluation of the Mastery of Christian Grey”

“Domination and submission, power and surrender, mean different things for different people. For some it’s about having a chance to trust someone else to take control. For others it’s the pure physical sensation—spanking, flogging, licking, restraints—that bends the mind, the antithesis of thinking in straight hard lines. Being held in just the way you need to be by someone stronger than you are in that moment, being told what to do in the safe context of a mutually agreed upon power exchange, is pretty damn intoxicating.” —Pamela Madsen, “The Collar of Blue Stones”