As eager fans and skeptical hatewatchers fill theaters for “Fifty Shades Of Grey,” they will watch Christian and Anastasia move seamlessly from one mechanically complicated sex act to the next. They’ll watch the pair execute highly intimate scenarios with such ease that little verbal communication is necessary.
It’s no surprise that this is rarely, if ever, how BDSM actually works. For those of us without Grey’s nimble, knowing hands and apparent telepathy, there are classes for these things.
“Get Knotty With Me: Easy, Sexy Rope Play” is a workshop offered by Babeland, a chain of sex shops that also provides educational resources for customers. Claire Cavanah and Rachel Venning founded Babeland based on a “mutual interest in sex-positive feminism” in 1993.
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“If you’re interested in the fantasy element of it, take that, and leave the other stuff,” she told HuffPost. “There’s something there about being tuned in to what you really want, whether it’s BDSM or something else. You should listen to that. Go for it, be fulfilled.”
Of course, “Fifty Shades'” resonance may also have something to do with its embrace of one woman’s sexual agency to follow her own desires, or as the book insists on calling it, her “inner Goddess.”
“I think that, in general, men are more comfortable asking for the sex they want and identifying it and kind of saying what they want,” she said. “But women are getting better and there’s definitely some sort of female positivity of women asking for it and we’re all kind of like, ‘You go girl.'”
