It’s the day before Valentine’s Day and for the fourth day in a row this week I’ve woken up with chest pains. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that I still sleep in the bed where he raped me, in the apartment where so much of the abuse happened. I only got the apartment when I did because he wanted to visit me so badly. It was good for me to move out of my parents’ house (my father’s continued emotional and psychological abuse was making me ill), but traumatic memories have a way of lingering. They are in every shadow. I hope to have the means to move away soon. 

But it’s not just my personal trauma that gives me chest pains – it’s also the trauma that’s happening in the world, every day, all day, the sexism, the racism, the transphobia, the classism, the ableism, the empathy-deficit that is so strong I can’t help but think it will destroy the planet long before any bursting sun or meteor will. 

And today is the opening day of the movie Fifty Shades of Grey. I haven’t read the book and don’t plan to. I don’t need to read it to know what it’s about. I don’t need to see the movie. I know what emotional and sexual abuse look like. I know what they feel like. I know all the signs. I am still living in the aftermath. 

Instead I’ve read many of the articles that dissect the story, and from what I’ve gathered there doesn’t even seem to be much dispute about whether or not the relationship between Christian Grey and Anastasia Steele is abusive, but whether or not that matters. Women like this book – that is, after all, how it sold so many copies – so it can’t be problematic, right? It’s just a book. It’s not real. 

But it’s because women like this book that it’s so problematic. The fact that women find this book sexually liberating is so problematic it makes me dizzy. And not because women shouldn’t have sexual agency but because we already so gravely don't and Fifty Shades only reinforces mainstream sexual violence, i.e. heteronormative male sexuality, i.e. that’s why it’s so popular. If the movie was sexually groundbreaking it wouldn’t be opening at $60 million. If the book was sexually groundbreaking it wouldn’t be mainstream. Misogynist beliefs about sex and sexuality are too deeply ingrained in ourselves and our society for millions of women to suddenly become liberated by a story that people around the world recognize as abusive. And I know this attitude can sound patronizing, and I cringe at that, but that’s also because of the nature of abuse – it’s designed to look like something other than abuse, especially in the beginning. Abuse is designed to make you think you like it. And when you don’t like it, abuse is designed to make you think it’s your fault. Something must be wrong with you. What the fuck is wrong with you, he said… Abuse is abuse because it denies the victim agency to fully recognize that what’s happening is abuse. 

I was with my abuser when several of his other victims came forward about his abuse. I wasn’t shocked at their stories (which should have been shocking to me, in the moment), but I felt patronized when anyone tried to tell me I was being abused, and I think that’s because victims are already denied so much agency – by that point my entire life was being dictated by him, his wants, his needs, his moods – that I couldn’t stand yet another person trying to dictate my reality. And besides, listening to those other voices, believing them, would mean I’d have to face reality, to face the real him, but he’d already stripped away so much of my personhood that I didn’t have an “I” with which to face him. I was a nobody. Just a body. And he loved that body. He loved that body more than I had ever loved that body, and, growing up being shamed for my body – by both my father (“hey there, fatty,” “hey there, bubble-butt”), and body-critical American culture, it felt good, for once, to not be ashamed of my body, even though I was depressed, even though he was mean to me, even though I was scared of him, even though he wouldn’t take no for an answer –at least I was sexy as fuck, and I took this distorted thinking as some sort of liberation, some sort of power, when really that was exactly how he wanted me to feel – liberated, beautiful, not abused. 

My psuedo-liberation was a product of his emotional and sexual abuse and only reinforced his control over me. He didn’t love my body – he loved using my body. And he damn did he use it up. If I hated it before I don’t know what to call my relationship with it now. There isn’t one. Numbness.  

Patriarchy at large functions in much the same way – it denies its own existence through pseudo-liberation of marginalized groups, i.e. claiming that something like Fifty Shades  is all about giving women permission to openly talk about sex and is therefore progressive, when what it’s actually doing is further normalizing male narratives of sexual violence, which in turn only reinforces the power of those already in power, i.e. not women.  

And it’s not “just a book.” What is “just a book,” anyway? We shape our reality through language and stories. Language and stories reinforce our attitudes and beliefs about the world. No book is “just a book.” No movie is “just a movie." 

Part of me wishes I was able to read the book myself and draw more specific connections between Christian Grey and my abuser, the similarities and differences between them and how both are important to note – no two abusers are exactly the same, especially since many are very skilled at adapting their tactics to the personality and environment of the victim – but the foundation is the same – manipulation, control, confusion, fear, all wrapped up in a big red bow labeled LOVE. 

A year ago on Valentine’s Day I remember fantasizing about telling someone that my fiancee was abusing me. But am I being abused? I asked myself this so many times, entirely oblivious to the fact that the answer to my question lay in my need to ask it so many times. 

A year ago I was at work, not at all excited for Valentine’s Day. I thought, How could all this rage be love? I was scared to go home, to this apartment. But I went because there was nowhere else to go, and there he was, all showered and clean, with a bottle of champagne and a several-hundred dollar diamond bracelet he’d spent the day searching for at the Mall of America, a handwritten card he’d diligently worked on at the coffee shop. 

I am so in love with you I am so in love with you I am so in love with you 

Over and over I read the card. It was like water in the desert – I was thirsting for affection, romance, emotional intimacy – signs of all the things that had led me here in the first place, signs that I wasn’t crazy, that I wasn’t being abused, that everything would be okay… 

Fifty Shades of Grey is and will continue to be popular and there’s not much I can do about that. Women around the world are and will continue to be abused at alarmingly high rates, and there’s not much I can do about that either. But I’ll keep writing when I can, I’ll keep supporting other victims, and instead of seeing Fifty Shades of Grey I’m going to donate the ten dollars a movie ticket would cost me to The Domestic Violence Relief Fund. I hope you’ll consider doing the same. 

P.S. a few months later I burned that fucking card.