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Newsweek Puts Mommy Porn, Working Women's Rape Fantasies On Cover
By
Jen Chung
Published Apr 16, 2012
Modified Apr 16, 2012
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By
Jen Chung
Published Apr 16, 2012
Modified Apr 16, 2012
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While Time's cover story is about powerful dudes, Newsweek is tapping into the working women zeitgeist with a heaping dose of "Mommy porn" with its cover story, "The Fantasy Life Of Working Women." Hey, what about stay-at-home moms? Don't they get fantasies? The Republican Party is gonna love this lamestream media snub of women who raise five kids while their husbands are out firing people!
The story, by Katie Roiphe—once dubbed by Gawker as the "upper crust version of crazy cat woman Andrea Peyser"—questions the popularity of Fifty Shades Of Grey, the so-called Mommy porn book (which is also popular with billionaire mayors), which features a naive college student's seduction by a billionaire businessman and graphic depictions of BDSM ("he points the end of the riding crop at my navel, leisurely circling it"), and insists Mommies aren't the only ones reading it:
Why does this particular, watered-down, skinny-vanilla-latte version of sadomasochism have such cachet right now? Why have masses of women brought the book to the top of the New York Times bestseller list before it even hit the stores? Most likely it’s the happy convergence of the superficial transgression with comfortable archetypes, the blushing virgin and the whips. To a certain, I guess, rather large, population, it has a semipornographic glamour, a dangerous frisson of boundary crossing, but at the same time is delivering reassuringly safe, old-fashioned romantic roles. Reading Fifty Shades of Grey is no more risqué or rebellious or disturbing than, say, shopping for a pair of black boots or an arty asymmetrical dress at Barneys...
[A]ccording to the publisher’s data, gleaned from Facebook, Google searches, and fan sites, more than half the women reading the book are in their 20s and 30s, and far more urban and blue state than the rampant caricature of them suggests.
(Jezebel suggests reasons besides, you know, crappy writing and somewhat naughty sexual scenarios, for the Fifty Shades' success.)
Roiphe suggests that the trend is on fire—in spite of feminism and women empowering themselves—because a character on HBO's Girls fantasizes about a jerk instead of her nice boyfriend and the Freud-Jung drama A Dangerous Method included Keira Knightley was spanked! Oh, and in the 2002 indie film Secretary, Maggie Gyllenhaal gets spanked by James Spader.
And then Roiphe delves into rape fantasies ("An analysis of 20 studies published in Psychology Today estimates that between 31 percent and 57 percent of women entertain fantasies where they are forced to have sex"). The Internet, to say the least, is very amused.
Tagged
empowerment
feminism
katie roiphe
newsweek
rape fantasy
Jen Chung
Jen Chung is a former WNYC and Gothamist editor.
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