It is generally accepted that the integration of sexuality, emotions and character is one of the marks of a mature personality. Men and women, however, often come to this maturity in different ways because the differentiation of sexuality and emotionality is stronger for the former than for the latter. This could explain why the consumption of pornography has traditionally been higher among men than among women. Thus, it might seem that the success of Fifty Shades of Grey, preferred by women around 40 years old, contradicts that idea. However, the fact that precisely this, and not another, pornographic product has crossed the threshold of marginal and minority groups to make its way among the general public demands a sociological explanation. Eva Illouz has given one in a book called Hard Core Romance: Fifty Shades of Grey, Best Sellers and Society (Katz 2014), which in many ways is a corollary of a previous book, Why Love Hurts (Katz, 2012), which explores the contradictions that afflict the relations between the sexes in the context of late modernity.

Regarding Fifty Shades, Illouz wonders why a product like this, whose reading "made [her] bristle," has resonated so extensively among its female audience. It must be considered that the initial distribution of the book took place spontaneously: only afterwards did the publishing and film industries take hold of the book, with the marketing proper to those spheres. Because the book's success is relatively spontaneous, it makes sense to raise the sociological question: what button did this otherwise poorly written book push to garner so much more attention than other works of its kind?

Among the considerations that Illouz explores, one caught my attention: Fifty Shades functions as an inverted Victorian novel; while in the Victorian novel we find an emotional facade of sexual conquest that never explicitly appears as such, here we have exactly the opposite: an explicitly sexual façade with an emotional ending. According to this reading, a relationship that began in the key of pure and naked sexual desire and finds expression in sadomasochistic practices void of all emotional content between the dominant and the dominated, slowly becomes a woman's emotional conquest of a man. In this sense, despite its offensive and pernicious immorality, it could be described as a "conservative" story. This is what the story ultimately suggests: where preceding women failed, Ana, a normal woman, won an incredible victory: Christian begins to feel genuine interest and admiration for her.

We cannot forget that the author of Fifty Shades is a woman who primarily writes for women. The fact that this basic story is wrapped in pornographic garment allows women to take ownership of a way of dealing with sexuality that they initially find strange. Hence, the Castilian title of Illouz's book translates to "erotic self-help." After all, the relationship between men and pornography usually does not require much literary mediation. With women it is different: precisely because sexuality and emotionality are presented to them in an indiscernible form, the fracture of both spheres is not possible without a certain measure of violence.

In fact, the "attractiveness" of the story lies precisely in presenting together, on the plane of literary imagination, qualities that are incompatible in reality, like when we are told stories of men flying, talking animals or women who fall in a blow to a group of strong men. 50 Shades presents a fantastical story line where the possibility exists of emotionally winning over a man by such means, without the woman meanwhile losing both her autonomy and sense of dignity. That a relationship of this nature leaves a woman's autonomy itself in tact is more than questionable; and that the naked sexual pleasure derived from sadomasochistic practices compensates for the depths of humiliation through which women who "freely" consent to these practices pass is more than doubtful. From this perspective, the success of 50 shades among the female audience indicates not only an alarming number of women desperate to conquer a man's heart at any price; it also gives us the exact measure of women's desperation, as much as or more than cases of gender violence that we see in the media everyday.