Billionaires Are Bad: Revisiting 50 Shades of Grey in the Age of Mega-Rich Creepers

“It’s my body.” That’s what virginal Anastasia Steele tells billionaire Christian Grey when he asks her to see the OB/GYN he has picked to check her out before he will consider having intercourse with her.

“It’s mine, too,” replies Christian.

That line from the beginning of Fifty Shades of Grey hits differently now, doesn’t it? Now that “your body, my choice” is a rallying cry for young men on the right in our post-Roe v. Wade world?

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about E.L. James’s dark romance series that has sold more than 165 million copies worldwide since 2011. Since then the gap between the 1% and the rest of the country has continued to grow, with the wealth of the 1% reaching a record $44.6 trillion at the end of 2023. Since then our bodily autonomy has been taken away. Since then our data and privacy have been severely compromised by Big Tech and its less than charismatic leaders. Since then we’ve re-elected one of the worst billionaires to the office of President.

As Americans we should be furious. But rather than questioning the methods that billionaires have used to make their money on the backs of the poor, we (not “we” as in you and I, but the royal “we”) instead revere them as heroes and titans of industry. If Christian wasn’t a fictional character Walter Isaacson would have already written a big flashy biography of him.

In some ways I understand the fantasy of the virile billionaire. Who hasn’t dreamed, in late stage capitalist misery, of meeting someone filthy rich and falling in love—or lust—and thereby being freed from the confines of the rest of the world?

But the 50 Shades of Grey phenomenon and the billionaire romance subgenre it inspired reflect a culture that was ready to debase itself with its delusions about the fabulously wealthy and all of the stuff their money and power could buy. Using the Trojan horse (ironic because Christian notoriously hates to use condoms) of female sexuality to hook readers, 50 Shades provided a primer on what we could come to expect from our current crop of billionaires who buy political influence and mass communications platforms along with their private jets and mega-yachts.

It’s the fantasy of the billionaire as a romantic hero, as someone who is as good at love and sex as he is at making money (or spending the money his ancestors made).

Let me be clear: This is not about kink-shaming. BDSM is not the problem, sexual preferences are not the problem. It’s not about genre-shaming, either. Romance novels are not the problem and they have never been the problem! Even the notoriously less-than-sparkling prose of Fifty Shades isn’t a problem. It’s the adulation of billionaires, specifically. It’s the fantasy of the billionaire as a romantic hero, as someone who is as good at love and sex as he is at making money (or spending the money his ancestors made).

“I’m incapable of leaving you alone,” Christian tells Ana in that very first book, and he proves it, using technology to track her location and swoop down to rescue her from a boring college party in a way that feels both stalkerish and exactly like Mark Zuckerberg’s business model for Facebook. Ana, of course, is grateful for Christian’s constant surveillance, his “overwhelming good looks” a nice distraction for how very creepy that is. As the series continues Christian Grey begins to control every facet of Anastasia’s life, from her diet and exercise to her birth control. Her submission in this very heterosexual, gender essentialistm feels like a precursor to the tradwife, that current TikTok sensation in which stay-at-home wives defer to their husbands, harkening back to a time when, apparently, America was Great.

Even before Ana can enter into a relationship with Christian she must sign a robust non-disclosure agreement. So much has been made about the love contract Ana signs, the ways in which it’s good that she puts her sexual boundaries in writing, but this contract is more about protecting the billionaire than it is about protecting the (frustratingly) innocent young woman whom he dominates. NDAs, of course, have been primary tools for billionaires (or hundred-millionaires, if we’re counting decimal places) to control their subordinates and keep their dirtiest secrets, from Jeffrey Epstein to Jeffrey Bezos.

I would never say that 50 Shades of Grey is a dangerous book; very few books actually are. I’m not asking for censorship here, or censure. I’ll leave that to the fundamentalist Right. I’m just asking for a more mindful reading of what we, as a culture, consider to be attractive and aspirational. We live in a world in which billionaires are spanking us in so many metaphorical ways, if not literal. Let’s be a little less deferential when they show us their villainous sides.