Well, the hotel owner decided the best book for his establishment was Fifty Shades of Grey. Yup, E.L. James’ New York Times bestselling BDSM erotica will soon be in all 40 guest room night tables. Guests will now be able to curl up with some soft core porn reading before bed.

The local vicar has publicly denounced the move, calling it a gimmick. Other than the vicar, reports state that feedback within the UK is generally favorable. Meanwhile, the hotel owner has apparently been receiving more than a few emails from the US quoting scripture and even threatening him. Apparently, we just can’t handle porn on our side of the Atlantic.

Either way, I know where I’ll be staying next time I visit the United Kingdom.

So what is Fifty Shades of Grey? Well, for starters, it’s a book. Yes, with words. We know, we know…reading is so hard. However, that hasn’t stopped women from jumping all over it like a fat kid on smarties. In fact, some people are even referring to it as “mommy porn” because it’s been so popular with women.

What is this crazy book about? In a word: sex. It describes the BDSM relationship between Anastasia Steele and Christian Grey. She’s a young college graduate and he’s a billionaire. They have sex. Lots and lots of sex. The sex is described in great detail and housewives are eating it up.

Why do we care about this? More importantly: why should you care about Fifty Shades of Grey? Well, because if this book is any indication, your wife/girlfriend/friendly neighborhood fuck buddy (Hi Gladys!) may just have some naughty fantasies up her sleeve that she’s not telling you about. Yup, just think about it: she could be fantasizing about you taking her roughly from behind and you don’t even know about it.

There is just no objective way to define really what is sexy. What is absolutely abjectly kinky to one person is downright boring to another. What titillates one person or even a group won’t another. If we can’t really determine what’s good and bad in porn-as we couldn’t ever be able to in any other artistic pursuit-then we can’t say if and when porn movies have or are made with good taste or not.

This is really at the crux of what drives critics crazy about porn. They cannot get anyone to agree with them that porn is in bad taste and when you don’t agree with someone proposing a religious-based agenda or a morals cause, then you challenge the very fabric of the world they believe in, and that’s just none so good for the zealot. When you postulate that there is a possibility that like all things, taste in porn movies is a subjective critique at best, then you open the door to the possibility that there might simply be different ways of looking at the world and the more insecure one is about how they look at the world, the more resistant they will be to different ways of looking.

If indeed there is taste in porn or porn of taste then that presupposes that things are subjective and everything is open to interpretation, even in porn movies…and that is just something some people will not allow in their world view!

With the early Indian cultures we were given the Kama Sutra or series of scripts on the entire ordeal behind courtship, relationships and sex, complete with an entire ten sections dedicated to the 64 different sexual acts used to entice, seduce and persuade a woman to a man’s bed and heart. The Kama Sutra governs practices of sexual ritual all the way from courting and making advances to dealing with the duties of the wife once marriage is established. The book’s thirty-six chapters also delve into sexual practices governing coitus, oral sex, biting, scratching and moaning by the woman in order to be mated to the male.

Sexuality permeates society in all that we have done. Not just the written word, but storytelling of bawdy limericks and tales not fit for proper society’s ears came from man’s exploits. Sculptures of the various positions and combinations have been found in ancient ruins ranging from India to the Greek and Italian islands in the Mediterranean. African cultures sculpted phallic objects as symbols of potency. The ruins of Pompeii were painted with erotic artwork giving humankind some of the earliest images of gay behavior often associated with the Greek and Roman cultures. As society grew, others painted, sculpted or wrote erotic artwork, much of which is famous today and on display in many prominent museums. Erotica was produced during the Renaissance period for the amusement of the aristocracy. By the twentieth century, erotic photography became the main and most interesting media for erotic art.

The large debate has rolled on as to whether the works of art are erotic or pornographic such to the point that the Supreme Court became involved in an attempt to explain the difference, but even that venerable institution couldn’t define it properly/ Justice Potter Stewart wrote one of the most famous lines in history concerning the great debate over obscenity; I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced; but I know it when I see it.

Guys and girls who enjoy some sort of kink play, can even see their specific actions and mindset follow them out of a play space or scene, often to just as insidious results. They might begin to live their kink as part of their life or simply want that kink to be their life

For most, the fun of kink is that it is not real, that both partners know it is fantasy, and that, for the most part, a couple takes a break from their everyday lives and whatever their roles might be in those lives to either accentuate certain parts of their personalities or completely flip their experience for something they never encounter in real life. If one maintains the kink life beyond playing, if roles we are in real life become very much the role we play at in a kink scene, we do run the risk of not knowing where the kink stops and real life begins.

Complete immersion in what we want sexually, during even the moments of our lives when we aren’t exercising our lusts, can be exhausting to say the least!

But a good many kinksters are not looking to make a distinction, to delineate between what they do in kink and what they do in life. For many couples there is no separation. These men and women employ a Herculean effort keeping their kink alive all the time. The slightest slip from the pose threatens not only the loss of erotica for the partners it also means a loss of self, of who one is as much as what one wants.

Identity for these kinksters is part and parcel with their play.