“If you go on PornHub, you’ll find a lot of different kinds of porn, some pretty obvious (“blowjob,” “gangbang”), some not so obvious (“feet,” “tickling”), and at least one or two (“smoking while pissing”) the attraction of which is not obvious at all (no offense, smokers and pissers). What you won’t find, despite the fact that in book form it has sold over 100 million copies and as a film has made more than $500 million, is contract porn. But now, with its release on DVD, Fifty Shades of Grey — maybe the only movie ever made that’s understood the appeal of a woman looking at a man across 12 inches of hard-wood conference table and murmuring “no anal fisting” — puts contract in the light it deserves (glowing, above the Apple logo). It’s not so much that with Fifty Shades, porn has gone mainstream; it’s that with Fifty Shades the mainstream has been revealed as porn.

Of course, it’s not as if masochists didn’t always sort of know that. After all, the founding text of sadomasochism, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs, revolves not exactly around its hero’s desire to be a “slave” but instead around his desire to be a slave by “contract.” Like the one in which he agrees to become the “property” of his “cruel mistress” while she, “in exchange,” agrees to “appear as often as possible in fur, especially when she’s being cruel to her slave.” And like the several contracts Sacher-Masoch himself actually entered into with his mistresses. The slave by contract has made a choice, and the importance of choosing links masochism not only to compulsion but to consent, identifying freedom with the right to sell not only one’s labor but also, if one wishes, one’s person and insisting on both the benefits and the pleasure associated with the exercise of that right. Or, as Marcela Iacub puts it, “It’s my body,” and I can do with it “what I want.””

50 Shades of Libertarian Love by Walter Benn Michaels