Fifty Shades of Success

By Briana Delbuono

A new generation of women have started to speak up about their desires and demands. When talking about their turn-ons in the bedroom, more women are coming out saying they want to be physically dominated. An astounding 57% of women get excited when the idea of forceful sex is on the table.

Powerful women are guilty of these desires. In the real world, they are on top but in their private lives, it’s a different story. Being in control all of the time isn’t entirely pleasuring.

“I had a partner who choked me a little bit, and I liked it. We talked about it afterward, and things progressed from there—slapping, spanking, degrading sex talk. Since then, it’s been a part of my sex life,” told Nicole, a 29-year-old teacher from Long Island, Cosmopolitan magazine.

No need to fear! This behavior is completely normal.

“Most women who are into rough sex are into it for a very simple reason: It turns them on.” told Sex and relationship therapist, Stephen Snyder, MD, Associate clinical professor of Psychiatry at the Ichan School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in NYC.

Women are attracted to many traits that are often found in men including their strength and other physical tendencies.

“Physical size and strength and muscularity are essential differences between men and women and those kinds of differences are going to be erotic,” Dr. Snyder continued in the article ‘Some Like It Rough’ from Cosmopolitan magazine.

When the body becomes frightened, blood flow increases while concentrating the focus and magnifying arousal. These physical characteristics help identify why women are very turned on in unnerving situations.

Some women want to let go and feel like they are the ones being controlled for a change. This experimentation in the bedroom leads to talk amongst their girlfriends at happy hour after one too many drinks.

Desire is often second-guessed since women have fought so hard in the past for rights and equality and are still not completely there yet. Women still earn seventy seven cents for every dollar a men earn for the same amount of work.

This can be troubling because, as much as women want equality, women want to be able to justify being dominated in the bedroom while maintaining gender equality. Thus come the mixed feelings on the subject of rough sex and the unwillingness to talk about it in an open environment.

Women are taught growing up that men are supposed to keep their hands to themselves. Period. End of discussion. But what if women don’t want them to?

More women are opening up to their inner sexual desire to be thrown around, slapped, have their hair pulled, etc. This does not have anything to do with their progression in society.

S&M, short for sadism and masochism, is the process of using pain as a sexual stimulant. As Rihanna said in her song S&M released in 2011, “Sticks and stones may break my bones but chains and whips excite me.”

Apparently 2011 was the year women stopped caring enough to hold in their inner desires. Way to go Rih-Rih.

Clearly Rihanna wasn’t the only one with sexual thoughts in 2011. The Fifty Shades of Grey novel came out that same year and many women were intrigued by the idea that maybe their fantasies weren’t as far fetched and unrealistic as they once thought. Originally selling a million copies on the Kindle, the novel reached out to more women and took their expectations in the bedroom to the next level.

Fast forwarding to now, the Fifty Shades of Grey movie will be released on February 14- further opening the door to many more sexual-based movies and novels in the future. This kind of sexual desire is definitely not going away anytime soon, in fact, it is multiplying.