Fifty Shades Of Grey Ending Explained

This article contains discussions of sex, sexual abuse, manipulation, coercion, and consent.

Summary

• Fifty Shades of Grey’s ending raises ethical questions about Ana and Christian’s relationship and consent issues.
• Christian’s BDSM origins stem from trauma, involving sexual abuse by an older woman before becoming a dominant.
• The movie misrepresents BDSM practices by ignoring aftercare, communication, and consent, painting an inaccurate picture.

Fifty Shades of Grey’s ending raises many questions about Ana and Christian’s relationship as well as the ethics of the storyline. In 2015, Universal Pictures released a movie adaptation of the eponymous book, which started out as a Twilight fan fiction. The story follows a billionaire businessperson named Christian Grey who sets his sights on an undergraduate student named Anastasia “Ana” Steele, wanting to make her his sexual submissive. The two Fifty Shades characters meet when she steps in to interview him when her roommate Kate gets sick.

Christian immediately becomes enamored with her and starts showing up where she is. Eventually, he proposes that she become his sub because he doesn’t do romance but is interested in her. As a virgin, she has no idea what any of this means, so he gives her a contract to read and research. While she is looking everything up and thinking about it, he continues to pester her until she finally agrees, even though she wants a romantic relationship. This leads up to Fifty Shades of Grey’s climax, which is morally dubious and raises many questions.

Do Ana And Christian End Up Together In Fifty Shades of Grey?

Ana And Christian’s Relationship Becomes Strained As He Implements Punishment

As the central couple in what’s considered a romance story, the question naturally comes up whether Ana and Christian get together and stay together at the end of Fifty Shades of Grey. Prior to the two officially getting together, Christian starts treating her like his submissive without her agreement. Ana eventually says yes to being Christian’s submissive at the graduation ceremony to being in a submissive-dominant relationship, with a small bit of romance added in so that she would agree.

It’s worth noting that Christian does many horrible things like continually pushing her to make a decision on the matter, even when she expresses her uncertainty. He also love-bombs Ana by showering her with attention, gifts, and compliments. Combined with the uneven power imbalance, this paints the consent as highly coerced, which negates its validity. Ana visibly struggles throughout the movie to be okay with the dominant-submissive relationship. She even expresses to Christian that him punishing her makes her feel the way that he does when she touches the scars on his chest. This does nothing to delay him from punishing her, though.

Ultimately, by the end of Fifty Shades of Grey, Ana decides she can’t continue this relationship anymore, ending things after a particularly brutal punishment session. Her mannerisms and words afterward are challenging to watch as they mirror those of an abuse victim. Unfortunately, Ana cutting things off isn’t the end of Ana and Christian’s story, because the series has two more Fifty Shades movies.

How Christian Started BDSM

Christian’s Backstory Misrepresents BDSM As A Result Of Trauma

Because the entirety of Fifty Shades of Grey centers on Christian being a dominant who wants Ana as his submissive, the movie needed to explain at some point how he got into BDSM. Unfortunately, his sexual preferences come from trauma. When Christian was 15 years old, his mother’s friend Elena Lincoln, nicknamed Mrs. Robinson by Ana, groomed the young boy and eventually preyed on him. She became his domme for six years, and Christian states that he enjoyed this because he could feel free. After six years, he became a domme (who acts more like a sadist) to others.

Within the movie, Ana is the person who sees the person for what it is – sexual abuse – but the movie seems to dismiss her concerns due to her sexual inexperience. Consequently, Christian also writes off her concerns. This shows just how little he cares about Ana’s thoughts, seeing her instead as a prize that he can win.

Luckily, Elena is treated as a villain throughout the next two movies, correcting the horrible handling of this sensitive issue within Fifty Shades of Grey. Unfortunately, the series never walks back the implicit message that only people with abusive pasts – whether a victim, perpetrator, or both – enjoy participating in BDSM, which paints the kink community in a horrible light and simply isn’t true.

Christian’s Submissive Contract Explained

Christian Gives Ana A Dubious Contract That He Then Ignores Completely

One of the only times Fifty Shades of Grey properly engages with a BDSM norm is when he and Ana negotiate a contract to ensure everyone knows the expectations, rules, and limits within the sub-domme relationship. However, the content of his contract is woefully lacking. The contract only outlines rules for Ana, providing no rules or restrictions for Christian, a fact that he uses to wield power over her even when it’s unwanted. The contract also lacks a time limit, which is general practice with BDSM contracts.

Moreover, Christian’s contract is viewed as unbreakable and ignores shifting needs and desires within a BDSM scene. BDSM contracts are always supposed to allow for the revocation of consent at any time for any reason. Neither a sub nor a domme need an excuse to stop the scene, even if they agreed to it beforehand. Christian’s contract essentially negates Ana’s consent by telling her that she must perform anything not laid out in the contract without question. These factors contribute to the normalization of abuse throughout Fifty Shades of Grey.

Disregarding the ethics of Christian’s particular submissive contract, there’s one big issue surrounding the contract throughout Fifty Shades of Grey. Christian regularly engages in dominating acts and controls her behavior without a signed contract. Ana hasn’t even verbally agreed to the contract when he gets angry about her drinking too much and tracks her down to force her to leave. He even takes her into the red room of pain, using kink-related sex toys on her, before she signs the contract.

Christian’s behavior in Fifty Shades of Grey is a parallel to Twilight, meant to mirror Edward’s inability to control himself around Bella, but both circumstances are undoubtedly disturbing, considering neither Ana nor Bella enthusiastically consented to this behavior. Instead, Christian forcing BDSM and control onto Ana without the signed contract comes across as him grooming and priming her to behave in a way he finds acceptable.

How Fifty Shades Misrepresents BDSM

Fifty Shades Of Grey Paints BDSM In A Bad Light By Spewing Inaccuracies

Before outlining all of the issues with Fifty Shades’ portrayal of BDSM, credit must be given for two things. Christian and Ana come up with safe words, a necessary part of any BDSM relationship, and he asks her before starting whether she remembers her safe words. Secondly, Ana is allowed to set hard limits, though he frustratingly questions her choices. Besides these two elements, Fifty Shades of Grey is a mess when it comes to properly representing BDSM.

Christian completely ignores the idea of aftercare, which kink culture heavily recommends to the point that it’s basically considered a rule.

Firstly, the person in control of a submissive and dominant dynamic is the submissive. Submission must be granted freely without coercion, threats, or against the will of the sub. Christian coerces and manipulates her into agreeing, and he also acts like he has the power as the domme. Secondly, BDSM relies on constant communication between partners. Christian doesn’t check in with Ana before, during, or after acts of dominance. For instance, he follows her to Savannah, Georgia and exerts dominance over her behaviors without ever asking whether he could come there.

Additionally, Christian doesn’t follow the BDSM Safety philosophies of Safe, Sane, and Consensual (SSC); Risk-Aware Consenual Kink (RACK); or Personal Responsibility, Informed, Consensual Kink (PRICK) – three philosophies in kink culture which are crucial (via Loving BDSM). This is particularly disturbing because his contract includes practices that would fall into the higher-risk category, like suspension and genital clamps. Both Christian and Ana should have been able to name the risks and how they would be mitigating them. Instead, Christian never bothers to explain the risks of anything on his list.

On top of these issues, Ana’s safe words in Fifty Shades – red and yellow – aren’t actually good choices under these circumstances. It’s important that a safe word is not something that anyone might say within a scene. Christian’s entire BDSM room is red, meaning Ana could say that word in multiple circumstances unrelated to expressing limits. Lastly, Christian completely ignores the idea of aftercare, which kink culture heavily recommends to the point that it’s basically considered a rule. After any BDSM scene, partners take necessary steps to soothe each other to prevent emotional or physical harm.

Ultimately, by painting BDSM as deviant and misrepresenting kink culture, Fifty Shades of Grey stigmatizes the very thing that it uses to get streams. This is a shame because BDSM is perfectly normal and healthy when done correctly.

Fifty Shades of Grey’s Ending Changes The Book

The Movie Ending Of Fifty Shades Of Grey Is Less Impactful Than The Book

The ending of Fifty Shades of Gray diverges from the book after Christian punishes Ana by lashing her with a belt six times. In the movie, she stays overnight and leaves in the morning, at which point she tells Christian “stop” and “no” when he tries to come after her. The movie ends with the elevator doors closing, mirroring the pair’s first meeting. However, in the book, Ana leaves in the middle of the night. She confesses her love for him, and he rebuffs her, at which point she refuses to stay the night.

Like in the movie, she stops him from hugging her. However, the book continues on past the elevator doors closing. She sobs all the way down the elevator and on the way home. When she walks into her room, she collapses onto the bed, continuing to cry uncontrollably. Some may see this change as positive because it’s briefer. It could even be argued that the ending in the movie has the same impact; however, the scenes after Ana leaves are crucial to understanding the real impact of Christian’s actions.

At the end of the Fifty Shades of Grey book, Ana isn’t just mad at Christian or afraid of him. She feels entirely broken by the fact that the man she loves only wants to hurt her. This feeling isn’t unfamiliar to victims of abuse. However, the movie change had an unfortunately logical purpose. If Fifty Shades of Grey had maintained the original ending from the books, the writers would have had a harder time fixing the dynamic going into Fifty Shades Darker.

A theatrical version of the book’s ending appears in the unrated version of
Fifty Shades of Grey
.

The Real Meaning Of Fifty Shades Of Grey’s Ending

Fifty Shades Of Grey Sends One Intended Meaning And One Unintended Message

The ending of Fifty Shades of Grey sends a clear message that love doesn’t equate to compatibility. Despite their emotional connection, Ana and Christian have different wants and needs. Unfortunately, the intended message of the movie is contingent on the audience buying into the love between these characters. If coercion has influenced Ana’s feelings, the implications of the movie are completely different.

When viewing the movie through the lens of abuse and manipulation, the message becomes that hurt people hurt people. Christian holds the role of both victim and abuser, and neither one negates the other. Hopefully, young and impressionable viewers will be able to see through the fake erotic love story and identify the dark side of Fifty Shades of Grey, which is packed with red flags.

Sources: Loving BDSM