Manacled and its ilk are foundational texts that define the strange yearnings of hyper-online young women — women who have been yearning especially hard since AO3 crashed last Thursday. Its 11 million users are now withdrawing from their customary dose of steamy fanfic; the site is expected to remain closed for maintenance for a few weeks yet. To my male readers: now is a good time to go girlfriend-hunting in the supernatural section of your local bookshop. It’s Black Friday for maladjusted fantasy foids.

If you can find a copy of Manacled in an internet archive, it’s worth skimming — not because it’s good (it’s not), but because it can be considered a Rosetta Stone for the sexual and romantic hinterlands of Zoomettes. The unmet desires of Gen Z women, now squinting around the dusty stalls of the marriage market, are laid out in technicolor in this strange compendium of snarling villains, whimpering damsels, groaning lovers and smirking captors. The plot, in brief, is this: Hermione finds herself in a Handmaid’s Tale-style arrangement with peroxide-blond bad boy Draco after Voldemort wins the Wizarding War. The evil regime assigns her to be a surrogate for Draco; she is kidnapped and violated, but she thoroughly enjoys it. In the end, they have a baby. Things work out.

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Throughout, there is lots and lots of shagging. Often this comes with amusing Potter window-dressing, as if to reassure the reader that they are not simply perusing erotica. In one scene Hermione “cast a spell to unbutton his shirt and robes and then, with a practiced partial-levitation charm, she pulled him up so that he was leaning against her and pushed all the clothing down off his shoulders and arms”. There is endless throbbing and thrusting, lots of hot breath, a million “wolfish” smiles and pounding hearts, even the occasional appearance of a nipple or two. This is the bread and butter of AO3 and fanfic more broadly: torrid romance between an everywoman protagonist and a brutish but tender, misunderstood man. There is constant sexual risk on AO3 — themes of abduction abound, as do elaborate pretexts for gray-area sex like Manacled’s forced surrogacy plot. Dubious consent, known as “dub-con”, is probably the site’s most distinctive theme. 

Launched in 2009, AO3’s rise to prominence was driven by a bizarre wave of fandom around X-Factor band One Direction in the early 2010s, with “Larry Stylinson”, the romantic “shipping” (fantasy) of the apparently heterosexual members Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson, becoming a key genre. But it wasn’t all gay. At one time, the internet was also brimming with stories about 1D, a mass-market teenaged boy band, kidnapping girls from concerts and turning them into (willing) slaves. Today, there are as many granular subgenres as you can think of: wingfic (essentially rutting with feathers); mpreg (male pregnancy); breeding kink; gay fanfic (yaoi) for the enjoyment of heterosexual women; RPF (real-person fiction) imagining sexual escapades between celebrities; even Drapple (stay with me: Draco Malfoy and a green apple he is shown eating in the third Harry Potter film). As you might have inferred, sex is often described in extremely graphic detail.

As niche and strange as these subcategories become, they can mostly be read as wish-fulfillment by young women cut adrift in a sexual culture which leaves them cold. The median age of AO3 users is 26. One 2022 study found 54% of them identified as female, while 41% identified as “non-cisgender”, a wildly disproportionate figure which I suspect comprises a healthy slice of AFAB enbys, he/theys and so on (basically the demographics of your local mask-mandated lesbian bar). Almost half of users not only read but write on the site. The writing is therefore abundant, fervent and often shit. But literary pretensions are not the site’s aim; instead, the most successful writers are there to quench their thirsty fans with escalating sexy scenarios. It is evident that posting is as exciting for the writers as for the readers; AO3 is a rare repository of free, non-visual pseudo-pornography in an online sex economy which prefers the most graphic, hardcore, and shareable material possible. For the site’s largely female constituents, this matters: these readers are in flight from the mainstream and in thrall to their own, quaintly analog nerd erotica. The very different private habits of the internet’s men and women is our riven sexual culture in miniature.

The curious thing about AO3 is that, as powerful and prolific a cultural institution as it may be, it is largely invisible to the public. Nevertheless, its sexual themes have long since bled out into the mainstream. The boom in fantasy smut — published novels about minotaur milking farms and other such nonsense — is a direct consequence of internet fanfiction. Fifty Shades of Grey began as Twilight fanfic; the new film Wicker, in which Alexander Skarsgård stars as a sexy man inexplicably made of rattan, is unmistakably AO3 in nature. Then there’s Heated Rivalry, the gay hockey romp which was adapted by HBO last year, which not only began as a series of posts on AO3 but has now inspired a whole new genre about sexual tension between competitive, horny men (again, to be clear, most of its readers are female). I suspect most young women today — even those who, like me, never read fanfic — are subconsciously honed by its sexual values: the valorization of taboo, secrecy, extraordinary emotional dramatics and undying loyalty. There are, of course, male-coded fandoms: edgelord X’s current obsession is “Malfoid”, a girl version of Draco who is blonde, evil, hot and from what I gather, mostly a meme. But none are as sincere, and as reliably twisted, as the female fanfic which Malfoid parodies. To read these stories is to peep through a window into a generation’s sexuality — and the view is frightening.

It is troubling for a feminist to realize that lots of her peers have spent years reading and fantasizing about submission, surrender, abduction, and sexual enslavement. Nevertheless, that is what AO3 is all about; the site reveals the furtive and unrealizable desires of girls unsatisfied by the modern sexual settlement. To see fanfic as a revolt against the gains of feminism is too easy, though; instead, we might consider its themes an uplifting consequence, if a slightly unsettling one, of those gains. In the West at least, institutionalized forced marriage, coercion and rape are so unimaginable as to be deemed fodder for fantasy; that women want to daydream about them is testament to how thoroughly they’ve been expunged, how remote they now seem. And like other corners of modern sexuality gatekept by women — heterosexual polyamory, for example — fanfiction is highly regulated. AO3 prides itself on almost never censoring any fiction, however egregious the content. This is justified by the extremely strict enforcement of tagging rules on the site; so it is that even rape content can remain if appropriately labeled. As with so many “queer” and/or feminine-coded sexual subcultures, taboo is permitted only within the most rigidly enforced rules imaginable. 

None of this makes for good writing. But AO3 is nevertheless an invaluable archive, an uncensored record of what women daydream about when no-one is watching. There is perhaps no more unflinching guide to “what women want” than the weird warrens of this website whose uninhibited readers share their desire to be kidnapped, romanced then wedded by a borderline abusive werewolf CEO. I won’t make the case that AO3 tells us how women secretly want to live; instead, it shows up the fault lines in real-world dating, which has been drained of romance by apathetic casual sex and sterile hookup apps. Women might not want to be kidnapped and forcibly impregnated by an erotically insatiable Draco Malfoy; really, it’s about them wanting to be overwhelmingly desired. The scenario is almost unimportant, the more far-fetched the better — the emotional payload it carries is what matters. To be pursued, to relinquish control, to experience and inspire unfettered passion: fanfiction’s underlying tenets are not so difficult to understand. We may deride the genre as weird, subterranean and obsessive — but really these girls’ yearnings are, upon closer inspection, universal.

Since signing on with a mainstream publisher in 2012, she’s sold over 150 million copies of her books worldwide. Last week, she released Freed, the final part of a retelling of the original Fifty Shades novels from the male love interest’s perspective. Again, James is following Meyer here, whose Midnight Sun (leaked in 2008 though not officially published until 2020) is the masculine take on the Twilight story.

Following, and, as usual, going further. Where Meyer contented herself with one volume of perspective-shifting, James has gone for a do-over on all three of hers; and where Meyer’s books sustained an atmosphere of age-appropriate repression and Mormon-appropriate sexual repulsion (Meyer is LDS), James went the whole hog-tied way into BDSM. James took the characters and relationships from Twilight, and rewrote the story to suit herself. “All my fantasies in there, and that’s it,” she said in 2012.

Edward Cullen still met Bella Swan, only now he wasn’t a 103-year-old vampire, and she wasn’t a depressed high-school virgin with a maddening tendency to bleed. He became an emotionally repressed (and very handsome) billionaire; she became a shy, klutzy (but beautiful!) student. In Twilight, Bella’s love helps Edward learn to control his instinct to suck her like a Capri-Sun; in Master of the Universe, Bella teaches Edward that there’s more to sex than trussing a woman up with cable ties and lovelessly banging her senseless.

Eventually Edward was renamed “Christian Grey” and Bella turned into “Anastasia Steele”; the whole thing was reworked and presented as an original fiction, and the cultural phenomenon we all know and masturbate to/hold in contempt was born. And there is so much contempt for James. Deriding her is as much of a compulsion for large chunks of the public as paddling Ana’s pert behind is for Christian. Feminists said she glorified abuse; BDSM-ers said she made BDSM look bad; conservatives said she was corrupting public decency; the sneery tag “mommy porn” was invented to describe her work.

And everyone, but everyone, said she couldn’t write. “In fact, if I were a member of the Christian Right, sitting on my front porch decrying the decadent morals of working American women, what would be most alarming about the Fifty Shades of Grey phenomena… is that millions of otherwise intelligent women are willing to tolerate prose on this level,” wrote Katie Roiphe in a 2012 article for Newsweek asking why the collective female libido seemed to have achieved a consensus around submission.

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Part of the strangeness of the reaction to Fifty Shades — both the passion of its fans, and the dismay of its detractors — is that it’s nothing very new, and nor would James ever pretend it was. As much as it owes to Twilight, and to the collaborative inventions of fanfiction, it’s also part of the grand tradition of the bonkbuster, which dates back to the 1970s. And the bonkbuster has always loved a bad boy: the caddish Rupert Campbell-Black, of Jilly Cooper’s Rutshire Chronicles, would make no better of a boyfriend than Christian Grey.

But bonkbusters also tended to celebrate variety and adventure for their heroines, not only sexually but professionally. Anastasia Steele is a retreat from that: a one-man woman whose eventual career is a gift of her wealthy husband (he buys a publisher for her run) and who gives up her surname when she marries him. After all the benefits of second-wave feminism, it seemed like what straight women really wanted was not to have it all but to give it all up; and they wanted it enough to buy James’s fantasies not just once but twice over.

Retelling might, in fact, be too strong a word for what James has done in her Christian-narrated novels. Comparisons of Master of the Universe and Fifty Shades suggest the shift from one to the other was not that extensive after all (Master of the Universe has been almost totally erased from the internet now); similarly, when you look at the original trilogy and the new one side-by-side, there’s often very little difference to detect.

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For example, the first time Christian gets Ana off, he does it by playing with her breasts in a “slow, sensual assault”. This continues until her “whole body sings with sweet agony”, at which point she tells us: “He kisses me, deeply, his tongue in my mouth absorbing my cries.” From his perspective, this is a “lascivious assault”, which ends when “I move quickly to kiss her, capturing her cries in my mouth.”

Where we do get new information from the Grey version, it’s mostly reassuring confirmation that he was always secretly concerned about Anastasia’s consent (take that, feminists worried about BDSM/BDSMers worried about being confused with rapists!), and childhood memories of his mother that help to explain his emotional remoteness. It’s not exactly Rashomon, but then, being Rashomon would be very much against the spirit of Fifty Shades. Nobody came here for the fracturing of reality into multiple perspectives, thank you very much.

The grand fantasy of Fifty Shades isn’t really the spanking or the restraints or any of the other delightful perversions that Christian introduces Ana to. It’s that a woman could know a (billionaire, handsome) man completely and, by loving him, redeem him. Through all the business in the Red Room of Pain, Ana achieves the ultimate in vanilla: straight, monogamous intimacy. To that end, nothing could be hotter than the revelation that Christian and Ana were having almost the exact same subjective experiences all along.

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I don’t share a lot of the moral concerns about Fifty Shades. Yes, much of what occurs between Christian and Ana would be deeply alarming if it happened in a real relationship, but prissy fussing about how it misrepresents consent overlooks the fact that this is happening in a fiction. People who enjoy submission are also enjoying a fiction: it’s necessary to believe in your own resistance in order to extract the pleasure of being possessed.

So however careless Christian appears to be about Ana’s boundaries, readers know that she ultimately wants to be totally his; and they know also that her surrender becomes a way of mastering him. Even writing as infelicitous as James’s has a huge advantage over visual pornography when it comes to sex, in that it can show us its characters from the inside, and fulfil the part of the fantasy which is about feeling rather than simply doing (or being done to). If there’s danger in Fifty Shades, it’s not the sex so much as the romance.

To love someone is always to be slightly at the mercy of the unknowability of the other. Ana is able to overcome that with what the rewrite trilogy now confirms is perfect understanding. But in the real world, there is much that women are never going to comprehend about the men they love, however much they prostrate themselves in the effort — and much that men never make any effort to understand about the women who love them. More than horsewhips and hemp ropes, it’s that gulf of sympathy that leaves real-life people hurt.