Once upon a time there was a rock band that needed a name. Central to this band’s identity was an inclination to report upon the seamier side of avant-garde NYC life: heroin, S+M, and unapologetic decadence. Behold, one of them discovered this obscure paperback, and immediately, its name became theirs:

What is trumpeted as underground seldom stays there, however, and so perhaps it served Lou Reed right that he lived long enough to see one belated fruit of his artistry. Yeah, “fruit of his artistry” is too strong, since I suppose if he hadn’t introduced S+M-connected topics into pop songwriting, someone else would have soon enough, and with less intelligence than he displayed in the lyrics of “Venus in Furs,” “Some Kind of Love,” and “Foggy Notion.” Still, aren’t you curious about what thoughts might have zipped through Reed’s brain in early 2012, when he saw, probably in a hospital waiting room, the way Newsweek pumped up a starting-to-sell romance novel called 50 Shades of Grey, with an oh-so-serious-sounding story “The Fantasy Life of Working Women: Why Surrender Is a Feminist Dream,” complete with a soft-porn cover?

What I really wish, however, is that Reed could have lived to read the only thing anyone needs to about 50 Shades, this delicious Dave Barry take-down. Barry’s piece will leave you with a smile, and not before showing you that 50 Shades might just be the most embarrassingly dumb book ever to become a best-seller. Thanks, Newsweek and co.! And behold, in aisle three of every supermarket, The Velvet Saturation.

I guess social conservatives like myself are duty-bound to fret over this, and to note the hypocrisy of all those who run outlets like Newsweek and who make movies like this one (such as, you know, every single person listed on this IMDB page) who also claim to care an iota about “feminism” and women’s dignity.

But wisdom knows that Dave Barry’s approach, that of humor, is the better way. While not so many contemporary Americans as the denizens of Hollywood think would succumb to the temptation of lending aide to the production of something as low as 50 Shades for an easy paycheck, nearly all of us, I suppose, have had not a few moments of weakness for titillation. So as wisdom’s voice says,

We must not be totally serious about Venus. Indeed we can’t be totally serious without doing violence to our humanity. It is not for nothing that every language and literature in the world is full of jokes about sex. Many of them may be dull or disgusting and nearly all of them are old. But we must insist that they embody an attitude to Venus which in the long run endangers the Christian life far less than a reverential gravity. …Banish play and laughter from the bed of love and you may let in a false goddess. She will be even falser than the Aphrodite of the Greeks…

Oh that’s right! I forgot to tell you that wisdom’s voice here is a Christian one, that of C.S. Lewis, as expressed in one of his finest books, The Four Loves. Of course, that book is also suffused with the wisdom of the liberal learning generally, such as you get from knowing the likes of Emerson, Milton, Shakespeare, Ovid, and Aristotle.

The structure of the book is to explain the four different sorts of love: affection, friendship, eros, and charity. The chapter on Eros concerns what our Valentine’s Day is supposed to celebrate, but one significant part of Eros is what Lewis calls “Venus.” Those familiar with Greek texts will recognize that there is some parallel in the way the words eros and aphrodisias are often used, with the way Lewis uses his terms: “From Venus, the carnal ingredient within Eros, I now turn towards Eros as a whole.”

There is much to learn about Eros-love from Lewis, and mainly about it as love, or to speak Jane Austen, as a sensibility. For more on the sense, I’d recommend The Jane Austen Guide to Living Happily Ever After by Elizabeth Kantor. But Valentine’s Day 2015 finds us talking about one particular possibility of love’s carnal element. Now, according to certain expectations, a Christian author would largely refuse to deal with the delicate subject of likely widespread yet-seldom-admitted—thus, Underground!–desires for mastery-related sex-play. He would simply denounce such desires, perhaps even–veering into the Freudian/psychological language–calling them “perversions.” But three years before 1963, the year the VU paperback was published, we find Lewis saying the following, and without a dollop of that sort of language:

This refusal to be quite immersed–this recollection of the levity even when, for the moment, only the gravity is displayed–is especially relevant to a certain attitude which Venus, in her intensity, evokes from most (I believe, not all) pairs of lovers. This act can invite the man to an extreme, though short-lived, masterfulness, to the dominance of a conqueror or a captor, and the woman to a correspondingly extreme subjection and surrender. Hence the roughness, even fierceness, of some erotic play; the “lover’s pinch which hurts and is desired.” How should a sane couple think of this? or a Christian couple permit it?
I think it is harmless and wholesome on one condition. We must recognise that we have here to do with what I called “the Pagan sacrament” in sex. In Friendship, as we noticed, each participant stands for precisely himself the contingent individual he is. But in the act of love we are not merely ourselves. We are also representatives. It is here no impoverishment but an enrichment to be aware that forces older and less personal than we work through us. In us all the masculinity and femininity of the world, all that is assailant and responsive, are momentarily focused. The man does play the Sky-Father and the woman the Earth-Mother; he does play Form, and she Matter.
But we must give full value to the word play. Of course neither “plays a part” in the sense of being a hypocrite. But each plays a part or role in well, in something which is comparable to a mystery-play or ritual (at one extreme) and to a masque or even a charade (at the other). A woman who accepted as literally her own this extreme self-surrender would be an idolatress offering to a man what belongs only to God. And a man would have to be the coxcomb of all coxcombs, and indeed a blasphemer, if he arrogated to himself, as the mere person he is, the sort of sovereignty to which Venus for a moment exalts him.

Or, and particularly in the context of a sub-culture that has given up on marriage, he would have to be the sort who inclines towards the woman-beating that Velvet Undergound songs like “There She Goes Again” and “Foggy Notion” purport to merely “report” about.

She’s over in the corner,
with her hands at her sides
He hit her harder, harder, harder
Till you know, she might die.

But as we let Lewis finish, note the wrinkle he suggests about “play-mastery’s” connection with actual male chauvinist dominance, at least within marriage.

But what cannot lawfully be yielded or claimed can be lawfully enacted. Outside this ritual or drama he and she are two immortal souls, two free-born adults, two citizens. We should be much mistaken if we supposed that those marriages where this mastery is most asserted and acknowledged in the act of Venus were those where the husband is most likely to be dominant in the married life as a whole; the reverse is perhaps more probable. But within the rite or drama they become a god and goddess between whom there is no equality whose relations are asymmetrical.

More wisdom yet, where that came from, ranging over the whole landscape of love. But note what Lewis does with that little bit: through the lenses of pagan poetry and Christian doctrine, and by means of our older words, the Taboo Subject–whose “taboo” character in our day is nearly an entirely pantomimed one–becomes something we can acknowledge and deal with sensibly, humanely, and with the necessary humor. The Golden Rule will still apply, and God’s dignifying Image will remain visible in both Man and Woman.

Sure, if we feel obliged to, we can understand the embarrassing popularity of these books by considering them as a slight wrinkle upon typical pulp-romance themes, as this Allison Elliott NRO piece ably does. And sure, our best scholar psychologists probably have things to say about the subject that could be helpful to some small percentage of the population when employed by our best counselor psychologists—such psychologists would likely learn a thing or two from Lewis, and sure, might correct a thing or two also.

But following Lewis’ advice, let’s end with another laugh. When supporting Grey actresses Eloise Mumford told Time that “I would never make a film that didn’t empower women,” I immediately thought of a scene from Steve Martin’s classic Bowfinger, the funniest movie ever about movie-making. It’s the scene where the young Daisy character (Heather Graham) has convinced the screen-writer to insert some “hot scenes” for her into the low budget action flick.

Bowfinger’s office. Seated, director BOWFINGER is going over the new scenes with screenwriter EFRAIN as DAISY happily drifts in.

BOWFINGER: [reading, muttering] “…vixen in hot pants. What man wouldn’t want a hot virgin… …hmm, okay… [to Daisy] Uh, you’ll do this?”

DAISY: [rapidly] Well if I have too, if it’s for the movie, and you really really want me to, and if it’s not just about the nudity, but if it’s artistic, and says something about reality, and if it’s in character, and for the scene, and it’s not just a body…

BOWFINGER: “…right-right-right-right-right-right…” [phone rings, and he picks up]

Ah, Eloise Mumford, enjoy your pay, and thanks for the laugh, but if you want to “empower” anyone of either sex, try being involved in making a movie even half as funny as Bowfinger, or discussing with just one friend a book one-tenth as profound as The Four Loves.