The real reasons for the popularity of Fifty Shades, and for the persistent role of domination and submission in women’s sexual imaginations, are rooted in what it actually means to live life in a female body—and the truth about that is so dark it makes Christian Grey’s Red Room of Pain seem as innocuous as a backyard sandbox.

So when people pontificate about women’s intrinsic sexual nature, I find myself thinking: How do you know? How can we ourselves even know? From earliest childhood, women’s experience of sex is so inextricably intertwined with all forms of male control that submission is forever eroticized in more ways than we can possibly unravel. As females, we have been dominated physically, politically, socially, legally, and economically, and pop culture endlessly reinforces the message. Hip-hop derides bitches and ho’s, an entire genre of blockbuster videogames depicts female characters as sexualized corpses or disposable prostitutes, fashion sells bondage dresses with leather cages, and Hollywood recycles domination themes from 9 1?2 Weeks to Secretary to Venus in Fur. Sex is fused with violence for countless women who suffer domestic abuse by husbands and lovers. More than a third of all female homicide victims are killed by intimate partners.

Given those realities, who can say what we would be like in a world where our sexual desires, and the way we express them, were freely chosen instead of imposed on us by a lifetime of social conditioning? Fifty Shades of Grey may represent the ultimate appropriation for capitalist consumption of themes that have resonated throughout history, but one thing its popularity can’t tell us is the truth about female sexuality.