50 Shades of Breakfast: Fictional Scenes from the Kinkiest Meal of the Day

As a food writer and a former professional dominatrix, I’m uniquely qualified to talk about how fictional characters have done a lot of weird crap with breakfast items. I say “weird” in a loving way here. In my domme days, I touted myself as the splosh queen of New York City. I threw gigantic food fights and developed something of a reputation for turning grown men into elaborate dishes, like sundaes, fruit salads, and deli platters. But that’s peanuts (never used those) compared to the sensual shenanigans gotten up to by the protagonists of some classic works of kinky film and literature. This is by no means a comprehensive list because jeez, folks, this is a breakfast site, so just consider it an amuse bouche.

Of course we’ve gotta start with E.L. James’ 50 Shades of Grey because the second film just hit theaters, it’s the world’s widest-read BDSM fiction, and it re-sparked the flickering pilot light of your aunt and uncle’s marriage and now they buy fur-covered and battery-powered toys together and make everyone feel weird around the Thanksgiving table. In this trilogy international quazillionaire business guy Christian Grey gets a virginal, dimwitted young lady named Anastasia Steele to sign paperwork that allows him to insert various items into her behind and also order breakfast for her at IHOP after taking her for a flight in his private glider. Nope—not actually kidding about that last part.

Spoiler alert: The couple does not end up flapjacking in the IHOP walk-in after he refuses to allow her to pay for the meal (that’d be yer super hot and sexy financial submission). But the tedious and abusive Grey does decide to redefine the terms of their relationship so Anastasia is allowed to sleep in his bed, and he gets to decide what she eats.

(Anastasia’s response: “I am eating a banana as I type.” HAWT!)

Pancakes are mentioned seven times in the course of the first book, the word breakfast appears 48 times, and Christian’s recollection of her preference for Twinings brand tea is substituted in for actual emotion six times. By the final book in the trilogy, it seems as if James really wants to be writing breakfast fiction, but has to slather a layer of smut atop it to stay on brand.

There is also a mention of a debate among rich people on a boat over the merits of bacon vs. sausage, an erotic response to the sound of a toaster lever, and 35 uses of the word breakfast. But aside from Christian’s semi-consensual-ish domination of Anastasia’s eating habits and some blindfolded feeding, the dullard duo seems to refrain from actually incorporating food items into their play.

The characters in Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye, Nasiga Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses, and Juzo Itami’s Tampopo, however, are all in. As in using eggs all up in their naked time. In Eye, a character “developed a mania for breaking eggs with her behind,” stared at eggs in the toilet before urinating on them, and forced at least one of her partners to consume them. The very notion of eggs became so charged that two members of the throuple entirely dropped the word egg from their vocabulary lest they become too scrambled with desire. (There’s a whole psychosexual thing with eggs, eyes, and testicles going on. It’s very French and complicated.)

I saw Senses the week I lost my virginity, in the company of the gent directly involved, and gaped in a sort of terrified awe as a character inserted an entire hard-boiled egg into his lover’s ladybits and instructed her to “Make like a chicken.” Is that just a standard part of everyone’s lovemaking menu, I wondered? By the time the film ended and the egg-layer was found wandering around with her partner’s severed, uh, sausage in her hand, I assumed I was off the hook—even when it was revealed that the last part was indeed based on a real story.

Tampopo, however, seems downright innocent in its messy kink by comparison—the primary physical risk being contracting salmonella. Its food-obsessed protagonists indulge their sensual impulses throughout—one old woman runs willy-nilly through a grocery store squeezing buns, cheese, and peaches, a man’s lip is cut as he slurps an oyster, and a yakuza spends his dying words describing the yam sausages he’d wanted to bring to his lover. But the food fixation’s climax—in all senses of the term—comes in a scene where two lovers delicately pass a raw egg back and forth between their mouths until it explodes in her mouth and gushes down her chin. Even if food play isn’t your particular bag, it’s pretty hot.

Or, to put it in terms a 50 Shades fan would appreciate: Holy crap!

Now go eat your banana. Mr. Grey is waiting. He sent an email about it.