IN a society where almost every cultural phenomenon ends up interpreted through an ideological lens, the success de scandale of “Fifty Shades of Grey” . the books, the movie, the branded cuffs and whips . has left culture warriors a little bit confused. Is this another transgressive breakthrough . the latest blow to whatever remains of traditional morality, the mainstreaming of a lifestyle long locked away from view? Or is the now-famous story, with its alpha male gazillionaire and his punished female prize, actually a reactionary fairy tale, encouraging submission to the latest version of the patriarchy?

The answer, of course, is a little of both, which is also the secret to the books’ success: In their not-exactly-literary pages, the central tension of the sexual revolution is finessed, tamed and happily resolved.

Viewed from one angle, the sexual revolution looks obviously egalitarian. It’s about extending to everyone the liberties . the freedom to be promiscuous, to pursue sexual fulfillment without guilt . that were once available only to privileged cisgendered heterosexual males. It’s about ushering in a society where everyone can freely love and take pleasure in anyone and anything they want.

But viewed from another angle, that same revolution looks more like a permission slip for the strong and privileged to prey upon the weak and easily exploited. This is the sexual revolution of Hugh Hefner and Larry Flynt and Joe Francis and roughly 98 percent of the online pornography consumed by young men. It’s the revolution that’s been better for fraternity brothers than their female guests, better for the rich than the poor, better for the beautiful than the plain, better for liberated adults than fatherless children ... and so on down a long, depressing list. At times, as the French writer Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry recently suggested, this side of sexual revolution looks more like “sexual reaction,” a step way back toward a libertinism more like that of pre-Christian Rome . anti-egalitarian and hierarchical, privileging men over women, adults over children, the upper class over the lower orders.

At times, the two sides of the revolution have come into conflict with each other. Think of Gloria Steinem going undercover as a Playboy bunny; or 1980s-era feminists campaigning against pornography; or today’s social justice activists making war on campus frats.

But the essential dream of our age isn’t conflict; it’s a synthesis, in which the aristocratic thrills of libertinism are somehow preserved but their most exploitative elements are rendered egalitarian and safe.

The hope, in other words, is that we can eventually have the fun of Rome without all the nasty bits: Contraception and abortion will pre-empt the inconvenient infant, age-of-consent laws will make sure that young people’s initiation doesn’t start too early, and with enough carefully drawn up regulations for initiating intercourse we can all experience the courts of Tiberius and Heliogabalus without anybody getting hurt.

So our sexual egalitarians don’t want to shut down the party or end the bacchanal. They just want hookup culture to be governed by affirmative consent, for prostitutes to become empowered sex workers, for misogynistic porn to be balanced out by feminist alternatives, for dangerous patriarchal polygamy to give way to safe egalitarian polyamory, and for De Sade’s Justine to find happiness as a submissive protected by her safe words.

This is the landscape in which “Fifty Shades of Grey” has found its audience, with a story almost perfectly suited to this dream: A fantasy of being chased, seduced and whipped by an embodiment of the .001 percent, a man who’s dangerous but not too dangerous, thrillingly Caligulan but ultimately vulnerable, and who proves himself to be a caring spouse and father in the end.

A real-life Christian Grey, the man set free from all restraint, would probably be a pure satyr like the sex-partying Dominique Strauss-Kahn or the billionaire Jeffrey Epstein, with his private-jet harems and the conviction for soliciting a 14-year-old. But in the fantasy, the synthesis, he’s a guy who will first dominate you but ultimately love you . providing that, like Anastasia Steele, you’re careful to sign a rigorously detailed contract detailing just how much domination you’ll accept.

And the sophisticated complaints against the books are equally illuminating. The problem isn’t that there’s anything wrong with pornography or sadism . don’t be silly! No, it’s just that the sadism isn’t quite safe enough (because the heroine doesn’t have a real BDSM adept’s skill at setting ground rules), that Mr. Grey’s kinks are judged a little too harshly (they’re rooted in childhood trauma, which is unfair to the dungeon set), and the romance is too old-fashioned and “straight” and not quite empowering enough.

These are not real critiques; they’re ideological line-edits. And their thinness pays tribute to what E.L. James has achieved: A fantasy that even many of its critics want to believe in, and the utopia that our society deserves.