Interesting Links for 08-02-2015

[andrewducker]

• Samsung: watch what you say in front of our TVs, they're sending your words to third parties
  (tags: samsung tv surveillance )
• Is 50 Shades of Grey abuse?
  (tags: FiftyShadesOfGrey abuse bdsm )
• If you don’t genetically engineer your kids, you are a bad parent. It’s that simple.
  (tags: genetics parenting fiction scifi vaccination funny )
• Girls

Comments

[cartesiandaemon]

That's a fairly good summary about 50 shades I think. I think there are problems with 50 shades but not exactly what many people think they are, and many people object to ANY romance novel which features "it wasn't proper consent but it was hot", even if the readers know it's not a model for real life, and people give a pass to worse things in other genres.

But I also think it's a problem that the 50 shades male lead is a creepy and abusive BDSM-er. It's entirely realistic that Anna happens to meet a creepy and abusive asshole who ignores consent and pretends to be a super-knowledgeable dom but does things that would lead to unfortunate injuries. And if he was just a kidnapper, I'd say "everyone can see this is obviously pretend". But I feel it's irresponsible to just show that as BDSM in the book, both because it increases stigma against anyone who actually practices BDSM, because people assume it must be creepy non-consensual abuse, and the risks for anyone who's into it, because they assume if it goes beyond mild pretending, there's no point looking for a consensual safe subculture, they just assume there's a choice between "stay vanilla" and "abuse" :( And maybe that's not THAT likely, but it's what bothered me about the book in general. (I don't care if it has bad writing, so do lots of books I love :))