"And Now [That I've Seen The Movie,] I'm Embarrassed That I Ever Joked About [50 Shades]"

[joreth]

http://www.mamamia.com.au/rogue/fifty-shades-of-grey-review-rosie-waterland/I've seen a lot, and I mean A LOT, of strawman arguments that it's insulting and overly simplistic to claim that people are too stupid to realize that 50 Shades is fantasy and fiction and that we shouldn't be worried about its impact on society, especially considering the

Comments

[admnaismith]

Seems to me, the strawmen have, accidentally or on purpose, confused "stupid" with "impressionable."

I'm not generally considered stupid, but like most people of my background, I once staggered away from home on unsteady adolescent legs, into a deeply fucked-up and hostile world, and I grabbed at references where I found them.

Where I happened to find them was 80s era rom-coms. I was taught that "no" means "Stand all night outside her bedroom window playing Peter Gabriel Songs on a boom box." And I kept doing shit like that, making myself and women I believed I cared about miserable until long after I was old enough to know better.

Somewhere there are impressionable young het women setting out to discover what kind of guy makes an exciting and satisfying partner. Somewhere there are impressionable young men looking for cues as to how to treat women. Some of them will latch onto 50 Shades. And it will not end well.

And they are not stupid. But they are impressionable and will take guidance where they find it.

Impressionable

[edm]

There's also another level of meta there, I think: those who know it's "not real", but believe that playing that "romantic fantasy" as if it were real is the way to convince others they are interested in you. Playing the role because you think it's what is expected of you

Re: Impressionable

[joreth]

So, I just read an article about a woman who had left her male partner (husband?). He knew that she liked 50 Shades. So he created a fake online profile, "met" her online, struck up an online romance by indicating an interest in the story, and after a while set up a fantasy date where she would leave the door unlocked for him to come in and rape her.

Afterwards, he took the blindfold off of her so that she could see who he really was, all to rub her nose in the fact that he got to "have her one more time". He also indicated he thought this would be a good way to "win her back".

So yeah, you're right, there's another level here. How "real" anyone thinks this is may not be the important part in whether or not anyone gets hurt by it.

Re: Impressionable

[edm]

That's terrible. Yet strangely inevitable.

I can also see the almost-logic that might lead someone to convince themselves that it would "win their partner back", particularly if they'd been repeatedly told they "weren't man enough" (ie, controlling/dominating) and felt that they needed to demonstrate they could be in some dramatic way. In the cold light of day it was clearly always going to end badly. But wrapped in enough "want it to be" romance and it seems "almost could be", if only "everything goes according to plan".

The saddest thing here is that both of them seem likely to be hurt by this experience because without the sane framework to play with consensual-non-consent, and without the "romance" to make it magically all okay, it's icky all around (it also seems at least plausible that a rape conviction would stick were a prosecutor to try -- "would not have consented if they had known the full facts, and the perpetrator knew that").

Ewen