Fifty Shades of Grey

So I took the time out today to watch Fifty Shades of Grey online. I'll admit, I've been intrigued to watch and possibly read. I mean, I was quite gutted that I was unable to take a trip to the big screen as it is an 18+ film. However after watching, I was left with the utmost rage and fury in every fibre of my body! Fifty Shades of Grey was not appealing to me at all, the story goes against everything I stand for and I can't help but rant about the utter disgust I feel about it.

First of all, the idea of romanticising abuse horrified me, making the unacceptable become accepted. It perpetuates the myth that women who are abused can change their abuser's behaviour if they simply just love them enough, obey them enough or submit enough. The insight on the abuser's behaviour is because they have had a difficult life, it is argued, as a loving partner they should understand it. From taking a look at key parts in the book to gather a "better understanding" (as many seem to arguably suggest) I noticed that the book removes a lot of responsibility for Christian's reactions. He isn't a person who has a will they can control, but a mere product of his experiences. He isn't responsible for how he treats Ana, as the myth goes, and if only she can love him enough, she can repair his broken past. This, of course, is absolute rubbish! The only person responsible for abuse is the abuser.

Fifty Shades of Grey cloaks the horror of domestic violence within clichés and metaphors, hiding the true nature of abusive power. By romanticising domestic abuse, it makes readers/viewers blind and numb to their reality - both in the fictional world and in reality.

To see why this blindness matters let's take a look at a few statistics:

• Somewhere between 60,000 and 85,000 women, and 8000 and 10,000 men are raped in the UK every year.
• One out of every three women has been beaten, coerced into sex or otherwise abused in her lifetime.
• The CPS estimates that around a million women in the UK are victims of domestic violence each year.
• In the UK, an average of 2 women a week get killed by abusive partners or husbands.

A reminder: this is the UK we are talking about. These crimes stand as massive condemnations of our society: we are consistently failing both male and female victims of domestic violence (this review concentrates on female victims merely because of the plot of the book). We cannot afford for abuse to romanticised. We cannot afford to think that Fifty Shades of Grey is a cutesy culture phenomenon which we can laugh about! These stories go on every day in our communities, places of work, schools and towns. Christian Grey is the romanticised abuser, hidden in cliché and metaphor, clothed in a robe of words that make it difficult to discern what is going on as domestic abuse.

This is not a book about sex, it is a book that masks domestic violence, romanticises abuse and means that the issue of consent becomes even more cloudy in our society than it already is.