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Fifty Shades of Grey
There’s been a phenomenal amount of noise on social media and in some church circles about one particular movie lately. And the book on which it’s based.
I’m referring to Fifty Shades of Grey, E.L. James’s story about the relationship between college graduate Anastasia Steele and billionaire businessman Christian Grey. This involves sadism and masochism (using pain as a sexual stimulant), and Christian’s attempt to secure a contractual arrangement that Anastasia will unquestionably submit to all of his desires.
Right off the bat, I confess I’m not qualified to review either the movie or the book. I haven’t seen or read either, and have no intention of doing so. Even in the interests of journalistic integrity.
There are two reasons for this. The first, and lesser, of these is I’m a literary snob. I detest wooden writing. By virtually all accounts, the writing in Fifty Shades is woeful, and life is simply too short to be trapped in a bad book.
But my primary objection is that I learnt many years ago the importance of guarding my mind and imagination from so-called ‘soft pornography’ or ‘erotica’ that disguises itself as ‘romantic fiction’. There’s a glut of this stuff out there—it’s easy to get online and discreet to consume on devices like Kindles. No one has to know we read it, that we’re filling our minds with material that allows our sexual expectations and aspirations to become coloured by fantasy. By continually escaping into this genre, we can start to neglect our real-life relationships, or even worse, to judge the quality of these relationships by some essentially fictional construction.
Christian author and psychiatrist John White described pornography as ‘tickle and tease’, the itch you can never scratch enough. The more we expose ourselves to it, he said, the more our tolerance of it grows, and the more we require for pleasure.
Now, I’m not going to come at you with a list of what is and isn’t appropriate in bed. I’m of the opinion that the church has nurtured some unhelpfully prudish attitudes to sexual activity. But there has to be mutuality and respect. And the type of consent that is sought frequently, not the sort of ‘submissive agreement-for-all-time-and-for-whatever-I-want’ model that Christian Grey seems to expect of ‘his’ woman. After all, in real life, long-term intimate relationships (which, at their best, offer the soundest base for trust and fulfilment) travel through a number of seasons. We must negotiate sexual fulfilment together through all of these.
One of the major criticisms of Fifty Shades is that, regardless of the right of people to make their own private choices about what goes on in their bedrooms, no individual has the right to physically, emotionally or sexually abuse another. Not in any relationship. The romanticising of Christian’s domination and control of Anastasia is being roundly criticised as helping to normalise attitudes that women are simply objects to possess and control.
Those in the church need to be on their guard here, recognising that Christians are abused and abusers within the bounds of the marriage relationship. This is not fiction
—it is our uncomfortable truth. Dominance and violence are perpetuated even in Christian marriages, supported by those who misuse the Bible by quoting phrases like ‘wives should submit to their husbands in everything’ (Ephesians 5:24). Using biblical texts as a mandate for misogyny ignores their correct context and the broader message of the Bible as a whole. Abuse is sin, and women are not expected to suffer in silence.
What’s my strongest caution to those considering the easy entertainment of Fifty Shades of Grey?
It’s really just the observation that our minds don’t have an erase button, so we need to take care what we put into them in the first place. Because what’s inside them shapes our attitudes and actions—toward others and toward ourselves. As the saying used to go in the early days of computer science: ‘Garbage in, garbage out.’
by Christina Tyson (c) 'War Cry' magazine, 7 March 2015, pp3.
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