Fifty Shades is Abuse

http://endsexualexploitation.org/fiftyshadesgrey/ Frankly, it disgusts me. Society pays a price when we teach men to be turned on by women in pain. 89% of scenes in mainstream pornography today depict violence against women and this is spilling over into the mainstream media. As a result, sexual violence is on the rise in our military, in our best universities, and on the street. When we make violence sexy, it is no wonder that these are the consequences we face. These books perpetuate the rape culture that so many, especially recent, have been trying to deal with. The main character is in fact raped in the book and women are fawning over Grey as a romantic hero. It sets women's suffrage back 50 years. It is disheartening. Women cannot expect to fight for rights and then hand them back by telling men that this type of behavior is OK. It is so far from OK.

Even the BDSM culture is upset with the books, because it portrays it incorrectly. Author E.L. James has often insisted that Fifty Shades of Grey is wildly popular not because of its titillating trappings of transgression, but because it tells a simple love story for the ages. But this is a romance for a particular kind of age — a time of growing inequality. The social order is breaking up and leaving massive human wreckage in its wake. Dreams of love turn into fantasies of power – who has it and what they can do to those who don’t have it. "I’ve long struggled to define feminism, but if 50 Shades of Grey makes the cut, then feminism is dead and buried. Surely the movement is worthless if it won’t loudly reject a book about a woman’s adventures in being manhandled and used by an emotionally stunted playboy." -Matt Walsh