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Short quick rant on a subject thats been annoying whenever i see it. I Don't get the hate for "50 Shades of Grey" now that its been released in movie format. all the picketing and "Boycott this movie" makes absolutely no sense to me. Even if people use the excuse of "its a book about an abusive relationship"...so was twilight..."it misrepresents BDSM and the bondage Community and fetish"...So did twilight...with vampires (not entirely the same thing but its still a fantasy with roots) .... "its a bad book / movie!"...I rest my case.
what are your thoughts?
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Well I mean, people DID complain about Twilight for those reasons as well, and they still do. Twilight also has a bunch of silly vampire and werewolf nonsense to distract from the crappy gender politics and romanticized emotional abuse.
50 Shades, however, is entirely about the relationship, which is also much more overtly abusive in a much broader sense, too. And it isn't just that it's fetishizing and romanticizing abuse, it's that it dangerously misrepresents BDSM and the like by making it seem like consent is irrelevant.
Books and movies with this kind of popularity do actually have some impact on people's attitudes and actions. Even if you don't care about these movies, people do have the ability and the right to be vocally critical about them. If everyone who hated these movies and what they represent would just ignore them, there wouldn't be anyone to let people know that, hey, these movies are fictional and the relationships they depict are not healthy in the real world. Even if you don't agree with calls for a boycott, it's still important for there to be people who will point out all of the fucked up stuff in those movies and warn peple not to emulate them in real life.
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^^THIS
ALL OF THIS
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well my thoughts here weren't about how people shouldn't critique or boycott 50 shades. Im all fine for people doing it and i agree that its perfectly fine and needs to be done. what I was saying was why didnt Twilight get the same treatment , when to me it was equally garbage. Not only that they were released around the same time or well within range of each other. You say twilight had these things? I dont remember hearing or seeing any of it. if it did then that too is great. Mostly i heard were jokes and how crappy they were and even had to watch the movie for pathetic laughs. it even got its own parody "Vampires Suck" thing.
I like to look at things equally . Abuse is Abuse no matter the severity. Some have said that since Twilight was mental abuse, its not as bad as 50 Shades , and i kinda lose it. Saying that its Dangerous is also kind of a silly thing because its no more dangerous than a violent video game or the WWE. Im sure more people have hurt themselves and killed people trying to replicate the moves seen on television in fake wrestling than this book. But that goes with anything Popular. Anything popular is bound to bring out the craziest of people , and when that happens , do we blame the people or are we gonna blame the medium?
But i agree! people SHOULD point out how fucked up things are and let people know. That wasn't my issue. i was more curious as to why one trashy abusive film got pickets and the other didn't. To get more of understanding as to what exactly the reason was behind all of this backlash and get more details i never heard of before now. Until recently i hadn't even heard it was BDSM related. Just that it was a girl in an abusive relationship and leads to her being kidnapped and Raped and she gets this whole Stockholm Syndrome where she ends up staying with the guy. Then i heard it was all under the guise of BDSM. and how its misrepresenting the fetish. so i got more insight! which is a good thing.
Thank you for your response!
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Oh yeah, Twilight's been on the receiving end of a shitstorm just as 50 Shades was. And I didn't mean to imply that some forms of abuse are less bad than others, because obviously, like you said, abuse IS abuse no matter what form it takes. I only meant that the abuse in 50 shades, due to being overtly physical in many instances, more easily reads as abuse to most people than the abuse in Twilight which was mostly emotional.
Part of the problem with these kinds of things is that yeah, they have about the same level of influence over folks as violent video games do but then you remember that something like Gamergate is still a thing and it dawns on you that while video games rarely if ever directly incite people to violence, they don't completely leave people unaffected, either. A lot of GG's attitudes towards women in general aren't directly found in most videogames, but once you start looking you might find that wow, a lot of videogames certainly do little to show women and minorities as actual people, putting things mildly.
And awareness is important, too. Violent games and sexist content and romanticizing abuse and such, all of those things appearing in media have a much smaller likelihood of affecting people's attitudes and behaviour if people are clearly taught that a lot of these things are awful and should never be attempted in real life. Our culture is really messed up in that respect in that it often outright condemns attempts at raising awarenes and responsibility, leaving the public who consume this media with no counterpoint to these shitty attitudes that keep sneaking in. Like teens "learning" everything they know about sex via pornography because sex education is barely a thing.
These things don't work like, you see a bad thing and then it throws a switch in your head and all of a sudden you think that bad thing is fine, but people are constantly being bombarded with these terrible attitudes through various media, and they're not given any healthy alternatives or more practical information and those shitty attitudes start to add up and they start to look "okay" because for all anyone knows that stuff's considered the norm.
It's a whole flippin' thing I tell ya.
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You definitely travel in some interesting social circles if stuff like this comes to your awareness.
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I think the backlash is just social justice but then getting further into that can easily turn into a minefield about feminism and secret or subconscious desires for abuse in relationships. Apparently in the book, it's sort of consenting BDSM, but then the guy starts to get abusive, but he's still supposed to be the ultimate hot guy, maybe just because he's rich and domineering, and ALLEGEDLY women to varying degrees and amounts want that, but then that's getting into a lot of supposition. Any fantasy where a woman permits herself to be subservient and abused is going to be something social justice people will attack. If anything, that just gave the movie that much more outlaw glamor and made more women want to see it. The masses enjoy safe dangerousness like seeing a "dangerous" movie that they're "not supposed to see."
The most important thing is that Bella wanted the wolf guy to knot her yiff hole.
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there is that aspect of it yeah. The SJW crowd for sure can use it for the relevant topics on feminism for sure . someone mentioned this elsewhere that it could be because of the time of its showing how feminist Issues are really mainstream , and thus this gets more attention because of it.
but you are right. bella wanted that were dong
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In the grand scheme of things, it feels like you are more opposed, or rather uncomfortable with people rallying up against things that they do not find acceptable, but at the same time you don't care about.
I feel as though more people that share this same viewpoint have a bigger issue against the boycotts and activism, than the actual book itself. This is of course in comparison to the Twilight novel series, which is rife with it's own controversial issues but intriguingly did not attract the same kind of critical response.
I am going out on the limb to say that the reason this is due to the fact that twilight's issues had to do with issues that could only apply in the realm of fantasy, while 50 shades's was a lot more close to home in terms of abuse fetish misrepresentations and problematic relationships.
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orphyxion
hello and you are rigth 50 shades are well is for womens, you have a great point and yeah to much books are realy bad story's but you know sometimes you need just let it go and ignore the bad books, if you hate it well you turn them into something important and well this bring more noise... I think someone get my point, welp the thing is dont pay attention to bad books just ignore them and if you look they do movies about it just say "meh whatever" is like the trolls, dont feed them so thats all and peace and hug for everyone