Forget burning your bras. A UK women's charity wants you to burn your books instead. Well, one book specifically: the mega-selling Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy, which the group refers to as "an instruction manual for an abusive individual to sexually torture a vulnerable young woman."
Unless you've been playing tortoise for the past year, you're well acquainted with EL James's 'romance' novels telling the titillating S&M affair between billionaire Christian Grey and college student Anastasia Steele. The first novel in the trilogy has sold more than 5.3 million copies in the UK, making it the bestselling book in British history.
After waiting for someone, anyone to speak out about about "this misogynistic crap," director of Wearside Women in Need, Clare Phillipson, took it upon herself and did just that. Her worry being that the book will normalize domestic violence for the young women picking up the book. Quite simply, she says, Fifty Shades banks on the whole mythology that "women want to be hurt."
Not only is Christian Grey young, filthy rich, and stinking gorgeous, he is also damaged goods. Rather than running the other way, Steele sticks by Grey, buying into what Phillipson calls the classic domestic violence fallacy—"that you can heal this broken man, that if you just love him enough and take his shit enough, he will get better."
"That message is so dangerous," she added. "... the chances of making a Christian Grey better by enduring the abuse he heaps on you—well, you would be physically traumatized and potentially dead. It is not going to happen. You have to walk away from the Christian Greys of this world."
It's a sentiment that comedienne Joan Rivers echoed in a recent Twitter spat with Rihanna, after the singer claimed to still be in love with ex, Chris Brown, who beat her. "Honey, Rihanna,' tweeted Rivers, "everyone knows: If he hit you once, he'll hit you again. Read the statistics."
Phillipson would tend to agree. That's why she is urging women to burn their copies of Fifty Shades alongside an effigy of Christian Grey at the Wearside offices in Washington, England, on 5 November.
Behavioural psychologist Jo Hemmings fails to see the correlation between the fact and the fiction. Most adults, she claimed, "have a pretty good handle on what and what isn't morally acceptable. Does reading a thriller involving murder makes us more likely to commit one? Or even consider it? Of course not."
A latecomer to succumb (sorry) to Mr. Grey's wiles, I'm only partway through the first Fifty Shades, and as such will have to postpone judgment. But it do seem to me that we should be beyond burning books by now. It also seems to me that erotica of this kind isn't intended for 13- to 14-year-old girls...
What's your take on the whole Fifty Shades phenomenon? Seduced or sickened?
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