LIPSTICK ON A PIG

Fifty Shades of Grey has made over $500 Million Dollars at the Box Office. At the 2015 Academy Awards, proud mother Melanie Griffith accompanied her young daughter Dakota Johnson, who starred in this movie, along the Red Carpet.

It has been called 'Mommy Porn' and is reportedly popular among teenage girls and college women, which makes the audience mostly Women 30 years of age or younger.

I keep meeting women who have read the books. Some say the movie got very poor ratings and they are not going to see it. Those who have seen it tell me that the movie was very much tamer than the books were. Someone else said the film had to be tamer than the books, because the general public won’t pay to see pornography.

Women’s rights and opportunities are newer than many of these younger women think. Older and middle boomer women experienced a fairly low ‘glass ceiling’ limiting their career prospects and therefore limiting their ability to be self supporting and independent of their families as adults.

The fact that we/they were one of the largest groups to pursue higher education and the professions, marriage and families were also being postponed by up to 5 or 10 years longer than earlier generations. In addition to this, student loans and being self sufficient required most women to enter and stay in the work force, usually at a lower salary than their male counterparts.

In fact, married women with their own jobs in Canada were told that their husband should cosign on car loans and other financial matters as late as the mid 1960’s. Unmarried Women were likely to be asked to have their father or brother vouch for them. Countries such as Switzerland only allowed women to vote in 1974.

The necessity for two pay cheques to support a family today is also a fairly recent dynamic in life among modern day couples and partnerships.

To me movies such as Fifty Shades of Grey dress up an otherwise unacceptable treatment of women. A Man who likes to whip and dominate physically and mentally but is very wealthy, does not make such a man anything other than a man who dominates over and beats up women.

The young Woman in the movie recognizes that the friend of her partner's mother, who dominated him for 6 years from the time he was 15 years old, was simply a Child Molester and calls it what it is.

As usual today, someone else is responsible for the molested child's chronic inability to have an equal relationship and is used to explain his need to seek out a way to physically abuse women, just as he was abused.

In 'real life', I doubt that most battered women were asked nicely to sign a contract specifying what level of abuse they find acceptable. The fact that they forgave the first instance of physical abuse (accepted the abuser’s apology and stayed with them) is probably the only 'contract' they ever get.

In this case, the woman gets a new car, a ride on a private helicopter and in a glider and (big deal) a chance to decorate a room in which she sleeps alone whatever way she likes. Oh yes, he also buys her a few nice clothes and seems to feel magnanimous when he offers to have a 'date night' written into her contract with him. A bargain for a Billionaire. Literally 'cheap' at twice the price. In actuality, like anyone else being dominated and battered, she does not sign the contract before he starts satisfying himself.

Interestingly enough young women referring to the book, use the books words and speak of dominant-submissive thereby appearing to entertain or condone what should probably be something a very limited number of people would personally endorse or wish for themselves; excepting those in the paid sex trade.  

I suppose it is a good idea for someone with these predilections to approach someone extremely innocent and inexperienced and work hard to pull her into his world. 

A jaded and decadent habitue of this world would not be as appealing to such a man (or movie goers) as much as someone innocent and inexperienced who we see is actually simply hoping to find someone to love.

In this movie, she is treated as strange when she tries to have a mutually loving relationship and tries to understand and question his demands. 

He was right at the start, she was not for him. This does not stop him from doing everything he can to bring her down to his level as quickly as he can.  Perhaps this will let him justify his decadence and inability to consider or accept anyone healthy enough to want an equal partner.

As I left the theatre the other day, I thought of another generation of women thinking the only way they may find love might include pleasing this type of person.

Too many young women today seem convinced that their chances of finding a partner will not be easy. Nor do many seem to entertain any hope of living out their lives with one partner. Growing old together is accepted as less than 50% possible since statistics, and their own experiences growing up as children of divorce, tell them.

With Pole Dancing and Lingerie that only Prostitutes would have worn in the past, becoming more acceptable, it is not surprising to find articles asking  young women how many steps further they are willing to consider taking sexually than they have so far.  

I was left thinking that a ‘normal’ couple, i.e. one that was based on a fairly equal partnership, would certainly have had a lot more mutually passionate sex together than this pair had. They would also have had a chance at ‘making love’ to and with each other.

In fact, I told the friend I saw the film with, that I thought a 'normal' couple would probably have had sex more than a hundred times in the time frame that this movies relationship covered. 

Strange as movies like this may make it seem, it is not exceptional to want to give love to someone you feel love for. What is exceptional to me is to put forward a relationship in which one partner dominates another as anything other than a lopsided and sadly unequal one.

You can dress up an abusive relationship with all of the material comforts you want, Lipstick on a Pig is still Lipstick on a Pig.

Men or Women inflicting pain upon one another should not be presented as anything other than the abuse by one and self abasement of the other whether it is actually 'consentual' or not.

Dress it up whatever way you like, these are people incapable of equality with each other, whatever excuse they use to justify and explain the need they have for it.  


*March 16, 2015 - I just read a review about these books on Wikipedia, which might be of some interest to those who interested in the above subject, whether you have read the books or not. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifty_Shades_of_Grey