Fifty Shades of Wrong

I will not be going to see Fifty Shades of Gray, but not for the reason you probably think.  I don't have any problem with consenting adults doing "things."  I don't really mind people making movies about consenting adults doing "things," even if those "things" are a little outside what might be considered healthy sexuality.  I think our general attitude towards having people do naked things in movies is a little ridiculous and hypocritical.  Case in point: a PG-13 rated romance where two people are obviously having sex (extramarital sex at that), but because of well placed arms and shadows, no nipples or other pudenda are visible, it avoids an R rating (and let's not get started on the amount of violence that can avoid being "adult content.") See also erectile dysfunction medication advertisements that are on during almost any type of programming imaginable and have led to some uncomfortable questions about why your heart needs to be healthy enough for sex from my kids.
I'm not a big proponent of pornography, but for reasons that have very little to do with sex and more to do with the destructive cycles of addiction it produces.
I have watched and found merit in movies like Basic Instinct, Henry and June, Shame, even Last Tango in Paris (definitely not recommending that one) and others that flirt with or receive an NC-17 rating.  I'm not a prude when it comes to movies.  But I'm not a big fan of Fifty Shades of Gray.
A couple of years ago, when several of the women in my life were reading Fifty Shades, I was at least curious enough to sort of skim through it.  One of the skills I learned in seminary was how to read and assess things really quickly, deciding on merit and highlights what "needed" to be learned.  I can "process" many works of non-fiction in the span of about an hour, which I will often do and then decide to go back and actually sink myself into reading it.  I did this with Harry Potter, and realized that Hogwarts was a story and a world that I definitely wanted to get into, likewise with the The Hunger Games.  However, Twilight and Fifty Shades, not so much.  The decision, with fiction, is largely aesthetic, how do the snippets of the story make me feel, does it seem worth the investment of time and emotion that it takes to actually enter the story, and is the story a place I want to enter?  Is it a safe story (like Harry Potter or Narnia)?  If there are dangers, will those dangers make my life appreciably better for having risked them?  Will they challenge my assumptions in a way that allows me to grow, or are they simply going for the iconoclasm of shock value?
My opinion of Fifty Shades of Gray was that E.L. James was just enough of a writer to be dangerous, and not a good enough writer to be trusted.  Her narrative was flawed, her characters were ridiculous at best and psychotic at worst.  The so called romance at the core of the books was far too abusive to be considered healthy, and even the much ballyhooed sex scenes were actually not all that sexy.
Fundamental problem number one: Christian Gray is a nightmare waiting to happen.  Seriously, I want to tell every woman that I care about even a little, if you meet a person like Christian Gray do not even give him your phone number.  If for no other reason than the simple fact that he has so much wealth and power that you will never ever, contracts be damned, be able to tilt the power dynamic to neutral, which is where it really should be in a genuine loving relationship.  In addition to being inexplicably rich, the man is a sociopath with a history of being sexually abused and manipulated, which he apparently has not managed to properly process.  The fact that he can only be aroused by inflicting pain on another person, is absolutely not okay, it is not just a peculiar sexual peccadillo, it is a sign of serious dysfunction.
Fundamental problem number two: Anastasia is a prototype for the type of woman that abusers go after: young, shy, naive, unsure of herself, and yet also attractive.  Her methods of dealing with Mr. Gray are also fairly prototypical victim-type rationalizations: he really loves me deep down, I really love him deep down, he's really just a wounded bird that needs me. Oh yeah, and she really likes all that his money can buy, and he's really attractive... and a host of other really bad reasons to stay with a creep.  She is not a strong female character who knows what she wants, she is a young girl who is seduced by a wealthy, attractive and older man, who basically forces her into signing a paper that says he's allowed to tie her up and rape her, you know, under certain conditions.
Fundamental problem number three: This story can only possibly have a "happy" ending in a very poorly rendered narrative.  For actual love to emerge from the primordial stew of abuse, is not just a stretch that requires a bit of imagination and suspension of disbelief, it is a positively toxic story in a world where rape and violence towards women is absolutely an epidemic. Framing this is a story as a unconventional, but ultimately romantic relationship is a task that has no place in a world where one of the biggest stories of the year was an NFL player punching his fiancee in an elevator, and where a girl has to literally carry a mattress around her college campus to get the community to acknowledge that she was raped and it's not freaking okay.  I'm not even going to go into what happens to women and girls in other parts of the world, because my blood pressure is already high enough.
The core issue is not telling the story of a dysfunctional, abusive relationship in graphic detail.  I can see the need for that sort of cathartic process, the problem is that it's being presented as a romance, with a "happy" ending.
Yes, there is lots of kinky stuff out there, and no, it's not always bad, but a lot of times it is, a lot of times it's broken and painful and a lot of times it absolutely eats people alive.
Saying that love can happen in that sort of a mess is not acknowledging the "gray areas" in human relationships, it is presenting a delusional version of a very deep truth: love conquers all.  Love does conquer all, but domination and power are antithetical to love.  Yes, antithetical, a destructive opposite force, which means that if you think this sort of thing is going to lead, in the end to a healthy relationship you are delusional.
I have heard the apologists for the BSDM world say that this stuff is perfectly healthy, but what I know about the human soul tells me otherwise.  Dominance and submission are ways that people sometimes express their sexuality, however there is a twisting and a disconnection, these are ways to gratify an impulse that has little to do with true intimacy, people wear masks and assume a different personality. They want to be something other than what they are, and they indulge in a fantasy, but that fantasy allows them to get away from themselves. For instance: a powerful politician takes the submissive role and a prostitute dominates him, in truth he still has all the power, and he can stop the role playing anytime he wants. If that's the case, I suppose you're welcome to have your kinks. But be aware that the falseness of the form is indeed pornographic, it's no more real than the absurd scenes involving buxom and bored women who answer the door in lingerie and seduce the pizza delivery guy.
But what worries me about the major publicity the book received and now the movie is getting, is that it tends to trivialize and smooth over behavior that is often not voluntary or consensual.  In the real world people who are dominated, abused and perhaps even enslaved cannot just walk away or change their minds.  This sort of relationship rarely has all the carefully placed safeguards that James has used to make her story less abjectly terrifying. The dark side of what probably would occur in reality between Anastasia and Mr. Gray makes me more than a little uneasy.  Just because you can tell a story where perversion and abusive behavior turns out okay, doesn't mean we ought to think it will regularly turn out that way, any more than the fact that some people survive cancer means that everyone should want to get it.