Fifty Shades of Grey: Pornography and Normalizing the Bizarre | Canon and Culture.
Bart Barber has done a good job of going beyond “rules” while discussing 50 Shades of Grey. When asking the question whether anyone, and especially Christians, should see this movie we need beyond a simple rule-based evaluation. We need to see what is behind the best rules. God has given us a world full of truth, beauty and goodness. And this includes sexuality. We cannot abandon beauty without loosing goodness. The article is worth reading.
I haven’t seen the movie or read the book, and I plan on NOT doing either. But from what I have read about the content, I am absolutely perplexed how a culture obsessed with talking about the abuse of women can make this a bestseller.
“This is the true price of pornography. Yes, pornography normalizes the bizarre, but the flipside of the coin may be the darkest aspect of it at all: It bizarrifies the normal.”
A few highlights:
“This is the true price of pornography. Yes, pornography normalizes the bizarre, but the flipside of the coin may be the darkest aspect of it at all: It bizarrifies the normal. If one were to create a pornographic website that featured average couples who had been married twenty years or more engaging in sex as the average married couple experiences it, who would watch it? And yet study after study has shown that the greatest satisfaction in romance comes to people in just that kind of a relationship. There is beauty there; our culture just doesn’t condition us to see it. What would we see if married men and women described their marriages to a sketch artist? What would we see if their friends described their marriages? When it comes to beauty, something about us has gone wrong.”
“Are you open to seeing this in another way? Each time you choose to read a book, choose to watch a film, or choose to DVR a television show, you are revealing something about what you find to be beautiful. Rather than imposing a set of shackles, God is trying to free you to crawl out of the muck and mire and to learn beauty.”
MattTroupe.net 