14 DAY TRIAL // “Fifty Shades of Grey” is very bad for women, a new study from researchers at the Michigan State University has proved, and not just because it’s very poorly written and researched literature.
Reading all 3 novels from the very successful series from E.L. James can lead to a normalization of the behaviors depicted in them, including promiscuity, binge drinking, extreme dieting, and last but not least, accepting an abusive partner.
In the books, which James started writing as fanfiction for “Twilight,” the main characters are Christian Grey, a millionaire with a mysterious past and a very secret love for S&M, and Anastasia Steele, a fresh out of college student who gets the chance to interview him and falls for him.
Mr. Grey “doesn’t do romance” so, instead of dating, he proposes to Anastasia that she become his submissive, for which she has to sign an NDA that includes, among other clauses, several mentions of the degree of pain she must stand from slapping and whipping. That isn’t even the worst thing about their relationship, which is profoundly marked by an undercurrent of emotional and verbal abuse.
Moreover, throughout all 3 novels, the leading female character refuses to eat because she is either too mad about Mr. Grey or because she doesn’t “feel like it.” In turn, Grey repeatedly tells her that he will have to force-feed her if she doesn’t stop with this kind of behavior. There is no concrete mention of dieting to lose weight, but the implication is there.
Even so, the series of novels has proved such a big hit with female readers that, come Valentine’s Day, we’re even getting a movie, the first installment of a planned trilogy. It’s billed as the next “Twilight,” yet another franchise that came under serious fire for normalizing an abusive relationship.
This is the risk that such works of entertainment carry, the study highlights. To come to this conclusion, researchers polled women who read all 3 “Grey” books, women who read just the first novel and women who didn’t read them at all.
Those who had read all 3 were more prone to display behaviors as those depicted in the books and attributed to Anastasia.
“Problematic depictions of violence against women in popular culture – such as in film, novels, music, or pornography – create a broader social narrative that normalizes these risks and behaviors in women's lives. Our study showed strong correlations between health risks in women's lives – including violence victimization – and consumption of Fifty Shades, a fiction series that portrays violence against women,” the researchers say.
“While our cross-sectional study cannot determine temporality, the order of the relationship may be inconsequential; for example, if women experienced adverse health behaviors first (e.g., disordered eating), reading Fifty Shades might reaffirm those experiences and potentially aggravate related trauma. Likewise, if women read Fifty Shades before experiencing the health behaviors assessed in our study, it is possible that the book influenced the onset of these behaviors by creating an underlying context for the behaviors,” they add.
In conclusion, not only are the books bad for you because they subject you to bad writing (they have actually been dubbed the worst books ever written), but also because they send the wrong message and might change your life for the worse. Keep that in mind before picking them up.