Fifty Shades of Grey, pp. 49, 50, 52, & 56
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TW: Discussion of rape, rape culture, and victim-blaming
I am so disgusted with this book—and, honestly, with the author as well, although I usually try to refrain from making judgments about people I don’t know in person—that I am honestly considering aborting this critique right here and now.
He took her jeans off when she was passed out drunk. This is never, ever okay. He says later that it was because she had spattered them when she had been sick the night before, but that is still not okay.
His reasoning for taking her back to his place rather than to her own was that he didn’t want to risk her being sick in his car?! Okay, jackass (and yes, I am upset enough to call fictional characters bad names), then you call her a cab. You do not take a girl who passed out in your arms because she’s had too much to drink back to your apartment. And if, God forbid, you do, YOU DO NOT SPEND THE NIGHT IN BED WITH HER.
It horrifies me that Ana’s reaction to this is to be ashamed and guilty. It also terrifies me that she takes his word about him not having slept with her. But as sickening as these things are, the excerpt from page 52 frightens me the most.
ANA ASSUMES THAT BECAUSE GREY DIDN’T RAPE HER WHILE SHE WAS UNCONSCIOUS, HE IS NOT SEXUALLY INTERESTED IN HER.
Anyone reading this right now, please, listen to me—male, female, nonbinary, young, old, whatever, I don’t care. Having sex with someone who is unconscious is rape. It doesn’t matter if the person, like Ana in the novel, has expressed interest prior to that. They are not able to give you consent and therefore that is rape. And somehow Anastasia Steele has made it through 21 years of life on four years of a college education without having the faintest idea what safe, consensual sex is.
Can I just point out the obvious here and say how really freaking scared that makes me? Because here’s the thing about things like that being in a book like this. Fifty Shades of Grey is on the New York Times Bestseller list. It is being talked about all over the internet. Heck, I had friends telling me I should read it. As if that weren’t enough attention to get this book and all the messages inside it out to the public, it’s widely known that this novel and its sequels began as Twilight fanfiction.
That means that the teenage and 20-something young people reading this book went straight from four books in Meyer’s Twilight Saga that idolized an entirely abusive relationship (see the awesome blog Reasoning with Vampires if you don’t know what I’m talking about), and continuing to pump absolutely horrible and wrong ideas about sex, love, and relationships into their minds. Don’t you tell me that underage Twilight fans aren’t going to get their hands on this book. They absolutely are. And the first 60 pages are filled with enough misinformation and blatant rape culture that I honestly fear for any impressionable minds, young or not, who get ahold of this book.
There is also the separate issue of Grey acting like he deserves a goddamned cookie for not raping Ana, and Ana basically giving it to him. Oh, he didn’t rape me while I was unconscious and completely unaware that he brought be to his apartment and slept next to me in his bed. He must be celibate or really picky or really upstanding. But I am way to effing angry at this book, its author, and the people who let it be published that I am just going to stop now before I give myself a heart attack.
