Twilight & 50 Shades - Abuse part 3

Welcome back to PART 3!

For starters, who guessed the other abusive relationship in Frozen? It should be obvious: HANS and ANNA.

(source)

I'll break this down quickly, because I think everyone recognizes how destructive Hans was, and we've got other stuff to get to! As we all know (because we all saw the movie, right?) Hans lies to Anna, manipulates her into agreeing to marriage after a frighteningly short time, and ultimately attempts to murder both her and her sister for his own ends. It was a brief relationship, but there can be no doubt that he's an abuser. And just generally a douche-canoe.

Let's move on to other representations of abuse in popular media. You know where this is going; it's in the title! Twilight and 50 Shades of Grey.

These have both been talked to death by people more articulate than I, but I still feel they are important to address because not only are they popular and mainstream, but they represent abusive partners as desirable. That is just horrifying. Yet it remains true that countless naive young women (and a creepy number of older gals who should know better) describe Edward and/or Mr. Grey as the ideal man.

Here's a list of signs of abuse (from the Mayo Clinic site):

Calls you names, insults you or puts you down

Prevents or discourages you from going to work or school

Prevents or discourages you from seeing family members or friends

Tries to control how you spend money, where you go, what medicines you take or what you wear

Acts jealous or possessive or constantly accuses you of being unfaithful

Gets angry when drinking alcohol or using drugs

Threatens you with violence or a weapon

Hits, kicks, shoves, slaps, chokes or otherwise hurts you, your children or your pets

Forces you to have sex or engage in sexual acts against your will

Blames you for his or her violent behavior or tells you that you deserve it

Countless people have pointed out that this is an almost exact description of how Edward treats Bella. He's definitely possessive and jealous, he isolates her from family and friends, constantly threatens her with violence (wanting to eat her) and blames it on her (because she smells so good and he just can't resist), and he controls their sex life independent of what she wants. But don't take my word for it, read the books with these points in mind. I'll let one of my favorite vloggers break it down for you as well.

It's no surprise, then, that a series of books that got their start as Twilight fan fiction also glorify abuse as a desirable quality. Oh yes, 50 Shades was originally a Twilight fan fic. Hopefully that will scare people away from taking it seriously, but the book shouldn't need any help in that regard. Not only does it glorify abuse in a similar track as Twilight, but it completely misrepresents BDSM (as based on reviews by those in the know and which really needs no further stigmatization, especially based on falsehoods) and is just really, really, really poorly written. Seriously, this POS is worse that even it's inspiration POS penned by Meyer.

There are others who know more about the topics discussed in 50 Shades, so we'll again turn to the experts.

both images courtesy of tickld.com

And finally, a review from an actually book reviewer (reviewist?) My favorite exert:
"I understand that it’s fantasy, but a twenty-one-year-old who’s never had – or even tried to have – an orgasm? A smoking hot, only-twenty-seven CEO making “one hundred-thousand dollars an hour,” a salary that easily trumps (pun intended) Bill Gates’s? Suspension of disbelief only goes so far outside of Aesop’s fables."

Again, the really scary part about all of this to me is how normalized it's becoming. Young women (and men) often don't know the warning signs of abuse when they first enter the dating/sexual/relationship world. That's part of the reason people often get into these relationships in the first place; they don't know what to look out for. We as a nation need better sex education for a LOT of reasons, and this is one of them. When books like Twilight and 50 Shades get published and popular and made into movies, these young innocents who don't have any experience and don't know how to recognize the more subtle signs of abuse (though many in the books aren't all that subtle) think that what they are reading about/watching represents, not just a normal relationship (wrong!), but an epic romance (also wrong!). There are a lot of lies our movies and books feed us that give us unrealistic expectations when entering the romantic scene, but this has got to be the worst. These books are advertising for abuse. They are telling people (specifically girls, as both "protagonists" are female) that they can only find true love, fairy tale, Romeo & Juliet (don't get me started on that farce), epic romance type of love if they let their partner abuse them. It's sick, and it's deeply frightening.



This is the part 3 of a multi-part series about abuse, addressing my personal experience, representations in media, and general information. Additions to the series will be published on Saturdays. Find part 1 here and  part 2 here.

The next installment in the series will cover the pattern and stages of abuse. Find part 4 here and  part 5 here.