Not okay.

I got a comment on my 50 Shades of Domestic Violence post this week that was so incredibly rude that I wasn’t sure what to do with it.  (Yeah, I’m talking about you, “bluelove.”) My first thought was to just delete it.  It’s my blog and I don’t have to let anyone’s awful victim blaming comments have space here.  Then I thought that maybe I should approve the post and then let my readers go to town on the person because I’m too pissed off to do it myself.

The more I thought about it though, I decided that I want you to see the bullshit comment that this woman posted in response to one of my readers saying that her husband gave her this book that is full of emotional abuse in hopes that it would improve their already abusive relationship.  I think people need to see what complete lack of empathy looks like.  What victim blaming looks like, and how incredibly WRONG it is. So instead of approving the comment where it was made, I’m going to just put it here.  She wrote the following:

Get back in the kitchen or leave your husband because women act like they don’t have a choice. Stop blaming men, stop blaming the media and stop blaming books. If you have the nerve to tell strangers on the internet that youre being abused, you should have the balls to leave him. There are two types of people:prey and predators. You decide which one you want to be. Does anyone blame the lion for eating the weak gazelle?

Bluelove, you clearly have no idea what it’s like to live in fear of your life because of a partner who uses power and control over every aspect of your being.  You have no idea how hard it is to “just leave” or how many victims are killed by their abusers when trying to do that.  You don’t know any of the pain that these victims go through.  You’re lucky.  My hope is that you never have to live through domestic violence whether it’s emotional or physical.  I also hope that if you do have to endure the spirit crushing pain that abuse brings, that no one is ever so insensitive to you.  Because I can say that as a survivor, comments like the one above are exactly what we don’t need to hear.  Comments like that are just as bad as the abuse and do absolutely nothing to encourage change.  Blaming the victim is never, ever okay.

More Shades

People are probably getting sick of my 50 Shades of Grey posts, but guess what? I don’t care.  This issue is near and dear to my heart and those of us who see the truth behind this book need to keep speaking up.

Yesterday my buddy Jennifer Armintrout whose 50 Shades recaps I’ve mentioned several times posted something that broke my heart.  It’s exactly why I feel so strongly that these books are doing a diservice to women and the media is only making it worse.

I beg of you, go read Jen’s post.  Another 50 Shades PSA.  Now with added author breakdown.

Then if you haven’t read her chapter by chapter recaps, have a look at them.  Even if you liked the 50 Shades books, you can’t possibly read these recaps without seeing them in a different light.

50 Shades of Domestic Violence

I haven’t been shy about my dislike of the book 50 Shades of Grey and the message it’s sending.  If you follow me on twitter you’ve heard me bitch about it even more over there when I get on one of my rants.  There are many, many reasons why this book just plain pisses me off.  Shitty writing, shitty fact checking, shitty editing, barely making an effort to change it from AU fanfic before publishing it… I could go on for days.  But honestly, the thing that bothers me the most about this book is that it is so incredibly full of universal red flags for Domestic Violence (DV) and women all over the world are eating this book up like it’s cake. 

BDSM is not domestic violence if both partners fully consent to it.  That’s not by any means what I’m getting at.  I think that when the DV term is thrown out there people automatically assume that you mean physical violence.  That’s not at all what I’m talking about here.  So let me give you my social worker rundown real quick.

Domestic Violence is not about anger management or just about physical abuse.  It’s about power and control over another person.  That can be physical control in the form of beating the shit out of someone, or emotional control through threats, isolation, and mind games.  As someone who has lived through emotional abuse I can say that it royally sucks and it’s just as awful dealing with someone emotionally beating you up as it is getting physically beat up.

An alpha can be an alpha without being an abuser.  Someone can assert themselves and be in control without having to control you.   The person who beat me never touched me physically.  But that person crushed my spirit, made everything bad in the world seem like it was my fault, blamed all of their problems on me, and kept me in this fucked up world where I actually believed that I was the problem.  But I wasn’t.  That is what domestic violence is about; having power and control over someone else and making them believe that they’re doing it for your own good.

I enjoyed the Twilight books and movies.  I’m not a Twilight hater by any means.  But the books were very hard for me to get through because of the little things that Meyer put in the books that screamed of DV.  I mean come on, step away from your love of Edward for a moment and think about it.  He would crawl through Bella’s bedroom window at night to watch her sleep and started that before he even was her friend.  He was nice to her one moment and then mean the next.  He got mad at her for tripping on the field trip to the greenhouse.  When he saved her life and she wanted to talk about it he blew her off and said she had hit her head.  He told her that he could kill her and how everything in him wanted him to.  Even Bella’s mom says to her in the second book how Edward is so clingy.  

Check this out and think about Bella and Edward’s relationship: Power & Control Wheel.

I can honestly point out something in nearly every spoke of that wheel that Edward does to Bella in the Twilight books.  I’m not the only one either, there have been plenty of articles about DV organizations pointing out the red flags in Twilight.

Even though Twilight is full of red flags, I was able to separate it as fantasy and just enjoy it.  Unlike when I rewatched Phantom of the Opera as a social worker and could not stop obsessing about how creepy the Phantom suddenly was! 🙂  But then we come to 50 Shades.  A story that is not about vampires even though it was written about Twilight characters.  A story that women all over the world are eating up and saying how bad they want a man like Christian Grey in their lives, how they wish their husbands were more like Grey.  That, my dear readers, is where I have a really big fucking problem with this book’s success.