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.

The Problem with Fanfic

There’s a lot of talk going on about fanfic lately. In fact, I think more people suddenly know what fanfic is than ever before. Sadly though, it’s because a series of Twilight fanfic stories have been published and despite how awful the writing is (and the fact that it’s fanfic) it’s selling like crazy. Yes, I’m talking about 50 Shades of Grey by E.L. James.

I will start this rant by saying that no, I haven’t read the books in their entirety. Frankly, I don’t plan to read them because the bits of the books I have seen make me want to vomit. I’m all for people getting published… I really am. Just like any writer I want to have bestselling books that inspire movies. I want people talking about my books all over the world on talk shows. But I have a serious problem with the 50 Shades book and its subsequent spawn, and it’s not because I’m jealous.

Let me also say that I write fanfic. I’ve been writing fanfic for over a decade now and without it I wouldn’t have fallen in love with writing like I have. Without fanfic I wouldn’t have groupies readers all over the planet who have read my books. I love fanfic and I love being a fanfic author. My distaste of the success of James is not because I’m a stodgy jerk who doesn’t understand the world of fanfic.

There are different types of fanfic though and I feel like with all of this new media coverage of fanfic people don’t understand the difference. One kind fanfic could possibly be turned into a standalone book without seeming like a total fucking rip off, and another kind walks the line of plagiarism, stealing, shadiness and just wrongness.

The fanfic that I write consists of using a person who exists in real life as a character in a fictional story. For example taking oh… let’s say a Backstreet Boy and throwing him into all sorts of drama (and hopefully lots of hot sex) in the form of a novel or short story. This is the kind of fanfic that in my humble opinion could be turned into publishable work. Names can be changed and although you might be able to draw similarities, it’s still fiction. In other words, it’s original. The characters are mine and as I see it, these stars are just the actors in my book. I have a book (which ironically is named Shades of Gray) that if I were to go through and take out the references to actual people and perhaps do a little tweaking of certain details, it would stand alone as a book about a chick who falls in love with a guy in a band.