PopMatters.com
Thomas Britt | 2.20.15
When the devil came / He was not red
He was chrome and he said
Come with me
You must go / So I went…—Wilco, “Hell is Chrome”
Fifty Shades of Grey is being celebrated as a record-breaking film, having earned more than $80 million in three days and more than $90 million for the four-day holiday weekend. Variety‘s Brent Lang sums up the film’s strength at the box office, declaring it “the highest-grossing Presidents Day holiday opener of all time and ranking among the biggest R-rated debuts in history.” The international total for the film’s opening weekend is just below $250 million. With a reported production budget of $40 million, the Focus Features / Universal Pictures film is doubtless a moneymaker, regardless of the drop in attendance that follows.
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One frequent response to observations such as this, as well as to the characterization of what occurs in the book and film as “abuse”, is to say that there is no exploitation in the text because of mutual consent. And while that might be accurate on the most basic, superficial level, the kind of relationship depicted in Fifty Shades of Grey fails to meet fuller conceptions of consent.
For example, the state of California recently enacted an affirmative consent standard, which was added to the Education Code and affects state-funded colleges and universities. The text outlining the policy runs in excess of 1,000 words. There are a lot of conditions to parse, including “policies and protocols regarding … dating violence and stalking”, two activities that drive the plot of Fifty Shades of Grey.
Moving beyond definitions of consent strictly related to sexual activity, we could apply the standard of informed consent, which is commonly used in medicine and human subjects research. In “Ultimately We Are All Outsiders: The Ethics of Documentary Filming”, Calvin Pryluck writes, “consent is not valid unless it was made (1) under conditions that were free of coercion and deception, (2) with full knowledge of the procedure and anticipated effects, (3) by someone competent to consent. The requirement that consent be truly voluntary is a recognition of the fact that there is typically an unequal power relationship between investigators and subjects.”
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