This Valentine’s Day I am giving serious consideration to dusting off my “Down with This Sort of Thing” sign and heading to the local cinema to stage a one woman boycott of the film, Fifty Shades of Grey. Please, will someone – anyone – save us from this Fifty Shades of Nonsense.
It is over a week to go until the great day and this film based on the “book” (I use that term in the very broadest sense) is gaining wall-to-wall coverage. I could not avoid it in the Sunday papers – despite the possible implosion of Greece.
I am one of the few people on this planet who has not read the book, but from what I have read of it – it is smut. Smut, I tell you, pure and simple. Worse than smut, in fact – smut that hurts.
It has come to a pretty pass has it not, that bondage and S&M have now gone mainstream? We were warned that it would come to this by that great warrior not of my time – Mary Whitehouse. Yes, Mary knew that where first there are swear words, the whips and paddles are soon to follow. Mary knew exactly where we were all heading – to hell in a handcart.
Some might say it is ironic that this film on inflicting physical pain on another is being released on St Valentine’s Day. In reality it is sick joke. It is deeply irritating that Christian festivals are now as a matter of course hijacked by commercial interests but this takes the biscuit.
The acts or suggested acts displayed in the book and the film is the very opposite of Christian love. Christian love is about self-sacrifice, loyalty, and service to your beloved. It does not seek to use a person as merely a means to an end. It is not about humiliation, exploitation and cruelty.
St Valentine is the patron saint of engaged couples and happy marriages. Although confusion surrounds his identity, one account describes Valentine as a temple priest who was beheaded near Rome by the emperor Claudius II for helping Christian couples wed. This man sacrificed his life to help couples marry in the Christian tradition.
So all in all I am pretty irked by this unfortunate turn of events. It was bad enough that one is expected to pile into over-priced restaurants with other put upon couples, but to witness this film exploit the sentiment of courtly love is hard to take. It is time to take a stand.
