BY MELEK CANSU PETEK (ELIT/III)
petek@ug.bilkent.edu.tr
Last week I wrote about superhero movies, and argued that if a book or a movie is popular and applauded by the masses, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it is downright bad. While writing that column, though, there was one thing that kept coming to my mind, an antithesis, if you will: I can’t stand seeing books like “Fifty Shades of Grey” (and its derivations) being popular.
It’s not my custom to criticize books and movies I haven’t read or seen, but in this case, I’ll make an exception. One doesn’t need to sit down and watch pornography in order to be entitled to criticize it, which is, after all, exactly what that movie sounded like to me, and my suppositions have been confirmed by a friend who has seen it. But still I wanted to be fair, so I sat down and read the Wikipedia plot summaries of the three “Fifty Shades” books, which was enough to suggest that they weren’t literary masterpieces. Then again, I’m a literature student, and I thought I should at least read the first couple of pages to comment on them more critically, and here is my evaluation: The publisher of those books must have sold his soul and self-respect in a Faustian bargain, or as dear Salman Rushdie put it quite nicely: “I’ve never read anything so badly written that got published. It made ‘Twilight’ look like ‘War and Peace.'” Cliché was written all over the pages I endured reading, there was no depth to the characters, and the “descriptive narrative” was essentially an overflow of adjectives. If I had been the editor who received that manuscript, it would have been put directly in a paper shredder.
Yet, there is something even more important than the apparent literary failure of the book: How on earth has it become acceptable to write a novel that belittles women to such an extent? How come a man like Christian Grey, a sociopath who wants to make women sign submission contracts, is the new “romantic hero” for millions of women? I don’t have the answers, but I will continue to ask for them until we save ourselves from this delusion and hypocrisy. Yes, I do believe that we’ve become hypocrites in our dealings with gender equality and violence against women. The contradictory values of our generation always puzzle me. A couple of weeks ago my Facebook newsfeed was full of people applauding Emma Watson’s speech for the UN’s “He for She” campaign, but somehow we’re also the ones who turn movies like “Fifty Shades of Grey” into box office successes. I believe the reason for that is the distortion of our perception—we manage to blind ourselves enough to avoid seeing the connection between reality and fiction. Now is the time to show what books/movies of that kind, or any kind of pornography for that matter, entail: harassment and abuse of women, and the encouragement of such acts. Consider Özgecan Aslan for a moment, a young Turkish woman who was murdered by a psychopath who had no control over himself, and was enraged when his desire to rape her was resisted. He wanted to have dominance over her, because he was constantly told that it was his right, but Özgecan very “daringly” declined his “right”: she fought back. Had she been “submissive,” there would have been no problems.
Seriously, people, is it too difficult to see the parallels between this horrifying story and “Fifty Shades of Grey”? Change the roles, rewrite the story, and the result is that Özgecan’s murderer and Christian Grey are practically the same control-freak man who thinks it’s his right to demand submission from women. The only difference is that Grey is portrayed as a good-looking, intelligent, extremely wealthy character, which makes millions of women fantasize about him. Dearest women, this is way beneath our dignity. No man, no matter how intelligent, attractive or rich he might be, is entitled to treat you with disrespect. He does not have the right to dictate your behavior, nor should he interfere with the way you carry yourself. If you feel the need to find a “literary hero” or a man of your dreams, go and read “Pride and Prejudice” instead. Then you’ll see how Elizabeth Bennet rejected Mr. Darcy’s first marriage proposal on account of his arrogant and degrading manner of speaking, and how he was infatuated with her because of her outspoken and confident manners, not because she was ready to become a toy for a sadistic man. Love, dignity and self-respect are not old-fashioned values, dear friends, and if “Fifty Shades of Grey” is the picture of “modern” love, I’d much rather stay out of it.