'50 Shades' About Paedophilia?

According to a comment made by a female reader at another blog who works with troubled and abused children, the 50 Shades Of Grey book that is so popular at the moment may actually be a thinly veiled story of paedophilia where the older man is a Jerry Sandusky type of abuser.

Although in the book, the woman's age is given as 21, the reader and her friend contend that this is a thin cover and the signs point to a much younger aged protagonist.

Now I know after saying that, many female fans of 50 Shades, many of them mothers, will naturally put up a defense against that kind of description.  These women, being mothers, are naturally wired to protect kids.  People like Jerry Sandusky are viewed with hatred, revulsion, and disgust.  Rightfully so.  What mother would want to condone anything having to do with the sexual abuse of children?  Of innocents?

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My professional experience centers around nearly 20 years with Child Protective Services.  Over that time, I’ve seen situations that do, literally, keep me up at night.  The amount of abuse that is going on in our society, that sexualization of our kids…well basically, what you hear about, what is reported in the news, that is only a small sample of just how large of a problem and the disgusting acts that are going on every day.  Kids are being raped.  Kids are being abused.  Every single day.  Over and over and over again.



I didn’t seek out 50 Shades of Grey.  It was brought to my attention by a longtime friend who is also a clinical psychologist at a university.  She’s a bit older than me.  She grew up in the counter culture era and did her fair share of experimentation of all kinds.  So she’s hardly a prude.  What she today though is a mother and grandmother.  And she’s smart.  One of the things that fascinates her is this age of cultural phenomena.  How due to technology things now spread so quickly throughout society and become the next big thing at an increasingly rapid pace.  She says sometimes this phenomena is pretty much harmless, and other times it can be very damaging to kids and or adults who begin to emulate something out of a need to belong to the “next big thing”.

Her reaction to 50 Shades of Grey though was much more aggressively negative than anything I could recall her talking about before.  It came up because I mentioned it to her offhand.  I had seen a couple mentions of it on the news and knowing her interest in cultural trends, asked her about it.  She stopped talking, looked right at me, and said the book was about pedophilia.   And it was her who then connected it to the Sandusky tragedy where so many young boys had been sexually abused. Sandusky committed his acts of crime under the cover of actually helping youth.  That is how he gained access.  My friend said 50 Shades was basically the same exact thing.  Its cover was a story of a young woman engaging is a very graphic sexual relationship with a somewhat older man.

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We are reading child pornography.  Remove the false age of the girl, which has no basis in reality, and what we are actually reading is the abuse of a little girl.

The main character is described in pigtails, given words like “Holy Cow”  “down there”, “jeez”  “double crap” she can’t operate a computer (but is supposedly a college graduate), describes skipping and doing cartwheels, repeatedly says she is made to feel like a child, has her imaginary friend (inner goddess) feels shame, is spanked and slathered in BABY OIL, told what to say, what to eat, what to do, until finally and sadly so predictably, is physically beaten.  (But she returns to him soon after, which is again, a very common theme of abuse, including pedophilia)

And beyond all of this evidence there is the fact that the male character is himself a product of sexual abuse at the hands of a pedophile.  The girl whose thoughts we listen in on as she is being abused, recognizes this aspect of the male abuser, but apparently, is too naïve or unwilling to realize she has continued this cycle of abuse herself. (Which again reinforces the idea that she is actually herself just a child)  There is no way the author did this by accident.  She puts out the theme of pedophilia openly, therefore hiding it in plain sight.

The post on the blog is followed by another one the next day with several female readers writing in and saying they agree.