For every Twilight and Justin Bieber and Transformers and twinkies and Duck Dynasty you have a comparable piece of garbage in the 90s, 80s, 70s, 60s, 50s, 40s, etc and so on. And yet despite consuming all this garbage on a regular basis for at least the past century, we still have people also churning out amazing art and technologies and feats of strength. Seriously, how is Honey Boo Boo any less stupid than My Mother the Car? Did watching Gidget surfboarding to Purple People Eater while eating moon pies turn our parents into idiots?
I really don't think you can compare the two. There are a huge number of "reality" shows that are being pumped out 24x7 these days that are having, in my opinion, a huge impact on society. If you look at how little watching TV took up life back then, compared to TV and internet watching now, there is a huge difference. Sure... if you compare one show then to one show now, I'll give you that they were both equally stupid and harmless. But compare ALL the crap shows back then and the amount of time watching them, with ALL the crap shows (including internet) now, and the amount of time watching them, and I tend to think that there will be many orders of magnitude difference in the amount of shit each generation is/has been exposed to. You just cannot be exposed to that much crap and not have it have an effect on you. Sure, there will be individual cases that run the gamut of observable influence, but as a whole, I bet you that the distribution curve is leaning towards the "harmful effect on society". Now, the great thing is that with advances in communication, like the internet, we can get access to much more high quality content than ever before... the problem is, that's not what's being programmed for the masses by the networks... they're appealing to the lowest common denominator, our attraction to watching people that are sooo fucked compared to the rest of us, and the cheapest production costs. It's like fast food... sure, you can eat healthy, but that kind of takes work. Fast food is cheap and easily acquired, and walk through any Walmart these days to see how that war is going. As an occasional "treat", no worries. Eat it every day, it's going to fuck you up. Same goes for shit programming.
I used to have a problem with people who were saying that the world is getting dumber. We're still doing a lot of technological progress, and we've got a lot of very smart people making stuff. I used that as evidence that we, as a race, are also getting smarter. How can we have Idiocracy when we're making Iphones? I now think that this is incorrect. Sure, the average person is now smarter, but it's only because the guys at the top are so much smarter than they were before. It's stagnated everywhere else; despite vastly increased levels of funding, academic achievement in high school students today is about the same as it was forty years ago. We have managed to separate our country into two classes - the Producers and the Consumers. The former are getting smarter and smarter as they compete with one another; the latter are being left behind. Sure, everyone has smartphones and computers now, but the latter are using them to watch movies, not learn. There's a Reddit Advice Animals picture that summarizes this pretty well - "I have a device in my hand that allows me to access the entire store of human knowledge and history, and I use it to watch cats." As this has happened, the Consumers are now a product in and of themselves. They don't make much money, but there are a lot of them, and they are very suggestible when it comes to spending. So, a lot of business is now finding ways to fuck idiots. Sign them up for shitty credit cards, get them on payday loans, get them to finance a bunch of furniture they can't afford, sell them a big 60" TV to watch more advertisements for stuff they don't need, get them fat on fast food, and then sell them weight loss remedies. Media is an integral tool to accomplish this, and it works. Kids want to have an MTV life, and they spend whatever they have to get a glimpse of it. Also, they vote, which means that decisions are made by the people who are best able to get the Consumers to vote for them. That being said, I don't mind some shitty TV, garbage mommy-porn books, or even fast food. I don't mind casinos, 60" TVs, or Rush Limbaugh. I just want there to be good TV, decent books, grocery stores that sell healthy food, and NPR as well. I think that the latter is slowly losing. This isn't a new problem; Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World in 1931, and Ray Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451 in 1953. But I think that the rise of the Internet, the ubiquity of television in life, and the drastically increased requirement of education and training in order to produce stuff has accelerated its development.
I watch my fair share of trash tv (True Blood, anyone?) and grew up on Jackass, Nitro Circus, and other similarly retarded, low-brow fare. I also have 500 books on my goodreads "read" list and I watch the highbrow stuff as well. Not all of this stuff is designed to become an integral part of your consciousness. I read Twilight, hated it, forgot about all but the most integral plot points and moved on. It was trash, but it filled the time that I didn't have the mental horsepower to fill with (insert intellectual stuff here). There is a place and need for shitty art, because not everyone grew up knowing how and why to appreciate good art and sometimes you need something to fill the space. I can't appreciate "Sportscenter" the way I appreciate "Mad Men". With that said, FSoG is not quite so harmless in the way it stereotypes the people who are into atypical sex. Kink is not a mental illness, nor is being LGBT and it bothers me that something this mainstream and popular essentially makes that argument as part of it's narrative. You could say the same thing about Twilight: it sets women back, perpetuates negative gender roles (rather than exploring BDSM together, he more or less shoves her into it in ways that are unacceptable), and is detrimental to other books dedicated to the subject. FSoG is shit when compared to whatever the marquis BDSM romance novel is, because any other well-written work would have to adhere to reality a bit better. I would love to know what research into BDSM James did while writing.
I think the problem is that too many don't have those 500 books on a goodreads read list. I'm not saying that there's no place for low-brow or shit programming, I'm saying it's becoming more the standard than the guilty pleasure.
I have said this to anyone who will listen. This book is about a billionaire and the masses of women who are reading it are glossing over the contracts and reading in depth about Grey flying a helicopter from Seattle to LA for dinner. I borrowed the books from a friend because I was not believing mainstream soccer moms had suddenly become into the kink scene. First 100 pages contained NO SEX, but his income was discussed at length. Women fantasize about maids/private chefs/private planes/bodyguards/personal shoppers/glamorous vacations/expensive cars and these books deliver. For that kind of cash most women apparently will overlook a blindfold. Also a news flash: by book three she turns him straight vanilla because he loves her so he doesn't need disassociated kinky sex anymore. Saying this book is about BDSM is like saying pro football teams are about the mascot. The mascot is there and everyone knows and recognizes and associates it with the team but it is actually about the sport (offense and defense etc). Same with this book. It is about money and "true love" with a spank thrown in for shock value. I showed the friend who loved the book and lent them to me real erotica online. She was NOT amused.
I've only read some clips from the book online and thought it was borderline hilarious in how awful the writing was. It is, quite literally, a Harlequin romance novel dressed up with some handcuffs and leather. I initially treated it the same way I treat most popular trash books - it's light, trashy entertainment, and generally I'd rather see someone getting their light, trashy entertainment by reading than by watching whatever the horrible TV show du jour is. The comments in this thread about ignoring the safe word, though, are a little more troubling. It's one thing to be into some kind of simulated forced sex where you get to fantasize about giving up control but are still able to put a stop to something that becomes scary. It's entirely different to glamorize actually getting raped, though. Which, let's be clear, is what happens when someone makes it clear they want the situation to stop. People are going to consume and popularize trash. It's just the nature of the lowest common denominator. There's a lot more to be angry about, though, when that trash is dressing up rape & essentially saying "she actually liked it so it was okay."
But what's the difference between this and, say, rape porn? Porn where the guy is late on his rent and has to fuck his landlord to avoid getting evicted? I think that the only reason why people are weirded out is that mousey women are reading it instead of guys.
Yeah, because I'm thinking of the anxiety every guy on this board, and in the world, is currently having in thinking 'Holy Fucking Shit, you mean I can pay my rent with sex?' (assuming the Landlord is a hot as hell female - actually, she doesn't even have to be hot, she just has to be a 'she.') Because no guy wants to live in that world.
Something tells me it wouldn't be the equivalent of rent if you had to thumb in a softie. Surely this is a given?
Wasn't it Juice that essentially got crap on him and his g/f, wipped it off, then took a shower and got it on immediately afterward?
Juice has a different idea of what 50 Shades of Grey means. For instance there are 50 shades of brown, grey, some disturbing red, bits of carrot orange, and pea green, and corn yellow even though he didn't eat any corn. "The safe word is Metamucil. I have such sights to show you."
Well, I don't recall suggesting that rape porn was okay either. I think, primarily the difference is one of scale. I really have no idea what the number of people who watch rape porn are, but I'm guessing it's less than the 100+ million who bought Fifty Shades. I also have a little trouble with the set-up. It's nebulous, of course, but as I said, there's a difference between the fantasy of giving up control and the reality of actually being powerless. If there's a setup in the book where someone is very clearly setting up a situation so they can escape it, then having that escape deliberately removed, that's pretty fucked up, whether it's book/porn/movie/whatever.