Anyone for a little SMB (and I am not even sure what the “B” stands for)?

This was my cheesy way of getting you to read this blog. In any case, Valentine’s Day has just past and the big hype in media was that “Fifty Shades of Grey” movie. Ironically, I am the exact demographic for which this movie is targeted: middle-aged, white, working FT, married, female—so how come I had absolutely no desire to go see this flick?

This morning, I looked into the money that this movie made last weekend and was dismayed, astounded and confused that it grossed $103 million as of February 18^th with an opening weekend take of about $85 million. Movie Box Office Gross Stats. Who was attending this debacle? A couple years ago, I tried to read some of the actual online book, being a Communication Arts professor I felt it my duty. Bad writing, predictable plot and amateur story treatments are what I found in the text. I stopped reading after about 20 minutes.

To my surprise, two years later the book has been converted to a movie. I wondered what makes people, especially females who should know better by now, attracted to the concepts embedded in sexual dominance? Is it just because the idea of sex is so compelling to the human animal? I believed better of us. I believe that we get what we think about and then we realize it probably wasn’t the best use of our time in the first place. Sex is an incendiary subject and seems to be a rather useless preoccupation in contemporary media. About 20 years ago, Michel Foucault, a brilliant, critical theorist, wrote extensively about how we, as a public, are severely limited by the dominant leadership in our culture. Not only are we controlled by it — but also we actually negotiate that control and often give it away willingly. Is this the case here? Are we choosing to see a movie about an older male authority figure dominating the weaker, naïve, younger, female (and she likes it)? Come now, do we, as females really have to fight that battle again. I hope not!