Watching 50 Shades of Grey at my local cinema offered a somewhat prescient and serendipitous beginning. The trailer which preceded the movie was for The Boy Next Door, a film about a man who stalks, threatens and emotionally blackmails a woman, whilst coercing her into sex. A truer representation of the film which followed it, there could not be.
50 Shades has been portrayed as a love story which has BDSM as central to its narrative. I disagree. The sex, kinky or otherwise, is actually irrelevant. This film, like the books, is solely about power – specifically, of a man having it and a woman not. It uses BDSM as a inaccurate metaphor to drive the story, but the sex is just a distraction for what is at its heart: an abusive relationship. 50 Shades is not about kink, but about control.
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