Fifty Shades of Pale

The bestselling book "Fifty Shades of Grey" has now been followed with a blockbuster movie, at least in its opening weekend. Will voyeuristic soccer moms keep it up or was this a quick "girls night out" fling?

Full disclosure: I have not read 50SoG. I understand that it depicts adults agreeing to "play rough" in sex, using bondage, dominance/submission, and maybe even some pretend or mild sadism/masochism. The keywords here are "adults” and “agreeing" (note that only adults can agree; children need their guardian to agree, legally). Compare this to scandalous dramas in the past, such as "Lolita", brilliant book and movie by geniuses Nabokov and Kubrick, where a young schoolgirl is the object of an old professor's lust. That his lust is inappropriate is integral to the story. (That she proves more, ahem, experienced than him...is twisted for sure.) Or the movie "Manhattan", where a middle aged nebbish Woody Allen's girlfriend is 17 years old. (That she proves more mature than him does not mitigate the fact that the obtuseness of the "relationship" is never even hinted at). The blockbuster movie “Pretty Woman”, where an improbably beautiful and delicate prostitute is cast as Cinderella, swept off her feet and away from her hovel by a Wall Street buccaneer, is disturbing but at least it depicts adults (behaving badly).

50SoG is not beyond the Pale.