The blockbuster novel ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ depicts an erotic romance of sexual dominance where discipline, sadism, masochism and submission define the relationship between the young male and female protagonists.
It is main-stream and acceptable because it is fiction. But a new study has found that it may have a real impact on women’s lives.
In a ground-breaking report that claims to be the first to empirically characterise the association between reading popular fiction depicting violence against women and health risks, researchers have found that women reading ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ are more likely to have abusive partners.
Published in the Journal of Women’s Health, researchers found that adolescent and young adult women who have read the first novel are more likely than non-readers to have had a partner who shouted, yelled, or swore at them and who delivered unwanted calls or text messages.
The women were also more likely to report using diet aids or fasting for 24 or more hours at some point in their lives.
Women who have read the entire trilogy, ‘Fifty Shades Darker’ and ‘Fifty Shades Freed’, were more likely to binge drink, to use diet aids and have five or more sexual partners in their lifetime.
The researchers’ conclusions were that “depictions of violence against women in popular culture—such as in film, novels, music, or pornography—create a broader social narrative that normalises these risks and behaviours in women’s lives.”
“Our study showed strong correlations between health risks in women’s lives—including violence victimisation—and consumption of Fifty Shades.”
The study does not include evidence relating to the temporal relationship between reading the book and experiencing abuse or issues related to drinking and dieting, that is whether one occurred before the other, but the researchers say that “the order of the relationship may be inconsequential”.
“For example, if women experienced adverse health behaviours first (e.g., disordered eating), reading Fifty Shades might reaffirm those experiences and potentially aggravate related trauma. Likewise, if women read Fifty Shades before experiencing the health behaviours assessed in our study, it is possible that the book influenced the onset of these behaviours by creating an underlying context for the behaviours.”
