50 Shades of Concern

(Disclaimer – I’ve never watched or read it. I may be talking out of my backside. Also this piece may contain triggers about things like rape.)

Let’s lump 50 Shades of Gray and the Twilight Saga together as part of the same phenomenon on the basis that both portray emotionally controlling relationships in which women are systematically abused. What’s that all about? Why do people want to read or watch this? Who wants to be demeaned and abused? It’s a profound mystery up there with the fact that rape fantasy is a thing that exists.

I think that this is part of a wider phenomenon that is not just something that is about women. Of course, if a man wants to get his kicks by being chained up by a dominatrix in black leather and stiletto heels our emotional responses to that might span a range of feelings, but fear for the man’s self-esteem is not usually one of them. The difference between this and the response we might have to a woman who plays a submissive role in a relationship – whether in a sexual sense or not – is about ongoing power imbalances in society. We fear more for a woman who is submissive because there is perceived to be a higher risk of the role becoming habitual or even permanent, or lasting trauma or damage to her self-worth.

If I understand it correctly (a pretty big assumption, I admit), much of the appeal of things like ritual humiliation, rape fantasy, or BDSM is about handing over control. A person who, during most of their daily life, is expected to wield large amounts of responsibility might experience an immense release in temporarily giving up their autonomy to someone with a whip and a red leather thong. Perhaps it’s not surprising, with the growth of feminism and women being generally more self-determining and holding positions of greater responsibility, that fiction aimed at women that flirts with these kinds of ideas should become more popular. Hence Christian Gray and Edward Cullen, I guess.

Does this make the kind of fiction that is epitomized by Twilight and 50 Shades benign? Should we perhaps even celebrate it, as marker of the success of feminism? The jury’s still out. I’m not yet convinced that male and female roles have equalized sufficiently to make indulging in these fantasies risk free. Moreover, the kind of man who will take the existence of submission or rape fantasies to justify harassment or actual rape (“all women want it really”) still exists and still preys on vulnerable women. These fantasies can be dangerous. I don’t argue that we should suppress them entirely, but if we’re going to indulge in them we need to pay attention to context.

I guess what I’m really saying is: don’t forget the safe word, guys.

Boldly Go

I think I became aware of the death of Leonard Nimoy thirteen minutes after the news was released. Admittedly, that was partly due to the fact that I happened to be online and browsing social media at the time (no great coincidence), but it’s also a measure of just how fast the news propagated. The passing of Mr. Nimoy struck a chord. The deaths of well-loved celebrities do this, of course, but it seemed to me that this one evoked more grief than most. The whole Internet was suddenly united in sadness over the loss of an actor who played a fictional pointy-eared alien.

Partly, of course, that’s a nostalgia thing. The past is gone and cannot be reclaimed, and we mourn for that. Even as we live and enjoy our lives we grieve for lost youth and opportunities that have passed, and that’s right and healthy. The passing beyond reach of every icon of our youths and childhoods is going to evoke something of that response.

It seems to me, though, that there’s more going on here. The grief – or my grief, anyway – seemed disproportionately large.

I’m going to go out on a limb here, and say that the grief is not for Leonard Nimoy, but more for Mr. Spock. Mr. Nimoy brought him to life, and no doubt imbued the character with something of himself, but what we’re really crying for is the elf-eared chap with the silly haircut. Why?

Mr. Spock represents something we aspire to. That unfaltering rationality and uncompromising morality is twinned – brilliantly – with a great and deep humanity. Something in us responds to that combination, the paradox of logic with love, dispassion with compassion, morals with mercy, born of the vulcan father and human mother (or was it the other way around? Damned if I’m going to look it up). It’s all there in the name: Vulcan, the God of fire and volcanoes, associated with anger, used to describe a race famed for their cold detachment.

For a while I’ve been wrestling with the fact that even though my religious faith slipped quietly away some years ago, I still find the idea of the incarnation hugely evocative. The idea of an unknowable, omnipotent God becoming a vulnerable human that shares human suffering still seems tremendously powerful to me, even though I no longer actually believe a word of it. Mostly when something like that happens it makes some kind of sense to me – I recognize that something might have metaphorical truth even if the truth isn’t literal – but this one just didn’t.

But maybe now I’m starting to get it (no, you’re not imagining it. I really am extrapolating theology from a character from Star Trek. Deal with it). We really do aspire to ideals – logic, rationalism, ethics, and justice: things that we cannot grasp or truly know, things that can exist only as concepts, things that are, literally, a bit alien to us. But justice untempered by mercy is a cold, hard thing that I want no part of, and however clear a logical argument might be it will frequently cede to the demands of our emotions.

So is this the secret of the enduring power of Christianity: not that it actually solves the paradox of wanting justice and mercy to co-exist, but that it at least provides a framework in which we can think about them in the same sentence? The unknowable God becomes something that is fully human: through the intercession of that human the demands of strict justice are tempered by an all-encompassing compassion and forgiveness. The theology of the incarnation – and the infuriating behavior of Mr. Spock – allow us to imagine a place where those things can coexist, a framework that helps us reconcile our ideals with our failures.

And we do need them to co-exist. Look at the issues we deal with. Abortion: the demands of justice tell us that even the potential for life should be given the opportunity to fulfil itself, but that has to be balanced with a compassion that recognizes the enormous tragedy that is an unwanted life. Inoculation: logic tells us that exposure to a tiny risk for the greater good of society and the self is a reasonable thing, but the emotional barrier to exposing our children to even the slightest possibility of harm is very strong indeed.

We need help to navigate through these minefields – perhaps, in a small way, Mr. Nimoy gave us some. RIP