My latest cultural obsession...
Apr. 30th, 2012 07:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkatYes, I know, I'm boring everyone with my weird obsession with the 50 Shades of Grey popularity. Which I wouldn't have known about if it weren't for livejournal, so you only have yourselves to blame. (Over 200 people showed up for the book signing in Miami.) But there's a reason for this obsession. a) I'm a frustrated writer trying to get published, and like my father, I like to figure out what works - why people go nuts over one book and not another (my father literally read every best-selling mystery novel out there - binge reading runs in our family), and b) frustrated social psychology major. (hello).
Have figured a few things out, now that I'm a third of the way through the second book.
1. This book's central problem reminds me a great deal of Nautibitz' Crave and about 99% of the Spuffy fanfic and meta I've read. (ie. Sick Mother (Inability to Protect/Save Mother) Issues meets Lost Father (Abandonment/Inability to Know or Save Father issues) .) In short, the hero is acting out his inability to protect his mother in kinky sex games. While the heroine needs to feel cherished and loved by her father and not abandoned. In this trope, the heroine's father dies young, she probably didn't know him and was raised by a step-father who is distant and taciturn and a flaky mother or a single Mom, while the hero, who is older than she is and more experienced, lost his mother to illness, drugs, and she was abused. He was too young to protect her. And often was abused himself by the father figures - at an early age. Usually he's seduced by a much older woman or his mother as a teen, and tries to act out the psychosis by beating her, and having kinky sex - the attempt to deal with his inadequacy and inability to handle the fact that she wasn't there for him and too busy having sex. Or she's ill and dies and he can't save her.
It's basically the Spike/Buffy trope. But it goes back further...much further. Almost all of Joss Whedon's stories deal with lost mother, abandoned father trope. And a lot of vampire stories fit it. And it is in a lot of erotica fiction.
2. Why does this turn us on? Well, statistically speaking a woman dies in a domestic violence situation on a daily basis. Actually more than one. Many women are left to raise children by themselves, while men go to war, travel non-step or just leave.
Most dysfunctional families are the sick mom and the absent dad. It permeates our culture.
And our stories reflect these issues back to us, they give us ways to resolve the problem. A myriad of what-if scenarios. And for me, it's no different. While my own immediate family is fine.
I can't say the same for the extended one. Two Aunts were in abusive controlling marriages, with men who were damaged or broken in some way either by culture or something unknown. Two great-grandmothers were beaten by their husbands. My Granny told me how my Grandfather stopped his own father from beating his mother to death. He was traumatized and glad he didn't have boys, also very protective of his daughters. My sister-in-law has a nut-job mother. Her cousin - a sick, mentally ill mom and a somewhat absent Dad. And for a year I worked with the Domestic Violence group in Missouri, to provide orders of protection, also, mediate child custody. Plus, two cousins' married to nutty women, who abused them, and were drug addicts. I think all families have these issues. And that's why these stories resonate on a primal level.
Even Harry Potter was about this, as is The Hunger Games. As was Star Wars. At the core of all these stories is a child dealing with the sick mother and the absent father or the loss of both. Buffy also had this at its core - constantly repeated. Jung called it the male and female anima, Frued called it what it was - Mommy and Daddy issues. Even our religions played with this mythos - the unknowable father, the insane mom...virgin/whore, devourer/life-giver. Look around the world and there they are in various guises. The unknowable universe, the violent and life-giving earth. I remember seeing it in all the mythology, and so much of the literature. Faulkner, Garcia Marquez, Fitzgerald, Heminway, Joyce...even the older one's Feminore Cooper, Richardson, and the Brontes. Not to mention Mary Shelly and Bram Stocker. At the root of most if not all horror stories, noir, romance, and even mysteries are these tropes. How do we deal with the sick mother earth...who nurtures and devours, and the universe and sky that seems so unknowable and beyond our reach?
And if you look at the recent Horror film "Cabin in the Woods" - the first victim is Jules (the whore), while the last girl standing is "the virgin who slept with her older teacher".
Twilight? Same story. From what I'm told.
One group of stories deals with the problem through violence, the other group through sex. Oddly as a culture we seem to blase with the violence. Or laugh at it. It barely bothers us. Or why else would every critic on the planet think Breaking Bad (perhaps the most violent television series on)
was the best thing ever, but can't handle sex? Why else do we cringe during the sex scenes in GoT but barely react during the sword-fights and gore? Why is Cabin In The Woods celebrated but 50 Shades scoffed at? Why do we embrace the violence, and either laugh at or cringe away from the sex?
It's a question that I keep asking myself. Why do we have no problem with the violence of Girl with a Dragon Tattoo - the graphic rape scene in that book that I could barely read, yet, think the rather tame sex in 50 Shades is "porn" and "naughty"? And why haven't we asked ourselves these questions? Why can't we handle sex and yet violence isn't an issue? And is this why a woman is killed every five minutes in this country? Why contraception is considered wrong under a health care plan - because, what, exactly, it is against a religious doctrine?
Maybe it's not that clear-cut? I don't know. And I don't know why I think about it. I swear, I overthink everything. Stupid brain - it won't stop analyzing. I fall in love with stories I can analyze whether they are good or not, much to my friends considerable annoyance.
Have figured a few things out, now that I'm a third of the way through the second book.
1. This book's central problem reminds me a great deal of Nautibitz' Crave and about 99% of the Spuffy fanfic and meta I've read. (ie. Sick Mother (Inability to Protect/Save Mother) Issues meets Lost Father (Abandonment/Inability to Know or Save Father issues) .) In short, the hero is acting out his inability to protect his mother in kinky sex games. While the heroine needs to feel cherished and loved by her father and not abandoned. In this trope, the heroine's father dies young, she probably didn't know him and was raised by a step-father who is distant and taciturn and a flaky mother or a single Mom, while the hero, who is older than she is and more experienced, lost his mother to illness, drugs, and she was abused. He was too young to protect her. And often was abused himself by the father figures - at an early age. Usually he's seduced by a much older woman or his mother as a teen, and tries to act out the psychosis by beating her, and having kinky sex - the attempt to deal with his inadequacy and inability to handle the fact that she wasn't there for him and too busy having sex. Or she's ill and dies and he can't save her.
It's basically the Spike/Buffy trope. But it goes back further...much further. Almost all of Joss Whedon's stories deal with lost mother, abandoned father trope. And a lot of vampire stories fit it. And it is in a lot of erotica fiction.
2. Why does this turn us on? Well, statistically speaking a woman dies in a domestic violence situation on a daily basis. Actually more than one. Many women are left to raise children by themselves, while men go to war, travel non-step or just leave.
Most dysfunctional families are the sick mom and the absent dad. It permeates our culture.
And our stories reflect these issues back to us, they give us ways to resolve the problem. A myriad of what-if scenarios. And for me, it's no different. While my own immediate family is fine.
I can't say the same for the extended one. Two Aunts were in abusive controlling marriages, with men who were damaged or broken in some way either by culture or something unknown. Two great-grandmothers were beaten by their husbands. My Granny told me how my Grandfather stopped his own father from beating his mother to death. He was traumatized and glad he didn't have boys, also very protective of his daughters. My sister-in-law has a nut-job mother. Her cousin - a sick, mentally ill mom and a somewhat absent Dad. And for a year I worked with the Domestic Violence group in Missouri, to provide orders of protection, also, mediate child custody. Plus, two cousins' married to nutty women, who abused them, and were drug addicts. I think all families have these issues. And that's why these stories resonate on a primal level.
Even Harry Potter was about this, as is The Hunger Games. As was Star Wars. At the core of all these stories is a child dealing with the sick mother and the absent father or the loss of both. Buffy also had this at its core - constantly repeated. Jung called it the male and female anima, Frued called it what it was - Mommy and Daddy issues. Even our religions played with this mythos - the unknowable father, the insane mom...virgin/whore, devourer/life-giver. Look around the world and there they are in various guises. The unknowable universe, the violent and life-giving earth. I remember seeing it in all the mythology, and so much of the literature. Faulkner, Garcia Marquez, Fitzgerald, Heminway, Joyce...even the older one's Feminore Cooper, Richardson, and the Brontes. Not to mention Mary Shelly and Bram Stocker. At the root of most if not all horror stories, noir, romance, and even mysteries are these tropes. How do we deal with the sick mother earth...who nurtures and devours, and the universe and sky that seems so unknowable and beyond our reach?
And if you look at the recent Horror film "Cabin in the Woods" - the first victim is Jules (the whore), while the last girl standing is "the virgin who slept with her older teacher".
Twilight? Same story. From what I'm told.
One group of stories deals with the problem through violence, the other group through sex. Oddly as a culture we seem to blase with the violence. Or laugh at it. It barely bothers us. Or why else would every critic on the planet think Breaking Bad (perhaps the most violent television series on)
was the best thing ever, but can't handle sex? Why else do we cringe during the sex scenes in GoT but barely react during the sword-fights and gore? Why is Cabin In The Woods celebrated but 50 Shades scoffed at? Why do we embrace the violence, and either laugh at or cringe away from the sex?
It's a question that I keep asking myself. Why do we have no problem with the violence of Girl with a Dragon Tattoo - the graphic rape scene in that book that I could barely read, yet, think the rather tame sex in 50 Shades is "porn" and "naughty"? And why haven't we asked ourselves these questions? Why can't we handle sex and yet violence isn't an issue? And is this why a woman is killed every five minutes in this country? Why contraception is considered wrong under a health care plan - because, what, exactly, it is against a religious doctrine?
Maybe it's not that clear-cut? I don't know. And I don't know why I think about it. I swear, I overthink everything. Stupid brain - it won't stop analyzing. I fall in love with stories I can analyze whether they are good or not, much to my friends considerable annoyance.
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no subject
Date: 2012-05-01 12:19 pm (UTC)