Fifty Shades of Grey: Pornography and Normalizing the Bizarre

By: American Decency Staff

In the early 2010s Unilever launched its “Dove Real Beauty” campaign. The effort included a video production entitled “Dove Real Beauty Sketches.” Forensic sketch artist Gil Zamora produced sketches of women whom he had never seen based solely upon their self-descriptions. He then drew sketches of the same women based upon descriptions provided by third parties. The self-descriptions were uniformly more negative and unattractive than the third-party descriptions. The closing line, “You are more beautiful than you think,” voices Dove’s concern: that upbringing, socialization, advertising, and other aspects of our society have rendered American women incapable of seeing the beauty that they possess. When it comes to beauty, something about us has gone wrong.

In the same period of time, British author E. L. James published her soft-porn fiction bestseller Fifty Shades of Grey. The book tells the tale of a rich, older man who woos a young, inexperienced woman into a relationship in which he dominates her and uses her for sex without obligating himself toward her at all. Original and imaginative, isn’t it?

Although E. L. James wasn’t trying to do so at all, she has made the same point that Dove made: When it comes to beauty, something about us has gone wrong. Upbringing, socialization, advertising, the Internet, and other aspects of our society have rendered an enormous number of Americans incapable of seeing the beauty in romantic love as God created it.

This is the true price of pornography. Yes, pornography normalizes the bizarre, but the flipside of the coin may be the darkest aspect of it at all: It bizarrifies the normal.

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