What does Planned Parenthood have in common with 50 Shades of Grey?
Torture sex.
In a recent string of expose videos, Planned Parenthood staffers are caught on tape advising underage girls to engage in violent sexual activity known colloquially as BDSM, or Bondage & Discipline, Dominance & Submission, and Sadism & Masochism.
In one video, a counselor talks to a girl about using a whip during sex. Another suggests handcuffs. Yet another assures a girl that painful sex is okay and normal. Yet another offers asphyxiation as a pleasurable option. Being spanked. Hit. Whipped. Gagged. All normal and healthy sexual options for teenage girls according to Planned Parenthood, as long as it’s consensual. As one staffer put it, “It just depends what kind of pain you can take.”
Regardless of one’s position on abortion (the issue most closely associated with the world’s largest abortion provider), that Planned Parenthood, recipient of hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer funding annually, advises violent sex for teenage girls, who are more likely than not to be insecure and vulnerable, should evoke national outrage.
And yet, unsurprisingly, it doesn’t. Why?
Well maybe it’s because the release of the violent teen sex advice videos happened to coincide with the first trailer release for the film adaption of 50 Shades of Grey, book one of a trilogy ode to violent sex. The book ranks among the top ten bestselling books in the world, right up there with actual literary works of art like Le Petite Prince, A Tale of Two Cities, and The Hobbit. It has sold more than 100 million copies worldwide, and during its peak popularity, sold at a rate of one book per second. Many casually refer to it as “mommy porn,” as it’s supposedly a literary outlet for pent-up housewives the world over.
I haven’t read the book, but the trailer gave me enough of a taste. An insecure, bookish woman falls for a playboy tycoon, who happens to be a pervert. They meet when she interviews him. She self-deprecates, and then asks, “To what do you owe your success?”
He replies, with obvious sexual implications, “I exercise control in all things.”
Later in the trailer he says, “I don’t do romance. My tastes are very secular.” (More overt sexuality implied.)
She swooningly replies, “Enlighten me, then.”
Then it flashes to her, blindfolded and in chains. To Beyonce music. You get the drift.
I recognize that a preference for sexual violence is not mainstream, but yet it sort of is, in a pop culture sense. Listen to our pop music. Look at our books and television shows. And then look at its real-world implications.
Planned Parenthood and their sex-education counselors are not characters in some “mommy porn” book. They are women in the flesh and blood, telling the daughters of the mommies reading 50 Shades of Grey over Chardonnay after the kids are in bed, that it’s okay to be tied to a tree during sex, as long as you consent.
But yet feminists everywhere are (rightfully) rending their garments over rape and sexual assault, which is completely rampant. Does no one stop for just a second to think that it’s perhaps all connected? You consume violent sex in a fantasy world and it mars the real world. Planned Parenthood even calls its campaign to teach children that playing out rape scenarios can be okay “50 Shades of Safe.”
Whether it’s in the fiction of elitist favorite Margaret Atwood’s Rape Fantasies, bought from a grocery store shelf, or coming out of Cecile Richard’s money machine, the dulling and marketing of torture sex belongs nowhere in a civilized, pro-woman society.
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