With the release of Fifty Shades of Grey, it’s important to remember the difference between having a healthy relationship and being in a negative one.

Fifty Shades of Grey is a Twilight fanfiction focused on the sexually abusive and manipulative relationship between the main female character Ana and the male lead, Christian.  Christian stalks Ana, who begins to become isolated from the world due to his controlling nature and on multiple occasions forces her to have non-consensual sex with him.  Fifty Shades of Grey is a good opener to discuss what’s wrong with our society in how we view women in the media.

In America, and other places, women are viewed not as subjects, but as objects. There is a key difference between a subject and an object. A subject uses an object, while an object is used by a subject. Objectification theory created by Fredrickson and Roberts, published in 1997, says that it is very common for women to be sexually objectified by society and treated even by other females as an object to be valued for its use to others.

That is really important. Read it again. When you place a person’s value on how you can use them, then something is seriously wrong with the way we treat other human beings.

Objectification often occurs when a woman’s body parts are separated from her as a person, like in magazines when a woman’s lips are the only part of her face shown in an ad, for instance, and she is understood as a sexually desirable object rather than a human being. Objectification of females by the media is a factor that heavily contributes to the majority of the mental health problems like eating disorders, depression, and body dysmorphia (viewing your body differently than it is, usually in a very negative way) that affect young women more than any other group.

This type of portrayal in the media of women as things to have sex with or be used for sexual purposes has really morphed society’s ideals of what being a woman really means. In the 21st century, if a woman isn’t sexually attractive, she can be made to feel and believe as though she is defunct in some way because she doesn’t get an abundance of male attention.

In order to change this type of thinking, we need to stand up against products that use advertisements that don’t promote women as a whole by displaying their bodies as more than sexual objects.  One way to support change is to boycott a movie that promotes serious relationship abuse as romance for entertainment. #50dollarsnot50shades is a campaign that encourages potential viewers to donate the $50 they would have spent on a night out at the movies to a women’s shelter for survivors of domestic abuse.

College kids aren’t spending $50 on a movie but every dollar you give