Sexual Politics: Fifty Shades of Grey Meets Marquis de Sade

…by Jonas E. Alexis

The much-anticipated movie—Fifty Shades of Grey—is already out and has created a storm of controversy.[1] Peter Bradshaw of the Guardian has recently called it “the most purely tasteful and soft-core depiction of sadomasochism in cinema history.”[2]

The film was banned in Malaysia because it was “unnatural” and “sadistic.” The chairman of the Malaysian Film Censorship Board, Abdul Halim Hamid, said that the film is “more pornography than a movie.”[3]

“The film was also banned in Indonesia, Kenya, Russia’s North Caucasus, and the United Arab Emirates. Studios will not pursue a theatrical release in China.”

But authorities in Europe and America have a different appetite. The Daily Mail has reported that the movie “will be shown in French cinemas to children as young as 12, after the country’s film board gave it the second lowest possible age rating.”[4]

In Florida, where this writer is from, 900 youths (presumably under the age of 17) tried to swarm a mall to watch the film; 200 of them succeeded.[5]

The sexual nature surrounding the movie itself has sparked intense debate and concerns. Dawn Hawkins, executive director of National Center on Sexual Exploitation, said:

“The media firestorm has pushed [the movie] into the awareness of children of all ages. The sexual templates of children are being altered to think that sexual violence, emotionless sexual encounters, and fetishized practices are normal and healthy behaviors.”[6]

Gordon Coonfield, professor of communication at Villanova University, added:

“We have been letting advertisers, who rip off the aesthetics, themes, and genres of pornographers, talk to our children for us instead of really talking to them ourselves.”[7]

In Pennsylvania, where Villanova University is located,

“At least five students at Monessen Middle School were given puzzles based on ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’… the puzzles contained terms including ‘spanking,’ ‘submissive,’ ‘leather cuffs’ and ‘bondage.’”[8]

“The West Wind Sacramento 6 Drive-In — a six-screen, open-air multiplex in California’s capital city — was one of nearly 3,646 theaters showing Fifty Shades over the weekend. But unlike most viewing locations, the West Wind is not only outdoors, but also nestled right by a major highway. (Highway 50, to be exact.)

“The convenient location meant that the R-rated film, which has 14 minutes and 17 seconds of sex scenes during its 125-minute runtime — many of them the more exotic S&M variety — was clearly visible to passing drivers and their passengers on one of the drive-in’s 5,000 square foot screens.

“That includes children, such as the sons of Sacramento resident John Schmidt. He was driving the boys — aged 10 and 12 — to a birthday party when the young’uns got a very special present from Christian Grey…. Another parent complained to the local KCRA 3 News that children could glimpse the film while exiting the local go-cart track.”

The movie, the Daily Mail says,

“was recently named the most erotic mainstream movie in a decade, after featuring more sex on screen than the 100 raunchiest films released in 2014 put together.

“The president of France’s Board of Film Classification [Jean-Francois Mary] defended the low rating, saying Fifty Shades a ‘schmaltzy romance’ and ‘not a film that can shock a lot of people.”[9]

There is plenty of sadomasochism in the movie, Mary tells us, and that part of the movie is “a romance, you could even say schmaltzy.”[10]

France wants children to watch the movie, but Jamie Dornan’s wife probably will not see the movie because…you know the drill.[11]

The moral contradiction is simply unavoidable: Dornan’s wife does not have enough stamina to suck up the pornographic nature of the film, but children as young as 12 ought to watch it! Dornan and Dakota Johnson have not even dropped a word of caution to parents.

In other words, both producers and actors of the film, like Dracula who feasts on other people’s blood to survive, are preying on other people’s children and weakness to make millions of dollars. Dornan and Johnson have ended up selling their souls for money, power, and fame and have inevitably placed precious children at the altar of pornography. Pamela Paul of the New York Times Book Review has indirectly drawn similar conclusions:

“Pop music is intimately with the pornography industry as today’s pop stars embrace and exalt the joys of porn. Eminem, Kid Rock, Blink 182, Metallica, Everclear, and Bon Jovi have all featured porn performers in their music videos.

“Trying to keep up, Britney Spears, Lil’ Kim, and Christina Aguilera emulate porn star moves in their videos and live concerts. Pornography has not only seeped into televised music videos; musicians have crossed over into the adult film industry.”[12]

Fifty Shades of Grey author E. L. James, who said that the story was personally meaningful,[13] is not off the hook. One individual by the name of Brian testified,

“I got involved in the sexual practices depicted in this movie as a senior in high school, when I knew nothing of the love of God. When the relationship with that woman ended, I began gratifying those fantasies through pornography, and as is normal my tastes got darker and darker and more violent.

“I still struggle with this – I can go a year without watching any, then get depressed and maybe have a couple too many drinks and I’m back at it (not making excuses, just speaking of the nature of the cycle).

“I think the thing that people don’t realize is that there are some things you cannot un-see, some desires that are incredibly hard to put back in their place. Back in my atheist days, I would have said, why would one want to put those desires away?

“Now of course, with a bit of wisdom (and the Word), I look at those urges and I say, why would I want those burning desires that I never would have known about? Why would anyone want desires that make ‘normal’ sex seem unappealing? And yet people seem to run wholeheartedly toward those things, damn the consequences.”[14]

 Practically overnight, E. L. James has magically become a millionaire,[15] which to her was a great surprise. “The explosion of interest has taken me completely by surprise,” she declared. She added on a different occasion,

“It’s surreal. It’s completely and utterly overwhelming and it just hasn’t sunk it.”[16]

According feminist scholars at the University of Waterloo, many women begin to swim in the sea of pornography for the first time right after they start reading Fifty Shades of Grey.[17]

Those same scholars, Diana Perry and Tracy Penny Light, even argue that “the scripts” in the book “could potentially be harmful to women’s understandings of their sexuality.”[18]

“One of the things that jumped out at us from that research was that so many of the women [we interviewed] were hopping in for the first time to pornography or sexually explicit material that was written by women for women.

“It got women moving from the book into consuming other types of books, but also sexually explicit material that’s online.

“So we embarked on [this latest] study where we interviewed 28 women who ranged in age from their twenties to their fifties around their pornography consumption patterns.”[19]

When asked the question, “What is the connection between reading ‘Fifty Shades’ and then seeking out online pornography?,” Perry in particular responded,

“I find it’s motivating women. It is exposing them to a genre of material that they either didn’t know existed or they didn’t know that they liked — but they’re reading the book and then they’re curious. They want to know more. They want to see what else is out there, so they’re going online to find that material. It’s really motivating women to look for sexually explicit material online.”[20]

Isn’t it interesting that a well-known French aristocrat by the name of Marquis de Sade would have agreed with Perry here? And isn’t it a surprise that BDSM (Bondage & Discipline, Dominance & Submission, Sadism & Masochism) professionals welcome the movie?[21] In fact, Fifty Shades of Grey uses the same language which Sade used profusely throughout his pornographic text Philosophy in the Bedroom.

In the movie, Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan) sparks an interesting conversation with Anastasia Steele (Dakota Johnson) and then intones: “I would like to fu$k you into the middle of next week.”

In response to one of Anastasia’s questions, Christian expands his sexual adventure by saying, “I don’t make love. I fu$k. Hard.” This line is straight from the book. Anastasia responded,

“My mouth drops open. Fuck hard! Holy shit, that sounds so…hot.”[22]

Anastasia eventually lost her virginity. In the book, E. L. James describes what happened to the young Anastasia who was ashamed of her virginity:

“‘I’m going to fu$k you now, Miss Steel,’ he murmurs as he positions the head of his erection at the entrance of my sex. ‘Hard,’ he whispers, and he slams into me. ‘Aargh!’ I cry as I feel weird pinching sensation deep inside me as he rips through my virginity…

He shifts so he’s between my legs, pressed against my back, and his hand travels up my thigh to my behind. he caresses my cheek slowly, and then trails his fingers down between my legs.

“‘I’m going to take you from behind, Anastasia,’ he murmurs, and with his other hand, he grasps my hair at the nape in a fist and pulls gently, holding me in place…I feel his growing erection against my thigh.

“His long fingers reach around to gently massage my clitoris, circling slowly….’Keep still,’ he orders, his voice soft but urgent, and slowely he inserts his thumb inside me, rotating it around and around, stroking the front wall of my vagina….he starst to flex his thumb slowly, in, out, in out…his fingers still circling.”[23]

The simple question is this: are there striking similarities between James’ Fifty Shades of Grey and Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom?

First of all, it must be pointed out that Marcel Henaff, who happens to be a sort of Sade protégé, was on to something when he declares that “Sade’s extreme defiance, his intolerable radicalism, is that he establishes the discourse of the cycle of violence and sexual pleasure and relates all possible discourse to that very cycle.”[24]

Sade indeed is the person to examine if one is to understand the sexual nature of Fifty Shades of Grey. In fact, the New York Times indirectly makes references to this:

“‘Fifty Shades’ not only destigmatizes kink, bringing bondage and spanking to airport bookstores and reading groups across the land. But it also, so to speak, de-sophisticates certain sexual practices, taking them out of the chateau and the boudoir and other fancy French places and planting them in the soil of Anglo-American banality.”[25]

Read the above statement again and you will indirectly hear Sade in the background. But the writer, A. O. Scott, could not even mention Sade by name, and we probably know why.

Scott cannot read Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom without coming to terms with the inescapable conclusion that Sade explicitly talks about pornography. Perhaps the reason Scott fails to mention Sade is that Scott does not believe that Fifty Shades of Grey is pornography.  Scott says that the movie

“dabbles in romantic comedy and splashes around in melodrama, but the one thing it can’t be — the thing the novel so trashily and triumphantly is — is pornography.”[26]

How did Scott arbitrarily arrive at this conclusion? The novel is pornography but the movie is not? Why doesn’t he ask the author of the book, E. L. James herself, who literally micro-managed the sex scenes and who “demanded that the film should be rather more raunchy”?[27] James herself had “input as a producer from the first to the last frame.” She admitted, “What you see up there, I had a say in all of it.”[28]

And why theaters had to warn moviegoers “to leave whips and ropes at home ahead of Fifty Shades of Grey world premiere”?[29] In fact, E. L. James had planned to boycott the film if the director, feminist Sam Taylor-Johnson, didn’t include what James wanted in the film.[30]

The fact is that Scott is defending the Jewish universe, in which pornography has to be redefined to fit the suitability of the Dreadful Few. As we have seen in the past, the Dreadful Few began to attack pornography laws since the 1950s. To cite again Jewish scholar Josh Lambert,

“[M]any of the defendants in crucial, precedent-setting Supreme Court obscenity cases were Jewish men, specifically in Burstyn v. Wilson (1952), Roth vs. United States (1957), Freedman vs. Maryland (1965), Mishkin v. New York (1966), Ginzburg v. United States (1966), Ginsberg v. New York (1969), Cohen v. California (1971), and Miller v. California (1973).

“As conventional and mail-order publishers, editors, film distributors, news-dealers, and social protesters, the men named in these cases tested the limits of the American law of obscenity and of the First Amendment.”[31]

So, to talk about pornography particularly in the United States without mentioning the real culprits—the Dreadful Few—is bad research and shoddy scholarship. If you doubt this assessment, listen to Lambert, who is a visiting professor at the University of Massachusetts:

“American Jews played a crucial role in obscenity controversies not just as defendants but also as lawyers, judges, and witnesses. Jewish lawyers were often willing to defend people accused of obscenity even when their liberal non-Jewish colleagues were not…

“In the postwar decades, many of the most influential lawyers who took on obscenity cases were also Jewish…”[32]

The religious weltanschauung behind the movement is Judaism. Jewish scholar Andrea Most of the University of Toronto makes the case that one cannot fully understand how pop culture in America has changed without a full grasp of Judaism.

There is a “Jewish-created popular culture,” argues Most, and this includes “Hollywood films,” Broadway plays, “popular novels written by secular American Jews,” etc.[33] No serious Jewish scholar would put his credibility at stake by denying this historical fact.[34] In fact, over the years the Jews have used Hollywood to “project the Holocaust into the present.” A classic example would be Brian Singer’s X-Men.

“In the comic book series, Dr. X had befriended magneto in Israel, where the latter worked in a psychiatric hospital for Holocaust survivors….

“Wolverine learns that General Stryker, who headed the project that operated on him, is preparing to destroy all mutants. Only the most avid fans of the comic book series will recognize that Stryker is based on SS war crimes fugitive Baron von Strucker, who kidnapped Dr. X’s Israeli paramour Gabrielle Haller, a survivor of Dachau…

“Jack Kirby and Stan Lee, the creators of the series, were the American-born children of Jews who immigrated to the United States before World War II….

“Kirby designed the cover page for the first issue of Captain America in March 1941. It featured the patriotic superhero punching Hitler in the face. Similarly, Lee’s first comic strip character was the Destroyer, a superhero dedicated to defeating the Third Reich…

“In the 1970s, Marvel writer Chris Claremont changed Magneto into a Holocaust survivor, transforming him into a ‘tragic figure who wants to save his people.”[35]

“In this world of popular entertainment,” Most writes,

“Judaic values about freedom, performance, action, and communal obligation exist in productive tension with Protestant liberal ideals.”[36]

Most moves on to make this astonishing observation:

“Judaism has always existed for Jews beyond the reaches of the synagogue and organized religious practice, and in the early and mid-twentieth century Judaism continued to shaped the worldview of so-called ‘assimilated’ or ‘secular’ Jews, albeit in ways that were not as obviously ‘religious’ or ‘Jewish’ as the observance of holidays or the maintenance of dietary laws.

“To identify this elusive American Jewish secular culture is not to look for overtly religious or ethnic representations on stage and screen.”[37]

So, when you see people like Sarah Silverman and Larry David acting out their sexual fantasies on stage, you can be sure that they indirectly have been influenced by their essentially Talmudic ideology. Moreover, you can be sure that their “comedy” is an indirect a way of corrupting “Christian” culture or any society that upholds the moral and political order, as Nathan Abrams himself articulated in 2004. Lest we be accused of something weird, let us quote Abrams in context here:

“Some porn stars viewed themselves as frontline fighters in the spiritual battle between Christian America and secular humanism. According to Ford, Jewish X-rated actors often brag about their ‘joy in being anarchic, sexual gadflies to the puritanical beast’.

“Jewish involvement in porn, by this argument, is the result of an atavistic hatred of Christian authority: they are trying to weaken the dominant culture in America by moral subversion.

“Pornography thus becomes a way of defiling Christian culture and, as it penetrates to the very heart of the American mainstream (and is no doubt consumed by those very same WASPs), its subversive character becomes more charged.

“Porn is no longer of the ‘what the Butler saw’ voyeuristic type; instead, it is driven to new extremes of portrayal that stretch the boundaries of the porn aesthetic. As new sexual positions are portrayed, the desire to shock (as well as entertain) seems clear.

“It is a case of the traditional revolutionary/radical drive of immigrant Jews in America being channeled into sexual rather than leftist politics. Just as Jews have been disproportionately represented in radical movements over the years, so they are also disproportionately represented in the porn industry.

“Jews in America have been sexual revolutionaries. A large amount of the material on sexual liberation was written by Jews. Those at the forefront of the movement which forced America to adopt a more liberal view of sex were Jewish.

“Jews were also at the vanguard of the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Wilhelm Reich, Herbert Marcuse and Paul Goodman replaced Marx, Trotsky and Lenin as required revolutionary reading. ”[38]

 During World War II, Jewish scholar Benjamin Ginsberg tells us, the WASP ruling class forged an alliance with the Jews “to bring about shifts in American public opinion, to discredit isolationist groups, and to give Roosevelt the political backing he sought for rearmament, the introduction of universal military training, and critical lend-lease aid to Britain and the USSR.”[39]

What was happening in the political realm was also happening in the cultural realm. Once the dubious alliance was forged, the Dreadful Few swiftly and subtly overthrew the WASP mores and substituted Talmudic speech code.

As we all know, America was overwhelmingly Protestant. After the alliance, things began to change. Scholars such as David A. Hollinger and Murray Friedman agree that the Jews played a crucial role in the “De-Christianization of America.”[40]

By 2013, Jews such as Joseph Epstein of the Wall Street Journal celebrated the decline of the WASP ruling class. “WASP culture,” Epstein wrote then, “though it exists in pockets of private life—country clubs, neighborhoods, a few prep schools and law firms—is finished as a phenomenon of public significance.”[41]

The WASP ruling class brought this upon themselves. They promoted birth control, allied with the Dreadful Few to defeat the Catholics,[42] and then they magically expected to have a bright future! Now members of the WASP have to beg their big boss for a job in Hollywood. William Cash of the British newspaper Spectator remembered:

“Bill Stadiem, a former Harvard educated Wall Street lawyer who is now a screenwriter in LA, told me that he recently came across an old WASP friend in an LA restaurant who had been president of the Porcellian at Harvard—the most exclusive undergraduate dining-club.

“His friend—a would-be producer—was dressed in a black nylon tracksuit and had gold chains on his wrist; dangling around his neck was a chunky Star of David. Stadiem asked: ‘Why the hell are you dressed like that?’ The WASP replied: ‘I’m trying to look Jewish.’”[43]

 In short, if the WASP or the Goyim aspire to succeed in Hollywood and the entertainment industry, they have to talk Jewish, walk Jewish, act Jewish, befriend Jewish magnates, or sign contracts with big Jewish companies.

This is true of E. L. James. It is the case of Elizabeth Taylor, who “studied with Rabbi Max Nussbaum to convert to Judaism, which in April 1959 she did.”[44] It is the case of Madonna, who attended a synagogue, wore the Star of David, observed the Sabbath, and studied “under a Rabbi (Philip Berg).”

It was true of the late Robin Williams, whose “ostensible Jewishness” became apparent in in movies such as Jakob the Liar.[45] It was the same thing with Ashton Kutcher. Kutcher and his Jewish wife Mila Kunis

“attend the funeral of prominent Kabbalah Chief Rabbi [Philip] Berg in Israel…. Rabbi Berg was the founder of the Kabbalah Center in Los Angeles, which is frequented by A-list Hollywood stars including Ashton, his ex-wife Demi Moore, Madonna, and also Paris Hilton and Britney Spears in the past.”[46]

Rock bands and groups such as the Beatles, the Rolling Stone, David Bowie, among others, also had to walk, talk, and smell Jewish in order to make it big.[47]

If you are still in doubt, ask Ted Cruz, who “woos the Jews” in order to get elected. The Jewish magazine Tablet recounted:

“He has already gone to great lengths to court Jews, making it clear that he wants their approval, acceptance, and financial support. He turned up, for example, at Commentary magazine’s annual dinner in September 2013, the only potential 2016 candidate to do so.

“The senator also attended New York City’s Israel Day concert and parade in June — and then raised $100,000 at Abigail’s, a kosher restaurant in Manhattan.

“He gave an address last month to the Zionist Organization of America, preceded by a meeting with New York Daily News owner Mort Zuckerman and followed by meetings with Sheldon Adelson and the hedge-fund manager Michael Steinhardt, former chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council.

“Steinhardt hosted Cruz in his office around a table with some of the Jewish community’s most influential political donors.” [48]

 Lambert would almost certainly say that E. L. James’ sexual fantasies are congruent with the Jewish weltanschauung.  Listen to what Lambert said about modern comedy:

“I hereby submit that if you want to understand what today’s comedy reveals about Jews, the people to consult aren’t the ones retailing in-jokes to heymishe audiences, but rather our masterful goyishe comedians and the jokes they tell about us.

“Jokes about Jews have long served as a crucial inspiration for non-Jewish American comedians, a point that was driven home on a recent episode of Marc Maron’s What the Fuck podcast, the massively popular comedy-world analog of Inside the Actors Studio…

“Non-Jewish comedians have always done Jewish material, going back to the days of vaudeville, when plenty of the so-called ‘Hebrew comedians’ were, off-stage, Irish or German… Some non-Jews’ Jewish jokes have always been backward-looking, an homage to the history of the field, like Eddie Murphy’s ‘Old Jew‘ character.”^[49]

The plot thickens. The Goyim ended up mimicking the Dreadful Few in the twenty-first century ultimately to worship Mammon. After all, Jewish scholar Yuri Slezkine of the University of California tells us precisely that we are living in “The Jewish Century.”[50]

In that century, what used to be immoral in the culture becomes moral and what was moral becomes a relic of the distant past. Jewish comedians and movies literally changed the largely Protestant culture in America and turned it into what one can call Babylon, which implicitly exalts pornography through capitalism and which always ends up humiliating, degrading, and denigrating any culture that upholds the moral and political order.

The Dreadful Few produced pornography in the West Bank,[51] they produced pornography in Europe and America in the nineteenth century and twentieth centuries,[52] which largely gave rise to Nazi Germany, and they continue to produce pornography in films and movies to this very day.

This Babylon also seeks to drag virtually everyone into this mad cult. The book of Revelation calls this cult the Synagogue of Satan, the spiritual and diabolical virus from which all significant revolutionary activity springs. The book of Revelation specifically calls this Jewish cult “the mother of harlots and abomination of the earth” (Revelation 17:5).

Previously, St. John declared that “the kings of the earth have committed fornication” with this Babylon “and the inhabitants of the earth have been made drunk with the wine of her fornication” (Revelation 17:2).

This cult continues to exert an enormously powerful influence on virtually the entire world. And the Dreadful Few are directly or indirectly following that tradition. But first, they have to debase the culture and allow you to come on board the rebellious ship.

 Danielle Berrin of the Jewish Journal has pointed out in a twisted way that Fifty Shades of Grey is a soft version of Marquis de Sade.[53] She went on to say that if you like Fifty Shades of Grey, “you’ll love Judaism.” But in order to make her case, Berrin, like Scott, has to declare that Fifty Shades of Grey is not pornographic:

“Here is where Orthodox Judaism and ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ have something in common. Sex in ‘Fifty Shades’ is safe. It is carefully channeled around a set of rules and hardly the white-hot, unbridled licentiousness common in porn books.

“There are boundaries around desire, quite literally. The lovers are contractually bound; every detail of their erotic encounter is agreed upon: They will be monogamous, they will use birth control; diet, exercise and dress code are part of the deal.

“Can’t take the pain? Just say so. The portrait of their pleasure is thus carefully guarded, fenced in by rules of conduct.”[54]

Berrin is probably not sophisticated enough to recognize the internal contradiction and circular reasoning of her assertion. Yes, Fifty Shades of Grey “is carefully channeled around a set of rule,” but who is the author of that rule? A Platonic idealist? A Kantian ethicist? A Darwinian metaphysician? A serial killer?  A pedophile? A disciple of Marquis de Sade?

If sex in Fifty Shades of Grey is safe, why did Anastasia have to be morally devastated at the end of the movie? Why didn’t she draw the same conclusion that Berrin is preposterously postulating here?

And how can Berrin logically defend one set of rule from another apart from an objective, metaphysical moral order? Can she seriously and logically say that Fifty Shades of Grey is all right and that Marquis de Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom is wrong? I would certainly be interested in seeing how she expands on this inadequate and unnecessary argument.

In the same vein, sex therapist Stephen Snyder unintentionally locks himself in the same crazy logic by magically arguing that the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy is enjoyable but the movie is morally irresponsible.[55]

What Berrin ended up saying is that Judaism and Fifty Shades of Grey are two sides of the same coin, which is another way of saying that E. L. James was doing the Dreadful Few a great service.

So, whether she likes it or not, James is perfectly at home with Marquis de Sade, sleeping in the same ideological bedroom and essentially drinking the same sexual wine and cocktail. Their philosophical perceptions and tastes are superficially different but essentially the same.

That is why neither Berrin nor Scott can logically draw any serious difference between Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom and James’ Fifty Shades of Grey. Both books celebrate pornography as a virtue and both books view women as machines which can be dominated by a powerful force.

Chris Hedges has provided a cogent and thoughtful assessment of Fifty Shades of Grey and has even called it sadism. He wrote,

“Fifty Shades of Grey…is a celebration of the sadism that dominates nearly every aspect of American culture and lies at the core of pornography and global capitalism. It glorifies our dehumanization of women. It champions a world devoid of compassion, empathy and love.

“It eroticizes hyper-masculine power that carries out the abuse, degradation, humiliation and torture of women whose personalities have been removed, whose only desire is to debase themselves in the service of male lust.

“The film, like American Sniper, unquestioningly accepts a predatory world where the weak and the vulnerable are objects to exploit while the powerful are narcissistic and violent demigods. It blesses this capitalist hell as natural and good…”

“Porn is not about sex, if one defines sex as a mutual act between two partners, but about masturbation, a solitary auto-arousal devoid of intimacy and love. The cult of the self—that is the essence of porn—lies at the core of corporate culture. Porn, like global capitalism, is where human beings are sent to die.”[56]

Andrew Adesman, chief of the Division of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics at Cohen Children’s Medical Center of New York, and Alexis Tchachonas of the same center, wrote:

“[T]he fact that this film elevates and glorifies erotic sadomasochism. Although the story’s protagonists are consenting adults, this kind of explicit adult entertainment may give young teens the wrong message about appropriate dating behavior — which is especially worrisome in light of the large body of research documenting the adverse effects that violent video games and pornography have on teen development.

“In recent months, the media has paid considerable attention to on-campus rapes and spousal abuse at the hands of high-profile athletes and entertainers. By contrast, very little attention has been given to dating violence among high school students, even though research has linked exposure to violence and pornography in movies during adolescence to increased aggression and permissive sexual behavior, respectively.

“In a 2008 study led by Keilah Worth in Pediatrics, approximately 3 million out of 40 million (12.5 percent) of surveyed youth ages 10 to 14 have viewed movies that were rated R for violence. Teens who view violent television programs are more likely to become aggressive than their non-viewing counterparts, which then leads to the use of violence to settle conflicts, lack of trust in others, and the use of violence for self-protection, according to 2013 research by ob-gyn Dr. Michael Cardwell in Southern Medical Journal.

“In terms of teen viewing of erotic material, pediatrician Dr. Deborah Braun-Courville and pediatrics researcher Mary Rojas found that adolescents who visited sexually explicit websites were more likely to engage in risky sexual behaviors such as having sex with multiple partners and using controlled substances or alcohol during sex. The researchers also found that those teens have a more permissive attitude toward sex than their counterparts who did not access pornographic content on-line.

“In yet another study, led by researcher Ross O’Hara and published in Psychological Science in 2012, early movie sexual exposure (i.e., viewing movies with sexual content before age 16) has been found to be predictive of engagement in risky sexual behaviors by altering sexual behavior and accelerating the typical development of sensation-seeking during adolescence. There is also evidence, from a study in Adolescent Medicine in 2007, that earlier exposure to sex in the media expedites sexual debut among adolescents.”

 Gail Dines, a professor of sociology and women’s studies at Wheelock College, arrives at the same conclusion:

“When you fight porn you fight global capitalism. The venture capitalists, the banks, the credit card companies are all in this feeding chain. This is why you never see anti-porn stories. The media is implicated. It is financially in bed with these companies.

“Porn is part of this. Porn tells us we have nothing left as human beings—boundaries, integrity, desire, creativity and authenticity. Women are reduced to three orifices and two hands.

“Porn is woven into the corporate destruction of intimacy and connectedness, and this includes connectedness to the earth. If we were a society where we were whole, connected human beings in real communities, then we would not be able to look at porn. We would not be able to watch another human being tortured.”[57]

The link between porn and capitalism is not far-fetched at all. In fact, “The income of the global porn industry is estimated at $96 billion, with the United States market worth about $13 billion.” There are “420 million Internet porn pages, 4.2 million porn Web sites, and 68 million search engine requests for porn daily.”[58]

Get this: “500,000 pornographic images are posted on Twitter every single day—but bosses refuse to do anything to protect children… But because the website is not classified as pornographic, the pictures can be seen even in households with child internet filters in place… Twitter bosses have resisted calls to block or filter illicit content on the website.”[59]

Capitalism legitimizes pornography, and pornography legitimizes or flatters gang rape and sexual violence. The consequences are inevitable:

“Along with the rise of pornography there has been an explosion in sex-related violence, including domestic abuse, rape and gang rape. A rape is reported every 6.2 minutes in the United States, but the estimated total, taking into account unreported assaults, is perhaps five times higher, as Rebecca Solnit points out in her book “Men Explain Things to Me.”

“So many men murder their partners and former partners that we have well over a thousand homicides of that kind a year—meaning that every three years the death toll tops 9/11’s casualties, though no one declares a war on this particular kind of terror.”[60]

The Dreadful Few in Hollywood make all of that possible. Dines adds,

“Women are told in our society they have two choices. They are either fu$kable or invisible. To be fu$kable means to conform to the porn culture, to look hot, be submissive and do what the man wants. That’s the only way you get visibility. You cannot ask adolescent girls, who are dying for visibility, to choose invisibility….

“With a mobile phone you can deliver porn to men who live in highly concentrated neighborhoods in Brazil and India,” Dines said. “If you have one laptop in the family, the man can’t sit in the middle of the room and jerk off to it. With a phone, porn becomes portable. The average kid gets his porn through the mobile phone…

“Studies are showing that boys are losing interest in sex with real women. They can’t sustain erections with real women.

“In porn there is no making love. It is about making hate. He despises her. He is revolted and disgusted by her. If you bleed out the love you have to fill it with something to make it interesting. They fill it with violence, degradation, cruelty and hate.”[61]

Dines also says,

“I meet these women [like Steele] all the time. They marry a ‘Christian Grey,’ and they think they’re going to love him out of it. And then they end up either dead or in a women’s shelter or on the run for years.”[62]

Dines and Hedges indeed have some sensible things to say. The only problem is that they never have enough moral courage to tell us that the people who control the porn industry are none other than the Dreadful Few.

If they did not know, then they should pick up scholarly studies such as Unclean Lips: Obscenity, Jews, and American Culture, The New Jew in Film: Exploring Jewishness and Judaism in Contemporary Cinema, and “Triple-Exthnics.” All those studies admit in an indirect way that the Dreadful Few are the kings and queens of pornography and have projected that lifestyle onto the entire American culture. Once again, Nathan Abrams is our witness here:

“[O]lder generation of Jewish filmmakers and actors, here [Woody] Allen, [Stanley] Kubrick and [Ron] Jeremy, arguably not only increased the Jewishness of their work, but updated it to match the new post-1990 sensibility by defining it in increasingly sexualized (and pornographic) terms.”[63]

This brings us to our final analysis. Let us ask: what is the actual connection between Sade’s philosophy and James’ sexual worldview? Listen to Sade very carefully here:

“Fuck, Eugenie [she is only 15 years old], fu$k away, my dear angel! Your body belongs to you, and to you alone. You are the only person in the world who has the right to enjoy your body and to let anyone you wish enjoy it…

“Her anus is tight enough to slice off my finger!…What bliss it would be to fu$k her up the ass right now!

“In whatever state a woman may be, my darling—whether girl, woman, or widow—she must never have any other goal, any other occupation, any other desire than to be fu$ked from dawn till dusk. It’s toward that single end that nature has created her…

“If the husband refuses, then the wife can virtually wear a thicker veil and fu$k tranquilly in its shadow…Ah! She must fu$k, fu$k with impunity! How I love to kiss an ass after fu$king it…”[64]

De Sade further deconstructs the moral order by saying, “It’s absurd to say that this mania is unnatural. Can it be censured if nature inspires it in us? Can nature dictate something that degrades it?”[65]

Since there is no difference between man and plants—or even worms or jackasses for that matter—Sade proceeded to cross the sexual Rubicon, never to return to sanity.

“Women are nothing but machines designed for voluptuousness,” and, as a metaphysical principle, “Voluptuaries of all ages and sexes” must “listen solely” to the “delicious passions” which guide them, and that “their source is the only one that will lead to happiness.”

Here and elsewhere Sade was following the logical outworking of Enlightenment philosophy, which promised freedom on the surface but delivered the opposite. As E. Michael Jones puts it,

“Sexual liberation is a conflation of Enlightenment thought, which is to say, rationalization based on ‘science,’ and masturbation.”[66]

This sexual liberation was the bedrock upon which many of the Enlightenment writers ended up sexualizing France.[67]

But there is something more underneath de Sade’s sexual metaphysics: men—or women—are simply machines that could be manipulated. Sade picked up that idea from Enlightenment writers such as d’Holbach and Helvitius.

“What is man? and what difference is there between him and other plants, between him and all the other animals of the world? None, obviously,” Sade theorized.

Austrian scholar Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn called Sade “the grandfather of modern democracy.”[68] Camille Paglia stated that Sade actually changed Mother Nature:

“Rousseau revives the Great Mother, but Sade restores her true ferocity. She is Darwin’s nature, red in tooth and claw.”[69]

Paglia moved on to say that Sade’s metaphysical worldview with respect to nature is “a classically Dionysian view of man’s immersion in organic nature. Judeo-Christianity elevates man above nature, but Sade, like Darwin, assigns him to the animal kingdom, subject to natural force.”[70]

By logical extension, then, “marital sex is no different than rape…As a Dionysian sexualist, Sade abolishes the great chain of being, sinking man into the continuum of nature.”

Sade’s view of nature and man got a “scientific” spin with the advent of Darwinian metaphysics, which largely declares that the universe, in the words of Richard Dawkins, contains “just electrons and selfish genes.” We will expand on Darwin’s principles next month.

In an indirect way, Sade and other Enlightenment thinkers and even E. L. James end up proving what St. Peter declared thousands of years ago:

“While they promise them liberty, they themselves are the servants of corruption: for of whom a man is overcome, of the same is he brought in bondage” (2Peter 2:19).

Yet de Sade’s sexual metaphysics did not die during the French Revolution, which was Masonic in nature. With Talmudic and Masonic backing, the sexual virus traveled from France to England, from England to Germany,[71] and then from Germany in the 1920s and 30s[72] to America in the 1960s during the sexual revolution. It got refined by people like Wilhelm Reich, who declared that

“The first prerequisite for healthier human and sexual relationships is the elimination of those moral concepts which base their demands on allegedly supernatural commands, on arbitrary human regulations, or simply on tradition…

“We do not want to see natural sexual attraction stamped as ‘sin,’ ‘sensuality’ fought as something low and beastly, and the ‘conquering of the flesh’ made the guiding principle of morality!”[73]

Fifty Shades of Grey is a product of that sexual avalanche, and much of the West now accepts that sexual corruption under the name of sexual liberation or “freedom” or “democracy” or capitalism.

But, as Euripides teaches us, sexual licentiousness and unbridled concupiscence always end up with death in the most brutal and painful way. This is what Fifty Shades of Grey is implicitly unleashing to young and naïve fans, who probably cannot tie their own shoes. If Christ is right and if there is an ultimate judgment, then its author will have a lot to answer:

“But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea” (Matthew 18:6). 

[1] See for example Cheryl Wetzstein, “‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ pushes kinky sex into mainstream, infuriates family groups,” Washington Times, February 12, 2015; Gloria Goodale, “How ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ Is Contributing to Shift in Norms on Sexuality,” Christian Science Monitor, February 18, 2015.

[2] Peter Bradshaw, “Fifty Shades of Grey Review—Making a Bad Fist of It,” Guardian, February 11, 2015.

[3] Patrick Frater, “‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ Banned in Malaysia,” Variety, February 4, 2015.

[4] Sara Malm, “Fifty Shades Of Grey is deemed so tame in France, children as young as 12 will be able to see it in cinemas,” Daily Mail, February 11, 2014; see also Ariana Bacle, “French Teenagers Can Go See Fifty Shades of Grey,” Time, February 11, 2015.

[5] “‘Fifty Shades Of Grey’-Crazed Teens Storm Theater By The Hundreds,’” Huffington Post, February 18, 2015; “Teens bum-rush theater after being denied entry to ’50 Shades of Grey,” NY Post, February 18, 2015.

[6] Gloria Goodale, “How ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ Is Contributing to Shift in Norms on Sexuality,” Christian Science Monitor, February 18, 2015.

[7] Ibid.

[8] “Parents outraged after Fifty Shades of Grey crossword puzzle with words like ‘intercourse’ and ‘spanking’ were handed out to middle school students,” Daily Mail, February 11, 2015.

[9] Sara Malm, “Fifty Shades Of Grey is deemed so tame in France, children as young as 12 will be able to see it in cinemas,” Daily Mail, February 11, 2014.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Amanda Michelle Steiner, “Jamie Dornan’s Wife Will Not Be Watching Fifty Shades of Grey,” Time, February 13, 2015.

[12] Pamela Paul, Pornified: How Pornography Is Transforming Our Lives, Our Relationships, and Our Families (New York: Times Books, 2005), 6.

[13] Cheryl Wetzstein, “‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ pushes kinky sex into mainstream, infuriates family groups,” Washington Times, February 12, 2015.

[14] Cited in Rod Dreher, “50 Shades of Barbarism,” American Conservative, February 13, 2015.

[15] “Fifty Shades makes EL James top-earning author,” BBC, August 13, 2013.

[16] Barbara Davies, “50 Shades of Control Freak: As she’s helped turn her novels into a new film, E.L. James has gone from home counties housewife to Hollywood player,” Daily Mail, February 7, 2015.

[17] Tracy Clark-Flory, “Research shows “50 Shades” is a gateway drug for women and porn,” Salon, February 12, 2015.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Ibid.

[21] Tara Fowler, “A BDSM Expert Reviews Fifty Shades of Grey,” People Magazine, February 15, 2015.

[22] E. L. James, Fifty Shades of Grey (New York: Vintage Books, 2011), 96.

[23] Ibid., 117-120.

[24] Marcel Henaf, Sade: The Invention of the Libertine Body (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 241.

[25] A. O. Scott, “In ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ Movie, Sex Is a Knotty Business,” NY Times, February 11, 2015.

[26] Ibid.

[27]Barbara Davies, “50 Shades of Control Freak: As she’s helped turn her novels into a new film, E.L. James has gone from home counties housewife to Hollywood player,” Daily Mail, February 7, 2015.

[28] Quoted in Emma Jones, “Fifty Shades of Grey Film Premieres in Berlin,” BBC, February 12, 2015.

[29] Snejana Farberov, “Theaters ask moviegoers to leave whips and ropes at home ahead of Fifty Shades Of Grey world premiere,” Daily Mail, February 6, 2015.

[30] Baz Bamigboye, “50 Shades writer E. L. James cracks the whip on film changes,” Daily Mail, February 6, 2015.

[31] Josh Lambert, Unclean Lips: Obscenity, Jews, and American Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 7.

[32] Ibid, 7, 8.

[33] Andrea Most, Theatrical Liberalism: Jews and Popular Entertainment in America (New York: New York University Press, 2013)., 6.

[34] See for example Patricia Erens, The Jew in American Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988); J. Hoberman and Jeffrey Shandler, Entertaining America: Jews, Movies, and Broadcasting (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003); David Zurawik, The Jews of Prime Time (Lebanon: Brandeis University Press, 2003); Henry Bial, Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage and Screen (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005); Omer Bartov, The “Jew” in Cinema: From the Golem to Don’t Touch My Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005); Lawrence Baron, The Modern Jewish Experience in World Cinema (Lebanon: Brandeis University Press, 2011); Nathan Abrams, The New Jew in Film: Exploring Jewishness and Judaism in Contemporary Cinema (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2012); Murray Pomerance, ed., Hollywood’s Chosen People: The Jewish Experience in American Cinema (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2013); Eric A. Goldman, The American Jewish Story Through Cinema (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013).

[35] Lawrence Baron, Projecting the Holocaust into the Present (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 259, 261.

[36] Most, Theatrical Liberalism, 2.

[37] Ibid., 6.

[38] Nathan Abrams, “Triple-Exthnics,” Jewish Quarterly, Winter 204.

[39] Benjamin Ginsberg, How the Jews Defeated Hitler: Exploding the Myth of Jewish Passivity in the Face of Nazism (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013), 4.

[40] David A. Hollinger, Science, Jews, and Secular culture: Studies in Mid-Twentieth Century American Intellectual History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), chapter 2; Murray Freidman, The Neoconservative Revolution: Jewish Intellectuals and the Shaping of Public Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 25.

[41] Joseph Epstein, “The Late, Great American WASP,” Wall Street Journal, December 23, 2013.

[42] See for example E. Michael Jones, The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing (South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2004).

[43] Quoted in E. Michael Jones, The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and Its Impact on World History (South Bend: Fidelity Press, 2008), 1035.

[44] M. G. Lord, The Accidental Feminist: How Elizabeth Taylor Raised Our Consciousness (New York: Walker & Company, 2012), 66.

[45] Nathan Abrams, “The Ostensible Jewishness of Robin Williams’ Mork,” Haaretz, August 13, 2014.

[46] Lean on me: Grieving Ashton Kutcher comforts a teary Mila Kunis as they attend the funeral of prominent Kabbalah Chief Rabbi Berg in Israel,” Daily Mail, September 19, 2013.

[47] See for example Seth Rogovoy, “Secret History of Paul McCartney, the Jewish Beatle,” Jewish Daily Forward, November 8, 2013; Seth Rogovoy, “The Secret Jewish History of The Rolling Stones,” Jewish Daily Forward,  June 13, 2014; Seth Rogovoy, “The Secret Jewish History of David Bowie,” Jewish Daily Forward, April 19, 2013; Scott R. Benarde, Stars of David: Rock ‘n’ Roll’s Jewish Stories (Hanover and London: Brandeis University Press, 2003); Michael Billing, Rock ‘n’ Roll Jews (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2001).

[48] Stephanie Butnick, “Ted Cruz Woos the Jews,” Tablet Magazine, December 15, 2014.

[49] Josh Lambert, “Non-Jewish Telling Jokes,” Tablet Magazine, June 12, 2012.

[50] Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).

[51] See E. Michael Jones, The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and Its Impact on World History (South Bend: Fidelity Press, 2008), 1054-1055.

[52] See Edward J. Bristow, Prostitution and Prejudice: The Jewish Fight Against White Slavery, 1870-1939 (New York: Schocken, 1983).

[53] Danielle Berrin, “Like ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’? You’ll Love Judaism,” Jewish Journal, August 29, 2012.

[54] Ibid.

[55] Stephen Snyder, “Christian, This Just Isn’t Fun Anymore,” Huffington Post, February 13, 2015.

[56] Chris Hedges, “Pornography Is What the End of the World Looks Like,” Truthdig.com, February 15, 2015.

[57] Ibid.

[58] Ibid.

[59] Katherine Rushton and Daniel Martin, “500,000 pornographic images are posted on Twitter every day – but bosses refuse to do anything to protect children,” Daily Mail, February 19, 2015.

[60] Chris Hedges, “Pornography Is What the End of the World Looks Like,” Truthdig.com, February 15, 2015.

[61] Ibid.

[62]Cheryl Wetzstein, “‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ pushes kinky sex into mainstream, infuriates family groups,” Washington Times, February 12, 2015.

[63] Nathan Abrams, The New Jew in Film: Exploring Jewishness and Judaism in Contemporary Cinema (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 72.

[64] Marquis de Sade, Philosophy in the Boudoir (New York: Penguin, 2006), 19, 36, 40.

[65] Ibid., 44.

[66] E. Michael Jones, Libido Dominandi: Sexual Liberation and Political Control (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2000), 22.

[67] See Peter Cryle and Lisa O’Connell, ed., Libertine Enlightenment: Sex, Liberty and License in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).

[68] See Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Leftism (Washington DC: Regnery, 1991).

[69] Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 235.

[70] Ibid., 236.

[71] See E. Michael Jones, Monsters from the Id: The Rise of Horror in Fiction and Film (Dallas: Spence, 2000).

[72] See Mel Gordon, Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin (Los Angeles: Feral House, 2006); Maria Tartar, Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1995).

[73] Wilhelm Reich, The Sexual Revolution: Toward a Self-Governing Character Structure (New York: Doubleday, 1971), 53.

Jonas E. Alexis, Assistant Editor

Jonas E. Alexis has degrees in mathematics and philosophy. He studied education at the graduate level. His main interests include U.S. foreign policy, the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict, and the history of ideas. He is the author of the new book Zionism vs. the West: How Talmudic Ideology is Undermining Western Culture. He teaches mathematics in South Korea.

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