Monday, August 25, 2014

Desperately Seeking Pleasure

So much for the pursuit of excellence. So much for the pursuit of career success.

Female aficionados of the Fifth Shades of Grey trilogy are more likely to engage in risky and dangerous behaviors… presumably to garner more than their fair share of extreme thrills.

Is it a case of life imitating art? Perhaps, so.

At the least, it feels like a sign of desperation.


Women who read "Fifty Shades of Grey" were more likely to have fasted, used diet aids and had a partner who verbally abused them or demonstrated stalker behavior toward them, according to a study by Michigan State University.

Women who read all three books were more likely to binge drink and have five or more sexual partners than women who hadn't read any of the triology.

Naturally, the group is self-selected. No one knows whether women who try out extremely risky behaviors in search of intense thrills are more likely to read the books or whether women who read the books are induced to avoid stable relationships in search of pleasure that is associated with abuse.
  
The distinction is certainly important, though one imagines that, given the number of books that have been sold more than a few of the readers would not have indulged such temptations without having the imprimatur that arrives when a book becomes a best seller and when everyone is reading it.

And, it is worth mentioning that people who seek extreme thrills often do so because they have, perhaps through trauma, numbed themselves to many of life’s more banal and perhaps more enjoyable pleasures.

The phenomenon bespeaks an underlying malaise in American women. The popularity of these books seems to have offered them a new way to try to overcome it.



6 comments:

Dennis said...

The question has been "What do women want?" I have long sense not cared what women want because I don't think that women, as a whole, have the slightest idea of what they want.
This is just another example of wanting something, being treated in a manner that seems less than optimum from a feminist's point of view, we have been told was wrong. Women keep stating they want men to meet certain requirements and then have little use for the men they create. I could go on noting the confusion that seems to exemplify the average American woman, but we all see it every day.
Life is so much simpler if one stays out of it until there is some semblance of functioning adult. I may enjoy keeping the child, with its attendant creativity and willingness to tilt at windmills, because it opens up the joys of the world many women seem to miss. I can enjoy the little things in life that are there for all to see.
Years of feminism and we have more unhappy women than we have ever had throughout history. There must be a reason for that that doesn't always have to be blamed on men in an effort to not deal with the real problems women exemplify.

Anonymous said...

In our next study, we'll see if women who read "Games of Thrones" leads to other destructive passions, like incest among lonely gold-digging women who marry for wealth and power.

Anonymous said...

Given people's masochistic bending over to the homosexual lobby, it seems the book of America is Fifty Shades of GAY.

Ignatius Acton Chesterton OCD said...

People such people find happiness, or the next cheap thrill? Although I know this is research on female readers, I can't help but think of Michael Hutchence, frontman of the Australian act INXS, who asphyxiated himself trying to have exotically intense orgasms. How far will one go for sensory pleasure? What will they do with themselves the other 23 hours and 50 minutes of the day? Fifty shades of nothing, I suppose.

Jocker said...

People repeats something because of trauma? Is this a cognitive behavioral model? ;)

Dennis said...

An interesting thought is that the more people chase a given goal the farther away it gets from them. This happens because the goal is almost never what hey thought it was and loses its ability to provide what was expected.
Instead of seeing life as a learning experience that provides a large number of challenges that in and of themselves can create happiness just by knowing one has the wherewithal to overcome them too many people spend their lives chasing something of little value to their actual existence. Life and the enjoyment there of is in the living of it with all its various ups and downs.