A bit of cultural rumination

[missroserose]

50 Shades of Grey has just had the second-biggest February box office opening in history. Right behind The Passion of the Christ.

Apparently ecstasy, be it religious or sexual in nature, is only acceptable in our culture if it involves obsession, dysfunction, and serious physical or psychological harm.

(Note that I'm not intending to slam either Christians or kink practitioners here; I think we can all agree that the films present a realistic version of neither Christianity nor the kink scene. In fact, it's that very lack of realism, as well as the focus on suffering, that makes their incredible popularity strike me as worrisome.)

Am I completely off base here? Does anyone else see this parallel?

Comments

The Problem With Pain & Pleasure

[faith_in_the_journey]

Rose, the history of the Christian Church and the cult of "Christ as suffering sacrifice" is quite interesting. Death by crucifixion was so horrific that it wasn't really discussed much the first two hundred years after Christ died. The sign of the cross and the more graphic crucifix wasn't adopted as a primary Christian symbol until the Middle Ages. This is the time in Church History where the big debate was going on about whether Jesus was human or divine.

Politically this mattered because if Jesus was human the priests and the Church would not be essential to salvation, a celibate clergy would not be essential (thus depriving the Church of the ability to control the property of its priests and get their full time and effort devoted to the Church) and a strong lay (non-clergy) leadership would prevail. A strong lay leadership, of course, required education and translation of scripture into the local tongue (not keeping it in Latin or Greek where the Church could control content.) A strong lay leadership promoted women in equal leadership positions with men -which was the custom in the early Christian Church. A strong lay leadership did not need to denigrate women, or sex or the human body. If Jesus was human the human body should be celebrated as the vessel suitable to hold the divine.

You know which way the Church went - Jesus was divine, he condescended to enter a human body that was miraculously born of a virgin untouched by the debased nature of animal sex; all that is of the body is sinful, sex and women are sinful, denying the body is the right thing to do, including punishing the flesh. This is the era when the Crucifix becomes prominent in Catholic theology - the suffering of Jesus becomes symbolic for the essential nature of all life. Pretty soon the Church is so twisted around that pain becomes pleasure and pleasure becomes pain.

I think your studies in psychology have shown that pain and pleasure are both intense sensations and humans can slip between them fairly easily in body and mind. Love can become hate, a good enemy is more reliable than a good friend, the fine line between genius and insanity, etc.

So, in America and the West, we are heavily invested in "The Agony and the Ecstasy". The suffering artist is a common archetype. "Beauty is pain" you see it everywhere in the fashion industry that starves its models, puts them in spiked-heels, and with fads obsessed with piercing or tattoos.

In the East,the Buddha also came to the essential conclusion that "All of Life is Suffering." His answer was to renounce attachment and desire. Since desire is such an integral part of the way humans are "hard wired" in the body and mind, this has evolved into "renounce life" in some Buddhist traditions - so the East hasn't really solved the problem of suffering either. C.S. Lewis, the Western theologian attempted to solve "The Problem of Pain" by theorizing that pain exists as a means to help us grow and evolve, so we can learn to genuinely love and have compassion for each other. Still hard to reconcile a loving God with one who would inflict suffering as a teaching method.

I concluded that, given the Western traditions where social ideas were so heavily influenced by the religious and political choices of the Catholic Church (which led to the reformation, and our particular Puritanical heritage, God help us!) it isn't really surprising at all that we can't seem to allow for Ecstasy without packing it in Agony. Thoughts? - Mum