Tag: film

Never simply a personal or interpersonal affair, romance is a multifaceted cultural formation that comes to us through a bewildering array of texts, voices and discourses. The struggle against love involves wrestling not just with the poetics of individual attraction, but also with the complex inheritance of received opinion that defines amorous relations. Hollywood itself has played a crucial role as part of the apparatus of intimate culture, its widely disseminated fictions translating affairs of the heart into accessible conceptual and emotional forms.

Frank Krutnik, “Conforming Passions?: Contemporary Romantic Comedy” (138, in Neale’s Genre and Contemporary Hollywood, 2002)

Fifty Shades Of Grey reverses the normal sexual equation, putting a man in a position normally reserved for women: required to be intensely sexual and but open to potential ridicule for it. No actor, male or female, wants to be in that position. Fifty Shades is just a reminder that men have less practice at steeling themselves against the possibility.

What The ‘Fifty Shades Of Grey’ Casting Shakeup Says About Sex And Masculinity | ThinkProgress

Fifty Shades Of Grey reverses the normal sexual equation, putting a man in a position normally reserved for women: required to be intensely sexual and but open to potential ridicule for it. No actor, male or female, wants to be in that position. Fifty Shades is just a reminder that men have less practice at steeling themselves against the possibility.

What The ‘Fifty Shades Of Grey’ Casting Shakeup Says About Sex And Masculinity | ThinkProgress