{"id":2660,"date":"2024-09-18T21:25:07","date_gmt":"2024-09-18T21:25:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/josephrauch.com\/therauchreview\/?p=2660"},"modified":"2025-07-12T22:32:31","modified_gmt":"2025-07-12T22:32:31","slug":"fifty-shades-recycling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/josephrauch.com\/therauchreview\/creative-nonfiction\/fifty-shades-recycling\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Fifty Shades of Grey\u2019 Almost Made Me Stop Recycling Forever"},"content":{"rendered":"

May 10, 2010, was an important day in my life. Not birthday important, or free book day important, or free Laffy Taffy important, but important nonetheless.<\/p>\n

Actually I can\u2019t remember the exact date. I picked that one because it sounded good. It\u2019s almost alliterative. In fact, in the Kabbalistic tradition, those numbers mean\u2026 absolutely nothing because Kabbalah is silly bullshit.<\/p>\n

So imagine with me, if you will, a date. In fact, you can pick whatever date tickles your perineum. Got it? Good.<\/p>\n

On this day I did something that changed my life.<\/p>\n

It was the day I read 20% of the international bestseller, \u201cFifty Shades of Grey<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now after you\u2019re finished groaning to yourself, let me explain myself and my moment of metanoia.<\/p>\n

It didn\u2019t arouse me. I\u2019ve been accused of being a bit puritanical sexually. Maybe in response to reading it, or rather reading as much of it as I could, I have strengthened the firmness and fortitude of both my pre- and post-coital handshakes.<\/p>\n

It didn\u2019t offend me because of its explicit content. I\u2019ve been aware of sex ever since I was five when my mother threatened to shove me back into my dad\u2019s cock. I must confess I heard this as \u201cclock,\u201d and, as a result, it wasn\u2019t till much later I understood the look of horror on my father\u2019s face as he limped out of the room, both hands firmly on his groin as if it might fly away. This event is possibly the reason for my irrational fear of both cuckoo clocks and the Pink Floyd song, \u201cTime.\u201d<\/p>\n

It didn\u2019t introduce me to BDSM. I was introduced to that by reading the works of Marquis de Sade<\/a>, the man so diverse in his deviant sexual proclivities that his name was the foundation of the word sadism.<\/p>\n

It didn\u2019t open me up sexually, help me understand people\u2019s sexual desires, or make me more accepting of people\u2019s sexual appetites. I still think a lot of the things other people enjoy during sex are fucking weird, because well\u2026 they are.<\/p>\n

It didn\u2019t make me buy more leather. I already had enough to graft a farm full of severely burned cows.<\/p>\n

What it did, is it made me stop recycling.<\/p>\n

Once again allow me to explain. For those of you who weren\u2019t educated in a pinko hippy free-for-all elementary school without Pavlovian bells and an adherence to strict Emersonian standards, or who haven\u2019t lived in New York City, where not recycling is a crime punishable with hundreds of dollars of fines, recycling may not mean the same thing to you as it does to me.<\/p>\n

To me, it\u2019s the one time as an adult I feel like a superhero. Hell, I\u2019d wear a cape when I did it, up until I got sent to that therapist, but that may have been because I never wore pants with the cape and hummed my own theme song.<\/p>\n

In the previously mentioned school, recycling was sold to us as the easiest way a person could save the world, and we all believed it. My juice box will not strangle an anthropomorphic cartoon singing salmon on its way upstream; it would become a part of low-grade off-white paper that would smear the eraser marks on my shitty drawings until I crumpled them into the blue bin, and then it went on to make even shittier paper. Thus the circle of sustainable consumerism lived on.<\/p>\n

Well actually, they said the easiest way to change the world was the golden rule, treat people the way you want to be treated, which I\u2019ve never bought into for two reasons. One: Fuck people.<\/p>\n

Two: It doesn\u2019t apply to masochists. Cause, let\u2019s face it, they aren\u2019t gonna beat themselves up. That\u2019s up to us well-adjusted folks with a penchant for self-destructive addictive behavior, and adoration for damaging relationships, emotional and sexual frigidity, and\/or stupidity, and media-enforced body image issues.<\/p>\n

So recycling for me is tantamount to the feeling I had when I was a kid and tied a towel around my neck and protected the house from cops and robbers. Each time I recycle something, I feel empowered and self-important, so much so that George Carlin\u2019s bones are clawing at their coffin, salivating at the chance to kick me in the short and curlies so hard I fly into traffic, where a leaking honey truck, drags me to the wilderness for the wolves to do their bidding.<\/p>\n

Each time I recycle something, I feel like I\u2019m saving the world.<\/p>\n

So all this begs the question: Why the hell would a book \u2014 a book I didn\u2019t read all of and didn\u2019t care for \u2014 how could this book make me stop recycling?<\/p>\n

The answer to that is rather simple.<\/p>\n

After reading a brief excerpt of this pile of compressed excrement \u2014 I pause here for a moment while those of you who are fans of this work may just say to yourselves, \u201cAlfred, you\u2019re just jealous that nobody loves you, and that you haven\u2019t written a worldwide bestseller.\u201d<\/p>\n

To the former I retort, that\u2019s not a very nice thing to say, or alternatively, you must know my family. To the latter I say, while I applaud your use of Aristotelian argumentation, and thus the expression of the teleological argument that spite is always at the route of true outrage, I say to you ignoratio elenchi<\/a>, colloquially known to the non-pretentious, as missing the point, much like petty bickering solves nothing. Or, alternatively, well of course I\u2019m jealous, doesn\u2019t make me wrong though, so go fly a kite. Or even more alternatively, your momma.<\/p>\n

After reading this book, I was appalled to find that the main male character was an abusive rapist. Now I\u2019m not sure how familiar all of you are with the BDSM community, but because of the risks of injury and death, there are strict rules. As an expression of intimacy or love or consenting debauchery, whatever the case may be, the goal is to enhance the sexual experience, not to hurt the other person or persons. Well, not to hurt them too much anyway. Now while I personally think that the better part of the BDSM experience is a bit like putting a good book into a meat pie and trying to sodomize it while eating it, that\u2019s really not the issue here.<\/p>\n

The main male character ignores safe words. A safe word in a rough sexual drama is necessary, to denote when pleasure-pain turns to pain-pain. Or, to be vulgar, when a breathless \u201cFuck me\u201d turns into a shrill panicked \u201cFuck you\u201d with several exclamation points.<\/p>\n

In case you still don\u2019t get it, a safe word, in vanilla sex terms, means, \u201cStop right now,\u201d \u201cNo,\u201d or \u201cI really, really, don\u2019t like what you\u2019re doing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Anyone who breaks those rules in the confines of a sexual relationship is, by definition, a rapist.<\/p>\n

Now there have been worse characters in media, but in this supposedly more enlightened age, the fact that millions of women were beguiled into making a fictional rapist a demagogue and emulating the behavior of his victim\u2019s Stockholm Induced participation, a la \u201cPolly<\/a>\u201d by Nirvana, robbed me of the little shred of hope I had for humanity. So, like I said at the top, I stopped recycling because suddenly the world wasn\u2019t worth saving.<\/p>\n

I puttered about for a week or so, wrestling between my urge to tell everyone about this revelation and my urge to just give up entirely and move into the woods.<\/p>\n

It was about two weeks later when I saw someone litter on State Street. When I say \u201clitter,\u201d I mean, juggle two bags of dog shit, an iPhone, a leash and a big gulp, pitching all of them except the phone and leash into the street. I got enraged, but I had a plan. First, I thought, I\u2019m going to punch that granny in her freakishly childlike face, and then I\u2019m going to pick up that garbage and be a hero.<\/p>\n

But then I remembered that I didn\u2019t care, and didn\u2019t recycle anymore. Somewhere in the distance Barbara Streisand\u2019s \u201cThe Way We Were<\/a>\u201d played, and I started to cry, because I hate that song, and I\u2019m a Midler fan.<\/p>\n

When I was finally able to get a friend to listen to what had both devolved and evolved into a three-minute rant about the sorry state of the world, which the success of this book wouldn\u2019t allow me to ignore, I found myself confronted with another ugly reality.<\/p>\n

As my friend put it, You make excuses for the things you enjoy and find to be important art-wise, why shouldn\u2019t other people be able to do the same? And if you thought the book was good, you\u2019d probably be defending it.<\/p>\n

I stood silent for a moment, before the subject changed, and didn\u2019t mention another word about it. We parted ways.<\/p>\n

Then I started thinking about the real people I\u2019ve made excuses for, to one extent or another: the Marquis de Sade, Woody Allen, Michael Jackson, Roman Polanski and, in the early days of the accusations, Bill Cosby.<\/p>\n

The Marquis de Sade. Well, his work was a parody. You know, like Machiavelli<\/a>? Machiavelli was a supporter of the republic and a proponent of democracy when it was still a twinkle in its father\u2019s eye. With Sade it\u2019s the same kinda thing, so when he was writing about a bunch of rich libertines kidnapping a castle full of men, women, boys and girls to rape and stuff with excrement, he was talking about the system, man. Open your eyes! OK fine, he was a grimy hedonist and a horrible 1% shitbag, but he was such a good writer. Besides, who hasn\u2019t accidentally gotten period blood on them or vomited on someone mid-coitus? Oh, you haven\u2019t? Yeah me neither.<\/p>\n

Michael Jackson? No way! He had more money than God, and he owned The Beatles’ back catalog. Nobody with that amount of money and talent would ever do anything like that. I mean if that were even possible, there would be a lot of people who turn to music and art as professions to escape from inner torment.<\/p>\n

Woody Allen did what? No way, that\u2019s just the plot to \u201cManhattan.\u201d He married her? Well… see that\u2019s a man who adheres to family values. You know what they say: If you can\u2019t keep it in your pants, keep it in your family.<\/p>\n

Roman Polanski? Do you know his life story? Parents murdered in the Holocaust, pregnant wife stabbed sixteen times by the Manson family, which is 11 more than they needed \u2018cause five of the wounds were fatal, they just wanted to make sure they killed the baby. Anybody who had lived through that trauma would never inflict horror on another person. Wait, he admitted it? Well, I mean technically he\u2019s not a pedophile, he\u2019s an ephebophile, \u2018cause the gal was in the 15 to 19 age range. And you know how they are in Europe. No, that doesn\u2019t make it right! I think it\u2019s horrible and disgusting, but it\u2019s primarily because of my cultural upbringing. Technically most sexually healthy people are chronophiles, I mean I love older women, not like Harold and Maude old, but older. Should I be judged based on our particular society’s ever-changing stringent rules of decency? Drugged? Well, shit \u2014 have you seen \u201cChinatown\u201d? It\u2019s like the best movie ever. What do you mean, how can I watch that? It\u2019s amazing, and it came out before he committed a crime against God, humanity and the universe abroad.<\/p>\n

Bill Cosby would never \u2014 Goddamn you, Bill. Now I can never listen to \u201cChocolate Cake For Breakfast<\/a>\u201d ever again.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s an odd cognitive dissonance we can achieve with musicians, filmmakers, actors and the like.<\/p>\n

I recently had a discussion with one of my good friends while writing this, lamenting over the use of the word, butchered, when relaying a story of a horrific murder or a grotesque performance. The use of the word, butchered, in either of those contexts, though I\u2019ve been guilty of it myself, makes me wonder where these people get their steaks and cheese. Butchering is an art form. It takes a skilled artisan to make those cuts, which are the complete antithesis of the mauling the oft referred to \u201cbutchered corpses\u201d receive. It just isn’t right.<\/p>\n

Butchers also get the short end of the stick because they can\u2019t utilize the loophole we\u2019ve created for artists and musicians. Imagine, if you will, the world\u2019s greatest butcher. This butcher always cleans the knives and slicer in-between cuts for the more finicky or dietary-restricted customers. The meat, fish and cheese are always fresh, the cuts supple, round and taut, has vegetarian options for customers who can\u2019t make it to a further store, and never, ever, puts a thumb on the scale. Can you imagine this person committing a heinous crime, like the aforementioned artists, and people defending this butcher because of their skill with a blade? So they [insert heinous unforgivable act, preferably in a verb in the past tense] \u2014 he or she makes the greatest cuts of filet mignon, remember those ribeyes? And the rump roasts? Shit, don\u2019t even get me started on the rump roast.<\/p>\n

Leon Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance<\/a> distilled to a couple of sound bites is similar to Orwellian doublethink<\/a>, as it allows people to hold two disparate ideas while reaching a conclusion that adheres to their inherent prejudices, be they negative or positive, to achieve a sort of mental balance, weighted down by obvious logical fallacies. Self-justification or apologetics develop for otherwise illogical or reprehensible behavior.<\/p>\n

It’s things like this that allow us to justify our racist, misogynistic, transphobic and homophobic ideas.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also what allows the media and corporations to create terms like \u201cexcited delirium<\/a>\u201d and have them be accepted (until very recently) by the National Association of Medical Examiners<\/a>, the Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine<\/a>, and the American College of Emergency Physicians<\/a>. For those of you who don\u2019t know, Excited Delirium was the prime cause, according to the Fairfax PD in the death of 37-year-old Natasha McKenna<\/a>, the woman who died as a result of four or more \u2014 the numbers may never be released \u2014 brave officers defending themselves from a disoriented schizophrenic 130 lb, 5\u20195 woman in a hospital gown, shackled to a chair. Authorities claimed her death was the result of excited delirium and not from having a group of officers shoot her in the chest four times with 50,000 volts of electricity.<\/p>\n

You may be asking what Excited Delirium is. Well, it\u2019s paranoia, removal or lack of clothing, incoherence, hyper-aggression, sweating, a rapid heartbeat, and the perception to others that one may have superhuman strength.<\/p>\n

Now while that may sound like either being drunk or the results of a person with severe mental illness being put upon by a group of officers in attack formation, the law and part of the medical community don\u2019t share that opinion. Even though the phrase, \u201cexcited delirium,\u201d in this context was created by the tasers, it previously only applied to people who had taken too much clinical cocaine<\/a>. Paranoia and incoherence were indeed present in Ms. McKenna\u2019s last words, \u201cYou promised you wouldn\u2019t kill me<\/a>.\u201d Which I have no doubt were used to demonstrate her state of excited delirium as no one at this time in history could rightfully expect that behavior from an officer.<\/p>\n

Cognitive dissonance, an explanation that, at its core, is arguably no different than me excusing the horrific behavior of people whose work I enjoy.<\/p>\n

A slightly nicer example is Chinua Achebe\u2019s<\/a> landmark essay on Joseph Conrad\u2019s \u201cHeart of Darkness<\/a>.\u201d Achebe was able to accurately describe the infantilization of African people in the landmark work often touted as a racially progressive book for the era because it highlighted the horrors of colonialism. Achebe famously announced it should no longer be considered a great work of art as a result of these shortcomings. However, when he was later questioned about the rampant misogyny in his landmark novel, \u201cThings Fall Apart<\/a>,\u201d he was able to dismiss the accusations, based on the fact that his work was an accurate presentation of life in Nigeria at the time.<\/p>\n

Whether you think \u201cFifty Shades\u201d is art or not, and it sure as fuck isn\u2019t art, it made me take my language and presentation and male gaze more seriously, and stirred me to return to my readings of scholarly works on feminism and sexual relations. I could attack the horrors of fiction and allow their faults to influence my behavior negatively, but fiction is where cognitive dissonance belongs. While reality can\u2019t fight the negatives of fantasy, fantasy (be they songs, physical art, movies, books, delusions of grandeur, or hope) can all fight the negatives of reality. They can be a force for good, a force for change, either raising the human spirit to soar like a phoenix or rebuilding a foundation on more equivocal and less flowery grounds.<\/p>\n

By the time all of this had occurred to me, I was finished with my 1.5-hour commute home, Bette Midler was crooning \u201cWind Beneath My Wings<\/a>\u201d into my headphones, and I was fired up. So I headed inside, took off my pants, put on my cape and took out the fucking recycling.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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