In eight Southern states, including Tennessee and Alabama, ticket buyers for “Fifty Shades of Grey” are spanking superheroes, dominating Katniss Everdeen and forcing Bella to kneel.
According to officials at Fandango, the online ticketing site, each of these states is selling more advance tickets to “Fifty Shades” than it has for any previous film. Whether it’s “The Avengers,” “The Hunger Games,” “Twilight” or any other blockbuster, “Fifty Shades” is outpacing them.
The figures are even more impressive since “Fifty Shades,” which opens tonight in Chattanooga, is an erotic romance that sports handcuffs, blindfolds, and bondage and discipline, not exactly polite dinner-table conversation in the conservative and religious South. And, dubbed by some as “mommy porn,” its target audience is women.
“In the South, where gender norms are more traditional and standards for sexual behavior are conservative, ‘Fifty Shades’ is finding an audience of women who want to learn more about BDSM [bondage, dominance, sadomasochism], or find it sexy, but would be appalled or embarrassed to consume anything marketed as pornography as opposed to a mainstream movie release,” said Laura Carpenter, director of Women’s and Gender Studies at Vanderbilt University in Nashville.
And the large advance ticket sales may indicate that a certain amount of shame is in play, she said.
“It’s probably also the case that people, especially women, in the South are more embarrassed than people in other parts of the country about asking aloud for tickets to ‘Fifty Shades’ in line at the movie theater, so they’re ordering ahead,” she said.
Bo Wagner, pastor at Cornerstone Baptist Church in Mooresboro, N.C., and a columnist in the Times Free Press, said the South’s cultural underpinnings, which stress the value of traditional marriage, have turned “Fifty Shades” into forbidden fruit to some Southerners.
“Those who have been the most often exposed to all forms of fornication and illicit sexuality/sensuality will not find this movie nearly as much of a new, shiny, enticing thing as those who have been raised to understand the value of a man-and-wife monogamous relationship,” he said.
Surging ticket sales in the South “actually says more to me about the other areas of the country than it does our own,” he continued. “The Bible Belt is normally ‘behind the times’ on things like this, and that, to me, is a good thing, not a bad thing.”
Mentions of the “Bible Belt” popped up several times on the Times Free Press Facebook page after readers were asked why they thought “Fifty Shades” was selling so well in the South.
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“It is ‘Class Porn’ without the label. Makes the steamy scenes acceptable here in the Bible Belt,” wrote Barbara Jane Vorenkamp-deheus of Elizabethton, Tenn.
“It explores a side of sexuality that women around the Bible Belt think about, but are too afraid or embarrassed to admit,” wrote Julia Fairchild of Chattanooga.
But Adam Rector of Chattanooga had a different take. People in the South are going “’cause” everyone thinks it’s a documentary about the Confederate Army.”
Vanderbilt’s Carpenter said that, since the movie is coming out right before Valentine’s Day, she suspects groups of women – moms’ clubs, women’s groups in church – “may be using trips to the film as an occasion to talk about healthy relationships and intimacy. I know at least one dorm group at Vanderbilt is planning such an outing.
“Again, Southern conservatism about gender and sexuality is probably at play,” she said. “I doubt that the movie seems as daring or challenging in the Northeast or West Coast.”
Pastor Craig Gross, who founded the Los-Angeles-based XXXchurch.com in 2001 to help those addicted to porn, says the South doesn’t have the blasé attitude about sex that is prevalent on the West Coast, where the porn industry is based.
“Sex sells and what we’re seeing here is, probably, the South has just as much interest in it, if not more,” Gross said. “Maybe we’re just too used to it out here.”
But he also said he’s not surprised by the ticket sales. “The book sold 100 million copies,” he said, “so I’m not shocked that people are interested in the film.”
Both Gross and Wagner said interest in “Fifty Shades” is a chance for religious leaders to bring sex out of the darkened bedroom and discuss it openly.
“We need to do a better job talking about sex, the reality of sex, not the fantasy of sex,” Gross said, “and ‘Fifty Shades’ is all about fantasy.”
Wagner said pastors must be “very careful and appropriate when preaching on this, but it is a subject that does need to be broached.
“The quickest way to send husbands and wives scurrying for illicit sexuality of this type is to make them equate boredom in the bedroom with spirituality.”
Contact Shawn Ryan at sryan@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6327.