I agree with the Catholic writer David Mills, who says that Christians ought not to feel obliged to react to every single thing that comes out of the sewage pipe of popular culture. Excerpt:

Here I want only to say that  when engaging the culture, our default position should be: Stop talking. The world will not be harmed if you do not speak about 50 Shades of Grey. It is not waiting to hear your opinion on the effects of movies that glamorize rich guys dominating submissive young women.

It may be waiting to hear you say something about the Mass, or confession, or the Rosary, or holy cards, or the Miraculous Medal. It’s waiting to hear from someone about Jesus and his Church. Even your simple testimony that “Jesus loves me, this I know,” will likely have more effect than your best cultural analysis of 50 Shades of Grey.

This isn’t to leave the public square. It’s to live in it without getting caught up in its ceaseless movement, and in its frequent excitements and its occasional riots. It’s to know when to address the crowd from a box in the square and when to walk through the crowd talking to a few people or stand off to the side and watch. It’s to know when to go home, and how you might bring others home with you.

Yet I also agree with him that Catholic Bishop Paul S. Loverde has a good and necessary response to the latest excrescence. Bishop Loverde has been in the trenches, dealing with people whose lives were broken, even destroyed, by porn. Excerpt from his essay on the release of Fifty Shades of Grey

Seven years into his addiction to online porn, John wrote to tell me of his struggles. His addiction began when he misspelled a word in an online search and was taken to a hardcore porn site. When I received his letter, he was nineteen. If anything, his exposure to pornography at the age of twelve was later than some: studies reveal our children’s first exposure is even younger.

With the release of Fifty Shades of Grey, I wonder what we are saying to John and his female peers. I wonder what our decision to objectify women in situations of sexual violence—and to support the industry which fuels it—says about us and about our society? Though by the entertainment industry’s standards this movie is not classified as pornographic, it normalizes the intertwining of sex and violence, that old pornographic standby.

I have not had the privilege of a sheltered life. As a young priest and campus minister in the ’70s, I saw the early fruit of the sexual revolution: broken relationships, devaluation of sexual union, and rising divorce rates. In the lives of those I served, I saw prolonged adolescence, rising numbers of fatherless children, more addictions, and isolation. I listened, counseled, and tried to listen some more.

With the dawn of the Internet, we awoke almost overnight to new dangers. Men began to chase online fantasies through progressively more explicit images, ones in which men were violent and controlling of female subjects. Virtual fantasies now broke apart real marriages, careers, and families. Wives stumbled upon their husband’s online history. Young adults lost their jobs viewing porn online at work. Children imitated what they saw in adults and began “sexting” one another—the end result of which was suicide in several cases.

By the mid-2000s, I was fed up with the silence surrounding this issue. In 2006, I wrote Bought with a Price, a pastoral letter aimed at empowering men and women to protect themselves and their children from porn. Since publishing that letter, I have been welcomed into many lives. Victims and addicts often share their stories with me—through letters and conversations. So too, many have confided their stories of hard-won freedom in overcoming addiction.

I’ll let that stand as my reaction to the movie. It is a matter of real significance that an extremely vulgar book about people who torture each other, and wish to be tortured, for sexual pleasure became a worldwide sensation, selling over 100 million copies. It is a matter of real significance that the kind of thing that you used to have to go to dirty movie theaters to see is now thoroughly mainstream.

This is the world we’re in, and in which our children are being raised. The walls have come down. Panic, or mere denunciation, or “just say no,” are insufficient responses. A few years ago, talking about the increasingly graphic and sinister nature of violence in popular films (her peg was the “Dark Knight” shootings at the Aurora, Colo., theater), Peggy Noonan wrote:

Mr. Cannon noted the different ways Hollywood executives have attempted to rationalize and defend what they produce. At first they claimed TV and movies had no impact on the actions of viewers. Then why, they were asked, have commercials, and why have characters who don’t smoke? Next filmmakers claimed violent movies not only don’t increase violence, they probably decrease it by letting audiences vicariously blow off steam. “Legions of social scientists lined up to test” the catharsis theory, says Mr. Cannon. They discovered the opposite: “Violent programming desensitized young people to violence, made them more likely to hit other children, and often engendered copy-cat behavior.”

Some of the sadness and frustration following Aurora has to do with the fact that no one thinks anyone can, or will, do anything to make our culture better. The film industry isn’t going to change, the genie is long out of the bottle. The genie has a cabana at the pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel. The movie market is increasingly international, and a major component is teenage boys and young men who want to see things explode, who want to see violence and sex. Political pressure has never worked. Politicians have been burned, and people who’ve started organizations have been spoofed and spurned as Puritans. When Tipper Gore came forward in 1985, as a responsible citizen protesting obscene rap lyrics, her senator husband felt he had to apologize to Democratic fund-raisers. If some dumb Republican congressman had a hearing to grill some filmmakers, it would look like the McCarthy hearings. There would be speeches about artistic freedom, and someone would have clever words about how Shakespeare, too, used violence. “Have you ever seen ‘Coriolanus?'”

The president won’t say anything—he too is Hollywood funded—and maybe that’s just as well, since he never seems sincere about anything anymore.

A particularly devilish injustice is that many of the wealthy men and women of the filmmaking industry go to great lengths to protect their own children from the products they make. They’re able to have responsible nannies and tutors and private coaches and private lessons. They keep the kids busy. They don’t want them watching that garbage.

Everyone else’s kids?

Last year, I met someone who was severely injured in that Aurora shooting. She is literally the walking wounded, three years later, and may always be. Ideas have consequences. Art has implications. It’s naive to think otherwise.

What are you reading, and watching, instead of 50 Shades of Grey? What are you teaching your kids to read and to watch instead of filth? If you aren’t setting a good example, and engaging your kids at the imaginative level, you aren’t helping matters, and may be hurting.

If you aren’t going Benedict Option, you’re going to be swept away.

UPDATE: Reader Brian writes:

I got involved in the sexual practices depicted in this movie as a senior in high school, when I knew nothing of the love of God. When the relationship with that woman ended, I began gratifying those fantasies through pornography, and as is normal my tastes got darker and darker and more violent. I still struggle with this – I can go a year without watching any, then get depressed and maybe have a couple too many drinks and I’m back at it (not making excuses, just speaking of the nature of the cycle).

I think the thing that people don’t realize is that there are some things you cannot un-see, some desires that are incredibly hard to put back in their place. Back in my atheist days, I would have said, why would one want to put those desires away? Now of course, with a bit of wisdom (and the Word), I look at those urges and i say, why would I want those burning desires that I never would have known about? Why would anyone want desires that make “normal” sex seem unappealing? And yet people seem to run wholeheartedly toward those things, damn the consequences.

UPDATE.2: Reader Sean:

My mother-in-law, a third grade public school teacher in NYC, recently gushed enthusiastically about 50 Shades of Grey to my wife – offered to to loan her copy to her, can’t wait to see the film. My wife and I are traditionalist Catholics, and my MIL has expressed annoyance and bafflement that we placed our children in an orthodox Catholic homeschool academy. The parents/teachers who work there must take an oath of fidelity to the magisterium before they are permitted to assist in the formation of the students’ minds and souls. And thank God that we have this option. We now inhabit a world where 60 year-old grandmothers and elementary school teachers can watch violent bondage pornography and have no idea that anything might be wrong with it. The Benedict option is the only means we have of raising our kids with some semblance of civilization.