this morning i woke up and along with millions of others began scrolling my facebook feed. i’ve been following the coverage of the 50 shades movie release with some interest.  i joined #50DollarsNot50Shades and have been happily promoting this fantastic initiative to send $50 to your local womens refuge rather than buying a ticket to watch what the reviews are telling me is a really poor film regardless of the subject matter.

so as i scrolled down past cats pushing glasses of water off desks, coverage of the terrible chapel hill shootings and beloveds holiday shots this morning there was a very distasteful presence of memes made by midwives suggesting all  the birthkeepers better prepare for a spike in the birth rate come november after the release of this movie. it has turned my stomach.  i believe birthkeepers have a responsibility to be feminist and woman-centred always fighting for women to be kept safe and flourish, to be empowered and to protect them while they realise and actualise their own strength and power. more than anyone else we know the impact of sexual trauma on a woman – i have held so many women while they wept and broke in half with the pain of their sexual abuse in my role as birthkeeper.  this smacked of those same women trivialising something that can be so damaging, demoralising, haunting and often times deadly – i am despairing – i am crestfallen and i am really fucking angry!

now i’m all for everyone getting DOWN in whatever way they want – seriously i have no hang ups about what people get up to when they are being consensual. thing is with this book and this subsequent movie is that it’s not hot sex in a safe context – it’s hot sex in a very dangerous context.  this blog post however isn’t to pull that apart as many, many others have done so in a wonderful way.

this blog post is about how on earth women who are supporting women around birth can think its appropriate to joke about this! since when is it okay to joke about stalking, domestic violence and sexual abuse? i grew up in a home with a very charming, handsome, rich, charismatic and horribly abusive and controlling man – i know how this goes down and i know how far it permeates – female members of my family have read this book and found it hot regardless of the trauma they have suffered. you know i really hope lots of people have some great really hot sex this weekend and i hope that some of this sex results in babies or i’d be out of a job but what i want more than anything is for us all to THINK about this for a minute. is it about hot sex or is it that the mainstream have now decided that this kind of abuse is hot ? many abused women stay remember and have sex and express love and still find their man hot – it’s a very fine line that is easily crossed – as a dear facebook friend said and i quote “.. replace Grey with that creepy guy working down the road in tesco, and the whole thing would not be regarded as quite so harmless and hot anymore. so as long as you are a hot guy, abusive is ok….women should probably just count themselves lucky….”

please, please birthkeepers i emplore you to take down any jokes that have this distasteful subject at its heart – please, please i beg you do not bring this 50 shades bullshit to birth work!

nicola mahdiyyah goodall is a revert muslim who grew up with hip hop based in edinburgh, scotland and london, england. she works with women trying and mainly succeeding to build circles of knowledge and community primarily with birth.

she is also the director of wysewomen publishing and facilitates wysewomen workshops and red tent doula courses.