Parents Television Council blasts 'Today' for showing 'Fifty Shades of Grey' trailer

The Parents Television Council isn't happy that Today showed the trailer for Fifty Shades of Grey on Thursday, even though it was an edited version.

The PTC says that the NBC morning program shouldn't have been airing a clip of "mommy porn," edited or not, as children could have been in the room at the time, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The promotion of the trailer was also deemed "excessive" by Melissa Henson, grassroots education and advocacy director.

"We're talking about basically the equivalent of a dime-store trashy romance novel. Essentially, what Today's doing is they're promoting what people refer to as mommy porn," Henson told THR. "That's what it boils down to. Today is helping promote mommy porn. That's pretty poor judgment on their part in terms of their attitude towards their audience."

Henson says that children could potentially be exposed to the trailer as parents often watch Today in the background while getting ready in the morning. Henson suggested a disclaimer should have been aired before and that the edited version was "misleading," making the film appear to be "like a very ordinary...romance story."

An anti-porn group, Morality in Media, also was unsurprisingly quite unhappy with the trailer, with executive director Dawn Hawkins saying in a statement that it "deceives the public with a visually appealing melodramatic love story that romanticizes and normalizes sexual violence."

In the statement, according to USA Today, Hawkins goes on to say "There is nothing empowering about whips and chains or humiliation and torture."

The film's trailer dropped on Thursday, as had been previously announced, finally giving eager fans a glimpse of Christian Grey and Anastasia Steele, played by Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson, respectively.

image courtesy of Famous/ACE/INFphoto.com

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