If you're concerned about 50 Shades of Grey, the "dark fairy tale" with dubious consent politics, you should go and see it. Better yet, you should take your teenagers to see it with you.

At first glance this is a standard romance with a bondage twist: 50 Shades introduces us to Anastasia Steele, a sexually inexperienced final-year college student. She becomes fascinated by Christian Grey, a rich, handsome, slightly older man who "doesn't do romance" and has a yen for kinky sex. As the story goes on, Grey shows an alarming desire for total control of Anastasia's life. In this context, potentially harmless whips and blindfolds become analogies for the escalating inequality of their emotional exchanges. Commentators have rightly expressed concern about implications that a woman's desire for pleasurable sex must be coupled with submission to men's desires or to coercive relationships. But if we willingly don blindfolds and boycott 50 Shades we'll miss an opportunity to discuss the complexity of consent, coercion and romance.

Before deciding whether 50 Shades of Grey is bold and emancipatory or "the worst film we've ever seen", we should note the stigma already attached to the romance genre, which is explicitly pitched at female audiences.

Anxieties about 50 Shades seem to revolve around the sense that women – particularly young women – uncritically absorb films in the doe-eyed spirit that trailers anticipate they will. The reviewer's question, "is this a good film?", is quickly replaced by a potentially condescending question, "is this a good film for women?" Female audiences are assumed to confuse fact and fiction, and to be less genre savvy and media literate than male audiences.

