I actually liked 50 shades, once I got past the formulaic "a young and inexperienced but brave girl meets a sexy and powerful but troubled man" and the ever-present muggle plot, and I did not have trouble appreciating the good bits.
What I do not get is professional wrestling and its close cousin in poorly done fakery, professional porn. I have no idea how to find something worth appreciating there, even though millions of people get off on either.
Professional wrestling does a lot of interesting fourth-wall breaking/meta plots etc. Parts of the scripted tensions might be about contract negotiations or about a wrestler being frustrated with being scripted to lose a bunch of matches, so tonight you know he's meant to lose, and the tension is about whether he'll choose to.
I had an ex-bf who basically wrote wrestling fanfic, and it got me a bit sucked into the layers upon layers of artifice. (Still didn't care much about the physical wrestling part).
I think it would be a useful rationality exercise to take something that millions of people love, that you have contempt for, and sincerely try to appreciate it. The purpose would be to get practice imagining a different point of view, and to see whether you're able to do so.
50 Shades of Grey might not be the best choice for this exercise. I haven't read it. Maybe a better choice would be The da Vinci Code, NASCAR, or professional wrestling. But a book has a definite length that you have to get through to be allowed to say that you honestly tried.
The idea is to start a thread for people to discuss 50 Shades, or something else perceived as trashy, and try--not to find what you might like in it, but to get inside someone else's head and imagine why they might like it. (Of course it could backfire, and leave you less open-minded than before, if you always conclude that your contempt was simply right in the first place.)
I think the biggest problem is that if people succeed at finding something to appreciate in it, they would feel terribly embarrassed to say so. So this can be done with alternate accounts.
Anyone interested? What do you hold in contempt that you might be willing to take a closer look at?