Twilight is socially acceptable girl-porn

I’m going to start by explaining the title of this post in sections.

Socially acceptable – sure, there’s no shortage of people willing to spend oodles of time mocking Twilight and its fanbase… but it’s still something that’s shown in theaters, still something you can easily buy at almost any store with a book section – without walking through a beaded curtain. I could go to my local 24-hour Kroger and pick up a copy of Twilight – something i couldn’t do with Debbie Does Dallas, or even a copy of Playboy magazine. (Granted, i live in the south, where you can’t buy alcohol on Sundays – so that may be a regional thing, at least in the case of nudie mags.)

Another aspect of the “socially acceptable” bit: based on what i’ve heard from my friends, girls/women seem to have no problem asking their boyfriends/husbands to come with them to watch Twilight in the theaters… but how would they feel if their male companions asked them on a date to a strip club? I don’t see that going over well, not at all.

Girl – it is marketed as a Young Adult novel, not as an adult romance novel. That may be the fault of the publishing house, rather than the author – but regardless of who put it in that category, that’s still how it’s being marketed.

Porn – This one needs a bit more description than the rest of the statement, as it’s the most controversial.

What do you call a movie that centers around a male lead, where any/all female characters exist solely for the purpose of the male’s stimulation and gratification? Where the male lead is desired by every female in the movie? Where the females are only there to make the appropriate noises and faces that better enhance the male’s excitement? You’d probably call it porn.

But wait, what happens if you swap the genders? A movie that centers around a female lead, where any/all of the male characters exist solely for the purpose of the female’s stimulation and gratification? Where the female lead is desired by every male in the movie? Where males are only there to make the appropriate noises and faces that better enhance the female’s excitement?

That, my friends, is still porn. But that’s what Twilight is.

In male porn, the males are actually relatively disposable. They are a walking penis – whose ultimate goal is to make the women make those noises and faces that the viewers (stereotypically men) are there to see. The men who watch porn generally don’t want to watch men having sex with women, they want to imagine themselves as the man who is having sex with women on screen.

In Twilight, Bella is relatively disposable; the Twilight fans aren’t there to see her, they’re there to proclaim themselves Edward or Jacob fans: they themselves want to be desired by Edward or Jacob.

The central figures in these sorts of stories are often as minimally-described (i hesitate to say “stripped down”) as possible. Bella is an Average Girl that quickens the cold heart of the vampire to new-found love… in the same way (and with exactly the same realism) that Willie The Pool Boy doesn’t get called to the house to clean out hair clogs from pool filters, but to satisfy the lady of the house as only he can.

Characters like Bella and Willie need to be disposable so that the viewer can easily imagine themselves in their position – that’s part of the fantasy involved in pornography.

Some might argue that Twilight is fantasy, maybe erotica – but definitely not porn. After all – porn isn’t socially acceptable. There’s a difference between porn and erotica, but determining the delineation between the two often depends on who you ask. Some say that porn is graphic or sexually explicit, whereas erotica is not; it comes down to a matter of just how much is described/shown.

In my opinion, the difference between porn and erotica is the characters – do they actually have a personality, do they have any depth to them? We don’t need a fifty-page outline of their life story, but even a hint of depth goes a long way.

One of the criteria of the heroine in a romance novel is that she is simultaneously generic and exceptional. She is often described with words and phrases such as vibrant, full of life, fiery, or tempestuous. (I once had a particularly vibrant set of curtains, but it honestly never occurred to me to get into a hot and steamy relationship with them.) This heroine needs to be generic enough that she can be mentally replaced with/by the reader, but at the same time, all of the other characters in the story need to view her as exceptional – to titillate the reader’s replacement fantasy.

The vampire mythos allows us to extent this to hyperbolic heights. The female protagonist is not only the most exceptional girl in town, or the most exceptional lady in court; she is the most exceptional woman that this being has encountered in centuries. The deal is only sweetened by the distance between the vampire’s reactions – he didn’t just reject all of those other women, he probably killed them brutally. This is the end-all-be-all version of having the man on your arm insult his most recent ex in your presence.

I’ve heard some Twilight fans claim that it endorses or encourages abstinence in its teenage readers. Abstinence is about more than figuring out which body part should or shouldn’t go into which orifice. If it encourages young women to carefully consider the potential long-term and/or life-changing consequences of a sexually active lifestyle? Great. I’m not of the opinion that everyone should wait until they’re married, but i do think it’s a good idea to wait until you’re in a healthy and safe relationship – both with yourself as well as with your partner. I’d love to see some statistics on whether or not that’s actually the case: are teenage Twilight fans more likely to abstain from sexual relationships?

Even if that does turn out to be the case, therein lies another problem: Twilight does not promote healthy and safe relationship dynamics. The series promotes codependency as preferable or optimal in a relationship. It’s viewed as the epitome of romance; anything less than the perpetually thrilling barb of mutual deceit and emotional manipulation is not regarded as Real Love.

It promotes an ideal that is, in reality, an incredibly destructive social dynamic. With a Debbie Does Dallas-style fantasy, it happens or it doesn’t. But with a Twilight-style fantasy, you can always keep trying until you turn your relationship(s) into that. If your Vampire Lover abandons you, well, there’s always the Werewolf boy next door.