For one thing, I enjoy it as the vampire fluff that it is, and for another, I can and do read critically! Even if it's vampire fluff!
Exactly! God knows I used to read a lot of stuff with immensely anti-feminist undertones back in the day (hello, Narnia, with your creepy sexist and racist undertones that are mysteriously absent from the movie adaptations. Although it's lovely that they left in that whole thing about how making our own decisions is baaad and we should trust in Jesus to sort everything out. BUT THAT IS ANOTHER RANT FOR ANOTHER TIME) and I turned out all right.
It's really interesting what you say about girls being essentially groomed by society to act like bait - because I think that is something I have very much internalised, unfortunately (see, er, my recent slew of angsty posts, yes) - and one thing that's always interested me about the vampire genre as a whole is how different authors navigate and subvert the food=sex=death threeway metaphor. Sometimes this is done pretty nicely, but Twilight seems to... sort of bypass the whole discussion in the worst way, really. There's still the creepy Womens Is Food thing, but then again Sex Is Evil, so... yeah.
Then again, I've read interesting things saying that actually Edward's characterisation is supposed to be unrealistic, cartoonish, almost laughable - because he apparently represents some kind of idealised object of stereotypical female sexuality, much like the grotesquely stylised portrayals of women in porn targeted at men, for instance - but we're so used to that as a society that nobody bats an eyelid. They went on to say that while Edward's behaviour is creepy, that sort of hyper-attentive devotion and androgynous beauty maybe taps into teen girl fantasies in the same way the equally unrealistic girls in porn apparently attract dudes. I'm not so sure that I agree with the thesis (apart from anything else, it seems a bit binary-enforcing in itself) but it's interesting to discuss, I guess.
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timeasmymeasure
Re: why yes I do have a lot of rage tonight
Date: 2010-02-03 02:58 am (UTC)Exactly! God knows I used to read a lot of stuff with immensely anti-feminist undertones back in the day (hello, Narnia, with your creepy sexist and racist undertones that are mysteriously absent from the movie adaptations. Although it's lovely that they left in that whole thing about how making our own decisions is baaad and we should trust in Jesus to sort everything out. BUT THAT IS ANOTHER RANT FOR ANOTHER TIME) and I turned out all right.
It's really interesting what you say about girls being essentially groomed by society to act like bait - because I think that is something I have very much internalised, unfortunately (see, er, my recent slew of angsty posts, yes) - and one thing that's always interested me about the vampire genre as a whole is how different authors navigate and subvert the food=sex=death threeway metaphor. Sometimes this is done pretty nicely, but Twilight seems to... sort of bypass the whole discussion in the worst way, really. There's still the creepy Womens Is Food thing, but then again Sex Is Evil, so... yeah.
Then again, I've read interesting things saying that actually Edward's characterisation is supposed to be unrealistic, cartoonish, almost laughable - because he apparently represents some kind of idealised object of stereotypical female sexuality, much like the grotesquely stylised portrayals of women in porn targeted at men, for instance - but we're so used to that as a society that nobody bats an eyelid. They went on to say that while Edward's behaviour is creepy, that sort of hyper-attentive devotion and androgynous beauty maybe taps into teen girl fantasies in the same way the equally unrealistic girls in porn apparently attract dudes. I'm not so sure that I agree with the thesis (apart from anything else, it seems a bit binary-enforcing in itself) but it's interesting to discuss, I guess.