I'll admit it; I read all four of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight novels. I took the first one with me on a trip to California one weekend, got totally sucked in (don't forgive the pun) and then read the next two while stuck in the airport and on route back to Colorado a few days later. So there--I admit it. Am I ashamed? Not that I read them, so much, but that I too, fell briefly in love with Edward Cullen. Let's face it--he is girl-porn to the extreme. I got pulled in by his Byronic Hero-esque personality, his undying love and unending affection, and couldn't stop turning the pages to see if the vampire and his human love would eventually end up together, despite all the odds.
Today I watched the second Twilight film, New Moon, with some of my students. It was a bootleg copy (yeah, yeah, I know) and we only watched it because I was running my Shakespeare Club, and the Macbeth adaptation we began to watch was not only unbelievably horrible, but also dubbed over in Turkish. My students begged me to turn it off--and I wanted to as well (they had blood pulsing in spurts out of a guy's neck in the first three minutes--really, Hollywood?). Anyway, the technology was all hooked up and one of my students had the copy, so they unanimously decided to watch it.
Oh god, people, it was horrible. I actually somewhat enjoyed the first Twilight film. Maybe because it was an intriguing love story, a semi-new world, and it played to the part of me that secretly wanted a crazy-hot immortal being to fall madly in love with me and no one else. And being a vampire in Meyer's world seems pretty darn cool; you're invincible, gorgeous, rich...who wouldn't want that reality?
But the second book got really twisted. Suddenly this wasn't a love story at all (or a falling madly in love story). It became a weird, psycho tale about a girl with no hobbies, no real friends, and clearly no self esteem, who gets crazy co-dependent with some vampire who doesn't know how to communicate his real feelings and has to fight constant urges to kill her. He treats her like a baby by making a decision about their relationship without consulting her, and she acts like that pathetic girl/woman we probably all know or fear who completely breaks down and can't function when her man leaves her.
The months pass by and Bella just stares out the window, unable to exist without him. She only finds some respite by engaging in life-threatening activities so she can have psychotic episodes where she sees visions of Edward in her head. And when it comes down to it--when Edward's life is at stake--she'll gladly give her own because life just ain't worth living when the guy you've been dating for five months might not be around.
Yeah, it's just a story for teens; a story about teenage angst and loneliness. Okay, fine. If that's all it was, then I wouldn't be writing this post. But the fact is, people, it's not just teens who are into it, and the teens that are into it are going KUHRAZY! Girls cut themselves when they see actor Robert Pattinson (who plays Edward) and ask them if he wants to suck their blood. I have several friends (my age) who confessed that Edward made them question the man they were in relationship with. And I have students who tell me about romances like this that happen in the villages in Turkey where young people will kill themselves when they can't be with their seventeen year old boyfriend because their father won't allow it.
What does this say about our culture that we are so obsessed with a story about one girl's inability to be happy without her man? This clearly has tapped into many a woman's psyche, because I have several women friends and have heard of many other adult women who have gone nuts for this guy--myself included. We're all oohing and ahhing over dreamy Edward, when the reality is, the guy's a stalker. Edward Cullen is a big fat psycho.
I think this Edward phenomenon is dangerous, honestly, as it adds to the disturbing heaps of literature, film, and media that creates unrealistic men that women want to be with. Real men are not like Edward. And if they were, they'd be that super creepy guy you dated for a month before you found out he was staring in your window at night without your permission. I mean, really. Is that what you want?
But what disturbs me most is not Edward, but Bella, who is a lifeless, hopeless thing whose whole world revolves around one man. I wish young girls would go crazy over someone like Hermione Granger, the teenage heroine in Harry Potter. The girl was super smart, cute, caring, and tough. Or Lyra from the Golden Compass trilogy, or Sabriel from the Abhorsen Trilogy. I write young adult fiction; I know the genre. There are strong female characters out there that know how to respect themselves and love someone else at the same time. Why aren't these the role models young girls are going crazy over?
The truth is, I want young women (okay, all women) to fall in love with healthy, balanced men. There, I said it. I want them to ooh and ahh over men who can communicate. Men who don't stalk them. Men who don't keep secrets and hide their love. Men who don't want to suck their blood. Maybe it's because I recognize the sad, desparate part of me that went a bit crazy for unavailable guys when I was a teen (hell, in my twenties)--but I can now see all my insecurities, all the parts of me that wanted validation and suffered from a low sense of self-worth. And because I know what it stemmed from, because I know why I had those obsessive feelings, that's why I worry for girls today. I just want them to be loved in all the right ways. I want them to be strong, tough, and happy on their own.
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