Lisbeth Salander, the heroine of the popular The Girl With a Dragon Tattoo series, is emotionally stunted but, damn it, she actualizes herself! She punishes the people who hurt her, she sleeps with whomever she wishes, she zips around on a motorcycle, and she’s a master computer hacker. In other words, our actualized female heroine might as well be a tiny man.That said: burn it with fire.
[...]
Bella holds up a cracked mirror and shows us some things we don’t want to see. But she also reminds us that the imagination resists checklists of appropriate behavior. Teen girls resist checklists. The really interesting conversations start to happen when we stop circling the wagons against “bad examples” and “passivity” and start exploring not only what we want our heroines to be like, but why.
The release of Breaking Dawn raised the game to new heights; when "playing" it with my aunt, I had the pleasure of saying, "No, Jacob doesn't end up with Bella. Bella marries Edward at the beginning of the fourth book, and then she gets pregnant with his half-vampire baby and it comes to term in like a month and then it breaks all her ribs and her spine coming out and Jacob falls in love with it." And I didn't even get to tell her how they delivered the baby.I have to admit, I'm a bit morbidly curious as to how they filmed the delivery scene. (Cleolinda isn't making any of that up, by the way. And she did indeed skip over the most horrifying part.)
Yeah, I understand and am sympathetic to the author's discussion of flawed characters, and that we shouldn't unconditionally condemn a book because it portrays things that are considered un-feminist or anti-feminist values, but can we please stop assuming that anyone who does anything besides swoon and give birth is automatically some sort of penis-envy wish-fulfillment fantasy? That was such a terrible line that I almost stopped reading right there.Wait, wait. Are people now saying that it's somehow 'un-feminist' to 'act like a man' and transcend gender roles? Really? I thought that was the whole point of feminism. And "Tiny Man" is now a common term? I thought it was a really odd way to describe the heroine.
There is no more divisive book on Goodreads than Twilight. It manages to top both our Best Books Ever and Worst Books of All Time lists. And now, surprisingly, we've discovered that where you live can indicate whether you're a Twi-Hard or not.posted by stbalbach at 2:52 PM on November 18, 2011 [6 favorites]
Edward is afraid to fuck his new bride. The reason: he’s super strong and she’s just a human – Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex type of situation here. But Bella wears him down and Edward throws it in her – and knocks her the fuck out, leaving her badly bruised.posted by davidjmcgee at 2:54 PM on November 18, 2011
Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life...You give them a piece of you. They didn't ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like 'maybe we should be just friends' turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It's a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love.This is what I think of when Linda Holmes says "Bella Swan wants nothing more than to be well and truly devoured from the inside out. This, we are given to understand, is the only way she will ever know real love."
A map of what each state thinks of Twilight ends up looking a lot like a map of the most recent election results... The Midwest and the South represent The Twilight Belt, while the coasts were decidedly less impressed with the book.posted by overglow at 7:03 PM on November 18, 2011 [3 favorites]
“I tried to remember this – to remember pain—but I couldn't. I couldn't recall a moment when his hold had been too tight, his hands too hard against me. I only remembered wanting him to hold me tighter, and being pleased when he did...”Okay. See that last sentence there? She remembers what happened. She just doesn't remember feeling pain at all. This is, we have to grant, often how sex is. Part of the misunderstanding is also fed by Stephenie Meyer's particular brand of selective modesty which apparently does not allow her to describe anything having to do with sex, which is why that paragraph I quoted above trails off into ellipsis at the end. We're supposed to fill in the blank with "sex." And again, yes, this is how sex is sometimes – and sometimes not even just rough sex. Bruises happen for all sorts of reasons.
“‘I didn't know what to expect—but I definitely did not expect how... how... just wonderful and perfect it was.’ My voice dropped to a whisper, my eyes slipped from his face down to my hands. ‘I mean, I don't know how it was for you, but it was like that for me.’”I guess you could claim that Bella, the victim of abuse, is lying to her abuser and telling him she remembers it when she actually blacked out; but that seems like a monumental stretch to me.
“‘I can't, Bella, I can't!’ His moan was agonized.... so here she's clearly conscious at the beginning of the sexing. Does she stay conscious? She wakes up the next morning, and after being embarrassed that she was emotional about her dream, we get this exchange:
“‘Please,’ I said, my plea muffled against his skin. ‘Please, Edward?’
“I couldn't tell if he was moved by the tears trembling in my voice, or if he was unprepared to deal with the suddenness of my attach, or if his need was simply as unbearable in that moment as my own. But whatever the reason, he pulled my lips back to his, surrendering with a groan.
“And we began where my dream had left off.”
[Edward:] “‘You never did tell me what your dream was about.’So, yeah. It's pretty obvious. Bella is totally conscious and awake during the sex she and Edward have. In fact, the implication is that she initiates it and is pretty active, if not dominant.
[Bella:] “‘I guess I didn't—but I sort of showed you what it was about.’ I laughed nervously.
“‘Oh,’ he said. His eyes widened, and then he blinked. ‘Interesting.’
“‘It was a very good dream,’ I murmured.”
the Quileute do not have magical wolf genes of 24 chromosomal pairs (Breaking Dawn, 236-7), and are actually humans with 23.(Actually, the site entirely reasonable, but I just am amazed that they have to explain that the werewolf part is not real, and they are normal humans.)
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posted by foldedfish at 1:53 PM on November 18, 2011 [76 favorites]