Internalised misogyny and Twilight
January 30, 2018 9:07 PM   Subscribe

Dear Stephenie Meyer: I'm Sorry. Lindsay Ellis addresses the misogyny that underpinned a lot of Twilight criticism back in its heyday.
posted by divabat (101 comments total) 24 users marked this as a favorite
 
I mean yeah- it was a book for young women, of course some of it's critics were misogynistic. But the books themselves are basically three books that glorify multiple abusive relationships presented to young girls as "true love" and I will never apologize for criticizing that. I can't watch youtube videos right now- so hopefully the video addresses that- but I doubt it.
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 9:38 PM on January 30, 2018 [70 favorites]


The video does go into that, but also talks about how male-written work with similar abusive tropes didn't get nearly as much scrutiny and also says that readers who identified more with Bella than take-charge Strong Female Characters don't really need to be scorned so much.
posted by divabat at 9:43 PM on January 30, 2018 [40 favorites]


Never could get into the books, but does Bella ever develop some sense of agency? It didn't feel like she even had awareness of her deficiencies.
posted by BrotherCaine at 9:50 PM on January 30, 2018 [2 favorites]


This helps to understand why you may not have seen many YA authors joining that criticism.
posted by filtergik at 9:56 PM on January 30, 2018 [2 favorites]


I truly hate to admit it, but she’s got a strong point. We put the onus on women - starting when they’re girls - to be moral signposts. How many of you remember being little girls who were told: boys don’t grow up for years, you’re so much more mature than they are, you should know better.

There’s a lot to unpack here, but I also think that plain old irritation at Meyer’s success is a huge part of it. Her funniest and sharpest critics were writers themselves. “Envy” doesn’t seem to be the right word; no one really wants to have written Twilight, aside from the lottery element. But here’s this lady who wrote a first book in three months, got it accepted right away, and ended up sitting atop a huge pile of money. To writers of vast imagination, wit, and industry, who will never see a fraction of her money in their lifetimes, that is galling - as indeed it should be.
posted by Countess Elena at 9:57 PM on January 30, 2018 [46 favorites]


How many of you remember being little girls who were told: boys don’t grow up for years, you’re so much more mature than they are, you should know better.

And then we continue to hear it into our twenties and thirties and forties.
posted by elsietheeel at 9:59 PM on January 30, 2018 [57 favorites]


Hunger Games came out in 2008. It was arguably bigger than Twilight, though later. It was similar "commercially driven YA". Heck if we want to criticize that, I'd want to talk about the similar comments which had made about Rowling only a few years prior (and before her, King and before him Collins and before her... Dickens and Dumas).

Rice and Hamilton and Harris had already been over the sexual promiscuity/sexy vampire ground and back again in the decade or 15 years prior. Sookie and Anita Blake didn't get that level of animosity either. True Blood was on the air in 2008 as well.

Twilight, in that atmosphere twigged something that all of those books, all aimed at the YA or young adult girls and women's markets did not. I don't know if that's just and fully attributable to misogyny, though there obviously was lots of that. But I do think there's more going on there, relating to the glorification of dysfunction in Meyer's writing.

I don't know. I do know however that Twilight is one set of books I'll never put in front of a young reader. Meanwhile, I'm very happy to give them Harry Potter or Katniss or even Sookie (when they're older).
posted by bonehead at 10:12 PM on January 30, 2018 [30 favorites]


I think the criticism of Meyer got way too personal, but in the end she made a pile of money writing books that reinforced a lot of negative stereotypes about femininity, the ubiquity of which worked to the disadvantage of better storytellers. That’s fucked up, and people should be pissed off.
posted by um at 10:24 PM on January 30, 2018 [16 favorites]


Are the movies much different than the books? Because, from my perspective, the movies didn't so much reinforce negative stereotypes about femininity as much a look to embrace the feminine aspect of strength as opposed to treating it as a inherently masculine attribute. It posits a notion of there being the possibility of a passive and resisting power that can defeat active aggressive force. There are some other elements to the movie stories that are more contentious, like the use of Native Americans as allegorical figures offering a more positive side to the negative masculine force of the Euro vampires. All in all I found the series was much more interesting in its attempt to suggest an alternative to the "as strong as any man" measure for strength than most of its popular contemporary blockbusters.
posted by gusottertrout at 10:47 PM on January 30, 2018 [11 favorites]


I think the criticism of Meyer got way too personal,

It's hard to separate (for me anyway) that a lot of that she

reinforced a lot of negative stereotypes about femininity

because she has readily admitted she is Mormon, and that her religion influences her writing.

If we're talking about these fucking negative stereotypes of femininity but we have to gloss over the bullshit religion behind it because its "too personal" that she believes in fucking bonkers nonsense that supports such insipid, shitty stereotypes.

No, she's Mormon, that's a huge influence, and it's a huge part of why it abso-fucking-lutely deserves criticism as much as Kirk Cameron, Tim Lahaye and Jerry B. Jenkins and their fucking hot mess of Left Behind.
posted by deadaluspark at 10:51 PM on January 30, 2018 [32 favorites]


Gosh, Twilight is a weird one. I was probably too close to the proximity of its subject matter/location/time frame/target audience. Never tried to read it, but absorbed enough of it over the years to be genuinely amused with it. Vampire nerdery exists on a very wide spectrum, and Twilight was more in this other thing entire while still hitting most of the grace notes. Most of my conversations about it were with mostly non or non-experienced readers. People saying it's their first, or near to that, book. I'd consumed more than my fair share of Vampire canon, culminating up to that point, in a couple hours of Vampire : The Masquerade LARPs at convention halls and bars.

When it was described to me, it always sounded comical, which I think may have been the secret sub-text. People then enjoyed the culture of lightly making fun of it. I'm sure there was a toxic hate, somewhere, but I never quite saw it. Worst/best was always the 'still a better love story than Twilight' meme. If it was perhaps adapted as graphic novel or vidya game ala the somewhat in-debted Dontnod's Life is Strange, it might have had a bit more pull. Dontnod's Vampyr looks like a more visceral Gothic take on the more languid small town supernatural soap.

And then there was Sookie Stackhouse/Tru Blood...
posted by chainlinkspiral at 11:03 PM on January 30, 2018 [1 favorite]


Mormonism may have contributed to the problems with the books, but it was the publishing industry that decided to blow the books up into this inescapable Potter-esque phenomenon for a couple of years. You can't lay that at the foot of Mormonism, or Meyer. She took the opportunity an ran with it - that's the least problematic aspect of all this!
posted by um at 11:07 PM on January 30, 2018 [4 favorites]


I don't think a lot of these comments are really engaging with the substance of the argument in the FPP, specifically: Twilight is trashy but so is a lot of stuff that does not have nearly the same intensity of disdain (Ellis's example here are the Transformers movies, which are her favourite examples). There is an undercurrent of people being stupid if they like or identify with Twilight, illustrated with footage of Team Edward and Team Jacob girls murdering each other. Things teenage girls like or live are evidence of their inherent idiocy; dumb things teenage boys like are dumb but are not reflections on the teenage boys anywhere as much.
posted by Merus at 11:19 PM on January 30, 2018 [48 favorites]


This is very similar to Bob Chipman's take on Batman & Robin

I.E. It wasn't a good movie, but the backlash was much larger because the movie was camp.
posted by poe at 11:36 PM on January 30, 2018 [3 favorites]


A lot of the backlash I saw about Twilight was really problematic in that it, essentially, was invested in upholding the status quo perspective of how "vampire stories are supposed to work" which itself is laden with misogyny. Twilight inverted many of the major tropes associated with vampire stories, having Bella actively seeking to become a vampire as opposed to the Lucy model of the womanly virtue who's been infected by vampirism and has to be destroyed. The sexual modelling is radically different in the stories, which brought rise to a lot of quasi-homophobic attacks on the character of Edward for being effeminate among other things. The gist of the issue for a lot of the hate for Twilight, from my perspective, again only having seen the movies, was in defense of conventional tropes that are steeped in masculine privilege.

None of that is to say there weren't more reasonable and valid critiques too, just that the broad mass of them weren't based in looking at the stories in detail as much as attacking them for being different.
posted by gusottertrout at 11:40 PM on January 30, 2018 [11 favorites]


Ellis says this:
"And the vast majority of virulent hatred towards Twilight didn't really come from grown men, but from other girls and women who were more than eager to distance themselves from something so un-apologetically female."
This is a part of her argument I have a hard time with, because it strikes me as pretty dismissive of the hater's motivations. Perhaps it wasn't about women seeking to distance themselves as it was about pushing back against a mass-marketed phenomenon that traded on some pretty gross assumptions about 'the way women are'? Maybe they were just sick of it? Maybe that anger sought ground via the easiest targets?
posted by um at 11:54 PM on January 30, 2018 [27 favorites]


Lindsay makes a good point, but on the other hand I think we were all relieved when Hunger Games came out
posted by eustatic at 11:58 PM on January 30, 2018 [4 favorites]


I just hated them because they were really really badly written but ok.
posted by billiebee at 1:42 AM on January 31, 2018 [23 favorites]


Eh. True confessions time?

I have spent a fair bit of time looking at and pondering popular stories that are terrible. I loved taking a look at Twilight and Left Behind and so on, because the thing is... if they're so bad, the thing they're doing right must be epic. (It's my belief that our favorite stories reveal our idealized vision of the world - know a person's favorite terrible book, know their dreams.) So the whole thing was fascinating and horrible. Fascihorrible?

Plus, I used to tell myself stuff like, 'If Stephanie Meyer could get rich off of that junk pile, surely you can finish a story worth a sandwich.' And it's true: I totally bought that sandwich.

Thanks, Stephanie Meyer.
posted by mordax at 2:10 AM on January 31, 2018 [14 favorites]


How many of you remember being little girls who were told: boys don’t grow up for years, you’re so much more mature than they are, you should know better.

I'm an exception that proves the rule: I never heard this as a girl. My teachers were worried that I was too serious and needed to have more fun, so they encouraged me to get out of my head and play. In my case this mostly meant running around the playground, jumping out of swings at the high point (parallel to the top bar lol) as soon as a recess monitor turned their back, and playing baseball (I was the only girl on the team, which, yeah, hrm, but the other girls were also welcome). All of it was treated as completely normal; neither I nor any of my friends had any idea that it could be seen as odd until we reached middle school, and even then, wider misogyny wasn't too pronounced. Our group made other friends (girls and boys) as well, and we all continued to play pick-up basketball and street football and baseball together, plus got into to music groups, through high school and even university. Most of the boys grew up to be men who are still among my best friends. Not a single one has fallen for MRA bullshit. Not. A. Single. One.

As for me, the older I get the more I treasure that aspect of my childhood. I may have been raised by fundamentalists who had a shit-ton of violently misogynistic beliefs, but as I mature, I also see that I fell through some important cracks as a kid – to them, girls/women were so unimportant, so invisible that they didn't bother comparing me to boys in detail. It was just "go off and die", which, while bluntly horrific, is a different type of trauma than the slow, specific, crushing drip of society's cool hatred.

I would honestly like to see books written for boys put under the same lens as Twilight. And yes, books for girls put under a more balanced, diverse light. There's a hell of a lot of praising the passive and hero-ifying the opportunistic in works for boys. Why does society always, without fail, rip anything and everything tagged as "female" to shreds, whereas "male" gets the complexity treatment? We're not doing any favors to anyone with that kind of approach.
posted by fraula at 2:14 AM on January 31, 2018 [19 favorites]


What YA series for boys come to mind? Percy Jackson? Maze Runner? I can't think of one that approaches Twilight levels of popularity.
posted by GhostintheMachine at 3:08 AM on January 31, 2018 [2 favorites]


How about Harry Potter? YA series for boys don't get branded "for boys".
posted by phooky at 4:02 AM on January 31, 2018 [17 favorites]


if you watch booktube (youtube book reviewers) or goodreads reviewers, there's a clear case now of women (young, it's the internet and requires spare time on your hands) enjoying what they call particular tropes eg (there are some weird ones, i'm trying to remember) barbarian rapes virgin, with no intention of doing any such thing themselves, they enjoy or get off on a particular one, they're not confused and don't take it terribly seriously - i'm not young myself nor a romance reader, so i can't write an informed comment, and i agree that the young believe everything wholesale provided it directly contradicts everything their parents and teachers tell them (because clearly They are trying to keep The Truth from you, so anything they hate and fear must be The Truth About The World) and this means it's dangerous for impressionable (stupid) minds (i was young once, and boy was i stupid, gullible stupid not daring stupid), but still, i get the impression that those who have grown up with a wealth not a starvation of information (internet) and a constant mirror of themselves and society that constantly talks back at them, day and night (social media, via mobile phones) see things more detachedly and differently than we do (and keep saying than not from, gosh my standards are dropping)
posted by maiamaia at 4:12 AM on January 31, 2018 [2 favorites]


This is an area I've been hoping to see deeper conversations for a long time. I never related to the idea of female power having to look exactly like our view of male power- I don't want to be a CEO, I don't want to have power over other people, when I hear "demonstrates agency" all I can think is a bunch of people judging me which feels oppressive and uncomfortable, not empowering and not reflective of people trying to actual support me in who I want to be or identify with. It doesn't feel helpful.

I love feminist theory and it's complexity but because these topics are so big, there's a few theories that wind up dominating and of course the theories that wind up dominating are often the ones that able to push through public consciousness which is still misogynistic and which still sees feminine associated traits as inferior. Women can be equal to men, but only if they act like traditional men. Women can be respected and have financial support for their lives only if they jump on board and "lean in" to the monster of colonial capitalism that is currently destroying our world and our fellow humans. Fuck that noise.

It's hard to describe how I both take people's hope of helping women see the light that they can be "more than" just some mother at a young age, as like both an attempt to empower and educate that essentially young motherhood especially by older men absolutely is a direct tool of masculinity to restrain and overpower the feminine and to oppress women- and ALSO that seeing women who become young mothers or even want to be become young mothers as inferior and unempowered feels like more of an insult, a judgement and another tool to control women? The idea that just wanting to grow up and fall in love and be a mother is not an equal choice is part of what drives the low pay and disrespect of caregiving and early childcare in general- the idea that choosing to mother is insignificant and unimportant and just any untrained and barely capable person can do it for barely any money or even better for free....

This is underlying a lot of problems that I don't think the more vocal strains of feminism we see actively working for change are addressing (though there are a very few orgs actively addressing the full spectrum of reproductive justice that includes the right to be a young mother, or a struggling mother, or a mother with disabilities and fighting for financial justice for mothers and for caregivers of all stripes).

I appreciate the criticisms of Twilight because I think there is needed discussion about the harms of glorifying abusive relationships but I want to add something I see even deeper- shaming women for wanting financial security to just be mothers IS mysogeny.

Motherhood is hard and there is no hope of being a stay at home mother in our current model other than total dependence on a man. Shaming women for dreaming of being allowed to just need a man so they fill their dream of being a mother is not empowering. However I do believe looking at alternate financial models that empower women to be at home with their children particularly in the early years would be very empowering.
posted by xarnop at 4:13 AM on January 31, 2018 [19 favorites]


An interesting question I just came up with, and am pondering:

People in here have said that we seemed to cast a sharper critique on Stephanie Meyers' work than we do works written by men. It also seems that the video has chalked that up to "internalized misogyny".

Might it not simply be because the critics were coming from a place of "okay, we get why a guy wouldn't understand how shit this is, but Stephanie, you're a woman, haven't you experienced stuff like this and don't you therefore know how creepy this is?"

I grant that does sound similar to "you're more mature than the boys and you should know better," but there's a difference between "I'm assuming you're more mature because a girl" and "I am a woman like you and I therefore know that you and I have shared experiences, and so I can't understand why you are behaving like someone who's never experienced this and are feeding into it."
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 4:40 AM on January 31, 2018 [16 favorites]


She brought up Ready Player One, and I've heard some (clearly much less) of the same sort of internet criticism about that, and it's got almost the same problem--not just "she doesn't like it" but she reads aloud from it with the shared understanding that we are all supposed to roll our eyes. I think she's right about a lot of stuff, but I also feel like in places she's suggesting that it's okay to not consider Twilight to be the worst because now we have OTHER stuff to be the worst. It's not just that lots of stuff has problems so Twilight's okay--I'm really starting to question how healthy it is to build community around a bonfire of this week's unacceptable media properties and creators, rather than dithering about whether this particular one should have gone on the pyre.

I find myself semi-regularly in the past couple years especially having to explain in conversations that I am not saying that a work or creator is perfect or beyond criticism but that yeah I guess I still like them okay. I have nearly lost friends over it. The media's always going to want to go for the clickbait, and there's going to be plenty of misogyny in the larger cultural way things land, but when we're talking more about The Discourse--just, ugh, why is The Discourse even a thing about this. We should have conversations about media. Thinkpieces and Youtube videos and Tumblr posts are not, as a rule, conversations, and I think engaging with media this way is a problem itself and getting worse.
posted by Sequence at 4:58 AM on January 31, 2018 [4 favorites]


One thing I've noticed: there is a tendency to lump subcultures, feminisms, etc, in critique, and sometimes this results in needless confusion or argument. "We" made lots of different criticisms of Twilight, ranging from the obviously misogynist to the "it has a lot going for it, it speaks to a lot of young [straight] women's concerns and desires, there are also concerning ideas about birth, the body and sex and all these things can be true", and IME of the internet, these seemed to vary a lot by which internet you spend your time in. Your critique is also probably contoured by your experience - this type of romantic narrative speaks strongly to some young women because it chimes with their experiences and reads as hugely oppressive to others because it chimes with negative aspects of their experience. I think the kind of "we all raised [X] critique and it was wrong" narrative that tends to get applied after the fact about many, many cultural phenomena tends to flatten what actually happened. (My part of the feminist internet was qualifiedly positive on Twilight, actually, and far more critical of the reification of "a heroine should trip and fall and be super-bashful, also a hero should kind of stalk her, even when the 'but vampires!' logic that exists in Twilight is not present and as a result it's just tripping/falling-is-my-flaw and regular stalking".)

I also think that it's common to default to a type of killer (Oedipal, kill-the-father-text) critique, whether you're talking about a book, a trend or an analysis, where your goal is to utterly annihilate the subject under discussion, leaving you victorious over all those who are terrible people enough to enjoy or find interesting whatever you're discussing. The fandom default of "we all like problematic things because almost everything is at least somewhat problematic" has its...problems, but it does have the advantage of getting around this.

Like, a book can be very interesting on the notion of passive strength (which is a super smart formulation IMO) and also be sort of disturbing about how it circumscribes women's identities. These things can exist in tension without one erasing the other. I think "there are tensions in this narrative" is a useful default understanding. ("A novel is a text of 150,000 words with something wrong with it, also tensions".)

IIRC, it's Frederic Jameson who is so on about the utopian kernel that exists in, uh, most things. I think that considering genre fiction in particular as always containing a kind of utopian element is very useful - for instance, a lot of "society collapses" dystopias contain a "and we got rid of the oppressive state even though zombies" utopian grain. I think that reading Twilight for its utopian aspects would be an interesting exercise.

I'm not so much on the "oh, I totally read these deeply problematic things but they don't affect me in any way because I am very smart and to say otherwise is misogynist" line, though, because I don't think any of us are smart enough to avoid having our assumptions altered by immersing ourselves in a strongly ideologized milieu. I see it in myself all the time. There was a time, for instance, where I was reading a bunch of military SF and associating fandomings, and I noticed my attitude toward the military changing and becoming way more positive, and positive for stupid, SFnal reasons, not even for actually-existing reasons. It's not that you read Twilight once and your outlook is forever changed, but frankly I'm in fandom and many of us tend to read similar settings and tropes over and over again, and I don't think merely asserting that we're very smart and self-aware actually negates that.
posted by Frowner at 5:09 AM on January 31, 2018 [27 favorites]


I am much more on board for criticism of the vitriol directed at 50 shades of gray, and, crucially, the fans of that series, because that was a series for adults, marketed to adults. Grown women who know the difference between fantasy and reality and presumably have enough life experience to make their own judgments, and who sometimes just want to relax with a ducking book.

It is something different when you’re talking about something written for and marketed to very young women and girls. The genre does make a difference here.

It is especially different when the books are borne of codified misogyny like you find in Mormonism. Not that it’s an influence; it’s like...foundational to the bones of the story and the characters. That is creepy as shit.

And so of course the criticism of the actually bad and damaging books themselves became criticism of people who liked the books, because we live in a misogynist culture, and people will gleefully pounce on any opportunity to beat up on women. And that sucks. But Twilight is still legitimately terrible. Both things are true at the same time.

Mormonism may have contributed to the problems with the books, but it was the publishing industry that decided to blow the books up into this inescapable Potter-esque phenomenon for a couple of years.

lol no this is not how publishing works. If you think anyone in publishing was like “oh YES this is what we’ll turn into an international bestseller next, perfect!” ...no. They had no idea. It hit and they followed the money.

They try to make stuff hit like that all the time and fail, because they have no idea, for the most part, about what they’re doing. Nobody engineered Twilight’s success. It was genuine and organic.

Which is more horrifying, to me.
posted by schadenfrau at 5:13 AM on January 31, 2018 [15 favorites]


I read Twilight in a postpartum haze, and I have to admit that for a while I took the series as proof the Muses have a sense of humour. There’s so much in there that is absolutely genius except it is so lost in a sea of terrible prose and utter lack of awareness that it must be accidental. The baby literally eating the mother from the inside out, Sylvia Plath on acid ever I saw, the Bloomsbury group reference with Jacob falling in love with the Renesmee as a baby (David Garnett)…it’s like there’s an alternate universe where Margaret Atwood could have created the thing totally on its head.

I actually think that Dan Brown is the male counterpart to Stephanie Meyer on the literary axis (although vaguely less excreble prose, let’s thank an editor), not Transformers, and I think he actually has been mocked quite a lot...a bit less because he gets read more in business class and things aimed at teens, possibly. But still.

Where I’m guessing the video (can’t do video right now sorry) departs is in examining explicitly feminist critique of the Twilight series...but what we need is more of that, in my opinion, not less. The epic we tell each other matters.

I honestly don’t believe that it’s accidental that Twilight and 50 Shades of Grey were hugely popular in the shadowy time before the rise of the #MeToo movement. (I am projecting hopefully.) I also don’t think it’s that odd that it’s women who wrote them, because women marinate in the contradictions of our culture. I think their authors are reflecting something in the underbelly of our culture. But that should only inform our criticism, not lesssen it.
posted by warriorqueen at 5:25 AM on January 31, 2018 [18 favorites]


Twilight is trashy but so is a lot of stuff that does not have nearly the same intensity of disdain (Ellis's example here are the Transformers movies, which are her favourite examples).

I speak only for myself, but I assure you that the intensity of my disdain for The Transformers movies dwarfs my disdain for Twilight, and always has. If I was granted the ability to edit exactly one movie franchise out of our timeline, it would be Transformers, hands down.
posted by Caduceus at 5:38 AM on January 31, 2018 [6 favorites]


Jacob falling in love with the Renesmee as a baby

Yeah, shit like this is why I will never stop criticizing these books, and it has nothing to do with internalized misogyny, but more “what the fuck are you thinking Stephanie Meyers”. It has nothing to do with its trashiness - I happily read trashy books all the time. But this is a gross trashy book and damaging as fuck and I hate it with the fire of a thousand suns forever.
posted by corb at 6:08 AM on January 31, 2018 [25 favorites]


I don't understand comparing the reception of something like Twilight to something like Transformers anyway. Of course there are people who are familiar with both, but I imagine that the people who critiqued Twilight seriously (rather than casually and yes, probably misogynistically - lol stupid girly sparkly vampires, etc.) mostly make up a different demographic from the one that mindlessly imbibed Transformers. The community of YA readers is text-based, politically-engaged, and critical by nature. Like, of course I have a problem with Twilight, I read it and it's garbage. (I really liked the first movie though, tbh, so moody.) On the other hand, I was born having a problem with Transformers; it's never even crossed my mind to watch any of those movies.

If the point is just that things girls like are treated with more contempt by society in general, why focus on a franchise condemned most strongly by girls and women on feminist grounds? It feels like another tedious round of So You Thought You Were Woke (see the many generations of Correct Opinions About Taylor Swift for another case of this). It all seems so fucking meaningless that I think it must just be for entertainment or something.
posted by two or three cars parked under the stars at 6:21 AM on January 31, 2018 [6 favorites]


For anyone curious about the misogynistic Mormonism in the books, there's Sparkledammerung, a long and very snarky close reading of the material by a young woman ex-Mormon posted on LiveJournal back in '08. Which kinda blew up to the point where she then covered all the rest of the books (and I think eventually the movies, too.) So, fair warning, if this kind of critique is your cup of tea, you're about to head down a long path covering the whole Twilight phenomenon. But even if you just read the first piece, it's very clear why many critics believe that the series is religion-based patriarchal propaganda.
posted by soundguy99 at 6:37 AM on January 31, 2018 [18 favorites]


I think that reading Twilight for its utopian aspects would be an interesting exercise.

I hated Twilight for a while before coming around to the side of acknowledging that I just can't read narratives where possessive stalky guys are romanticized but that's a romantic fantasy that works for a lot of young women who don't necessarily take it overly seriously or apply it to their own lives.

I think what's utopian in Twilight is the idea that the guy who's confusingly hot-and-cold toward you is not a guy who turns out to be indifferent to you, or a guy who wants to have sex with you but has no actual feelings toward you, or a guy who stalks you in ways that are creepy and scary; the guy who's confusingly hot-and-cold toward you genuinely loves you a lot and is possessive and jealous enough to be exciting and romantic but never enough to be genuinely scary or dangerous. (This is not just because of how Edward is; it's also because Bella herself is completely on board with becoming a vampire, so she's not scared by the possibility.)

Isn't the true horror of the teen-girl experience the fact that all the guys who you spend an infinite amount of emotional labor on, all the guys whose confusing or stalky behavior you have to deal with, turn out to be so disappointing? I'm being facetious, of course, but I think the idea that relationships could be better than this just... isn't even on the radar, in some ways. It's much safer to imagine that the guy is jealous and possessive toward you but it all turns out okay because of True Love.
posted by Jeanne at 6:37 AM on January 31, 2018 [16 favorites]


Ahem. National Treasure Lindsay Ellis.

That is all, carry on.
posted by tobascodagama at 6:49 AM on January 31, 2018 [7 favorites]


If the Mormonism is the problem, then why don't we see this response to Ender's Game or Maze Runner or Dragonlance?
posted by I'm Not Even Supposed To Be Here Today! at 7:03 AM on January 31, 2018 [2 favorites]


The books were very anti-woman, and the only difference between those and those other anti-woman books were that those others were written by men, and Twilight was written by a woman, but if Twilight wasn't oppressive literature wrapped in romantic packaging, no one would have published them. Period.

And its oppression of women was as blatant as it could get: a re-telling of the Beauty and the Beast tale where Bella is completely defined by the blood-sucking monster she beds. He literally sucks the life out of her as she breeds for his kind. She becomes like him -- he doesn't become one of her kind.

She had to sacrifice. She had to give up all of the qualities that made her her.

But she does it all in the name of love as she pretends that she is an outsider, so it's all "okay."

Twilight is great propaganda for men who run cults -- that is the way of recruiting young women who are trying to find their way -- throw up a detour to suck her right in.

Any misogynist who hated the book was a confused one -- it was a manual for women on how to sell themselves out, but find the right -- and Victorian -- sophistry and justification to do it.

It's that reasoning that has destroyed the potential of many capable young women who stay in bad relationships as their lives and opportunities pass her by -- she had to cling on to a monster because he is attracted to her -- and that's all that matters.

Twilight is vile, destructive, and oppressive, and works in a misogynist's favour: it creates good little women for them who are willing to assimilate without fuss. Enough.
posted by Alexandra Kitty at 7:13 AM on January 31, 2018 [17 favorites]



If the Mormonism is the problem, then why don't we see this response to Ender's Game or Maze Runner or Dragonlance?

I think the problems with Ender's Game have more to do with Card specifically than with Mormonism. The biggest one being that, like so many of his other books, it's fundamentally a story about someone who does (or is) something awful and unforgivable, but it's not really their fault because of reasons. It is also relevant that, regardless of the problematic aspects of his fiction, Card is an amazingly skilled writer.
posted by thedward at 7:17 AM on January 31, 2018 [2 favorites]


Yes, it's hard to talk about Twilight without dealing with the tacit misogyny and gender issues within SFF fandoms, and we're still wrestling with some of the consequences of that trend, both good and bad from all parties involved.
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 7:21 AM on January 31, 2018 [6 favorites]


I promise ex-mormons can do close reads of Card's work and come back with the same "absolutely influenced by and pushing the message of the LDS church" but they don't. Meyer is a shit writer, no doubt about it, but the critiques of her and her writing hardly stop there. With all the mormons in YA/fantasy/sci-fi etc, the only one who seems to get the attacks about the religion specifically are Meyer. It's hard to not wonder if that's about her being the most famous woman mormon author. There's this thing that happens where women in oppressive systems are held as worse offenders than the men and people outside hardly ever recognize they're even doing it.
posted by I'm Not Even Supposed To Be Here Today! at 7:23 AM on January 31, 2018 [7 favorites]


It is entirely possible to think that the Twilight books weren't very good and that the reviews of them were often deeply sexist.
posted by maxsparber at 7:30 AM on January 31, 2018 [22 favorites]


In re Twilight: I think it got more and more varied criticism because it's far, far more of a mass phenomenon. People who didn't read fantasy read Twilight (I mean, now some of them do read fantasy). People who didn't read romances read Twilight. People who would never, ever read Orson Scott Card or go to a Transformers movie read Twilight.

It's a bit like any time any fantasy or SF story attracts a non-fandom audience (however many of those people go on to become fans, etc) - common tropes and techniques burst like genius upon people who've never encountered them before, aspects of the book that are responses to SF or fantasy get missed by people who haven't read other fantasy or SF, the book gets read as both smarter and dumber than it really is because its less innovative aspects seem brilliant and its weirder, more interesting aspects get dismissed as "oh, just some fantasy thing" instead of seen as innovations. (Consider Oryx and Crake, if you want a high culture version.)

People are less likely to do close readings of OSC for the Mormonism because the people who are likely to read more Card than just Ender's Game are a different and smaller set of people than read Twilight.
posted by Frowner at 7:31 AM on January 31, 2018 [10 favorites]


I think it is important to remember that a book can be gross and weird, and that teen girls can read it in order to say “omg this is so gross and weird, hahahah!!!” rather than “I will choose to model my life after this narrative, for I am a blank page upon which all poisonous narratives shall be writ.”

I mean, every time something becomes popular with teen girls that is Immoral and Bad, people say “but what about the childrennnnnn?” as if teen girls can’t read trash and have their response be “lol”. Early 19th century teen girls were reading a lot of trashy French novels about damsels in distress being SWEPT AWAY by the MACHINATIONS OF FOREIGN RAKES, and everyone was VERY WORRIED about it, but most of those girls just ended up marrying nice local boys or their stolid second cousins, because the point of reading books is not to recreate them, for most people. And teen girls are people.

I agreed with many of the criticisms of Twilight that were made at the time, and I think that reminding teen girls that the Edward/Bella and Jacob/Bella’s ovary containing her future daughter relationships are HORRRRRRRIBLE nightmarish garbage is good.

But a lot of the panic about the books was “girls will think this is good!!!!” and, I mean, come on. Give teen girls a little credit. If girls think abusive relationships are good, they will probably do so because we live in a patriarchy where abused women are blamed for being abused, where abused women are given zero resources or agency to get away from their abusers, where abusive men are give plenty of legal leeway to do harm to their victims, where teen girls afraid of their entirely human abusive teen boyfriends are told “he just loves you so much” and “boys will be boys” by allegedly responsible adults, where teen girls are blamed for getting pregnant while teen boys frolic without a care, where Chris Brown still has a career, where R. Kelly still has a career, where 99% of famous abusers still have careers, where radio DJs make “edgy” jokes about women deserving what they get from their men, where women who make accusations are blamed for being “attention-seeking”, where every cover of every grocery store magazine is about how [x actress] is pathetic for being alone and [y actress] is pathetic for being married to a man who isn’t as successful as her and [z actress] is pathetic for not having babies yet and [n actress] is pathetic for not losing her baby weight fast enough.

Most of the teen girls I have ever met have viewed Twilight as a sort of cartoonish parody of our culture’s treatment of women, even though Meyer didn’t intend the books that way. I don’t think the books are capable of doing damage in a vacuum, and I don’t think teen girls are as naive as people tend to think. I think they are some of the keenest cultural critics in the world.
posted by a fiendish thingy at 7:40 AM on January 31, 2018 [39 favorites]


I'm Not Even Supposed To Be Here Today!,

Totally.

My comment was more of knee-jerk reaction to the mention of Ender's Game, which was once one of my favorite books.

I'm sure Meyer would have been attacked even if Twilight had been a master work of prose.
posted by thedward at 7:41 AM on January 31, 2018 [1 favorite]


I could see that if the mormon critiques always came from outside genre fandoms, but that doesn't seem to be the case, and in fact the mormon critiques seem to be stronger from the SFF communities. They're terribly written books with awful underlying messages and that describes a whole lot of books she didn't write. Some combo of popular, woman, and mormon seem to be why she gets such an out-sized reaction. When you notice other popular mormon male writers aren't being served the same, it can make one wonder what's driving it.
posted by I'm Not Even Supposed To Be Here Today! at 7:42 AM on January 31, 2018


If the Mormonism is the problem, then why don't we see this response to Ender's Game or Maze Runner or Dragonlance?

Because it's not "the Mormonism" that's the problem, it's the misogyny and (for many critics), the anti-feminist messages - which, in Meyers' case, are rooted in her Mormon religious beliefs. Had she been openly Evangelical, there probably would have been more critiques examining her writing in light of her religious beliefs, as more Americans are probably more familiar with Evangelical beliefs than Mormon ones.

On preview, seconding both maxsparber and Frowner - to a large extent Twilight was a sort of Perfect Storm, where it was both a huge phenomenon (that would undoubtedly generate some sexist critiques) AND sort of narrowly targeted at adolescent women, and the confluence of the two meant no small number of feminists got curious about what their sisters/daughters/friends were reading (especially if said sisters etc had shown little or no previous interest in either reading in general or reading Fantasy/SF) and first discovered the misogyny and then did a little digging and understood the misogyny as an aspect of the author's religious beliefs.

I could see that if the mormon critiques always came from outside genre fandoms, but that doesn't seem to be the case, and in fact the mormon critiques seem to be stronger from the SFF communities.

I think this depends a lot on what critiques you encountered when - most of what I found during the rise of the books and the early days of the films being developed (so, '05 to '09) came from a non-SFF feminist perspective, and those critics had no problem picking up on the religious elements.
posted by soundguy99 at 7:52 AM on January 31, 2018 [3 favorites]


If the Mormonism is the problem, then why don't we see this response to Ender's Game or Maze Runner or Dragonlance?

Twilight is bigger than all of those books combined. Possibly by orders of magnitude.

And Twilight is a romance. It is principally about the development of a romantic heterosexual relationship, written for young women. The degree to which it is defined by the religious misogyny of the author is also gonna be orders of magnitude more...define-y...than is the case with military SF that asks questions about moral culpability in general, or sword and sorcery books about a poor bastard who’s really secretly the Special One etc etc. The themes and tropes of a romance are ones you see play out in actual life in a way that’s just never going to be true for Ender’s Game.

It’s a qualitative difference.

And for “what about the children...”

I mean. There is a difference. I make the same arguments about media that’s geared towards young boys, but you’re absolutely right that not as many people seem to care about that, even though things like Twilight are best seen as responses to the patriarchal norms created by all that other bullshit no one seems to care about.
posted by schadenfrau at 7:53 AM on January 31, 2018 [11 favorites]


Jacob falling in love with the Renesmee as a baby

Jacob falling in love with the Renesmee as a baby an egg inside Bella.

When the final book came out, I didn’t believe what my students told me about it, so I stood in the bookstore reading, alternating between horror at the terrible prose and horror at the vampire c-section.

Tbh, one thing I found interesting in the books is that Bella is so consistently hot for Edward, while he is the blushing (sparkling) virgin who wants to wait until after they’re married. I think for some people this can be an appealing fantasy—expressing desire without worrying about safety.
posted by betweenthebars at 7:54 AM on January 31, 2018 [7 favorites]


But a lot of the panic about the books was “girls will think this is good!!!!” and, I mean, come on. Give teen girls a little credit.

THIS!!!!! I mean, I can't be the only 13yr old who read V.C. Andrews and yet I never married my uncle then locked my 2 sets of twins in an attic and tried to kill them with poison donuts so my mom would love me/I'd get all the money/I could run off with the lawyer.
posted by I'm Not Even Supposed To Be Here Today! at 7:55 AM on January 31, 2018 [22 favorites]


My feelings on Twilight are always a resounding meh. At the time they were released, I was pressured to read them by every adult woman I knew, and it bothered me mostly in the same abstract way that the Harry Potter peer pressure did, in that I was someone who had been reading YA (and magical children's lit) without pause since my childhood and it felt weird to have so many books I'd love very much go ignored. In fact, the first time I heard about Twilight, I was sure--based on the description--that the person who mentioned them was talking about LJ Smith, who had been writing very well about relationships between teenage girls and vampires since the 90s. Smith has more of a name now, in the wake of Twilight, because of the Vampire Diaries (the writing of which was taken away from her in really shitty and unfair ways) but the Night World books are the better series. Her approach to vampires is more thoughtful, breezily feminist (one girl chooses not to become one until she's finished college) and textured. She also writes love triangles, as a general rule, but those triangles are used to explore character growth. The first boy you fall in love with is a symbol of who you are then, and then later, your experiences change you. You grow darker, harder, more complex, and usually fall in love with the dark horse bad boy later. Anyway, they are still very cheesy, but there is no vampire baseball.

Still, when it comes to the books, Twilight does some things very well. Well, actually one thing--something I never really see talked about. Namely, it's one of the most accurate depictions of parental neglect, emotional incest, and parentification I've ever read. Bella goes to live with her dad because her mom's off with her new husband, a minor league baseball player. She's forced to cook and care for her dad, who wants her to get hitched to a dad-approved guy (and yeah, totally Team Jacob, who actually shares interests with Bella, but Rowling makes him both a jerk and a creep and what teenage girl wants to end up with the guy that her dad chooses?) The Cullens represent escape from that: conspicuous wealth and culture, attractive and generous parental figures, siblings, an escape from caretaking. Where Bella ultimately ends up wasn't personally appealing at the time I read it but now it seems a little moreso--she gets a baby, and the companionship and relational power that comes with parenthood without having to sacrifice herself to more parenting. As one of the ladies in my office who wouldn't shut up about Twilight once said, Bella finally gets to be happy! And she's spent 4 books being deeply unhappy!

(Shout out to those blank chapters in New Moon, which are nifty on a conceptual level and pretty daring, too.)

And that unhappiness is very emotionally true, as art. Bella's depression is pervasive but honest. People try to claim she's a "pants"--that is, an anonymous role teenage girls slip into--but I never actually thought so. She is actually very specific, and if she doesn't speak to you, fine, but I can see why she spoke to some teenagers.
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 8:03 AM on January 31, 2018 [10 favorites]


I think for some people this can be an appealing fantasy—expressing desire without worrying about safety.

For teen girls, this is perhaps the MOST salient trope and it's important. Exploring your sexuality safely is something that teen girls really only ever get in fantasy. It's why boy bands are also presented as extremely wholesome and non-threatening and not overtly sexual. It's not because girls are vapid and dumb, it's because girls are under threat from all corners once they hit puberty (if not before) and having one special carved out place where you can fantasize about being the pursuer and not the pursued is valuable. (See also, for nerdier girls: the Doctor. He's juuuuust on this side of asexual but not aromantic, as presented in the current era--and bound by all sorts of other "No, I musn't" constraints to his sexuality/romantic impulses that make him safe. And he's been very popular with teen girls, much to the abject horror of older male fans who are not shy about their derision for teenyboppers in their fandom and the terribad romance fic they write.)

I can't be the only 13yr old who read V.C. Andrews
Yeah, word. And the Clan of the Cave Bear books. And all manner of severely fucked up novels we all read as teens.
posted by soren_lorensen at 8:09 AM on January 31, 2018 [16 favorites]


Twilight also became the scapegoat for a larger phenomenon of paranormal romance becoming the genre monster for a few years, with the effect of Barnes & Noble devoting entire shelving units to paranormal romance. That's no longer the case, but I still can't find what I want there.
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 8:12 AM on January 31, 2018 [3 favorites]


Media for younger boys is carefully sanitized of sexual content. For older teens, it's conventionally sexed up with male-gazey, sexy girls as objects. Whatever the age group, YA fiction targeted for boys almost never talks in a meaningful way about relationships. So while there's lots to criticize how fiction aimed at young males objectifies and ignores the concerns of anything but its own narrow gender presentation, there's not a lot of examples that can compare to the headspace Twilight lives in.
posted by bonehead at 8:14 AM on January 31, 2018 [2 favorites]


terrible prose and horror at the vampire c-section

Oh right, I forgot the father literally eats the womb or whatever. I mean this is the stuff of prizewinning poetry in someone else's hands.

Honestly I read Clan of the Cave Bear and similar and I...would like to say I came through unscathed but actually I think I did not. Did they ruin my life and cause me to lie on the floor sobbing or something, no. But I think they did contribute to my accepting things that should be unacceptable, a process that continues to today. I didn't read VC Andrews, but I was a victim of incest and I can think of several things I did read that contributed to my continued acceptance of that status quo and the need I had to protect my abuser from censure because of fear mixed with a fucked-up kind of responsibility and yes, love, until I felt the need to protect someone else.

I don't blame the authors for that particularly, I blame the society in which authors and readers live, but I'll keep going to the wall to discuss these things and not just write it off as "people have sense."

I actually have trouble picturing the books I wish existed instead, which is thoughts for me on my future writing.

I think that Ender's Game and the like (I am a very bad SF/F fan and have not read any of them) don't come in for the same criticism not just because of their relative lack of popularity, but because they are not as explicitly about a Girl Finding Happiness. But I could be wrong.
posted by warriorqueen at 8:18 AM on January 31, 2018 [5 favorites]


Yeah, I mean, it's this thing--I talked to a lot of other female YA writers about it--how men write books that reflect reality while women are supposed to write books that are reflections of an ideal reality. I grew up with Cave Bear but also like the Pern series which are Very Rapey and I definitely did have toxic ideas from them (though Ayla's enthusiasm for sex was good, I think) but I am also grateful that I had Mercedes Lackey, who was wonderful in modeling consensual, communicative relationships (it's been years but from what I remember...Talia and her friend Skif try to have sex and it keeps not happening because they're tired and they finally laugh it off and decide to be friends.) The Twilight mode of reflecting a world where it is still taboo to reflect female desire isn't one I want for my kid but there are still a lot of parents who would prefer that. It's a story about abstinence, yeah, and those can be harmful but we're not even in agreement as a society that those ARE harmful. So. Dunno.

Sometimes you want to write about problematic things, though, and not even as wish fulfillment, but just because those things are interesting. And you have to deal with people saying your characters aren't totally woke or perfect in their attitudes and boys written by men are rarely critiqued under the same lens.
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 8:29 AM on January 31, 2018 [10 favorites]


So feminist critiques of Twilight's themes are being written off as some kind of hysterical moral panic now? Is it just a waste of time to critique art from a political point of view at all, seeing as everybody has so much good sense and sees right through everything? Teenage girls are great, but they're not magically immune to believing bad things or living by and perpetuating harmful attitudes when that's what their society is telling them is fine and great and romantic and most of all, normal. To the extent they are able to do that, it's because they're really exceptional, or because they're learning better somewhere else. Maybe at home, or maybe like, from all the women who take the time to do a feminist analysis of rubbish like Twilight, and from the culture that gets better every day because of their contribution.
posted by two or three cars parked under the stars at 8:33 AM on January 31, 2018 [7 favorites]


I think a lot of the issues with Twilight is that Bella is modelling life and particularly how to live a relationship in a really unhealthy way. The objections centre repulsive set of values, what to expect and tolerate in a partner, to most people.

The reason I don't think Ender's Game works as a comparable is that it doesn't share a really objectionable value model for Ender. He's a kid who is tricked into doing a really horrible thing by intense psychological grooming, but who, none-the-less, is intuitively emotionally mature enough himself to ultimately reject and even to mitigate his crimes. There's a lot to admire in the way Ender thinks and behaves even given the whole ridiculous and jingoistic set-up in the book.

I'd offer as a comparison instead Starship Toopers. It famously models a near-fascist mindset for its protagonist, one that's similarly viscerally repulsive. What it shares with Twilight is an uncritical acceptance of a value set that is almost entirely at odds with ideas of human equality and rights, though in a rather different way.

Bella and Johnny Rico are uncritical and accepting of their new values; Ender considers and rejects them ultimately. I think that's the difference.
posted by bonehead at 8:37 AM on January 31, 2018 [6 favorites]


I don't blame the authors for that particularly, I blame the society in which authors and readers live, but I'll keep going to the wall to discuss these things and not just write it off as "people have sense."

Just want to clarify, in case this is partially in response to my post above, that my point was not “people have sense” so much as “teen girls have as much sense as most people, and maybe more, but are treated as vapid and passive consumers to a degree no other group experiences and that is unfair to them as a group”.

I mean, people freaked out about teen girls choosing a side on Team Edward vs. Team Jacob, but just a reminder: grown adult men commit felony assault against one another for liking the wrong sports team on the REGULAR. Yet I have yet to see a panicked thinkpiece about what NFL narratives are doing to these impressionable 39-year old dudes, because the way that we talk about media consumption for teen girls is dramatically different from the way we talk about media consumption for most other groups of humans.

I did not wish to say “media doesn’t have an impact on how we see the world”, at all. I read some stuff in my teens that definitely messed me up! But it wasn’t the stuff that grownups in my life were “worried” about, and it wasn’t in the ways they thought a teen girl must be vulnerable to the dangers of fiction.

So feminist critiques of Twilight's themes are being written off as some kind of hysterical moral panic now?


Literally no one has said this.
posted by a fiendish thingy at 8:39 AM on January 31, 2018 [14 favorites]


Okay, here's a probably equivalent comparison: the early works of John Green present women as manic pixie dream girls who exist for the edification of the male narrators. Even when he's trying to subvert this (Paper Towns), he ends up repeating the same trope, and only seemed to manage to genuinely subvert it in The Fault in Our Stars because he swapped the gender of the narrator and love interest. A manic pixie dream boy is a little different, at least. I haven't read his most recent.

And while JG has not escaped criticism, it's not of the die-in-a-fire type. I have never heard a man casually suggest that John Green should go kill himself (I have heard them say that about Stephenie Meyer) or refer to any of the myriad essentially interchangeable narrators as Pants, even though they are totally bland objects of possible projection for teenage white boys who think themselves clever.
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 8:43 AM on January 31, 2018 [13 favorites]


I didn't read VC Andrews, but I was a victim of incest and I can think of several things I did read that contributed to my continued acceptance of that status quo
I can't really explain it (although I suppose the pop-psy explanation is easy enough to guess at) but I too am a victim of incest and I cannot get enough of weird, creepy incest tales. I can see how others aren't looking for that and finding that as a kid can be not great. Just for me, diving into the creepy, twisty, all too real trauma was an escape of sorts as odd as that sounds.

I'd offer as a comparison instead Starship Troopers.
I would totally watch a Paul Verhoeven directed Twilight series.
posted by I'm Not Even Supposed To Be Here Today! at 8:43 AM on January 31, 2018 [5 favorites]


I mean, people freaked out about teen girls choosing a side on Team Edward vs. Team Jacob, but just a reminder: grown adult men commit felony assault against one another for liking the wrong sports team on the REGULAR.

Yeah, I agree with you on this, but I don't personally recall The General Public freaking out about teen girls. (See also: postpartum haze.) I mostly remember the critique of the books, not the fans. I'm with you on pro sports though. I don't feel like I have to choose between the two.

Sometimes you want to write about problematic things, though, and not even as wish fulfillment, but just because those things are interesting. And you have to deal with people saying your characters aren't totally woke or perfect in their attitudes and boys written by men are rarely critiqued under the same lens.

Totally fair but my position would be that the problematic things would have to be addressed as problematic somewhere within the book/world. With the possible exception of some kind of literary tour de force novel where it's just self-evident that things are horrific like, I don't know, Room. Which this was not.
posted by warriorqueen at 8:52 AM on January 31, 2018


Totally fair but my position would be that the problematic things would have to be addressed as problematic somewhere within the book/world. With the possible exception of some kind of literary tour de force novel where it's just self-evident that things are horrific like, I don't know, Room. Which this was not.

Men are not held to this standard.
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 8:56 AM on January 31, 2018 [8 favorites]


Also in YA men are more likely to be assumed to be writing literary tour de forces rather than romances. Well, in publishing at large (see: the treatment of Curtis Sittenfeld, for example). But especially in YA.
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 9:00 AM on January 31, 2018 [3 favorites]


I don't remember seeing critiques of the fans either, rather a lot of pieces pointing out just how wrong and stupid the series was in its view of femininity. I also recall several brilliant takedowns comparing the character Bella with another young girl heroine with plenty of agency: Hermoine Granger.
posted by Ber at 9:05 AM on January 31, 2018



Honestly I read Clan of the Cave Bear and similar and I...would like to say I came through unscathed but actually I think I did not. Did they ruin my life and cause me to lie on the floor sobbing or something, no. But I think they did contribute to my accepting things that should be unacceptable, a process that continues to today. I didn't read VC Andrews, but I was a victim of incest and I can think of several things I did read that contributed to my continued acceptance of that status quo and the need I had to protect my abuser from censure because of fear mixed with a fucked-up kind of responsibility and yes, love, until I felt the need to protect someone else.


This really resonates with me! I'm glad that most tween/teen girls apparently readily see through the negative messages they receive from books and movies, but I was really influenced by them! A lot of my expectations about relationships, how much you could ask for, what needed to be explicitly stated versus what should be implied or left unspoken, how you knew that someone was attracted to you, what you were entitled to ask for or refuse during sex, etc....a lot of my grounding in those things came from books, television and movies.

I don't think I'm actively stupid, and I don't think I was totally "my life should be just like [random screwed up book aimed at teens and early-twenties women], therefore I have no agency", but I definitely referred to books and movies in my head when I had no other reference and was not sure what to do.
posted by Frowner at 9:06 AM on January 31, 2018 [10 favorites]


I mean, people freaked out about teen girls choosing a side on Team Edward vs. Team Jacob, but just a reminder: grown adult men commit felony assault against one another for liking the wrong sports team on the REGULAR. Yet I have yet to see a panicked thinkpiece about what NFL narratives are doing to these impressionable 39-year old dudes, because the way that we talk about media consumption for teen girls is dramatically different from the way we talk about media consumption for most other groups of humans.

I'm finding it hard to keep track of what this conversation is about to be honest. I thought we were talking about critiques of the books/movies on the grounds of their perpetuating harmful attitudes but now it seems like you are talking about mockery of their readers/viewers on the grounds of their being stupid girls. So no, I'm not for that? Also, I don't think it would be bad to feel more concerned about the messages going out to teenagers than the ones going out to adults, but I do think plenty of the people who are worried about what teenage girls are learning is normal are extremely worried about what adult men have learned is normal. I feel like you are conflating the reactions of a number of different groups of people to a number of different phenomena and I don't know how to respond to that.
posted by two or three cars parked under the stars at 9:10 AM on January 31, 2018 [4 favorites]


damaging as fuck and I hate it

Yes. But.

All 3 of my kids read books I wouldn't have endorsed or bought for them as gifts. (I would however, buy pretty much any book for them if they were committed to reading it.) The youngest read all of the Meyer books. She was and is a reserved and careful and caring human being. Currently she lives and works in a L'Arche community. She is the least likely to dress and act "girly". She read the books, I'm guessing, because they were transgressive on many levels - I didn't like them for the writing, and the conservative, faith-based community she lived in thought they were demonic. She was doing more "damage" (at the time) to me and to the adults around her by reading them then the books could ever do to her. I'd guess that as a parent I was more likely to have been damaging as fuck to her than those books.

Teenage girls often form the most resilient social universes in schools and in society. And they do this while generally getting flak and disdain from most sides. Right now as I listen to a giggling and yelling group of gr 9 girl Drama students prepare their final project for performance, I'm reminded of this Strong Opinions Loosely Held podcast, "Teenage Girls Are Magic" which was a recent revelation to me. Now I try not to look at them as annoyances, but as prophets. They are signs. We should pay attention.
posted by kneecapped at 9:18 AM on January 31, 2018


Men are not held to this standard.

Mmmm. I mean, I don't think Stephenie Myers was held to very much of a standard by most people, but we're talking about whether a feminist critique of her work was inherently misogynistic right? I've read lots of feminist critiques of Xanth, for example, and this takedown of the 100 top books in SF is one of my bookmarked articles although right now it seems awfully inadequate.

If we're talking about why do male authors seem blissfully unaware and get paid more, I'm on your side. But if we're talking about apologizing to Stephenie Meyer, then...I'm not in.

I'm saying that mildly but...yes, I would like to hold men to the same standard. Ask Me About Jonathan Franzen.

I feel like I should qualify this. I had a short story knocked out of a flash fiction competition a couple of years ago - the literary genre was "fairy tale" and I wrote about a teen martial artist who discovers she's fae royalty and has to go on a quest. My story was eliminated because it "wasn't believable that the heroine could learn all the skills like sword fighting in one day." (The opening scene of the story had a wall with her katana on it as well as reference to her expertise.) So I completely believe that women authors have an uphill battle in this regard. (It totally may have been a garbage story, but that's the critique I got! !! !!!!)

But I still am not going to apologize to Stephenie Meyers.
posted by warriorqueen at 9:20 AM on January 31, 2018 [6 favorites]


Explicitly feminist critiques of Twilight comprise about 2% of all the people who hated on Twilight. Which is perhaps where some of the disconnect in this discussion is coming from.

Anyway, the video doesn't try to say the books are good. It's not "Stephanie Meyer I'm so sorry, you're books are actually brilliant works of genius and totally feminist!" Its "Yeah, my animus towards these books and this woman was not entirely based on literary merit, I am now realizing."

I was in another fandom entirely (one that started out as a mostly dude-centered fandom and only recently had gotten girl cooties), and writing fic for it, back when Twilight was a thing and even at the time was uncomfortable with, oh, say, like 80% of mentions of Twilight that came across my eye holes because much of it did quite closely resemble the rhetoric used to belittle and sneer at girls and women in my own fandom, for doing the usual fandomy things. It didn't sit well with me despite the fact that everything I read indicated these are awful books with squicky themes. I'm sure they're terrible. A massive amount of talk about Twilight I saw at the time was not thoughtful feminist critique even remotely. And some that tried to be feminist quickly slid into "I'm not like those other girls, I'm cool" territory. The existence of good, cogent, respectful feminist critique does not mean that none of this other stuff existed/exists.
posted by soren_lorensen at 9:29 AM on January 31, 2018 [7 favorites]


Now I try not to look at them as annoyances, but as prophets. They are signs. We should pay attention.

Seriously, when I was [living as] a teenage girl (AFAB transmasculine person here, late realization) it would have made me feel so damn weird to hear from adults that I was a "sign" and a "prophet". It would not have been empowering. My life was incredibly fucked up. I was horribly bullied and abused by my fellow prophets and signs, of whom I lived in fear, most of whom were attempting to impose gender-normative, heteronormative, thin-rich-normative stuff on my body, some physically.

Now, on the one hand I am not a woman, but on the other hand, when I was fifteen I didn't have any other identity or any language to express any other identity, and "teen girls are amazing because they are teen girls" would have been a total head trip, and not in a good way.

I know why people say this stuff and I realize that it comes from a good place, but individuals aren't magic. No one is "magic" by virtue of their age and gender identity.

Also, even at that age I was aware that I was getting older and would have read these statements as "teen girls are magical prophets of popular culture and morality...then they get old and they're stupid boring garbage like mothers and middle aged women".
posted by Frowner at 9:31 AM on January 31, 2018 [15 favorites]


Frowner, you made a good point above about modeling. Now that Western humans no longer live in tight-knit agricultural communities or crowded cities where we have to grow up sleeping in the same room with our whole families, media provides many young people with their only model for the most intimate stages of human relationships. They show how two people behave alone together. This shouldn't be mistaken for a call to some kind of Hays Code for YA, but it's silly to pretend that it isn't real.

I won't be budged from believing that Twilight is bad for all the reasons we know already, that even Robert Pattinson knew. It's amazing how he looks perfectly nice to me when he's talking in that interview, whereas in the Twilight movies he looks turgid and loathsome and, frankly, like a foot. He's visibly weighed down with resentment for the role.

Anyway, forget Fifty Shades. If you want some terrifying Twilight-based fanfiction for adults with the serial numbers filed off, let me show you this. ("Heather has reached the pinnacle of the publishing world through weaving suspenseful plots in romantic novels featuring vampires. She's the toast of the town to most, but to David her fiction threatens to toast a whole generation of readers in the broiler of Hell ...")
posted by Countess Elena at 9:43 AM on January 31, 2018 [3 favorites]


I thought we were talking about critiques of the books/movies on the grounds of their perpetuating harmful attitudes but now it seems like you are talking about mockery of their readers/viewers on the grounds of their being stupid girls.

I am talking about the video from the FPP, whose creator argues that the backlash against Twilight was influenced by the fact that it had a female author and a female audience, despite its problematic content matter being viewed as standard and run-of-the-mill when they appear in other genres, in works by men, and in works aimed at boys or at general audiences.

Here are some quotes from the video:

“I am not saying that Twilight deserves to be re-evaluated because it was secretly good the whole time, but rather that the level of virulent bile that came to define it— and Meyer herself— is actually not in proportion to Twilight’s badness or anything Stephenie Meyer herself did.”

“We— and by we, I mean, our culture— we kind of hate teenage girls. We hate their music, we hate their insipid backstabbing, we hate their vanity, we hate their selfie sticks, we hate their makeup, we hate their stupid books and the stupid sexy actors they made famous, and their stupid sparkly vampires, and then we wonder why so many girls are eager to distance themselves from being the object of societal contempt.” [followed by clip of Arya Stark on GoT saying regular girls are idiots]

“Your pop-feminist hot takes can have elements of internalized misogyny— namely, that visceral aversion to a thing that women and teenage girls like while giving a pass to (or ignoring altogether) other equally high-profile media of the day that has the moral benefit of not needing to provide strong role-models for teenage girls.” [followed by clip of Transformers]

The creator is also talking about backlash of a specific period, around 2008-2009.

No one is telling Nicholas Sparks to kill himself for continually writing paint-by-numbers commercially successful books where women have to be saved by a man's protective love, and I have yet to see actors publicly shamed for starring in movies based on those books. A lot of fandom people who called the relationship dynamics in Twilight "toxic" are open fans of The Joker/Harley Quin relationship and got mad that their scenes together were cut from the Suicide Squad movie, or are happily shipping Kylo/Rey today (shudder). If you wear an Avengers shirt in public, no one is going to come up and lecture you for your bad taste because the sterilization plotline in Age of Ultron was a dangerous message to send to girls and women about their self-worth. Elisa really wanting to bone down with the fish man in The Shape of Water without knowing whether or not it will get her killed or turned into a monster herself is part of what makes it an Oscar-nominated film that sublimates our cultural anxieties, not a dangerous example to set.

I mean, the point isn't that Twilight wasn't bad or gross or Mormon propaganda or even dangerous for impressionable audiences, but that it was subjected to a level of backlash based on those critiques that we basically never see for cultural texts that are not by and for women. Furthermore, the people who enjoyed Twilight were treated with a level of contempt and cultural scolding that is also typically reserved for girls and their girl-centric pursuits.
posted by a fiendish thingy at 10:25 AM on January 31, 2018 [16 favorites]


So the interesting question for me is, given everybody agrees that Twilight is utterly awful and harmful and stuff: WHY is it so popular?

I mean, with all this, with nobody even mentioning any virtue made the books popular, we seem to be left with three narratives:

1. It's a conspiracy by the publishers
(AAHAHAHAHA- No. Don't be stupid. That's the Rabid Puppy argument about the Hugos. Don't be like Vox Day.)

2. Teen Girls are stupid, naive, easily manipulated creatures that may be protected from evil influences like books, TV, driver's licenses and voting.

3. It's uh, I dunno. Magic. Or PCP laced in the pages. Whatevs. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

So any other theories as to its popularity, while the writers of "vast imagination, wit, and industry" languish?
posted by happyroach at 10:36 AM on January 31, 2018 [4 favorites]


And Forks, WA continues to quietly decompose in a dark, wet corner of the world.
posted by humboldt32 at 10:43 AM on January 31, 2018 [1 favorite]


So any other theories as to its popularity, while the writers of "vast imagination, wit, and industry" languish?

I dunno, I think that this line of reasoning tips over into "if it's popular, it must be good!" pretty readily, and we can all think of many things that are or have been popular and Very Definitely Deeply Problematic, or extremely popular (Jonathan Livingston Seagull!!) and later viewed as inferior cultural product. And it also seems to veer into "well, if it's not popular, it can't actually be witty or interesting, because if it were actually good people would like it".

What about, "the books tap into some widely-held fantasies and anxieties in a way that is accessible, they're plotted in a way that many people enjoy and they have, on their own terms, a happy ending"? That seems enough to explain popularity without getting into the weeds of morality-of-being-popular and without precluding either praise or critique. "Popular anxieties and desires accessibly expressed" is pretty much why anything is widely successful. You can express popular anxieties and desires in ways that are less accessible/more niche and have something that's a runaway success in smaller milieu. You can express less common anxieties and desires accessibly and ditto.
posted by Frowner at 11:02 AM on January 31, 2018 [16 favorites]


I agree with some of what Lindsay Ellis says. She left a one-star review for the book when she hadn't read the book. There were unfounded personal attacks on the author. Books/movies written by women for a female audience are treated more critically and harshly than books/movies written by men for a male audience, even though they aren't worse artistically speaking.

But Twilight is not fine. I stand by what I said of it back in October 2009, and yes, I read the first book, so I get to critique it. I also think Bella Swan is a Mary Sue character, so what Robert Pattinson said about the book being "creepy wish fulfilment" on the part of the author isn't baseless. And I would be happy to criticize the kind of books/movies that get targeted to men as scathingly, but the thing is that I don't read/watch them. I only read Twilight because I was given a copy of it (I was given copies of the next two books at the same time, but wound up donating them to a thrift shop unread).
posted by orange swan at 11:05 AM on January 31, 2018 [5 favorites]


So the interesting question for me is, given everybody agrees that Twilight is utterly awful and harmful and stuff: WHY is it so popular?

1. Not everyone agrees
2. See all the FaceShooter WWII Alien 3042 games released every year, generic and arguably harmful isn't a barrier to being popular.
posted by I'm Not Even Supposed To Be Here Today! at 11:12 AM on January 31, 2018 [3 favorites]


Luke Skywalker is a Mary Sue his name is even an adaptation of the creators name and he creeps on his sister but no one names a huge deal about how terrible star wars is because of that.
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 11:17 AM on January 31, 2018 [6 favorites]


In fact, men complained when Luke was made into less of a Mary Sue and was shown as a complicated character who made some bad decisions. Complexity is not easy for everybody.

I never said, and never will say, that better writers make less money than Stephenie Meyer because of some explicit conspiracy. A dish of cut oranges and grapes is a lower-value item than a mimosa, but you will feel better if you have the fruit at breakfast instead. Everyone knows that, and nobody goes to brunch for fruit salad. Meyer had something to sell with an obviously high market value, and she sold high. There are many better authors who, for various reasons of circumstance, have a low market value put on their work; they have to spend years proving that it even has that much. So they sell low if they are going to sell at all. It's true, and it's no surprise to anyone who knows the business, but that doesn't mean that people don't feel the bitter unfairness of it.
posted by Countess Elena at 11:33 AM on January 31, 2018 [4 favorites]


People claiming men never get hassled as much for their shitty writing have obviously never heard the endless stream of critiques of The Room and why everyone thinks Tommy Wiseau is the saddest, most pathetic jaggoff alive.

He has also profited handsomely from his god-awful work, and like Meyer, he is somewhat huge and a household name now. He even has a documentary about himself, The Disaster Artist.

Rifftrax have done both The Room and all the Twilight movies. The Room is definitely worse, by far. At least Twilight had a budget and people who could, you know, actually act.

I have heard plenty of stinging, negative criticisms about The Room. I can't think of a single person who has a single nice thing to say about Tommy Wiseau. To be fair, it's true, I've never seen a Wiseau death threat, but I also never personally saw one of those for Meyers, so your mileage may vary.

As others have pointed out, I remember disliking Harry Potter in much the same way as Twilight, being in my mid-twenties during the Potter era and having everyone try to shove it down my throat while I was busy trying to read The Society of the Spectacle or some other sort of highfalutin philosophical nonsense. Every mention of Potter made me roll my eyes, and I thought the writing was horrid and still do. (I remember, at the time, my main complaint with the first Potter book was how they seemed to magically be able to create food, yet no mention of all the homeless muggles who starve to death in the streets of the real world. I used to gripe the fuck out about that one to Potter fans. What a fucking elitist society the fucking Wizarding world was.) In both cases, it probably partially had to do with the overall crass-consumerism cash-in where suddenly every bookstore was filled to the absolute brim with nothing but Potter/Twilight paraphernalia during their respective periods. When you just want to go into a normal fucking bookstore without having to wade through a bunch of garbage that are not books, but just tie-in products to go with books it makes me want to fucking scream.

Twilight, The Room, and Starship Troopers have all had the Rifftrax treatment, so to me, they're all on the same god damned page.

Also, Star Wars is a LOT worse than just Skywalker being a Mary Sue and being a creeper on his sister. My first realization that George Lucas was one of Hollywood's worst writers was when I went to see Episode I. My second realization was a few years later when I watched the original Star Wars with a girlfriend who had never seen it before. By halfway through the movie, we were both cracking on it relentlessly.

Finally, agree with upthread, if I had a choice of a series of movies to remove from history entirely, it would be Transformers, hell, toss any Michael Bay property in there, and Michael Bay too, thanks.
posted by deadaluspark at 11:46 AM on January 31, 2018


-Tommy Wiseau is regularly fêted at screenings of The Room, and plays football with his fans outside showings of the movie, which has been celebrated as a strange pop artifact since the year of its release
-The Disaster Artist is NOT a documentary
-He is regularly invited to talk about his creative process, despite the fact that he is barely able to form a coherent sentence (this is part of his "brand" and "ethos")
-Even the people who make fun of him do so with affection for him, and talk about how hard it has been for him to hear criticisms of his movie
-Literally no one in Hollywood is criticized for being a fan of The Room, being able to quote the movie makes you artistic and cool because of the irony factor
-Greg Sestero has made an entire career out of being "the guy who played Mark in The Room"

In fact, given the weird cultural cachet of The Room, mentioning it is almost making the opposite point of the one you intended. People grant Tommy Wiseau an interiority and depth (despite the evidence of his work) in real life and in the fictional world of The Disaster Artist that is never afforded to Stephenie Meyer (who was regularly characterized as vapid, hollow, narcissistic). He tried his best and followed his dream, while she was blamed in advance for the potential future suffering of all of her teen readers.
posted by a fiendish thingy at 12:08 PM on January 31, 2018 [19 favorites]


There's plenty of criticism of Star Wars, and a great deal of it from Star Wars fans. Many of us were laughing along with Carrie Fisher when she roasted Lucas and Star Wars. It's well deserved, and I'd say that you don't get far in SFF fandoms without the ability to laugh at the works you love. But there's never been a large movement saying that Star Wars fans are a creepy and oversexed collective of bad taste who were ruining things for everyone else as we had with Twilight.

(I also have an argument that people other than cishet white SFF dudes deserve aspirational pulp. Not every book needs to be a Le Guin, Atwood, Butler, or Delany. But that's another topic.)

I think that the romance aspects of Twilight were a part of backlash, since it's a major theme and not just a formula epilogue of protagonist-gets-secondary-character.
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 12:18 PM on January 31, 2018 [4 favorites]


I just watched the Disaster Artist recently, and nothing in it made me feel like Tommy Wiseau was anything other than vapid, hollow, and narcissistic. I'd really love to see some evidence of people giving him "interiority and depth."

You don't get asked to be in Samurai Cop 2 as a joke because of your fucking depth.
posted by deadaluspark at 12:22 PM on January 31, 2018


I'm fairly certain Tommy Wiseau did not receive death threats as a result of The Room though.
posted by soren_lorensen at 12:23 PM on January 31, 2018 [1 favorite]


Having a hard time seeing how a "men get mocked too" discussion is relevant here, especially one centered around Wiseau.
posted by soundguy99 at 12:26 PM on January 31, 2018 [9 favorites]


I'd really love to see some evidence of people giving him "interiority and depth."

Try checking out

-every shot of "Tommy" in The Disaster Artist looking wistfully sad as he gazes at some Hollywood landmark
-the entire press tour for the The Disaster Artist
-every interview where James Franco talks about Wiseau's motivations and goals and vision
-the podcast episode of "How Did This Get Made" that inspired the screenwriters of The Disaster Artist
-the cottage industry of Film People discussing The Room as an eternal mystery
posted by a fiendish thingy at 12:28 PM on January 31, 2018 [2 favorites]


I guess I must be oblivious to that stuff, those shots didn't read as wistful to me.

The rest of the stuff, yeah, I haven't seen the press tour or any interviews with James Franco, and I don't generally do tons of Podcasts, and I wasn't aware of Film People talking about it as an eternal mystery.

Among the people I know in real life, it's just a shitty movie by a shitty person that is so god damned bad you can laugh at it.

So, I guess that's fair, it's a different situation if Hollywood people are treating him like some sort of auteur (which he most certainly fucking isn't.).
posted by deadaluspark at 12:33 PM on January 31, 2018 [1 favorite]


Hermione Granger was a much stronger (POC) character, and Harry would be dead 20 times over without her, but for whatever reason her name is not on the book covers.
posted by Brocktoon at 12:56 PM on January 31, 2018 [12 favorites]


Honestly I read Clan of the Cave Bear and similar and I...would like to say I came through unscathed but actually I think I did not.

This. Clan of the Cave Bear is 100% responsible for teaching me shit that lasted until my late twenties, including the truly horrific ‘You can tell by whether a penis is the “right size” for a particular vagina whether people are meant to be together’ (So much “who will be a match for Jondalar’s Mighty Penis” I cannot even) and a lot of romanticizing of teenage girls having sex with older men that probably helped with a lot of my damage.
posted by corb at 1:28 PM on January 31, 2018 [4 favorites]


someday I will write an entire book about being mad at the Auel books. In the meantime, I can only recommend Reindeer Moon.
posted by Countess Elena at 1:31 PM on January 31, 2018 [6 favorites]


Hermione Granger was a much stronger (POC) character, and Harry would be dead 20 times over without her, but for whatever reason her name is not on the book covers.

Because as we all know, no boys would have bought "Hermione Granger and the Anything At All, Whatsoever, Because Girl Cooties." Same logic as "nobody's gonna buy a book by Joanne Rowling."

Anyway.... I dislike Twilight because I got bored after a few pages of reading it and then it turns out the rest of the plot is terrible. While I concur that our culture hates anything teen girls (or any girls, or females, women, anything that isn't 100% macho macho man), I still think it's valid to say these books are awful in many ways. I think a lot of folks liked say, Hunger Games, but we don't hear so much bitching about that because the plot is better.
posted by jenfullmoon at 1:47 PM on January 31, 2018 [6 favorites]


Well at least until the casting when people got worried that Jennifer Lawrence was too fat for the role and "setting a bad example of health" to young girls. But lucky for those people, Lawrence was put in a lineup of much skinnier women, all of them naked, as "inspiration" to "get healthy" so her newer movies feature a shrunken version of her.
posted by I'm Not Even Supposed To Be Here Today! at 2:13 PM on January 31, 2018 [2 favorites]


I dunno, I think that this line of reasoning tips over into "if it's popular, it must be good!"

That's Puppy reasoning, and I'll have none of it. It's not that a popular book is good, but the question of why a terrible book is popular. I mean, Paul Clifford, source of "It was a dark and stormy night" was highly popular. The end result is often, we just point at the readers and say "Well, they're stupid", without asking what they liked about it. Especially if they're women,

Anyway, I'll just put you down for 3: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
posted by happyroach at 3:38 PM on January 31, 2018 [1 favorite]


it would have made me feel so damn weird to hear from adults that I was a "sign" and a "prophet"

Frowner,
Right. And to be clear, I don't tell them that, and I never would. But keeping it in mind when I'm dealing with them everyday keeps me curious, rather than dismissive. It reminds me that some of what I find off-putting about them is as likely to be my problem, as theirs.
posted by kneecapped at 3:55 PM on January 31, 2018


I've been thinking a lot about my reaction toward the art of sexual harassers and rapists in the wake of #metoo. For example, for years I've loved Mad Men, particularly Peggy's story, which ends with her getting together with a guy who starts their relationship with a heavy dose of workplace sexual harassment just because he, like, stuck around long enough and, uh, listened to her, I guess. We also had to watch years of her getting sexually harassed and just plain harassed (don throws money in her face!) to get there. But I was always, like, Matt Wiener is deconstructing the sexism of the age, he's self aware, it's realism, not, like, toxic media that actively contributes to our attitudes about sex. I was also really into Louie, and I thought it was....interesting? An interesting artistic choice? That in one episode Louie is raped by a woman but ends up going on another date with her because, uh, she's funny? And like yeah he also rapes people in the series but I thought *waves hands around* we were having a dialog.

Then you learn about the shitty behavior behind that and you realize that like. No. They were telling us about and excusing their own rapetastic predilections. I haven't even begun to unpack the fact that, like, in the middle book of The Magicians, there's a big ol' rape scene, but in the past I have defended it. I don't know from Lev Grossman's personal life but I have dismissed the discomfort of other women because these works had the hazy mantle of art. Because they were created by dudes.

I have been a professional book reviewer, a professional author, and if I'm real with myself, I have always been MUCH harder at the works that participate in rape culture written by women, like I wrote a scathing review of a Deborah Harkness book for pay once, I wrote really harsh reviews of a ton of YA books on GR, I had an entire adolescence bitching about Anne McCaffrey's problematic tent peg theory. Which isn't to say that the tent peg thing was good or Deborah Harkness book was good or Patch in Hush, Hush is an unproblematic character but when I've looked at works by men, I'm more likely to assume it's intentional, it's conversational, it's a deconstruction, it's a product of its time, it's a critique when I'm not sure that's really the case.

I think it's because in part we're always encouraged to be factional, as people assigned female at birth. We are a good girl or a slut; we are an example or a reflection. We are a smarty social justice warrior who knows about rape culture or a Mormon mombie who upholds it. But like.

Art is messy and our society is messy. We have messy attitudes toward female desire and sex. Anne McCaffrey's books screwed me up a bit sexually, but let's be real, so did, like, Garden State and Stranger in a Strange Land and a whole bunch of other stuff written by men, too.

I don't know what the answer is here other than being, broadly, less fucked up as a society but I'm tired of being just so vicious toward the few women who do succeed, scrutinizing them in a way I never would men. And part of that is my own internalized misogyny, my own complicated gender shit, but part of being better isn't just . . . writing less shit that upholds rape culture it's also extending more empathy toward women broadly and if you do that it becomes pretty obvious that Stephenie Meyer didn't deserve half of what she got.
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 4:12 PM on January 31, 2018 [12 favorites]


I pointed and laughed at Twilight until I realized that as a teenager I was crazy for the Andrew Lloyd Webber Phantom of the Opera and...

Uh, errrrr....

Yeah.

Reeeeeally wish sometimes I'd been a teenager in the Hamilton era of theater is all I'm saying.
posted by offalark at 10:35 PM on January 31, 2018 [3 favorites]


I think the whole genre of paranormal romance spawned off closely aligned with fetish erotica. That didn't start with Anne Rice but she was a breakthrough in popularizing it (Prior art, Rocky Horror, more recently and positively, The Shape of Water.) The Addams Family revival had a comedic take on that dynamic, turning the horror elements into play and pranks that worked because the Addamses were treated as nearly invulnerable cartoon characters. The horror elements served as something of a safe buffer for erotic fantasy, because one's actual risk of being captured by beautiful bisexual vampires is pretty low, unless you end up at the right bars where the vampires are mild-mannered data entry mooks in daylight.

A lot of that can and should be criticized, because the "don't actually try this at home, unless you're doing an explicitly negotiated scene" aspect of those stories is rarely explicitly stated. IME BDSM culture has a bad problem with making "more" an ideal. But Twilight probably wasn't the worst book to use that vehicle in print at the time.
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 4:44 AM on February 1, 2018 [2 favorites]


I also have an argument that people other than cishet white SFF dudes deserve aspirational pulp.

Oh I could get into this wrt Becky Chambers' The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet.

I too read both VC Andrews and Jean M Auel -- I even read that final book that was released when I was an adult which was horrible, even for that series -- but I don't regret either.
posted by jeather at 8:39 AM on February 1, 2018


Oh I could get into this wrt Becky Chambers' The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet.

Beukes has a nice rant about "quality" as a challenge to feminist and queer SFF recs.
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 8:57 AM on February 1, 2018


For Lindsay’s next video: Deconstructing ‘Bright’ which contains this choice quote:
I see you type in those comments about how I'm overthinking this...yeah it's true but why are you watching this channel anyway?
She’s one of us, she just doesn’t know it yet.

(I binge watched nearly every video she made some time last year I think.)
posted by pharm at 1:06 AM on February 2, 2018 [1 favorite]


I read the Twilight series because I was in a foreign country when those books came out and frequently found my English-language reading options limited to romance novels or Motor Trend. That's two genders, I guess! The Twilight books are not great. Until the last book, they're also not that bad. They are leagues better than the 50 Shades series they inspired (based off the first 10 pages of 50 Shades of Grey, at which point I quite sensibly noped out of the whole nightmare).

Even GOOD things made for women get degraded over time. This is especially true when the market is middle/lowbrow or for young people. People (men) in charge realize how much money they can squeeze out of women desperate for something made for them, and quality drops. This is what happened to Sex & the City. I feel like this probably happened with the 50 Shades of Grey movie, where director Sam Taylor-Johnson (reportedly) made something half-decent out of serious dreck. And I really think this happened with the first Twilight movie. Catherine Hardwicke signed on to a project with embarrassing source material and a modest budget. In turn, she coaxed good performances out of a surprisingly great cast. She approached it the right way -- with a bit of ironic reserve, but without actually making fun of adolescent emotions. She made a GOOD movie. And she made a hit! But for the sequels, she was replaced by men with larger budgets who made no attempt to make something worth watching. And why not? If you never accept that there is anything worth watching/reading in Twilight, then you don't have to try to make a good sequel.
posted by grandiloquiet at 4:06 PM on February 3, 2018 [3 favorites]


« Older Molecular Redistribution   |   "the Ghetto Gump" Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments