Twihards: we don't mock you because you're girly. We mock you because you're crazy.
Writer Sady Doyle has published an editorial on The American Prospect about hate directed at the Twilight series, and how it is essentially happening because Twilight is girly and something can’t be good unless it speaks to a male audience.
Actually, I’m pretty sure Twilight gets flack because it is flagrantly anti-woman, anti-feminist and encourages young girls to pine for emotionally abusive men and seek out co-dependent relationships. And it’s poorly written (and acted).
But I am not going to counter here with a statement against the Twilight series. I didn’t make it through the first book (I faltered when Edward started sparkling, then came to a full stop after vampire baseball), and while I’m fully versed on what happens in the following books, I’m hardly an expert. And others can say it much better. I would recommend reading this post about the anti-feminist issues in the Twilight series – it’s excellent!
What I did find notable in Doyle’s editorial was first her assertion that developing teen girls need “safe” stories with characters such as vampires because real boys are “scary.” Doyle’s right — YA has a very appropriate place in the development of pre-teen and teen girl readers, and most tween-aimed novels do function as a “safe space” for girls to explore ideas about sex and romance. And vampires are a perfect object of focus: they are enigmatic, a little bit dangerous, usually beautiful, often sensitive (for various reasons) and one can focus on all the existential angst of being and loving a vampire without having to bring up sex. Or, you know, biting can function as a metaphor.
I, too, loved vampire stories when I was a young girl (which never really stopped — Buffy, True Blood). My favorite when I was about 11 was a novel called The Silver Kiss, which it seems with all the Twilight rage has been repacked and reissued. The heroine is 16-year-old Zoe, whose mother is dying of cancer and her grieving father is pushing her away. She meets the pale, mysterious Simon, and angst ensues. It’s a solid book, though hardly award winning stuff, that skirts the romance question far more than Meyer’s Twilight, but still give a good thrill. But, of course, Simon was a real vampire (who feed on people, 4SRS!) and Zoe was a real girl, and not a rampaging Mary Sue.
But Meyer doesn’t offer a safe space for girls in Twilight. Her vampires don’t offer an outlet for girls to contemplate adult relationships and sexuality through mystique and metaphor. Hell, they’re not even real vampires — they don’t feed on people, they can go out in sunlight — and SPARKLE!, they have no problems with crosses or garlic, they can fly (generally using tacky special effects) and they play wicked awesome games of baseball! Edward is an abusive figure, Bella is weak and needy, and Meyer hits girls over the head with sex and all sorts of messages about marriage and female subordination. She teaches girls antiquated ideas about patriarchy, co-dependent relationships and saving sex for marriage — then letting your husband ravage and destroy you. NOT A SAFE SPACE FOR YOUNG GIRLS, SRY.
Doyle’s main supporting argument and counter-example to Twilight, however, is the Harry Potter series, and here is where she goes horribly wrong, displaying her ignorance of Harry Potter fandom, and of the books in general (though given her romantic sentiment, I’m not surprised). Honestly, this is one of the reasons the Twifen are so derisively mocked — they are so tightly enclosed in their own bubble, thinking they are OMG SO OPPRESSED and the world revolves around them, that they are totally out of touch with other fan circles.
Doyle asserts that people don’t mock Harry Potter fans. Why? Because the main character is a boy, who does boy things, and there are a lot of male Harry Potter fans. And in the sci-fi/fantasy fan world, a fandom surrounding a girly book and populated mostly by girls is OMG NOT ACCEPTABLE. Doyle writes:
“…she also benefited from escaping the girly ghetto to which Twilight has been confined. Her publishers, famously, asked her to bill herself as J.K. rather than Joanne so as not to alienate male readers, and her books focused on a male hero and included lots of boy-friendly elements such as sports and warfare. She won a male readership, and with it, praise for the “universality” of her work.”
Oh, but this is where she is ever so wrong. There is a significant faction of Harry Potter fans and scholars who believe just the opposite: that JKR can’t write strong female characters to save her life, let alone good romance, and that the Harry Potter series isn’t universal at all. It teaches girls that male characters are the most complex and interesting, and that female character’s lives do and should revolve around boys, and more specifically marriage. Every single Harry Potter fan convention held has featured some panel, roundtable or paper discussing issues of romance, feminism and heteronormative standards present in the Harry Potter series.
Author Meyer with her Mary Sue self insert Bella (Kristen Stewart) and Perfect Man Creation Edward (Robert Pattinson)
The fandom is also mostly women. Not the readers, the fans — the ones who, just like the Twifen (though not to the same extent!), line up in the thousands, dressed up, with wild signs, for book releases and movie premieres, who obsess over the film stars and the characters and the romances. Twilight has Edward or Jacob, HP had the Harmony debacle of 2005 (Hermione with Ron or Harry, with JKR derisively calling the Harry/Hermione shippers short-sighted and silly).
Doyle says that Meyer dared to be female, have a leading female character and a driving romantic plot. And you know what, it is good to see female writers writing female characters in YA novels — many fans question JKR for choosing to write Harry Potter and not Harriet Potter, though seeing how she ultimately fails to write well-rounded female characters it was probably for the best. But women writers often have the sad distinction of doing the most disservice to female characters, and on this point, Meyer and JKR can be united. But at least Rowling didn’t focus her novel on archaic romantic drivel, and her female characters floundered on the sidelines of her story. Meyer’s instead stood center stage. Harry Potter isn’t some infallible bastion of popular fantasy literature — though it is leaps and bounds better than the Twilight series.
The Twihards aren’t getting flack because Meyer dared to write a girly book. We deride the Twifen because everything about the book and what it stands for smacks of misogyny. Twilight is perfectly fine for what it is, but the super fans have put it on a pedestal that opens them up to mocking: enjoy your silly YA novel (I like them, too), but don’t define your life by it!
Doyle concludes by calling out to feminists to defend the Twihards, even if they loathe the series, because the powerful teen female consumer is being trodden upon. Actually, I think what feminists should concentrate on is misogyny (Twilight) and male-produced drivel (Miley Cyrus, whom she also cites as proof of an empowered tween girl market) being peddled to impressionable tween girls and the implications thereof.
Excellent post! I’m glad you took it upon yourself to elaborate after the twitter debate.
Also, not that Robert Pattinson is ever attractive, but wow that’s a bad picture of him.
PS Thanks for the blog link and complement!
Thanks! I was inspired, LOL. Because, seriously, this woman is clueless. She’s in the defensive Twilight bubble. Plus safe spaces for young women is totally a sensitive issue for me. I think it’s super important for not only young girls but women sometimes, as well, and Twilight is NOT a safe space. (neither are some aspects of Harry Potter fandom, which I will blog about sometime in the spring)
And also I’m a crazy Harry Potter fan, so I could see her bullshit LOL. And HP fans TOTALLY get mocked. I mean, they are far worse about dressing up in costume as the Twilight fans, which invites mocking. But they are less delusional
NP — I thought your post was GREAT. It really boiled down the issue thoughtfully, without my having to read the books. Though they are on my list. I feel like I need to read them both for the mocking joy, but also so I can more fruitfully argue about them.
I don’t like it because it’s STUPID. Kidding. Ok, half-kidding (vampire baseball??). But judging by my obsession with fashion and the fact that I read the Shopaholic series, it’s NOT because it’s girly. This is why she works for Tiger Beat.
Yeah, she’s ridiculous. While she’s specifically saying that the fantasy fan circles are OMG MEAN to Twilight fans, her argument is definitely weaker for ignoring the very powerful consumer market for chick lit. No one’s mocking them, and some of those books are actually good. Twlight is ridiculous, and the fans act like psycho crazies.
And, yes, come on — she works for Tiger Beat, and dares to refer to herself as a feminist!
Hmm.
I think you’re right about fans’ response. I agree that when it comes to Harry Potter fans making fun of Twilight fans, it’s because of feminism. And I agree that there’s nothing special about Twilight in the context of YA.
However, I don’t agree that the movies get so much flak because reviewers are all feminists. That’s just downright bullshit. The movies get a lot of flak – and not a lot of credit for being blockbusters! – because they don’t appeal to a male audience, and I will stand by that statement. You cannot convince me that Transformers is any better of a movie than Twilight or New Moon, but Michael Bay (despite a lot of criticism) gets credited for creating brainless action flicks that everybody wants to go see (despite their racism, sexism, and basically everything-that-is-wrongness). I’m not a fan of Twilight’s messages, and I’m not defending it as a feminist text, but when you put it in the greater context, there is something going on that devalues stories that women seem to like.
Compare it to romance novels. Why is it that men feel comfortable reading (racist, sexist, violent) spy novels and political thrillers, but women hide their romances behind quilted book covers? It’s not because Rainbow Six is a great work of fiction. It’s because women are devalued in our society, women’s wants and needs are devalued, and yes, women’s fiction is devalued, in comparison to men’s fiction of a similar (low) caliber.
And frankly, I think that’s wrong. I might not like the content of romance novels, or of the Twilight series, but shaming women for enjoying them is not the answer.
Oh, yes, I do agree with her that the film’s success being mocked because of the mostly female audience is unfair. I take serious issue with male action flicks, as well (Michael Bay is AWFUL).
Generally (and this is me totally wandering onto another topic!), I think an overarching issue in cinema marketed to the “female audience” is that we’re sold absolute drivel PLUS mocked for liking it on top of things: i.e., the long-running joke about women dragging their boyfriends to chick flicks (which then indicates that they do well at the box office because women force men to see them). I’m less fussed by the Twilight films (because they are what they are, and from a marketing POV, they’re brilliant) and more fussed about the books, but you know that
I wish there were better content available to women as consumers, but at the same time, I don’t think content that would be deemed acceptable by a feminist standard would achieve a level of popularity anywhere close to Twilight (or Bridget Jones’ Diary, or the highest grossing romantic comedy/chick flicks which usually tend to have some caveat in terms of female characterization/decision making). To me a deeper problem, that the editorial writer misses by focusing on the Twifen’s angst (and speciously pitting it against the anointed Harry Potter fandom of which she knows little!), is that the female market of late, more than ever, is embracing content that is questionable. And often, I find, the people creating it are women who often unknowningly/subconscious promote “anti-woman” ideas, because of the vicious circle of a (male driven) media that have somehow convinced women to view women as men see them, while falsely believing that they view themselves this way because they are empowered. Bizarre. I think Twilight is just an excellent example (as is Sex in the City and other cultural phenomenons) of this trend.
I’ve wandered WAY off point
I’m not sure that the market is embracing stories that are anti-woman more than ever. Have you read much of the women’s fiction of the 1950s? LOL. I mean, yeah, it goes in waves: in the 30s, women’s magazines published stories where the women had careers. Then in the 50s, it swung the other way, and there went the cult of the housewife (which you can also see in most of the romance novels of the time). The 60s and 70s may have had some feminist content, but there was more overt sexism. Honestly, I think that we’re living in a time where there’s less offensive content than there was before.
The other thing is, Stephenie Meyer is Mormon, and you can’t divide that out fact from the content of the Twilight books. Sometime I’m going to write a nice big blog posts about this, because I think a lot of people don’t understand the connections there, and they’re super duper obvious when you read her other book (The Host). A lot of what she writes is clearly directly tied to her Mormonism and the related value-sets.
Then, too, there are good reasons why a young girl might want to ape Bella, if she’s got romantic blinkers on. I can’t remember where I read this argument – it was someone else’s meta post, and I have it bookmarked on another computer – but Bella actually does get to make a lot of choices in her life. She chooses which parent to live with. She chooses where she goes (she has a car and not a particularly involved parent). She chooses what they eat every night (which we can say ‘ugh! she has to do the cooking!’ but when I was a teen, man, I wished I could have jettisoned some of the things my parents made). She’s able to travel to Italy, for chrissakes, all on her own. She may end up getting convinced to be married, but she gets to choose to have a baby when she’s still a teen, going entirely on her gut. (And by the way, the books don’t come off as totally anti-abortion – at least, not preachily so. The implicit message is anti-abortion, but not the explicit one: there are several characters who advocate for abortion and aren’t treated as being bad people for it.) To a teenager who lives in the suburbs – the exact target market – that’s a pretty appealing picture. Being a teen sucks partially because you don’t have a lot of control over your life. Well, Bella does. So it’s not 100% just ‘girls just want to be controlled.’ A large part of it is about not being controlled – by your parents.
I do get defensive when people criticize Twilight in fuzzy terms – fuzzy about ‘are you talking about the book or the movie,’ fuzzy in terms of ‘are you talking about the content or the fans,’ etc., for aforestated reasons. (Aforestated in my blog post about it – http://flourish.dreamwidth.org/455712.html)
Also: I cannot close my tags, apparently.
ALSO: When she’s saying Harry Potter is acceptable because it’s masculine, I think she is absolutely right. Harry Potter appeals to both men and women. I’m not talking on the fandom level because I don’t think she’s talking on the fandom level (in fact I think you have some pretty big fandom blinkers on, to be honest). On the wider cultural level, Harry Potter was in fact marketed to both boys and girls, and it’s OK for both men and women to say they like it (whereas it isn’t OK for heterosexual men to say they like Twilight). And I think that that is a real difference, and I don’t think that it implies that Harry Potter is some kind of feminist text.
Ah, see the comment I was drawing from what that which she made about fan groups at Comic Con rejecting Twilight, where she indicated that male-dominated fantasy/sci-fi groups scorned Twilight because it is dominated by female fans/romance tropes. You’re right that HP itself was marketed to girls and boys, and Twilight is marketed to girls (most books for children and young adults nowadays are, though). This bit:
Self-described geeks and horror fans are especially upset at how the series introduces the conventions of the romance novel — that most stereotypically feminine, most scorned of literary forms — into their far more highbrow and culturally relevant monster stories. At the 2009 Comic-Con, Twilight fans were protested and said to be “ruining” the event. Fans of Star Wars, Star Trek, X-Men, and Harry Potter are seen as dorks at worst, participants in era-defining cultural phenomena at best. Not so for Twilight fans. What sets Twilight apart from Marvel comics? The answer is fairly obvious, and it’s not — as geeks and feminists might hope — the quality of the books or movies. It’s the number of boys in the fan base.
That’s what I was latching onto — the males in the fanbase comment. And while I do have fandom blinders on, I think in one part of her piece she is describing reaction to the fans (the visible ones) and not just the readers/target demographic. HP is universal in terms of overall demographic, but the fan contingent isn’t varied in terms of gender. It has a lot of crossover with Twilight, actually. Specific to her “the Twilight books are feminine/the HP books are masculine (and therefore acceptable)” argument, yes, she is correct.
Thanks for keeping me honest XD <3
Well, having been at Comic-con, it really is true that the male fans scorned the Twilight fen. And the Comic-con HP panel was pretty much balanced in terms of gender of the attendees. And let’s be fair about the outside perception of Harry Potter fans. Think of the most famous Harry Potter fans: Melissa, Steve, Emerson, Andrew Slack, then maybe some of the wrockers? Maybe Heidi or Gwen, who’ve appeared on the Comic-con panels? But probably not to people who aren’t themselves in the fandom. That’s a pretty masculine group. Steve is definitely the most (in)famous Harry Potter fan, and he’s male. So I can’t quite blame her for having those blinkers on. Male Harry Potter superfans are disproportionately represented in the media. I bet that’s what she’s working off of.
Anyway, of course I’ll keep you honest! <3
Your best blog post yet! Good food for thought!