So. Twilight Eclipse. Wolfboy Jacob lurks nudely, rudely, buffly, looking ever-ready for some lupine tussling out yonder. Vampire Edward appears to be struggling with constipation. And Bella, how goes it with her? Do you know, I can't remember. Who is she? Nobody. What does she do? Nothing. Where is she without men? Nowhere.Oh, I see where this is going…
Bella's passivity, the oppressiveness of her boyfriends (presented as protectiveness), the fetishisation of female victimhood and the unstinting justification of the guys' abusiveness have spurred a strong feminist backlash against the books – a backlash which I fully support.Now there’s a shock, eh, gentle reader?
Part of our sense of disturbance and bafflement is that while all the misogynist elements of Twilight are detectable in mainstream arts and the media, they are rarely created by women.Because she’s neither dynamic, nor creative, perhaps? Prolific, she certainly is, but it’s pap. Barely better written than the awful ‘Harry Potter’ pablum.
Why would a dynamic, creative, prolific and talented woman like Stephenie Meyer write a protagonist as useless as this?
But it sells. I suspect that’s what gets Bidisha’s (nanny) goat more than anything.
Do young women despise themselves so much that the very best they can fantasise about is trailing around after not one but two bullies? It's puzzling. I grew up obsessively reading adventure novels by Tamora Pierce, the Worst Witch series and all sorts of bronze breastplate Amazonian guff. The women in these books bristled with chagrin and energy, as did their lovers, allies, enemies and friends.Oh, why can’t everyone be more like Bidisha? Why can’t they like what Bidisha likes, read what Bidisha reads, watch what Bidisha watches?
It’s just so unfair! *stamps foot*
'Prolific, she certainly is, but it’s pap'
ReplyDeleteyes, thankyou sums up anna cuntoon to a tee.
How does one bristle with chagrin?
ReplyDeleteOh hang on, I'm now suffering palpitations of remorse at having read Bidisha's piece.
My spleen is bridling.
Oh no!
The male characters spend an inordinate amount of time hanging around in a state of undress and she finds it sexist against women, yet I bet she also claims that Page 3 girls are sexist against women.
ReplyDeleteI think we should tell her not to worry her pretty little head about this. Clearly, as a woman, she doesn't understand money.
ReplyDeleteSometimes your humour is so dry, Julia. I take it from your tags that we probably see eye to eye on this.
ReplyDeleteThe word verification for this is 'pricks'! There was a form of feminism that involved powerfully sexual women that made men so scared they started hanging witches and other repressive barbarity.
ReplyDeleteNovel is an oxymoron as they are all basically the same dross, promising the sound of snow falling on cedars, but playing out an old story in smaltz yet again.
Janeway on Voyager is one of my 'favourites'. When all she has to do to get her crew home (they are stranded because of her hapless leadership) is drop her knickers to get the requisite technology that will not only get them home but have astounding benefits for humankind, she becomes as chaste as a pea-detecting princess. A long way from Gillian Anscombe, the philosopher,Catholic housewife and multiple mother, who when told the posh New York restaurant didn't let women in wearing trousers, promptly dropped her keks.
Offence seeking feminist vs Twilight sparkly vampires... I'm torn.
ReplyDeleteThe most flagrant examples of The fetishisation of female victimhood are to be found in pages of The Guardian. Bidisha and Julie Bindel are the worst offenders.
ReplyDeletePut the kettle on, luv.
ReplyDelete"The male characters spend an inordinate amount of time hanging around in a state of undress and she finds it sexist against women..."
ReplyDeleteIndeed!
"The word verification for this is 'pricks'!"
LOL!
"A long way from Gillian Anscombe, the philosopher,Catholic housewife and multiple mother, who when told the posh New York restaurant didn't let women in wearing trousers, promptly dropped her keks."
Heh! She sounds a lot more useful than a hundred whiny 'let's write a column about how men keep us down!' modern feminists...
I find the Twilight series objectionable because it's so anodyne. The original Bram Stoker version has more sex in it, back when people didn't actually have sex and reproduced by a kind of fission, like amoebas.
ReplyDeleteWeekend before last there was a 200' queue to get into the multiplex in the shopping mall. It was utterly swamped with 13-18 year-old girls who all looked identical (admittedly, now that I'm old enough to be father to any of them, my discrimination circuits for parsing the relative lickability of pubescent girls have atrophied. and this is a good thing.) Bidisha half-ignores, half-tacitly acknowledges a salient anthropological point: teenage girls want good-looking teenage boys to fondle them. For it's not just the UK/US. All these girls with their mid-length hair and baby T's from The Gap and their slightly bewildered/exasperated parents in the queue with them had Spanish as their native language. They were going to sit through two hours of reading subtitles just to see Robert Pattinson with tinted contact lenses. Get a 15 year-old to sit down and read a book for two hours (let alone a book with foreign cultural idioms.) Wow. I mean it it's at least vaguely plausible you could get a fifteen year old boy to read Portnoy's Complaint and see the tribulations of teenage onanism, and it might be an instructable moment ('cos it's Literature) But the Twilight saga is bereft of literary merit. I don't know whether to be appalled at the lack of boobs in modern vampire softporn or delighted at Bidisha's discomfiture.