Topic: The Twilight Series

Perhaps I should title this complaint, “How the Twilight Phenomenon Further Jaded My View of Adolescents”, “Vampires Were Never Cool”, or just “Twilight Sucks”. I can’t decide, but I think the first one is too pretentious. You can decide.

I started hearing about this vampire love story sometime in my senior year of high school, when it was a cult-type thing, which is how everything is before it hits the mainstream. I asked a friend what it was about (he only read it “because his sister told him to”; secretly, everyone suspects he’s in the closet and wants a boy like Edward), and he went on a fifteen-minute dissertation about the plot and the characters and blah blah blah. Guy and girl fall in love, can’t be together, and instead share mass amounts of sexual tension due to the fact that sex will kill the girl. There’s something else with some other guy but he’s irrelevant because he gets burned. I got it.

To me, it sounds like any lite version of some erotic romance novel--minus the erotica. I have heard before that the sexiest things are best left to the imagination and this is a prime example. Stephanie Meyer has crafted any prepubescent girl’s fantasy--a guy that’s into them that doesn’t (or can’t) rush into things.

Although apparently, according to a different friend, the two have a kid in the last book and Bella turns into a vampire. What kind of message is this sending to the kids and teenagers reading this? (Even older than teenagers--I do to go a women's college, so this is probably a bit biased based on the demographic--but I was the only one out of sixteen students in my creative writing class that never read Twilight.) It's implicitly telling readers to not have sex until you are ready for a commitment (i.e. Bella must be a vampire) or ready to have a kid. It's abstinence education at its finest, and the youth of America is buying right into it.

And I think parents feel comforted knowing that their kids are reading this type of novel in our over-sexualized culture. We're constantly bombarded with countless TV shows and movies where love is meaningless and sex is the only thing on anyone's mind--all you have to do is turn on MTV to watch some of the worst offenders. And I understand that, but does that make it right to let your kid read shit?

Sometimes I get this: “You read Harry Potter—why don’t you read Twilight?” I can see how you can confuse the two: the Harry Potter series is well-written and compelling, and Twilight is pop garbage. Yes, I like Harry Potter, because it is original and it amazes me that someone could have created something so unique and so universal. Not to mention that toward the end, Harry Potter begins a satirical political commentary (e.g. jailing Stan Shunpike for doing nothing wrong = jailing innocent civilians for months at a time at undisclosed detention centers in Iraq), and I have a soft spot for satire. I see no originality in Twilight, no epic compelling story, no commentary of any kind (except the aforementioned abstinence agenda, which makes me shudder).

And this kind of illustrates why I just don't get it: as a mass society, we’d rather read something brain-numbing like Twilight instead of 1984 or Johnny Got His Gun. We’d rather read People Magazine than the newspaper (even The Morning Call, with its staunch local agenda, is better than the celeb magazines at the checkout). We'd rather watch American Idol than Frontline--fuck what's going on in the world, Adam Lambert's on! And we'd rather let our children read trashy pop no-sex-no-drugs-no-rock-n'-roll-till-you're-married novels than take them to the library to pick out something meaningful.

Just so this whole writing doesn't sound like some bitter, bitchy rant, I'd like to add that I see a silver lining here. At least kids are reading and at least they're passionate about it, and I sincerely mean that. I'd rather see someone with a Twilight novel than some piece of high-tech Bluetooth bullshit that won't get them anywhere. I just hope that when push comes to shove, they reach for Kurt Vonnegut and not Danielle Steel.