Haha, nice status jockeying there.
Quite frankly…I wouldn’t be surprised if that actually existed. Maybe it’s sold by the makers of the Vulva Puppets?
(There’s already a shadow cutout of “Edward” for your wall)
I did have a good time reading it aloud with like-minded friends. At one point my friend laughed so hard that she actually fell off the couch. I don’t think I’d ever seen that happen in real life before.
It’s not for sale, but it does exist.
What, do you have a MST3K-for-books club? Because that would be totally awesome!
My 13 year old daughter went to see the new Twilight movie this evening. When she came back, she did me proud by saying that the movie was unintentionally funny, otherwise not any good, and she’d give it maybe 3 out of 10.
Is that what they call comparing dicks these days?
Only if they’re ice cold vampiric ones.
It’s true, my main interest here is in convincing athelas I’ve got a bigger wang than he does, not in talking about the obvious fallacy inherent in the claim that there’s something about women’s psychology that makes them desire a vampire class structure and which is evident in the popularity of a series of tweener novels.
It’s like thirty or thirty-one inches long, yo.
Yeah, since the author of Twilight has some deep insight into the primal nature of females us deluded feminists don’t have. That’s why there are so many of us here saying “this stuff sucks.” It’s because we just don’t want to acknowledge that we really think that our life’s purpose is to find an abusive stalker to be our prefect mate forever.
Wienie-waver.
Denigrating the author proves nothing - catnip doesn’t have any deep insight into the psychology of cats. The fact that the books are this popular speaks for itself.
Also your sarcasm needs to be more consistent to work properly.
Sadly this was a one-time event (over the course of a long weekend), because these friends live quite far from me and I only see them once or twice a year. But yeah, it was basically a book-based version of MST3K. We had a lot of fun with it, and developed several running jokes that we still use.
The only downside to giving a book the MST3K treatment is that it takes so long to read a book out loud. Especially when you have to keep stopping to laugh. We only got about 1/3 of the way through the book during my visit. I could have easily read the whole thing myself in half the time.
I think 99% of the books’ popularity is because they’re so easy to read. If someone like Joyce Carol Oates or Toni Morrison had written a novel about a teenage girl in love with a vampire, the book would have been “difficult”, loaded with symbolism and metaphor. The characters would have been realistic, with faults and failings. There would have been words of more than one syllable, and the books would not have the repetition that allows you to fall asleep while reading, let someone else turn the pages, and you wake up 20 pages later without missing anything. There would have been a plot, with continuity. Readers would have to remember what someone did on page 25 because there’d be consequences on page 150.
They’re popular for the same reason that Dan Brown, James Patterson, Danielle Steel and that forensics author (blessedly forgot her name) are popular – they’re easy and you can turn your brain off.
1% is because some some girls (and women) have a soft spot for “bad boys”.
They are popular among people who have few experiences with healthy relationships- tween-age girls and a few emotionally stunted women of the “too many cats” variety.
I have little to say about what appeals to lonely women with a lot of cats, but I am concerned with the 'tween girls. It is true that girls (and boys) of that age are at a stage where their hormones out pace their wisdoms. Adolescents are pretty notorious for getting love and obsession mixed up. Both boys and girls are susceptible to manipulation by older, more experienced and sometimes abusive people. These early teen relationships take on a kind of life and death urgency that usually fades as emotional maturity sets in.
One thing we do as a society is try to guide our children through this stage. We model healthy relationships. We limit their ability to screw up their life through obsession- for example, by placing age limits on marriage. On the whole, we do this a little better for boys than girls. But things have been changing and as a society we have been pretty successful at raising independent young women. Generally, this has led to an improvement in the lives of women.
Texts like Twilight, which comes not from some primal understanding of female’s true nature, but rather from the notoriously repressive, submissive and outdated LDS theology, undermine these efforts by modeling unhealthy relationships. This is not some connection to our caveman instincts, but rather a connection to a bunch of religious fundamentalists from the American frontier. They are not connecting with our true selves, but rather with our pretty crappy-for-women past.
In a different culture with different cultural baggage, chances are Twilight would not be so popular. For example, in the Wodaabe cultures of West Africa teenage boys hold a beauty pageant and marriageable girls choose the most attractive men from the line-up for a one year trial marriage, at the end of which the girl holds the sole right to continue the marriage or choose a new man. Twilight wouldn’t even make a lick of sense to them, and I really doubt that they would think you’ve finally stumbled upon their true desires.
But I’m not going to convince you of much, am I? Your already pretty stuck on the idea that women have some cave-man desire to be stalked, abused, controlled and physically injured.
Wow…I had no clue how utterly frakked up these novels are. I’m a high school teacher, and I have a group of students who are totally into these books, and now I find it disturbing in the extreme.
I just hope their parents are taking some time to discuss the plot with them.
I’m not putting things in spoilers here, you’ve either read the books and already know this, or you don’t care about the spoilers for them:
Aside from Edward, what about Jacob? I liked Jacob, at first - he wasn’t controlling like Edward, Bella could do what she wanted around him, rather than what he wanted, necessarily.
Then it got weird. He fell in love with her, and is pissed (of course) that she’s in love with Edward. So far, no big deal - until he forces her to kiss him (more than once, IIRC) - at one point in one of the books, she eventually “finds herself kissing him back”, or at least he seems to think so.
So…no means yes, and someone can still be your best friend even after he forces himself on you.
All of Bella’s human girlfriends are completely one-dimensional, as well. There’s Angela, the nice, sweet one. And that’s all she is. Then Jessica, the one who’s jealous of Bella b/c the boys all like her - and again, that’s all she is. The jealous one, who’s nice to Bella’s face but thinks nasty thoughts about her.
Hmmm…according to my Facebook news feed the books and movies are also very popular with 30-year-old suburban moms that I went to high school with.
… and, of course, my preferred reading at that age means I grew up believing that any problem can be successfully resolved with sufficient firepower.
I have a very high tolerance for escapist “literature,” regardless of what a more discerning reader can infer from it.
I hope it’s just the bandwagon effect – people want to read what their friends are reading and see the movies they’re seeing. But that doesn’t explain why the books sold so well in the first place. I was astounded (mouth hanging open astounded) when I looked it up at Goodreads and saw all the awards the book has received. Awards!!