I recently came across a press release from Match.com informing me that the Edward vs. Jacob thing was still going on in Canada and that they'd done a survey asking single Canadians what type of supernatural creature they would prefer to date. Yes, really, I'm not making that up. We're asking single men and women if they would prefer to date vampires or werewolves.
This leaves me with so many questions. First and foremost, however, is why are adult women lusting over teenaged characters in their fantasy worlds and why are we finding this acceptable as a society? Secondly, why the hell are we asking adults if they'd rather have sex with a vampire or a werewolf? I'm glad that as a married person, I don't get asked asinine questions about which undead creature of fiction I'd rather bang.
But back to this quiz for a moment: according to Match.com's Canadian relationship expert, Canadians prefer overwhelmingly to want to date a vampire but, surprisingly, MOST Canadians would rather date a ghost. A GHOST. The bottom two on the list are werewolves and finally zombies. Apparently people haven't heard about Warm Bodies yet (I'm personally excited about this movie, but not because I'm fetishizing zombies). But why are we asking people about this? Oh wait. Twilight.
Click here to see the top five Twilight fan fiction books to be published.
In case you are living under a rock, the final instalment of the film version of the Twilight series was released in theatres last week. The books, young adult fiction written by Stephanie Meyer as an allegory of her Mormon beliefs aren't very good and centre around 120-something-year-old high school student (and sparklepuss) Edward Cullen who falls in love with 16-year-old teenaged girl, Bella Swan. Werewolves get involved, she is torn between the two (but without the premarital sex business), settles on the vamp, eventually becoming a vamp herself and (*spoiler alert*) her former werewolf boyfriend falls in love with her NEWBORN DAUGHTER. Oh, and vampires play baseball during thunderstorms because the sheer power of their baseball prowess would scare people if not masked by thunder. Vampires should not sparkle.
Over 50 per cent of Young Adult fiction is purchased by women over the age of 25. YA fiction is described as fiction for youth aged 12-16. So, we've got this weird romance and no-sex-before-marriage book for girls aged 12-16 that adult women have just decided is the bee's knees. That's sort of weird enough, but I get it. I'm not into YA myself for reading, but I do enjoy movie versions of books such as Harry Potter and The Hunger Games. The weird part of this is the marketing of the Team Edward vs. Team Jacob camps that was clearly designed for adult women. Yes, Edward is a vampire who's technically 120 years old, but he's acting as if he were a teen and became a vampire as a teenager so he LOOKS like a kid. Jacob in the books goes from what, 15-18?
Why is it acceptable for grown women to fetishize these characters? Grown men who look for their own personal Lolita are deemed creepy pedophiles, and ladies, this is weird creepy stuff. At least in 50 Shades, everyone is an adult and the books are about sex (granted, 50 Shades started out as Twilight fan fiction, but that's for another day). But I digress.
Click here to see the top five November romance book releases.
Am I being overly sensitive about the idea of grown women fantasizing about teenaged boys? Because if you strip away everything else, (I've seen video clips of grown women trying to rip Taylor Lautner's shirt off. And he just turned 18 in the last year. Why aren't these women being arrested?) this is adult women fantasizing about and sexualizing teenaged boys. Why does our culture have this strange double standard? If 35-year-old fathers were lining up at movie premieres to get their photos taken with Dakota Fanning, we'd scream bloody murder.
I don't have any answer for this because it truly boggles my mind. I cannot, for the life of me understand what makes this acceptable. And before anyone gets all "you don't get it because you don't like the series" this has nothing to do with the quality (or lack thereof) of the books or films that are the Twilight franchise. This is me not understanding how or why as a society we find this kind of adult on teen lust acceptable if it's coming from women and deplorable when it comes from men.
Tell me what you think -- do you love or hate Twilight? Do you find sexual interest in the characters? Because for me, if I were going to go for a vampire, it'd have to be Lestat or Louis from Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles or that flawless vampire god, Eric Northman. They only come out at night, people.
So, spill it! What do you think of Twilight fan lust?
Written By: Kat Armstrong, Yummy Mummy Club
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Swooning over any actor is a bit immature, but I don't think it's odd or creepy - this is marketing success at it's finest. Women (whatever their age) are responding to what the marketers want them to do.
Under all the hubris about what's acceptable and not, there is a natural tendency for humans to think and fantasize about things that others find unacceptable.
Mind your own thoughts I say, and let everyone think theirs. As long as the fantasy remains a fantasy I have no problem with it.
What is so very different between a woman fantasising over a sparkly teen vampire, and a man fantasizing over an air-brushed teen bikini model/actress/singer etc? They are both completely fictionalised ideas...
The idea of a 30 year old woman swooning over such a guy is rather creepy, however. I get the whole "When I was younger" kind of romance, and maybe the thing isn't so much that grown women are lusting after teen characters, but that grown woman are finding the movie and novel world to be so inundated with relatively simple stories they can follow casually (or fanatically - but no need for a deep personal thought-provoking attachment) are all aimed at teens (because everything needs to be the next big teen attraction, it seems) and so they have nowhere else to go for a SERIES they can sink into for a long while. Adult movies, apart from maybe James Bond and others that may have steamy sex scenes but no lasting relationship, don't seem to come in highly anticipated series, but rather stand-alone films, so perhaps that's where this is stemming from?
I remember watching shows with my mum and we'd jokingly "claim" a character or actor (I preferred blonds, she preferred them dark), and we'd both be too far away from the actor in terms of agand none of it was plausible, but it was fun. Maybe it's just that.
I don't understand what's wrong with our society, as you said, that it's deemed perfectly acceptable for grown women to openly lust after teenaged boys, but if the roles were reversed and it were grown men and teenaged girls, we'd be completely up in arms as a society. I don't know how it is that this has happened, and why we continue to accept and perpetuate it. But seriously, this is not right.
All adults escape in fantasies from time to time, but if a 40 year old man would voice his fantasy of banging ... sorry, romancing a 16 year old girl he'd be regarded as a pervert and shunned by everybody, while if a 40 year old woman does it she's applauded as a strong woman who's in charge of her sexuality.
If adult women want to indulge in a fantasy, what is the harm? Edward is a several-century old vampire(which makes it totally safe to lust after him).
OK so Jacob(the werewolf) is still a teen boy. Well - what if the woman in question imagined herself as a teen girl for her little fantasy?
Much ado over nothing.
Double standards...they may change someday, but not in our lifetime.
I did know two women who loved at least the movies. I gave them a really weird look when they told me they were going to see one of the installments. It was like they were fifteen again and maybe that's it. They're reliving their youth through these movies and books. I don't know. Even when I was fifteen, I wouldn't have read these books. These kinds of books never had any resonance with me. I preferred science fiction at that age.
As for the older women loving it - it says a lot (to me) about their intelligence level. Why is someone still reading books set at a reading level so low? Are they not capable of reading and understanding books for adults? DO they not enjoy reading and just want to stay 'in the know'? And don't say "I don't have time to read grown-up books" because that's total BS. If you have time to watch and follow Law and Order, Castle, etc, you can read an adult novel.
And the attraction part? Besides the fact that dudewhosdating KristinStewart... Pattinson... is really odd-looking (he's a decent actor outside Twilight, though), I don't get it at all. I'll see a teenage boy and think "hey, he's cute... oh, okay, that thought hasn't been ok for fifteen years, Sam, look away" but do I fantasize? ... Ew. Ew ew ew ew ew ew ew. Especially having been a teacher - EW.
I've read two of the Twilight books. These are very clearly teenage stories for teenage kids. They are not very deep, nor do you ever get the sense that the author is trying to tell you something, a larger message.
But you know what? Shrug, I understand when you say the intelligence level is very low in these stories. Fifty Shades of Grey is exactly the same way. In a depressing way though - the fact that Twilight and Fifty Shades are so popular, tells me some very fundamental things about our audience.
They don't necessarily want to exercise their brains over a novel or entertainment. They simply want to read something easy and not need to think about what they're reading or seeing. They don't want to overthink any of it, for any reason. They want the fantasy - the good looking, rich man(which is what Edward IS - a centuries old, unimaginably rich vampire. Fifty shades...the wealthy businessman, etc).