I am very curious about your take on those who attack Twilight for being anti-feminist, specifically for encouraging young girls to engage in male-dependency fantasies.
I’ve heard tons of this sort of criticism from men and women alike, and since you appear to be the de facto voice of feminism on Lesswrong, I would very much appreciate any insight you might be able to give. Are these accusations simply overblown nonsense in your view? If you have already addressed this, would you be kind enough to post a link?
I really don’t want to be the voice of feminism anywhere. However, I’m willing to be the voice of Twilight apologism, so:
Bella is presented as an accident-prone, self-sacrificing human, frequently putting herself in legitimately dangerous situations for poorly thought out reasons. If you read into the dynamics of vampire pairing-off, which I think is sufficiently obvious that I poured it wholesale into my fic, this is sufficient for Edward to go a little nuts. Gender needn’t enter into it. He’s a vampire, nigh-indestructible, and he’s irrevocably in love with someone extremely fragile who will not stop putting herself in myriad situations that he evaluates as dangerous.
He should just turn her, of course, but he has his own issues with considering that a form of death, which aren’t addressed head-on in the canon at all; he only turns her when the alternative is immediate death rather than slow gentle death by aging. So instead of course he resorts to being a moderately controlling “rescuer”—of course he does things like disable her car so she can’t go visiting wolves over his warnings. Wolves are dangerous enough to threaten vampires, and Edward lives in a world where violence is a first or at least a second resort to everything. Bella’s life is more valuable to him than it is to her, and she shows it. It’s a miracle he didn’t go spare to the point of locking her in a basement, given that he refused to make her a vampire. (Am I saying Bella should have meekly accepted that he wanted to manage her life? No, I’m saying she should have gotten over her romantic notion that Edward needed to turn her himself and gotten it over with. After she’s a vampire in canon, she’s no longer dependent—emotionally attached, definitely, and they’re keeping an eye on her to make sure she doesn’t eat anybody, but she’s no longer liable to be killed in a car accident or anything and there’s no further attempt ever to restrict her movement. She winds up being a pivotal figure in the final battle, which no one even suggests keeping her away from.)
Note that gender has nothing to do with any of this. The same dynamic would play out with any unwilling-to-turn-people vampire who mated to any reckless human. It’s fully determined by those personality traits, this vampire tendency, and the relative fragility of humans. So, to hold that this dynamic makes Twilight anti-feminist is to hold one of the following ridiculous positions:
the mate bond as implied in the series is intrinsically anti-feminist (even though there’s nothing obviously stopping it from playing out with gay couples, or female vampires with male humans)
it was somehow irresponsible to choose to write a heterosexual human female perspective character (...?)
it was antifeminist to write a vampire love interest who wasn’t all for the idea of turning his mate immediately (it is completely unclear how Edward’s internal turmoil about whether turning is death has anything to do with feminism in the abstract, so his individual application of this quandary to Bella can’t be much more so)
Other feminist accusations fail trivially. Bella doesn’t get an abortion. So? She doesn’t want one! It’s called “pro-choice”, not “pro-attacking-a-pregnant-woman-because-your-judgment-overrides-hers”. Etcetera.
I haven’t read Twilight, and I don’t criticize books I haven’t read, but I do object in general to the idea that something can’t be ideologically offensive just because it’s justified in-story.
Birth of a Nation, for example, depicts the founding of the Ku Klux Klan as a heroic response to a bestial, aggressive black militia that’s been terrorizing the countryside. In the presence of a bestial, aggressive black militia, forming the KKK isn’t really a racist thing to do. But the movie is still racist as all hell for contriving a situation where forming the KKK makes sense.
Similarly, I’d view a thriller about an evil international conspiracy of Jewish bankers with profound suspicion.
Well, sure, but men who think women need to stay in the kitchen for their own good are. What makes Twilight sound bad is that it’s recreating something that actually happens, and something that plenty of people think should happen more, in a context where it makes more sense.
There are other female characters in the story. Alice can see enough to dance circles around the average opponent. Rosalie runs around doing things. Esme’s kind of ineffectual, but then, her husband isn’t made out to be great shakes in a fight either. Victoria spends two books as the main antagonist. Jane is scary as hell. And—I repeat—the minute Bella is not fragile, there is no more of the objectionable attitude.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that the Edward/Bella dynamic wasn’t written to appeal to patriarchal tendencies, and just arose naturally from the plot. I’m completely unequipped to argue about whether or not this was the case. But I’m pretty confident the reason people who haven’t read the book think it sounds anti-feminist is that we assume that Stephenie Meyer started with the Edward-Bella relationship and built the characters and the world around it.
First of all, thanks for taking the time to give an in-depth response.
I personally have misgivings similar to those expressed by HonoreDB, insofar as it seems that although the fantastical elements of the story do ‘justify’ the situation in a sense, they appear to be designed to do so.
I felt that these sort of plot devices were essentially a post hoc excuse to perpetuate a sort of knight-in-shining-armor dynamic in order to tantalize a somewhat young and ideologically vulnerable audience in the interest of turning a quick buck.
Then again, I may be being somewhat oversensitive, or I may be letting my external biases (I personally don’t care for the young adult fantasy genre) cloud my judgment.
I don’t credit Stephenie Meyer with enough intelligence to have figured out this line of reasoning. I think it’s most likely that Meyer created situations so that Edward could save Bella, and due to either lack of imagination or inability to notice, the preponderance of dangerous situations (and especially dangerous people) ended up very high—high enough to give smarter people ideas like violence is just more common in that world.
That said, my views on Twilight are extremely biased by my social group.
My idea that violence is common in the Twilight world is not primarily fueled by danger to Bella in particular. I was mostly thinking of, say, Bree’s death, or the stories about newborn armies and how they’re controlled, or the fact that the overwhelming majority of vampires commit murder on a regular basis.
I have a friend currently researching this precise topic; she adores reading Twilight and simultaneously thinks that it is completely damaging for young women to be reading. The distinction she drew, as far as I understood it, was that (1) Twilight is a very, very alluring fantasy—one day an immortal, beautiful man falls permanently in love with you for the rest of time and (2) canon!Edward is terrifying when considered not through the lens of Bella. Things like him watching her sleep before they’d spoken properly; he’s not someone you want to hold up as a good candidate for romance.
(I personally have not read it, though I’ve read Alicorn’s fanfic and been told a reasonable amount of detail by friends.)
I am very curious about your take on those who attack Twilight for being anti-feminist, specifically for encouraging young girls to engage in male-dependency fantasies.
I’ve heard tons of this sort of criticism from men and women alike, and since you appear to be the de facto voice of feminism on Lesswrong, I would very much appreciate any insight you might be able to give. Are these accusations simply overblown nonsense in your view? If you have already addressed this, would you be kind enough to post a link?
I really don’t want to be the voice of feminism anywhere. However, I’m willing to be the voice of Twilight apologism, so:
Bella is presented as an accident-prone, self-sacrificing human, frequently putting herself in legitimately dangerous situations for poorly thought out reasons. If you read into the dynamics of vampire pairing-off, which I think is sufficiently obvious that I poured it wholesale into my fic, this is sufficient for Edward to go a little nuts. Gender needn’t enter into it. He’s a vampire, nigh-indestructible, and he’s irrevocably in love with someone extremely fragile who will not stop putting herself in myriad situations that he evaluates as dangerous.
He should just turn her, of course, but he has his own issues with considering that a form of death, which aren’t addressed head-on in the canon at all; he only turns her when the alternative is immediate death rather than slow gentle death by aging. So instead of course he resorts to being a moderately controlling “rescuer”—of course he does things like disable her car so she can’t go visiting wolves over his warnings. Wolves are dangerous enough to threaten vampires, and Edward lives in a world where violence is a first or at least a second resort to everything. Bella’s life is more valuable to him than it is to her, and she shows it. It’s a miracle he didn’t go spare to the point of locking her in a basement, given that he refused to make her a vampire. (Am I saying Bella should have meekly accepted that he wanted to manage her life? No, I’m saying she should have gotten over her romantic notion that Edward needed to turn her himself and gotten it over with. After she’s a vampire in canon, she’s no longer dependent—emotionally attached, definitely, and they’re keeping an eye on her to make sure she doesn’t eat anybody, but she’s no longer liable to be killed in a car accident or anything and there’s no further attempt ever to restrict her movement. She winds up being a pivotal figure in the final battle, which no one even suggests keeping her away from.)
Note that gender has nothing to do with any of this. The same dynamic would play out with any unwilling-to-turn-people vampire who mated to any reckless human. It’s fully determined by those personality traits, this vampire tendency, and the relative fragility of humans. So, to hold that this dynamic makes Twilight anti-feminist is to hold one of the following ridiculous positions:
the mate bond as implied in the series is intrinsically anti-feminist (even though there’s nothing obviously stopping it from playing out with gay couples, or female vampires with male humans)
it was somehow irresponsible to choose to write a heterosexual human female perspective character (...?)
it was antifeminist to write a vampire love interest who wasn’t all for the idea of turning his mate immediately (it is completely unclear how Edward’s internal turmoil about whether turning is death has anything to do with feminism in the abstract, so his individual application of this quandary to Bella can’t be much more so)
Other feminist accusations fail trivially. Bella doesn’t get an abortion. So? She doesn’t want one! It’s called “pro-choice”, not “pro-attacking-a-pregnant-woman-because-your-judgment-overrides-hers”. Etcetera.
I haven’t read Twilight, and I don’t criticize books I haven’t read, but I do object in general to the idea that something can’t be ideologically offensive just because it’s justified in-story.
Birth of a Nation, for example, depicts the founding of the Ku Klux Klan as a heroic response to a bestial, aggressive black militia that’s been terrorizing the countryside. In the presence of a bestial, aggressive black militia, forming the KKK isn’t really a racist thing to do. But the movie is still racist as all hell for contriving a situation where forming the KKK makes sense.
Similarly, I’d view a thriller about an evil international conspiracy of Jewish bankers with profound suspicion.
I think it’s relevant here that vampires are not real.
Well, sure, but men who think women need to stay in the kitchen for their own good are. What makes Twilight sound bad is that it’s recreating something that actually happens, and something that plenty of people think should happen more, in a context where it makes more sense.
There are other female characters in the story. Alice can see enough to dance circles around the average opponent. Rosalie runs around doing things. Esme’s kind of ineffectual, but then, her husband isn’t made out to be great shakes in a fight either. Victoria spends two books as the main antagonist. Jane is scary as hell. And—I repeat—the minute Bella is not fragile, there is no more of the objectionable attitude.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that the Edward/Bella dynamic wasn’t written to appeal to patriarchal tendencies, and just arose naturally from the plot. I’m completely unequipped to argue about whether or not this was the case. But I’m pretty confident the reason people who haven’t read the book think it sounds anti-feminist is that we assume that Stephenie Meyer started with the Edward-Bella relationship and built the characters and the world around it.
Alicorn,
First of all, thanks for taking the time to give an in-depth response.
I personally have misgivings similar to those expressed by HonoreDB, insofar as it seems that although the fantastical elements of the story do ‘justify’ the situation in a sense, they appear to be designed to do so.
I felt that these sort of plot devices were essentially a post hoc excuse to perpetuate a sort of knight-in-shining-armor dynamic in order to tantalize a somewhat young and ideologically vulnerable audience in the interest of turning a quick buck.
Then again, I may be being somewhat oversensitive, or I may be letting my external biases (I personally don’t care for the young adult fantasy genre) cloud my judgment.
I don’t credit Stephenie Meyer with enough intelligence to have figured out this line of reasoning. I think it’s most likely that Meyer created situations so that Edward could save Bella, and due to either lack of imagination or inability to notice, the preponderance of dangerous situations (and especially dangerous people) ended up very high—high enough to give smarter people ideas like violence is just more common in that world.
That said, my views on Twilight are extremely biased by my social group.
My idea that violence is common in the Twilight world is not primarily fueled by danger to Bella in particular. I was mostly thinking of, say, Bree’s death, or the stories about newborn armies and how they’re controlled, or the fact that the overwhelming majority of vampires commit murder on a regular basis.
I have a friend currently researching this precise topic; she adores reading Twilight and simultaneously thinks that it is completely damaging for young women to be reading. The distinction she drew, as far as I understood it, was that (1) Twilight is a very, very alluring fantasy—one day an immortal, beautiful man falls permanently in love with you for the rest of time and (2) canon!Edward is terrifying when considered not through the lens of Bella. Things like him watching her sleep before they’d spoken properly; he’s not someone you want to hold up as a good candidate for romance.
(I personally have not read it, though I’ve read Alicorn’s fanfic and been told a reasonable amount of detail by friends.)