Are the ‘Twilight’ books ‘girl porn’?

I just got back from a week-long family vacation with limited internet access, so I’ve spent the morning trying to get caught up on current events (wait, we seriously had an earthquake here?). Wading through my feedreader, an article by Kathleen Gilbert over at LifeSiteNews caught my eye (via David Goldman at First Thoughts) — because of the conversation over on Deal’s column today about Father Euteneuer and the Twilight books, as well as some of the comments made on my post about pornography from a couple of weeks ago.

Gilbert argues that, though the Twilight books have been praised for their emphasis on chastity and self-control, the storytelling in both the books and the movies actually underscores a definite “girl porn” effect:

[T]he book’s narrative reflects what appears to be a mistaking of healthy boundaries for a wooden set of “thou shalt nots” detached from a realistic understanding of sexual impurity. For example, despite the prohibition against sensual kissing – an obvious and admirable moral in the stories – the books constantly use very vivid imagery in the tradition of seedy romance novels, building to scenes of throbbing sexual tension that are just as explicit, if not more so, than a typical kiss scene. A fine example of this is Bella and Edward’s first kiss; in both the movie and book version, the scene is made explicit (in the uncut film version, extremely so) by the exaggerated sexual tension of what should have been, in real life, a simple, chaste kiss. In these scenes, it’s obvious that the belief that lovers literally “can’t touch each other for fear it will lead to sex” is no exaggeration.

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Thus this false idea of chastity contributes significantly to the series’ “girl porn” effect, despite the lack of actual sex – something that might not be apparent to men, but is all too clear to women. Touted for promoting chastity, the books in fact offer a combo of emotional titillation and steamy sexual near-misses, all bound together with a steady undercurrent of rape fantasy, that is deadly for women. These elements, as in sex-laden romantic novels, are geared toward over-stimulating female emotions and sending women hurtling towards an unhealthy escapism. Instead of the selfish male ideal of regular pornography, i.e., the perfect-bodied female delivering the ultimate sexual climax, women reading Twilight can find themselves craving a different and equally selfish fantasy: the perfectly “intense” male delivering the ultimate emotional climax.

I haven’t read Meyers’ books, but I did see the first two movies (long story). I was too busy rolling my eyes to notice what Gilbert describes, though there’s no denying that the high-school drama factor was turned up to eleven. But is it a more insidious problem than simply mirroring your Typical Teen Angst? You tell me.

Basically, my thoughts on the series are pretty well summed up by the following guide.

 

 

Author

  • Margaret Cabaniss

    Margaret Cabaniss is the former managing editor of Crisis Magazine. She joined Crisis in 2002 after graduating from the University of the South with a degree in English Literature and currently lives in Baltimore, Maryland. She now blogs at SlowMama.com.

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