"No Shame in Loving Twilight"

The Washington Post has a great article on intelligent, literary women loving the Twilight Saga and not being ashamed.

All across the country, there were women who managed to avoid Stephenie Meyer’s
series about a star-crossed human/vampire teen couple. (Vampire Edward lusts for
mortal Bella, but also for her blood; the books are less plot than endless
yearning). They resisted the first three books — refused to read them, didn’t
know they existed — and the lunacy that was “Breaking Dawn.”

“Twilight”
came for the tweens, then for the moms of tweens, then for the co-workers who
started wearing those ridiculous Team Jacob shirts, and the resisters said
nothing, because they thought “Twilight” could not come for them. They were too
literary. They didn’t do vampires. They were feminists.

One minute
you’re a functioning member of society, the next you’re succumbing to the dark
side, wondering how deep you’re willing to go — and what that longing says about
you.

In “Twilight,” Edward Cullen waffled between wooing and eating new
girl Bella Swan. He chose love. In “New Moon,” the darkest installment of the
series, Edward becomes convinced that his girlfriend would be safer without him,
so he dumps her in order to protect her and then vanishes. Bella, catatonic from
the pain, finds solace in Jacob Black, the devoted friend who has just learned
he is a werewolf, and their relationship grows deeper, and this description is
utterly, utterly useless because none of it gets at what the “Twilight” series
is actually about, which is being 17.

It’s a time capsule to the
breathless period when the world could literally end depending on whether your
lab partner touched your hand, when every conversation was so agonizing and so
thrilling (and the border between the two emotions was so thin), and your heart
was bigger and more delicate than it is now, and everything was just so much
more.


It’s just a movie. It’s just a movie. It’s just a movie.

It’s just a movie — well, movie and books — but it’s a movie that’s come
to represent such big things, from the future of girls to what women really want
(they want men who will shut up and come to watch “New Moon,” and not ask how
many points they’re getting for the evening).

Men feel perfectly
comfortable slathering their chests in greasepaint and screaming like half-naked
ninnies at football games, but women too often over-explain their passions,
apologizing for being too girly or liking something too trashy.

The
grown women of “Twilight” will no longer apologize. They will go to those
midnight “New Moon” screenings.

But as for telling them how silly
they’re being, how Edward is not real and neither is Jacob, how their brains are
rotting and their sense of reality is being distorted and this obsession is
crazy, just crazy? There’s really no need.

They already know.

You must read the entire article here!

Source: WashingtonPost Photo: Breaking-Dawn.fr via newmoonmovie