Twi-Hard with a Vengeance

Dating is stressful enough when you’re 30 but it super-duper sucks when your mom won’t let you get highlights and all the boys in your school still smell like worms. Wouldn’t it be nice if someone really hot would come along, fall in love with you, beat up your enemies and make life a little easier? Would it be nicer if we could magically take away all of the ridiculous dating pressure that our society places on 12 year olds and make them all love themselves as is? OF COURSE. Let me know when you get to that. 
Tomorrow night I am going to see Twilight: Eclipse and I’m very excited because there will be six packs and wolf packs, blood drinkers and vodka drinks (pre party!), and lust and romance and campy overwrought silliness. Bring it on. Of course, if the Internet has anything to say about it, looking forward to sparkling vampires on the big screen makes me at best a huge loser and at worst personally responsible for the downfall of cinema.
I’m not going to argue that the Twilight movies (or the books for that matter) are high art but the assertion that they are any worse then the rest of the summer blockbusters seems inherently sexist. Nobody seems angry when Pirates of the Caribbean or Ironman or Spiderman 3 (or anything else primarily marketed to teen boys) drag in buckets of money at the box office even though it’s generally accepted that none of these films will be honored by The Academy. But with last week’s record breaking release of the third movie in the Twilight series the Internet seems awash with backlash.
There are a lot of real issues in the Twilight-verse that are ripe to bitch about: 

• The writing isn’t challenging.
• The story perpetuates the idea that a person (in particular a female person) cannot be whole without a partner (for more on this topic read Gloria Steinem's brilliant chapter on love vs. romance in A Revolution From Within). 
• Ain’t nobody getting laid.
• Two different adult characters fall in romantic love with babies.   

But I don’t think any of these reasons are the real source of the rampant Twilight hatred. I think people are hating on Twilight because the boys don’t want to share the marque with girl-y romance movies. And I think all of us are a lot too quick to brand almost anything made entirely for girls as lame. 

Most of the Twilight complaints seem obsessed with the mushiness of the central romance between Edward and Bella. For those not in the know: the handsome vampire falls madly in love with the regular girl (without even talking to her!) and dedicates himself to her for life (which in his case is FOREVER). She can’t do anything to make him stop loving her. He wants to protect her and watch her sleep and drink every little drop of her yummy yummy blood. I’m going to assume that most of the haters were never 8th grade girls so they should trust me when I say that this shit would be super hot if you had a vagina and were in junior high.

Also confusing is the anger over Stephanie Meyer’s tweaking of the Vampire myth (as evidenced by the millions of geeks yelling about “real” vampires not sparkling). How does one go about establishing a “real” version of a completely fictional creature that no one knows the original source for? (Aside: here’s an interesting comparison of vampire traits). Obviously the real issue is not the sparkle (poor quality special effects notwithstanding) but (I’m guessing?) the feminizing of a scary monster. Stephanie Meyer can’t be blamed exclusively for the concept of pretty pretty vampires falling in love with mortal girls (Buffy? Interview with a Vampire?) and boys can hardly lay claim to the vampire character (True Blood? Bram Stoker’s Dracula? Dark Shadows? Was any of this shit made for dudes?). 
One has to ask, “Why are the boys so angry?” One theory (thanks to my coworker Aaron) is that the geeks don’t like having Comic Con taken over by girls. While I can understand not wanting the ladies to see you dressed up as an anime character (living in glass houses much?) I can’t help but think that training a bunch of young girls to like fantasy stories will surely lead to more geeks getting laid. Even Kevin Smith is down with that shit. 

Next time you find yourself angrily ranting about a piece of pop culture you might consider that you’re not the target demographic. (Personally I find Veggie Tales, Saw IV and The Bridges of Madison County all irredeemable.) You might also consider that the fantasy of every pasty white pre-teen boy was already made into a movie back in 1985. And hey, boys -- if you’re still feeling the rage, rest easy knowing that teen heartthrobs rarely fare well in the end. As proof here’s a recent image of my own personal adolescent love interest. Smoking.

Got Vampire Sex? No.

Vampire Porn spoiler alert.

The Twilight books contain no sex. This is especially shocking because the books are essentially paragraph after paragraph of foreplay with a little blood letting mixed in for spice.

I'm only half way through book four but let me summarize the plot for those of you who are not drooling over the books between multiple viewing of High School Musical 3:

Angst. Mope. Oh Hottie. Ahh Vampire! Mmmmm Vampire! Love. Love. Love. Love. TRAGEDY. Depression. Doom. Whining. Angst. LOVE. Love. Maybe they'll get it on. Love. Love. Minor scary bit. Survived! Totally time for sex now. LOVE. Oh. I see we're going to be all chivalrous about the pootang. FINE. Wedding. Yawn. OK SEXY TIME IS NOW. Skinny dipping! HERE COMES THE BOOTY! Morning After. Wait.... let me go back a page. wtf? W? T? F? I WANT MY NAUGHTY VAMPIRE SMUT!

Now obviously I was super upset to find out that the books would be skipping over all of the good stuff, but mostly I was worried about the children. I know we usually give all of the hormone credit to teenage boys, but naughty girls need love too. And while the lads have Hustler and The Girls Next Door and looking up "fine art" in the encyclopedia, lassies are left with far fewer options for scratching the hormonal itch, so I think it's especially cruel for these books to be such a cunt tease.

I may be 30 years old, but I promise you that I am very in touch with the pulse of adolescence. A friend once even told me that I was perpetually 15 years old and, though this is the biggest insult ever and a curse worse than death, it makes me uniquely qualified to speak on behalf of teenage girls everywhere in the following letter to Stefanie Meyers, the author of the Twilight series:

Dear Stef,

I am 14 years old. My life already sucks A LOT. I have acne and braces and all of the boys in my school are losers. My parents have installed Net Nanny™ on the family computer. It will be at least 4 years until I go off to college where, god willing, no one will ever find out that my mom still only buys me Barbie panties because college boys are way too mature to pants someone in the lunch line. If they even have lunch lines in college which they probably do not because everyone is too busy drinking coffee and writing poetry to care about tater tots. Anyways. All I wanted. Nay, all I NEEDED to get me through high school was a little sweet vicarious vampire loving. Why must you deny me this you evil Mormon harpy?

Sincerly,
Every 14 Year Old Girl In America (except the slutty ones)

But this letter speaks not only for the girl next door but for the girl next door to 1601 Pennsylvania Ave. According to US Weekly, Barack is reading Twilight with his daughters. I'm going to ignore the fact that this is the single creepiest thing since Purity Balls and just say that I am 100% certain that Barack does not want to have to teach his little girl about the vampire loving and that he would be super happy if Ms. Meyer's would just do that for him. Unfortunately, she hates freedom.

Certain that there were some patriotic perverts out on the web, I did what any independent adult with unfettered access to the internet would do. I began searching for fan fiction. Surely someone had taken care of Meyer's oversight with a little vampire P in the human V short story action and perhaps my good deed of the millennium could be distributing this smut to junior high students nationwide. So I sorted through every Twilight themed entry on the Adult Fan Fic site (putting myself at great risk of spoiling the ending of book four I might note). There were werewolf on vampire stories, group vampire orgy stories, vampires as cowboy lover stories and even one vampire on Hogwarts entry. (I AM NOT KIDDING ). But apparently NO ONE has thought to write the most obvious and necessary of all perverted internet content: hot young virgin gets more than bitten.

And so I say, Internet Perverts, This is your big chance to do what Ms. Meyers could not! The Twilight movie comes out today, this shit is about to go VIRAL and you could ride its coat tails. Get to ye olde keyboard and start typing up that smut because I promise you that whomever can capture the passion of "Edward and Bella: Horizontal Feasting" will be the most famous creepy dude on the tubes. You might even get a cabinet post.