i'd like to point out first, my del.icio.us tags include amtdi and non-con

[seperis]

You know, I thought I talked myself down off this one, because frankly, Twilight is not great literature and mounting a defense takes up valuable time reading non-con amtdi porn.

But you know, I just feel that inspired, plus I ran out of Dean/Castiel reading and my son still has Twilight in his locker. Go figure.

I have to know something; did I miss the memo that I'm supposed to be ashamed of being twelve? My apologies; see, when I was twelve? I never really considered to form my actions to meet an arbitrary standard that would come into existence twenty years later on my reading habits, because that? Would have totally pulled the Gor novels right out of my hot little hands.

As in, please to be putting down your AMTDI non-con for a second while ranting on how Twilight is ruining young girls. I will totally be there when fandom as a whole stops finding aliens made them do it rape as a fun and lighthearted fanfic pasttime. I mean, I will be there, but I'll still be writing it. Hell, throw in eroticized slave-fic with idealized sexual slavery and falling in love with your enslaver controlling boyfriend who stalks you...wait.

Writer responsibility comes up a lot with this, which I suppose is fair when one is writing cross-alien-species sexual hijinks and one is struggling to portray those sensitivity, or the reality of slave trafficking in the modern world, or hell, magical healing cock after rape and lets toss in mpreg for kicks, because there's a genre that's incredibly sensitive and socially conscious. I have zero interest in writer responsibility, to be honest, except for one key points--did they tell a story? That's it; that's where it starts and stops, with some codicils of audience. Twilight was readable to a huge group of people.

Maybe the mystery is the plotline? Because I agree; I cannot imagine why anyone would enjoy a fantasy novel about two people obsessively in love with each other and would do anything to be together.

You may pile your under the bed romance novels over to the left, please; lets do this right. Let's blackball the entire romance novel industry already. I want petitions against VC Andrews, Johanna Lindsay, Judith McNaught, Catherine Coulter, Virginia Henley (Okay, I could stand to lose her), and anything set in Viking England with a wee Saxon lass.

Seriously. I get hating them for being bad, as beauty is in the eye of the beholder; shaming young girls for something they've found to love is edging right into the reason I'm trying to stop myself from ever using the term "Like a twelve year old girl" again in any slash fic I write. Which will probably be something I'll have to pick up on beta because comparisons to teenage girls as insults to men is surprisingly common.

Please lay off the girls. And remind me again how Seeds of Yesterday ended. For the life of me, I couldn't find it with my other VC Andrews work.

Comments

[ranalore.livejournal.com]

I suspect a lot of the vitriol aimed at the book and its audience is less about either book or audience and more about the social conditioning and attitudes the book represents (plus a fair chunk of LDS-bashing under the mistaken impression we're all Mormons, because it's always open season on my religion). It strikes me as pretty similar to the hatred of female characters that's actually about how said characters represent the misogynistic, pro-patriarchal leanings of their creators, but the expression of the rejection of the message comes out as hatred of the character, which feeds into the misogynistic atmosphere that gave birth to such a character in the first place. A lot of people want teenage girls to have other choices, to have the awareness that the romance of Twilight is not a healthy one, to avoid abusive relationships. Unfortunately, the expression of this is shaming of young women's reading choices, which...only feeds into the social environment where a book with such an abusive relationship as the central romance would be so very popular, and upheld by a certain segment of the population as some kind of ideal to which young women should aspire.

The thing is, I was partially raised in the Mormon subculture, wherein the abusive, controlling Edward/Bella dynamic is presented as the only option to which a "good" young woman should aspire. I was lucky in that I had exposure to other cultures and knew it was propoganda. I'd like the girls reading Twilight to have that same awareness, and part of that awareness is often going to be shame or regret about enjoying the book at twelve. As long as that means a girl knows she doesn't have to marry the creepy kid who won't quit staring in gym class when she's seventeen, I'm okay with that.

[seperis.livejournal.com]

I don't disagree with either, necessarily, up until the point we choose to say the book is the problem, and not the people who conflate one person's romance with another person's real life.

[ranalore.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I don't think the book is the problem. I think it's badly written, and certainly it reinforces an ideology I find problematic, and I think both things should be acknowledged (of course, I also think "aliens made them do it" should be acknowledged as problematic, and usually is). At the same time, it bugs me how the target audience's age and gender are explicitly tied to the badness in many criticisms. I mean, come on, has anyone paid attention to what twelve-year old boys read? How about the middle-aged male readership that keeps people like John Ringo in book contracts? And really, it wouldn't take much effort at all to connect the popularity of Ringo and Meyer and the ways in which they both feed into and represent the same set of misogynistic attitudes. So why is Meyer's audience so much more of a focus for attack than Ringo's?

[seperis.livejournal.com]

Bingo. The impression that girls are weaker and need the protection coming from the feminist side is freaking me out badly.