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

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

[kitsune-kitana.livejournal.com]

This all went down in Rockdale county in Georgia. There's a pretty pitiful Frontline expose on it floating around.

I don't think that anyone who has responded to this post believes that parents and society aren't an enormous part of the problem we're discussing--the thing is that these adults are condoning this kind of gender expression because they aren't providing the necessary framework for their kids to question these images. I don't know that I would use the word "dangerous," but this book is even worse because it's being promoted by a patriarchical religious leadership and an enormous network of adults who, I think, don't feel the need to contextualize the ideas in Twilight with--for lack of a better word--other gender discourses.

"Teenagers being stupid is consistently pushed into a corner of other people's responsibility instead of the parents from teh beginning grounding them in what they want their kids to be."

Yet just a couple replies before, you were saying that teenagers doing stupid things wasn't new or unique. Then you say, "The girls were emulating porn and not responding to stimulus combined with biological urges." So was this the parents' responsibilities or just impulses that teenagers would've carried out regardless? Yeah, teenagers can be idiots, but when teenagers are engaging in unprotected sex orgies, that has nothing to do with "biological urges," and everything to do with girls and guys wanting to embody the uber-masculinity and femininity they see on a TV screen.

"Everything doesn't have to be about making sure all messages are crafted to current ideology--sometimes, we, these girls, everyone, can take enjoyment and let it stay enjoyment instead of the constant barrage that nothing they do, read, say, is good enough or mature enough or smart enough or worthy enough."

Now, I think this may be an inflammatory move, but I feel like this idea has the same associations to it as white privilege does in society. As a minority female--and reflective of the research I do in my department right now--I don't get the privilege of not thinking, "How does what I do reflect on my minority group as a whole?" Unfortunately, being considered the lesser sex/gender/race/ethnicity/etc. comes along with a great deal of self-consciousness as to how that facet of my identity is represented to society as a whole.

[seperis.livejournal.com]

That was sarcasm. It started with Teenagers doing stupid things. That's new and unique. The girls were emulating porn and not responding to stimulus combined with biological urges. Without porn, they never would have engaged in sexual activity, as without society, there would not be stupid sexual activity.

The question is, if the porn didn't exist, would people have sex for stupid reasons anyway? Yes. Porn can be an excuse along with anything else, but again, it's blaming the video game and thinking that removing that will stop the violence. It doesn't. Removing Twilight doesn't stop bad or abusive relationships from existence. It won't.

Now, I think this may be an inflammatory move, but I feel like this idea has the same associations to it as white privilege does in society. As a minority female--and reflective of the research I do in my department right now--I don't get the privilege of not thinking, "How does what I do reflect on my minority group as a whole?" Unfortunately, being considered the lesser sex/gender/race/ethnicity/etc. comes along with a great deal of self-consciousness as to how that facet of my identity is represented to society as a whole.

Not inflammatory; your approach is as valid as mine. If you feel the cigar is always a metaphor, rock on. I don't agree, and I think it's damaging to constantly and consistently call out every cigar as a metaphor, fully as much as not calling out anything at all. It simplifies the issue from "There is behavior here we need to examine" to "if only Stephanie Meyers or etc author would stop writing books I find questionable, all things would be awesome and non-problematic." Girls literally modeling Twilight in their real lives when they come of age would be terrifying adn wrong. Teenage girls indulging in wish fulfillment with unicorns and vampires is normal behavior when exploring their sexuality.

[fyrdrakken]

Removing Twilight doesn't stop bad or abusive relationships from existence. It won't.

Here's a thought I just had, referring back to your upthread point about Twilight not causing any problems for anyone who didn't already have issues with fantasy vs. reality, stalking vs. healthy relationships, etc. (sidestepping the whole thing about how the media we're immersed in as a culture -- fictional and non-fictional -- both reflect the world as the producers see it and reinforce those attitudes in the less-aware consumers, since that's a long-assed topic for another time): Being ga-ga about Twilight -- and not making disclaimers about knowing what's wrong with it but liking it anyway as literary junk food -- can be seen as an indicator of a person who actually doesn't have functional detectors for "healthy relationships," because so many of the comments from some of the fans are coming from such a jaw-dropping place. It's not so much that Twilight is itself a horrific piece of literature, it's that it's attracting so many horrifyingly clueless individuals and aggregating them and letting them reinforce each other on their wrongness, and the cumulative effect is what's creeping a lot of people out who would otherwise just shrug and toss the books aside and move on. We didn't realize there were so many people out there who really didn't understand "What's wrong with this picture?" until they all got together and started squeeing.