Jordan Buckley over the Resurgence commented on my earlier post on the Twilight vampire series linking to this interesting article from Wired magazine about unfortunate lessons girls learn from New Moon and the rest of the Twilight books and movies.
These start with:
1.) If a boy is aloof, stand-offish, ignores you or is just plain rude, it is because he is secretly in love with you — and you are the point of his existence.
These “lessons” move on to darker, abuse-enabling themes, such as:
7.) It is extremely romantic to put yourself in dangerous situations in order to see your ex-boyfriend again. It’s even more romantic to remember the sound of his voice when he yelled at you.
I don’t think this is unique (at all) to the Twilight series, but this is an area to which we ought to pay more attention. It’s also an area where Christians and some feminists can agree, at least on diagnosing the problem.
Images given to our girls and young women often mask a pagan and predatory patriarchy, one in which female worth is seen satanically in terms of sexual availability and attractiveness to men.
The answer isn’t just to “deconstruct” these images. The answer means providing a compelling counter-narrative about the glory of womanhood.
