An Observation On What “Twilight” Is, and What It Is Not

Within the first ten pages of Twilight: New Moon, I was shaking my head in annoyance, disgust, and disappointment. Edward is still a controlling jerk, Bella is still a spineless girl with a celebrity-worship crush on her boyfriend, the narrative is bland, the dialog slow, and the supporting characters flat. Shocking, I know.

There’s a popular theory about Twilight and Meyer’s religion that’s been hashed out plenty on the internet before. To wit: it’s a Mormon treatise on young love, sexual abstinence, and the idyllic heroic, temptation-resisting male partner. Plausible, but I disagree.*

If Meyer’s faith really was directly influencing her writing, I’d expect the Vampires-don’t-have-souls plot point to be played out with a little more focus and emphasis. Among the inane teenage banter Meyer tries to pass off as dialog throughout books 2 and 3, it’s established that Edward refuses to turn Bella into a vampire because he thinks her soul will be damned (notably, Carlisle, father-figure of the Cullen family, is less certain about his spiritual fate). You would expect that a religious writer would consider the fate of the undead soul a pretty damn salient plot point. As far as I know, Meyer doesn’t provide a resolution to this at the end. Bella just happily joins the Cullen family, destined to forever look super-awesome with her glittery skin (Bella Swan becomes a swan, and that name still makes me roll my eyes every time I type it).

Furthermore, though Bella and Edward’s relationship is chaste throughout most of the series, it still has a somewhat creepy dynamic. He makes her decisions for her. He drives her car for her. He rarely gives her any choice in determining their  after-school or weekend plans (when he does, it’s highlighted as a special occasion, or as him being nice). He frequently talks down to her, or speaks to the other Cullens about her as though she’s not in the room. And Bella, for her part, seems to take comfort in her decisions being made for her. What I’m saying is that there’s a strong dominance/submission aspect to their relationship, one that goes beyond mere “chivalry,” and may not have even been intentional when Meyer was writing it.

In other words: Twilight is a vampired-up, sexed-down version of The Secretary.

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*I haven’t read all the books, because they’re terrible. My understanding of the plot is informed by the films and Wikipedia. Also, I don’t know much about Mormonism, other than it’s an offshoot of Christianity and Mormons are usually really nice people.

“We have got to find another way to obliterate this population.”

Dear god, yes.

The [quick] Thing About Hate Crimes

Note: criticisms that the white hetero lady is going to solve racism and win the internet may be warranted. Whatevs.

Generally, I think hate-crime legislation is the kind of feel-good bone the Left-ish half of the Political Party of Power (there’s only one) likes to throw to the progressive half of the base every now and then. Libertarian legal scholars have laid out the case against said laws far better and more eloquently than I could, but here’s my stab at something coherent:

The thing about hate crimes is this: All violent crimes are hate crimes. All instances of unprovoked violence are crimes against humanity, in as much as they are against one human. If some vile brute is kicking the crap out of somebody else while muttering the word “f*g,” the severity of that crime doesn’t hinge on the sexual identity of the victim. The problem you are dealing with is that some half-evolved boob with an impulse control problem feels entitled to pummel the face of a fellow human being. In many cases, the problem is that said boob has, in his mind, de-humanized a fellow human being. Making this more illegal doesn’t solve the issue, and it gives the Right side of the PPoP one more issue with which to compose obtuse, vulgar talking points for their imagined “culture war.” (And let’s be real, Left – your eagerness for greater power – to protect people! – makes you a far better analogue for Big Brother than the Right, their dislike of gays and slutty women notwithstanding).

If local police officers refuse to give proper attention to transgendered victims of violence, or they refuse to investigate the murder of a “suspicious” black teen, then the rules that protect bad cops need to be scrapped. The problem of bad cops being sheltered is systemic, and it’s a biggie. As are problems like widespread dislike for minorities, or American culture’s hard-on for violence. Reforming these kind of institutions is a project for the long-haul; patting yourself on the back because you convinced a roomful of former/future lobbyists to pass a bill doesn’t fix what’s broken.

But as my favorite author was fond of saying: “Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.”

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Here’s a bit of positive news: It looks like public outcry has convinced the Florida State Attorney to launch a grand jury investigation of Trayvon Martin’s murder. Well done, humanity. Sometimes, when I think you can’t get any stupider, you go and do something like this…

Friday Miscellany: The Fourteenth Book of Bokonon

Title: What Can a Thoughtful Man Hope for Mankind on Earth, Given the Experience of the Last Million Years?

 

Only Verse: Nothing.

 

I hope one day I'm as insightful, clever and poignant as Kurt Vonnegut was.

Media Narratives

At Colorlines, Jamilah King asks:

But the [Kony 2012] campaign’s visibility is forcing to the surface some uneasy questions about race, political organizing, and the Internet. Namely: Must nuanced political issues be narrowed down to their simplest forms in order for the public to digest them? Can that issue work without perpetuating deeply problematic caricatures about race? And what, in the long run, does it mean to “win”?

The answers to those questions: 1. Yes. 2. No, because deeply problematic racial caricatures arise from boiling away the mind-blowing complexity real-world human events. 3. 79,000,000 friggin’ video views, apparently.

Boiling away all the nuance and packaging up a story in its simplest form is what the media does. Heck, it’s what most of us do. As Tyler Cowen said, the story is a way of packaging information into something more easily-digestible. There are good guys and bad guys, and a coherent structure with a beginning, middle, climax and resolution. Audiences know what they expect and that is all they are prepared to believe in.*

The media, and people who work in media, have an uncanny ability to construct artificial  narratives out of human affairs. Current events are bent around a 24-hour news cycle. Sexy stories that insinuate deception, conspiracy, or simulate the plot of a George Clooney geopolitical thriller are all the rage. Government officials release unpopular statements on Friday afternoons because the press has already left the office and is on the way to the beach for the weekend. The most ridiculous, ridiculous, presidential candidates command media attention despite having no damned sense about any of the issues.

Now here’s the scary part: all of the above happens despite the fact that Americans are more literate, more connected, and yes, more intelligent than we have ever been at any point in human history. Think about that for a while.

He may be a killer, but I hear he gets a hell of a stew on.

*Reference

A Facepalm Moment

Yesterday, IWF’s Anna Rittgers explained how the Left is conflating “birth control paid for by somebody else” with “access to birth control.” While I think the actual feminist organizations involved (NARAL and others) are legitimately concerned with women’s reproductive rights, I agree with Anna and Lee Doren that this is an issue about insurance claims, wealth transfers, and whether the government can compel private companies to sell certain products, not reproductive rights.*

Of course, leave it to the internet to ruin my mood. A facebook user left this comment on the story:

You don’t need “birth control” if you don’t have sex with everyone you go out on a date, then move in together and pretend to be married without real commitment.

Fun Fact: The staggering amount of woman-disparaging, sexist tripe frequently espoused by folks on the Right is another reason why this fight over insurance premiums and birth control is seen as a women’s rights issue. Another thing the birth control fight isn’t, is an appropriate place to vent your uninformed reckons about how the way women dress or date results in more unwanted pregnancies. I mean, for f**k’s sake.

See, this is why I don’t vote (or more accurately, why I can’t be bothered to vote for either of the two duopolist political parties). Romanticize democracy and the duty to vote all you want, I see the act as a symbolic endorsement of the 2-party – or really, 1-party – status quo. Just because there are two options shoved in front of your face doesn’t automatically mean that one is right and the other is wrong. Hell, it doesn’t even mean that one is less wrong than the other.

Screw it. Where’s my lifejacket? I’m starting my own seastead.

*of course, the never-ending political battle over whether or not abortions should be illegal, birth control should be provided by the state, etc. makes it difficult to frame this issue in any other way. Of COURSE progressive feminists are going to see this as an encroachment into the fight for reproductive rights, while social conservatives see it as a step toward state-sanctioned and state-financed abortions. I really try to embrace the idea that people can be surprisingly smart when you give them a chance; politics and the media slap this hope down every freaking day.

Feminism and The Schwyzer Situation

I’ve not been closely following the fight that’s unfolded between internet feminists* and Hugo Schwyzer over the last several weeks. I didn’t even know who Schwyzer was until I stumbled upon his column at Jezebel last month about the redemptive aspects of the ‘facial,’ – which is admittedly not the best way to be introduced to a male feminist’s (or any feminist’s) writing.

So what happened? Schwyzer, a gender studies professor and prolific feminist writer, did an interview with Feministe that drew attention to his spotty past, which includes several relationships with students and a drug-addled, attempted murder-suicide of an ex-girlfriend. Several internet feminists responded with demands to know why a man with an abusive past was allowed such a prominent platform in the feminist movement. Schwyzer has since been banned from/erased by several feminist blogs. Around the same time, he left the Good Men Project over philosophical differences with its founder regarding the essential natures of men and women.

The fight over Schwyzer has become something of a proxy battle in the ongoing fight over the role of (hetero) men in the feminist movement. Many feminists do not allow the openly male-identified to participate in their blog communities. They argue that they want to create a “safe space” for women, or that they have no time for moderating comments that threaten rape and violence, or the “mansplainers” who think they can tell women how the world works and *poof* the problems of feminism will be solved. And some well-meaning men grow frustrated with the frequent “priv-checking” levied toward them in communities that do allow their participation. If feminism is about liberating women from male oppression, gender roles, gender-based expectations (whether legal or cultural), and more broadly about liberating people from these constructs, then clearly there is a place for men in the broader movement. It also suggests that a reasonable condition for participation is that men, along with all people higher on the privilege chain, better be prepared to spend more time and effort deconstructing and examining how privilege and power work.

Elizabeth Nolan Brown recently had some choice words on the matter:

I mean, I say, the more men the merrier! Let’s all talk about birth control and blow jobs and the difference between domestic violence and rape fantasies. Gender issues, marriage equality and the contradictions inherent in trying to be good men and good women in a culture with completely schizophrenic ideas about femininity and masculinity. These are problems for all us.

As for Schwyzer, from the little bit that I’ve read, I kinda dig his shtick. I will support any guy’s attempt to dismantle the hierarchic, dominance-based social structure that too many men grow up with, and replace it with one based on self-knowledge, empathy, and treating women like dignified human beings and not “keepers of the sex resource/baby machines.” The mainstream feminist movement (which I suppose is something like Beltway libertarians or the liberal/conservative elite) has been accused in the past of silencing people with whom they disagree. I do not contend that this is a problem with feminists, so much as it is a problem with human beings who ascend to positions of power or high social status.

Libertarians can tell you a thing or two about making the perfect the enemy of the good. When it comes to Schwyzer and feminism, my outlook is similar to Bryan Caplan’s when Paul Krugman won the Nobel Prize: “The world’s most famous left-wing economist… Publicly and articulately advocates free trade” and “Identifies anti-globalization activists as the enemies of the world’s poor.” The number of popular male feminist writers who actively court men’s attention is similar to the number of popular pundits who advocate for globalization: not large.

*For the record, I’m not part of the “internet feminist” school, though much of my writing over the last couple of years has reflected my feminist views. There are a few feminist writers that I follow, including Twisty Faster, Kate Clancy, and Sady Doyle (before she left TigerBeatdown in the hands of a bunch of B-stringers), but it’s not a community I engage heavily with, in large part because of its overlap with progressive politics. Instead, I am an internet bloviator who holds feminist views, as well as libertarian views, agnostic/atheist views, artistic views, Bokononist views, etc.

Online Gaming Zaps Marital Bliss

CNet reports:

Among the couples they found who were willing to be studied (they say many dedicated gamers weren’t), the researchers found that the biggest problem when gaming enters a relationship is not so much the time spent gaming, but rather the resulting arguments and disrupted bedtime routines, which in turn can lead to less time spent doing shared activities or engaging in serious conversation.

So what they’re saying, as I grok it, is that adults with the emotional maturity level of teenagers and people struggling with addiction make awful romantic partners.

Thanks for that nugget, Journal of ‘Leisure Studies.’

/groan. Before a legion of indignant gamers attacks the comments section: No, I am *not* equating a penchant for WoW to being an emotionally-underdeveloped drug addict. I’m saying relying on gaming (or anything else) as a frequent means of escapism is a poor life strategy, and will ruin most romantic relationships.

Marriage: Like a Trip to the Zoo, Apparently.

Over the weekend, I happened across this article on relationships in Psychology Today (worth a read, if you’re interested that sort of thing – and I’ll make no effort to pretend I’m not, thank you). In a nutshell, the piece is a feature-length article which criticizes the practice – common among the American bourgeoisie and the copycat middle-class – of divorcing one’s spouse due to “irreconcilable differences.” It’s a good read, but the content isn’t why I bring it up. Rather, the accompanying photo spread is what caught my attention. Behold:

What’s the editorial intent behind this series of photos? It appears to tell the age-old story about every man being a wild animal until he meet “that special someone” who marries him and eventually “civilizes” him. Though notably, in the last photo of the spread, the chimp hasn’t magically transformed into a grown man. No sir, he’s just wearing a sweater vest.

While there won’t likely be too many men getting riled up over this photo spread (yet further evidence that men don’t inhabit the same sexist culture that women do), isn’t it still kind of… icky? If you’re a man, are you really okay with a popular cultural narrative that casts you as a smelly, pre-linguistic, feces-flinging animal that’s in desperate need of education in the ways of the world before he can be accepted into society? Imagine if the photos showed a man with a female chimpanzee. I have no idea what that would possibly imply, and part of me suspects that photos of a male human sharing a bed with a female chimp aren’t commonly published out of the fear that some people will mistakenly believe that the man might actually attempt to have sex with the chimpanzee. (And sure enough…)

None of this is to knock marriage or men or the editors at Psychology Today. It just seems like the decision to hire a chimpanzee (and whatever associated costs come with hiring an exotic animal) to play the role of Husband in a photo shoot about marriage is a non-neutral decision. An actor or model brings with him knowledge of using expression and body language, enabling the photographer to create more nuanced compositions that better illustrate the complexity of romantic relationships. Using a monkey stand-in for one half of the equation feels sitcom-trope-y and incongruous with the subject of the article.

Psychology Today – Are You With the Right Mate?

In Which a Humor Site Validates My Unqualified Assertions About Sex

A year and some change ago, I blogged some of my hunches about why there’s a discrepancy between men’s and women’s attitudes toward casual sex. In that post, I argued that “orgasmic parity,” or the fact that penetrative sex is almost certain to result in male orgasms, but not necessarily female orgasms, might be the reason behind the common wisdom (and research supporting it) that men are more likely than women to sally forth when the opportunity for casual sex arises.

We all carry signs like this. Just in case.

Then along came Cracked columnist Robert Evans, who in his column yesterday suggested that I’m totally right:

A half century of feminism and women’s liberation haven’t changed the fact that women consider sex to be a step toward a long-term relationship and deep emotional commitment, while men consider sex to be nothing more than scratching an itch.

And there is plenty of scientific basis for this; a 1989 study showed that men were far more likely to accept solicitations for casual sex than women. Male and female students were approached by “moderately” attractive students of the opposite sex and awkwardly propositioned. The men, being 18 and in immediate proximity to a vagina, said, “Fuck yes.” Most of the women said no. Obviously.

But Actually …

A University of Michigan psychologist named Terri Conley decided to dig a little deeper. Her study found that women were no less likely to be down for some consequence-free coupling, as long as it was in a safe situation with a sexually competent partner. The difference wasn’t in the expected commitment, but in how much harder it is to bring a woman to orgasm.

So both genders seek sex for the awesome, toe-curling pleasure it brings. But the difference is that men know they’re going to get an orgasm no matter how bad the girl is in bed, and in fact know that it will happen even if she leaves halfway through. But women only orgasm 35 percent as often in first-time sexual encounters. Why commit yourself to a night of getting some guy off if you aren’t getting anything but filthy sheets out of it?

Studies of bisexual women showed that their hesitance to bone disappeared as soon as the partner wasn’t a man. That infamous female prudishness all came down to the fact that most men have awful cocksmanship.

[Emphasis mine.]

If I may hash this reasoning out for the sizable number of straight guys who still don’t quite grasp the concept: imagine an alternate reality in which sex is divorced from reproduction.  I suspect that if the act were defined as the culmination of the female orgasm; if very little thought had been put into the male orgasm for much of your culture’s written history; if your ability to orgasm was historically considered by physicians to be a disorder considered by physicians to be a useful treatment for a made-up gender-based mental disorder instead of a normal function of the human body; if the odds were good that any new lady you went home with would be clueless about how to please you (or even worse, not really interested in doing so); if the majority of mainstream ‘adult entertainment’ was marketed toward women and featured gorgeous men getting their rocks off (supposedly) with women who look like Ron Jeremy; if there were a vocal minority of women who refused to (ahem) orally pleasure men and who also thought of this refusal as a symbol of their own dominance; if there were centuries worth of cultural baggage associated with your gender’s sexual agency – at best defining it very narrowly and at worse denying its existence entirely… you, too, might opt to stay home with your vibrator instead.

The moral of this story is that the straight guys out there should adopt a quality-over-quantity approach – at first – and spend less time and energy on merely scoring notches on their bedposts, and more time developing some damned skills. (Dan Savage would agree with me). Yes, I agree with the advice that women should “speak up and say what you want,” but as I wrote the last time around, having to direct the entire show with each new partner can be tiresome. The great thing is, if enough men follow this advice, women will eventually catch on, and there will be more sex to go around. Now that’s what I call progress.

The article has some more fantastic tidbits, like a debunking of that obnoxious old advertising adage that “sex sells”:

Studies show that less than 10 percent of men who were exposed to sexual advertising could even recall the actual brand the ad existed to promote. And that’s men, the gender that’s supposed to get brainwashed by anything titillating, including the word “titillating.” For women, sexual advertising cut brand recall in half.

The upshot is that sexy advertising gets your attention, but doesn’t communicate that a company has any confidence whatsoever in its product’s ability to sell itself. Who would have thought?