BRENDAN writes:

I have to say that Vanessa’s comment [that Twilight represents a wholesome longing for strong heroes] strikes me as wide of the mark.

Men do not have sexual fantasies about being Spiderman so that they can “get the girl.” It doesn’t register in the sexual attraction and arousal areas of our brains in the least. If anything, it is the appearance and demeanor of the “girl” herself which can be alluring — which is probably why Hollywood is so selective when it comes to the appearance of its star actresses. But there is no “male equivalent” in Spiderman or any other action film, of the kind of hysteria we see among women relating to Twilight. It just doesn’t register with us the same way.

This is why the most appropriate comparison is pornography, because pornography is something that does register in the attraction and arousal areas of the male brain. I’m no advocate of pornography — it’s immoral and also profoundly unhelpful for maintaining a normal sex life. It distorts the guy’s image of what is attractive in women, makes ordinary women and ordinary sex less appealing, and so on. I would submit that for many women, Twilight does exactlythe same thing — it distorts the woman’s image of what is attractive in men, makes ordinary men and pairing and sex with them less appealing and so on. It’s true that male porn is mostly visual/physical and female porn is often mostly emotional (like Twilight or bodice-ripper romance novels), but to place one as being “worse” than the other (typically with male/visual porn as being “worse” for the viewer) is simply to pedestalize female attractional vectors over male attractional vectors. It’s sort of like saying “the way my female brain chemistry works in terms of attraction and arousal is better than yours, which is why things that trigger my brain chemistry in that way are more acceptable than the things that trigger yours”. Either way, it’s feeding distorted expectations, and distorted expectations are a primary cause of marital strife and divorce today. Look at the number of women who are even admitting to marital problems relating to Twilight. Seems very similar to the impact of visual porn to me.

As for the comment that Edward needs to be supernatural because there are no naturally attractive male personae in the culture — well, that about says it all right there, I think. Perpetuating that by de-humanizing female attractional vectors (again, very similar to the “unrealistic” portrayal of women in visual porn) just makes matters worse. Indeed, one might say that the mushrooming of visual porn is also directly related to the relentlessly increasing masculinity among women in this culture, which makes them less attractive to men to begin with, and sends men running to visual porn for images of women who are attractive and arousing, rather than pushy, domineering, competitive and determined to be like guys.

Our slow, sloppy slide into androgyny is leaving quite a few men and women alike rather disaffected. But onward it marches. And things like Twilight are just extending the same trend forward — namely, men and women abandoning the realities of each other in exchange for fantasies of each other, because the reality, well … isn’t that appealing any more. As technology makes alternative and fantasy pseudo-realities ever more compelling, expect this trend to accelerate.

Laura writes:

Fitzgerald’s original description of Twilight as “female porn” is apt, and Brendan also makes an excellent case for the comparison. There is something natural and normal behind men’s attraction to sexually explicit images and there is something natural and normal behind the attraction to dark heroes. Visual pornography overstimulates and makes normal sex less appealing. Emotional porn overstimulates and makes normal relationships more difficult because it is so unreal and artificial, an effect which is compounded in this case by images of Twilight everywhere.

Women will always be attracted to romantic heroes, but these longings can be just as promiscuous and destructive as the male desire for novelty in sex.

Jesse and Vanessa argue that the mass phenomenon of Twilight expresses the healthy longings by women for strong men, yearnings that have been repressed by feminism. But the desire for heroes can takes extreme form. It is not necessarily good and can be as wrong as the desire for virtual sex. Twilight represents the assertiveness and free expression given to all female desires in our culture. Girlfriend culture is aggressive about its interests and women trumpet and glorify their basest instincts. The crowds at Twilight are the equivalent of crowds of men lining up to see porn flicks and pretending there are some higher aesthetic motives at work.

                                   — Comments —

Randy B. writes:

I don’t have to watch Twilightto know what it intends. This is a series of books and movies whose sole purpose is to give women a two hour to full-time imaginary inflatable doll that they can call “their man.” Women carry fantasies for years, where men carry fantasies for minutes. To the guys (metro’s) who would complain that I am attacking “men” (again), I suggest that our ability to forget and release is a blessing. We can go watch Troy, Braveheart, Master and Commander, Patriot, etc., and imagine ourselves heroes in a different time, but once we leave the theater we don’t go get our faces tattooed as a continuation of the experience, we move on and re-engage with the real world. Not that America and the world does not have enough problems, to further exaggerate the problem we have created a cult of permanent illusion for women, who are so disenfranchised with the modern man they specifically created through years of misandry. The tattoo displayed on the ladies back in the previous post is not only frightening but calls into question her mental stability. 

Fortunately for me, my wife went to the first show and recognized it for what it is, and has long since walked away from the books and movies. Because of her actions and recognitions, I am further endeared to her, as displayed by my philogyny in previous posts.

Laura writes:

I am politely asking Randy to please not expand at this time on the subject of his wonderful wife. : – )

Vanessa writes:

I just wanted to note that the interesting thing about these stories isn’t really the vampirism, which is what most of you are concentrating on. Supernaturalism is merely the vehicle for telling this particular story in a coherent manner, by putting the main female character into a setting where her actions and reactions will be more plausible.

Similar methods are apocalyptical, historical, or science fiction. In other words, women are simply populating (men would say, tainting) an increasing number of literary genres with their sexual fantasies. The storylines are increasingly similar, only the environments change.

Laura writes:

The vampire theme is not the main focus of objections here.

Vanessa writes:

I have to say that Vanessa’s comment [that Twilight represents a wholesome longing for strong heroes] strikes me as wide of the mark.

I never said that Edward was “wholesome,” merely that he is portrayed as being so because he’s not as blatantly evil as the blood-drinking vampires are.[Laura writes: “Wholesome” was a word I added because I was trying to sum up your remarks so that people would know what Brendan was referring to. I have since added the brackets to make that clear. But I didn’t say that you said Edwin was wholesome. I said you contended the longing was wholesome.]

Furthermore, women’s sexual attraction is not limited to the “wholesome, strong heroes”, but to all “strong heroes”. Even bad guys can be sexy. Some women (an ever-shrinking proportion, unfortunately) don’t gravitate to bad guys because they don’t find them attractive, but because they are smart enough — or well-raised enough — to know better. Strong fathers often making the difference. Women who grow up withstrong fathers learn that there is a type of strength that is different and more valuable than mere thuggishness. Women without strong fathers will simply gravitate toward whatever man displays the most obvious signs of strength, even if they are immoral and merely superficially strong (lacking in “inner strength”).

Brendan says, This is why the most appropriate comparison is pornography, because pornography is something that does register in the attraction and arousal areas of the male brain.

This is true. I think we can expect for both female and male porn to become increasingly explicit and sex-specific, as the culture becomes increasingly androgynous. I’m a bit more ambivalent about milder forms of porn than most of you, but I agree that it tends to skew people’s views on the other sex. And both male and female porn does so in a largely-equal fashion.

Brendan writes, And things like Twilight are just extending the same trend forward — namely, men and women abandoning the realities of each other in exchange for fantasies of each other, because the reality, well … isn’t that appealing any more.

Although all is not yet lost. There are increasing numbers of men and women who are actively attempting to strengthen sex-specific roles, dress, and behavior (like Laura here), and the mere act of doing that results in people becoming increasingly interested in the opposite sex. The cure for disinterested androgyny is explicit and alluring differentation. So, Laura could be described as a Catholic marriage therapist.

Laura writes, The crowds at Twilight are the equivalent of crowds of men lining up to see porn flicks and pretending there are some higher aesthetic motives at work.

They just read Playboy for the articles, you mean?

Randy writes, We can go watch Troy, Braveheart, Master and Commander, Patriot, etc., and imagine ourselves heroes in a different time, but once we leave the theater we don’t go get our faces tattooed as a continuation of the experience, we move on and re-engage with the real world.

Really? What about Trekkies, and Star Wars fans? What about the guys in my school who were obsessed with Dungeons & Dragons, or World of Warcraft?

Laura writes:

I think the distinction Randy was trying to make between male action movies and Twilight was that the former is not sexual.

Vanessa adds:

I just wanted to note that I do see some problems with the currect Twilight-craze:

1. I don’t think these books are appropriate for the young women, or even girls, that they are marketed to. This is clearly “adult literature” written at a YA-level.

2. I think the books aren’t that well-written. I read through the whole thing, but thought it was all a bit inane. I find it hard not to finish a series after I’ve started it, though. I think the success is based mostly upon marketing.

3.  I’m a bit surprised by adult women getting so excited over this. I read the books, but I don’t obsess over them like many seem to do. And the movies interest me even less.

4.  I find it especially disturbing to hear about married women fantasizing and obsessing about these male characters. It seems a bit adulterous. It’s one thing to note that a man is attractive, it’s another to go on and on about him, as if he were an important and intimate part of your life. And the lady with the bedsheets was simply unbelievable! That story can’t be for real.

Laura writes:

I strongly agree on all points.

Jeanette writes:

I don’t have a problem with the movies (they are pretty thin as far as acting and story line, in my opinion) my problem lies in the fact that this film will be considered a good influence solely because the vampire wants to wait until after marriage to have sex. 

Shouldn’t films and books that we allow our young to see and influenced them be inspirational? As far as I can tell teen girls are going to want some mysterious brooding mystery man as a result of this film.

John E. writes:

Vanessa has some good observations and makes some good points, not least of all that there is a necessary distinction between books like Twilight and the visual pornography that men typically consume. A girl’s spending a couple of minutes reading a passage from Twilight for the first time will not have nearly the debilitating effect on her that the same time spent by a boy with his first encounter with pornography will have on him. For this reason, it might be wise to avoid the use of the term pornography for forms of media directed toward women and girls such as Twilight. It makes the term watered-down and less useful. However, I think the important point being made by Fitzgerald is that the end result of media such as Twilight is much the same for women and girls as visual pornography is for men and boys. Both leave the one who consumes them with a highly distorted view of humanity, most especially of the opposite sex. Though women face a lesser danger from the same amount of time spent with their preferred degenerate media compared to men with pornography, perhaps the danger is increased by the fact that very few people are telling women there is anything wrong with becoming engrossed in Twilight or the like, allowing their conscience to justify unlimited amounts of time engaged in consuming these things. In contrast, it is probably a rare man who views pornography, who is not told many times that at least there may be something wrong with what he is doing, and most men at least feel compelled to engage in this degeneracy under cover of darkness or anonymity. It will at least get them to think twice about spending much time viewing pornography, if nothing else. 

Vanessa’s point about Victorian novels was not lost on me. Because a novel was written in the 19th century does not mean that its reading could not possibly pose a danger to women. To be honest I had difficulty thinking of a substitute for Twilight written from the past, I think for the very reason of the point Vanessa raises that there was no need to look for powerful men in a fantasy world when Dickens and Austen wrote: there were abundant examples of powerful but good men walking about every day then. However, I sense a bit of a justification in Vanessa’s words, and in society at large, for the fantasy-world escape of women into Twilight and the like, and wonder if she would consider it a matter of being consistent to apply her observation also to men who use pornography. For my part, I sympathize with women who have difficulty in this society fulfilling a rightly-ordered longing for interaction with a good man who holds power and authority, and so feel compelled to escape the real world to find him; I sympathize with them, but not much more than I sympathize with men who have difficulty fulfilling their rightly-ordered desire for deep and meaningful connection with the beauty of a woman in this society, and so feel compelled to escape the real world into the fantasy of pornography.

Vanessa writes:

Jeanette writes, I don’t have a problem with the movies (they are pretty thin as far as acting and story line, in my opinion) my problem lies in the fact that this film will be considered a good influence solely because the vampire wants to wait until after marriage to have sex.

Considering that we now praise women (like Bristol Palin) who choose not to murder their children, holding up Edward as a “good example” is par for the course. She’s a fornicator-but-not-murderer, he’s a vampire-but-not-fornicator. Same difference, really.

John E. writes, However, I sense a bit of a justification in Vanessa’s words, and in society at large, for the fantasy-world escape of women into Twilight and the like, and wonder if she would consider it a matter of being consistent to apply her observation also to men who use pornography.

Not justification, just pragmatism and curiosity. I think a bit of escapism isn’t so terrible (I used to like to read the Little House books and pretend I was a hardy prairie girl), but I’m quite interested in what bothmale and female “entertainment” says about the state of our modern marriages. Do both sexes find each other so unnattractive that they increasingly prefer virtual intimacy? Or does the availability of virtual intimacy make real intimacy seem like too much effort for too little reward? Either way, it’s a problem.

It’s one thing to wish to escape for five minutes, but what is making people so obsessive? Why can’t they put down the material and just let go? It seems to me a sign of a deeper problem, that the entertainment is just making more apparent to the rest of us.

Brendan writes:

Vanessa writes, Do both sexes find each other so unnattractive that they increasingly prefer virtual intimacy? Or does the availability of virtual intimacy make real intimacy seem like too much effort for too little reward? Either way, it’s a problem.

It’s one thing to wish to escape for five minutes, but what is making people so obsessive? Why can’t they put down the material and just let go? It seems to me a sign of a deeper problem, that the entertainment is just making more apparent to the rest of us.

I think the issue is a combination of both finding each other unattractive AND virtual intimacy (emotional or visual) being “easier”.

The lives we lead smush us together into similar roles in most marriages today. There is a blurring happening that makes people less appealing. Articles abound, for example, about how men doing housework makes women feel more in the mood for intimacy, but this is bunk (speaking from experience of myself and quite a few other men I have spoken with). It actually makes us more compliant, less strong, less assertive and, in many cases, more of a “delegated helper” figure than an exciting lover. Yet we do it because our busy, working wives want us to do it (as they incessantly tell us) and it seems “fair” to do so as we are both working. So the guy sees himself as doing what his wife wants, and being “fair”, yet, in spite of herself and her Oprah-cum-Self programming, she finds him … boring in terms of intimacy. She loves him, but feels no rush, no excitement for him.

For women, they are mostly now working and contributing almost half or more of the income, and both spouses benefit economically from that. Yet, there is competition between husband and wife. There is evaluation of the “other” … are they moving ahead of me, or not, are they too ambitious or not ambitious enough, do I resent them, and so on. And the more forcefully she pursues her career, using her blackberry at dinner and curling up on the couch with a laptop after dinner while the husband bathes the baby, makes her more masculine and less interesting to her husband in terms of intimacy. He loves her for what she does, but isn’t really in love with who she is. Feminists say that this is because “he can’t handle her success,” but it’s more a case that he isn’t terribly passionate about a woman who is behaving like a guy.

So both try to find escapes. At first it’s just scratching an itch, and the justification one hears is often “this will make things better, because it will make me resent him/her less” (for not being the spouse I would like them to be, instead of being the spouse who does things I like). Trouble is that, over time, it becomes the main event. A marriage where the passion is being drained into other things (work, or porn, or Warcraft, or Edward or what have you) cannot be sustained, even if at first these crutches appear to “vent” frustration that could otherwise bubble up. The fact is that the bubbling up of some of that frustration could actually be beneficial to the marriage, provided, of course, that it is productively expressed. But many people take the easy way out. Watch some porn while your wife is on her laptop in another room. Flirt with guys on your secret Facebook account while your husband is mowing the lawn. And so on. It breeds separation and divorce, without doubt.

Laura writes:

The blurring of sex roles causes unhappiness. Brendan’s observations of interactions between married men and women are very perceptive. Marriage thrives on differentiation. It also thrives on shared moments of leisure. Brendan’s husbands and wives are people who are never really spending time together because they are managing too much.

However, I will quibble with his last point. “It breeds separation and divorce.” No, I think these things cause tensions, but they do not cause separation and divorce. Only one things breeds separation and divorce, and that is the freedom to separate and divorce, which comes in turn from idea that marriage is no longer meaningful if there is unhappiness.

Let’s not be overly romantic about traditional sex roles. Husbands and wives may grow alienated from each other even when both are comfortably expressing masculine and feminine ideals. In fact, brief periods of alienation and estrangement are normal. Marriage is not a natural state, or let’s say it is the product of both nature and craftsmanship. To say marriage is natural, is like saying a fine sculpture is natural because it is made of marble. The marble is from nature, but the form itself comes from conscious technique. When happiness becomes the main purpose of marriage, it inevitably fails for many people. Happiness is secondary to the true purpose of marriage, which is to create the essential cell of society through a permanent, indissoluble bond between a man and a woman.

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