A Virginal Goth Girl By GAIL COLLINS Published: July 12, 2008
Every so often I discover that the whole world seems obsessed with a pop-culture phenomenon that I’ve missed out on completely. This would be O.K. if I’d been spending my time on more important matters, but unfortunately I’m not all that deep. I’m telling you all this because our topic for today is “The Twilight Saga,” a series of extraordinarily popular books that you may have never heard of, just the way I had never heard of “American Idol” until it was practically passé. “Twilight” and its successor novels are about a girl who falls in love with a vampire. There seems to be a lot of this going on lately. If you want to become a best-selling novelist, I would definitely advise that you start by making your hero a little bit undead. Even given this important thematic advantage, however, the Twilights are a phenomenon. According to a spokeswoman for the author, Stephenie Meyer, the first three books sold 6.5 million copies in the United States alone in less than three years. The fourth, “Breaking Dawn,” is scheduled to arrive in the stores on Aug. 2, when it will be greeted by midnight parties in at least 4,000 bookstores. In New York City, there will be a preparty concert of music that Meyer says inspires her writing. When the tickets went on sale, all 2,000 were gone within 45 minutes. I read the first two Twilights, searching for the key to their success. (This is where the part about being not all that deep comes in handy.) The attraction is clearly the vampire hero, who is a perfect gentleman, eternally faithful and - as the author points out repeatedly - quite a hunk. (“He lay perfectly still in the grass, his shirt open over his sculpted, incandescent chest, his scintillating arms bare ... A perfect statue, carved in some unknown stone, smooth like marble, glittering like crystal.”) Before you make fun of this, I want you to seriously consider whether you’re interested in denigrating people who spend their leisure time actually reading books rather than watching “America’s Got Talent.” The heroine is Bella, who gets sent off to finish high school in a really, really rainy part of the state of Washington. She catches the eye of a gorgeous boy in her biology class named Edward. He turns out to be a member of a commune of vampires, who have banded together to fight their inclination to drink human blood. Edward, who has never been attracted to a woman, mortal or immortal, in more than a century of postdeath existence, falls for Bella at first sniff. (It’s all about the smell.) And he is going to be faithful to her forever, even when she gets old and dies. But as much as he adores her, he won’t have sex with her because he worries he might kill her with his superstrength in the heat of the moment. So, they are forced to spend all their time kissing and cuddling and talking about their feelings. “Only a vampire, ladies,” said Jessica Valenti, the author of “Full Frontal Feminism.” She worries that in the real world, young men are spending so much time watching pornography on the Internet that they will never be satisfied with normal women and normal relationships. This sure sounds like trouble to me: A generation of guys who will settle for nothing less than a porn star meets a generation of women who expect their boyfriend to crawl through their bedroom window at night and just nuzzle gently until they fall asleep. It’s no wonder that Valenti sees today’s young women being pulled between complete chastity and utter sluttiness. Good girl or “Gossip Girl?” Courtney Martin, the author of “Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters,” spends a lot of time on college campuses and says students seem to be torn between anonymous sex and monogamy - “either hooking up with no expectations or you’re basically married. You stay home and watch movies.” Stephenie Meyer is a Mormon mom who was a stay-at-home housewife in Phoenix when she wrote her first book. (People who have tried to write fiction may be deeply depressed to hear that she did it in a flash after she had a dream about the characters, who then inhabited her mind and dictated the novels to her.) Maybe the secret to her success is that in her books, it’s the guy who’s in charge of setting the sexual boundaries. Edward is a version of that legendary, seldom-seen male who won’t take advantage of his date even if she rips off her clothes and begs him to take her to bed. By the second novel, Bella was hounding him to turn her into a vampire so they could be together forever, but he was resisting on the grounds that it would be bad for her soul. Meanwhile, a second suitor for Bella surfaced, who also believed she was destined to be his one true love, even after he turned into a werewolf about halfway through the story. “It gives a whole new meaning to: ‘Just can’t meet a normal boy,’ ” said Valenti.