Twilight Time for Feminism?

by Rose O’Malley, Program Assistant
National Women’s Law Center

Leonard Sax, single-sex education advocate and author of books such as Why Gender Matters, claims in a recent column that the success of the Twilight series among girls and young women proves that young people are rejecting feminism and yearning for traditional gender roles.

The Twilight series, for those without teenage daughters or access to the New York Times bestsellers list, consists of four books by Stephanie Meyer about a normal, clumsy girl named Bella who falls in love with an oh-so-perfect vampire boy, Edward. The books are extremely popular, almost exclusively with teenagers and young women, and the first book in the series is being made into a movie to be released this Fall. 

The books are also blatantly traditional, almost Victorian, in their portrayals of gender. Bella, the main character, is a passive klutz who constantly needs to be rescued, while Edward is a brooding strongman who watches and protects her every move, even while she sleeps. Their love is epic and intense, overcoming werewolf love-triangles, among other supernatural interruptions, before the inevitable happily-ever-after.

Embarrassing admission:  I have a major weakness for young adult sci-fi and fantasy that Harry Potter alone cannot satisfy. So yes, as a 23-year-old who should probably know better, I read the Twilight books. Shockingly, I found them…problematic. Bella is one weak heroine, nowhere near as interesting as Hermione Granger, or any one of the many kick-ass women in Tamora Pierce’s books, and I often found myself wanting to slap her instead of root for her. Edward’s “romantic” gestures were too controlling for me to find them appealing and his insistence that he couldn’t turn Bella into a vampire or have sex with her until they got married was too clearly a cry against sex before marriage. And let’s not even get into the final book, with its implied message that all women (including teenage brides who only got married so they could have sex with their vampire sweethearts) want is a husband and a child, college be damned.

I could go on, and in fact, I’ve spent long hours with similarly-minded friends discussing the series and just why we find it disturbing. Unlike Mr. Sax, however, I don’t have a vested interest in boys and girls naturally falling into established gender roles, and so I’m not going to try to give these books universal importance. But as someone who was a teenage girl not that long ago, it’s easy to see why these books are popular, and it has nothing to do with the rejection of feminism or traditional gender roles being inherent. I know when I was 12, I would have been more likely to have found the idea of the coolest, most popular, incidentally immortal, guy in school loving imperfect me appealing enough to ignore the politics behind the writing. But then I grew up, just as Twilight’s readers will grow up, and realized that the real world is nothing like books, and that it’s a lot more satisfying to be my own woman than a damsel in distress.

Do I wish that these books weren’t quite so popular, and that young women today would choose to borrow my Buffy DVDs and my What Would Xena Do? bracelet instead of swoon over the cold, stoic Edward? Of course I do, but I’m not overly concerned about today’s teenagers and young women, who continue to reject traditional gender roles and expectations time and time again. I think, unlike Mr. Sax, they can distinguish the fantasy from reality.

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