In part two of this three-part installment, Christakis tackles Bella’s apparent lack of modern, individual academic pursuits for eternal life and love with Edward.
Bella’s helplessness can be incredibly annoying — Edward always cooks for her, even though she makes dinner every night for her dad and Edward doesn’t even eat human food — but it’s only maddening when viewed in the context of real life. Who doesn’t dream of shirking responsibilities and being indulged? In this age of anxiety and the “End of Men,” I suspect many teenage girls are drawn to a character like Bella who marries up in such shrewd and spectacular fashion.
We all were brought up on some form of the Disney fantasy, either directly or indirectly and if you didn’t have Disney, you had your own cultural version of it most likely, so it is hard on the one hand, to truly dismiss what is seen as Bella’s helplessness, but so easy to condemn it. Modern women are not supposed to be into that type of thing anymore. We are more educated and experienced, choosing to be married later in a more realistic fashion. Never mind that the wedding industry worldwide is fetching billions of dollars for over the top weddings. Take the dream wedding of Kim Kardashian, with three wedding dresses, a 20.5 karat ring, spending $10 million for the wedding, which they likely didn’t have to pay for thanks to the corporate sponsorship. To simply say that the fairy-tale is dead in our modern world would be a joke.
Why wouldn’t we want a bit of fairy tale after all? Not $10 million dollars worth maybe, but a little very small minute fraction of that maybe would be nice. When my husband proposed to me, I was hours from leaving him for another country. Not another person, but a country! Our relationship had reached a point of normalcy and had been stuck there for a while. This trip, in my eyes, was a way for us to separate for a while and see what was really important. He had said he would join me, but from my point of view, didn’t really seem to be maneuvering much toward that direction. When he proposed he made his own fairy tale promises and I accepted his promises and his proposal because I did and do love him dearly. He promised to write me love letters and call regularly much of which fell flat once I was on the other side of the world. He wrote me twice I think. The letters were lovely and romantic, but nothing to the scale that he had promised and the calls we would share left much to be desired usually involving one or both of us sitting in silence waiting for the other person to share news while the other didn’t really feel like there was much news to share. That first Christmas was dismal. I decided to call upon my Facebook friends to save me from my own loneliness and my fiancés’ lack of romanticism and I spent a week in Prague. This was the time that I picked up the Twilight Saga. My university was on a two-week holiday and I ended up reading [all] the books twice in that time because they offered me something that my reality was not: romance and indulgence. I am a fully capable and intelligent woman. I have a master’s degree and I can change my own car’s oil and breaks. I have swam with sharks and been skydiving, however, I became I twi-mom, and I don’t even have children. The idea of someone being so in love with me as to write me love letters and come to Europe to be with me, to take care of me and see the world was and still is amazingly appealing.
“The most humorless and tone-deaf criticism of Twilight is the claim that Bella and Edward’s relationship echoes patterns of real-life human domestic abuse. Edward is too controlling, Bella too submissive, so it goes. He carries her around a lot — it just works faster that way. And sometimes he also scales the walls of her house to watch her sleep. I can attest with utter certainty that I’m not ‘down’ for a man rappelling into a bedroom window to gaze wondrously at my daughter while she sleeps. But the thing is, vampires don’t sleep. So Edward is fascinated not only with Bella but with the notion of human sleep. Get it?
Personally, I think even a 12-year-old can grasp that it’s okay to enjoy an elaborate kidnapping-cum-sleepover as fantasy even if you would be appalled to find the UPS driver or neighborhood perv sitting in your room in the middle of the night. Edward is just trying to protect Bella from bad vampires who want to kill her! And, anyway, he later apologizes for being a control freak — unnecessarily, in my view. He was only being gallant, and there are a lot of dragons to slay out there.”
Mind you, toward the end of the series, I find both Jacob and Edward annoying and creepy for how they treat Bella and the actions they take on her behalf. This story is not reality, it is fantasy – utter fantasy. I mean Edward sparkles! How menacing and scary! Sometimes women fantasize about men both protecting and harming them. It doesn’t make it real or does it make it wrong. These same women, as Christakis points out, know the difference between the fantasy and the reality. “Surely this is more comprehensible than the kind of men who don’t know the difference and actually commit rape.”
“Critics are offended by the implied presumption that men are sexual predators, but a lot of teenage girls might argue differently. Sexual assault is committed overwhelmingly by men against young, fertile women (five percent of whom become pregnant from the rape, according to reliable estimates). Yes, it can happen to anyone; but it usually doesn’t. Does that make men rapists at heart? Surely not. But you have only to wander the halls of a college dorm on a weekend night to see the ambivalence on young women’s faces as they try to navigate the sexual politics of 21st-century hookup culture.”
Christakis also explains that people critical of the series lament how much Bella is giving up for Edward, ignoring what he too is giving up for her. Focus has been on Bella’s “protracted virginity, rough sex followed by demon pregnancy, and so on — suggests the tired cliché that women, not men, suffer for their sexuality.” While both men and women share the desire to have a partner for life, it is women who seem, at least in popular culture and media to want this more than men. Or at least it is more acceptable and expected for a women to want this rather than men. The idea that men will and do cheat (or the reality that both men and women cheat) is awful and disgusting. After seeing countless high profile men that discovered to have cheated with nannies, secretaries, interns, etc – is it really surprising that Edwards love for Bella and self-control are so appealing to audiences?!
Christakis ends part two with a brief discussion about the love triangle between Edward, Bella and Jacob and then actual sex scene. How nice it is for once, it is true, to see the woman at the heart of the story and the men both superhuman and blandly human all fighting over her. Regarding the sex scene, abstinence message aside, who cannot relate to the fumbling nervousness of our first time and the sheer excitement of successful completion of it (or trying again and again, for that matter), or has it really been that long ago or that awful of an experience that you don’t remember?
livingtheamericandreamineurope.com 