Let's Talk About Twilight.

So I know this isn't exactly relevant to this week's topic, but I still find it interesting, and hopefully you will, too: a friend and I started talking about Twilight.

She asked me, somewhat rhetorically, why the vampire has to be eternally seventeen. Seventeen is such an "awkward" age: he's not a legal adult, can't live alone without raising suspicions, can't smoke, can't drink, can't engage in any kind of sexual behavior without being considered a social deviant. Why is the seventeen-year-old bad boy presented as the "ideal" of male attractiveness? Why can't he be eternally nineteen, to at least enjoy the independence of college life forever?

The explanation we eventually came up with centers around the idea of suppressed sexuality in adolescent girls. If the vampire were nineteen, and he and his fawning mortal were both, say, freshmen in college, the story would immediately lose a lot of its risqué, dangerous appeal. There is nothing unusual or rebellious about two consenting adults engaging in a sexual relationship at the age of nineteen; although some people might consider that "too young," it is generally not considered altogether worrisome.

Contrast this with contemporary America's conception of sexuality in high school: absolutely forbidden. It is a social taboo for an adolescent girl to engage in any kind of sexual activity, while the same is not true of adolescent boys. In fact, society as a whole seems to assume that adolescent girls have no sex drive at all; we're quite familiar with the stereotype of the adolescent girl as "pure" and "innocent," clean in thought and deed. Adolescent girls do experience the same, normal sexual drives that adolescent boys do, of course, but they know that society would disapprove and label them all sorts of demeaning epithets (á la Rush Limbaugh) if they were to knowledge those feelings openly.

We hypothesize, my friend and I, that Twilight addresses this issue directly by giving high school girls the perfect, sexy fantasy, daringly acknowledging a previously taboo subject, but within the safety of imagination. In other words, Twilight allows girls to express a feeling they could not express before, helping them feel rebellious and assertive at the same time. But the feeling is directed at a man so perfect he must forever remain fantasy; the sexual messages in Twilight can't be translated into the real world, and thus society is able to swallow this particular pill--if only begrudgingly.

What d'you think?