twilighters deserve some respect

I went to see Twilight yesterday. It was okay, kind of uneven—parts of it drew me in (ex. the baseball scene) and other parts kicked me out (ex. Edward Cullen’s make-up). I’m not a fan, but I was interested enough that when I got home, I got on-line and poked around for scoop about a sequel, read a review or two, and learned that it is a HUGE hit, $70 million made in the first weekend alone, wow.

But what really struck me, as I read, was the ridicule, the eye-rolling, directed towards the fans, called Twilighters, some 10 million (mostly) young women.

Which got me thinking about the similar head-patting and condescension that swirls around the interests of even younger girls—I’m thinking of the sparkles and pink and unicorns that attract my five year old girl. The stories and games that my son is drawn to—diggers and super-heroes and dinosaurs—rarely receive eye-rolling or condescension that the sparkle girl-stuff almost always does—until recently, even by me. But why? Why are the stories that young and younger females are drawn to, the object of so much derision?

Well, duh (I thought to myself), it’s only been a few decades since it was openly believed by a male-run society that female people were simply not as smart as men, not as valuable, not as important. And a hundred years ago, it was common ‘knowledge’ that African American people weren’t as smart as the white men who ran everything. The prejudice against these groups has, until recently, been so normative that making jokes at their expense was just the way people talked. And I strongly believe that children are a group still caught in that same kind of blind prejudice. Jokes at the expense of kids (think of commercials that ridicule teens, for example) are seen as truth, not as the put-downs they are, and are accompanied by those same condescending, knowing looks that accompanied jokes about blonds or blacks, not so long ago. And girl children get the worst of it. By far.

The jokes at the expense of the fans of Twilight, the majority of whom are young females, are a case in point. Reading it reminded me of the eye-rolling and ridicule directed at the fans of another big movie Titanic. Okay, stay with me here…

Joseph Campbell did some great work exploring myth and story to uncover what he called the Hero’s Journey, that is, the archetypal story of a young man going out into the world on a quest, facing certain tasks, and returning home a changed person. Christopher Vogler did an interesting treatment of this with regard to screen writing. And then somewhere I read a wonderful article? book? (I’m so frustrated that I can’t remember where or who it was! If anyone reads this and recognizes it, please, please tell me the source!) questioning whether the hero’s journey was the only journey—whether it was a mistake to lump in the archetypal feminine experience with the masculine. Was there also a heroine’s journey? She (I think it was a she) thought there was, and she suggested the Descent of Inanna as a model for it. (And please note, I don’t recall this author as saying girls did one and boys did the other. More on that in a minute…)

Inanna’s myth is linked to the dance of the seven veils, where each veil is something she removes, or is removed from her, as she descends into the Underworld to save her lover. When everything she was is stripped away, she dies. And is reborn! The movie Titanic, this author proposed, was a powerful a story to a lot of young women because it retold this archetypal story, the Decent of Inanna, in modern garb. Rose, the main character of Titanic, loses everything she was, descends into the sea after her lover, basically dies, and is reborn a new person with a new life. It was the author’s thought that Titanic did for the Heroine’s Journey what Star Wars had done for the Hero’s Journey.

Which I thought was pretty cool. But remember the eye-rolling? Remember the jokes? The media was happy to make a giant pile of money off the fans of that story, but putting down the fans as silly, screaming girls, was a national pastime for a while there.

But back to vampires. Vampires are the new pink! They’re everywhere right now. For example, Paranormal Romance and Urban Fantasy are two new genres that have taken two long-standing genres, Romance and Fantasy, and injected them with vampires—and they are selling like hotcakes. One might say that Twilight is at the commercial pinnacle of this trend, led largely by a hunger in young women (and older women, too) to engage with a vampire story. Thinking about the Titanic thing made me start to wonder what sort of underlying story is being told in the vampire story, that it is engaging so many. Could it be another Heroine’s Journey?

On one level, the vampire story is about a girl, swept up in a love affair with a powerful, attractive man, who is simultaneously dangerous as well as her protector… a man who values this girl above all else. It’s kind of like being a little girl who is the apple of her powerful, handsome Daddy’s eye—except the story brings in the sexuality (the danger) of the young woman transitioning from connecting with Daddy, to connecting with another man. A different story from Inanna, for sure! But a story that speaks to a lot of female people, as attested to by the huge numbers of fans of vampire stories.

Now don’t go all twitchy about how girls shouldn’t define themselves in terms of a man, okay?

(1) I’m not saying what I think the role of women should be, I’m talking about one story that calls to a lot of female people, perhaps because it is part of a path that many girls go through.

(2) Being engaged with a story isn’t the same as living a story out, or even wanting to live it out. That’s the beauty of it—like a child playing king and queen, then cops and robbers, then dinosaurs—engaging in a story is play, too, and we try things on for a while, then discard them. We learn from our play experiences and move on.

(3) We don’t get to choose what stories call to us. I could no more make myself be emotionally engaged with a political thriller than I could grow a mustache. Even if I really wanted to, even if thought I SHOULD like that kind of story, I wouldn’t be moved by it. I might be able to make myself intellectually appreciate it (while I secretly read the ‘trash’ that I loved, in my case a hefty dose of SF), but it wouldn’t be my story of the moment. It doesn’t matter what anyone thinks girls (or kids) (or women) (or anyone) SHOULD be interested in.   If story X calls to a lot of female people, then it does. Period. We love what we love.

(4) The stories that engage us change over time. I remember a friend of mine, a classically trained musician, going through a particularly bad break-up one year. She found herself listening to country music for the first time in her life, something she had ridiculed in the past. But that year, those Losing It All songs were the stories that spoke to her. She hadn’t seen the value of those stories before, but for a while, they were hers. And after a bit, she moved on.

Finally, (5) there are plenty of boys and men who are into the Twilight books and movie, too. I’m not suggesting that boys do one and girls do the other. It’s more complex than that. Girls sometimes want to beat up the bad guys and save the world. Boys sometimes want romance. It’s all good.

But what is it about this vampire story that causes so many to make fun of it? Why is this story, or any other, a “silly” story? Why is it more silly than, say, wanting to identify with a guy in a cape who can fly? Or a super-spy who saves the world from terrorists? Frankly, I think it’s prejudice against girls that is at the heart of the jokes about the interests of young women. George Banks, the father in the movie Mary Poppins, epitomizes the put-down of girlish things by calling it “slipshod, sugary, female thinking.” But these stories aren’t silly. They just aren’t boy stories, or men stories, or grown-up stories. Like my musician friend who had belittled the songs/stories of people who had lost a lot—the stories of other people’s lives don’t speak to you…until they do.

But I really think the why of it, the gender and age prejudice, isn’t the most important thing. Here is what I came to, pondering the eye-rolling in the descriptions of the Twilight fans:

People ought to be free to engage with the stories that move them, whatever those stories are, without being insulted for it. I say, the only reason certain kinds of stories, say, unicorn stories, or vampire stories, are seen as silly, is because those tend not to be the stories that call to those in power—adult men. But don’t fall for that old-school might-is-right thinking. Belittling the stories that call to someone else is rude and prejudiced. Instead, respect and support people’s draw to engage with whatever stories call them. Including yourself. Life is complex. Who knows why a story is the right one at the moment? It just is.

All stories are important.

[/soapbox]