I Am So Popular: Bella Blue Balls

Instead, I dropped twenty bucks on a copy, was mortified that I had done so upon reading the first sentence, and was disinclined to donate it to the library, as I would’ve felt guilty in spreading that crap around. I may have actually thrown it in the trash, though it’s possible I sent it to the thrift store to where some unsuspecting fool wound up parting ways with two bits for it.

So how is it I have come, in past months, to dedicating about forty hours (and counting) of my life to listening to the audiobooks of Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series? Please, step right into our Excuses, Excuses Department and let me try to explain. Let us begin with a much more excellent series of books targeted at young lady readers: Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women books. The eponymous first, and best known, in this series remains on my all time favorite list of great reads, even though, by about the twentieth time I read it, it did finally seem a bit outdated. Not a huge surprise since by then the manuscript was well over a hundred years old.

I had a long dead distant relative, one Uncle Albert (just like the song—so sorry), who’d worked in publishing, and the house he worked for published Alcott. So the volumes I cruised through in summers of my youth were fairly early editions, passed down by Uncle Al, and they reeked of that special sweet rank musty scent that, for some reason triggers an I-suddenly-need-to-shit sensation whenever I walk into a bookstore filled with antique tomes.

Many years later, I picked up a paperback copy in which an afterword was included, written by a scholar who explained that, what with the March girls’ father being off to war and Marmee left at home in charge, the characters comprised a female utopia, free of the stress and anxiety that can come from having a man about the house. I loved that theory for it explained to me my attraction to the book—how I wish my own grouchy old man would head off to war or at least parts unknown, and leave my mother and seven sisters and me to our own devices. (We probably would’ve let my little brother stick around.)

The March girls had a good excuse for leading virtuous lives and exercising caution in the heavy petting department. That’s just the way things were done then, which might not have been the best idea, but at least they were sticking with the status quo and, lacking decent birth control, avoiding the pitfalls of teenage single motherhood.

Not so Bella Swan, angst-riddled protagonist of the Twilight series. She is, or at least should be, a modern girl, living in a modern world and, at eighteen, has access to all manner of pregnancy prevention. Okay, so her boyfriend, Edward Cullen, is over a hundred years old, a hotty hot vampire trapped in a seventeen year old’s body. Maybe it’s his old-fashioned morals that keep the girl from getting laid. The author’s excuse is that Edward can’t do his love up one side of the house and down the other because she smells so delicious he might accidentally go too far, which in his case would be a form of oral sex that includes, quite literally, devouring her.

How the hell did these books come into my life, can someone tell me that? I must’ve heard all the rumbling, or read a review or something. But really, I’m often quite good at avoiding a lot of pop culture crazes. I probably saw two episodes of Friends and maybe three Seinfelds when those were on the air. Well, whatever, Twilight got here and, like a vampire, I do, in fact, have intense addictive tendencies, and once I dedicate myself to something—be it alcoholism, perpetual knitting, shitty relationships, or rescuing dogs—I’m either all the way in or all the way out, no in between.

And so, while the books have gotten progressively worse, and the prose increasingly purple to the point I feel as if I am suffocating in a field full of violets, I just keep buying the next one and the next one, listening as the breathless narrator reads through another ten million pages which go something like this:

Bella loves Edward. Edward loves Bella. They love each other so much. Uh-oh, watch out, Bella is about to lose her life. Edward will save her. Now she has to trick her parents into thinking she broke her leg falling down the stairs, instead of the truth—she was attacked by a monster! Bella is irritated with Edward. Edward is irritated with Bella. It is raining. It is raining and raining and raining. Why won’t he fuck her? Why won’t she marry him? When will the rain stop? When will they stop being irritated? Lookout, here comes another life-threatening monster!

I even went so far as to rent the movie, which took me at least three sittings to get through. It too was filled with rain and monsters and crankiness and Bella’s ever blue balls as her handsome vampire refuses her advances.

Okay, here comes a spoiler so stop now if you don’t want to know. Finally—FINALLY— I am well into the fourth book, which I think is about twenty hours long, and they have at long last gotten it on. And what is the result? Bella awakens the morning after, feeling glowy but with no memory of the specifics of what went down, though apparently she is covered from head to toe in bruises more purple than the prose describing them, sore all over, inside and out. But she is HAPPY! She is so HAPPY! She loves that her man has finally given in, even if it will take her weeks to recover.

Somewhere along the line, I made the mistake of reading up on the author. And I learned that Stephanie Meyer is a Mormon. After having been briefly married to a psycho Mormon (don’t ask) and after having read Under the Banner of Heaven, an expose of some of the sicker aspects of the religion, by Jon Krakauer (a bestselling author I actually do love), I must admit I have a special prejudice against the sect. Don’t even get me started. So it’s hard to listen to the Twilight series and not think that there’s some intended not-so-between the lines Mormon-related message being directed at the bazillions of teen girl readers who have snapped up the series, warning them that one must only have sex within the confines of marriage, and that doing so is going to leave you battered, but that your love and dedication to your man will make the battering a source of ecstasy.

Perhaps I am overreacting. Perhaps young female readers today can zip through the Twilight books, disbelief suspended, and not get sucked into the heroine’s role modeling, the idea that one can (and perhaps should) shackle oneself to another, forever, before the age of twenty. But I say, based on personal experience, that the ongoing portrayal of girls and women in pop culture has a really, really long way to go. How much my own oft-ridiculous, boy-crazy choices in life were influenced by what I saw on big and little screens and in advertising and in all the fluffy books I have taken in is, perhaps, debatable. But brainwashing is real, advertising works, and I wonder how things might’ve been different if I’d had more good examples.

That said, there remains Jo March, forever planted firmly in my heart. Chaste until her marriage, several books in? Yes. But also smart and strong, defiant and independent. Jo loved to run up to her little attic garret and write her heart out passionately. And this is, for me, evidence that positive influences come through, too. For it was the earnestness and dedication of young Jo that lit a fire in my own heart and prompted me to pick up pen and paper at an early age. I knew, through following her adventures, that I wanted what she had—independence and drive.

Here’s hoping that the fifth book in the Twilight series—put on hold indefinitely apparently—will at last materialize and find Bella stumbling upon some Alcott. May she devour it the way Edward wishes, some days, to devour her. And may she, in turn, find a way to escape some of the oppression heaped upon her by her creator.

Spike Gillespie admittedly gets way too wrapped up in young adult literature from time to time. She blogs at www.knitbuzz.blogspot.com and www.spikeg.com. She is head mistress for the Dick Monologues—next show May 13th. Email spike@spikeg.com for reservations.