(Part 1 of 2) American culture is willing to accept almost any message aimed at young women if it purports to convince them that sex is dirty, dangerous, or just plain bad. Any other concerns are secondary, especially if they involve trivial matters... View high resolution

(Part 1 of 2)

American culture is willing to accept almost any message aimed at young women if it purports to convince them that sex is dirty, dangerous, or just plain bad.  Any other concerns are secondary, especially if they involve trivial matters like girls’ emotional well-being or sexual health.  No, the important thing is to keep those young ladies pure and good at all costs.  We lie to them about condom failure rates.  We tell them that it’s more important that they avoid promiscuity than get the first vaccine developed to prevent a form of cancer.  We tell them that if someone assaults them, they should press charges only if they’ve been “good girls,” i.e. dressed modestly, weren’t drunk, and haven’t had multiple sexual partners.  We tell ourselves that it’s for the best, because it’s all in the name of maintaining a rigid definition of morality that for some reason hardly ever involves young men. 

We are so invested in this belief system that we are willing to pretend ridiculous things so long as we can keep telling ourselves that we’re protecting young women from the evils of sex.  For example, the persistent belief that Twilight, despite all of its flaws, is “good for girls because it promotes abstinence.”

In fact, it does precisely the opposite, as Film Crit Hulk delineates in Exhibit E of his recent Twilight essay: 

“BECAUSE TWILIGHT PREACHES ABSTINENCE THE SAME WAY AN AMSTERDAM PEEP SHOW BOOTH WOULD. SURE THERE’S A LAYER OF GLASS TECHNICALLY SEPARATING YOU FROM GOING OVER THERE AND JUST HAVING ALL KINDS OF FREAKY AND EVIL SEX, BUT IN ALL OTHER RELATIVE EMOTIONAL, VISCERAL, AND CEREBRAL CONTEXTS YOU’RE EFFECTIVELY GETTING YOUR SEX ON.”*

You know those moments where something you’ve been trying to figure out for a couple of years suddenly falls into place with a resounding click?  This would be one of them for me.  I’ve been trying to figure out how the hell Stephenie Meyer makes Twilight work, between the nonexistent plotting, thin characterization, terrible sentence structure, and extremely questionable content.  By “work” I mean “produce a particular emotional response in the reader,” which it clearly doesn’t for the legions of readers who either couldn’t get through the first two chapters or flung the book away from themselves in shuddering horror (which is not the emotional response I’m referring to).  For a not-insignificant chunk of Meyer’s audience, though, Twilight does an amazing job of reproducing the exact sensation of teenage infatuation.  I have been wracking my brain for nearly three years now trying to figure out why.  Everything I know about literature says it shouldn’t be able to function as a narrative at all, much less produce that result.  But it does.  

Understanding this layer of glass and how it functions textually is the key to comprehending why Twilight works, insofar as it does.  In order to do so, however, I’ll need to compare it to another YA novel that does fit into the abstinence-promotion agenda, and in order to make any sense of either book, I’ll need to bring in some of Michel Foucault’s philosophical theories for analytic assistance.  You can stop laughing now; I really do. 

* If you’re wondering why I’m responding to someone who writes in the persona of the Incredible Hulk, please read my first essay in rebuttal to his analysis of Twilight and its discontents.

“
The central issue… is not to determine whether one says yes or no to sex, whether one formulates prohibitions or permissions, whether one asserts its importance or denies its effects, or whether one refines the words one uses to designate it; but to account for the fact that it is spoken about, to discover who does the speaking, the positions and viewpoints from which they speak, the institutions which prompt people to speak about it and which store and distribute the things that are said.
Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality Vol. I
Depending on how you count it, Don’t Go Home With John is either the 90th or 108th* installment of the core Sweet Valley High series. A brief synopsis for those happy innocents who may not be familiar with Sweet Valley High: it is a YA series first...

Depending on how you count it, Don’t Go Home With John is either the 90th or 108th* installment of the core Sweet Valley High series.  A brief synopsis for those happy innocents who may not be familiar with Sweet Valley High: it is a YA series first published in 1983 with perilously few merits, literary or otherwise. It’s set in Sweet Valley, California, a place that so little resembled the California Central Valley of my upbringing that I wondered at age ten whether I or Francine Pascal (the series’ creator) was confused**.  Everyone in Sweet Valley is rich, carefree, and almost uniformly WASPy.  Nobody ever has any problems with traffic; nobody ever worries about earthquakes; nobody obsesses over real estate; elementary, middle, and high schools are always fully funded; any interruption of racial, ethnic, or upper-class homogeneity exists solely to impart a Meaningful Lesson to the other characters and, by proxy, to the reader.  

Each book is about the shenanigans of the Wakefield identical twins, Elizabeth and Jessica.  How to tell them apart: Elizabeth is the goody-goody serial monogamist; Jessica is the fun-loving casual dater.  Characters, plot elements, and scenery remain remarkably consistent throughout the books in the series, mostly because they’re all written under the pseudonym of “Kate William” by a passel of ghostwriters*** clearly hewing to a tight script obvious even to ten-year-olds.  Roughly 1/3 of each book is a canned physical description of the twins, their friends, their family, the environs of Sweet Valley, and a recap of the previous book.  Another 1/3 involves an A plot and a B plot, usually relating to a boy problem of Jessica’s and an academic or social problem of Elizabeth’s, occasionally interspersed with another character’s issues.  The final 1/3 involves the convenient resolution of all problems and the setup for the next book.  Each book covers roughly 2 ½ weeks in the lives of the Wakefields and almost always includes a school dance or big party. 

(For the wretched wanting to know more: a handy plot synopsis of DGHWJ and a SVH timeline including brief summaries of all the books in the series. I am not responsible if your brain leaks out of your ears while you read either.)

DGHWJ is somewhat unusual for SVH books in that the A and B plots have the same theme:  sex is bad and girls are responsible for preventing guys from having any.  The titular character is John Pfeifer, a recurring minor character who was most recently a B-plot star in White Lies.  He’s the sports editor of The Oracle (the Sweet Valley High School newspaper), and Jessica’s best friend Lila Fowler thinks he is just dreamy.  He even buys her flavored coffee!****

However, he is serious, “intense,” short on confidence, prone to mood swings, and obsessive over his ex-girlfriend Jennifer.  

Hmm.  

* In addition to the core series books, there are Sagas and Super Editions and Super Star Editions and Super Thriller editions and look, this whole shebang is an adolescent soap opera that exploded all over the hypothetical timeline with no regard for coherency and only the barest sense of continuity.

** Turns out Pascal had never even been to California.

*** If anyone knows the identity of DGHWJ’s author, please leave a message in “Ask Me Anything."  I would love you forever and always if you did.

**** 1992 was a weird time.

“Well, I, personally, can’t believe you’d even consider going out with John!” she said. "He’s not your type at all… Let’s face it, Lila. If boys were automobiles, you usually go out with Corvettes. John’s more like a Volvo with an air bag.“ –Don’t Go... View high resolution

“Well, I, personally, can’t believe you’d even consider going out with John!” she said.  "He’s not your type at all… Let’s face it, Lila.  If boys were automobiles, you usually go out with Corvettes.  John’s more like a Volvo with an air bag.“

–Don’t Go Home With John, Kate William anonymous ghostwriter

It’s tempting to write an essay about how the villain of a novel in one decade shares many character traits with the romantic hero of another and what this says about the changes in American society between 1992 and 2005.  However, there’s a lot more going on in both DGHWJ and Twilight than the two manic-depressives who hate themselves*. 

Twilight’s depiction of male and female sexuality is actually subversive in comparison with what Jessica Valenti has termed "purity culture” values on display in DGHWJ.  “But wait!” cry all the late twenty-something early-thirty-something female readers.  "Damn near anything is subversive in comparison to DGHWJ's depiction of adolescent sexuality!“  Yes, that’s true, and I’m not claiming that Twilight isn’t seriously screwed up.  However, in order to fully understand why Twilight isn’t promoting abstinence, one must compare it to a book that unquestionably is.  

* Robert Pattinson, who should know, on Edward’s character

image

Sweet Valley High played a balancing act over the course of the series with its endorsement of two different modes of teenage romantic relationships: casual dating (Jessica, Lila) and committed exclusivity (Elizabeth, many of the ancillary characters).  Both involve a certain level of potential queasiness for concerned parents and social forces.  While casual dating is more in line of Francine Pascal’s retro 1950s worldview–not too serious!  keep it light and friendly!–it also runs dangerously close to the perception of promiscuity, especially once Jessica’s dated a new guy each book for nearly 60 books.  On the other hand, Elizabeth’s devotion to Todd the Chump and Jeffrey the Nice Guy is commendable but also worrisome to parents who believe that young women “shouldn’t get too serious,” because “serious” is of course a code word for “getting their freak on."  By the time the series gets to DGHWJ, Jessica is in a committed relationship with Sam, and Lila is reconsidering the merits of singlehood.

Problem is, she’s nominated John Pfeifer for the prestigious position of Lila’s Boyfriend.

Because Lila has not read The Gift of Fear (mostly because it won’t be published for another seven years), she happily goes on a date with John.  After dinner, they drive up to Miller’s Point, and things go seriously south.  

I’m quoting this section in full (complete with punctuation errors, comma splices, and sentence fragments) below the cut because it is just too screwed up to summarize.  Keep in mind that SVH is recommended for ages 12 and up.

Keep reading

(Source: youindangergirl)

Clearly, what just went down at Miller’s Point was a horrible assault for which Lila couldn’t possibly be blamed, right?  The anonymous ghostwriter couldn’t possibly mean for us to think that it’s a girl’s fault if a guy can’t control himself, right?  What we need is a nice, wholesome, loving relationship to provide contrast and balance, right?

(Bolded text is my emphasis; underlined text is emphasized in the book.)

The longer they stayed in each other’s arms, the more Jessica felt herself slipping away.  She was no longer in the front seat of Sam’s car on Calico Drive,* she was floating in the sky of a sunny day.  She and Sam, so close she could feel him breathing, as warm and strong as a kiss themselves**.

Sam pulled back at the same moment as Jessica.  Still holding on to each other, they sat for a few minutes, trying to regain their composure.  Jessica’s heart was racing.  

Sam leaned against the headrest.  "You know what I think we should go to Lila’s party as?“  he said once he had finally caught his breath?

Jessica stared out at the street.  "What?

He squeezed her hand.  "A nuclear bomb.”

Jessica didn’t smile.  This wasn’t the first time something like this had happened.  Lately, every time the two of them kissed it was harder and harder to stop.  "This is serious, Sam,“ she told him once she had caught her own breath.  "I’m really getting worried about this.  What if I lose control?”

Sam put an arm around her shoulder.  "What are you talking about, if you lose control?  You’re not the police force here, Jess.  We’re both involved.  Nothing’s going to happen if we don’t want it to, and we don’t.  Just because we like kissing doesn’t mean we’re going to go too far.  We’ve discussed that already.“

Jessica leaned against him.  "I know that, but I can’t help feeling that it’s up to me.  I mean, I’m the girl.  If I can’t keep myself, you know, more in check, how can I expect you to?”

Sam moved his face in front of hers.  "Jessica Wakefield,“ he said gently.  "I may be a boy, but I’m not some sort of wild beast, you know.  It’s not like I kiss you and I go brain dead right away.  I’m a person, too.  I have as much responsibility for what happens between us as you do.” He kissed the top of her head.  "I care about you, Jess.  You know I would never hurt you.“

This passage is supposedly the ghostwriter’s attempt at communicating a fine moral message about the joint responsibility of teenage couples to discuss sex, come to a clear understanding about boundaries, and never actually bone.  Instead, it’s a reinforcement of Ye Olde Virgin/Whore Trope:  the girl is responsible for setting limits; guys are brain-dead wild beasts and slaves to their passions; sex is very very bad and will hurt girls, but not guys.  Gotcha.  And no, I am not at all impressed by Sam the Chivalrous and Decent Who Doth Protesteth Too Much and Planteth These Notions in Young Minds.  Notice how the reader is not actually getting the discussion about going "too far,” but is instead getting a reference to it?  Nice try, ghostwriter.

*Check out that comma splice!  Stephenie Meyer does not have a monopoly on lousy grammar.

** ENGLISH, MOTHERFUCKER!  CAN YOU WRITE IT?!

DGHWJ’s ghostwriter does not, in fact, have any interest in depicting healthy sexuality for pre-teens. To the contrary, s/he is promoting a particularly nasty cultural stereotype that casts girls as pure and saintly sexual gatekeepers with minimal...

DGHWJ’s ghostwriter does not, in fact, have any interest in depicting healthy sexuality for pre-teens.  To the contrary, s/he is promoting a particularly nasty cultural stereotype that casts girls as pure and saintly sexual gatekeepers with minimal sex drives and guys as thinking exclusively with their dicks.  Sadly, it’s isn’t limited to bad YA fiction, either.  Check out some examples taken from abstinence-only curricula taught in public junior high and high schools in the mid-2000s:

“Girls need to be aware they may be able to tell when a kiss is leading to something else. The girl may need to put the brakes on first in order to help the boy.”
Reasonable Reasons to Wait, Student Workbook, p. 96

“Guys say sex is more physical, that they are driven by hormones and peer pressure. Girls say sex is an emotional experience, involving strong feelings.”
Choosing the Best LIFE, Leader Guide, p. 6

“Men sexually are like microwaves and women sexually are like crockpots…men respond sexually by what they see and women respond sexually by what they hear and how they feel about it*.”
WAIT Training, Workshop Manual, p. 194

(More examples and detailed analysis available in Jessica Valenti's The Purity Myth.)


However, Bella didn’t get any of these memos:

Edward hesitated to test himself, to see if this was safe, to make sure he was still in control of his need.

And then his cold, marble lips pressed very softly against mine.

What neither of us was prepared for was my response.

Blood boiled under my skin, burned in my lips. My breath came in a wild gasp. My fingers knotted in his hair, clutching him to me. My lips parted as I breathed in his heady scent. Immediately I felt him turn to unresponsive stone beneath my lips. His hands gently, but with irresistible force, pushed my face back. I opened my eyes and saw his guarded expression.

“Oops,” I breathed.

“That’s an understatement.”

I’m guessing Forks High School is not an abstinence-only campus.

* ENGLISH, MOTHERFUCKER!  CAN YOU WRITE IT?!  

So why do we collectively believe that Twilight promotes abstinence, if it clearly doesn’t follow the girl-as-sexual-gatekeeper and girls-are-disinterested-in-sex tropes that are the foundations of abstinence-only education? “A lot of people don’t...

So why do we collectively believe that Twilight promotes abstinence, if it clearly doesn’t follow the girl-as-sexual-gatekeeper and girls-are-disinterested-in-sex tropes that are the foundations of abstinence-only education?   

“A lot of people don’t wait until they’re married,” Sara Swiokla, 15, says. “But reading [Twilight] makes you want to save your virginity more because it’s a really special thing that you want to share with a really special person.”

(from “No Sex Please, We’re Vampires,” Newsweek, July 20, 2008)

Sara, I have GOT to talk to your English teacher.  He or she is clearly not teaching you a blessed thing about textual analysis.  Nowhere in any of the books does Bella say a word about wanting to save her virginity, much less because she wants to share it with a really special person.  In fact, she spends a good chunk of Twilight and most of Eclipse actively trying to jump Edward, who also never says anything about her virginity.  Her soul, yes; her continued existence as a human being, yes; her virginity, no.   

Granted, you wouldn’t be the first person to have a personal interpretation of a work of art that is completely unsupported by the text.  For instance, I could introduce you to a whole lot of Fight Club fans.  (On second thought, maybe it’s better if you don’t know them.)

Hang on a moment, though.  I’m sorry, Sara; I misunderstood you.  You weren’t talking about the actual contents of the novel.  You were talking about your experience reading Twilight.  Important distinction.  

Sara, like many other Twilight readers, is responding to what Michel Foucault termed the “repressive hypothesis” in his seminal post-structuralist philosophical work The History of Sexuality (Vol. I). Short version: We believe that Western society...

Sara, like many other Twilight readers, is responding to what Michel Foucault termed the “repressive hypothesis” in his seminal post-structuralist philosophical work The History of Sexuality (Vol. I).  Short version: We believe that Western society has been repressed since the 17th century.  However, when we talk about this belief to explain how repressed we are, we’re talking about sex.  Foucault’s main focus throughout the book is to analyze how Westerners wound up in a position where claiming that we’re not talking about sex means that we’re talking about sex and what impacts it has had on our society: 

By what spiral did we come to affirm that sex is negated?*  What led us to show, ostentatiously, that sex is something we hide, to say it is something we silence?

In essence, the more Edward and Bella talk about not having sex and reaffirm through their actions that they can’t have sex–the more they claim on the surface to be abstinent and repressing their desire for one another–the more the reader thinks about sex and how awesome it is.  Meyer’s real trick with Twilight was to tap into this paradox** and use it to create a pervasive atmosphere of sublimated desire every time Edward and Bella get anywhere near each other or think about one another.  At the same time, she and her readers can innocently claim that the novel promotes abstinence and is therefore a positive thing for young women.  Notice how Sara’s statement references both virginity and “sharing” it with a really special person?  She can’t even stay off the topic of sex in a single sentence.  

(Side note: oddly enough, Hulk talks about abstinence in similar terms too:

“THUS ENGAGING IN ABSTINENCE MEANS TRYING TO FIND A LEVEL IN CONFIDENCE AND MATURITY IN LEARNING HOW TO MANAGE WHAT YOU WANT AND WHAT YOU’RE BEGINNING TO EMBRACE AGAINST A SEA OF SOCIAL PRESSURES. AND IF YOU’RE LUCKY, YOU CAN FIND SOMEONE YOU LOVE IN HIGH SCHOOL OR WHENEVER AND THAT PERSON IS A KIND AND DECENT PERSON. THUS, YOU CAN TRY AND SHARE THE AWKWARDNESS AND UNDERSTANDING AND AT LEAST BE COMFORTED WHEN YOU START THAT PHYSICAL JOURNEY WE ALL GO THROUGH.***” 

Apparently gamma radiation does not protect against the repressive hypothesis.)

Furthermore, by constantly talking about Twilight as a novel that promotes desirable and commendably restrained sexuality, they’re reaffirming their own perception of sexual purity and simultaneously getting to talk about sex with very little censure.  Foucault calls this mechanism “putting sex into discourse” and spends the remainder of The History of Sexuality analyzing the way Western society has been using it since the Victorian era.   

If this analysis doesn’t make a lot of sense, please scroll down to the next post for someone who can explain it far more succinctly.

* ENGLISH, MOTHERFUCKER! CAN YOU–oh, yeah; you originally wrote this book in French.  Carry on!

** Remember what I said about eating a copy of Breaking Dawn with raspberry jam and cream cheese if I learned that Stephenie Meyer was familiar with Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth?  I’ll throw in a hardcover copy of Eclipse too if she’s even heard of Foucault.  

*** It would have been nice to hear something like this when I was about 14 or so.  Instead, I mostly got the spectral boogie-man version found in DGHWJ.  

Ladies and gentlemen, noted Foucauldian analyst Russell Brand:

(The relevant part is at about 6:20-7:15, but the rest is entertaining too.)

“I think what I meant to say when during the MTV VMA Awards, I implied that the Jonas Brothers’ chastity rings and virginity might in fact be a cynical marketing ploy, utilizing the theories of Michel Foucault, who said that in Victorian society, the repression of sexuality was just another way of bringing sexuality to the forefront of our consciousnesses.  It’s a marketing technique.  By saying that the Jonas brothers are virgins, you can’t help but think about them having sex.  The Jonas Brothers are not having sex.  The Jonas Brothers are not having sex.  The Jonas Brothers are not having sex.  As long as you’re looking at the rings on their fingers you’re not wondering about where them fingers ain’t straying.”

Simply put, this is how Hulk’s pane of glass works.  

In part II of this essay, I’ll analyze why it and Twilight work for some readers and fail miserably for others, using the remainder of DGHWJ and theories from Foucault's Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison.  Those of you who believe that the conclusion of DGHWJ provides a more hopeful and nuanced message for young readers can rest assured that I’ll address that issue as well. 

(Source: arewomenhuman.me)