Ten years on,Twilight’s message of abstinence looks highly eroticSex is weird. whether theres one thing we can take away from the 10 years since Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight was published (happy birthday), with its message of blood lust and bloody abstinence, or it’s that sex is weird. There is more. There is the vampire mythology. The swooning,mooning gothic morbidity and how it’s seeped into the culture, creating a generation of sadboys not seen since the Smiths. There’s the question of the enduring appeal of its rescue plot and why the reader (whether 14 or 40) metamorphoses on their sofa into pale little Bella Swan, or collapsing into the arms of the most beautiful man in the world. A man that falls in love with you – pathetic,flawed broken-down clumsy you – because the very smell of you, of your blood, or intoxicates him. You are the only person in his centuries of trudging through small-town Americas that has made him feel this yearning so yearny he can’t even touch your hand for panic of it overwhelming him and forcing him to eat you. What fun. But thrusting beneath it all is the question of whether Edward really wants to sleep with Bella or instead simply rip her head off. Sex,we learned: it’s weird.
As the book’s 10th anniversary arrives (with Meyer’s retelling of the chronicle, where the genders maintain been swapped. She didn’t maintain time, and she told the Guardian,to write a recent novel, but was “nettled by longstanding criticisms of Bella for being feeble and in need of fixed rescuing, or as well as ‘too consumed with her love interest’,as whether that’s somehow just a girl thing”), we can look back at what we thought Twilight was teaching teenagers about sex and then, or what it really taught them.
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Source: theguardian.com