Thoughts: If you thought I couldn’t do another post about sexism, you were dead wrong

This is late because 1) I travelled for sixteen godforsaken hours yesterday and didn’t have internet until just now and 2) because this is a 1,200 word masterpiece, so stop complaining.

Today, I want to talk about Twilight.

Twilight?

Yes, that Twilight. The Stephanie Meyer monstrosity. Let’s do this.

In case you hadn’t been aware (and I don’t know why you would have been, honestly), our dear Steph just dropped a new book on us out of the blue, like Beyonce’s new album except with mediocre word choice and less feminism. It’s also not actually a new book, per say, just a new title, Life and Death. It’s a scene-for-scene recreation of Twilight, but the genders of all the characters are switched. Edward the vampire is now Edyth (yeah, I did spell that right), and our dearly not-beloved Bella has been renamed Beaufort (good god someone needs to get that woman a better editor. Beaufort? Really??) Every character has undergone a gender switch, all the way down to the school secretary. I’ve got some issues with this right off the bat, not the least of which is that Meyer is treating this like a revolutionary idea, even when it has been one of the fundamental tropes of fanfiction and fan art for so long that there are hardly any characters in popular culture and literature that haven’t been reimagined as another gender. I’m going to read this book soon, if only to revel in something with a badass woman doctor and a highly matriarchal Native American tribe, but I’m certainly not going to buy it. There’s a Google Chrome extension that switches all gender pronouns in text to the opposite pronoun for free.

If this ‘Twilight, reimagined’ idea coming from Meyer seems weirdly familiar, it’s because it is; she released Midnight Sun a few years ago, which was Twilight, but from Edward’s point of view instead of Bella’s. (Ah, the POV switch, another famous fanfiction trope). Just now, I won’t examine why she insists on clinging to the Twilight ship with a tenacious fury that no pitbull could hope to match, and I’ll get on with why this new book drives me so damn crazy.

Meyer has said that she wrote Life and Death (or rather, edited Twilight) to prove that Bella was not a ‘damsel in distress’ but rather ‘a human in distress’, and implied that Twilight, and the power imbalance depicted within it, is not sexist, but derived from the human/vampire dynamic. It is her attempt to rationalize the insane sexism in Twilight. In that case, I really don’t know why it didn’t have strong female leads, or depict more female vampire/human male interactions in the first place, just so that point was a little more clear. And that’s not the least of it. She’s essentially saying, “Look! I made a new thing, based on the old thing. Since this new one doesn’t feature the things that bugged you about the old one, but they’re similar, the problems in the old one don’t actually exist, so you can stop criticizing me now.” Nice try, Steph. The internet never stops criticizing. Also, you’re wrong.

Doing a gender swap to disprove the existence of sexism in a work is total bullshit. The presence of soft-spoken men being trampled by aggressive and competitive women does not negate the wider system of gender inequality. As Hermione and the Goddamn Patriarchy tells us, “Don’t misinterpret your feelings of inadequacy for the cultural, social, economic, and political oppression of an entire gender. Feeling personally maligned does not a wider prejudice make.” And just because a story can still be feasible with opposite genders does not mean that the original doesn’t perpetuate dangerous gender stereotypes and enable sexism.

Here’s a story as an example of how ridiculous this theory of Stephanie’s is: A boy goes to a new school. He sees a girl he spent the summer with, but she’s too cool to hang out with him and she snubs him for being too nerdy and not sexually adventurous enough for her. He spends a ton of time trying to be sexy and cool so she’ll like him, and she’ll hang out with him only after lying to her friends about their relationship. Eventually, with his new group of hot guy friends, he succeeds in his ‘cool transformation’ and the girl falls in love with him and they fly off into the sunset.

Now that I’ve written a gender-swap of it, are you going to say that the movie Grease isn’t sexist? (If your answer was ‘Grease is sexist??’ then you need to go watch that movie again, and weep). The existence and possible intrigue of this story does not negate how truly screwed up the original is. In some ways, this idea that Meyer has makes things worse, because it implies that you don’t need to feature strong women, because they already exist. We could have them, we just don’t really want to bother right now. Done, we don’t need to work on this sexism thing any more.

Just kidding, this entire thing is completely crazy. If I have written two similar books and one of those books is not sexist, then neither of my books are sexist. Can you spot the mistake? I only took one semester of formal reasoning, but I can tell you that this isn’t how it works.

But wait— there’s more! There’s another big problem in Twilight, and it can’t be (attempted to be) explained away with this weirdly backwards rhetoric. It doesn’t matter what genders are involved, Twilight still features a frightening, abusive relationship. It’s romanticized so heavily that in my misspent youth, even I, super-feminist and social-justice-warrior-princess extraordinaire, once thought that the behaviors in Twilight were acceptable, or even desirable. Some of these behaviors include: stalking: watching the other person sleep without their knowledge: breaking into the other person’s house (to watch them sleep): deliberately withholding important information: making decisions (about health, safety, and friendships with other people) for the other person: making decisions about the relationship without consulting the other person: isolating the other person from friends: heavy guilt-tripping: manipulation: non-consensual kissing: and using physical intimidation to get the other person to agree with you or to make a point.

I don’t care how you swing it; no combination of genders makes this kind of relationship even vaguely acceptable. Even one of these things would be an immediate turn-off, and the combination of all of them looks like the beginning of a TV show about crimes of passion. Giving the power in that relationship to a woman (therefore making it not-sexist, apparently, because nothing is sexist when a woman has any power) does not mean it’s fine. It just means that now you’re… yep, still romanticizing the abuse and manipulation of a human being.

All this because Meyer won’t let go of Twilight and let it go live in the world like an adult. A friend pointed out to me that Meyer takes any criticism of her books very personally. She can’t seem to separate criticism of her work from criticism of her self, which is a problem. It can be difficult and frustrating to hear negative comments about something as personal and emotionally demanding as your book, but listening to critiques and deciding whether or not to take them to heart is incredibly important. If a criticism has merit, you take it into consideration when writing your next thing, but what’s done is done. Meyer spends her time revamping and defending Twilight, instead of improving her writing skills and learning from the comments that people make about her books. And I think that if Twilight were really that worth defending, it would speak for itself.

And it doesn’t. Because it’s sexist as f*ck. #sorrynotsorry