To the point where stuff like Criminal Minds can refute it or undermine it without even having to explain the setup.
This. I am surprised to hear people say that the Twilight books present this love/possession/sex/violence trope as a model for teen relationships, as if it is somehow the first popular *anything* to do so, as if that is not the *standard* presentation girls get. As if they won't absorb that message without those books.
I wonder sometimes if the Twilight presentation of that sort of relationship--which is so very, very obvious, without any attempt to pretend it's something else, where the boy is literally a monster and the danger is literally that she'll be killed, and she believes that is the whole purpose of her being, to succumb to that--is why some groups of people are so freaked out. Not because they *disagree* with the motif, but because they are made uncomfortable by its not having been dressed up as something else. Because they don't like being made to confront the fact that this IS the dominant narrative. So they'll pretend it's scary, and new, and dangerous, and evil, because they want to deny the parallels between that and their own cultural narrative about het-normative relationships.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2008-09-24 09:17 pm (UTC)This. I am surprised to hear people say that the Twilight books present this love/possession/sex/violence trope as a model for teen relationships, as if it is somehow the first popular *anything* to do so, as if that is not the *standard* presentation girls get. As if they won't absorb that message without those books.
I wonder sometimes if the Twilight presentation of that sort of relationship--which is so very, very obvious, without any attempt to pretend it's something else, where the boy is literally a monster and the danger is literally that she'll be killed, and she believes that is the whole purpose of her being, to succumb to that--is why some groups of people are so freaked out. Not because they *disagree* with the motif, but because they are made uncomfortable by its not having been dressed up as something else. Because they don't like being made to confront the fact that this IS the dominant narrative. So they'll pretend it's scary, and new, and dangerous, and evil, because they want to deny the parallels between that and their own cultural narrative about het-normative relationships.