I agree that fantasy is not reality, and I don't think that fiction should have to be didactic.
Most teenage boys could easily harm and even kill most teenage girls, if they wanted to.
Yet most teenage girls are quite so ridiculously helpless and passive as Bella. Perhaps it's her passivity that helps to make her an audience-blank-slate, but Meyer makes her almost pathologically clumsy (though never given in the text as an actual medical condition) as well as physically fragile. There are teenage girls who play sports, who kickbox, who feel physically confident in themselves, and I think presenting women of a warlike bent can be empowering.
As well, while the reality is that the bell curve of boys' physical strength is different to the bell curve of girls' physical strength (though these overlap), when supernatural elements come into play there is no reason why girls should not have equal access to these powers. The pattern is too frequently a powerful male supernatural boyfriend and a helpless female human girl. When there is no reason why girls cannot access this fantasy skill set, it's as sexist as portraying men as brilliant scholastic geniuses and women as barely sapient creatures with the intelligence of hamsters. Alice, Rosalie, and eventually Bella have some vampiric powers, but Rosalie's is beauty-based and Bella's is passive and defensive.
There are also many forms of strength that don't come in stereotypically masculine flavours and are therefore not acknowledged as often as they ought to be. I don't think Bella has any of them. The text claims she's self-sacrificing when she's whiny, in true love when she has a case of teenage depression, a brave and noble mother trying to protect her daughter while she and Edward aid and abet vampiric murderers who eat people.
I think it would be more psychologically realistic to back away from the killer who claims he wants to eat you, unless the character is portrayed as the sort of person who writes letters to serial killers--and the text should give a clue that something's wrong with them. Stories don't have to stick to psychological realism, but when they're ostensibly set in the real contemporary world and have details about daily life at an ordinary high school, there is dissonance when the psychology and characterisation fails. As it does frequently in the Twilight series.
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winterfish
no subject
Date: 2012-06-12 10:19 am (UTC)Most teenage boys could easily harm and even kill most teenage girls, if they wanted to.
Yet most teenage girls are quite so ridiculously helpless and passive as Bella. Perhaps it's her passivity that helps to make her an audience-blank-slate, but Meyer makes her almost pathologically clumsy (though never given in the text as an actual medical condition) as well as physically fragile. There are teenage girls who play sports, who kickbox, who feel physically confident in themselves, and I think presenting women of a warlike bent can be empowering.
As well, while the reality is that the bell curve of boys' physical strength is different to the bell curve of girls' physical strength (though these overlap), when supernatural elements come into play there is no reason why girls should not have equal access to these powers. The pattern is too frequently a powerful male supernatural boyfriend and a helpless female human girl. When there is no reason why girls cannot access this fantasy skill set, it's as sexist as portraying men as brilliant scholastic geniuses and women as barely sapient creatures with the intelligence of hamsters. Alice, Rosalie, and eventually Bella have some vampiric powers, but Rosalie's is beauty-based and Bella's is passive and defensive.
There are also many forms of strength that don't come in stereotypically masculine flavours and are therefore not acknowledged as often as they ought to be. I don't think Bella has any of them. The text claims she's self-sacrificing when she's whiny, in true love when she has a case of teenage depression, a brave and noble mother trying to protect her daughter while she and Edward aid and abet vampiric murderers who eat people.
I think it would be more psychologically realistic to back away from the killer who claims he wants to eat you, unless the character is portrayed as the sort of person who writes letters to serial killers--and the text should give a clue that something's wrong with them. Stories don't have to stick to psychological realism, but when they're ostensibly set in the real contemporary world and have details about daily life at an ordinary high school, there is dissonance when the psychology and characterisation fails. As it does frequently in the Twilight series.