Yesterday I encouraged my tween to take in some compelling propaganda that highlights, condones and/or actively encourages the perspective that women are weak, men are the protectors, sexual relations are controlled by the male, male spousal abuse is a forgivable aspect of their innate character, and good and evil are identifiable and tinged with racist overtones.

My 12-year-old and her friends are pretty sophisticated propaganda consumers at this point in their 21^st-Century upbringing, so they were aware of and had their own opinions of the whole ‘weak female’ controversy – but the domestic violence and racist aspects of the Twilight/New Moon juggernaut (and I’m presuming few between here and Ouagadougou wouldn’t have recognized my topic) were new and startling for me.  Not having read the books (I can’t stomach Meyers’ execrable prose), I was unprepared for the scene where main protagonist Bella, torn between her Aryan vampire lover and the Native American werewolf aspirant for her affections, visits the latter’s lair.  A number of highly-pumped shirtless young men sit at a table, served lovingly by Bella’s counterpart, a dark-skinned female.  Turning from the counter to provide fresh-baked cookies to the joking males, the werewolf’s human female reveals a face raked by scars.  She moves about offering food, smiling and gently kidding the guys.  The scene closes on a warm kiss with her boyfriend.  Later, it’s explained that in an uncontrolled fit of pique he’d injured her because she was “standing too close.”

I asked the tweens whether there was any further exposition in the book. Had she rebelled? Was there indictment of his behavior, or retributive measures from his clan?  If there was, the girls didn’t recall it.  “It was just a quick thing,” explained the oldest and most sophisticated of the group.  “He was just angry, and she was too close to him.  He was sorry afterward.”  I was slack-jawed.  This very bright and thoughtful girl on the verge of young womanhood (daughter of a feminist university professor and a equality-minded lawyer), had just mouthed something  out of a bygone rule book.  Postulated a concept that was dated even when I was their age in 1973. 

I can handle the perspective that female blood is an uncontrolled, lust-inducing exudate against whose lure a moral male must summon superhuman control, and that such moral men must be consistently vigilant to protect females from men of lesser fiber.  The metaphor is so obvious and awkward as to be laughable, and laughingly sloughed off.  Also humorous and worthy of jesting discussion is the concept that the ‘change’ from human to vampire (aka loss of virginity) is a ‘death’ which is rightly put to vote before the family of the male.  I can even take the precept that the moral male agrees to such a death only if marriage is accepted (the entire tween audience swooned as the question was posed.  My own jaw dropped even lower.  He’ll allow her to change into a vampire if she agrees to lifelong partnership with her violator/savior? This is 2009?  I’m not sitting in some sort of timewarp tunnel to the 1950s?).  But okay.  I can take all that.  Worthy fodder for discussion with this next generation of females.

But that male violence issue.  That’s a bit of a poser.  That might require a public protestation or two.  That might beg the suggestion that the next benefit for ‘My Sister’s Place’ employ a poster of the ravaged face of this beautiful young actress, and a flaming title slashed at the mid-point:  “THIS ISN’T UNDYING LOVE.  IT’S SELF-HATE.”