a blog

i look at bella swan, and instead of a dream, i see my high school loves now married to men, in the closet to this day, holding the door shut with both hands. i see my friends who were pregnant by eighteen, who never went to art school or finished that education degree or cut it at the big engineering school, despite all the scholarships, because somebody had to stay home with the broken-condom baby. i see my friends who detransitioned because it was easier, and i can't even resent them for no longer speaking to me--we buzzed our heads together for the first in the same bathroom sinks.

i see the horror of being frozen forever at eighteen, never to dye your hair or pierce your ears or get a tattoo or gain comfortable weight, to make your body yours--the horror of never getting to grow up! there is a reason it is a tragedy when someone dies at 18. there is so much potential never realized.

i see the horror of being trapped in a "family" who are the only real friends you will ever have because no one else is allowed in, because they don't know the truth you do. i see the horror of the simple fact of being married to a man! when all the wealth is his, all the decisions are his, and your entire social circle becomes his family and friends, just as a matter of course. when no matter how much he has hurt you, you are sure it was because he loved you. what happened to you? where did your identity and your beliefs go? what is horror if not that?

i am white, but i can certainly still see the horror in having your culture and community and ACTUAL LITERAL MELANIN IN YOUR SKIN stripped away because you exist in a world where it is ontologically true that being "perfected" means becoming white, and being anything else means all the worst stereotypes about you are true.

and even if you aren't on the margins--even if you are stephenie fucking meyer, an upper-middle class, white, heterosexual, cisgender, able-bodied Mormon woman writing this in the early aughts in the bad old US of A--

we all see the horror bleeding in. we see the bloody, painful, terrifying birth after the pregnancy that distorts bella's body in horrific ways. we see the cracks straining where all of the messy, real parts of motherhood are fast-forwarded through and hand-waved away, almost as if someone is trying not to admit they didn't love it. we see alice pushing bella into taking things that she "doesn't want" because it would, of course, be wrong to want them, even if it's so much fun to fantasize about having them. we see edward, controlling and demanding and angry, jacob, even worse, teachers fantasizing about their young female students, assault everywhere, dripping off the pages, misogyny so heavy even good relationships like the one with bella's kindly father are buckling under it--and we know stephenie meyer isn't horrified of it herself, but she still can't keep the dissatisfaction from creeping in, even in her fantasy--

in other words:

We chase romance, we structure our lives around it, we fashion much of our art and culture from it. The romance story is not only a narrative but becomes also, more disturbingly, an imperative. (The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Romance Fiction; ed. Jayashree Kamblé, Eric Murphy Selinger, Hsu-Ming Teo)