@tinkdw 

Wow. Okay. I’ll be honest with you, I was expecting something… more veiled I suppose but whatever. I’ll break this down… again. 

Putting that quote back in context, I said: 

The misogynistic undercurrent comes in when we use Twilight (and 50 Shades) as the height of “crap I don’t want young women to read”. And of course I have to ask why? Why shouldn’t teen girls read it? It’s not well written, sure, but that’s not the reason most folks give. The reason most folks give is that it’s bad for them somehow, that reading Twilight is somehow damaging. Again, why? Because teen girls are impressionable and will think this is the kind of relationship they should be striving for? Can’t they understand the difference between a romantic fantasy that means nothing, one where they can live vicariously through a fictional character and date the bad body without actually ever being in any danger of anything more than a paper cut?

And you respond by blaming dating violence on fiction. And to be honest, this really, really pissed me off. I don’t know if you’re aware how much responsibility you’re putting on stories here, but it’s a lot. You’re placing blame on fiction when the blame for any and all abuse in relationships should be on the abusers. I’m very sympathetic to your friends and I hate that they were ever abused, but it wasn’t because of stories, it was because their partners were dicks. Their partners made the choices to be abusive. 

Look, perhaps I made a mistake by using the term “critical thinking” when I really meant “the ability to differentiate between fiction and the real world” I’m not asking teenage girls to sit down and write an essay about every book they read, but I am saying that most teenagers know the difference real and not real and that the hopeful optimism in things like “happily ever after” and those kinds of romantic notions have more to do with the idealism and optimism of youth than they do with the kinds of stories we tell. Art is reflective. It can seek to change the world we’re living in, but for the most part it reflects something about the world. We write about our hopes, our fears, our wants, our dreams, and our worries. We write about what the world is and what we fear or wish it could be. This is the reason fantasy exists. We want to slay dragons and save the day. We want happily ever afters. We want to have some kind of power in our own lives, especially when we have none. 

And I have to ask, why do you think certain stories appeal to certain kinds of people? Why would teenage girls especially be drawn to love stories where bad boys have soft centers and desire them wholly? Why would a teenage girl want a story where she’s special and important and has power over men? Well, I’d say a lot of it has to do with the fact that young women have very little power in the real world. In fiction they can explore a power fantasy they don’t have access to in real life. 

I know I’m probably not going to change your mind, and that’s okay. You can say you want better stories for teen girls and that’s fine, but what I’m saying is I really don’t think there’s that much harm in young women reading their “trashy” teen romances. You said yourself that as a teen you loved Angel/Buffy, and while I don’t know much about Buffy at all I do know that you yourself put it in the “power imbalance”/bad category in your original post. I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that even as a teen you knew it wasn’t perfect, but there was something about it you loved. It spoke to something inside you, and it made you happy. So I have to ask you here, what makes you so special? What makes you different from all the other girls who loved that relationship or relationship like it that grew up well adjusted and able to understand that things that are okay in books aren’t always okay in real life? I’m not asking them to “ignore” things. I’m asking them to think about things. I believe they can. I believe they do. I believe we’ll get better at is as time goes on. Education goes a lot with it, because even if every teen romance ever written from now on was a shining example of real love (which… I’m not ever going to get into that) there would still be dating violence. Cruel people will always be cruel, but the key is recognizing the behavior for what it is and helping those who need help.

Now, of course I’m saying we should be critical of media. I’ve said that several times. But I actually do think young women are smart enough to do it. I was a teenager when Twilight came out. I was one of those teenage girls who used to get in fights with other girls to tell them what they were reading was trash. I was one of those girls who cited all those articles and think-pieces about how bad Twilight was. I’m deeply ashamed of that now, because I was an ass. I shouldn’t’ve been out there moralizing about how terrible it was. My peers understood it was just a story. They loved it for their own reasons, but I was the jackass who didn’t trust their judgment. I was wrong. But the fact was that when Twilight was a thing (ten years ago) the environment around it was such that plenty of people were telling teen girls the relationship wasn’t ideal, to the point of bashing. Teen girls were educated on the issues with that series whether they wanted to be or not. 

As to the larger conversation about the messages we send in media, I do feel there are harmful messages sent to all people. I’m not saying there aren’t. What I am saying is that we’re too hard on things like teen romance. Media isn’t the only thing that affects who we are and how we behave, and I would wager that a lot of the harmful things we’re taught aren’t taught through television or books, but through parents, teachers, and guardians. “He picks on you because he likes you” was told to me by my own mother. The conversation about bad messaging is complex, and as I stated before I refuse to lay it all at the feet of art. There are dozens of factors. And I also don’t agree that the majority of love stories aimed at teen girls are in the same vein as Twilight. 

And to the thing about boys, what I was saying is that no one talks about how terrible it is for boys to read books like say… Ender’s Game. No one talks about how damaging and dangerous it is for boys to read about someone who is essentially a child solider who destroys entire worlds. That’s what I meant. No one expects boys to become Ender because they read about him. We also don’t expect young women to become Katniss and kill kids and topple governments. I know these are different genres, but that’s my point. My issue is that we hold romance to a higher standard when it’s just as fantastical as any other genre. 

But I will tell you what I think is unfair and unreasonable: assuming that young woman can’t think about the media they consume. It’s unfair and unreasonable to hold books written by women, for women to a standard we don’t hold for books written by men, for men. It’s unfair and unreasonable to blame stories for the actions for real people. It’s unfair and unreasonable to hold girls to a different standard and to moralize about their tastes.