We Interrupt Our Regular Programming. . .

She dealt with moral problems
as a cleaver deals with meat
--The Dubliners, James Joyce

Some day my prince will come
Some day we'll meet again
And away to his castle we'll go
To be happy forever I know
--Someday My Prince Will Come,
Snow White

I'm in control, my worries are few
'Cause I've got love like I never knew
Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh
I got a new attitude
--New Attitude, Patti LaBelle

A girl is just not as good as a son.
It doesn’t matter how much money you have.
If you don’t have a son,
you are not as good as other people who have one."
SU QINGCAI, a tea farmer in China
who paid $3,500 for a 5-year-old boy.

________________

Ranger's out of town all week, it's Friday night. The cat's away, the mice shall play. All are invited to humor me on this non-military, archetypal investigation of the adolescent paranormal series, Twilight.

From friend LTNixon's site, a tween is currently being charged with attempted murder for launching an Orion single shot/use hand-held rocket flare against someone who spoke ill of her beloved Twilight series.

My query is: Why has the adolescent series Twilight become such a phenomena amongst all female demographics, not just the target audience? It is naught but piffle, and shamelessly distilled piffle. Every trope is trotted out: Vampire Edward Cullen is beautiful yet dangerous, but he so admires adolescent Bella that he would not think of penetrating her, by fang or otherwise. He dotes upon her every word (is he actually male?)

In place of consummation, he serves as a kind of guardian angel for Bella. Though he is over 100, being a vampire, his age has frozen at an appropriately earlier game point. For all its insipidity, even gradmas love it, or more precisely, the good-bad boy, Edward. (Perhaps for the Boomers, Edward is some type of hopeful template.)

Protest against the books centers around their propagation of stereotypical Cinderella thinking. While it does that, I am still intrigued by how such pap could hold the attention of any woman. It is reminiscent of the reaction elicited by Bridges of Madison County.

Women were red-eyed leaving the screenings for that film. Clint Eastwood aside, why? After all, this was a tale of adultery, and a woman who ended up doing the "right thing" by her farmer husband, whose best attribute as described by the wife was that he "was clean."

Rather than the perpetration of the old stereotype, what if the feminine impulse to be cared for and even swept away by a guardian is hot-wired into our DNA? What if, instead of being an external imposition, these stories are merely the manifestation of an indwelling impulse, one that society would not even need to impose? And what do you do about that?

In a NYT piece, "A Person Could Develop Occult," the writer surmised, "the paranormal does have a pattern of springing up at times of deep pain or confusion." Perhaps carin' vampire Edward is merely a manifestation of that. But that does not explain Bridges.

I was raised by a staunch Gloria Steinem touting feminist mother. The battle of the sexes was an actual war. And while I'm glad she taught me this sort of thing was tosh. . . what if all these attempts to "man-up" are antithetical to our nature? Freedom and independence of spirit is a superior thing, but perhaps we should recognize these ancient archetypes for what they are.

And then how might that recognition affect relations between the sexes?

Comments from either side of the aisle are solicited.