Saturday, July 18, 2009

Twilight & Women's Rights: Demythologizing The Stalky My Little Pony With Fangs

Any self-respecting girl will tell you she wants to slap Bella Swan across the face, hard.

They will also laugh uproariously at hearing Edward Cullen described as " vampire that glitters like diamonds in the sunlight to attract prey — sorta like a stalky My Little Pony with fangs."

Here is an excellent link that discusses Twilight and women's rights. (Thank you to Emily from my Sex & Gender Roles class at Hunter College.) Here is the link to the actual blogpost by the creator of the mash-up below (where he discusses sexism, women's rights, feminism and the various ways in which Twilight is an insult to women.)

Here is a brilliant mash-up between Twilight and "Buffy The Vampire Slayer." Utterly hilarious.

5 comments:

Beth said...

"We need to be teaching girls to kick ass - not become victims of a man's prey".
I couldn't agree more.
Great post!

Izgad said...

I acknowledge that Twilight can easily be taken as upholding a passive stereotype for women. There needs to be room to tell many different types of stories. Twilight is the story about the normal girl who gets the hot guy. There is nothing wrong with that we just need that there also be stories available about the empowered girl who takes initiative. That story can be messed with the normal girl who gets the guy but it is not easy. If she is too successful at being empowered then she stops being “normal.”
Love the Stalky my Little Pony with Fangs line.

jdub said...

Twilight sends the wrong message, but so does every single romantic comedy. They both create extremely ridiculous paradigms of romantic relationships. At least with Buffy, they showed that sex has consequences. One guy she sleeps with loses his soul (ok, a bit extreme), one guy totally ignores her the next day (a bit more realistic).

And, one of the best things about the new Harry Potter movie, which you panned, unfairly I think, is that Harry's love interest is rather ordinary looking, as is Hermione's (Ron is completely goofy looking).

Aliza said...

Lovely, Chana! Brava! I've had a major problem thought admittedly mostly for the ultrapoor writing, with Twilight since the beginning. Needless t say i love this!
-Aliza

Ballard said...

I acknowledge that Twilight can easily be taken as upholding a passive stereotype for women. There needs to be room to tell many different types of stories. Twilight is the story about the normal girl who gets the hot guy. There is nothing wrong with that we just need that there also be stories available about the empowered girl who takes initiative. That story can be messed with the normal girl who gets the guy but it is not easy. If she is too successful at being empowered then she stops being “normal.” Love the Stalky my Little Pony with Fangs line.