I Read Twilight and Hate It: Chapter 8

Chapter 8: Port Angeles
    On the drive, they're listening to "whiny rock songs¹" on the way (I find it pretty ironic that Bella would describe anything else in this book as "whiny") and chatting about boys, as Jess talks about ho well her date with Mike went.  During this conversation, Bella reveals that she's never been to a dance because (and I don't see why Stephanie Meyer thinks it's necessary to remind us of this) she's clumsy, and also because she's never had a boyfriend before (I guess none of the boys in Phoenix were sparkly enough).  Actually, she says it's because none of the boys asked her.  Jessica points out a plot hole:

        She looked skeptical. "People ask you out here," she reminded me, "and you tell them no.¹" 

    Good point, Jess.  Are we going to get an excuse for the Sue-paradox that Bella is both wanted by every guy with a name and still playing up the whole "unlucky at love" thing?  Nope, it's just used as a segue into the fact that Tyler was telling every that he was going to the Prom with Bella.
    Anyways, their shopping trip continues, and the girls talked about boys, and "giggled while pawing through the clothes,¹" and paid compliments to how each other looked in different dresses and looked at shoes, etc.  I know that Meyers actually is female, so I almost can't make this argument.  But, is it me or does she seem to write the whole "girl time" part like a middle-aged man would, like someone who has never been female and is just basing it off of stereotypes from TV and movies?  Maybe it's just my imagination.  But then again, what girls'-night-out with Bella would be complete without her bringing up Edward?  She asks Angela whether it's normal for the Cullens to be missing school a lot, and Angela rather unceremoniously reassures her: yes, yes it is.
    After they're all done with dress/shoe shopping, they decide to split up for an hour and then meet at a restaurant for dinner. 

        I wanted to go look for a bookstore.  They were both willing to come with me, but I encouraged them to go have fun - they didn't know how preoccupied I could get when surrounded by books.¹

    "You two go do some stupid non-thinky thing.  Only I am allowed to enjoy books and reading."  Bella goes out walking and looking for a bookstore.  In a seemingly-pointless scene, she passes a hippie, New Age looking one and decides to forgo it and look for a "normal book-store.¹"  Screw local business; I'm going to find me a Borders.   While looking, she gets lost, because her mind was busy "wrestling with despair¹" about Edward.  She finds herself in sort of an industrial/warehouse district (which, inconveniently, was just one block away from the main tourist boardwalk), where she passes a group of guys who are "joking loudly among themselves, laughing raucously and punching each other's arms.¹"  So, I guess it's not just girls; Meyer writes "guy-time" out as a ridiculous stereotype of male behaviour, too.
    One of the guys tries to hit on her (all the boys do), but she gets freaked out and starts walking away quickly.  As she's walking, she notices that two of the guys from the group are following her.  She keeps walking quickly down the street, trying to out-pace them, until she finds the other two guys waiting in front of her (I guess they can teleport, too).   As they close on on her, suddenly a silver car bursts through the alleyway, making the guys scramble.  A door opens, and the driver tells Bella to get in.  She does, and gets driven back to the main part of town.  The driver is Edward, obviously.  Oddly though, Meyer doesn't say it's Edward at first, just referring to him as "him¹," until several paragraphs after Bella gets in the car.  Was she expecting us to be surprised that the person in the car was Edward?  Because, if so, she completely failed.
    Anyways, Edward speeds out of there with Bella, "blowing through several stop signs¹."  I guess because he's worried that those guys could outrun his car if he doesn't bolt out of there.  On the way, Edward sounds really pissed off at her for almost getting raped.  After she calms him down, though, he explains that he's really pissed off at the would-be rapists, and was having trouble resisting the urge to hunt them down and slaughter them.  He drives to the Italian restaurant that Jessica and Angela are waiting out side.

        He parallel-parked against the curb in a space I would have thought much too small for the Volvo, but he slid in effortlessly in one try.¹

    Bow-chika-wow wow.  You know how Bella is constantly thinking that all the guys around her are jealous over her?  Well, in the restaurant she does the same thing the whole time, except with thinking that the hostess and waitress are jealous over Edward.  You could tell the hostess would be trying to steel her man, because of her "unnatural blondness¹."  Curse you bleach-blondes and your inherent evil!
    After they get seated, Bella gets jealous an tells Edward that she doesn't want him being all sparkle-sexy in front of other girl.  After that the waitress comes out, and Bella is actually thinking, when she sees her, that she was gossiping with the hostess in the kitchen about how smoking hot Edward is.  This is what she's thinking about.  She's so paranoid about other girls getting Edward, that she's actually imagining that they're conspiring together to steel him away.  Not to mention the fact that she was almost just raped, and probably has more to be shaken up about than possible competition for Edward.  Actually, I should note that the word "rape" or "rapist" is never actually used in this chapter.  It's always just replaced with a phrase like "do something horrible¹" or the character trailing off before finishing their sentence.  Why Meyer decides this is beyond me.  Maybe they just didn't want this book to be too adult, so they could put it in the "teen" section at bookstores.  Although, if you ask me, having a chapter about rape is going to make the book just as mature whether you use the word or not. 
    Anyways, Edward makes Bella drink a couple Cokes (the word "Coke" is actually mentioned five times in this chapter.  Sponsorship?) and eat some pasta and bread, the whole time his eyes "golden butterscotch.¹"  He asks her if she's feeling okay after the whole rape thing, but she just keeps turning the conversation back to him.  She mentions about his eyes changing colour again, and says she has some theories.  He asks to hear them, but she says she wants some information out of him first, and he agrees.  Um, that's not really a good deal for Edward; I mean, it's not like Bella's theories are going to reveal any terribly useful information about him; they're just facts about him which may or may not be true.  But, I guess the story has to move forward somehow.
    The fist question, "why are you in Port Angeles?¹" Edward passes on.  The second question, "how can you read minds?" he's oddly open about.  Actually, before he answers it, it sort of evolves into "how did you know I was in trouble?"  Edward responds by saying "Only you could get into trouble in a town this small.  You would have devastated their crime rate statistics for a decade, you know¹."  Okay, so he’s actually saying that it is her fault that she almost got gang-raped.  Also, it did seem really unrealistic that Bella would fall victim to street crime in a town as small as Port Angeles, but now that I've read Edward's explanation... it still seems really unrealistic.  He further elaborates the point:

        "I was wrong about you.. You're not a magnet for accidents - that's not a broad enough classification. You are a magnet for trouble.  If there is anything dangerous within a ten-mile radius, it will invariably find you¹"

    He also says that he would fall into this whole trouble category, "unequivocally¹."  He then goes back on his previous decision to past on her first question and announces that "I followed you to Port Angeles,¹" apparently because he was trying to keep her alive.  How would he know that she'd be in danger, though?  They give the wishy-washy excuse that it's because he knew that she was a "magnet for trouble," based on her clumsiness, but there's no sound logic-track that leads from someone being clumsy to you knowing they'll be raped at a certain time and place, no matter how much you think about it.  It seems like another instance of "I know, because the author told me so." 
    Bella notes that this is the second time he's saved her life and/or virginity, and he says that it's actually the third time; saying that "your number was up the first time I met you,¹" presumably because he was so tempted to kill her to drain her blood when they first met (or just kill her because she was so annoying).  Saving someone's life and refraining from murdering them are hardly the moral equivalent, though. 
    He then gives her some more information regarding her second question and lets her know that he knew she was in danger, because he could tell that she wasn't with Jessica and Angela by reading their minds, and then later was able to read the rapists' minds and see her face and what they planned on doing to her.   Wait, what?  You mean, when he was talking about reading people, he didn't mean just estimating what they were thinking by reading their body language, he actually meant looking into their heads and seeing what they were thinking.  How stupid is that?  Stephanie Meyer, apparently, was sitting in front of her computer thinking, "Well, he's already got super-strength, super-speed, super-hotness, and immortality... but maybe, that's not quite enough powers.  I'll make him psychic, too."    Protip, writers: it is your hero's weaknesses, not their strengths, that makes them great.  He also makes it clear that Bella's mind is the only one he can't read.  Maybe she lacks the delta brainwave from doing the nasty in the pasty at some point².
    Edward laments again, how hard it was for him not to kill the would-be rapists (awww, poor Edward).  He then suggests that they leave and asks for the check, in a voice that's "quiet, rougher, still reflecting the strain of our conversation.¹"  He let her into his car, and as he was walking around to the driver's side, Bella was "amazed, yet again by how graceful he was.¹"  Umm... okay.  Walking to the other side of the car isn't an act that usually requires a lot of grace; but who knows, maybe he was doing some spins and pliés along the way.  They drive off, and Edward lets Bella know it's her turn to answer questions.  So ends chapter 8.
    Nice thing: it is sort of refreshing that Meyer decided to give Edward a Volvo as a car.  Given that the rest of his character design seemed like she was trying to build the "perfect man," one would guess that she'd give him some kind of sexy car, like a Charger or a Corvette, or a roadster, or at least a Beamer..  But instead, she chose to gave him a rather non-descript vehicle from a company that's known for making cars that are reliable but boring.  Kudos.  Stay tuned for Chapter 9.

    

¹Meyer, Stephanie Twilight. “Chapter 8: Port Angeles” Little, Brown and Co., 2005
²Futurama episode 3ACV07 "The Day the Earth Stood Stupid," Which incidentally pre-dates Twilight by four years.

Anti-Troling

    I'm going to introduce a new fun activity on the internet; a new way to mess with people with ideology-centered message boards.  I call it "anti-trolling."  Anyone who's been on the internet for awhile is probably familiar with trolling; the act of going to a message board or chat room and saying things solely for the purpose of annoying and harassing everyone there or to provoke an argument.  Anti-trolling is sort of like acting in the opposite of that, but with the same effect. 
    Basically, I got the idea when I noticed that a lot of message boards considered anyone who disagreed with the ideology of the message board to be a troll and usually banning them.  So, since it's usually so easy to get banned while disagreeing with a community, I wanted to see how easy it was to get banned by agreeing with it, fervently and aggressively.  For instance; if it's a right-wing message board, you can act like the most jingoistic, liberal-hating, belligerent conservative that you could imagine, and talk about things, like how you think that it would be a good idea to round up every member of the Democratic Party and shoot them, etc.  Then, sit back and watch while people with moderately left-leanings opinions are all banned for trolling, while you get away with idiotic post after idiotic post.  It's fun.
    There's only certain kinds of message boards that this works for, however.  First of all, it has to be a community based around an ideology (which you will aggressively embrace).  That ideology could be political ("the Iraq war needs to end now") or non-political ("Twilight is the best book series, evar").  Secondly, you'll want to pick a message board that's heavily moderated, and has a tendency to ban people for officering opinions that clash with the above-mentioned ideology. 
    For my anti-trolling experiment, I chose the previously-mentioned "I Blame the Patriarchy" message board¹.  It was great until I eventually did banned and then the message board shut down soon after.  I didn't actually end up getting banned for the wacky-ass ideas I was submitting on the board, but because they somehow found out that I wasn't who I was pretending to be.  But oh well, guess I'll just have to be more careful next time.

 

 

¹: This link is to the old message board, which I would frequent.  Iblamethepatriarchy.com links to a new(?) one, but it’s not loading for me. 

Dworkin’s Razor

I was reading a thread on the I Blame the Patriarchy forum about men who start dating those life-sized dolls, and I noticed everyone had their own comment about why the men did this. None of them had anything to do with crippling social anxiety or anything like that They were all something along the lines of "having a woman who couldn't say 'no,'" or a way to have sex with a female body without having to deal with a female mind, or just being able to rape without ever getting in legal trouble.
They all seemed to be be explanations that were sex-based and usually involved some heavy hatred of women on the part of the men owning the dolls. It really puzzled me how these forum-goers could come to a conclusion without doing any research, be so wrong, and be so sure of themselves.
Then it dawned on me that they just have another way of thinking; it explains so much of what people said on that forum. I call it Dworkin's Razor, and it consists of the idea that: whenever there are multiple explanations for something, the explanation which implies the most hatred and discrimination against women is always the correct one.

On feminism (and masculinism).

     Feminism is an interesting word.  It means many different things to many different people.  To some, feminism is almost synonymous with the legalization of abortion.  Others may consider those values completely incompatible.  I've heard feminism often described as "the radical idea that women are people," an idea that's hardly been radical in my lifetime.  If I were to provide a definition for how I see it, it would be that feminism is the desire to remove from our society the cultural and legal inequalities between men and women which negatively effect women.  Certainly, there will always be argument over what these inequalities are and how best to get rid of them, but I believe at the core are the things I stated above.

     I used to think that feminism accounted for any desire to remove inequalities between men and women.  I would rail against many discrepancies between how males and females were treated, and I wondered why other self-described feminists didn't rally behind me.  Mostly, it's because I would rally behind ideas that would benefit men, but not so much women.  Feminism doesn't take into account the needs and problems faced by men.  It's not because of some inherent sexism within feminism; it's just not what it was made for.  That was my misunderstanding of feminism.
     On the other end, you have ideologies which want to make the world a better place for women, but to do so by creating inequalities (or at least strengthening existing ones) rather than destroying them.  People in this camp will usually wave the banner of feminism, or "radical feminism."  Of course, any ideology that supports any kind of inequality between men and women isn't really feminism (as per my definition).  Because it so often self-describes as "feminist," however, I like to call it faux-minism¹.  I've run across a lot of this mindset on the internet, mostly because I'm an internet masochist and like reading sites catered towards people I disagree with.
    One such site is a little chestnut called "I blame the patriarchy"; a nice little blog and accompanying message-board.  This place is a goldmine for off-the-wall, no-holds-barred misandry, and it will probably serve as my whipping boy for some future blog entries, but I digress.  Faux-minist writings that I've seen seem to avoid the idea that they're creating inequalities with sort of a "blank check" attitude towards them.  That is to say that: they see the inequalities and discrimination against women as being so great that they could not be overcome in the foreseeable future, and that anything that makes things better for women, at the expense of men, could never shift the balance enough to set things so that they favour women overall, but would rather only move society closer to the (distant) middle-line of equality.  I'm kind of half-making this up; I've never heard it actually described to me like that.  It's more of a general impression I get from reading a ton of blog posts.  I don't believe that society is really that stacked in men's favour (which is a post for another day), but even if it were; counteracting inequalities with more inequalities doesn't "balance things out."  It's clumsy and inaccurate and just creates a more complex web of separate roles.
      Most Men’s Rights blogs I've read suffer from the same problem, but with reversed genders.  They seem to have an unhealthy interest with restoring traditional gender roles and the nuclear family, thus restoring previously weakened inequalities.  Given the fact that the modern men's rights/masculinism movement was basically created to be a mirror movement of feminism, it seems logical that qualifications for what counts as masculinism is the mirror of what counts as feminism: any idea that seeks to remove inequalities which negatively effect men.   
     There's a middle ground, as set of changes we could make in society that's both masculinist and feminist, that removes inequalities and benefits both men and women.  Removing violence and similar tough-guy ideals from society's idea of what it is to be a man is one example of this. 
     Even with the presence of common ground, though, there seems to be a weird kind of animosity between many feminists and masculinists, as though they were each other's enemy.  I don't know why, though.  Both camps have similar goals of ending sex-based discrimination; each one is just better at seeing and attacking different kinds of discrimination.  After all, the most visible kind of discrimination for anyone is the kind against a group that person belongs to. 
    If feminists are trying to remove some kind of inequality, it is not the goal of masculinism to stop them; or visa versa.  Eventually, if both parties keep removing inequalities against themselves, the barriers between men and women might not be so present.

 

¹ Why does the French word for “fake” make such better portmanteaus than the English one?