Twilight | ContraPoints - YouTube zweisprachige Untertitel

Twilight | ContraPoints - Zweisprachige Untertitel

So, I've been reading The Twilight Saga, a series of vampire romance novels by someone

called Stephanie Meyer, and I have, oh, just a couple thoughts.

I know a lot has been said about Twilight, but this is a complex work.

There's depths to Twilight that we, as a society, haven't even begun to explore.

So let's get into it.

Most of you know what Twilight but I should explain the basics for new people.

Stephanie Meyer was,

by all accounts,

a bored Mormon housewife when,

on June 2nd,

2003, around four in the morning, she awoke from a vivid dream about a girl and a boy and a meadow,

having this conversation about how.

they were in love and the difficulties in that because he wanted to kill her.

He was a vampire.

A boy and a girl in the meadow having this conversation about how they were in love and

the difficulties in that because he wanted to kill her, he was a vampire.

That dream became the first of four novels, Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse, and Breaking Dawn, which were made into five films.

In 2015, Stephanie published Life and Death, a gender-swapped reimagining of the first novel.

Yes, she transgendered Twilight.

Twilight has gone woke.

And in 2020, she published Midnight Sun, which is just the first novel again, but from Dracula's perspective.

Twilight has been on trend again recently.

I mean, I'm talking.

about it.

So honestly it was more on trend when I started this video but the script took me 18 months.

Twilight took me three months to write.

So in the 2000s these books about a teenage girl being seduced by various creatures

of the night spent 235 weeks on the bestseller list for children and as you can imagine there was discourse.

Vampires need love too.

That is world news for this Sunday.

I'm John Berman for all of us at ABC News.

Thanks for watching.

Good night.

Twilight's one of those pop culture phenomena from the 2000s that was

intensely loved and then intensely hated and then 10 years later it got

re-evaluated and everyone's like do we really need to hate this thing so much, you know, like gay people, or 9-Eleven.

Some critics have suggested that Twilight was hated so much because of misogyny,

and definitely true, you know, people love to hate whatever teenage girls are into.

D-Manward!

D-Taker!

I remember when Twilight came out, boy.

really hated that Stephanie Meyer had feminized vampire lore by making Edward sparkle,

you know, because Count Dracula was always a so much, and yet the truly devoted Twilight haters have always been women.

Twilight is a romance novel and as long as Because romance have existed,

women have always been at the majority of readers, but also the harshest critics.

Hating on romance novels is as much a part of feminine culture as reading them.

In 1856, yes, video essays are pretentious, yes, it's very funny.

Let's all laugh.

In 1856,

Marianne O'Rourke,

known by her masculine pen name,

George Elliot,

and often considered one of the greatest novelists of all time,

wrote an essay called Silly Novels by Lady Novelists,

in which she complained that Lady Novelists write unrealistic wishful filament fantasy schlock with absurd Mary Sue self-insert protagonists to every man.

falls in love with, you know, all the same complaints that people make today about romance fiction.

It is clear that they write in elegant boudoirs,

with violet-colored ink and a ruby pen,

that they must be entirely indifferent to publish these accounts, and inexperienced in every form of poverty except poverty of brains.

There is a level of internalized mystery.

misogyny in this, the not like other girls urge to identify with men and share in men's contempt for women.

That is misogyny.

But to simply dismiss hatred of Twilight as misogynistic is too simple,

because the criticism is usually not just that Twilight is feminine and frivolous, that it's written with violet-colored ink and debris.

be pen, but also that vampire romance entered Twine's love and violence.

Here was this guy and he was in love with everybody wanted to kill her.

And Twilight is therefore somehow dangerous.

Is this true?

Is Twilight dangerous?

Well, Edward Cullen is the world's most dangerous predator.

world's most dangerous predator.

He's a killer.

I'm a killer.

He's killed people before.

I've killed people before.

He wanted to kill you.

I wanted to kill you.

He still don't know if I can control himself.

I still don't know if I can control myself.

He's designed to kill.

I'm designed to kill.

I don't care.

Baby Robert Pattinson is a little peacoat saying, I designed to kill is my favorite thing ever.

How can you not love this?

This is the skin of a killer, Bella.

Now, am I saying the Twilight books are the greatest work of art ever produced?

Yes.

Part 1, Fiction.

It has been said that Edward Cullen is an abuser, but that's an understatement.

He's not just an abuser, he's a serial killer of killed people before.

Many people are disturbed that Twilight is a romance, and yet the hero is dangerous and absurd.

excessive and capable of violence what if I'm not the hero what if I'm the bad guy in other words

They're disturbed that it's the average romance novel.

I don't have the strength Stay away from you anymore,

and no not every romance novel has a bad boy hero,

but it's one of the most common truths Vampires need love too critics point to things like the age gap 109.

Maybe I shouldn't be taping such an old man It's gross and this talking.

So you followed me.

I like watching you sleep and the gaslighting You hit your head and you confused.

I know what I saw.

It's And when Twilight was at the peak of popularity,

there were all these articles a hand-wringing about the potential of all this to corrupt the youth.

Twilight not feminist, said the Guardian, it's female masochism.

Fifty shades for teenage girls, except with vampires.

All these articles cited the same live journal posts,

that went down a checklist from the National Domestic Violence Hotline to prove that Edward Cullen is an abuser.

There's always some version of this discourse going on.

Women are reading the wrong books.

The books that women read are dangerous.

In the 2000s, it was Twilight, and in the 2010s, It was the Twilight fan fiction 50 Shades of Grey.

At the time I'm making this video, it's a novelist called Colleen Hoover, who's sold six trillion books about dangerous alpha males named Ryle.

I promise that in whatever year you're watching this video,

there's currently some lady novelist who's called caused an outrage at writing stories about a dangerous, wealthy, controlling alpha male.

He doesn't do romance.

I don't do romance.

But the female protagonist awakens his capacity for love, at the same time as he awakens her desire for sex.

Now, I don't want to dismiss the feelings.

of people who find this kind of romance disturbing.

I think it's healthy and normal to be uncomfortable whenever a sexuality and violence are intertwined.

So I'm not exactly disagreeing with these critics of Twilight and of Dark Romance in general.

I'm yes-anding them.

Yes, Edward Cullen is creepy.

He's a vampire.

If Edward Cullen were real, I would log onto Twitter and I would cancel that vampire.

I'd call the police and I would say hello 911.

I'd like to report a coven of vampires outside Forks Washington.

Yes, they've smashed many salads.

Yes, Edward is problematic.

Yes, and Edward is not real, right?

He can't hurt you.

It's gonna be okay.

Edward Cullen is a fictional character in a woman's fantasy, and I do feel that that is relevant to how we analyze his behavior.

The main line of argument against is that this type of story normalizes and romanticizes abusive relationship dynamics.

It's a monkey-see-monkey-do theory of media analysis, this moralistic, cinema-sins thing everyone is doing now.

Age ding, stalking, ding, infanticide.

This idea that if people read Reylo fanfiction, this will somehow normalize relationships with Sith Lords.

Are tweens going to jump off a cliff because Bella does?

I say the obsessive moral policing of the romance genre as a continuation of

literally centuries of concern that women are reading the wrong kinds of books.

When I was young in the 18th century,

were advised to read what we called conduct books,

such as Thomas Gizburn's and inquiry into the duties of the female sex, which instructed the reader in proper virtues.

Doesn't that sound exciting?

To indulge in a practice of reading novels is liable to produce mischievous effects.

A certain kind of person has always considered romance novels a sort of decadent and salacious.

Some of this comes down to a question about the purpose of art.

Is art supposed to be,

A, moral education that instructs the reader in proper virtuous conduct, or a mirror of reality that reflects life as it really is, or C, escapist fantasy that's primarily entertainment?

Throughout the history of the novel, the genre has often been disneyed.

dismissed as escapist fantasy, literary opium, and addictive, corrupting influence.

The best-selling English novel ever was a romance published in 1740 by Samuel Richardson called Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded.

the story of a virtuous 15-year-old girl named Pamela Andrews, who's employed as a maidservant by the wealthy pervert, Mr.

B, who repeatedly attempts to seduce her, kidnap her, sneak into her room at night, and whole time Pamela is like, nay, I shan't acquiesce to this licentious

break, for my innocence and virtue are more dear to me than my life, and if the cosplay

of my felicity, so be it, for I shall subject my poor mother and father to the ignomineer.

In the end, Mr.

B is so impressed with Pamela's virtue that he reforms his rakish ways and marries her, which is supposed to be the reward I guess.

for Pamela's chaste behavior.

It's a Cinderella rags to Rich's fantasy, with a prince charming, who's not so charming.

Pamela kind of like an 18th century, 50 Shades of Grey.

Mr.

B will see you now.

You could also make an argument that Pamela was the novel with the first modern fandom.

There was Pamela Fanfiction, Pamela Murch.

There discourse between Pamela's and anti-pamaless, about the sincerity of Pamela's virtue.

Anti-pamaless wrote parody novels like Eliza Haywood's anti-pamala, or Famed Innocence, detected.

Wow.

a savage burn, and Henry Fielding's Shamala, both of which reframe Pamela as a gold-digging social climber.

This must have been an affront Samuel Richardson,

who makes his position clear on the cover page, claiming that he published Pamela, quote, in order to cultivate the principles of virtue.

and religion, and the minds of the youth of both sexes.

So in 1740, there was already this tension between two purposes of art.

Is art supposed to inflame the mind?

Or is it supposed to cultivate the principles of virtue and religion in the minds of the youth?

Personally, I prefer to be inflamed.

I want to feel good.

I want to be good and Stephanie Meyer apparently agrees.

I never stop and think, you know, oh, this is a role model for people.

It's fiction.

It is fiction.

Whatever we think of its morality,

Pamela the template for romance novels where a young,

inexperienced, impoverished girl becomes the object of fascination for an older, richer man with a dangerous edge.

In 19th century, Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre both fit this description.

The Pride and Prejudice is obviously much more agreeable to 21st century morality than Pamela.

is not Elizabeth Bennett's sexually abusive boss.

He's not even a vampire.

You should have thought of that, Jane Austen.

What are you doing?

In the 20th century,

the term romance novel became associated with mass-market paperback romances to rrogatorily known as bodice rippers,

like Joanna Lindsay's gentle, rogue with the classic Fabio clinch on the cover.

They don't do covers like this anymore.

Here's the new edition of Gentle Rogue with the most boring cover imaginable.

Red Verne, red verne to the clinch covers.

We used to be a country, a proper country.

The Gen Z equivalent of bodice rippers is like Wattpad, BTS, wear wolf thick?

How many mafia twinks can they read?

The specifically feminist criticism of romance novels goes back at least to Jermaine Greer,

who a long rant about them in her 1970 manifesto The Female UNIC,

in which she condemns romance readers as women cherishing the chains of own bondage.

The I'm trying to make is there's a historical continuity from Pamela to Twilight.

Stephanie Meyer's contribution is that she took the classic romance formula,

combined it with the lurid sexiness of Dracula, and then marminized it to the point it became appealing to 21st.

century teenagers and moms.

Another from Pamela to Twilight is the persistent anxiety of critics that the romance novel is somehow corrupting the youth or enslaving women or both.

Aaron worries about Twilight, quote, some girls might expect their love.

life to look just like Bella's.

Now what I call scary.

Neha Gandhi says, Bella is essentially a romanticized version of all our worst, weakest impulses put up on a pedestal, and that makes her dangerous.

With a lot of criticism of Twilight,

you get the impression that the critic both senses the attraction to tri-late, and is uncomfortable with that attraction.

And the anxious hand-ringing is a manifestation of that ambivalence."

Even Jermaine Greer admits quote,

I cannot claim to be fully emancipated from the dream that some enormous man,

say 6'6,

heavily shouldered and so forth to match,

will crush me to his Swedes,

look down into my eyes and leave the taste of heaven or the scorch of his passion on my waiting lips.

Remember what they took from you.

I want to argue that both the fascination with vampire romance and the discomfort with it are natural reactions to something paradoxical

in the experience of erotically.

love itself.

Twilight is everything we fear in sexuality.

The excess, the irrationality, the transgression, the violence, the loss of self-possession, the violation of boundaries.

None them belong to themselves anymore.

And the sickest part is, the genes tell them they're happy about.

Stephanie Meyer is continuing an ancient mythological tradition of storytelling that equates love and death.

Think and Persephone, the temptation of Eve, Swan Romeo Juliet.

Like Romeo and Juliet, Twilight a moderate teenage love escalated by the point of death.

And you could argue that Romeo and Juliet are closer to equals, where Edward and Bella are predator in prey.

The lion fell in love with the lamb.

But at the big picture in Twilight.

The lamb doesn't stay the lamb by the end of the story, she becomes a lion.

She's a powerful vampire with a rich husband and a magical demon baby.

Yes, Edward is a dangerous predator, but his power is subservient to his love for Bella, and it's deployed for her protection.

You feel very protective.

of you.

She becomes powerful because he loves her.

This is not a story of becoming prey, it's a story of rising to the level of the predator.

Behind every Cinderella fantasy is a female will to power.

The debates about romance fiction are not frivolous.

They concern the deepest questions in women's lives.

What happiness look like?

What do we want from love?

From sex?

What does it mean to succeed as a woman?

What does it mean to be a woman?

What does it mean to be anything?

Why is Twilight like this?

To answer these questions and more,

I read the entire Twilight Saga twice,

I watched the movies 37 times, I read 3,000 pages of psychoanalysis, and 8,000 pages of queer and radical feminist theory.

Now some people say that I'm overly fixated on Twilight that mothers have.

having another episode, and maybe some of those people are my psychiatrist, and maybe they're trying to put me on mood stabilizers.

But why those people are wrong.

Part two, desire.

One way to state the question,

the mystery we're trying to solve,

is why we're would someone romanticize the relationship between a vampire and a human, between a predator and his prey?

Isn't this problematic, with its age gaps and its power dynamics?

One answer is that yes, it is problematic.

And it's problematic because in order for a story to have a plot, there needs to be a problem.

what is sometimes known as a conflict.

Conflict creates tension, both romantic and narrative, and in Twilight, Edward's vampirism is the source of that tension.

Listen to how Stephanie Myers summarizes the dream that inspired Twilight.

A boy and a girl in the meadow,

having this conversation about how they were in love, The danger of Edward wanting to kill Bella adds to this tension.

It makes the story more exciting.

A common complaint from Twilight haters is that the first book has no plot.

I feel like this complaint comes from people who don't understand romance at a genre.

It's like that Goodreads review of Pride and Prejudice.

Just a bunch of people going to each other's houses.

Strictly speaking true, but this person's idea of plot is too narrow.

They think that plot just means physical action.

Even Stephanie Myers seems to think this to some extent because there's a lot of what I would consider gratuitous action.

action, forced into these stories.

The last movie ends with this giant battle between the Mormon vampires and their army of ethnic stereotypes,

good missionary work I guess, and their sworn enemies, the Vulturri.

The Vulturri are like a Mormon's idea of Catholics, you they live in the Vatican, they speak Italian.

They're gay.

I do the Volturi.

They're my kind of vamps.

I guess it was the 2000s and everything had to have giant battle scenes because Lord of the Rings?

Why can't a romance just be a romance?

Pride and Prejudice didn't end with Darcy High.

hunting down Wickham in a high-speed carriage chase.

Isn't my husband a fine horseman?

Romance stories can't have action elements, but they're primarily driven by emotion, pining, longing, yearning even.

The plot of a romance is always desired, deferred.

In her natural history of the romance novel, romance scholar Pamela Regis says, quote, the barrier is the conflict in a romance novel.

It is anything that keeps the union of heroine and hero from taking place.

In Pride and Prejudice, the barrier is in the title.

It's Darcy's pride and Elizabeth.

And Mrs.

Bennett certainly isn't helping either.

Bingley's wealth is nothing to miss.

Lower your voice, woman.

Everyone can hear you.

I don't care if he does.

In Twilight, you may be thinking the barrier is Jacob.

Hey, beautiful.

Because are triangular moments between Jacob, Bella, and But let's face the facts.

Team never sit a chance.

He loves Bella, but he lusts for her blood.

And because his bloodlust will kill her, he has to resist the temptation of bloodlust in order to love Bella.

I still don't know if I control myself.

That's the barrier he overcomes.

It's an internal barrier, a psychological conflict.

Stop.

Find way.

The barrier...

is essential to romance stories because narrative is sustained by tension and so is romantic love.

Now, I should explain that by romantic love, I mean what the ancient Greeks called Eros.

Eros is the ancient Greek personification of erotic love, that archery twink better known by his Roman name Cupid.

And I'm not just bringing this up to be pretentious, though that is a benefit.

In English, the word love is awkwardly nonspecific.

You your friends,

you love your husband,

you love your dad, you love your dog, you love God, you love Twizzlers, love, love, love, as if it's all the same.

Greek different words for all these kinds of love.

There's philia, brotherly love, agape, spiritual love, storgi, familial philautia, self And then there's Eros, the problem child.

Eros is the aching, passionate longing of romance novels of Sappho's poetry, of Romeo and Juliet.

is similar to what the psychologist Dorothy Tenov called limerance.

Limorance is like an adult crush.

Sexual nature intends to the point of obsession and anguish.

Arrows limerance or romantic love, whatever we want to call it, is the emotional impetus of the Twilight Saga.

People who have never experienced limerence will be confused by Bella's behavior in Twilight because it's extreme,

it's irrational, it's obsessive, it's all-consuming, it's at times masochistic.

In New Moon,

after Edward breaks up with Bella,

she shrieks and agony all through the night and then sits in her depression chair staring, dejectedly out the window for three consecutive months.

There's a possibility, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow.

To an aromantic person, this might look like madness, because it is madness.

It's just not normal, this behavior.

But to anyone who's been in love, it's your madness.

Unlike other forms of love, erotic love is painful.

When you left, you took everything with you.

The of him is everywhere I look.

Absence is the essential nature of erotic love.

Because Eros is desire.

and desire is lack.

You what you don't have.

The essayist Ann Carson explores this idea in one of my favorite books, Eros the Bitter Suite.

The title comes from one of Saffo's poems.

Eros once again a limb listener whirls me sweet bitter and possible to fight off.

Creatures dealing up.

So why is Aeros bitter?

Well, we say that a person in love is in search of their other half.

In Plato's symposium,

Aristophanes tells a myth about the origin of love,

which says that we all used to be double what we are now,

round beings with forearms, and two heads, and two sets of reproductive organs, and tells Zeus split us all in half.

Why is God always an abusive father concerning?

So when we fall in love, we're yearning to heal the trauma of human nature to be whole again.

Yearning is always a desire for something we feel like we have lost.

And it's that ache of loss, of separation that makes arrows bitter.

And Carson said,

says, quote, pleasure and pain at once register upon the lover in as much as the desirability

of the love object derives, in part, from its lack.

Because desire is derived from lack, something has to separate the lover and the beloved for desire to sustain itself.

In romance fiction, that something is the barrier.

The ruse, Ann Carson calls it the third thing that triangulates desire.

The purpose of the barrier is, quote, to represent arrows as deferred, defied, obstructed, hungry, organized around a radiant absence to represent arrows as lack.

When the barrier is overcome, when the two lovers unite, that's the end of your romance novel.

Because narrative is sustained by desire,

and desire is sustained by separation, so when the separation ends, the desire ends, and that's the end of your story.

The kiss.

Odysseus is home.

The end.

Happily ever after is, of course, not a reality.

It's just a device of romance fiction.

In when two people in love unite,

it's what we call a long-term relationship,

which, I'm sorry if I'm the one breaking this news to you, but many long-term relationships are not, in fact, happily ever after.

It's not easy to sustain desire over years.

You have to keep inventing new ruses, new barriers that create the space for desire to continuously reignite.

Successful couples either learn to be content with a more pragmatic,

non-erotic love, or they're somehow able to sustain arrows, falling in love with each other again and again.

But I fear that, the exception.

The rule is absence makes the heart grow fonder.

Another way to put this would be to say that desire prefers the hunt to the kill.

And maybe that's one reason sexuality is often represented as predator and prey.

The first shot of the first Twilight movie is of a deer being stalked by a predator.

This tells us what kind of story it's going to be.

Edward, the lion, Cullen, embodies Hunter's sexuality.

He glares, he stalks, he pounces, and Bella, at least at first, is his prey.

A similar trope of lover as Hunter.

exists on ancient Greek urns, which often depict a lover, not in possession, but in pursuit of his beloved.

And Carson says,

quote, the moment of ideal desire on which vase painters as well as poets are inclined to focus is not the moment when the two unite in happiness.

What is pictured is the moment when the beloved turns and runs.

It's the moment of obstructed desire John Keith's described in his own on a Grecian urn.

Bold lover never, never, canst thou kiss.

The winning near the goal, yet do not grieve.

She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, forever wilt thou love and she be fair.

The poet or the urn painter, captures that moment of desire for all time, the hunter suspended in the middle of a hunt.

Desire is like a dog that wants to chase a squirrel but not to catch it.

And it may be this fugitive element of desire that gives rise to double standards,

where the beloved, the one who is pursued, is valued only as long as she is unattainable.

To quote Ann Carson again,

because I love her so fucking much,

a titillating triangle comes into play between the lover, the bad girl who attracts him, and the good girl who honors him by saying no.

In this kind of dating ritual, the barrier is the good girl who is modest, hard to get.

Like in the 90s, there was this infamous dating manual for women called The Rules, time-tested secrets for capturing the heart of Mr.

Right.

It included such advice as, always end phone calls first.

Don't accept a Saturday night date after Wednesday.

In other words, play hard to get.

yet she has nothing but contempt for him if he remains at her feet.

This is the torture of impossible love.

To paraphrase the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, desire thinks it wants to be satisfied, but really it wants to go on desiring.

Desire is desire for desire.

Shakespeare says something similar in Sonnet 147.

My love is as a fever, longing still for that which longer nurseth the disease.

Shakespeare compares desire, that is love, arrows, to a sickness that wants to perpetuate itself.

What kill me makes me want you more,

is Taylor Swift's version of the same thought,

in a song that begins dream high in the quiet of the night,

echoing Shakespeare's comparison of love to a fever, a desire that feeds on its own frustration.

And pretty sure Taylor agrees with what I'm saying in this video.

Also, I apologize for criticizing her in my jakey rolling video, I've since read a bunch of Tumblr posts that convinced me that she's gay.

Inspiring.

Follow the money.

In an episode of Seinfeld, George Costanza makes a distinction between two types of desire, yearning and craving.

What is the difference between yearning and craving?

Well, let's start with craving.

What kinds of things do you crave?

You crave a cigarette, a sandwich, an orgasm, a drink.

You satisfy a craving for something, but then an hour later, you crave it again.

So maybe craving is a desire that can be satisfied, but only for a moment.

Craving is like Shakespeare's description of Lust and Sonnet 129.

The expensive spirit in a waste of shame is Lust in action, enjoyed no sooner but despised straight.

A and proof and proved a very woe before a joy proposed behind a dream.

Aww, poor baby.

Bill really having a hard time in those sonnets.

How is yearning different from craving?

Well, maybe it's the difference between love and lust, the difference between Shakespeare's sonnet 129 and 147.

Craving is enjoyed to know sooner but despise it straight, and yearning is a fever longing still for that longer nurse with the disease.

Isn't this was Stephanie Meyer really trying to say here.

Edward Cullen craves blood, but he yearns for Bella.

It's lust against deliverance.

Let's talk about yearning.

What of things do you yearn for?

You yearn for union with the person you're in love with,

or for union with God like in Psalm 63,

my whole beat being longs for you in a dry and parched land where there is no water.

You yearn for God, you don't crave God.

No one says I need to get my God fix, don't talk to me until I've had my God.

You yearn to feel whole again, maybe by finding your other half, or through some kind of shroomy oneness.

Freud was right that it's really mother who we yearn for.

Mother, I mean we did use to be one with her body and the womb, and then I caught the umbilical

cord and they weaned you from her breast and life has been downhill ever since.

Yurning, maybe you yearn for the good old days, nostalgia, a yearning for life.

lost time, or your yearn for nostalgia's inverse, utopian socialism.

Think about the kind of leftists who talk about the revolution like it's the rapture.

These people are yearning for a different time, but it's one they imagine in the future.

Yearning, I think, is inherently erotic.

It's not necessarily sexual,

but it's erotic in the sense that unlike craving,

which can be satisfied, though only for a moment, yearning is a desire that can't really be satisfied at all.

Like, you know how no matter what you accomplish in life, you never really be satisfied because you always still feel the same void inside eating away at you all the time?

Well, this is the reason for that.

We all have a black hole deep inside of it.

us and nothing can ever really fill it.

Some people call it a God-shaped hole, but I'm pretty sure my God-shaped hole is shaped like...

Actually, I think the hole is flexible.

It kind of shapes itself to whatever it is we think we're missing.

The things we desire become symbols of the hole, and we come to believe that we're yearning for this symbol.

And Carson said his quote, Who is the real subject of most love poems?

Not the beloved.

It is that whole.

Now would be a good time to admire my restraint and not making any jokes about filling my holes.

Very very lady-like, I know.

You praise me in the comments section now.

Lacan says something similar.

I'll quote Jijek's summary because Lacon is illegible.

If you don't care about philosophy, just ignore these names, close your eyes and pretend this isn't happening.

Quote, the drive's goal to reach its object is false.

It masks its true aim, which is to reproduce its own circular movement by repeatedly missing its object.

This is the trap of yearning.

of unrequited love and of nostalgia.

You yearn for the good old days because you lack them.

They are lost time.

But try explaining that to the people in the comments section of a 90s fruity pebbles commercial pining for the lost golden age.

I miss the world when there is still love left in it.

On second thought, the fruity pebbles commercial may be the only thing holding this man's sanity together.

Let's just let him have this.

We all wish there was a way to feel like you're in the good old days, but there isn't.

It's impossible.

Why?

Well, you're never in the good old days because you can only yearn for what you've lost.

The good old days are old because they're gone,

and they're good because you idealize what you yearn for, and you only yearn for what you do not have.

Your childhood is dead, and no will bring it back.

I have tried.

Advertising simulates desire by invoking lack, often yearning for beauty, prestige, and glamour.

Glamour simply is the unattainable, the always out of reach.

Do you ever feel like goldilocks in a world where the porridge is never just right?

I feel like I'm describing some kind of pessimist's prayer.

You can't get what you want, and if you do, it won't make you happy.

Not for long.

The way to escape the cycle of suffering, the only path to salvation, is to both like and subscribe.

Give your money.

You know, I think I crave because I yearn.

Suppose, hypothetically, someone named, I don't know, Veronica an unrequited love.

And suppose the pain of that drives me to for Veronica,

hypothetically, for educational and harm reduction purposes to get a little bit addicted to… she's craving to cope with the yearning.

Like my own personal brand of heroin.

What's your favorite brand of heroin?

Leave a comment.

Maybe you could visualize cravings as like epicycles of the larger cycle of yearning that orbits around the void.

Constant I promise this is about twilight.

Yearning is bittersweet,

and the bitterness of yearning comes from the absence at its core, from the futility of grasping at something always out of reach.

But what about the sweetness?

The sweetness of yearning comes from anticipate...

It's not easy having a good time.

The sweetness of yearning comes from anticipation.

It's the hope that just maybe you might finally grasp what the thing you're reaching for this time.

There's a German word for this because of course,

for Freuda, which means pre-pleasure, the pleasure of anticipation, is the reason that we gift wrap presents.

As Ted Bundy said, the fantasy that accompanies and generates the anticipation that precedes the crime is always more stimulating than That's it.

of the crime itself.

So Anticipation is the basic pleasure of eroticism.

And I do think that if you skip right ahead to sex in a story,

you're missing out on a lot of really exciting things the first time you hold somebody's hand.

your heart just goes crazy.

It's amazing experience you go home and tell your friends about, oh my gosh, he touched my hand, you know.

A strip tease is infinitely more erotic than a nudist colony.

Why?

Anticipation, tension, and release.

The of strip tease is that the audience wants to see a naked woman,

but once the woman is naked, once the barrier is removed, the show is over.

Strip tease.

equivalent of a slow build romance novel.

Aren't mystery stories like this too?

Are mysteries erotic?

The pleasure is in unraveling the mystery, the yearning for the truth, the anticipation of the answer.

Once the puzzle is solved, you lose interest.

This is how people become conspiracy theorists.

addicted to that rush of discovery going down the rabbit hole is the pursuit of truth rather than the possession of it.

A better outlet for this urge is philosophy.

Philosophy inherently erotic in that philosophical questions by nature can never be definitively answered, so the epistemic yearning never ends.

In the importance of being earnest, Algae says, The very essence of romance is uncertainty.

Uncertainty is also the very essence of gambling, is why I wasted $2,000 playing Egypt quest.

Gambling is addictive because the forefroida, the anticipation of a maybe-win, is more compelling than the win itself.

Very romantic to be in love when there's nothing romantic about a definite proposal.

I won't let me be Why don't you leave as I believe?

And then the whole excitement is over.

Uncertainty sustains the bittersweet mix of hope and anxiety,

which is ruinous when it leads to the junky behavior of gambling addicts and serial adultery,

but which I think can be safely simulated in art.

Consider Twilight to choose a random example.

Will this romance end in love or murder?

It doesn't matter if you know it will end with a happily ever after.

It's about the process, how you get there.

Consider the music of my youth.

Mozart.

This symphony number 25 in G minor.

Guess what corded ends on?

Spoiler alert, f***ing G minor.

People think Mozart is stuffy now, but it's very erotic music.

It's all about tension and release.

Mozart builds tension through devices like rising melody, increased dissonance, increased volume, rhythmic complexity, harmonic wandering from the tonic, or simply adding more notes.

Two notes.

The tension is released in a chorus sequence called a cadence.

Music teachers always describe the cadence as returning home, comparing the musical narrative structure to a hero's journey.

On its own, the cadence is kind of boring, so it's often drawn out and ornamented with a trill.

What is the point of this gesture?

Well, it heightens the tension just as it's about to be released.

The trill occurs at that pre-climactic moment when gratification is imminent.

It's very sexual, it's musical edging.

When you hear it in isolation, it just sounds like an 18th century musical stock phrase, but that's exactly the point I'm making.

The release is only part of pleasurable because of the tension that is accumulated in anticipation of it.

Without the tension, there is no release.

And just kind of the nature of human pleasure.

It's fire and ice.

Hare Father we are so constituted that we can only intensely enjoy contrasts.

Without the big, bitterness of tension, there is no sweetness of release.

Philosophies that seek to liberate us from suffering advise that we let go of desire.

Stoicism says we should limit desire to things we can control.

Buddhism we can stop craving and clinging by recognizing that desire arises from in person.

permanence and from the illusion of the self.

Philosophers and gurus are correct to recognize that desire leads to suffering.

But detachment from desire is not bliss.

If someone is promising you bliss or some mystical solution to the wound of human nature, that's probably a cult.

Watch out for that.

Detachment results in something more low-key, like tranquility or peace.

Wise are always saying, stop clinging to desire and you'll find peace.

Wise men are always saying this.

The Chapter 46 says, one who knows that enough is enough, will always have enough.

That is wisdom, and wisdom is soothing, but it's not exciting.

So it's really your choice to make.

Do you want to read novels about wise people being at peace, or do you choose violence?

Do you choose the world's most dangerous predator?

Personally, I think wisdom is best left to be.

to the wise.

Couldn't be me.

I like things and stuff too much.

The wheel of samsara is very much my stomping ground.

So in Maryland there's this place called Royal Farms.

It's like the KFC was inside of a 7-Eleven through up all the time and get cigarettes and energy drinks, you know, human blood.

Part three, fantasy.

Okay, we need to talk about this sexual aspect.

I know YouTube is trying to be more family-friendly, and as a friend of the family, I respect that.

So I might have to use some euphemisms, some indirect language, but at the I'm done with them.

The family is going to be on their hands and knees begging for more.

Many have commented on the unguarded, blurting-it-all-out quality of Twilight.

In one interview, Robert Pattinson said he thinks that Twilight is Stephanie Meyer's sexual fantasy.

I was convinced that Stephanie was convinced she was Bella, you know, like reading her...

her sort of sexual fantasy about some, and especially when she says I was based on her dream.

I think this is another reason that people find Twilight cringe.

Stephanie Meyer is taking dictation directly from the inner goddess.

And it's very honest.

It's really, really honest.

And that's kind of what's weird about it.

I love that about Twilight.

It's like reading someone's diary.

realize here, I'm stepping into a vicious debate that's been going on for decades about the difference between romance and erotica.

What is the difference between romance and erotica?

I got so curious about this that I actually contacted the English departments of Harvard,

Yale, and Stanford and I was surprised that they pretty much all agreed on a definition that

romance, is for good girls, and erotica is for sluts.

Pornography, of course, is for men.

There's a buck wild debate from 1987 between romance titans Jackie Collins and Barbara Cartland, who between them sold more than a billion books.

The debate gets, well, you of just have to see it to believe it.

Barbara Cartland says that Jackie Collins' books are evil.

Why?

Because they have sex scenes.

In Scotland, women's fiction shouldn't have sex scenes, because A.

Think of the children.

I never thought that she'd have some young people.

Yes, they love it.

And that is what is wrong.

Two.

Is helping the perverts.

Doing too thick, it has helped the perverts.

And According to Cartland, we should encourage purity from women.

That is, asexuality.

It's a classic good girls vs.

sluts debate.

There's something so surreal about what I can only describe as an 80-year-old woman in the clown lecturing out.

everyone about sexual purity.

Like, what is this?

The aren't coming.

Carlin endorses the Victorian viewpoint that women, ladies, are asexual.

You were a lady.

You were Dresden, China.

You something perfect, slightly sacred.

This is the view taken by 19th century sexologist Rishad Fonkraft Ebbing, author of Psychopaths.

the asexualis, one of the first attempts to scientifically study human sexuality.

So scandalous at the time of publication that it had to be printed in Latin to keep the hoy puloi from getting notions.

Quote, woman, if physically and mentally normal and properly educated, has but little sensual desire.

This is an absurd claim on its If women instinctually have but little sensual desire, then why is that contingent on their being properly educated?

The is basically that for Victorians, the Madonna whore dichotomy was an ontological distinction.

It was understood that there were really two very different kinds of women.

There were real women,

ladies, who were by definition asexual, and then there was this other category of person, prostitutes or fallen women, who were technically female but who

were seen as degraded, ruined beings.

with desire equal to, if not exceeding, that of man.

Strumpets, trawlips, flirtatious whores.

Ladies seen as delicate and innocent, sacred treasures to be protected.

You were a lady.

You Dresden, China.

You were something perfect, slightly sacred.

And there's a kind of privilege that came with that, but at the cost of sexualism.

And I believed it for years, I thought that ladies didn't feel passionate, and did.

Lady status has often only been available to middle and upper class white women,

with prostitutes and fallen women relegated to this other category that was seen as sexual but degraded.

The idea that purity is the natural story.

state of women is actually fairly recent.

Ancient medieval Europeans had almost the opposite view of the Victorians, often seeing women as more sexual than men.

According to the most widely read encyclopedia of the Middle Ages,

quote, the word feminine comes from the Greek derived from the force of fire, because her concupisence is of very passionate.

Women are more libidinous than men.

In an ancient Greek myth,

Zeus and Hera are feuding about whether men or women enjoy sex more,

so they summon the transsexual prophet Tiresias to resolve the issue,

and Tiresias says, of 10 parts a man enjoys one only, but a woman enjoys the full 10 parts.

arts, which sex is more sexual, controversial, looking it.

In own time,

the Victorian idea that the right kind of women have but little sensual desire still persists and stereotypes about female sexuality being limited to delicate

hand-grazing.

In 1973, permissive cosmopolitan magazine ran an article by a male psychiatrist who announced, women do not have sexual fantasies.

How do we know?

Ask a woman, and she will usually reply, no.

Good doctor.

Incredible research methods.

This of statement is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

When the experts announced that women do not have sexual fantasies,

women whose experience tells them otherwise feel deviant and abnormal, which makes them reluctant to speak up.

Seemingly descriptive statements about sexuality, like women do not have sexual fantasies, often served to enforce the very situation they claimed.

to describe.

The Cartland Collins debate was echoed 25 years later in debates about Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey,

with Fifty Shades widely condemned as mommy porn.

which, come on people, let, mons, have, pornography.

It's like once a decade, society collectively discovers that women's sexuality exists and everyone loses their minds.

Stephanie like Barbara Cartland, is something of a neo-Victorian, or at least a neo-Edwardian.

Boo!

Stephanie is not as moralizing as Barbara Cartland, but she has said, for example, Erotica is not something I read.

I don't even read traditional romance.

too smutty.

There's a reason my books have a of innocence.

That's the sort of world I live in.

Well, I support whatever Stephanie Meyer has to tell herself to sleep at night.

I don't know that I would describe Twilight as a world of innocence of killed people before.

I like watching you sleep.

It's hard to say with all those clothes on.

Stranger things happen every day.

But it's true that there are no sex scenes, it's strictly PG-13.

In scene, Bella is too embarrassed to look at lingerie because it's too sexy even when it isn't on.

In an out-infamous scene, Bella walks down the stairs in a long khaki skirt and blue blouse, were described as utterly indecent.

No one should look so tempting, it's not fair.

So what did Robert Pattinson mean when he said that Twilight is Stephanie Meyer's sexual fantasy?

You're like reading her sort of sexual fantasy.

A story can be sexy without sex scenes.

How?

Well, I feel like this is something that I should show and not tell.

For example, can we talk about the cuck-tent scene?

Why is no one talking about the cuck-tent scene?

In Twilight episode three, Eclipse, Bella and her polycule of Monster Men are taking the ring to Mordor when a winter storm rolls in.

Bella is in the tent and she's shivering her innocent little butt off.

off, and Edwards upset because vampires have no body heat, so he can't warm her up.

But Jacob is right outside, and Jacob is a toasty dog boy with a canonical body temperature of 108.9 degrees Fahrenheit.

Let's face it, I am hotter than you.

So Edward agrees to let the sexy, shirtless Jacob share a sleeping bag with Bella to prevent her imminent death by freezing.

Jacob Bella against his hot and naked chest while Edward gazes on in jealous agony.

Bella is nestled in Jacob's arms pretending to be asleep while the two gorgeous monster men are incandescent with desire for her.

They argue through the night about who loves her more and who can take better care of her.

And Edward can read minds, so he's experiencing all of Jacob's perverted fantasies and excruciating detail.

Can you at least attempt to control your thoughts?

So, why does this happen?

scene happen.

Wherefore art the cuck tent?

This is not a trick question.

The answer is very obvious.

The cuck tent happens because Stephanie Meyer thinks it's hot.

Because it is hot.

And maybe Stephanie would deny that she has any such impure feelings since she lives in a world of innocence.

But let's use common sense.

This is a sexual fantasy.

It's almost everything that went into Twilight was unconscious.

A lot of women like to feel intensely desired.

It's a common feminine fantasy is being at the center of attention from multiple men because more men symbolizes more desire.

It's why you get romance novels like Two Billionaires in Vegas,

Three Bosses Assistant,

four ranchers bride,

five mafia captors virgin,

six single dads nanny, seven groomsmen from hell, eight brothers fiance, nine merians shared property, ten mountain men's baby, and wuthering heights.

It's a really straightforward example of what is called wish fulfillment, and Twilight has a lot of wish fulfillment.

You know,

Bella moves to a new school,

and even though she's an awkward tomboy who drives a rusty truck, every boy in school has a crush on her.

It's like first grade all over again.

You're the shiny new toy.

Two gorgeous monster boys fight over Bella,

and they carry her around, and they tell her how much they love her and want to protect her.

All the other girls, girls are jealous of my cool boyfriend.

So by association, I must be cool too.

If you're a Twilight reader and you identify with Bella, these are exciting fantasies to have because they gratify what Dr.

Father his Majesty the Ego, the hero of everyday dream and every story.

All of this.

I think is pretty obvious,

but where things get controversial and to many people disturbing is when you start introducing darker themes into your romantic wish-fulfillment fantasies.

Edward's stalking, the fact that he's self-admittedly a dangerous predator, his struggle with a vampire.

puric desire to kill Bella and drink her blood.

People see this stuff and they think, oh my god, this is masochistic, it's internalized misogyny, it's abusive, it's pathological.

But I think that those concerns, while understandable, come from a misunderstanding of how fantasy works.

Consider, for example, the ultimate problem.

of thematic fantasy, the fantasy of non-consent, what we could euphemistically call a ravishment fantasy.

This fantasy of being overpowered or in bondage

or surrendering to a dominant lover is a very common fantasy for a lot of women and also a of people who aren't women.

It's the reason bodice rippers are called bodice rippers.

They were notorious for these ravishment scenes, where bodices are, you know...

ripped, and this can be difficult to talk about because, you know, we worry that the worst men in

the universe will take these fantasies as proof that women really want to be dominated by violent men.

But abusive men will use any pretext to justify their behavior, and that's not on us, it's on them.

So let's talk about it.

In 1973,

the same year that Cosmo announced women don't have sexual fantasies, the author Nancy Friday published a book called My Secret Garden, Women's Sexual Fantasies.

Nancy ruin of the sexual revolution, and I think it was brave of her to publish this book.

Despite its misleadingly tweee cover and blurb, dare to discover the beautiful blossoms, the winding paths, and the hidden nooks of female sexuality.

I hate that even the cover of a pervert book like this assumes that female sexuality is as mysterious as it is floral groundbreaking.

But there's nothing floral about the contents of Nancy Friday's books,

which are essentially anthologies of fantasies submitted in response to a newspaper ad Nancy published that said, female sexual fantasies, wanted by serious female readers.

researcher, anonymity, guaranteed, above that.

This in a book which is very explicit in which challenges assumptions about feminine sexuality being sort of soft and gentle and mushy.

The single greatest theme that emerged was that of weak women being sexually dominated by male strength to do this deliciously awful thing.

So the rafishment fantasy proves to be the most common fantasy.

Why?

Are these women all horribly traumatized?

Is this internalized misogyny?

Well, maybe, but there's other explanations to consider.

You know, women are kind of social.

socialized not to display sexuality openly, not to initiate.

Being a proper feminine woman is supposed to involve being passive and modest.

Or else, women risk being recast from Madonna to horror, good girl to slut, and being victimized and degraded as a result.

result, so it makes sense that a lot of women might be very protective of their innocent good girl self-image, even in fantasy.

The-consent fantasy is a device that absolves the woman from blame.

If she's being forced, then it's not her fault.

Ravishment is a ruse.

As Nancy Friday says quote, a Deus Ex machina we roll in to catapult us past a lifetime of women's rules against sex.

The women whom I've interviewed don't really want to be hurt or humiliated.

His male presence, that effective battering ram, neatly makes her relax sufficiently to enjoy.

and then allows her to return to Earth her nice girl, good daughter, self-intact.

So the non-consent fantasy is not wish fulfillment in a literal sense, but in an emotional sense.

Like if a teenage boy fantasizes about dying gloriously in battle, is that a masochistic fantasy about death?

Or is or is it a natural an egotistical fantasy about glory, probably the latter.

Likewise, women who fantasize about being a ravished do not actually want to be assaulted.

In a fantasy, which is a fictional scenario where you are in control, The non-consense situation satisfies your emotional needs.

To gratify desire without the burden of shame and guilt and anxiety that comes with taking responsibility for your desire.

Another novelist Anne Rice said of her own sadomasochistic erotica series, the books aren't about literal cruelty, they're about surrender.

you have no choice but to enjoy sex.

The point is this.

Fantasies are not literal wishes.

Fantasies construct situations where emotional needs are met and inhibitions to pleasure are removed.

So for example, in a fantasy where the dangerous alpha male is the aggressor, the woman remains innocent.

The bad boy is bad so that the good girl gets to stay good.

We could call this disavowal,

the process of constructing fantasy situations where desires are gratified without having to assert or even having to acknowledge the desire.

one ruse of disavowal, but fantasy is infinitely creative in constructing these devices.

Remember cuck-tent,

Bella's a good girl who would never consider having a threesome,

but it's dangerously cold, I guess we have no choice but to huddle for warmth, disavowal.

Me and Draco got detention in the forbidden forest.

And we had to camp out for the night, but there was only one sleeping bag.

Guess we have to share it.

There's a million fan fiction and erotica tropes that are basically variations on this ruse of disavowal.

For example, sex Aliens made them do it.

Hypnosis.

Mind control.

Non-control.

consent, dubious consent, made or die, pawn far, forced feminization, Hermione is an omega in heat, and Draco is the only nearby alpha.

The popularity of these tropes demonstrates to me that erotic disavowal fantasies are

not just a relic of a past age of bodice ripper of age and sexual conservatism.

I don't think that women today are much more liberated than Nancy Friday and Anne Rice.

Like where are these liberated women?

Maybe in Europe?

Look, I don't know what goes on over there in pervoslavia, but here in America we still believe in a little thing called sexual repression.

Like if you look through family.

fanfiction platforms like Wattpad and AO3 that host Erotica mostly by women.

Submissive fantasies are still pretty standard.

My mom sold my virginity to One Direction.

I also see disavowal at work in the infamous rescue fantasies in Twilight.

Bella is walking the street alone at night when she's menaced by a gang of thugs,

apparently ready for a bit of the old ultra-violence.

But at the last minute, Edward sweeps in in his battle vulvo and saves the damsel.

Likewise, at the end of the first movie, there's a, uh,

A snuff film scene,

where the evil vampire James intends to suck Bella's blood and make some kind of smot film out of it to torture Edward with.

This very eroticized violence is interrupted at the last moment, when Edward replaces the assailant and Bella is rescued instead of ravished.

You can try to suck the venom off, no it won't be you, stop, find wheel.

of double disavowal.

It's a non-consent fantasy that's transformed into something more morally acceptable.

A fantasy.

Rescued damsels are a common erotic myth.

In story of Perseus and Andromeda,

Andromeda is a naked woman in bondage,

threatened by a monster but saved at the last minute by Perseus thrusting into the rescue with some kind of phallic weapon.

In rescue fantasies,

the thrilling possibility of sexual violence is raised only to be disavowed at the last minute by the rescue,

but it's not just women who disavow desire.

The rescue fantasy is also appealing from the perspective of Perseus.

who gets to feel strong and important and heroic, while also, you know, getting to spend time around a naked woman in chains.

It's not even necessarily sexual desire that fantasy disavows.

In Shades of Grey,

Edward, renamed Christian, is constantly issuing orders to Bella, renamed Anastasia about what she should eat, what car she should drive, about what

gynecologist to see.

Why is this part of the fantasy?

Well, because making decisions is hard.

Sart said we're condemned to be free.

Why is freedom a condemnation?

Well, because freedom implies responsibility.

And responsibility sucks.

I for one hate being accountable for the consequences of my actions.

Even something as trivial as what should I eat today?

Is a decision fraught with moral quandaries and body image issues and contradictory nutritional advice coming at us from all angles?

Isn't there something relaxing about a competent person just telling you what to do, so you don't have to worry about it?

This vowel is a useful ruse for indulging in all kinds of guilty pleasures.

In Fifty Shades, Christian constantly lavishing extravagant gifts on Anna.

He buys her a computer,

a car,

first-class plane tickets,

and Anna constantly protests,

because she knows that it's a to accept expensive gifts from your billionaire boyfriend like some kind of capped woman, but Christian insists.

Oh well, I guess I have no choice but to fly first class.

The function of disavowal and fantasy is that you get what you want,

without the indignity of having to ask for it, or even against your will.

In Twilight, Bella hates birthday parties in presence, but they're lavished on her anyway.

Edward's fashionista's sister, Alice, is always feminizing Bella, ordering her to wear high heels.

And Bella's like, no.

No, stop, I wear flannel and drive pickup trucks, I'm totally butch.

But she's into this forest feminization, this de-butching.

Bella is adamant she doesn't want a fancy wedding, but Alison sits, so there's a fancy wedding.

Obviously, Stephanie wanted there to be a fancy wedding, but you know what people say.

say about women who want fancy weddings, divas, bride's zillers.

Not a cute look.

So thanks to Alice, Bella gets to have a fancy wedding without the indignity of having to want a fancy wedding.

Now I want to talk about one of the most controversial things that happens in Twilight.

Jacob imprinting on Renesma.

Okay, so I can't wait to explain this one.

Stephanie into werewolf lore the notion of imprinting, a kind of lifelong limerant fixation.

It's soulmates, basically.

In Dawn, Bella gives birth to a vampiric baby whom she names, Renesme.

Yes, it's very very.

funny, it's all laugh.

So Bella essentially dies in childbirth, and before she's resurrected, Jacob decides to murder Renesme, the baby, as revenge for killing Bella.

But when Jacob sees Renesme, he imprints on her.

The baby essentially falls in love with this infant.

Now, I think this is amazing, but everyone else seems to hate it.

You imprinted on my daughter?

It my choice.

She's a baby!

Why would Stephanie write such a thing?

I think Jacob imprints on Renesme, because Stephanie is unconsciously both Team Edward and to Team Jacob.

Almost everything that went into Twilight was unconscious.

I it's not that subtle.

You love more than one person at a time.

Don't make me choose.

But obviously Bella can't be polyamorous because Stephanie's books have a of innocence.

That's the sort of world she lives in.

So imprinting on Renesme allows Bella to secure monogamous ties to both Edward,

through marriage, and to Jacob vicariously through her own daughter, thus roping Jacob into this subtextually polyamorous family.

No, I'm not saying you have to like it.

I'm just saying that's why this happens, probably.

So I've been arguing that a lot of fantasies work by constructing situations where your desires are both fulfilled and disavowed.

But there's more to it than just that.

If we consider the more problematic aspects of Twilight,

Edward stalking his violent urges,

the ravishment turned rescue fantasies, the appeal is not just that it absolves the Bella identified reader of the responsibility and slut stigma of sexuality.

There's also something about the intensity and even the violence of a fantasy lover.

desire that is exciting.

There's a book by the psychoanalyst Michael Bader called A Rousal,

the secret logic of sexual fantasies that I really enjoyed, which surprised me because I found it in the psychology section.

Between why is my marriage bad, and help, my teenager is a piece of shit.

book takes a very optimistic view of sexual fantasy.

Quote, I do not think sexuality is driven by kinky desires.

I think that it is driven by straight forward desires for pleasure and safety.

Kinkyness is merely the complicated route that some people need to take in order to safely feel pleasure.

According to Peter, fantasy.

is a tool for overcoming guilt, shame, anxiety, responsibility, and obstacles to pleasure in arousal.

Like said, the sexual instinct has to struggle against certain mental forces which act as resistances, dams upon sexual development.

Disgust, shame, and morality.

functions to break through the dam, to rip the metaphorical bodice.

In the Cinderella fantasy where a billionaire falls for you,

an ordinary brunette, the attention of this powerful man functions as a proof of your worth, of your desirability.

It's fundamentally a shame-negating fantasy.

to see.

It's satisfying because most people have shame, have insecurities.

We feel too old, too fat, too trans, too disabled.

It's always something, right?

Or maybe you were neglected as a child, or you're sippling with always more beautiful and successful than you, or you feel underappreciated.

it at work, or your YouTube videos don't get as many views as each bomber guy.

Whatever the source of the insecurity, this shame is a damn, an inhibition, an obstacle to pleasure.

It's hard to get excited when you feel inadequate, unattractive, or ordinary, but in the eyes of this fantasy billionaire or villain.

vampire who's obsessed with you, you become extraordinary.

The creates a situation where your insecurities are proven false or in which your flaws turn out to be desirable,

which negates the shame that inhibits pleasure.

A feminist objection to Fifty Shades might go, why does it happen?

to be a rich husband?

Why can't women fantasize about financial independence?

Well, because that completely misunderstands the emotional logic of the fantasy.

It's not really about the money.

Money is just an efficient symbol.

It signifies value, worth.

In the logic of fantasy, a rich man is out.

high-value man, especially to us of vulgar Americans.

To an old-fashioned English woman like Barbara Cartland,

the ideal romantic hero is preferably a peer of the realm, a disgraceful duke, a wicked marquee, and elusive Earl.

In desperate times, we might even settle for a cruel count.

Your ship bestows upon you lavish gifts,

despite your protests and disavowals, the gifts are proof that he desires you, that you are as enticing as any beautiful, expensive object.

The wealth and gifts are of secondary importance.

First, we seek the refutation of our shame, the validation of our desire.

ability, and above all, proof that we are loved.

Often type of fantasy involves a competitive element too, where rivals, usually other women, must be eliminated.

This is taken to embarrassing extremes in Fifty Shades of Grey,

where Christians surrounds himself with what Anna refers to as immaculate blondes and stepford wives.

Young blonde women whom Christian employees precisely because he's not attracted to any of them.

Christian only being attracted to superficially ordinary and awkward brunettes who remind him of, and this is a direct quotation, the crack whore my birthday.

mother.

Anna also has the satisfaction of humiliating the attractive blonde architect Christian hires to design their house,

and at one point she throws a drink in the face of Christian's childhood seductress who, yes, is also blonde.

He's not capable of man.

In Twilight,

Bella is a superficially ordinary and awkward brunette who is frequently jealous of Edward's blonde bombshell sister Rosalie as well as the Denali Coven of Vampires,

blonde attraction.

My point is that this need and fantasy to cancel out every other attractive woman has the same meaning and a Freud attributed to a female patient's fantasy.

Father loves only me.

And the fact that the men in these fantasies are often a substitute father figures is a fact

It's so obvious that it hardly warrants mentioning.

I know, I look hot.

Feminine sexual fantasies are often modeled on myths and fairy tales.

Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Beauty and Beast, Little Riding Hood, Hades Persephone, Annie, Adam and Eve, Persephone.

as an Andromeda.

If Cinderella-style fantasies are usually about refuting shame, I'd argue that beauty and the beast-style fantasies are usually about negating guilt.

By beauty and the beast-style fantasies,

I mean erotic fantasies where the hero is a mafia boss,

a stalker,

a pirate,

and abusive employer, a conduct violating professor, a disgraceful duke, a sadistic billionaire, or for that matter my own brother, a goddamn shit-sucking vampire.

Obviously, and Twilight, as in a lot of romance fiction, the hero is both Prince Charming, and The Beast, a darcy with Heathcliff characteristics.

What is the fantasy appeal of The Beast?

Why is he so sexy?

Well, there's an element of selfishness inherent to sexuality, what Michael Bader holds ruthlessness.

excitement requires that we momentarily become selfish and turn away from concerns about the other's pleasure in order to surrender to our own.

Women in particular often feel guilty about being selfish.

They're afraid they'll take too long or that receiving pleasure is one-sided.

Maybe it's because women Women are told to be caretakers, to put other people's needs before their own.

But in the fantasy where you've been tied up by Christian Grey, you have no say in the matter.

You cannot be guilty because it's not your fault,

and the selfishness of the beast gives beauty permission to be selfish too, to surrender to her own.

pleasure.

Bader says, quote, sexual fantasies always find a way of turning the know of guilt into the yes of pleasure.

A similar guilt negation is achieved by fantasies of anonymity, a masked stranger, someone you have no obligation to take care of.

And because you're strangers to each other, you also have less reason to be ashamed.

It's why when you have an orgy at your opulent mansion, you have to make everyone wear a mask.

Like opulence is a defense against shame.

When someone surrounds themselves with opulence, what are they trying to say about themselves?

The subliminal message of opulence, is I am valuable, I am desirable.

It's why so many romantic and erotic fantasies take place in opulent settings.

Now in reality the ruthlessness enabled by fantasy eventually conflicts with our desire to be loved.

A paradox of sexuality is that ruthlessness.

must somehow be balanced with tenderness.

If you only use and objectify your partner, there can be no love.

But you're overly anxious about your partner's needs to the exclusion of your own, the flame of desire will go out.

In sex, there is such a thing as not enough selfishness.

This is my future.

about the gentle rogue.

He's appealing because he's both gentle and a rogue.

I am very smart.

The gentle rogue is a sort of vegetarian vampire capable of both ruthlessness and tenderness.

So from the perspective of Nancy Friday and Michael even

Even that seem violent and disturbing can be understood as psychological devices that lead us to pleasure through the labyrinth of guilt and shame.

I wish that people who are inclined to crusade against dangerous books or abusive ships would

try to think about fantasy in a way that's less literal and more psychological.

Like, do furries and omega-verse thick writers normalize beastiality?

No, the fantasy of human animality is not about literal animals.

It's about unleashing what is symbolically animalistic in us.

The drives and urges that human taboos, and decency forbid.

People think furries are weird now,

but your grandfather fought in World War II then came home and thought it was totally normal to be attracted to women dressed like rabbits.

Are people who are into daddy doms or diapers or whatever literally normalizing PDFs?

Well, no, it's usually not about that at all.

Each play is usually about fantasy regression to the social position of someone who has no responsibilities and needs to be taken care of.

The fantasy or the role-play scenario gives you permission to be taken care of.

lens notorious, I like to watch you sleep, feels to a lot of people.

And enough,

creepiness is subjective,

but I feel like you can find Edward creepy and still understand that for Stephanie Meyer,

Twilight is not an expression of a literal desire stalked by creatures of the night.

The fantasy is of a protector watching over you, a witness, a guardian angel.

Like when you're a kid and you want your mom to stay in your room with you until you fall asleep.

I wish that I could fall asleep with a vampire watching over me, talking to me, and she's saying, baby.

Mommy loves you.

You're a good baby.

I don't blame you for what happened to this family.

You're just a baby.

You had nothing to do with 9-11.

In 2015, radical feminist Dr.

Gayle Dines,

the quote,

world's leading anti-pornography scholar and activist,

according to her website,

let a boy cause of 50 Shades of Grey using the hashtag $50 and not 50 Shades,

encouraging people to donate to battered women's shelters instead of seeing the movie.

Dines claimed, 50 Shades glamorised and eroticised violence against women and rebranded it as romance.

She describes going to see the movie in a

theatre full of young women drinking cocktails and watching an object horror quote a film that depicted

in unbearable detail how to lure a lonely isolated child into consenting to sexual abuse watching

a seasoned predator toy with his immature prey you are left with a knot in the pit of your stomach that won't go away,

no matter how many cocktails you down.

Gail?

it's Twilight fan fiction.

When I watch Fifty Shades, I don't feel like I'm watching a seasoned predator.

I feel like I'm watching a woman's fantasy because I am.

And if people like Gil Dines are too obtuse to notice the difference, that's kind of their problem.

I've been holding this in for 10 years and I'm gonna say it.

I am begging these people to learn to think psychologically instead of literally.

So they're not constantly baffled and traumatized upon encountering common type of sexual fantasy that people have.

I guess when your only analytic tool is a sledgehammer, you see every problem as an author whose legs aren't hobbled yet.

It's frustrating because there's plenty of more nuanced criticism of pornography,

especially when it's produced coercively,

or when it actual sex education, but I reject the radical feminist idea that consuming pornography is a major cause of violence.

And I should know, because I'm a very violent person, and I never consume pornography.

I guess I also need to address that for every radical feminist who thinks that Twilight fanfiction is limited.

literally violence.

There's also a thousand misogynistic idiots who will argue that dark romance fantasies prove that women really want to be dominated by abusive alpha males.

Which no, stop.

No, fantasizing about sexy vampires doesn't make you a willing victim any more than fantasizing

about torpedoing a car holding up traffic makes you a murderer.

I fantasize about Mario Kart shelling bad drivers all the time.

It doesn't mean I literally want bloodshed on the New Jersey turnpike unless they're asking for it.

As Zarathustra speak, we have a name, a perfect name for fantasy.

It's called nightmare.

Our violent and twisted fantasies are unconscious solutions to the problem of anxiety.

And really, we're all just seeking pleasure and safety.

So probably it's fine, right?

wait, it's fine.

A little bit of healthy sadism never hurt anyone.

Part 4.

Power.

Is it really fine though?

We're not done.

We're not even close to done.

I'm just getting warmed up.

What feels incomplete to me about the it's just fantasy argument is that Twilight is a fantasy yes but it's a fantasy that reflects

the sexual dynamics between men and women.

I mostly agree with Nancy Friday's and Michael Bader's psychological analysis of fantasies,

but psychology, without material analysis of power, fails to explain some important things.

This becomes really obvious with sexual fantasies involving racial fetishism.

For example, there's a chapter of Nancy Fredrick book titled Big Black Men, which is exactly what it sounds like.

The fantasies of white women who are turned on by an animalistic stereotype of black men.

It's a racial fixation that's very much present as subtext in Twilight.

I leave you alone for two minutes, and the wolves descend.

Jacob is indigenous.

He into an animal, his last name is literally black.

Oh god, are the werewolves laminites?

Stephanie, I regret to inform you that the cuck tent is racist.

We could try to psychoanalyze all of this, the bigness in question, referring not just to anatomy, but to the intensity of your life.

desire, the exciting taboo of otherness, animalization as a shame-negating device, and all of that may be

true, but aren't these fantasies still a reflection and possibly a reinforcement of unjust political reality?

In his 2016 essay Decolonizing My Desire,

slave author Jeremy O'Harris describes his experience as a black gay teenager who became erotically fixated on white men.

Because to him, whiteness represented power and prestige.

He concludes that by obsessing over white bodies and white validation, quote, I was failing to exist.

I don't see myself as some kind of moral judge of who's allowed to fantasize about what.

But I've noticed, people are usually way less comfortable with fantasies rooted in racism than they are with fantasies about powerful men dominating submissive women.

But that justifiable?

Have men not dominated women throughout history?

Stephanie didn't invent this story about a male predator in his female prey out of thin air.

a of girls grow up being treated as a kind of sexual prey to male predators?

Doesn't that have some kind of influence on the fantasies that women have?

And can't fantasy sometimes influence reality?

According to criminologist Scott Baughn,

the behavioral science unit of the FBI has concluded that serial killers programmed themselves in childhood to

be come murderers through a progressively intensifying loop of fantasy.

I can confirm this.

My question is, are fantasy-powered dynamics simply the result of political inequality, or is there something inherently vampiric about sexuality itself?

According to Leopold von Sacher Massach, the guy who massacred is named after.

I wish I could have perversion named after me.

According to Masoch, in love, one person must be the hammer.

The other, the anvil.

Is this true?

Is sexuality always ruled by hierarchy, split into binary roles?

Is there always a hammer and an anvil,

a top and a bottom,

a dominant sub,

a lover and a beloved,

a lion and a lamb, and the default assumption is that the man is the lion and the woman is the lamb.

But people are hardly exempt from aligning with them.

types of roles, top and bottom.

Some people are born straight and others have straightness thrust upon them.

Let's call this situation default heterosexual sadomasochism, DHSM.

Remember this because I'm gonna say it a lot.

DHSM.

This division of sexuality into bipolar roles, masculine.

feminine, active-passive, subject-object, lover-beloved, giving-receiving, pursuing-pursued, predator dominant-submissive, possessing conquering-surrendering, penetrating voluristic-exhibitionistic, sadistic-masochistic.

In reality, none of these rules are interchangeable or even necessarily correlated.

Being masculine does not imply being a top, and neither imply being dominant.

Masculinity is gender expression, top is a sexual position, and dominant is a rule in a power dynamic.

But in DHSM, these assumed to be bundled together and assumed to belong to the sexuality of men.

When I say sadomasochism, I just mean the narrow sense of enjoying or inflicting pain, but this whole dynamic of dominance and submission.

Male dominance is so much the heterosexual default that female dominance, or femdom, considered a kink, that is, it's considered deviant.

DHSM defines heterosexuality as the dominance of women by men.

Men who are perceived as submissive to women are sometimes called gay,

over such emasculating behavior as leaning towards a woman, pleasuring a woman, walking behind a woman, and holding the baby he's sired with a woman.

DHSM is a woven into so much of our language about sexuality.

Think about the implications of the term impotence, literally loss of power, implying that phallic sexuality is fundamentally about power.

There's a strong association between masculinity and predation.

MATE!

is considered masculine.

A man is called a soy boy.

Edward Cullen is a vegetarian vampire.

He is vegetarian because without a guilty conscience he would be incapable of love.

But it's important that he be a vampire because his bloodlust gives him his dangerous virile edge.

I want my man to be a not a cow, a lion, says a woman on Tinder who has traumatic experiences with vegans.

Don't we all?

Supposedly, men hunt while women gather.

But in DHSM, women become the meat.

Just looks at you like you're something to eat.

In the sexual politics of meat, vegan feminists Carol J.

Adams argues for the interrelation of the oppression of women in the slaughter of animals.

She to abolish both forms of cruelty from human life.

God, you can't slaughter animals or objectify women, but what are men supposed to do for fun now?

Women's bodies are discussed as flesh to be consumed, castles under siege.

Temples to be profaned.

Her freshness seal is broken.

She becomes used goods.

Smut made for men tends to involve degrading women.

Likewise, erotic media for women tends to involve themes of submission and surrender.

Feminine masochism pervades culture.

says, he hit me and it felt like a kiss.

He hurt me, but it felt like true love.

Silvia Plath says, every woman adores a fascist.

From an egalitarian feminist perspective, it's troubling, concerning.

But not just in fantasy, but in reality, sadomasochism often reflects the social, political, and sadomasochism.

sexual domination of women by men.

Historically, psychoanalysis considered default heterosexual sadomasochism the result of biological predisposition.

Freud says, The sexuality of most male human beings contains an element of aggressiveness, a desire to subjugate.

Daddy, chill.

No.

Freud's colleague, Helen.

a Deutsch, argued likewise that, quote, masochism is part of the woman's anatomical destiny.

She thought that female masochism results from the inherent pain of women's reproductive role, deflation, menstruation, and childbirth.

It's really just a secular version of the biblical view that women's destiny is pain and submission,

in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children,

and thy desire shall be to thy husband,

and he shall rule over thee." A lot of twentieth-century feminist theory was devoted to arguing against this idea of anatomical destiny.

Feminists have tended to argue that male sadism and female masochism are purely the result of patriarchy.

of male social dominance.

The is that women learn to desire submission from their inferior social position,

and men learn to desire dominating and degrading women from their superior position.

In the 1980s,

a common radical feminist view was that male and female are not natural categories at all,

but that they're constructed through the through violence and exploitation, analogous to bourgeoisie and proletariat.

Radical Catherine McKinnon says, male and female are created through the erotization of dominance and submission.

Man woman.

Subject verb object.

Andrea says, men are distinguished from women by their commitment to do- violence, rather than to be victimized by it.

Notice how at odds this is with J.K.

Rowling's formulation, sex is real, which some radical feminists would once have considered the constitutive statement of sexism.

There's been a return to anatomical destiny lately in the form of turfism, that is, post-feminist bigotry against trans people.

Rowling's transphobic arguments often hint on an assumption that males are natural predators and females are natural prey.

Or as alien sex inspector Maya Forstadder puts it, In the context of prisons, it is a hell that matters.

Women have a hole, which men want to penetrate.

The reason we have men and women's prisons is to keep the men away from the hose.

This is anatomical destiny at the Kindergarten level.

Woman whole, man equals whole.

Therefore, man equals predator, woman equals prey.

I the pole and the whole.

Turfs think the Omega verse is real, that men are animals.

anatomical alphas, and women are anatomical omegas.

Stephanie Meyer takes a more gender fluid view.

In the introduction to femdom,

Twilight, Life and Death, Stephanie says, I've always maintained that it would have made no difference if the human were male and the vampire female.

It's still the same story.

And are there not male masochists?

and female sadists,

masochism is named after a man,

a man who once said, nothing kindles my passion quite so much as tyranny, cruelty, and above all unfaithfulness in a beautiful woman.

Send him to the cock-tent, send him to the tent of cock-oldry, even if there is an anatomical disposition of death.

men to sadism and women to masochism, disposition is not destiny.

Both men and women are anatomically capable of being the hammer or the anvil, the predator or the prey.

So I think that feminists are mostly correct to point to the history of male social dominance as the reason for default gendered roles.

Until the Married Women's Property Act of 1870,

English women were subject to a system called coverture,

meaning that when a woman married,

her entire legal existence was subsumed under that of her husband, and she effectively lost the right to own property or make contracts.

In the US, it was only as recently as 1974.

that women won the right to open independent bank accounts.

The same year they started having sexual fantasies.

Amazing.

So historically, the erotic and economic fates of women have been fused.

It's the key to historical romance novels like Pride and Prejudice, where the need for a marriage of security.

Incels like to complain about female hypergamy, and Mr.

Bennett sits around making sarcastic quips about it.

That's right, we're coming from Mr.

Bennett this video.

Nothing is sacred.

But women's preference for wealthy, powerful partners is the result of gender rules that make women dependent and subservient.

women are not biologically attracted to providers.

Elizabeth and then Lydia are initially attracted to Wickham, even though he has no money.

In upper-class Rose is attracted to working-class Leo.

In Heights, Catherine is attracted to feral dog boy Heathcliff, and in Twilight, Bella is attracted to feral dog boy Jake.

women are attracted to disempowered and impoverished men all the time.

But of their social and economic dependence,

for most of history a story about a woman who loves a lower-class man is not a romance.

It's a tragedy.

Catherine it would degrade me to Mary Heathcliff.

If the boy is poor, no room on the door.

What there need to be a hammer or an anvil at all?

Do we need sexual hierarchy?

Can't we just have a sexuality based on gentleness and equality and humane democratic values?

Well, that is exactly the question that divided feminists in the 1980s, a conflict known as the feminist sex war.

And I'm bringing it back, let's have a feminist sex war.

So, look, I'm now going to try to fairly present the arguments of sex-negative

radical feminism,

which fair warning can be difficult to hear,

because they're kind of saying that your most intimate desires and relationships are found on violence and injustice.

And trans, so I'm used to constantly having to defend my sexuality, but straight people, this might be new to you.

So strap in.

Sex-negative feminism is a backlash against the sexual revolution of the 60s and 70s.

idea of the sexual revolution was that sexuality should be liberated from marriage, from state, from religion, and from the imperative to procreate.

The feminist objection to it was basically that, in practice, the sexual revolution was only a liberation of men's desire to dominate women.

Radical feminist Andrea Dwork is says, quote, freedom, that hallowed word is valued only when used in reference to male desire.

For women, freedom means only that men are free to use them.

Sexual sometimes imply that sexual repression is inherently bad,

but many women experience violence at the hands of men whose sexuality is not repressed in to those women,

freedom of sexuality may seem less important than freedom from sexuality.

Sometimes, sexual repression is good.

Freedom the lion is not freedom for the lamb.

The question is, is it possible to liberate sex without liberating violence?

And for sex, negative feminists, the answer is basically, no.

As they see it, we have to choose between sexuality and women's rights, and we should choose women's rights.

This is a tough sell for most people, but okay, let's hear it out.

The boss of sex negative feminism is former academic Sheila Jeffries.

Quote, the democra- A demolition heterosexual desire is a necessary step on the route to women's liberation.

Good luck with that.

Now, I love Sheila Jeffries.

I think she's hilarious, but I'm an intellectual masochist.

I get off on bad ideas.

My tastes are very singular.

These days, Sheila Jeffries blends in as just another generic.

English transphobe.

These people are a diamond dozen.

The is that men doing women face are insulting to women when they're just walking down the street or sitting in a cafe.

Activities for which they need an unwilling audience of women in order to get sexual excitement.

She goes on podcasts and talks about how trans women are perverted fetishes, parasitically occupying.

female bodies, which, yeah yeah yeah, that is now the mainstream conservative view, so thank you for that, Sheila.

Sheila Jeffrey actually pioneered a lot of these transphobic arguments.

She walked so that J.K.

Rowling could run, give the devil her due.

Sheila's 2020 autobiography is titled Trigger Warning, which should give you some idea.

where she stands in the current culture war, like a hack comedian who hasn't been funny in 30 years.

I guess even lesbians aren't immune to boomer brainworms, sad.

But back in the 80s and 90s, Sheila was actually saying some genuinely subversive things.

Not good things, but subversive, that quote about demolishing heterosexual desire.

is from her 1990 book Anti-Climax,

a feminist perspective on the sexual revolution,

which is an amazingly bad book on sex and gender,

not just because of the transphobia,

not just because of bizarre claims like that women today are required to wear mandatory slut pumps at the office, but also because...

of the absurdly bold stance she takes on abolishing heterosexuality, which I realize may sound based, as the kids say.

I'm down with the kids.

But it is in fact cringe.

This book is bad, but it's bad in a way that is legitimately fascinating, in a way that we can all learn from.

So according to Sheila, the end goal of feminism is going to quote, the destruction of heterosexuality as a system.

She was influenced by Rod Femme Jill Johnson, who in 1973 said, Feminism at Heart is a massive complaint.

Lesbianism is the solution.

Until all women are lesbians, there will be no true political revolution.

These people were dead serious.

This is not a bit.

In any case, there 1979, Sheila Jeffrey's co-authored with the Leeds Revolutionary Feminist Group, a paper titled Political Lesbianism, the case against heterosexuality.

If I try to summarize it,

you'll think that I'm drawing a caricature,

so I'm just going to read you some direct quotes and I encourage you to go read it yourself to verify that

I'm not taking things out of context.

Quote, serious feminists have no choice but to abandon heterosexuality.

Men are the enemy.

Heterosexual women are collaborators with the enemy.

Attached to all forms of sexual behavior are meanings of dominance and submission, power and powerlessness, conquest and humiliation.

Any woman who takes part in a heterosexual couple helps to shore up male supremacy by making its foundations stronger.

So how do you think this paper was received by the women's liberation movement?

You probably won't be surprised to hear that it was not hugely popular.

When Sheila presented these arguments on a panel, the socialist feminist Lynn Segal said the speech made her feel as if she had been shot.

Sheila says, at the time we were not able to understand where the paper had provoked such a virulent attack.

I can't imagine why feminists would be so hostile to me simply pointing out that all women in relationships with men are counter-revolutionary traitors.

When here is such arguments, and what can one say, but Sheila Jeffries?

As Jack Halberstam said, if Sheila Jeffries didn't exist, Camille Palia would have had to invent her.

I it's funny if you know who these people are.

Please clap.

I mean,

it's one thing to seek a community with other women who renounce relationships with men and are therefore excluded from the vicarious power that comes with that.

Every marginalized community has a separatist friend.

cringe, which can be a valid choice, but where things get cuckoo bananas is when you insist

that all feminists must renounce relationships with men, because I'm sorry to say, but that will literally never happen.

And this kind of thing only divides the left when we should be united against the real enemy, the Vashite counter-revolutionaries.

But there's no- abstract kind of logic to Sheila's argument.

You put it like this.

Premise one.

Power in sexual relationships are oppressive.

Premise two.

Under patriarchy, men as a class have power over women.

Therefore, any sexual relationship between a man and a woman involved with a power imbalance.

Therefore, all heterosexual relationships are oppressive.

Therefore, men are the enemy, and women who date them are gender traders.

Is this argument wrong?

Why is it wrong?

Well, it's wrong because libido laughs in the face of reason.

You can't just reason people into being LGBT I've tried.

When anti Sheila makes an interesting shift.

She still advocates abolishing heterosexuality, but she redefines heterosexuality as sexual desire that erotizes power difference.

The reason for the redefinition seems to be that instead of feuding with heterosexual feminists, Sheila is now feuding with women.

as being pseudo-masicists, whom she argues are in fact heterosexual, because they eroticize power.

And eroticizing power includes anything from top-bottom dynamics, to to interracial relationships, to good old-fashioned penetration.

So, according to this view, gay men who have penetrative sex

are in fact heterosexual, because they uphold the oppressive power of the phallus that subjugates women.

Gay women who identify as butch or femme, they're heterosexual, because they're role-playing the oppressive dynamics of heterosexuality.

The only true homosexuals, according to Sheila Jeffries, are couples who eroticize equality.

So what does that mean?

It means no penetration, no tops or bottoms, no kinky fuckery, and no gender expression.

Apart from the androgynous Spock core aesthetic Sheila Jefferies was rocking.

So what is left of sex when you only eroticize equality?

Well, egalitarian turns out to be too idealized.

non-transsexual women who are the same age,

race and class,

with the same androgynous haircut lying side by side,

no one on top or bottom, just gently, non- aggressively, whispering sweet words of consciousness, raising to each other throughout the night.

Join the revolution, the tender, loving, twin-sest revolution.

You're probably getting very irritated listening to this.

I am also irritated, but I want to be very clear about why I'm irritated.

I no problem at all with Sheila Jeffery's defining sex as whatever it means to her.

A courtesy, she has never extended anyone else in her entire life, but we should extend it to her on principle.

If sex for you means tender cause.

consciousness-raising sessions between the sheets with your androgynous gal pals, by all means continue.

We also acknowledge that egalitarian sex is genuinely marginalized.

There are ways of having sex, like, you know, where both participants are equally active and there's no clear dichotomy of giver and receiver.

mainstream, straight, and gay culture dismisses egalitarian or non-penetrate of sex as immature as not real sex as not going all the way.

Gay dating app Grindr only added side as a selectable position in 2022.

The unthinkableity of egalitarian sex to many people should how deep DHSM goes.

So Sheila Jeffries is correct to defend the legitimacy of egalitarian sex against DHSM.

But again,

the problem is when you declare that your version of egalitarian sex is the only legitimate one,

and that everyone else is upholding the oppressive system.

I find this to be a deeply legal issue.

in curious and unempathetic way of thinking.

It's unpsychological.

This attitude of total indifference to what's going on in other people's minds.

Why is Sheila like this?

I think it's because she feels that she used to be a heterosexual.

Until the age of 28 when she made a rational conscious choice.

to become a egalitarian androgynous, trans-exclusionary, non-seidomasochistic lesbian.

And she thinks that every other woman can and should make that choice.

She in Trigger Warning, quote, In the late 1970s, I heterosexuality and chose to become a lesbian.

Lynn explains to me in patient detail the reasons to become a lesbian.

She describes how one evening she was with her boyfriend and his guy friend,

watching a TV drama in which a school boy put his hand up a teacher's skirt.

Quote, I looked at the two young men beside me, neither of whom looked particularly affected, and then I had an epiphany.

I could not see the point of spending time in the car of those who are members of the oppressor class.

I chose, from that day to the present, to have only women in my personal and emotional life.

I was suddenly open to the feelings I was increasingly having towards other women, not necessarily sexual, but profoundly emotional feelings.

So this is the story of how Sheila Jeffery's quit heterosexuality.

and so can you.

And again, I'm not saying that Sheila Jefferies isn't valid, or that she's not a real lesbian.

No, we're not doing that.

Her experience is valid for whatever that's worth, but it isn't typical.

Most people do not experience their sexual orientation as the result of a rational process.

process of consciously deciding the correct course of action after considering the advice of trusted colleagues.

Many heterosexual women totally agree with Sheila Jeffries that hashtag men are trash

and they love to say I wish I were a lesbian and talk about how gross and cringe heterosexuality is.

Because thing to the to living in libido does not follow reason.

For most of us, arrows is an archer.

We feel penetrated by something outside ourselves, possessed by this alien desire.

I can't help but wonder if what sex-negative feminists fear in sexuality is in fact, arrows.

Not just the physical penetration of heterosexual intercourse.

course, but the emotional penetration of romantic love, and the loss of self-possession that comes with it.

Telling yourself that everything you do is because of reason and logic soothe the anxiety of uncertainty, and it disguises the reality.

that none of us really have that much control over anything, not even our own desires.

And isn't that the point of fantasies like Twilight?

They make it feel safe to surrender to this frightening, overwhelming force inside us.

I feel like the only reasonable view for radical feminists to take is that changing society will change sexuality.

but instead, Sheila argues the opposite, that we should change society by changing sexuality, by abolishing it.

Sheila is aware that most people can't freely direct their own sexual orientation through acts of the will.

She even cites a feminist therapist who, quote, encourage their clients to democratize their relationships.

The couples kept reaching out, turning to her with a new problem.

They unable to summon up desire.

Love, yes, but not desire.

I think many, even most people, find that equality, like wisdom, is not exciting.

And solution for these people is celibacy.

So to recap,

Sheila, things that women should live in female-only communities where no one has sex, but everyone shares a kind of vague homoeroticism.

And I feel like this type of utopia already exists, and in fact has existed for hundreds of years.

It's called a convent.

Doesn't Sheila Jeffries want to be a nun?

family.

It's my life." Has she reinvented Christianity?

Well, no.

She's invented something worse because at Christianity is honest that with the fact that our will does not control our lusts.

You have to live the life you were born to live.

In mainstream Christianity, the idea that we can simply choose to live a sinless life is known as Pelagian heresy.

This was refuted by Augustine.

The North African theologian who argued that we all have lusted in our heart because we are of a fallen nature.

We the sin of Adam.

We are a stand from birth by the filth of concupescence.

And you might say aren't you overthinking Twilight?

No.

Now is this children who are underthinking it.

Augustine's claim is that our will can overcome temptation with God's grace.

But Christians do not make the psychologically batshit claim that we can consciously direct our lust towards virtue.

Sexuality can be repressed or resisted, or it can be sublimated into creative or spiritual energy, but free.

Free Will plays very little role in either love or lust.

So Sheila Jeffrey's feminism is actually more repressive than Christianity.

Because at least in Christianity, you get to talk about how sinful and wretched you are.

My favorite activity.

Part Death.

Sometimes late at night I read Twilight and I wonder, am I prepared for death?

Is anyone?

I've argued that sex negative feminists are wrong about psychology, freedom, and fantasy.

But are they wrong about sex?

Well, not entirely.

It sounds like an extreme provocation when ride feminists say things like, behavior are meanings of dominance and submission, power and powerlessness, conquest and humiliation.

But theorists of sexuality across the ideological spectrum, there's a surprising amount of consensus on this point.

Radical mortal enemy Dr.

Father The history of human civilization shows beyond any doubt that there is an intimate connection between cruelty in the sexual instinct.

Sexual Camille Palia says, all phases of procreation are ruled by appetite.

Sexual from kissing to penetration consists of movements of barely controlled cruelty and consumption.

In words, there's a pretty wide consensus that human sexuality.

is, in fact, Vampiric.

That is, it's ruled by hierarchy, cruelty, and consumption.

The real disagreement is about why that is and what we should do about it.

Let's address the why question.

Why is sexuality Vampiric?

The radical feminist response is because of patriarchy.

Radfans argue sadomasochism simply mirrors is the social reality of male supremacy,

even when inverted in female dominance or when practiced by same-sex couples whom red femmes say are just imitating heterosexuality.

And sure, I think patriarchy is largely responsible for default male dominance, but I think sadomasochism in general has roots deeper than political inequality.

Let's start by the We're about why sexuality even exists in the first place.

Why can't we just be normal?

We can't be normal because we're not bacteria.

We can't reproduce by mitosis.

In the scene where Bella and Edward are first introduced to each other,

they're in a science lab looking through a microscope at the stages of mitosis.

Prophase.

The metaphase.

Now you could say that's just a coincidence.

It mean anything.

Okay, well maybe everything's just a coincidence.

Maybe means anything.

Maybe life is pointless.

Asexual reproduction is fission.

The cell duplicates its chromosomes and rips itself in half, creating two daughter cells.

So what happens to the mother cell when it divides?

vision death or is it eternal life?

Well, it depends on being mean by death.

I this is about Twilight.

Wait for it.

Death is the dissolution of the boundaries that define individual existence.

Each individual thing is distinguished from other things by its edges.

The membrane of a cell,

the skin of an animal, the border of a country, In asexual reproduction, the life of this species requires the death of the individual.

The mother cell must split to reproduce.

Sexual reproduction also contains a paradox of life and death,

but instead of fission we have fusion and fertilization, where two gametes merge to create new life.

also involves fusion at a social and emotional level.

Your partner is your other half because in love, two people become one entity.

The Bible says two married people leave their father and mother and become one flesh.

Even if they don't biologically reproduce, the couple is a new social union that comes into being.

at the expense of their former family ties, and of the boundaries that used to define two separate individuals.

So love and sex create new life, but they also involve a kind of death.

In 1912,

the psychoanalysts Sabina Shbilirin published a paper called Destruction as the Cause of Becoming,

which sent free Freud reeling into a thought spiral that led him to theorize the death drive.

The question Shpielrhein wanted to answer is,

quote, why does the most powerful drive, the reproductive drive, in addition to the expected positive feelings, harbor negative feelings, such as anxiety and disgust?

Shpielrhein is trying to explain the ambivalence, the element of the of fear and trembling in every sexual encounter.

Don't be a coward.

She the cellular merging of the two gametes,

this creation of new life from the destruction of the parent cells, as an image representing the emotional conflicts of sexuality.

Erotic love is always a threat to our senses.

of self, to our identity as a distinct individual.

It's similar to the terror and awe of mystical experiences, encounters with God or psychedelic oneness, where you both fear and desire.

losing the edges of your ego.

In Saint Teresa of Avila's mystical encounter with the angel,

she, quote, saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the point there seemed to be a little fire.

He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart and to pierce my very entrails.

When he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God.

The pain was so great that it made me moan,

and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain,

but I could not wish to be rid of it."

Now, the obvious atheist thing to say is that this is just like a repressed Renaissance woman

getting off on Jesus, and yes, there's obviously a sight.

But is that all?

Couldn't it also be that both mystical and sexual experiences penetrate the edges of the self?

Blurring the line between self and other can be ecstatic or terrifying or both.

It's like when you eat too many mushrooms and melt into the universal mind lattice.

boundaries become unstable, a crisis of identity occurs.

Xenophil with people experience immigration as a violation of the nation's borders.

Build that wall.

It's a crisis of national identity.

They conceptualize as invasion.

I think that paranoia about vaccines is of a similar type.

The boundary of our bodies is our skin, which is punctured by the needle.

The garment is coercing us into being injected, penetrated.

It causes deep fears about bodily integrity that people rationalize with conspiracy theories.

For radical feminist Andrea Dorkin, intercourse is inherently invasion, it's occupation, it's annihilation.

Dorkin views penetration as an atrocity, committed against women by men, tantamount to colonization and war crimes.

I she overstates the case somewhat, is it really invasion if the invasion?

was invited in.

The argument is that women are coerced into consenting,

that no woman would consent to intercourse without coercion, and you can decide for yourself if you find that empowering or extremely condescending.

I think penetration can be reconceptualized as giving,

as offering, as an active service, but let's be honest, most of the time, penetration is associated with dominance.

Don't men have sexual paranoia of their own?

In romance, men fear viscosity, the overly attached girlfriend.

In sex, men sometimes fear engulfment, devouring, castration.

losing part of themselves and the women.

Their precious bodily fluids.

Not all fears are equally valid.

I do think the penetrated partner is made more vulnerable in most cases, if I may adjudicate as the tyresis in this debate.

penetration and devouring, the boundaries between people are violated.

Violation may be fundamental to sexuality, even when there is no penetration.

Freud's partial drives, oral anal and phallic, all involve the movement of a substance into or out of the body.

Simply the act of stripping naked, it destroys a boundary.

And at the interior emotional level, desire is a wound.

Subjectively, desire feels violating.

Ann says, When desire you, a part of me is gone.

Your lack is my lack.

I would not be in want of you unless you had partaken of me, the lover reasons.

A whole is being not in my vitals," says Sappho.

The awkward says, you have sucked my blood.

This is why vampirism is a metaphor for sexuality and twilight, and in most vampire media.

In Midnight Sun,

we learn what Edward is thinking next to Bella in biology, holding his breath to avoid, quote, sinking my teeth through that fine thin ceiling.

through skin to the hot, wet, pulsing.

There's a reason my books have a lot of innocence.

Masculine and feminine sexual hazards are blended in vampires who both penetrate you and devour your precious bodily fluids.

They have an androgynous appeal.

Both and female vampires are capable of pain.

penetrating and capable of sucking.

It's probably one reason there's so many LGBT vampires and lesbian vampires in particular.

The lesbian vampire is an oral sadist.

For Freud, the oral stage is quote, cannibalistic, pre-general sexual organization.

Here, sexual activity has not yet been separated from the ingestion of food.

The sexual aim consists in the incorporation of the object.

Adult develops out of infantile roots, beginning with the hunger for mommy's milk.

Freud it an infantile regression, but I for one stand by the oral stage.

I think it's a fine stage.

BBs are little vampires.

They sustenance from what they love.

Vampirism is a sub-genre of cannibalism, and cannibalism is usually connected in some way with the urge to merge.

I even know where you end and I begin.

Reddit Susie Meme-Bavaran.

explains, the thing about war that appeals to me is the closeness and intimacy between the two parties involved.

I it's literally letting someone inside you.

In a weird and abstract way, it's really cute.

Think of it like cuddling, taken to the extreme.

Aww.

These are not realistic, cannibal fantasies.

Most people into war have no interest in literally consuming human flesh,

but course there's always that one in a million psycho who takes things too far and ruins it for everyone.

Cannibal lust killer Jeffrey Dahmer claims he selected victims based on physical beauty,

killing and eating them quote, Not because I was angry with them, not because I hated them, but because I wanted to.

who keep them with me, possessed them permanently.

It a way of making me feel that they were a part of me.

Male killers, they don't even make use of the skin.

Even Dommers'

outlandish crimes are just a morally deranged enactment of totally common place erotic themes,

possession, dominance, fusion, eternal life, and

French and pervert, Georges Bautais says, quote, the urge towards love, pushed to its limit, is an urge towards death.

What does physical eroticism signify, if not a violation of the very being of its practitioners?

A violation bordering on death, bordering on murder.

Love is fusion, and fusion entails a kind of death.

Death reproduction are deeply connected in human symbolism.

Most religious traditions connect death to some form of rebirth, reincarnation, resurrection, rapture.

Many people feel that having children is their path to immortality.

And that's true in a way.

But in another sense, you're raising the generation that will replace you.

In literature and mythology, love often leads to death.

Romeo Juliet, Hades and Persephone, Tristan and his old, Madame Bovary and a Coronina, Jack Titanic.

Shakespeare desire is death.

The French call orgasim la pan quaternion.

Twilight's epigraph is Genesis 2 17,

but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil,

thou shalt not eat of it, for in the day that thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die.

The fruit of the forbidden tree brings lust and death into the world.

James 1 to 15, then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin, and sin when it is finished, bringeth forth death.

Is there any other YouTuber who quotes scripture as much as I do?

I like we're always cracking open the goddamn Bible.

Well, crack open your Bibles.

Romans 23, for the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through shame.

Lord, so lust is death, sin is death, but the death of Jesus Christ is eternal life.

Christians united with Christ and incorporated into his sacrifice in the ritual blood-drinking of the Eucharist.

Sacrifice, desire, crucifixion, reproduction, death and resurrection, all of these ideas are simple.

related in the Western imagination, and this is the network of associations Stephanie Meyer evokes in Twilight.

Before her wedding, Bella has bloody nightmares anticipating vampire transformation, and I assume symbolizing defloration.

Wedding The is violently consummated, leaving Bella bruised.

and instantly pregnant.

The is a vampire sucking the life from her body.

Childbirth is agonizing death.

Has any other popular author ever dwelled so much on the violence of childbirth?

Bella's body is destroyed giving birth to Renesme.

The baby cracks her spine, it bites her breast, her baby crazed sister-in-law performs a C-section without anesthesia.

The book is even more graphic.

Bella vomiting blood.

It's nauseating to read.

Edward Bella by injecting his venom and doing chest compressions, which begins her excruciating transformation.

Quote, I wanted to raise my arms and claw my chest open and rip my heart.

from it.

Anything to get rid of this torture.

So she suffers for three days on this lab, after which she rises reborn as a vampire.

Can you think of anyone else who died in agony only to be resurrected three days later?

I'm coming up blank.

I got nothing.

For Stephanie Meyer, childbirth is crucifixion.

It's death that gives is eternal life.

And if Twilight makes it sublicit, some of the sadomasochistic subtext of Christianity, 50 Shades of Grey takes it even further.

Christian's name is literally Christian.

Anna is tied in cruciform prose while sacred music by Thomas Talis, please.

Anastasia is Jesus in this scene, like Bella is Jesus in childbirth.

We're to understand that this is sacred pain, sacred sex, sacred violence.

Does Christian energy have a sadomasochistic subtext, or does BDSM have a Christian subtext?

Take a hit, leave a comment.

Either way, my argument has a lot of biblical support.

In the Book of Genesis, God creates the sex binary through the violence of fission.

He takes the rear bed of Adam and makes Eve.

Adam calls her flesh of my flesh, bone of my bones.

Then, in marriage, the two sexes become one flesh again, through the violence of fusion.

Can we talk about the sanctity of sex and violence?

My promises is about Twilight, okay, I'm not gonna go off on some wild tangent in a video about Twilight.

Like eroticism, sanctity is a matter of boundaries.

The sacred is contrasted with the pre- profane.

The word profane comes from the Latin profanum, meaning before the temple, outside the temple.

So the sacred is what's in the temple.

It's what's set apart as close to God or gods.

Religion ritual impose order on the world, creating distinctions between the sacred and the profane.

It sounds weird to say that.

sex and violence are sacred, because aren't sex and violence, the number one things that religious people are always whining about?

Well, yes and no.

God said to Moses, thou shalt not kill.

A simple commitment, the sort of thing you can carve in stone.

Nevertheless, Deuteronomy 2016 says, in the cities of the nations the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance.

Do not leave alive anything that breathes.

Completely destroy them.

The and Amorites, and Canaanites, and the Heh, and the Heh, and the Heh.

As the Lord your God has commanded you.

Well, that sounds an awful lot like killing to me.

I it's only the book of Deuteronomy.

We're already wiping out entire cities kill everyone now.

So maybe the commitment thou shalt not kill only means don't kill Israelites In fact, that is what it means.

The Canaanites don't have a covenant with God, so F*** him.

Hundone first degree murder.

The killing Israelites is not entirely off the table.

table either.

For according to Leviticus 2013,

say it with me, if a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination.

They shall surely be unalived.

Okay, so no killing except the Canaanites and the gays.

The exception Christians are stalking, so the commandment isn't really thou shalt not kill, it's thou shalt not kill unless.

Likewise Leviticus 17 seems to prohibit the slaughter of animals unless you kill them sacrificially at the tabernacle in the sacred space.

No Christians tend not to read Leviticus.

by do because I enjoy violence and I hate myself.

Leviticus is also important context for the entire story of Christianity.

Jesus the Lamb of God that take it the way the sins of the world.

What does that mean?

It doesn't make any sense unless you're familiar with Leviticus and you

understand that killing a lamb is a The ritual Atonement is a ritual of Atonement.

The Taranakal of Moses was like a goddamn shanty town slaughterhouse.

The barbecue, sorry I'm doing a of blasphemies, but frankly I think God is bored with you people.

I think he enjoys my innovative interpretations.

A had to be sacrificed every morning and every evening in addition to all the sin and killed sacrifices.

When Solomon dedicated the temple, we're told he sacrificed 22,000 oxen and 120,000 sheep.

Imagine the blood.

The elevator in the shining doesn't even come close.

We can't talk about vampire romance without understanding the symbolism of blood.

A paradox in Leviticus is that blood is both cleansing and unclean.

We're told that menstruating women are unclean,

a woman who gives birth is unclean,

eating blood is forbidden,

sorry vamps,

but when a woman has been made unclean through the blood of a regular menstruation or childbirth, how does she atone and become clean again?

Well, by the sacrificing an animal and spilling its blood and people have been trying to understand this paradox for thousands of years.

I'm not gonna pretend that I have it all figured out but I feel like I have something to do with blood

representing a transition between life and death.

Leviticus 17 forbids eating blood because the life of every creature is its blood.

It's blood is its life.

When is blood spilled?

When a child is born, beginning life, and when a lamb's throat is cut, ending life.

It's a lamb.

Could we say that blood is liminal?

It's super funny.

It's liminal.

It's uncanny, it's object.

Another explanation comes from George Batai, who quote, whatever is the subject of a prohibition is basically sacred.

The sacred world depends on limited acts of transgression.

So all societies have taboos, usually governing food, sex, reproduction, blood, violence, dead body.

You know, the good stuff.

But Ty's argument is that every taboo has exceptions.

Paradoxically permitted transgressions.

And those permitted transgressions simply are the sacred.

Thou shalt not kill...

unless.

The UNLESS is the permitted transgression.

Is the same?

The commandment,

Thou shalt not commit adultery,

could be rephrased as,

Thou shalt not have sex,

unless, unless, it's with the person who you're married to, for the purpose of procreation, or whatever it is you people do.

Sex is probably taboo for the same reason that killing is.

René Girard says, sexuality is impure because it has to do with violence.

Unregulated sex leads to abuse,

seduction, assault, disease, paratless children, defenseless women, cheating, jealousy, rivalry, literally the Trojan War, and could argue about

how effective marriage really is at preventing those things.

But in theory, sex, like killing, has to be contained within the boundaries of the sacred, in case marriage.

Batai says the initial sexual act constituting marriage is a permitted violation.

If sacrifices sacred's thought, the marriage is sacred sex.

I wonder if a wedding is also a kind of sacrifice.

It takes place on an altar, usually where sacrifices happen.

Who's the sacrificial lamb?

Well, I assume the bride.

She's the virgin on the altar, at least the symbolic version.

Twilight evocative imagery of red splashed all over white, purity and blood, life and death.

People say you're funeral.

The bride is going to die to be get life.

That her sacrificial Christ-like.

A wedding is a ritualized transgression of the usual taboo on sex.

And these dynamics of taboo and transgression make human sex and violence fundamentally different from natural animal sex.

and violence.

I think it's wrong to conclude,

as Paul Sheppard does,

that quote, there is a danger in all carnivores, including humans, of confusing the two kinds of venereal aggression, loving and hunting.

Human aggression is not like animal predation, it's conceptual rather than instinctive.

But says quote, the The object undiscriminating animal is after is not what is desired.

The is forbidden, sacred, and the very prohibition attached to it is what arouses the desire.

The that the taboo creates the desire explains the element of profanation in sadistic fantasy.

The word sadism is named after 18 years.

century French author and sex criminal, the Marquis Desaude.

Desaude was convicted on charges of debauchery and a moderate liberty-nedge and imprisoned in the Bastille, where he wrote 120 days of Sodom.

A heartwarming classic beloved to this day by children of all ages,

debauchery and moderate libertinage sounds very quaint, very charming, but let's be clear, Desod was drugging and abusing sex workers.

He some folks.

We tortured some folks.

Gen Z is canceling the Mark E.

Desod.

Is nothing sacred?

120 of Sodom?

I don't know if I can accurately summarize this book in a way that's even allowed on YouTube.

I'll try.

For wealthy libertarians in prison, a group of youths, in a castle where old prostitutes tell stories of every conceivable blasphemy, crime, and perversion.

And you did it at my birthday dinner.

Then whole thing escalates into an orgy of you know, grape and unalignment.

Still a better love story than twine bringing this up because the sod illustrates Batai's point that the transgressive is desired because it is forbidden.

Personally, I don't find sod's work sexy.

If anything, it's funny.

Like in the way that John Waters is funny.

advocate cannibalism ain't shit because comedy like sexuality relies on transgression the

things described in 120 days of Sodom like bodily fluids are excreted on a crucifix which is then deployed

in unspeakable acts of oh my god this is not natural animal aggression.

When Saad's champion, Camille Palia says, Nature's reality is Saudian, red in tooth and claw.

This isn't misuse of Saad's name, because there's nothing natural about 120 days of Saadam.

There is aggression in nature.

Dolphins, for example, are sexually violent.

Don't.

Google it, you don't need this in your brain.

But do not commit sex crimes because dolphins do not have laws.

In the criminal justice system, sexually-based defenses are considered especially Don't we know how to use a gun just friendly crust?

Only human violence is ritualized.

It always stands in some relation to taboo, whether it's sacred, permitted transgression or profane, criminal transgression.

Jeffrey sketched a diagram of a shrine he was planning to create, an altar on which to display his victim's skulls.

This not animal predation.

Lions not build shrines for the skulls of the lands.

The of blasphemy in Desod is the most telling.

In sadistic fantasy, the sacred is invoked, so it can be profaned.

But says, quote, beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled.

The polluting or disboiling of beauty is a major theme in male-oriented smut films.

There's a of fluids being, you know, blasted everywhere.

I think this is a real point of conflict within heterosexuality.

A lot of women want to be intensely desired by men,

a lot of women fantasize about being virtuosically ravished by men, but far fewer women swoon at the prospect of being befouled.

I some women do, right?

For anything you can think of, there's someone who's into it.

The submissive fantasies, if anything, tend to sanctify sexuality.

Before it was called Fifty Shades of Grey, this Twilight fan fiction was titled Master of the Universe.

Master of the universe is not what you call a man, it's what you call a god.

What if God was one of us?

By submitting to a godlike man, the masochistic woman elevates herself, whereas a sadistic man elevates himself by putting down a woman.

One sadistic fantasy usually involves degradation and disboiling of the woman.

Her beauty is a sacred temple that he profans with his, in this case, not so precious bodily fluids.

Muslim and masochism are, in fact, not complimentary at all.

The philosopher Duluth recounts a joke that tells of the meeting between a sadist and a masochist.

The masochist says, hurt me.

The sadist replies, no.

Christian Gray is not, as he claims, a sadist.

I get off and punishing women.

and women who look like you like like.

your mother.

He's a masochist's fantasy of a sadist.

In reality, a sadist and a masochist do not belong together.

The pairing is probably two masochists who alternate taking the active role in masochistic play-acting.

You what, maybe we should abolish heterosexuality.

I'm sorry Sheila Jeffries.

You were right.

Let's return to our question from three tangents ago.

Why sexuality vampiric?

Why is it so hard to make sexuality conform to humane political ideals of pacifism and equality?

I part of the answer is that sexuality inherently involves the of boundaries and the overcoming of barriers.

Something has to rip the bodice and there's a lot of bodices to be ripped.

It's not just Freud's guilt shame and anxiety, it's not just Nancy Friday's lifetime of women's rules against sex.

It's also the taboo against sex that allows society to function.

It's fear of reproduction and death, the fear of losing your identity and boundaries to desire and to fusion.

All of this must be overcome for climax to be reached,

and can conceptualize the overcoming as a conquest or a surrender, but there is no pacifying the emotional experience of eroticism.

It's conflicting.

by nature bitter sweet eroticism is a dialectic of life and death love and hate

tenderness and violence taboo and transgression separation and unity and

that's why Edward Cullen is a vampire the threat of losing yourself of losing your boundaries and will always be a source of ambivalence,

no matter how egalitarian or how permissive societies attitudes towards sex become.

St-omasticistic fantasy has psychological origins that cannot be fully explained by leftist analysis of social hierarchy,

nor abolished by consciousness raising or revolutionary Sexuality is not a pure innocent thing that gets perverted by corrupt society.

No, I agree with Augustine that lust is inherently perverted, and society's role is to channel it into outlets that minimize violence.

And those outlets may include novels and movies and erotica and pre- problematic ships, none of which are to blame for perverting a sexuality.

These things are an expression of something turbulent within us, which for me is symbolized by the sea, the inherently erotic sea.

Why is the ocean inherently erotic?

Well of the rhythmic expansion contraction cycles of her wave motion.

Yes, of course, but also because she's mother, because she's life, she's birth, she's death,

she's the primal horror of horrors and the sweet womb of Mother Knight.

She's erotic because she beckons, and we come.

Stephanie is, of course, aware of all this.

Maybe not consciously, but it's all there, it's all in fact.

Twilight Edward and Bella's ecstatic union takes place where,

in the sea, as Dickinson said, growing in Eden, ah, the sea, may I put more tonight in thee.

Penetration!

I know what you get up to, Emily, and I'm reporting you to Sheila Jeffries.

Part six, identity.

I'm once again wearing an evening gown at home in the middle of the night to film a YouTube video by myself.

Well, I do it for you.

The longest Twilight book is Midnight Sun.

This thing is like a blunt weapon.

Midnight Sun is the book that retells Twilight from Edward's perspective.

Here's a question.

If wishful filament fantasy element of Twilight relies on readers identifying with Bella, why would Stephanie Meyer rewrite it from Edward's perspective?

Why would Snow Queen's Ice Dragon copy Stephanie Meyer yet again rewriting Fifty Shades of Grey from Christian's perspective?

Well, but because she's a hack who likes money and wants to wear Stephanie's skin, but a lot of Twilight fans actually wanted Midnight Sun.

Why?

Why would you want to spend 800 pages inside the head of the world's most dangerous predator?

Well, let's maybe put it this way.

When you were a kid, what was the most popular week of programming on the Discovery Channel?

Kelp Week?

Sardine Week?

No.

F***ing Shark Week.

because sharks do murders.

I'm the world's most dangerous predator.

Humans are attracted to predators because we're attracted to power.

And we're usually attracted to power not because we're masochists who want to be preyed upon, but because we want to be powerful ourselves.

It's what philosopher Frederick Newton called the will to power.

We're attracted to predators because it flatters our egos to recognize part of ourselves in sharks or cats or wolves.

Whereas prey animals, calling someone a sheep or a pig, is usually a In my video on Envy, I argued that people resent power.

Actually, that's a pretty terrible summary of video.

Jessica watched the video,

and there's a usually right-wing version of this argument that says we live in a victimhood culture,

where all discourses, grievance, privileges, despised, everyone rhetorically positions themselves as the innocent lamb, the cross, I'm so oppressed.

But is just frustrated will to power.

It's derivative of the will to power.

You hate it, cause you ain't it.

And hurts.

Envy is the sin that gives no pleasure.

So usually, the path of least resistance is to feel powerful by identifying with power.

Why do poor downtrodden people support rich, powerful politicians.

It's not just because they see themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

It's because people identify with politicians they support, and that makes them feel powerful vicariously.

Why are so many weird nerds ready to die in battle for Elon Musk?

Isn't it because they feel that his power is also theirs.

They're like the boy who resolves the Oedipus complex, his feelings of rivalry and jealousy toward his father, by identifying with his father.

For similar reasons, women sometimes identify with male predators.

In the 1980s, California was terrorized by Richard Ramirez, AKA the Night's stalker, who brutally murdered at least 13 people.

Fan girls and crime groupies adored him throughout the trial, with one admirer eventually marrying him.

Many such cases, Ted Bundy also married one of his fans.

Jeffrey got lots of fan mail from women who thought they were attracted to him.

Ramirez offered a theory about his appearance.

to these women, saying, quote, I think the girls are attracted to me because they can relate to me.

I think that's essentially correct.

Attraction to serial killers is based on identification with the criminal.

These women are not masochists who want to be victims.

They're aspiring to be the final girl to vicarious power.

In her book, Saba- appetites.

Rachel says of serial killer groupies,

quote, "...in a world where masculinity meant power and power meant violence,

some women would always opt to align themselves with that violence and exert their own perverse power through love.

It was a way to feel special,

chosen, but it was an ugly kind of special, tainted with other people's

pain." In 2018, a small publisher told Rachel, we to do zombies and vampires, but that's going nowhere.

It's all true crime now.

Has true crime replaced the vampire romance?

If so, I think that's unfortunate, because Jeffrey Dahmer has real victims and Edward Cullen does not.

I feel like this is an area where fiction is superior to reality.

Whenever I finish one of my serial killer research binges, I'm always left with a feeling of disappointment.

These are men with something less, not with something more.

What really want serial killers to be is Hannibal Lecter, powerful, artistic, and deadly.

He combines the power of raw animal aggression, with the power of sophisticated civilized culture.

That's why he's daddy.

True crime is shark weak for grownups.

We are transfixed by the beauty of power and the power of beauty.

And in case this needs to be said,

the desire for power is a facet of human personality that is not going to be solved by lesbianism.

As if lesbians never decided to powerful women, as if no gay woman has ever wanted mommy to step on her.

Like, come on, pay attention.

But it's true that for most women, identifying with power means identifying with men.

For most of history, merging with a man has been many women's only plausible path to power.

Traditional marriage strongly incentivizes women.

women to identify with their husbands and enjoy his power vicariously.

As a 1966 Supreme Court opinion put it, though the husband and wife are one, the one is the husband.

Most married women still take their husband's surname, symbolically subsuming her identity into his.

On the altar is a Bella Swell.

one becomes Mrs.

Edward Cullen.

She is he.

Now, even if it's anti-feminist for a woman to fantasize about obtaining power by merging with a man, it still has to be said that this

is not really masochism.

It's still a kind of power fantasy.

Masochism would be, if in Bella just gets eaten by the vampires.

The end.

But that's not what happens.

According to Stephanie Myer.com, Breaking Dawn's cover is a metaphor for Bella's progression throughout the entire saga.

She began as the weakest player on the board, the pawn.

She ended as the strongest, the queen.

Likewise, 50 Shades of Grey concludes with Christian's admission that Anastasia is topping from the bottom.

You're topping from the bottom, Mrs.

Gray.

But I can live with that.

Isn't that the fantasy that it's really the woman who controls male power, who's topping from the bottom?

I think some degree of male identification is a normal part of women's experience.

In Wuthering Heights, Catherine says, I him because he's more myself than I am.

I am Heathcliff.

Ursula K.

Le Guin says, I am the generic he, as in, a writer knows which side his bread is buttered on.

That's me, the writer.

Him.

I am a man.

Men are viewed as default.

and women tend to be fluent in adopting a masculine perspective.

It makes me sad that...

When a woman writes a book from a woman's perspective,

pretty much only women read it, whereas I read books written by men about men's perspective all the time.

And this could be why men don't think they understand women, because you don't read our perspective as much as we read yours.

This is relevant to understanding Twilight as fantasy, because if readers are identifying with Edward rather than Bella, then this isn't female masochism, is it?

The reader isn't being dominated by Edward because she is Edward.

On this interpretation, romance fantasies with an alpha monster hero are simply vicarious powers.

But reduce the reader's experience to male identification is also too simple.

I've been sitting in front of this fruit tart for 40 minutes.

I'm gonna start eating it.

It's happening.

In essay,

The Androgynous Reader,

romance writer Laura Kinsel argues that romance novels have nothing to do with women's relationships with actual men,

but rather quote, whole adventure is an interior one.

Romance then is basically a psycho-drama between different elements of the reader's own personality.

Quote, romance reflects the exploration and reconciliation of male elephants.

Male elephants.

Are you fine kidding me?

Romance the exploration and reconciliation of male elements within the female reader.

The hero represents the reader's animus, the man within, her aggressive, adventurous, masculine side.

So unlike the strict subject-object dichotomy, Laura Mulvey describes as the male gaze in cinema, the female viewpoint in romance is inherently genuine.

Hansel says, quote, it is myopic to believe that just because the reader is female, she is confined to the heroine's character.

The female reader is the hero, and also is the heroine as object of the hero's interest.

The heroine in a romance novel is not a character the reader identifies with,

the way you might identify with a superhero and so aspirational way.

Instead, the heroine is a placeholder for the reader who both identifies with the hero and wishes to be loved by him.

Every girl projects their own personalities on to her,

so it was weird playing the part because I didn't feel like it was a big departure.

There no distinct character I was playing.

I really this girl.

This makes sense in later the way the Twilight fandom reacted to Kristen Stewart and the role of Bella.

Kristen Stewart was widely hated in the role of Bella,

I think in part,

because fans of Twilight didn't view her or Bella as an ideal they could identify with, but rather as a kind of rival.

In the book Bella is described in a mildly depreciatory sort of way.

Clumsy, ordinary.

This makes her not enviable, and therefore not an intimidating rival.

Many find Bella to be planned, but her blandness is part of the appeal.

It suits her role as placeholder.

And Kristen Stewart ruined everything by being gorgeous, how dare she.

So let's clap.

Contrast the difference between two fantasy structures, the gender fluid identifications of the feminine romance fantasy versus the subject object splitting of the male gaze.

John Berger,

who coined the term male gaze,

says, Man at women, women watch themselves being looked at, the surveyor of woman in herself is male, the surveyor.

female.

The male gaze exemplifies what we could tentatively call a masculine fantasy type, where you identify with a masculine subject, desiring a feminine object.

And in the feminine fantasy type, identification is split between the desiring masculine subject, and the feminine self as of object of desire.

So you simultaneously identify with Edward and you imagine yourself as the beloved object of Edward's desire.

A distinguishing feature of the feminine, beloved fantasy is that in a sense, the object of desire is yourself.

This has led some people to conclude that feminine fantasy is a essentially auto-erotic or narcissistic.

De says, in solitary pleasure, it happen that the woman splits into a male subject and a female object.

She describes a female patient of psychoanalysis who said to herself,

"'I'm going to love myself,

or more passionately, "'I'm going to possess myself.'" Margaret says, You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman.

You are your own voyeur.

There definitely is an autoerotic aspect of feminine fantasy, though I think it's unfair and stigmatizing to say that narcissistic love is specifically feminine.

Like, think about the masculine concept of a trophy wife.

Is that not erotic narcissism?

A man?

wants a beautiful woman because of what having a beautiful woman says about him.

Or a pickup artist who wants a high body count because that inflates his ego.

Freud that ego is the original reservoir of the libido.

There's an awful lot of narcissism to go around.

Now that I think about it, there's love me.

There's I love what I see of myself in you.

There's I identify with you and love myself as the object of your love.

There's I love what having you says about me."

It's like when Bella shows up at school for the first time with Edward as her cool new boyfriend

proving to everyone that she is cool too.

It's totally gorgeous, obviously, but apparently nobody here is good enough for him.

But Bella is, Bella is good enough for him.

She has what everyone wants.

Even though she's not the captain of the volleyball I'm just kidding, I'm just kidding.

Or the president of the student council.

Half a feminine fantasy is loving yourself.

through the eyes of the hero.

So the more powerful and esteemed the hero is, the more elevated the woman becomes as his beloved.

And you may as well shoot for the moon.

Darcy is one of the richest men in England.

Edward is a quote, God-like creature, a perpetual savior, the world's most dangerous predator.

Christian is master of...

the universe.

I feel like this grandiosity compensates women for being stuck playing second violin.

The escalation into theology is just the inevitable conclusion.

St.

Angela of Fellynio claims Jesus told her, my daughter and my sweet spouse, I love you so much more than any other woman.

I'm not like other girls.

in the eyes of God.

Alderton quotes a Snape wife who claims that Severus Snape would use her husband as a vessel

during the physical act of love so that while making love to her husband,

she felt that she was metaphysically making love to her lord and master Severus Snape.

And it seems like Snape was chosen because these women identify with him.

For the same reason women have all always identified with Jesus,

because he has relatable feminine-coded trauma,

abused, humiliated, penetrated even in the case of Jesus, but he also happens to be the God who loves you.

It's like a fantasy of being Mary in the Pieta, the feminine urge to be Daddy's mommy.

So if you take the feminine beloved fantasy to its existence, dream, this is what you end up with.

Narcissism escalated to theological proportions.

And if you take the masculine love or fantasy to its extreme, you get objectification to the point of predation.

This desire to pursue and possess that can get a little Jeffrey Dahmer, a little headbunty.

Now, every generalization about gender and sexuality is an overgeneralization.

And I've been calling these two fantasy types masculine and feminine because that's how most people recognize them.

But now we need to question the assumption that lover equals masculine and beloved equals feminine.

This assumption is part of DHSM, default heterosexual state of masochism.

and it's oppressive and imprecise, and I hate it.

Both and gay people frequently conflate the dyads, masculine feminine, top bottom, dumb sub, lover beloved.

And again, I really want to emphasize that masculine feminine refers to gender expression.

Top and bottom are sexual positions.

Dom and Sub are roles in a power dynamic, and Lover and Beloved are relationship roles that correspond to different ways of structuring desire.

The Lover is captivated by beauty and pursues it.

The Beloved either desires the desire of the Lover or narcissistically enjoys themselves as a beautiful object.

as that which is desired and pursued.

I don't buy the anatomical destiny argument that says that men naturally pursue because

their anatomy is pointed outward and women are narcissists because their anatomy is pointed inward.

Like, demand not have holes, demand not have holes.

Do not have external anatomy of their own?

You can be a feminine top, or a masculine submissive, or even a dominant bottom.

The of fantasy structure does not inherently take a feminine person as the beloved.

But DHSM is so prevalent that it's easy to make this mistake.

I'm sure you can find examples of me doing it.

Like a lot of trans women early in my transition.

tradition, I brought a lot of misery on myself by unconsciously assuming that women equals submissive equals attracted to men.

Which, no, this is cringe, antomaphobic, and misogynistic.

Stop it.

I forgive myself because this prejudice is extremely prevalent.

There are even sophisticated theorists or genders.

that slip into this.

Even Simone de Beauvoir, still one of the best commentators on gender ever in my opinion, makes this mistake.

She says,

quote, man with his hard muscles, his scratchy and often hairy skin, his crude odor, and his coarse features does not seem desirable to women.

And he even stirs her repulsion.

If the prehensile possessed of tendency exists in women more strongly, her orientation will be toward homosexuality.

So she's conflating femininity with the beloved, and just assuming that women are not actively attracted to coarse, hairy men.

Simone!

That's just the lesbianism talking, and I mean the same, but this is our emotional bias.

There are absolutely people, some of them women, who go wild for hairy, smelly, masculine bodies.

It's like their entire thing.

In fact, I can name at least three people who are attracted to men.

Now, it is interesting to ask, what is left of femininity when you separate it from its associations with submission?

and the role of the beloved, that which is desired.

It's femininity just an aesthetic?

I think gender expression is not just aesthetic, it's style.

And style is more than aesthetic.

It's a way of doing things.

Like a dominant woman can be a daddy-dom or a mommy-dom, depending on how she styles dominant.

We can maybe say that femininity is a stylization of the female, and masculinity is a stylization of the male.

DHSM is bad, first because it treats as equivalent all these dyads that are not even necessarily correlated.

And second, DHSM is bad because it doesn't recognize the versatility that is possible within each diet.

DHSM assumes that in every relationship, one partner has to be the man, where the pants.

And it also assumes that top bottom, dumb sub, lover-beloved, are fixed binary roles.

Which is just not true.

In fact, I think it's often dysfunctional to split sexuality in half this way.

Like in a common heterosexual dynamic, the man desires the woman's body and the woman desires the man's desire.

I think this is dysfunctional because in order to maintain the separation where he is the subject and she is the object,

the man has to degrade and objectify the woman.

But the woman's eco is wounded by the degradation.

So, in order to compensate, she has to imagine that instead of the mediocre schlub she's

married to, she's instead surrendering to the master of the universe, her lord and savior, Severus Snape.

I've noticed that even conservative straight people reveal, at times, a repressed longing for versatility.

Like so many straight men who complain

about male loneliness and involuntary celibacy seem to think that retverting to traditional gender roles will solve their problems.

But if you really get into it with these men,

it's often clear that what's really eating them up inside is that they've never felt desired by a woman once in their entire lives.

What they want is to feel desired.

There's some part of them that wants to be the beloved, but they don't have the words for that.

It doesn't fit into their idea of masculinity.

The traditional gender rules they want to reverend to assign the beloved role to women.

And many men feel that masculinity requires them to be dominant and in control all the time, but that's all.

unbalanced.

You learning to enjoy submission builds character and it's a valuable life skill.

Don't we all have to surrender in the end?

Likewise, a lot of women yearn to explore the more active virile side of sexuality.

In her book,

Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys,

Lucy Neville argues that male male erotica,

boys love,

slash-fick, yowie are very popular among women, in part because they make more room for versatility and fluidity than heterosexual conventions will allow.

This channel is a Fujioshi safe space.

I say women's sexual identification with men,

whether in slash-fiction or mainstream romance that includes a male perspective, I see it as disproving a basic assumption of DHSM.

If women were just submissive by nature, why would they sexually identify with men to this extent?

Even Myers' heterosexual world of innocence has its subversive gender-fluid elements.

Edward while in some ways a typical lover, father, god figure of feminine fantasy also has an alluring demure feminine appeal.

He he glowers, sometimes he needs rescuing.

Don't women sometimes want to pursue and enjoy a beautiful person's body?

Bella does.

In Breaking Dawn, Bella as a newborn vampire becomes a strong strong.

than Edward.

It's even implied that she becomes the dominant.

It's your turn now to break me.

Top Bella is canon.

I rest my case.

So if even something as conservative and thoroughly heterosexual as f***ing Twilight contains a quiet but persistent protest against DHSM,

then maybe DHS will BHSM has got to go.

Now, I don't think abolishing heterosexuality is realistic.

I would bet a lot of money that for the foreseeable future,

most men will continue to be attracted to women and vice versa, and I've also argued that sadomasochism is here to stay.

Some people may find it easy to embrace a tender, egalitarian sensuality.

But I think for most people, versatility is as close to sexual equality as it's possible to get.

The receiver becomes the giver and the giver becomes the receiver and it all balances out.

I'm not saying that perfect equality is possible, there's no sexual utopia on the horizon.

But equality through versatility is an ideal.

can strive for.

Like American democracy.

You it's a thing we say we believe in, and God bless us for trying.

For me, versatility is less about some ideology of sexual Maoism that says we have to abolish all hierarchy.

It's more just that I think we all contain masculine and feminine potential within us, and it's more satisfying.

satisfying to express both.

Unlike and proletariat or colonizer and colonized, I say masculinity and femininity as a duality inherent to human existence.

This, by the way, is why trans women and feminine men are not appropriating womanhood.

Woman is not an ethnic group, and masculinity- and femininity belong to all humanity.

Now am I saying that gender is binary?

No.

Gender is not a binary in the sense of zero one, but a duality in the sense of yin yang.

Yin and yang are interpenetrating opposites that constitute each other.

There is no yang without yin.

Giving receiving.

There is no doer without a done too.

There is no top without a bottom.

Yin and yang consume each other, as darkness grows light shrinks.

They transform into each other.

Night day, day becomes night.

They are infinitely divisible.

Yin contains yang, yang contains yang, yang.

in.

Men contain femininity, women contain masculinity, and you can keep subdividing and transforming.

There's femtops and mask bottoms, there's power bottoms and service tops.

Femininity is supposedly passive, but isn't there activity and such feminine gestures as inviting, seducing, exhibiting.

demuring?

Receptive is a better word than passive, because receptivity can be its own form of activity.

Sudo questions like how many genders are there,

or slogans like two genders,

or even the well-intentioned idea that gender is a spectrum, I see all of these as symptomatic of a misunderstanding of duality.

Yin and yang mean dark side and light side.

There two genders in the sense that there are two sides of a mountain, the sunny side and the shady side.

There's still shade on the sunny side and light on the shady side.

Depending where the mountain is, the shady side might become the sunny side.

There is no shade without light.

So in a sense, the binary is non-binary.

In a way,

it would be equally true to say that there is one gender, the human gender, that has been split into two, into three, into many.

Because yin and yang are mutually dependent, they're both a duality and a unity.

Yin yang.

Want this sort of thinking and turn us into a nation of cucks?

Are you trying to destroy masculinity?

Are you trying to destroy the West?

No, I'm not trying to cuck the West, okay?

I'm not trying to turn anyone into cuckolds.

I'm trying to bring the West into harmony with the Tao.

Is that so wrong?

Is it possible Twilight isn't even a...

about romance?

Could this all be an allegory for a more spiritual quest?

If a romance novel dramatizes the internal struggle to integrate the masculine and feminine elements of ourselves, then and Edward are not just characters.

They're projections of our inwardly conflicted nature.

The predator and the prey, the lion and the lamb.

the lover and the beloved.

How can these be reconciled?

In the last chapter of Breaking Dawn, Bella opens to Edward not only her body but her mind.

Edward's vampire power is that he can read minds but Bella's is that she can shield herself from other powers.

It's because Edward could not read her mind that he fell in love with her.

with Bella, because desire needs a boundary, it needs separation, but at the end, Bella says, I knew my shield better now.

I understood the part that fought against separation from me, the automatic instinct to preserve self above all else.

And she begins to lower her shield, letting Edward enter her mind.

Simone The aim of human love, like mystical love, is identification with the loved one.

When barriers fall, the two become one.

As their minds begin to meld, Bella thinks, we continue blissfully into this small but perfect piece of our forever.

Now you can call that cheesy romance writing, but some Sometimes you get out of art what you put into it.

So I prefer to see Twilight as a bold statement about the paradoxical equivalence of love and death and immortality.

The end of separation is the end of desire.

It's life, it's death, it's unity, it is the absolute.

It's perfect.

Forever.

Music Thanks for .

Thanks for watching!

Thank you.

And you've probably heard that J.K.

Rowling has a Twitter account now.

Does she really?

She did.

Wow.

Have you ever considered maybe in the future, because I know you don't have one now.

In the future, possibly getting on Twitter for us.

Absolutely Oh my gosh, no.

I would not be the tweeter.

I All the cool authors are doing it.

Fine.

I'm not a cool author.

I'm not called a nerd.

Can imagine going to the grocery store buying lettuce?

I just...

of a private person and I just don't think that people need to know my every little dumb thought that passes through my head.

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