What the hell is it about Twilight?

I have to agree with Amanda Marcotte. I just don’t get it. Sure, everybody likes something, right, so there were bound to be some that liked it, but why this screaming near-hysteria about something that is so inherently wrong for us? I really worry about young girls coming away with some of the repulsive messages this series dishes out:
• READ: Why Twilight?

You know what I really, really don’t get? The whole Twilight thing. I just don’t get it. I mean, I analyze and observe it like a good feminist critic of pop culture, but on the most basic, gut level, I just don’t get why it’s appealing to anyone, much less some big blockbuster hit. It just sounds so reprehensibly, tediously, unbelievably anti-feminist that I can’t see why any tween—much less a teenager or a grown woman—would get into it. I’m wracking my brain and trying to think of what we had when I was that middle school age bracket that’s even remotely comparable, and nothing comes to mind. There was New Kids on the Block and Johnny Depp to provide images of “safe” young men to crush on, but while that was all very corny, there wasn’t anything close to the hyper-patriarchal “getting married at 18 to a guy who stalks you!” kind of thing going on there. When I went to high school, there certainly wasn’t anything of this nature even close to my radar. Then again, my teenage years were, in retrospect, a startlingly feminist time in terms of pop culture. You wouldn’t really see, for instance, a band like L7 get the kind of promotion to teenage audiences that they got back then.

We’re in the midst of some kind of anti-feminist backlash and at the hopefully tail end of a surge of evangelical Christian power, and so I get that pop culture is probably going to reflect that to a degree. But at the end of the day, I don’t understand why young women and girls not only enjoy being insulted like this series insults them, but why they eat it up….