Replies

“I find myself concerned about the retrogressive gender stereotypes in all of her novels, particularly the ineptitude of Bella. Although the novels repeatedly tell the reader that Bella is smart and strong, they repeatedly show her powerlessness. She passes out; she trips repeatedly; she is victimized three times in the first novel alone, only to be rescued by Edward. Worse than Bella’s damsel-in-distress shtick is her disturbing tendency to blame herself for everything, expose herself to serious harm, take over all the homemaking chores for a father who seems incapable of the most rudimentary standards of self-care, and sacrifice everything for a man who is moody, unpredictable, and even borderline abusive. Many women readers will also be troubled by the extreme self-abasement of Wanda in The Host, particularly one scene where she mutilates her own flesh and another where she lies to protect the man who tried to murder her. These are themes I hope do not originate with Meyer’s Mormonism. But while they are cause for concern, they do not mar the creative spirit and theological integrity of Meyer’s work.”

"Off balance, that’s the name of the game. If you want a certain kind of female to do anything for you, and follow you anywhere, keep her off balance. Be moody and unpredictable. Be as erratic as you can be, and blame her for every change. Wobble down the highway, and every five minutes yell at the person in the passenger seat. The astonishing thing is that this really does work, but it only works if your daughters are the kind of girls you shouldn’t want them to be. It only works if they have the kind of parents who let them read Twilight like it was a Nancy Drew book from the fifties or something.
The apostle Paul rebukes the kind of person who goes for this sort of thing. “For ye suffer fools gladly, seeing ye yourselves are wise. For ye suffer, if a man bring you into bondage, if a man devour you, if a man take of you, if a man exalt himself, if a man smite you on the face” (2 Cor. 11:19-20). A daughter (or a wife) might be attracted to this kind of toying-with-rape lit for several different reasons. First, it might be all she knows—she grew up with and around abusive males. She might think that “this is just the way it is.” And the other reason might be that she is surrounded by passivity, males with all the backbone of a peeled banana, and she is so hungry for something hard that she falls for abuser-hard. Either way, the results are sick and twisted."
-- from the thread Twilight #8 (Christian commentary on the Chapter 8 of the first book in the series)