Jonathan Zimmerman: Film has chaste appeal in a promiscuous time, 'Twilight' fans may be reacting to 'hookup' culture
[Jonathan Zimmerman lives in Narberth and teaches history at New York University. He is the author, most recently, of "Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory" (Yale University Press). He can be reached at jlzimm@aol.com.]
Do you want to "hook up"? If you're like lots of American high school and college students, the answer is "yes."
But when you look at their reasons, you'll find an enormous gender divide. Girls have sex to score a boyfriend, and boys simply want to score. And the boys are winning.
That explains the overwhelming success of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight books for teenagers as well as the most recent film adaptation, The Twilight Saga: New Moon, which sold a whopping $140 million in tickets during its first weekend in North American theaters. Eighty percent of the audience was female, and half of it was under 21.
Why are young American women flocking to a movie in which the hero - Edward, a hunky dude who also happens to be a vampire - refuses to have sex with the heroine, a loner named Bella, lest he harm her with his supernatural powers? The answer lies in a University of Missouri survey of 4,000 Twilight fans, to be published next year. And it's not that complicated: Girls want love, not just sex.
"This series represents a backlash to the hooking-up culture," explained one author of the Missouri study. "Twilight has been a way for young girls to acknowledge their emerging sexuality without actually having sex."
In other words, it's a female fantasy. It's also every boy's nightmare. After all, the hooking-up deal works pretty well for guys: lots of sex without all that messy relationship stuff. What's not to like?
On this subject, I've heard plenty of my 40- and 50-something male peers complain that they were born several decades too early. But I have never, ever heard a woman my age say she would prefer today's hooking-up system to the dating rituals we grew up with.
Remember dating? As quaint as it might sound today, dating required a guy to get to know a girl before he did anything else. The goal might have been the same - indeed, it often was the same - but he had to follow several other distinct steps to get there.
That was far better for girls, who could decide if they liked a guy before physical intimacy began. Now, the order is reversed: you hook up first, then decide if you want to "go out."
And it turns out - surprise, surprise - that most guys don't want the second part, so long as they get the first. "They're in college; they don't want a girlfriend," one female college student told La Salle sociologist Kathleen Bogle. They just want to have sex.
Why do women put up with this? As Bogle explains in her indispensable 2008 book Hooking Up: Sex, Dating, and Relationships on Campus, part of the reason is that they overestimate the frequency of sex among their peers. Nationwide, about one-quarter of college students remain virgins. So when women presume that "everybody is doing it" - and that they have to do it, too - they're wrong.
Moreover, "it" can mean many different things. In one survey at a large Northeastern university, 78 percent of students said they had "hooked up" at least once. But among those students, only 38 percent reported that the encounter involved sexual intercourse.
No matter what you call it, though, many women feel that they must engage in a certain degree of sexual activity to have any hope of finding a boyfriend - and, down the road, a husband. They certainly understand that most hookups will not lead to the type of relationship they really want. But they just don't see any other way to get there.
It doesn't help that women outnumber men on most college campuses, with about 80 men for every 100 women. So men are the scarcer resource, and they get to make the rules. And they know it, too.
"No real commitment, no real feelings involved - this is like a guy's paradise," one male student told Bogle. "I mean, this is what guys have been wanting for many, many years. And women have always resisted, but now they are going along with it."
He was right. Since the sexual revolution of the 1960s, women have made enormous strides in education, income, and professional achievement. But when it comes to sex itself, it's still a man's world.
And that's why young women are celebrating an imaginary one in the movies, where the guy actually loves the girl before he makes love to her.
Even if he is a vampire.
Read entire article at The Philadelphia Inquirer
Do you want to "hook up"? If you're like lots of American high school and college students, the answer is "yes."
But when you look at their reasons, you'll find an enormous gender divide. Girls have sex to score a boyfriend, and boys simply want to score. And the boys are winning.
That explains the overwhelming success of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight books for teenagers as well as the most recent film adaptation, The Twilight Saga: New Moon, which sold a whopping $140 million in tickets during its first weekend in North American theaters. Eighty percent of the audience was female, and half of it was under 21.
Why are young American women flocking to a movie in which the hero - Edward, a hunky dude who also happens to be a vampire - refuses to have sex with the heroine, a loner named Bella, lest he harm her with his supernatural powers? The answer lies in a University of Missouri survey of 4,000 Twilight fans, to be published next year. And it's not that complicated: Girls want love, not just sex.
"This series represents a backlash to the hooking-up culture," explained one author of the Missouri study. "Twilight has been a way for young girls to acknowledge their emerging sexuality without actually having sex."
In other words, it's a female fantasy. It's also every boy's nightmare. After all, the hooking-up deal works pretty well for guys: lots of sex without all that messy relationship stuff. What's not to like?
On this subject, I've heard plenty of my 40- and 50-something male peers complain that they were born several decades too early. But I have never, ever heard a woman my age say she would prefer today's hooking-up system to the dating rituals we grew up with.
Remember dating? As quaint as it might sound today, dating required a guy to get to know a girl before he did anything else. The goal might have been the same - indeed, it often was the same - but he had to follow several other distinct steps to get there.
That was far better for girls, who could decide if they liked a guy before physical intimacy began. Now, the order is reversed: you hook up first, then decide if you want to "go out."
And it turns out - surprise, surprise - that most guys don't want the second part, so long as they get the first. "They're in college; they don't want a girlfriend," one female college student told La Salle sociologist Kathleen Bogle. They just want to have sex.
Why do women put up with this? As Bogle explains in her indispensable 2008 book Hooking Up: Sex, Dating, and Relationships on Campus, part of the reason is that they overestimate the frequency of sex among their peers. Nationwide, about one-quarter of college students remain virgins. So when women presume that "everybody is doing it" - and that they have to do it, too - they're wrong.
Moreover, "it" can mean many different things. In one survey at a large Northeastern university, 78 percent of students said they had "hooked up" at least once. But among those students, only 38 percent reported that the encounter involved sexual intercourse.
No matter what you call it, though, many women feel that they must engage in a certain degree of sexual activity to have any hope of finding a boyfriend - and, down the road, a husband. They certainly understand that most hookups will not lead to the type of relationship they really want. But they just don't see any other way to get there.
It doesn't help that women outnumber men on most college campuses, with about 80 men for every 100 women. So men are the scarcer resource, and they get to make the rules. And they know it, too.
"No real commitment, no real feelings involved - this is like a guy's paradise," one male student told Bogle. "I mean, this is what guys have been wanting for many, many years. And women have always resisted, but now they are going along with it."
He was right. Since the sexual revolution of the 1960s, women have made enormous strides in education, income, and professional achievement. But when it comes to sex itself, it's still a man's world.
And that's why young women are celebrating an imaginary one in the movies, where the guy actually loves the girl before he makes love to her.
Even if he is a vampire.