So, has anyone documented any negative social effects due to the Twilight books?
It has now been several (or more) years since Twilight was a massively super-popular book (and movie) phenomenon beloved by millions of teen (and older) girls. It has also been a while since I heard anyone vociferously extolling the evils of Twilight and how the books are going to lead teen (and older) girls astray, resulting in abusive, fucked-up relationships.
Of course, in the meanwhile, 50 Shades of Grey came out. It sold well, though doesn’t seem to have been quite so actually popular as Twilight. Perhaps because it’s not as good; perhaps because people don’t want to talk publicly about having read it.
Disclaimer: I have read neither Twilight nor 50 SoG, but I did read the first page of 50 SoG. I thought it was remarkably bad. So bad, in fact, that it makes me despair deep down in my soul.
Anyway. My opinions on the books are irrelevant.
At their heights, people predicted that these books would result in a lot of Bad Stuff, especially bad relationship stuff.
Now that the relevant cohort of women has had several years to date other people, have we actually observed any upswing of Bad Relationship Stuff?
Seems like a great opportunity for someone to really test their theories.
I’ve read both Twilight and FSoG. They didn’t do much for me, although I wasn’t the target audience. FSoG also didn’t seem as badly written as what many say, but it could’ve used some editing. As for the impact on relationships. I dunno. It’s probably too hard to discern any cause-and-effects. I don’t know how you would test for them.
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Well, you could just poll people and see whether people who report having read or liked Twilight or 50SoG report higher rates of abusive relationships than people who didn’t. You might want to do a follow-up survey in about a decade, since people are probably watching the 50SoG movie right now. (Whereby “you” I mean “someone.”)
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But how do you eliminate the roles of other social causes that might’ve existed at the same time? And is it really accurate to ask people to self-report on abusive relationship?
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Such as?
The original claim was that reading or liking Twilight would damage young women by giving them bad ideas about relationships, thus leading to them being involved in abusive relationships they otherwise wouldn’t have been. If this is actually true, then people who liked Twilight ought to actually have more bad relationships than people who didn’t. Any general stuff going on in the environment at the time wouldn’t affect just people who liked Twilight.
No, it probably isn’t, but I have no a priori reason to think Twilight readers would lie more than everyone else.
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I was thinking that people who read Twilight or FSoG might have similar tastes and other things uniquely in common to them (i.e. not to the general population). Thus, maybe this group also listened to certain music or watched certain TV shows at the same time (that they read those books) that might’ve influenced their attitudes and behavior. Dunno. I guess the proposed survey might work or at least be interesting, but I don’t know enough about the demographics of that audience to eliminate other possible contemporaneous factors.
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This is very true. It is definitely difficult to suss out the difference between “was affected by Twilight” and “Is the the kind of person who would like Twilight in the first place.”
Interviewing people’s parents or asking about their parents’ relationships seems like the way around this. Abuse probably runs in families, so there is probably some baseline chance of bad relationship we can establish for people based on whether or not their parents were in bad relationships.
Overall, the project doesn’t seem any harder than establishing, say, whether young women with certain reproductive cancers were disproportionately exposed to certain drugs during fetus-hood, which we’ve done. Or decades-long studies tracking the mortality rates of “good students” verses “bad students.” Of course cancer is more serious than abuse, but abuse is pretty serious and Twilight (and 50SoG) were read/seen by millions of people, so if the claims against them are true, that represents a massive potential human suffering.
Honestly, it seems like the proponents of such claims have a rare opportunity to test them, just because the books were so popular, so they have a really big cohort of people to investigate, and I am always in favor of testing claim whenever one can, to the best of one’s ability.
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