Titanic to Twilight: How Sexism Determines What’s Cool |
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| Written by Kevin Johns |
| Tuesday, 17 November 2009 |
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If you're like me, you probably have friends who, to this day, still proudly declare that they have never seen James Cameron's Titanic. They say this as though avoiding one of the most popular films of all time is some sort of badge of honour, a defiant act to be respected and admired. The In a similar vein, publicly admitting you are a fan of director Catherine Hardwicke's Twilight, or, heaven forbid, the Stephenie Meyer book on which the film is based, is to commit an act of social suicide. Despite being an international phenomenon generating millions dollars in sales and being devoured by ravenous fans everywhere, like Titanic a decade ago, Twilight is decidedly not cool. Some argue that Twilight's poor social standing is a result of the fact that the book and the film are both examples of low art, yet some of the people making these arguments are the same folks who proudly read their copy of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code on the bus ride to work a few years ago and were the first in line to buy tickets to Ron Howard's film. There was nothing about reading The Da Vinci Code or seeing the film that was considered shameful by mass culture at large. After all, everyone should be allowed to enjoy a good beach blanket read or a popcorn flick once in a while, right? Women's issues have long been considered secondary to male concerns, if not dismissed as completely trivial all together.But if that is the case, why is Twilight so disdained? The reason, of course, is that Twilight is looked down up for the same reason Barbara Streisand, Titanic, Dawson's Creek, Mamma Mia! and any other number of hugely popular cultural properties are mocked, disdained, and labelled uncool: they are targeted at a female audience. The Da Vinci Code and Twilight exist on the exact same plane of low-brow, mass-consumed art, and yet one (targeted largely at men) is shrugged off as a fun page-turner, while the other (targeted largely at young women) is considered pure and utter drivel for no better reason than that the arbiters of cultural capital are sexist.
Women's issues have long been considered secondary to male concerns, if not dismissed as completely trivial all together. Whether or not Bella should commit to her vampire lover is a silly second-class concern when placed next to 'important' male questions like whether Shia Labeouf and the Autobots will be able to defeat the Decepticons. On rare occasions, women's interests have been able to seep through into the realm of cultural credibility. Madonna's music and tours have played an active part in defining pop culture cool for over twenty years, and Sex and the City has been accepted, for the most part, as a worthy part of the North American cultural milieu. I suspect, however, one will still have a difficult time finding a straight man who freely admits to enjoying Sex and the City, let alone Mamma Mia! or Twilight. As always, admitting you like that silly women's stuff is just not cool. Kevin Johns is a senior editor of (Cult)ure. He can be contacted at
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Previously:Joe Lipsett described the "Titanic-related experience." April Yorke compared Twilight the Book to Twilight the Movie.
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Comments (8)
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And this is why I hate some women, and I am one! Twilight has so many things wrong with it and articles like this make it no better. Putting its films and books on par with works like Titanic and The Da Vinci Code is why some people despise Twilight and its fans. It's because they constantly compare their precious series to other works that are much better and more thought out. Titanic and Da Vinci Code were books/films for adults and Twilight is a film targeting teenage and little girls. Can't the author of this article pick a better female targeted movie to focus on for their article than the awful series that is Twilight?
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"Women's concerns" and "Men's concerns?" Why, it almost sounds as if the author is stereotyping. Yes, romantic love in fiction is almost always targeted at women, but men are also capable of worrying about their romantic lives, and romance is as much a "man's concern" as it is a "woman's concern." Concepts are intangible and do not have genders. Though fiction may be aimed at a specific gender through its construction, the universal themes portrayed have no such bias and can appeal equally to both sexes. A woman is as capable of enjoying a romance as she is capable of enjoying an action movie.
When the commenting wasn't working...
...a response to this article was posted here: http://ophelia23-surfacing.blogspot.com/
This was also emailed to me when the commenting wasn't working
Good article with some excellent points. I just wrote an article on Twilight's gender gap and compared its female/male split with other films that might be considered female-oriented fare.
Thank you for this article
I really appreciated what the author brought forth in ths article. The Da Vinci Code was long, boring and convoluted. So was Titanic, I hated every second of it while my ex-boyfriend sat next to me and wept. Badge of honour? Yeah, maybe.
Nothing Compared to Titanic
Wtf? I'm a woman and I hate Twilight. Dudes don't pretend to hate Twilight, they just do. How can you like a book about a creepy and abusive stalker? Then there's the pathetic girl who can't think of anything but him. She is weak and spineless, an insult to my gender. Every single thought of hers involves how "hot" the sparkly [redacted] looks. And every single chapter, Edward has to jump to the rescue and save her life. What a piece of garbage. She fell in love just because he's hot and he loves her back just because she reminds him of a tasty steak. lol
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I agree with many of the commentors here in that there are a number of reasons to dislike the Twilight series besides its "girly" nature. For one, it isn't very well written. I spotted a number of errors in mechanics in the first book, and Meyer overuses adjectives and adverbs. More importantly, the series is rather sexist. It's not just Bella who seems to be vapid and unconcerned with anything other than her love life, all of her female (human) friends seem this way, as well. Bella's mother also doesn't represent a strong female character, as Bella implies that her poor, scatterbrained mother needs to be taken care of by her new husband (or boyfriend, sorry, I can't remember at the moment). |
implication is clearly that it is cooler to have not seen Titanic than it is to have seen it.
Earlier this year, a writer ceased contributing to (Cult)ure, and one of the reasons he listed for quitting the magazine was that we were writing too many articles about Twilight. Would he have quit if it had been The Da Vinci Code, or Star Wars, or Transformers we had been writing about instead?
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