The REAL question is: “Does this literature encourage investigating restraint or giving into animal urges?” I think that the answer is clear…It realistically addresses the challenges of sexual desire while clearly recognizing that there is a path of honor and righteousness where our honor provides the restraint to behave as God intents! We can try to intellectualize this with long dissertations on Agency, but how does that help the young to restrain their behavior and respect their bodies? In truth, it doesn’t! They are visual learners and can understand the use of free will to demonstrate their love through restraint, sacrifice, and honorable choices! It is easy to over-intellectualize these books and try to turn this into an exercise in futility, or better yet, use these to visually teach the young to restrain their desires and live a life of spiritual and physical intimacy that provides eternal happiness that those in the secular world will never enjoy!

As the honorable and responsible father of four young adults, I have successfully used these books to enhance the teaching of my sons and daughters about the values of overcoming our physical urges and using our free will for good. My sons better understand the practicalities of applying the concepts of honor and respect to ALL of their decisions wrt respecting their dates and restraint from physical contact. My daughters better understand their roles in demanding appropriate behavior and respect from their dates. It has helped to clarify what I have taught them all along. As such, these books are a wonderful teaching visuals for young adults.

But I think Edward’s character goes a step beyond a realistic level of caring and compassion. I think the comment I quoted in the article sums it up: “He’s dangerous (a vampire!) but not really (he’s good!). He is hot but doesn’t care. He’s rich but doesn’t care and doesn’t have to work for it. He is powerful but is helpless before Bella’s charms after only a glimpse of her. He is attentive and loyal and thinks only of her.” Additionally, stuff like the fact that he snuck into her house to watch her sleep is the sort thing girls should understand is a red flag for someone who is potentially dangerous, not something that should be held up as a romanitic ideal.

Every reader of this blog has probably already seen the fMh thread I got these links from, but I have to tell you this post really nailed it, and this one isn’t too far behind…

Perhaps I shoud have added that I think everything we read has an impact on our worldview, including our views of other people, and things we read repetetively even more so. Again, this does not mean that one need take the character of Edward as a whole and seek to pattern-match it in the real world and I don’t think very many would do this. Rather, one need only to selectively take the patterns in Edward’s character that one adores or finds appealing while ignoring the rest. You know, ignoring things like cold lips and abusive obsessesions, etc.

And maybe this selectiveness is where the real problem lies. I don’t think my daughters want to find a vampire-like character in the real world, even a “veggie-vampire” like Edward, not literally at least. But they do seem willing to ignore/not notice the worst aspects of Edward in deference to his best aspects. And one of the wost aspects of Edward, in my opinion, is that he has a surreal collection of best aspects.

I don’t really know how to put this into words. The best I can do is to say that Edward is an irrational character on the whole while containing much that is rational. His surreal collection of best aspects being attached to a collection of horrifying aspects seems to have the affect of making the surreal seem real and attainable by contrast. As if, by having the opportunity to throw-out the obvious fiction, the mind finds reason for accepting as real what it might have otherwise rejected.

There’s certainly more to it. But I think we’re often puzzled by the ability of an idea to bewitch the human mind. And in my experience the bewitching follows a proccess that seems utterly reasonable to the mind. But the surest sign of such a process my be the arguement that you have to read the book to “get it”, to be critical of it, to be listened to by others who “get it”.