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Edward is really the ideal highschool boyfriend in a way, he Luuuurves Bella like THISMUCH, he lusts after her madly but won’t touch her for a fairly legitimate reason, he doesn’t suffer from any peer pressure, he has independent means. And he never sweats, ha!

I don’t want Edward. But were I 20 years younger? I might.

a death baby that…shatters its mother’s…spine

Um…shouldn’t the mother become paralyzed or die?

As for teens deciding to practice abstinence, I doubt it can be attributed to these books alone. I think any teen who is going to abstain from sex is going to do so regardless of what a fictional couple does and the same for any teen who wants to have sex.

Besides, as I have been told by my 14 year old niece… virginity has been rather narrowly defined by teens these days as no vaginal penetration. Anything and everything else, including oral/anal sex, is fair play and not counted against the participants.

Truthfully, I think that Breaking Dawn’s pregnancy and birth–which features a death baby that weakens the mother, requires blood in utero, shatters its mother’s ribs, pelvis and spine, kills its mother and has to be chewed out of the uterus–is a LOT more likely to gross girls out and convince them that they don’t want any part of sex if they have to go through that.

I suspect that Meyer is simply a very canny marketer. Most parents, especially American parents, have heard by now of the Twilight series and know that it is a) YA romance and b) Edward and Bella don’t even have sex until the last book, and then not until after they’re married. So they will think that the books are safe and good, and will buy them for their daughters, not realizing that there are a few other concepts in the books that are less than appetizing:

1) Edward’s stalking being equated with Twu Wuv. (Just once I would like to see a romance novel NOT muddle the difference between love and stalking.)

2) Bella getting married straight out of high school to a considerably older male–and everyone, including her mother, encouraging this.

3) Two werewolves, Quil and Jacob, “imprint” on baby girls. The babies are, or will grow up to be, their destined and ideal mates. Not only does this rather smack of pedophilia, it also establishes that neither the werewolves nor the babies have no choice in this matter.

(I think it’s a bit creepy that a girl’s entire life, including who she is going to fall in love with, could be determined for her in infancy. It’s rather more odious than an arranged marriage. A girl in an arranged marriage weds a man who isn’t of her choosing…but she’s not magically forced to like him.)

Parents will likely miss the anti-feminist messages, though. The books and the movie will make money. I don’t think it’ll last–the tweens and teens will go on to something new, as they always do.

However, I don’t think that boys and girls will instantly embrace abstinence as a result of the Twilight series. For one thing, this is a series that is mostly read by girls. I don’t see Twilight having a widespread impact on hormonal teenage boys (is there any other kind of teenage boy?). Secondly, the kids that love the series have been agitating for three books for Edward and Bella to have sex, and a lot of them seem pretty miffed that the sex scene in Breaking Dawn was fade to black. That, to me, suggests that they find Edward and Bella’s chastity to be frustrating rather than laudatory and worthy of emulation. (And a hundred and fifty-seven pages of M-rated Twilight stories on fanfiction.net alone suggests that a lot of fans would like to eliminate the abstinence as soon as possible.)

And weren’t we already told that a good percentage of teens were using anal and oral sex to get around that pesky abstinence thing? (Actually, I snickered at the idea some commentators had that this was invented by the current generation of teens. I remember reading in high school an introduction to the Heptameron by Marguerite of Navarre (1492-1549) which mentioned anal sex being used by Ladies in Waiting at the French Court to preserve their virginity.)

Edited to add this was 30 years ago.