Okay, I know I said I’d be roasting Edward and Jacob, but this topic has been rattling around in my head for days now and I feel like I have to get my thoughts out there on this. Also I’m so sorry this took so long, I actually got engaged and wedding planning is a bitch.

For the record, I’m not super well versed in kink culture, aside from my shitty ex I mentioned in the Turin stuff being really into porn and being into some decidedly not mainstream things, which I went along with because there was nothing I wouldn’t have done for that man. I could go on and on about how he would just sort of introduce things and I would roll with it, but that’s been spoken about here. What I think hasn’t been spoken about here is a fetishization of church girls/religious people that I believe I can speak to and absolutely has a lot to do with Twilight and the eventual rejection of its subtext with 50 Shades.

So a little background on me for context: I grew up heavily immersed in American evangelical culture. I come from a really liberal place and I’m sure that mitigated some things because I never had a purity ball or got told I was a wadded up piece of gum if I had sex before marriage (I did hear the tape thing though). However. I did take a purity pledge (I still have a picture of said pledge I signed at around 13-14) and my church regularly talked about sex before marriage as this thing you should NEVER do. There was also a lot of discourse around born again virginity, where you essentially got a second crack at it if you did “give into temptation.” As an aside, my first exposure to rap at all was the multiple rap groups at my church and my mom ran almost everything secular I wanted to watch or listen to by the Focus on the Family reviews they’d put out. I was also one of those kids who trashed all my secular stuff upon accepting Jesus into my life, so I was in deep on my own. (RIP, N*SYNC Christmas album. Merry Christmas and hApPy HoLiDaYs.) Hopefully this paints a picture of what I was like rolling into high school and the dating scene.

Now, I have no memory of being exposed to kink or rough sex in general but when I inevitably started being interested in dating boys in the back half of high school, they always said at some point, without fail, “oh, you’re religious? You’re probably wild, then.” At the time I didn’t understand why, I hadn’t been exposed to anything sexual really before. My mom was still covering 15-17 year old me’s eyes at the movies when sex scenes came on, to paint a further picture of how sheltered I was. But when I would talk with one of my high school girlfriends about sexual things since she was also dating and it had come up, I just blurted out that I wanted “to be told what to do” when asked what I wanted during sex. And when I ultimately started having sex in my early 20s with the shitty ex I’ve talked about in here before, when he asked what stuff I wanted to explore, I told him the same thing. There’s probably a lot of reasons why my brain went there, and to be honest, I don’t think I have the psychological knowledge to understand why, but I can tell you that this is something I’m continually hearing. On top of that, there’s an element of truth to it because a whole franchise is built upon this stereotype. Bella’s not overtly religious, but Stephanie Meyer is and that definitely contributes to how Edward is written, which is interesting because the only maintext religious character in the franchise seems to be secret LVM Carlisle.

Anyway, Edward isn’t written like most vampires: instead of being sexed up like something out of True Blood, he’s positively virginal, as in has never done the do once before Bella. That’s fine, more power to him. However, there’s this subplot where Bella’s virginity is discussed and Edward is basically like “hey I know you’ve promised to literally be with me forever and get all your blood sucked out of you so we can be immortals together, but sex with you before marriage is too much commitment” that only makes sense when you’re around religious communities where people are getting hitched very young so they can bang with the Bible’s approval. Now, I’m not saying Edward has to consent to sex because Bella has. What I am saying is that there is definitely the vibe that the narrative is putting off that’s saying that Bella doesn’t know what she’s giving Edward when she says she wants to have sex with him.

We also get a view of what Stephanie thinks of premarital sex, ironically, after they’re married. So Bella and Edward get married, beautiful dress and ceremony, absolutely atrocious ring and all, and they go to their honeymoon and do the do. Bella’s so over the moon with it, but she’s human, she’s getting bruised up by the mortal sex with the immortal vampire. Edward is freaking out because he’s hurting her and Bella’s like 🤷🏻‍♀️, and we as the audience are like “I mean this is exactly what you wanted, Edward: you wanted a mortal human girl, not the vampire she’s TELLING you she wants to be.” Now, I may be splitting a lot of hairs here, but I think that this entire part of the plot is supposed to be a metaphor of how destructive pre-martial sex can be. Both Bella and Edward have an idea of what they see lifetime commitment as: for Bella it’s literally giving him all of her blood, and for Edward it’s marriage in the eyes of humans. So they do the commitment to turn her thing, and the sex they’d have is hyped up to be this super destructive thing that would hurt Bella more than either of them would enjoy it. They do the mortal marriage thing and the sex is good enough that Bella waffles on the blood exchange, and THIS is the thing to look at. Bella’s so enamored by sex that she’s willing to not go through with what she committed herself to, and she ends up in a body breaking pregnancy because of it.

Once Edward does that blood exchange when Bella’s dying on the birthing table, Bella’s a vampire now, and they’re truly committed and married to each other then. They do the do and it’s perfect. No danger of having unplanned babies, no destructiveness that would hurt Bella, nothing but good old vampire cutaway sex. It’s almost like Stephanie Meyer is trying to say that the only kind of sex that isn’t destructive in some way is sex within marriage. She’s very clear about the Cullens living in closed, monogamous marriages (the word isn’t used but that’s what’s implied), while the human blood sucking vampires do have sex all the time but not all of them are doing it within that context so their sex has less meaning. There’s also a lot of this with the werewolves as well because of the imprinting thing: Sam is happily with Leah until he imprints on her sister and immediately goes to the sister despite still loving Leah, apparently. Their relationship is seen as invalid because a higher power isn’t smiling down upon it and it’s totally acceptable and even commonplace for Sam to do Leah dirty that way.

While this franchise is almost memetically chaste at this point, the fans didn’t take that long to bring the story to its other extreme. Somehow Twilight, the most virginal, abstinence only, pure as fuck vampire franchise, was the basis for a longtime fan to write a fanfiction that turned into 50 Shades of Grey. It was weird for me, someone who had picked up the subtext about purity culture that Stephanie Meyer was putting down, to see a franchise come out of it that was decidedly not about that. However, the links between purity/abstinence culture and BDSM aren’t impossible to see. As a disclaimer, I never read 50 Shades, so if I’m not getting stuff right on that franchise PLEASE call me out thank you.

  • Both stories revolve around a woman submitting themselves to a man and allowing them to change her into his image. This speaks to both the dom man/sub woman thing we get in both series (Edward might not be as overtly dominant as Christian Grey, but he’s the one calling the shots in the relationship and Bella’s only really heard when she makes a BIG move) and the whole “the man covers the woman like God covers the church” thing, and both things are rooted in patriarchy.
  • Both women make their men the absolute center of their lives. They see themselves as more of themselves WITH them than without them. Bella sees herself as someone who has to change herself in order to properly be with Edward instead of looking at this situation and being like “hey I’ve got a good human life and you don’t have to actually date me in order to think my blood smells best, so how about we be friends and we find you the vampire woman of your dreams?” As for Anastasia, from what I’ve seen of her, she’s not really into this whole BDSM thing but in order to be with Christian who says that this is something he needs, she pushes herself in that direction. From what in understand, the first book ends with them breaking up because Anastasia asked Christian to show her the absolute worst of what he could do and she got understandably freaked out, only to eventually MARRY the dude later, god Anastasia why are you this way
  • Both purity culture and BDSM culture are evangelical in nature. This sounds weird but hear me out. Purity culture generally gets folded into most patriarchal religions, and speaking personally as a former baby evangelical, we were encouraged to try and talk to as many people as we could about our faith because why would we want to see our non-believing friends and family go to hell because we were scared of being embarrassed. So while we share the gospel, we also share that purity culture message because it’s baked right into the Bible. We’re encouraged to live that part of our lives loud as a type of counter to the hyper-sexualized world we live in. As for BDSM culture, there are no traditional churches or whatever, but there are absolutely public advocates for it that are touting it as the answer to the demonization of sex that takes place in purity culture. This also speaks to how the ideas of purity culture and kink were highly publicized with both Twilight and 50 Shades.

I think the conclusion here is that both purity culture and BDSM/kink culture seek to solve problems that are caused by the other one, and all they’re doing is making more problems. I’m no sex expert or even the most well read feminist, but I think that the best way to counter the pitfalls of both of these things is to reject them altogether and have sex (or not!) on your own terms. Sex doesn’t have to be dirty outside of the context of marriage, and it doesn’t have to be a stage for people to play out things that should be played out in therapy. Making love is kind of like making babies: don’t make it and give it a to-do list.