Porn for the modern woman

An excerpt from How Twilight is Re-Vamping Romance, by "Eliza," at VisionaryDaughters.com:

For this discussion, we would like to set aside the dark paranormal element of Twilight, though that is a concern on its own. We believe what ultimately draws women into this series and other romance novels in millions-strong droves is the same thing that lures men into an estimated $3-4 billion-a-year pornography industry.

Journalist Alisa Harris explains: “It’s called emotional porn. When men glut their physical lust with pictures of airbrushed girls pumped full of silicone, they become dissatisfied with real women’s bodies. When women plug their emotional caverns with chick flicks and chick lit, they become dissatisfied with the real men they know because they can’t measure up to the guys from The Notebook or Pride and Prejudice or Walk to Remember.”

Pornography is not simply about pictures. At its core, pornography starts with:

1. A desire to use people as self-gratification machines
2. A preference for man-made reality and man-made people over the real thing.

These hold as much temptation for women as for men, though romance novels often feed their fire better than pictures.

R.J. Rushdoony asks, “Why should an unreal female be exciting, and a far better and real woman not be so? The key is the essence of imagination: the fantasy woman is totally the creation and creature of man, whereas the real woman is God’s creation and creature. It is essential to imagination to create a man-made world and a man-ordained decree of predestination. It is the essence of sin to demand such a world.”
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Stephanie Meyers certainly hit the jackpot, we believe, because she knows what it is that women really want in their fantasies: a god to worship them as a goddess.

And really, the desire to be “as gods” – the temptation Eve succumbed to – is the lure tempting every girl to create her own world and her own men, and define what is good and evil for herself. As we pointed out at the beginning, the choice before each of us is the choice Meyers wrote in for Bella: to eat of the forbidden fruit, or not?
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We realize this article has taken a hard line, and we certainly didn’t want to spoil anyone’s fun, but we don’t really have to: Twilight will spoil its own fun:

“When I finished [the last book in the series] I felt like my world would collapse. I had been living in Forks for so long that I didn’t want to go back to my boring not-at-all-interesting life! …Then reality hit me and I realized I’m not Bella and my husband is not Edward. That was hard for me to swallow.”