Sex in 'Twilight': An Argument for Bella
The Twilight series gets a lot of criticism for giving teenage girls an unrealistic idea of what teenage boys are like. As the average seventeen-year-old neither lives off of animal blood or has a century’s worth of experience holding back all sexual urges, this is a pretty fair critique. Edward Cullen is a terrible representation of young male desire.
But what so many miss in their rejection of Edward is that Bella Swan, the Twilight heroine and narrator, is actually a pretty remarkable thing in pop culture: an openly and unashamedly desirous teenage girl.
