Adults fret that 'Eclipse' lacks good role models for teens

We know the Adults fret that 'Eclipse' lacks good role models for teens

The Twilight Saga: Eclipse is at the top of the box office, but as teenage heroine Bella Swan moves inevitably toward marriage with a vampire, some wonder if she's such an exemplary role model for the girls who follow her adventures in the hugely popular books and movies.
It's a rerun of an old debate: Can pop culture — books, movies, music — influence the behavior of impressionable teenagers, and in the case of Bella, is that a good thing or a bad thing?

REVIEW: 'Eclipse' is fairly anemic.
And, for that matter, are teens really all that impressionable? After all, they've been reading Romeo and Juliet for 400 years.

Bella, for the few who have avoided the Twilight tidal wave, is a teenager who's so in love with an undead guy that she's ready to give up everything to be turned into a vampire so they can spend eternity together. Adding some urgency to the situation is the fact that Edward Cullen, her vampire love, is reluctant to have sex outside the bonds of matrimony.

Christine Seifert, a communications professor at Westminster College in Salt Lake City who has studied Twilight online message boards and fan fiction sites, says that the saga is strongly Mormon in tone and that a subset of Mormon culture prefers that girls marry young and start families. She says the abstinence message is so strong it could be labeled "abstinence porn," designed to convince teens that sexual self-denial is actually sexy. Will it work?

The author of the Twilight books, Stephenie Meyer, is a devout Mormon who says about Bella on her website: "I never meant for her fictional choices to be a model for anyone else's real-life choices."

Nevertheless, the three movies so far and the four books in print make some parents nervous about whether the saga is appropriate for younger teens, even aside from the vampires. Twilight, it should be noted, was No. 5 on the 2009 list of books challenged or banned from schools and libraries, according to the American Library Association.

'Virtuous' messages

Kristy Campbell of Marin County, Calif., a non-Mormon mother of five and a columnist for Mommytracked.com, says she won't let her 9-year-old read the books but she's OK with her 17-year-old doing so, as long as Mom and Dad help explain "the fiction in the fiction." She worries that Twilight over-romanticizes teen sex and marriage, creating unrealistic expectations.

"I'd like to see Edward and Bella one year into their teen marriage living in their parents' basement with a screaming toddler, no college plans, working at a 7-Eleven and wondering where the fun went," she says.

Kathryn Darden, a Christian freelance writer on arts and entertainment for several online publications who has written about Twilight, says there are some "virtuous" messages in the saga, but "I've never recommended it for (unsupervised) teens — it needs to be read by parents and discussed first."

Amy Best, an associate professor of sociology at Virginia's George Mason University who studies teens and popular culture, says adults do tend to get "a bit panicky" when teenagers invest too much in a particular character, and there's a long list of characters who have been "troublesome" on some level. But she says the "emulation model" is not followed by all teens, even the obsessed ones.

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