Twilight | ContraPoints

- So, I've been reading the "Twilight" Saga, a series of vampire romance novels by someone called Stephenie Meyer, and I have, oh, just a couple thoughts. I know a lot has been said about "Twilight", but this is a complex work. There's depths to "Twilight" we as a society haven't even begun to explore. So let's get into it. Most of you know what "Twilight" is, but I should explain the basics for new people. Stephenie Meyer was, by all accounts, a bored Mormon housewife when, on June 2, 2003, around four in the morning, she awoke from a

vivid dream about a girl and a boy in a meadow having this conversation about how they were in love and the difficulties in that because he wanted to kill her, he was a vampire. - A boy and a girl in a meadow, having this conversation about how they were in love and the difficulties in that because he wanted to kill her. He was a vampire. - That dream became the first of four novels: "Twilight", "New Moon", "Eclipse", and "Breaking Dawn", which were made into five films. In 2015 Stephenie published "Life and Death", a gender-swapped reimagining

of the first novel. Yes, she transgendered "Twilight". "Twilight" has gone woke. And in 2020, she published "Midnight Sun", which is just the first novel, again, but from Dracula's perspective. "Twilight" has been on trend again lately. I mean I'm talking about it, so... Honestly it was more on trend when I started this video but the scripts took me 18 months. - "Twilight" took me three months to write. - So in the 2000s, these books about a teenage girl being seduced by various creatures of the night spent 235 weeks on the bestseller list for children, and as

you can imagine, there was discourse. - Vampires need love too. That is World News for this Sunday. I'm John Burman. From all of us at ABC News, thanks for watching. Good night. "Twilight" is one of those pop culture phenomena from the 2000s that was intensely loved, and then intensely hated, and then 10 years later it got reevaluated, and everyone's like did we really need to hate this thing so much? You know, like, gay people. Or 9/11. Some critics have suggested that "Twilight" was hated so much because of misogyny. And that's definitely true, you know, people

love to hate whatever teenage girls are into. - [All] Team Edward! Team Jacob! - I remember when "Twilight" came out boys really hated that Stephenie Meyer had like "feminized vampire lore" by making Edward sparkle. You know cause Count Dracula was always sooo butch. - Perhaps you should grow a beard. - And yet, the truly devoted Twilight-haters have always been women. "Twilight" is a romance novel, and for as long as romance novels have existed, women have been the majority of readers, but also the harshest critics. Hating on romance novels is as much a part of feminine

culture as reading them. In 1856— yes, video essays are pretentious. Yes, it's very funny. Let's all laugh. In 1856, Mary Ann Evans, known by her masculine pen name George Eliot and often considered one of the greatest novelists of all time, wrote an essay called "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists" in which she complained that "lady novelists" write unrealistic, wish-fulfillment fantasy schlock, with absurd Mary Sue self-insert protagonists who every man falls in love with. You know all the same complaints that people make today about romance fiction. "It is clear that they write in elegant boudoirs, with violet-colored

ink and a ruby pen; that they must be entirely indifferent to publishers' accounts, and inexperienced in every form of poverty except poverty of brains." There is a level of internalized misogyny in this. The not-like-other-girls urge to identify with men and share in men's contempt for women. That is misogyny. But to simply dismiss hatred of "Twilight" as misogynistic is too simple. Because the criticism is usually not just that "Twilight" is feminine and frivolous, that it's written with violet-colored ink and a ruby pen, but also that vampire romance intertwines love and violence. - Here was this guy

who was in love with her but he wanted to kill her. - And that "Twilight" is therefore somehow dangerous. Is this true? Is "Twilight" dangerous? Well Edward Cullen is the world's most dangerous predator. - I'm the world's most dangerous predator. - He's a killer. - I'm a killer. - He's killed people before. - I've killed people before. - He wanted to kill you. - I wanted to kill you. - He still don't know if I can control himself. - I still don't know if I can control myself. - He's designed to kill. - I'm designed

to kill. - I don't care. - Baby Robert Pattinson in his little peacoat saying "I'm designed to kill" is my favorite thing ever. How can you not love this? This is the skin of a killer Bella. - This is the skin of a killer Bella. - Now am I saying the "Twilight" books are the greatest work of art ever produced? Yes. (glass shattering) (soft organ music) Part one, fiction. It has been said that "Edward Cullen is an abuser". (intense music) But that's an understatement. He's not just an abuser, he's a serial killer. - I've killed

people before. (intense music) Many people are disturbed that "Twilight" is a romance, and yet the hero is dangerous, and obsessive, and capable of violence. - What if I'm not the hero? What if I'm the bad guy? - In other words, they're disturbed that it's the average romance novel. - I don't have the strength to stay away from you anymore. - And no, not every romance novel has a bad boy hero but it's one of the most common tropes. - Vampires need love too. - Critics point to things like the age gap. - I'm 109. -

Maybe I shouldn't be dating such an old man. It's gross. - And the stalking. - So you followed me. - I like watching you sleep. - And the gaslighting. - You hit your head. I think you're confused. - I know what I saw. - It's the fluorescents. - And when "Twilight" was at the peak of popularity, there were all these articles hand-wringing about the potential of all this to corrupt the youth. ""Twilight" is not feminist" said the Guardian, "It's female masochism," "Fifty Shades for teenage girls, except with vampires." All these articles cited the same Livejournal

post that went down a checklist from the National Domestic Violence hotline to prove that Edward Cullen is an abuser. (intense music) There's always some version of this discourse going on. Women are reading the wrong books. The books that women read are dangerous. In the 2000s it was "Twilight", and then in the 2010s, it was the "Twilight" fanfiction "Fifty Shades of Grey". At the time I'm making this video, it's a novelist called Colleen Hoover, who's sold six trillion books about dangerous alpha males named Ryle. I promise that in whatever year you're watching this video, there's currently

some lady novelist who's caused an outrage writing stories about a dangerous, wealthy, controlling alpha male. He doesn't do romance. - I don't do romance. - But the female protagonist awakens his capacity for love, at the same time he awakens her desire for sex. Now I don't want to dismiss the feelings of people who find this kind of romance disturbing. I think it's healthy and normal to be uncomfortable whenever sexuality and violence are intertwined. So I'm not exactly disagreeing with these critics of "Twilight", and of dark romance in general. I'm yes-anding them. Yes Edward Cullen is

creepy. He is a vampire. If Edward Cullen were real, I would log on to twitter, and I would cancel that vampire. I'd call the police and I would say, "hello, 911? I'd like to report a coven of vampires outside Forks, Washington. Yes they've smashed many salads" (glass shattering) Yes, Edward is problematic. Yes, and Edward is also not real. Right? He can't hurt you. It's gonna be okay. Edward Cullen is a fictional character in a woman's fantasy. And I do feel like that is relevant to how we analyze his behavior. The main line of argument against

"Twilight" is that this type of story "normalizes" and "romanticizes" abusive relationship dynamics. It's a monkey-see-monkey-do theory of media analysis, this moralistic CinemaSins thing that everyone is doing now. Age gaps, ding! Stalking, ding! Infanticide, a-ding! This idea that if people read Reylo fanfiction this will somehow "normalize" relationships with sith lords. Are tweens going to jump off a cliff because Bella does? I see the obsessive moral policing of the romance genre as a continuation of literally centuries of "concern" that women are reading the wrong kinds of books. When I was young, in the 18th century, ladies were

advised to read what we called "conduct books," such as Thomas Gisbourne's "An Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex", which instructed the reader in proper feminine virtues. Doesn't that sound exciting? "To indulge in a practice of reading novels is liable to produce mischievous effects." A certain kind of person has always considered romance novels sort of decadent and salacious. Some of this comes down to a question about the purpose of art. Is art supposed to be a, moral education that instructs the reader in proper virtuous conduct or b, a mirror of reality that reflects life

as it really is or c, escapist fantasy that's primarily entertainment. Throughout the history of the novel the genre has often been dismissed as escapist fantasy, "literary opium," an addictive, corrupting influence. The first best-selling English novel ever was a romance published in 1740 by Samuel Richardson called "Pamela or Virtue Rewarded". "Pamela" tells the story of a virtuous 15-year-old girl named Pamela Andrews, who's employed as a maidservant by the wealthy pervert Mr. B, who repeatedly attempts to seduce her, kidnap her, sneak into her room at night. And the whole time Pamela is like, "Nay, I shan't acquiesce

to this licentious rake. For my innocence and virtue are more dear to me than my life. And if the cost be my felicity, so be it. For I shan't subject my poor mother and father to the ignominy of-" In the end Mr. B is so impressed with Pamela's virtue that he reforms his rakish ways and marries her, which is supposed to be the reward, I guess, for Pamela's chaste behavior. It's a Cinderella rags-to-riches fantasy, with a Prince Charming who's not so charming. Pamela is kind of like an 18th century "Fifty Shades of Grey". Mr. B

will see you now. You could also make an argument that "Pamela" was the novel with the first modern fandom. There was Pamela fanfiction, Pamela merch, there was discourse between "Pamelists" and "Anti-Pamelists" about the sincerity of Pamela's "virtue." Anti-Pamelists wrote parody novels like Eliza Haywood's "Anti-Pamela; or, Feign'd Innocence Detected". Wow, what a savage burn. And Henry Fielding's "Shamela". (all shouting) Both of which reframe Pamela as a gold-digging social climber. This must have been an affront to Samuel Richardson, who makes his position clear on the cover page, claiming that he published "Pamela", quote, "In order to cultivate

the principles of virtue and religion in the minds of the youth of both sexes." So in 1740 there was already this tension between two purposes of art, is art supposed to "inflame the mind" or is it supposed to "cultivate the principles of virtue and religion in the minds of the youth?" Personally, I prefer to be inflamed. I want to feel good, I don't want to be good. (electricity crackling) And Stephenie Meyer apparently agrees. - I never stop and think, you know, oh, this is a role model for people. It's fiction. - It is fiction. Whatever

we think of its "morality," "Pamela" became the template for romance novels where a young, inexperienced, impoverished girl becomes an object of fascination for an older, richer man with a dangerous edge. In the 19th Century "Pride and Prejudice" and "Jane Eyre" both fit this description, though "Pride and Prejudice" is obviously much more agreeable to 21st century morality than "Pamela". Fitwilliam Darcy is not Elizabeth Bennet's sexually abusive boss. He's not even a vampire. You should have thought of that Jane Austen. What are you doing? In the 20th century the term "romance novel" became associated with mass-market paperback

romances, derogatorily known as "bodice rippers," like Johanna Lindsey's "Gentle Rogue", with the classic Fabio clinch on the cover. They don't do covers like this anymore. Here's the new edition of "Gentle Rogue" with the most boring cover imaginable. Retvrn. Retvrn to the clinch covers. We used to be a country. A proper country. The Gen Z equivalent of bodice-rippers is like Wattpad, BTS, werewolf fic. How many mafia twinks can there be? The specifically feminist criticism of the romance novel goes back at least to Germaine Greer, who included a long rant about them in her 1970 manifesto "The

Female Eunuch", in which she condemns romance readers as "women cherishing the chains of their own bondage." The point I'm trying to make is that there's a historical continuity from "Pamela" to "Twilight". Stephenie Meyer's contribution is that she took the classic romance formula, combined it with the lurid sexiness of "Dracula", and then Mormonized it to the point it became appealing to 21st century teenagers and moms. Another continuity from "Pamela" to "Twilight" is the persistent anxiety of critics that the romance novel is somehow corrupting the youth, or enslaving women, or both. Erin Meanly worries about "Twilight", quote

"Some girls might expect their love life to look just like Bella's. Now that's what I call scary." Neha Gandhi says "Bella is essentially a romanticized version of all of our worst, weakest impulses, put up on a pedestal, and that makes her dangerous." With a lot of the criticism of "Twilight" you get the impression that the critic is both senses the attraction to "Twilight" and is uncomfortable with that attraction. And the anxious hand-wringing is a manifestation of that ambivalence. Even Germaine Greer admits quote, "I cannot claim to be fully emancipated from the dream that some enormous

man, say six foot six, heavily shouldered and so forth to match, will crush me to his tweeds, look down into my eyes and leave the taste of heaven or the scorch of his passion on my waiting lips." Remember what they took from you. I want to argue that both the fascination with vampire romance, and the discomfort with it, are natural reactions to something paradoxical in the experience of erotic love itself. "Twilight" is everything we fear in sexuality, the excess, the irrationality, the transgression, the violence, the loss of self-possession, the violation of boundaries. - None of

them belong to themselves anymore. And the sickest part is, their genes tell them they're happy about it. - Stephenie Meyer is continuing an ancient mythological tradition of storytelling that equates love and death. Think Hades and Persephone, the temptation of Eve, "Swan Lake", "Romeo and Juliet". Like Romeo and Juliet, "Twilight" is immoderate teenage love escalated to the point of death. And you could argue that Romeo and Juliet are closer to equals, where Bella and Edward are predator and prey. The lion fell in love with the lamb. - So the lion fell in love with the lamb.

- But look at the big picture in "Twilight". The lamb doesn't stay a lamb. By the end of the story she becomes a lion. She's a powerful vampire with a rich husband and a magical demon baby. Yes Edward is a dangerous predator, but his power is subservient to his love for Bella and it's deployed for her protection. - I fell very protective of you. - She becomes powerful because he loves her. This is not the Story of becoming prey, it's a story of rising to the level of the predator. Behind every Cinderella fantasy is a

female will to power. (rock crumbling) The debates about romance fiction are not frivolous. They concern the deepest questions in women's lives. What does happiness look like? What do we want from love, from sex? What does it mean to succeed as a woman? What does it mean to be a woman? What does it mean to be anything? (cymbal crashing) Why is "Twilight" like this? To answer these questions and more, I read the entire "Twilight" saga, twice. I watched the movies 37 times. I read 3000 pages of psychoanalysis, and 8000 pages of queer and radical feminist theory.

Now some people say that I'm overly fixated on "Twilight", that mother's having another episode. And maybe some of those people are my psychiatrist, and maybe they're trying to put me on mood stabilizers. But here's why those people are wrong. (cymbal ringing) Part two, desire. One way to state the question, the mystery we're trying to solve, is why would someone "romanticize" the relationship between a vampire and a human, between a predator and his prey? Isn't this problematic? With its age gaps and its power dynamics. One answer is that, yes, it is problematic. And it's problematic because

in order for a story to have a plot, there needs to be a problem, what is sometimes known as a "conflict." Conflict creates tension, both romantic and narrative. And in "Twilight", Edward's vampirism is the source of that tension. Listen to how Stephenie Meyer summarizes the dream that inspired Twilight. - A boy and a girl in a meadow having this conversion about how they were in love and the difficulties in that because he wanted to kill her, he was a vampire." - Well, that is a problem. (all laughing) - The danger of Edward wanting to kill

Bella adds to the tension and makes the story more exciting. A common complaint from "Twilight"-haters is that the first book "has no plot." I feel like this complaint comes from people who don't understand romance as a genre. It's like that Goodreads review of "Pride and Prejudice", "Just a bunch of people going to each other's houses." Strictly speaking true, but this person's idea of "plot" is too narrow. They think that plot means physical action. Even Stephenie Meyer seems to think that to some extent, because there's all of what I consider gratuitous action forced into these stories.

The last movie ends with this giant battle between the Mormon vampires and their army of ethnic stereotypes, good missionary work I guess, and their sworn enemies the Volturi. - (indistinct) Scum. - The Volturi are like a Mormon's idea of Catholics. You know they live in the Vatican. They speak Italian. - Magnifico. - They're gay. - Ah. - Ah. - Ah. (laughing) - [Both] Oh. - I do love the Volturi. They're my kind of vamps. - But I guess it was the 2000s and everything had to have giant battle scenes because "Lord of the Rings". Why

can't a romance just be a romance? "Pride and Prejudice" didn't end with Darcy hunting down Wickham in a high-speed carriage chase. - Isn't my husband a fine horseman? (suspenseful orchestral music) - Romance stories can have action elements, but they're primarily driven by emotion, pining, longing, yearning even. The plot of a romance is always desire deferred. In her "Natural History of the Romance Novel", romance scholar Pamela Regis says quote, "The 'barrier' is the conflict in a romance novel; it is anything that keeps the union of heroine and hero from taking place." In "Pride and Prejudice", the

barrier is in the title: it's Darcy's pride, and Elizabeth's prejudice. And Mrs. Bennett certainly isn't helping either. - Bingley's wealth is nothing to his. - [Natalie] Lower your voice, woman, everyone can hear you! - I don't care if he does. - In "Twilight", you might be thinking the barrier is Jacob. - Hey, beautiful. - Because there are triangular moments between Jacob, Bella, and Edward. But let's face the facts, Team Jacob never stood a chance. - It's always been him. - The barrier is really just that Edward wants to drink that girl's sweet blood, and who

can blame him? I've been thinking about taking a sip myself. (electricity crackling) In "Twilight", blood drinking is a metaphor for sinful lust, for violent lust. Edward's inner conflict is between lust and love. He loves Bella, but he lusts for her blood. And because his bloodlust will kill her, he has to resist the temptation of bloodlust, in order to love Bella. - I still don't know if I can control myself. - That's the barrier he overcomes. It's an internal barrier, a psychological conflict. - [Person] Stop, find the will. - The barrier is essential to romance stories

because narrative is sustained by tension, and so is romantic love. Now I should explain that by "romantic love" I mean what the Ancient Greeks called Eros. Eros is the Ancient Greek personification of erotic love, that archery twink better known by his Roman name Cupid. And I'm not just bringing this up to be pretentious, although that is a benefit. In English the word "love" is awkwardly non-specific. You love your friends, you love your husband, you love your Dad, you love your dog, you love God, you love Twizzlers. Love, love, love, as if it's all the same.

Greek has different words for all these kinds of love. There's Philia, brotherly love, Agape, spiritual love, Storge, familial love, Philautia, self love. And then there's Eros, the problem child. Eros is the aching, passionate longing of romance novels, of Sappho's poetry, of "Romeo and Juliet". It's similar to what the psychologist Dorothy Tennov called "limerence." Limerence is like an adult crush, sexual by nature, intense to the point of obsession and anguish. Eros, or limerence, or romantic love, whatever we want to call it, is the emotional impetus of the "Twilight" saga. People who have never experienced limerence will

be confused by Bella's behavior in "Twilight", because it's extreme, it's irrational, it's obsessive, it's all-consuming, it's at times masochistic. In "New Moon", after Edward breaks up with Bella, she shrieks in agony all through the night, (Bella screaming) and then sits in her depression chair staring dejectedly out the window for three consecutive months. ♪ There's a possibility (vocalizing) ♪ To an aromantic person this might look like madness. Because it is madness. - It's just not normal, this behavior. - But to anyone who's been in love, it's your madness. Unlike other forms of love, erotic love is

painful. (Bella screaming) - [Bella] When you left, you took everything with you. But the absence of him is everywhere I look. - "The absence of him is everywhere I look." Absence is the essential nature of erotic love. Because Eros is desire. And desire is lack. You want what you don't have. The essayist Anne Carson explores this idea in one of my favorite books, "Eros the Bittersweet". The title comes from one of Sappho's poems. "Eros once again limb-loosener whirls me sweetbitter, impossible to fight off, creature stealing up. So why is Eros bitter? Well, we say that

a person in love is "in search of their other half." In Plato's Symposium, Aristophanes tells a myth about the origin of love, which says that we all used to be double what we are now, round beings with four arms, and two heads, and two sets of reproductive organs, until Zeus split us all in half. Why is God always an abusive father? Concerning. So when we fall in love, we're yearning to heal the trauma of human nature, to be whole again. Yearning is always a desire for something we feel like we have lost. And it's that

ache of loss, of separation, that makes Eros bitter. Anne Carson says, quote, "Pleasure and pain at once register upon the lover, inasmuch as the desirability of the love object derives, in part from its lack." Because desire is derived from lack, something has to separate the lover and the beloved for desire to sustain itself. In romance fiction that something is the barrier. The ruse, Anne Carson calls it, the third thing that "triangulates" desire. The purpose of the barrier is quote, "to represent eros as deferred, defied, obstructed, hungry, organized around a radiant absence to represent eros as

lack." When the barrier is overcome, when the two lovers unite, then that's the end of your romance novel. Because the narrative is sustained by desire, and desire is sustained by separation, so when the separation ends, the desire ends. And that's the end of your story. The lovers kiss. Odysseus is home. The end. (triumphant music) "Happily ever after" is of course not a reality, it's just a device of romance fiction. In reality when two people in love unite, it's what we call a "long-term relationship." Which, I'm sorry if I'm the one breaking this news to you,

but many long-term relationships are not in fact happily ever after. It's not easy to sustain desire over years. You have to keep inventing new ruses, new barriers that create the space for desire to continually reignite. Successful couples either learn to be content with a more pragmatic, non-erotic, love, or they're somehow able to sustain Eros, falling in love with each other again and again. But I fear that's the exception. The rule is "Absence makes the heart grow fonder." Another way to put this would be to say that desire prefers the hunt to the kill. And maybe

that's one reason sexuality is often represented as predator and prey. The first shot of the first "Twilight" movie is of a deer being stalked by a predator. This tells us want kind of story it's going to be. - And so the lion fell in love with the lamb. - Edward "the lion" Cullen embodies hunter sexuality. He glares, he stalks, he pounces. And Bella, at least at first, is his prey. - What a stupid lamb. - A similar trope of lover-as-hunter exists on Greek urns, which often depict a lover not in possession but in pursuit of

his beloved. Anne Carson says, quote, "The moment of ideal desire on which vase-painters as well as poets are inclined to focus is not the moment when the two unite in happiness. What is pictured is the moment when the beloved turns and runs. It's the moment of obstructed desire John Keats described in his Ode on a Grecian Urn. "Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss, though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve; She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, for ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!" The poet, or the urn painter

captures that moment of desire for all time, the hunter suspended in the middle of a hunt. Desire is like a dog that wants to chase a squirrel but not to catch it. And it may be this fugitive element of desire that gives rise to double standards, were the beloved, the one who is pursued, is valued only as long as she is unattainable. To quote Anne Carson again 'cause I love her so (beep) much, "A titillating triangle comes into play between the lover, the bad girl who attracts him and the good girl who honors him by

saying no." In this kind of dating ritual, the barrier is "the good girl," who is modest, elusive, hard to get. Like in the '90s, there was this infamous dating manual for women called "The Rules: Time-tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right". It included such advice as, "always end phone calls first, don't accept a Saturday night date after Wednesday." In other words, play hard to get. The Rules strikes many people as oppressively old-fashioned at best, and straight-up psychopathic at worst. And I agree. I don't think The Rules should be taken too seriously. But I

do feel like there's a little grain of truth in it. Simone de Beauvoir says, "The knight departing for new adventures offends his lady yet she has nothing but contempt for him if he remains at her feet. This is the torture of impossible love." To paraphrase the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, desire thinks it wants to be satisfied, but really it wants to go on desiring. Desire is desire for desire. Shakespeare says something similar in Sonnet 147. "My love is as a fever longing still for that which longer nurseth the disease" Shakespeare compares desire, that is love, eros,

to a sickness that wants to perpetuate itself. "What doesn't kill me makes me want you more" is Taylor Swift's version of the same thought, in a song that begins "fever dream high in the quiet of the night," echoing Shakespeare's comparison of love to fever, a desire that feeds on its own frustration. I'm pretty sure Taylor agrees with what I'm saying in this video. Also, I apologize for criticizing her in my J.K. Rowling video. I've since read a bunch of Tumblr posts that convinced me that she's gay. Inspiring. Follow the money. In an episode of "Seinfeld",

George Costanza makes a distinction between two types of desire, yearning and craving. - Have you yearned? - Yearn, do I yearn? - Have you yearned? - Well not recently. I craved. I crave all the time, constant craving. But I haven't yearned. - What is the difference between yearning and craving. Well, let's start with craving. What kinds of things do you crave? You crave a cigarette, a sandwich, an orgasm, a drink. You satisfy a craving for something but then an hour later you crave it again. So maybe a craving is desire that can be satisfied, but

only for a moment. Craving is like Shakespeare's description of lust in Sonnet 129. "Th' expense of spirit in a waste of shame is lust in action enjoyed no sooner but despisèd straight, a bliss in proof and proved, a very woe; Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream." Aww poor baby. Bill was really having a hard time of it in those sonnets. How is yearning different from craving? Well it's the difference between love and lust, the difference between Shakespeare's Sonnet 129 and 147. Craving is "enjoyed no sooner but despised straight" and yearning is "a fever, longing

still for that which longer nurseth the disease," Isn't this what Stephenie Meyer is really trying to say here? Edward Cullen craves blood, but he yearns for Bella. It's lust against limerence. Let's talk about yearning. - Do you ever yearn? - What kinds of things do you yearn for? You yearn for union with the person you're in love with or for union with God, like in Psalm 63. "My whole being longs for you, in a dry and parched land where there is no water." You yearn for God, you don't crave God. No one says I need

to get my God fix. Don't talk to me until I've had my God. You yearn to feel whole again, maybe by finding your other half, or through some kind of cosmic shroomy oneness. Or maybe Freud was right that it's really mother who we yearn for. Mother! I mean we did use to be one with her body in the womb. And then they cut the umbilical cord, and they weaned you from her breast, and life has been a trash fire ever since. (dramatic orchestral music) Yearning! Maybe you yearn for "the good old days." Nostalgia, a yearning

for a lost time. Or you yearn for nostalgia's inverse, utopian socialism. Think about the kind of leftists who talk about the revolution like it's the rapture. These people are yearning for a different time, but it's one they imagine in the future. Yearning I think is inherently erotic. It's not necessarily sexual, but it's erotic in the sense that unlike craving, which can be satisfied, though only for a moment, yearning is a desire that can't really be satisfied at all. Like you know how no matter what you accomplish in life you can never be satisfied because you

still feel the same void inside eating away at you all the time? Well this is the reason for that. We all have a black hole deep inside of us, and nothing can ever really fill it. Some people call it a god-shaped hole, but I'm pretty sure my god-shaped hole is shaped like (beep). Actually I think the hole is flexible, it kind of shapes itself to whatever it is we think we're missing. The things we desire become symbols of the hole, and we come to believe that we're yearning for the symbol. Anne Carson says, quote, "Who

is the real subject of most love poems? Not the beloved. It is that hole." Now would be a good time to admire my restraint in not making any jokes about filling my holes. I'm very tasteful, very ladylike I know. You may praise me in the comments section now. Lacan says something similar, I'll quote Zizek's summary because Lacan is illegible. If you don't care about philosophy, just ignore these names. Close your eyes and pretend this isn't happening. Quote, "The drive's goal-to reach its object is 'false,' it masks its 'true' aim, which is to reproduce its own

circular movement by repeatedly missing its object." This is the trap of yearning, of unrequited love and of nostalgia. You yearn for good old days because you lack them. They are lost time. But try explaining that to the people in the comments section of '90s Fruity Pebbles commercials pining for the lost Golden Age. "I miss the world when there was still love left in it." ♪ Give me Fruity Pebbles in my bowl ♪ - On second thought, the Fruity Pebbles commercial may be the only thing holding this man's sanity together. Let's just let him have this.

- I wish there was a way to know you're in the good old days before you've actually left them. - We all wish there was a way to feel like you're in the good old days. But there isn't. It's impossible. Why? Well, you're never in the good old days, because you can only yearn for what you've lost. The "good old days" are old because they're gone, and they're good because you idealize what you yearn for, and you only yearn for what you do not have. Your childhood is dead, and no amount of Fruity Pebbles can

bring it back. I've tried. (cereal clattering) (Jack Daniels pouring) (Twizzlers thudding) (fish thudding) Advertising stimulates desire by invoking lack, often yearning for beauty, prestige, and glamour. Glamour simply is the unattainable, the always-out-of-reach. Do you ever feel like goldilocks in a world where the porridge is never just right? I feel like I'm describing some kind of pessimist's prayer. You can't get what you want. And if you do, it won't make you happy. And if it does, not for long. The only way to escape the cycle of suffering, the only path to salvation, is to both like

and subscribe. Give me your money. You know, I think I crave because I yearn. Suppose hypothetically someone named, I don't know, Veronica, is in unrequited love. And suppose the pain of that drives Veronica, hypothetically, for educational and harm reduction purposes, to get a little bit addicted to (eerie ambient music) She's craving to cope with the yearning. - You're like my own personal brand of heroin. - What's your favorite brand of heroin? Leave a comment. Maybe you can visualize cravings as like epicycles of the larger cycle of yearning that orbits around the void. - Constant craving.

- I promise this is about "Twilight". Yearning is bittersweet, and the bitterness of yearning comes from the absence at its core, from the futility of grasping for something always out of reach. - [Bella] The absence of him is everywhere I look. - But what about the sweetness? The sweetness of yearning comes from antici... It's not easy having a good time. The sweetness of yearning comes from anticipation. It's the hope that just maybe, you might finally grasp the thing you're reaching for this time. There's a German word for this, because of course, vorfreude, which means pre-pleasure;

the pleasure of anticipation. It's the reason that we gift-wrap presents. As Ted Bundy said, "The fantasy that accompanies and generates the anticipation that precedes the crime is always more stimulating than the immediate aftermath of the crime itself." So true. Anticipation is the basic pleasure of eroticism. - And I think that if you skip right ahead to sex in a story, you're missing out on a lot of really exciting things. The first time you hold somebody's hand, your heart just goes crazy. This is an amazing experience that you go home and tell your friends about. "Oh

my gosh, he touched my hand." You know? - A striptease is infinitely more erotic than a nudist colony, why? Anticipation. Tension and release. The point of striptease is that the viewers wants to see a naked woman. But once the woman is naked, once the barrier is removed, the show's over. Stiptease is like the visual equivalent of a slow-build romance novel. Aren't mystery stories like this too? Are mysteries erotic? The pleasure is in unraveling the mystery, the yearning for the truth, the anticipation of the answer. Once the puzzle is solved, you lose interest. This is how

people become conspiracy theorists, they become addicted to that rush of discovery, "going down the rabbit hole." It's the pursuit of truth rather than the possession of it. A better outlet for this urge is philosophy. Philosophy is inherently erotic in that philosophical questions by nature can never be definitively answered, so the epistemic yearning never ends. "In The Importance of Being Ernest", Algy says- - The very essence of romance is uncertainty. - Uncertainty is also the very essence of gambling. It's why I wasted $2000 playing Egypt Quest. Gambling is addictive because the vorfreude, the anticipation of a

maybe-win, is more compelling than the win itself. - It's very romantic to be in love. But there's nothing romantic about a definite proposal. Why, one may be accepted. One usually is, I believe. And then the whole excitement is over. - Uncertainty sustains the bittersweet mix of hope and anxiety, which is ruinous when it leads to the junkie behavior of gambling addicts and serial adultery, but which I think can be safely simulated in art. Consider "Twilight", to choose a random example. Will this romance end in love or murder? It doesn't matter if you know it will

end with a happily ever after, it's about the process, how you get there. Like consider the music of my youth, Mozart. The Symphony #25 in G minor. Guess what chord it ends on. Spoiler alert, (beep) G minor. People think Mozart is stuffy now, but it's very erotic music. It's all about tension and release. Mozart builds tension through devices like rising melody, increased dissonance, increased volume, rhythmic complexity, harmonic wandering from the tonic, or simply by adding more notes. - Too many notes. The tension is released in a chord sequence called a cadence. (organ music) Music teachers

always describe the cadence as "returning home," comparing the musical narrative structure to a Hero's Journey. On it's own, the cadence is kind of boring, so it's often drawn out and ornamented with a trill. (light piano music) What is the point of this gesture? Well it heightens the tension just as it's about to be released. (light piano music) The trill occurs at that pre-climactic moment when gratification is imminent. It's very sexual, it's musical edging. When you hear it in isolation it just sounds like an 18th century musical stock phrase, but that's exactly the point I'm making.

The release is only pleasurable because of the tension that has accumulated in anticipation of it. Without the tension, there is no release. And that's just kind of the nature of human pleasure. It's fire and ice. Herr Doktor Father says, "We are so constituted that we can only intensely enjoy contrasts." Without the bitterness of tension there is no sweetness of relief. Philosophies that seek to liberate us from suffering advise that we let go of desire. Stoicism says we should limit desire to things we can control. Buddhism says we can stop craving and clinging by recognizing that

desire arises from impermanence and from the illusion of the self. Philosophers and gurus are correct to recognize that desire leads to suffering. (Bella screaming) But detachment from desire is not bliss. If someone is promising you bliss, or some mystical solution to the wound of human nature, that's probably a cult. Watch out for that. Detachment results in something more low key, like tranquility, or peace. Wise men are always saying, "Stop clinging to desire and you'll find peace." Wise men are always saying this. Tao Te Ching chapter 46 says, "One who knows that enough is enough will

always have enough." That is wisdom. And wisdom is soothing, but it's not not exciting. So it's your choice to make. Do you want to read novels about wise people being at peace? Or do you choose violence? Do you choose the world's most dangerous predator? Personally I think wisdom is best left to the wise. Couldn't be me! I like things and stuff too much. The wheel of Samsara is very much my stomping ground. (dramatic music) (footsteps thudding) So in Maryland, there's this place called Royal Farms. It's like if a KFC was inside of a 7-11. They're

open all the time. You can get cigarettes, chicken, energy drinks, you know, human blood. Part three, fantasy. Okay, we need to talk about the sexual aspect. I know YouTube is trying to be more family-friendly, and as a friend of the family, I respect that. So I might have to use some euphemisms, some indirect language. By the time I'm done with them, the family is gonna be on their hands and knees begging for more. Many people have commented on the unguarded, blurting-it-all-out quality of "Twilight". In one interview Robert Pattinson said he thinks that "Twilight" is Stephenie

Meyer's sexual fantasy. - I was convinced that Stephenie was convinced she was Bella. You know like reading her sort of sexual fantasy, especially when she says it was a dream. I think this is another reason that people find "Twilight" "cringe." Stephenie Meyer is taking dictation directly from the inner goddess. - It is very honest. It's really really honest, and that's kind of what's weird about it. - I love that about "Twilight". It's like reading someone's diary. Now I realize here I'm stepping into a vicious debate that's been going on for decades about the distinction between

romance and erotica. What is the difference between romance and erotica? I got so curious about this that I actually contacted the English departments of Harvard, Yale, and Stanford, and I was surprised they pretty much all agreed on a definition, that romance is for good girls and erotica is for sluts. Pornography, of course, is for men. There's a buckwild debate from 1987 between romance titans Jackie Collins and Barbara Cartland, who between them sold more than a billion books. The debate gets, well, you kind of just have to see it to believe it. - It's evil really.

- What? - The books that you write, quite frankly. (audience laughing) - Barbara Cartland says that Jackie Collins' books are evil. Why? Because they have sex scenes. - Well, I really don't think there's anything disgusting about naked people rolling around on beds. I thought that's what you're supposed to do when you're married. - That is, no. (audience laughing) - [Jackie] How do you know? - And according to Cartland, women's fiction shouldn't have sex scenes because A, think of the children. - Have you thought of the effect it has on young people. - Yes, they love

it. - But that is what is wrong. - They say, I was reading it on the- - Two, it's helping the perverts. - Don't you think it has helped perverts? - Oooh. - And D, according to Cartland, we should encourage "purity" for women, that is asexuality. - You know, I believe in purity for women. And this is the thing I've been fighting for. - It's a classic good girls versus sluts debate. - All this awful abuse of children. All that comes from a permissive side. - There's something so surreal about what I can only describe

as an 80-year-old woman in clown drag lecturing everyone about sexual purity. Like what is this? The British aren't coming, the British aren't coming! Cartland endorses the Victorian viewpoint that women, "ladies" are asexual. - You were a lady, you were dressed in China, you were something perfect, slightly sacred. - This is the view taken by 19th century sexologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing, author of "Psychopathia Sexualis", one of the first attempts to scientifically study human sexuality, so scandalous at the time of publication it had to be printed in Latin to keep the hoi polloi from getting notions. Quote,

"Woman, if physically and mentally normal, and properly educated, has but little sensual desire." This is an absurd claim on its face. If women instinctively have "but little sensual desire," then why is that contingent on their being "properly educated"? The answer is basically that for Victorians, the "Madonna/whore" dichotomy was an ontological distinction. - So there's an enormous gap between the lady and the prostitute. And no young man who took me out would ever have thought of asking me to go to bed with him. They asked me to marry them. - It was understood that there were

really two very different kinds of women. There were real women, ladies, who were by definition asexual, and then, there was this other category of person, prostitutes or "fallen women," who were technically female but who were seen as degraded, "ruined," beings, with desire equal to if not exceeding that of men. Strumpets. Trollops. Slutacious whores. "Ladies" were seen as delicate and innocent, sacred treasures to be protected. - You were a lady, you were dressed in China, you were something perfect, slightly sacred. - And there's a kind of privilege that came with that, but at the cost of

sexuality. - And I've believed for years, I thought that ladies didn't feel passion and prostitutes did. - "Lady" status has often only been available to middle and upper class white women, with prostitutes and "fallen women" relegated to this other category that's seen as sexual but degraded. The idea that "purity" is the natural state of women is actually fairly recent. Ancient and Medieval Europeans had almost the opposite view of the Victorians, often seeing women as more sexual than men. According to the most widely read encyclopedia of the Middle Ages, quote, "The word femina comes from the

Greek derived from the force of fire because her concupiscence is very passionate, women are more libidinous than men." In an ancient Greek myth, Zeus and Hera are feuding about whether men or women enjoy sex more, so they summon the transsexual prophet Tiresias to resolve the issue and Tiresias says, "Of 10 parts a man enjoys one only, but a woman enjoys the full 10 parts." Which sex is more sexual? Controversial. Looking into it. In our own time the Victorian idea that the-right-kind-of-women "have but little sensual desire," still persists in stereotypes about "female sexuality" being limited to

delicate hand-grazing. (dramatic music) (Bella gasping) In 1973, permissive Cosmopolitan ran an article by a male psychiatrist who announced, "Women do not have sexual fantasies. How do we know? Ask a woman, and she will usually reply, no." Good work, Doctor. Incredible research methods. This kind of statement is a self-fulfilling prophecy. When "the experts" announce that women do not have sexual fantasies, women whose experience tells them otherwise feel deviant and abnormal, which makes them reluctant to speak up. Seemingly descriptive statements about sexuality like "women don't have sexual fantasies", often serve to enforce the very situation they claim

to describe. The Cartland/Collins debate was echoed 25 years later in debates about "Twilight" and "Fifty Shades of Grey", with "Fifty Shades" widely condemned as "mommy porn," which, come on people. Let moms have pornography. (hands clapping) It's like, once a decade, society collectively discovers that women's sexuality exists and everyone loses their minds. Stephenie Meyer, like Barbara Cartland, is something of a neo-Victorian. Or at least a neo-Edwardian. Boo. Stephenie is not as moralizing as Barbara Cartland, but she said, for example, "Erotica is not something I read. I don't even read traditional romance. Why not? It's too smutty.

There's a reason my books have a lot of innocence. That's the sort of world I live in. Well, I support whatever Stephenie Meyer has to tell herself to sleep at night. I don't know that I would describe "Twilight" as a "world of innocence." - I've killed people before. I like watching you sleep. - It's hard to say with all those clothes on. - Stranger things happen every day. Trust me. (wood cracking) But it's true that there are no sex scenes. It's strictly PG-13. In one scene Bella is too embarrassed to look at lingerie because it's

too sexy, even when it isn't on. In a now-infamous scene Bella walks down the stairs in a long khaki skirt and blue blouse, which outfit Edward describes as "utterly indecent, no one should look so tempting, it's not fair." So what did Robert Pattinson mean when he said that "Twilight" was Stephenie Meyer's sexual fantasy. - You're like reading her sort of sexual fantasy. - A story can be sexy without sex scenes. How? Well, I feel like this is something I should show not tell. For example, can we talk about the cuck tent scene? Why is no

one talking about the cuck tent scene? In "Twilight Episode 3: Eclipse", Bella and her polycule of monster men are taking the ring to Mordor when a winter storm rolls in. Bella is in the tent, and she's shivering her innocent little butt off, and Edward's upset because vampires have no body heat, so he can't warm her up. But Jacob is right outside, and Jacob is a toasty dog boy with a canonical body temperature of 108.9 degrees Fahrenheit. - Let's face it, I am hotter than you. - [Natalie] So Edward agrees to let the sexy shirtless Jacob

share a sleeping bag with Bella to prevent her imminent death by freezing. - You'll warm up soon. Faster if you took your clothes off. - Jacob clutches Bella against his hot naked chest, while Edward gazes on in jealous agony. Bella is nestled in Jacob's arms pretending to be asleep, while the two gorgeous monster men are incandescent with desire for her; they argue through the night about who loves her more and who can take better care of her. And remember Edward can read minds, so he's experiencing all of Jacob's perverted fantasies in excruciating detail. - Can

you at least attempt to control your thoughts? - So, why does this scene happen. Wherefore art the cuck tent? This is not a trick question. The answer is very obvious. The cuck tent happens because Stephenie Meyer thinks that it's hot. Because it is hot. And maybe Stephenie would deny that she has any such impure feelings, since she "lives in a world of innocence." But let's use common sense. This is a sexual fantasy. - [Stephenie] Almost everything that went into "Twilight" was unconscious. - A lot of women like to feel intensely desired. That's why a common

feminine fantasy is being the center of attention from multiple men, because more men symbolizes more desire. It's why you get romance novels like, "2 Billionaires in Vegas", "3 Bosses' Assistant", "4 Ranchers' Bride", "5 Mafia Captor's Virgin", "6 Single Dad's Nanny", "7 Groomsmen from Hell", "8 Brother's Fiancee", "9 Marine's Shared Property", "10 Mountain Men's Baby", and "Wuthering Heights". It's really a straightforward example of what is called "wish fulfillment." And "Twilight" has a lot of wish fulfillment. You know, Bella moves to a new school, and even though she's an awkward tomboy who drives a rusty pickup truck,

every boy in school has a crush on her. - It's like first grade all over again. You're the shiny new toy. - Two gorgeous monster boys fight over Bella and they carry her around and they tell her how much they love her and want to protect her. All the other girls are jealous of my cool boyfriend. So by association, I must be cool too. If you're a "Twilight" reader and you identify with Bella, these are exciting fantasies to have because they gratify, what Doctor Father calls, "His Majesty the Ego, the hero of every day-dream and

every story." All of this I think is pretty obvious. But where things get controversial, and to many people disturbing, is when you start introducing darker themes into your romantic wish fulfillment fantasies. Edward's stalking. - I like watching you sleep. - [Natalie] The fact that he's self-admittedly a dangerous predator. - I'm the world's most dangerous- - His struggle with a vampiric desire to kill Bella and drink her blood; People see this stuff and they think, "Oh my god, this is masochistic, it's internalized misogyny, it's abusive, it's pathological." But I think that those concerns, while understandable, come

from a misunderstanding about how fantasy works. Consider for example the ultimate problematic fantasy, the fantasy of non-consent, what we could euphemistically call a "ravishment" fantasy. This fantasy of being overpowered, or in bondage, or of surrendering to a dominant lover. It's a very common fantasy for a lot of women, and also a lot people who aren't women. It's the reason bodice-rippers are called bodice-rippers. They were notorious for these "ravishment" scenes where bodices are, you know, ripped. This can be difficult to talk about because, we worry that the worst men in the universe will take these fantasies

as "proof" that women "really want" to be dominated by violent men. But abusive men will use any pretext to justify their behavior, and that's not on us, it's on them. So, let's talk about it. In 1973, the same year Cosmo announced "Women don't have sexual fantasies," the author Nancy Friday published a book called "My Secret Garden: Women's Sexual Fantasies". Nancy Friday was a heroine of the sexual revolution, and I think it was brave to publish this book. despite it's misleadingly twee cover and blurb, "Dare to discover the beautiful blossoms, the winding paths, and the hidden

nooks of female sexuality." I hate that even the cover of a pervert book like this assumes female sexuality is as mysterious as it is floral. Groundbreaking. But there's nothing floral about Nancy Friday's books, which are essentially anthologies of fantasies submitted in response to a newspaper ad Nancy published that said, "Female sexual fantasies wanted by serious female researcher. Anonymity guaranteed." Love that. This resulted in a book which is very explicit and which challenges assumptions about feminine sexuality being sort of soft and gentle and mushy. "The single greatest theme that emerged was that of 'weak' women being

sexually dominated, 'forced' by male strength to do this deliciously awful thing." So, the ravishment fantasy proved to be the most common fantasy. Why? Are these women all horribly traumatized? Is this internalized misogyny? Well maybe, but there's other explanations to consider. Women are socialized not to display sexuality openly, not to initiate. Being a proper feminine woman is supposed to involved being passive and modest. Or else, women risk being recast from Madonna to whore, good girl to slut, and then being victimized and degraded as a result. So it makes sense that a lot of women might be

very protective of their innocent, good-girl self-image, even in fantasy. The non-consent fantasy is a device that absolves the woman from blame. If she's being forced, then it's not her fault. "Ravishment" is a ruse, as Nancy Friday says quote, "a deus ex machina we roll in to catapult us past a lifetime of women's rules against sex. The women whom I have interviewed don't really want to be hurt or humiliated. His male presence, that effective battering ram, neatly 'makes' her relax sufficiently to enjoy, and then allows her to return to earth, her Nice Girl, Good Daughter self

intact." So the non-consent fantasy is not wish-fulfillment in a literal sense, but in an emotional sense. Like if a teenage boy fantasizes about dying gloriously in battle, is that a masochistic fantasy about death, or is it an egotistical fantasy about glory? Probably the latter. Likewise women who fantasize about being "ravished" do not actually want to be assaulted. In a fantasy, which is a fictional scenario where you are in control, the non-consent situation satisfies your emotional needs to gratify desire, without the burden of shame and guilt and anxiety that comes with taking responsibility for your desire.

Another vampire novelist, Anne Rice, said of her own sadomasochistic erotica series, "The books aren't about literal cruelty, they're about surrender, the fun of imagining you have no choice but to enjoy sex." The essential point is this. Fantasies are not literal wishes. Fantasies construct situations where emotional needs are met and inhibitions to pleasure are removed. So for example in a fantasy where the dangerous alpha male is the aggressor, the woman remains innocent. The bad boy is bad so that the good girl gets to stay good. We can call this disavowal, the process of constructing fantasy situations

where your desires are gratified, without having to assert or even having to acknowledge the desire. Non-consent fantasy are one ruse of disavowal, but fantasy is infinitely creative in constructing these devices. Remember the cuck tent. Bella's a good girl who would never consider having a threesome, but it's dangerously cold, I guess we have no choice but to huddle for warmth. Disavowal. "Me and Draco got detention in the forbidden forest, and we had to camp out for the night but there was only one sleeping bag. Guess we'll have to share it." There's a million fanfiction and erotica

tropes that are basically variations on this ruse of disavowal. For example, sex pollen, aliens made them do it, hypnosis, mind control, non-consent, dubious consent, mate or die, pon farr, forced feminization, Hermione is an omega in heat and Draco is the only nearby alpha. The continued popularity of these tropes demonstrates to me that erotic disavowal fantasies are not just a relic of a past age of bodice rippers and sexual conservatism. I don't think women today are so much more liberated than Nancy Friday and Anne Rice. Like where are these liberated women? Maybe in Europe. I don't

know what goes on over there in Pervoslavia, but here in America we still believe in a little thing called sexual repression. Like if you look through fanfiction platforms like Wattpad or AO3 that host erotica mostly by women, submissive fantasies are still pretty standard. "My Mom Sold My Virginity to One Direction". I also see disavowal at work in the infamous rescue fantasies in "Twilight". Bella is walking the street alone at night when she's menaced by a gang of thugs apparently ready for a bit of the old ultraviolence. But at the last minute, Edward sweeps in in

his Battle Volvo and saves the damsel. Likewise at the end of the first movie there's an, um snuff film scene? Where the evil vampire James intends to suck Bella's blood and make some kind of smut film out of it to torture Edward with. The very eroticized violence is interrupted at the last moment, when the Edward replaces the assailant, and Bella is rescued instead of ravished. - We can try to suck the venom out. - You know I won't be able to stop. - Then find the will. (Bella breathing heavily) - I see this is a

kind of double disavowal. It's a non-consent fantasy that's transformed into something more morally acceptable, a rescue fantasy. Rescued damsels are a common erotic myth. In the story of Perseus and Andromeda, Andromeda is a naked woman in bondage, threatened by a monster, but saved at the last minute by Perseus thrusting into the rescue with some kind of phallic weapon. In rescue fantasies the thrilling possibility of sexual violence is raised only to be disavowed at the last moment by the rescue. But it's not just women who disavow desire. The rescue fantasy is also appealing from the perspective

of Perseus, who gets to feel strong and important and heroic while also, you know, getting to spend time around a naked woman in chains. It's not even necessarily sexual desire that fantasy disavows. In "Fifty Shades of Grey", Edward, renamed Christian, is constantly issuing orders to Bella, renamed Anastasia, about what she should eat, about what car she should drive, about what gynecologist to see. Why is this part of the fantasy? Well because making decisions is hard. Sartre said we're "condemned to be free." Why is freedom a "condemnation"? Well because freedom implies responsibility. And responsibility sucks. I,

for one, hate being accountable for the consequences of my actions. Even something as trivial as "What should I eat today?" is a decision frought with moral quandaries and body image issues and contradictory nutritional advice coming at us from all angles. Isn't there something relaxing about a competent person just telling you what to do, so you don't have to worry about it? Disavowal is a useful ruse for indulging all kinds of guilty pleasures. In "Fifty Shades", Christian is constantly lavishing extravagant gifts on Ana. He buys her a computer, a car, first class plane tickets. And Ana

constantly protests because she's knows that it's gauche to accept expensive gifts from your billionaire boyfriend like some kind of kept woman. But Christian insists. Oh well! I guess I have no choice but to fly first class. The function of disavowal in fantasy is that you get what you want without the indignity of having to ask for it, or even "against your will." In "Twilight", Bella "hates" birthday parties and presents. But they're lavished on her anyway. Edward's fashionista sister Alice is always feminizing Bella, ordering her to wear high heels. And Bella's like no, stop I wear

flannel and drive pickup trucks, I'm totally butch. But clearly she's into this "forced" feminization, this de-butching. Bella is adamant she doesn't want a fancy wedding but Alice insists, so there's a fancy wedding. Obviously Stephenie wanted there to be a fancy wedding. But you know what people say about women who want fancy weddings, divas, Bridezillas. Not a cute look. So thanks to Alice, Bella gets to have a fancy wedding without the indignity of having to want a fancy wedding. Now I want to talk about one of the most controversial things that happens in "Twilight", Jacob imprinting

on Renesmee. Okay. So, I can't wait to explain this one, Stephenie introduces into werewolf lore the notion of "imprinting," a kind of lifelong limerent fixation, it's soulmates basically. In "Breaking Dawn", Bella gives birth to a vampiric baby whom she names Renesmee. Yes it's very funny. Let's all laugh. So Bella essentially dies in childbirth, and before she's resurrected, Jacob decides to murder Renesmee, the baby, as revenge for killing Bella. But when Jacob sees Renesmee, he imprints on her, the baby, essentially falling in love with this infant. Now I think is amazing, but everyone else seems to

hate it. - You imprinted on my daughter. - It wasn't my choice. - She's a baby. - Why would Stephenie write such a thing? I think Jacob imprints on Renesmee because Stephenie is unconsciously both Team Edward and Team Jacob. - [Stephenie] Almost everything that went into "Twilight" was unconscious. - [Natalie] I mean it's not that subtle. - You can love more than one person at a time. - Don't make me choose. - But obviously Bella can't be polyamorous because Stephenie's books have a lot of innocence. That's the sort of world she lives in. So imprinting

on Renesmee allows Bella to secure monogamous ties both to Edward through marriage, and to Jacob, vicariously, through her own daughter, thus roping Jacob into this subtextually polyamorous family. - We're all gonna be together now. - Should I start calling you dad? - No. - I'm not saying you have to like it, I'm just saying that's why it happens. Probably. So I've been arguing that a lot of fantasies work by creating situations where your desires are both fulfilled and disavowed. But there's more to it than just that. If we consider the more "problematic" aspects of "Twilight",

Edward's stalking, his violent urges, the ravishment-turned-rescue fantasies, the appeal is not just that it absolves the Bella-identified reader of the responsibility and slut-stigma of sexuality. There's also something about the intensity and even the violence of a fantasy lover's desire that is exciting. There's a book by the psychoanalyst Michael Bader called "Arousal: The Secret Logic of Sexual Fantasies" that I really enjoyed, which surprised me because I found it in the psychology section, between "Why Is My Marriage Bad?" and "Help! My Teenager is a Piece of Shit" Bader book takes a very optimistic view of sexual fantasy.

Quote, "I do not think sexuality is driven by kinky desires. I think that it is driven by straightforward desires for pleasure and safety. 'Kinkiness' is merely the complicated route that some people need to take in order to safely feel pleasure." According to Bader, fantasy is a tool for overcoming guilt, shame, anxiety, responsibility, and other obstacles to pleasure and arousal. Like Freud said, "The sexual instinct has to struggle against certain mental forces which act as resistances, dams upon sexual development-disgust, shame and morality" Fantasy functions to break through the dam, to rip the metaphorical bodice. In the

Cinderella fantasy where a billionaire falls for you, an ordinary brunette, the attention of this powerful man functions as proof of your worth, of your desirability. It's fundamentally a shame-negating fantasy. It's satisfying because most people have shame, have insecurities. We feel too old, too fat, too trans, too disabled, it's always something, right? Or maybe you were neglected as a child, or your sibling was always more beautiful and successful than you, or you feel underappreciated at work, or your YouTube videos don't get as many views as hbomberguy, whatever the source of the insecurity, this shame is a

"dam," an inhibition, an obstacle to pleasure. It's hard to get excited when you feel inadequate, unattractive, or ordinary. But, in the eyes of this fantasy billionaire or vampire who's obsessed with you, you become extraordinary. The fantasy creates a situation where your insecurities are proven false, where in which your "flaws" turn out to be desirable, which negates the shame that inhibits desire. A "feminist" objection to "Fifty Shades" might go "Why does it have to be a rich husband? Why can't women fantasize about financial independence?" Well, because that completely misunderstands the emotional logic of the fantasy. It's

not really about the money. Money in the fantasy is just an efficient symbol. It signifies value, worth. In the logic of the fantasy, a rich man is a high-value man, especially to us vulgar Americans. To an old-fashioned Englishwoman like Barbara Cartland, the ideal romantic hero is preferably a peer of the realm. "A Disgraceful Duke", "A Wicked Marquis", "An Elusive Earl". In desperate times we might even settle for a "Cruel Count". When his lordship bestows upon you lavish gifts, despite your protests and disavowals, the gifts are proof that he desires you, that you are as enticing

as any beautiful expensive object. The wealth and gifts are of secondary importance. First we seek the refutation of our shame, validation of our desirability, and above all proof that we are loved. Often this type of fantasy involves a competitive element too, where rivals, usually other women, must be eliminated. This is taken to embarrassing extremes in "Fifty Shades of Grey" where Christian surrounds himself with what Ana refers to as "immaculate blondes" and "Stepford wives". Young blonde women whom Christian employs precisely because he's not attracted to any of them, Christian only being interested in superficially ordinary and

awkward brunettes who remind him of, and this is a direct quotation, "the crack whore, my birth mother." (kids cheering) Ana also has the satisfaction of humiliating the attractive blonde architect Christian hires to design their house, and at one point she throws a drink in the face of Christian's childhood seductress, who yes, is also blonde. - He's not capable of marriage. (person gasping) - In "Twilight", Bella is a superficially ordinary and awkward brunette who is frequently jealous of Edward's blonde bombshell sister Rosalie, as well as the Denali coven of vampires, blonde vixens all, to whom we

are assured Edward feels not the slightest twinge of attraction. My point is that this need in fantasy to cancel out every other attractive woman has the same meaning Anna Freud attributed to a female patient's fantasy, "Father loves only me." And the fact that the men in these fantasies are often substitute father figures is a fact so obvious that it hardly warrants mentioning. - I know. I look hot. - Feminine sexual fantasies are often modeled on myths and fairy tales. "Cinderella", "Sleeping Beauty", "Beauty and the Beast", "Little Red Riding Hood", Hades and Persephone, Adam and Eve,

Perseus and Andromeda If Cinderella-style fantasies are usually about refuting shame, I'd argue that "Beauty and the Beast style" fantasies are usually about negating guilt. By "Beauty and the Beast style fantasies" I mean erotic fantasies where the hero is a mafia boss, a stalker, a pirate, an abusive employer, a conduct-violating professor, a "Disgraceful Duke", a sadistic billionaire, or for that matter a my own brother, a goddamn shit-sucking vampire. - My own brother, a goddamn shit-sucking vampire! - Obviously in "Twilight", as in a lot of romance fiction, the hero is both Prince Charming and The Beast, a

Darcy with Heathcliff characteristics. What is the fantasy appeal of The Beast? (Beast howling) Why is he so sexy? Well, there's an element of selfishness inherent to sexuality, what Michael Bader calls "ruthlessness." Quote, "Sexual excitement, requires that we momentarily become selfish and turn away from concerns about the other's pleasure in order to surrender to our own." Women, in particular, often feel guilty about being "selfish." They're afraid they'll take "too long," or that receiving pleasure is "one-sided." Maybe it's because women are told to be "caretakers," to put other people's needs before their own. But in the fantasy

where you've been tied up by Christian Grey, you have no say in the matter. You cannot be guilty because it's not your fault, and the selfishness of the beast gives beauty permission to be selfish too, to surrender to her own pleasure. Bader says, quote, "Sexual fantasies always find a way of turning the 'no' of guilt into the 'yes' of pleasure." A similar guilt-negation is achieved by fantasies of anonymity, a masked stranger, someone you have no obligation to take care of. And because you're strangers to each other, you also have less reason to be ashamed. It's

why when you have an orgy at your opulent mansion, you have to make everyone wear a mask. Like anonymity, opulence is a defense against shame. When someone surrounds themself with opulence, what are they trying to say about themself? The subliminal message of opulence is, "I am valuable. I am desirable." It's why so many romantic and erotic fantasies take place in opulent settings. Now in reality the ruthlessness enabled by fantasy eventually conflicts with the desire to be loved. A paradox of sexuality is that ruthlessness must be somehow balanced with tenderness. If you only use and objectify

your partner, there can be no love. But if you're overly anxious about your partner's needs to the exclusion of your own, the flame of desire will go out. In sex there is such a thing as not enough selfishness. This is my theory about the Gentle Rogue. He's appealing because he's both gentle and a rogue. I am very smart. The Gentle Rogue is a sort of vegetarian vampire capable of both ruthlessness and tenderness. So from the perspective of Nancy Friday and Michael Bader, sexual fantasies, even ones that seem violent and disturbing, can be understood as psychological

devices that lead us to pleasure through the labyrinth of guilt and shame. I wish that people who are inclined to crusade against "dangerous books" or "abusive ships" would try to think about fantasy in a way that's less literal and more psychological. Like do furries and omegaverse fic writers "normalize bestiality"? No, the fantasy of human animality is not about literal animals, it's about unleashing what is symbolically "animalistic" in us, the drives and urges that human taboos and decency forbid. People think furries are weird now, but your grandfather fought in World War II, then came home and

thought it was totally normal to be attracted to women dressed like rabbits. Are people who are into "Daddy doms" or diapers or whatever "literally normalizing pediatrics?" Well no, it's not usually about that at all. Ageplay is usually about fantasy regression to the social position of someone who has no responsibilities and needs to be taken care of. The fantasy, or the roleplay scenario, gives you permission to be taken care of. Edward Cullen's notorious "I like to watch you sleep"- - I like watching you sleep. - Feels creepy to a lot of people. And fair enough. "Creepy-ness"

is subjective. But I feel like you can find Edward creepy and still understand that for Stephenie Meyer, "Twilight" is not the expression of a literal desire to be stalked by creatures of the night. The fantasy is of a protector watching over you. A witness. A guardian angel. Like when you're a kid and you want your mom to stay in your room with you until you fall asleep. I wish that I could fall asleep with a vampire watching over me, talking to me. And she's saying "baby, mommy loves you. You're a good baby. I don't blame

you for what happened to this family. You're just a baby. You had nothing to do with 9/11." In 2015, radical feminist Dr. Gail Dines, the quote "world's leading anti-pornography scholar and activist" according to her website, led a boycott of "Fifty Shades of Grey" using the hashtag #50dollarsnot50shades, encouraging people to donate to battered women's shelters instead of seeing the movie. Dines claimed "Fifty Shades glamorized and eroticized violence against women and rebranded it as romance." She describes going to see the movie in a theater full of "young women with cocktails," and watching in abject horror quote "a

film that depicted, in unbearable detail, how to lure a lonely, isolated child into 'consenting' to sexual abuse. Watching a seasoned predator toy with his immature prey, you are left with a knot in the pit of your stomach that won't go away, no matter how many cocktails you down." Gail, it's "Twilight" fanfiction. When I watch "Fifty Shades", I don't feel like I'm watching a seasoned predator. I feel like I'm watching a woman's fantasy. Because I am. And if people like Gail Dines are too obtuse to notice the difference, that's kind of their problem. I've been holding

this in for 10 years, and I'm gonna say it. I am begging these people to learn to think psychologically instead of literally, so that they're not constantly baffled and traumatized upon encountering literally the most common type of sexual fantasy that people have. I guess when your only analytic tool is a sledgehammer, you see every problem as an author whose legs aren't hobbled yet. It's frustrating, because there's plenty of more nuanced criticism of pornography, especially when it's produced coercively or when it functions as a replacement for actual sex education. But I reject the radical feminist idea

that consuming pornography is a major cause of violence. And I should know, because I'm a very violent person, and I never consume pornography. (sighing) I guess I also need to address that for every radical feminist who thinks "Twilight" fanfiction is literally violence, there's also 1000 misogynistic idiots who will argue that dark romance fantasies prove women "really want" to be dominated by abusive alpha males. Which, no, stop, no. Fantasizing about sexy vampires doesn't make you a willing victim any more than fantasizing about torpedoing a car holding up traffic makes you a murderer. I fantasize about Mario-Kart-shelling

bad drivers all the time, that doesn't mean I literally want bloodshed on the New Jersey Turnpike, unless they're asking for it. As Zarathustra spake, - We have a name, a perfect name, for fantasy realized. It's called nightmare. Our violent and twisted fantasies are unconscious solutions to the problem of anxiety, and really we're all just seeking pleasure and safety. So probably it's fine. Right? It's fine. A little bit of healthy sadism never hurt anyone. (dramatic orchestral music) (choir singing) Part four, power. Is it really fine though? We're not done. We're not even close to done. I'm

just getting warmed up. What feels incomplete to me about the "it's just fantasy" argument, is that "Twilight" is a fantasy, yes, but it's a fantasy that still reflects something real about the sexual dynamics between men and women. I mostly agree with Nancy Friday's and Michael Bader's psychological analysis of fantasies. But psychology without material analysis of power fails to explain some important things. This becomes really obvious with sexual fantasies involving racial fetishism. For example, there's a chapter of Nancy Friday's book titled, "Big Black Men," which is exactly what it sounds like: The fantasies of white women

who are turned on by an animalistic stereotype of Black men. It's a racial fixation that's very much present as subtext in "Twilight". - I leave you alone for two minutes and the wolves descend. - [Natalie] Jacob is indigenous. He transforms into an animal. His last name is literally Black. - We were great spirit warriors that transformed into a powerful wolf. - Oh god, are the werewolves Lamanites? Stephenie! I regret to inform you that the cuck tent is racist. We could try to psychoanalyze all of this, the "bigness" in question referring not just to anatomy but

to the intensity of desire; the exciting taboo of otherness; animalization as a shame-negating device. And all of that may be true, but aren't these fantasies still also a reflection and possibly a reinforcement of unjust political reality? In his 2016 essay, "Decolonizing My Desire," Slave Play author Jeremy O. Harris describes his experience as a Black gay teenager who became erotically fixated on white men, because to him whiteness represented power and prestige. He concludes that by obsessing over white bodies and white validation, quote "I was failing to exist." I don't see myself as some kind of moral

judge of who's allowed to fantasize about what. (gavel banging) But I've noticed people are usually way less comfortable with fantasies rooted in racism than they are with fantasies about powerful men dominating submissive women. But is that justifiable? Have men not dominated women throughout history? Stephenie Meyer didn't invent this story about a male predator and his female prey out of thin air. Don't a lot of girls grow up being treated as a kind of sexual prey to male predators? Doesn't that have some kind of influence on the fantasies that women have? And can't fantasy sometimes influence

reality? According to criminologist Scott Bonn, "The Behavioral Science Unit of the FBI has concluded that serial killers program themselves in childhood to become murderers through a progressively intensifying loop of fantasy." I can confirm this. My question is, are fantasy power dynamics simply the result of political inequality, or is there something inherently vampiric about sexuality itself? According to Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, the guy who masochism is named after! I wish I could have perversion named after me! According to Masoch, in love, "one person must be the hammer, the other, the anvil." (gavel banging) Is this true? Is

sexuality always ruled by hierarchy, split into binary roles? Is there always a hammer and an anvil, a top and a bottom, a dom and sub, a lover and a beloved, a lion and a lamb? - What a stupid lamb. - What a sick masochistic lion. - In heterosexuality the default assumption is that the man is the lion and the woman is the lamb. But gay people are hardly except from aligning with these types of roles, top and bottom. Some people are born straight, and some have straightness thrust upon us. Let's call the situation Default Heterosexual

Sadomasochism or DHSM. Remember this because I'm gonna say it a lot. DHSM, this division of sexuality into bipolar roles. Masculine, feminine. Active, passive. Subject, object. Lover, beloved. Giving, receiving. Pursuing, pursued. Predator, prey. Dominant, submissive. Possessing, possessed. Conquering, surrendering. Penetrating, penetrated. Voyeuristic, exhibitionistic. Sadistic, masochistic. In reality, none of these dualities are interchangeable or even necessarily correlated. Being masculine does not imply being a top, and neither imply being dominant. Masculinity is gender expression, "top" a sexual position, and "dominant" is a role in a power dynamic. But in DHSM, these roles are assumed to be bundled together, and

assumed to belong to the sexuality of men. When I say "sadomasochism" I don't just mean the narrow sense of enjoying or inflicting pain, but this whole dynamic of dominance and submission. Male dominance is so much the heterosexual default that female dominance, or "Femdom," is usually considered a "kink," that is, it's considered deviant. DHSM defines heterosexuality as the dominance of women by men. Men who are perceived as submissive to women are sometimes called "gay" over such emasculating behavior as leaning towards a woman, pleasuring a woman, walking behind a woman, and holding the baby he sired with

a woman. DHSM is is woven into our much of our language about sexuality. Think about the implications of the term "Impotence", literally, "loss of power", implying that phallic sexuality is fundamentally about power. There is a strong association between masculinity and predation. Meat is considered masculine. A feminine man is called a "soyboy." Edward Cullen is a vegetarian vampire. He's vegetarian because without a guilty conscience he would be incapable of love. But it is important that he be a vampire because the bloodlust gives him his dangerous virile edge. "I want my man to be a predator, not

a cow. A lion" says a woman on tinder who has traumatic experiences with vegans. Don't we all. Supposedly men hunt while women gather. But in DHSM, women become the meat. - Just looks at you like you're something to eat. - In "The Sexual Politics of Meat", vegan feminist Carol J. Adams argues for the interrelation of the oppression of women and the slaughter of animals. She wants to abolish both forms of cruelty from human life. God, we can't slaughter animals or objectify women. Well, what are men supposed to do for fun now? Women's bodies are discussed

as flesh to be consumed, castles under siege, temples to be profaned. Her freshness seal is broken, she becomes "used goods." Smut made for men tends to involve degrading women. Likewise erotic media by women tends to involve themes of submission and surrender. Feminine masochism pervades culture. Lana del Rey says, "He hit me and it felt like a kiss, he hurt me but it felt like true love." Sylvia Plath says "Every woman adores a fascist." From an egalitarian feminist perspective, it's troubling, concerning, that not just in fantasy but in reality, sadomasochism often reflects the social, political, and

sexual domination of women by men. Historically, psychoanalysis considered default heterosexual sadomasochism the result of biological predisposition. Freud says, "The sexuality of most male human beings contains an element of aggressiveness, a desire to subjugate" Daddy chill! Freud's colleague Helene Deutsch argued likewise that quote, "masochism is part of the woman's 'anatomical destiny'" She thought that female masochism results from the inherent pain of women's reproductive role: defloration, menstruation, and childbirth. It's really just a secular version of the Biblical view that women's destiny is pain and submission. "In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be

to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee." A lot of 20th century feminist theory was devoted to arguing against this idea of "anatomical destiny." Feminists have tended to argue that male sadism and female masochism are purely the result of patriarchy, of male social dominance. The idea is that women learn to desire submission from their inferior social position and men learn to desire dominating and degrading women from their superior position. In the 1980s a common radical feminist view was that the "male" and "female" are not natural categories at all, but that they're socially constructed through

violence and exploitation, analogous to "bourgeoisie" and "proletariat." Radical feminist Catherine MacKinnon says, "Male and female are created through the erotization of dominance and submission." "Man (beep) woman; subject verb object." Andrea Dworkin says, "Men are distinguished from women by their commitment to do violence rather than to be victimized by it." Notice how at odds this is with J.K. Rowling's formulation "sex is real" which some radical feminists would once have considered constitutive statement of sexism. There's a return to anatomical destiny lately in the form of TERFism, that is post-feminist conservative bigotry against trans people. Rowling's transphobic arguments

often hinge on an assumption that "males" are natural predators and "females" are natural prey. Or as alien sex inspector Maya Forstater puts it, "In the context of prisons its the hole that matters. Women have a hole... which men want to penetrate. Bluntly, the reason we have men & women's prisons is to keep the men away from the holes." This is anatomical destiny at the Kindergarten level. Woman equals hole, man equals pole. Therefore, man equals predator, woman equals prey. - I like the pole and the hole. - TERFs think that the omegaverse is real, that men

are anatomical alphas and women are anatomical omegas. Stephenie Meyer takes a more genderfluid view. In the introduction to femdom "Twilight", "Life and Death", Stephenie says, "I've always maintained that it would have made no difference if the human were male and the vampire female, it's still the same story." And are there not male masochists and female sadists? Masochism is named after a man, a man who once said, "Nothing kindles my passion quite so much as tyranny, cruelty and above all unfaithfulness in a beautiful woman." Send him to the cuck tent. Send him to the tent of

cuckoldry. Even if there is an anatomical disposition of men to sadism and women to masochism, disposition is not destiny. Both men and women are anatomically capable of being the hammer or the anvil, the predator or the prey. So I think that feminists are mostly correct to point to the history of male social dominance as the reason for the default gendered roles. Until the The Married Women's Property Act of 1870, English women were subject to a system called coverture, meaning that when a woman married, her entire legal existence was subsumed under that of her husband, and

she effectively lost the right to own property or make contracts. In the US it was only as recently as 1974 that women won the right to open independent bank accounts. The same year they started having sexual fantasies. Amazing! So historically the erotic and the economic fates of women have been fused. It's the key to historical romance novels like "Pride and Prejudice", where the tension is between Elizabeth's desire for a marriage of love and her economic need for a marriage of security. Incels like to complain about "female hypergamy," and Mr. Bennet sits around making sarcastic quips

about it. That's right, we're coming for Mr. Bennet in this video. Nothing is sacred. But women's preference for wealthy, powerful partners is the result of gender roles that make women dependent and subservient. Women are not "biologically attracted to providers." Elizabeth and then Lydia are initially attracted to Wickham, even though he has no money. In "Titanic", upper-class Rose is attracted to working-class Leo. In "Wuthering Heights" Catherine is attracted to feral dogboy Heathcliffe. And in "Twilight" Bella is attracted to feral dogboy Jacob. Women are attracted to disempowered and impoverished men all the time. But because of their

social and economic dependence, for most of history a story about a woman who loves a lower class man is not a romance. It's a tragedy. Catherine says, "It would degrade me to marry Healthcliff" If the boy is poor, there's no room on the door. So I'm prepared to believe that most of DHSM is the result of class struggle and not of genital anatomy. But either way, how do we explain male masochists? How do we explain gay or lesbian people who practice BDSM or who identify as tops or bottoms? Why does there need to be a

hammer and an anvil at all? Do we need sexual hierarchy? Can't we just have a sexuality that's based on gentleness and equality and humane democratic values? Well, that is exactly the question that divided feminists in the 1980s, a conflict known as the Feminist Sex Wars. And I'm bringing it back. Let's have a feminist sex war. (upbeat rock music) So look, I'm now gonna try to fairly present the arguments of sex-negative radical feminism, which-fair warning-can be difficult to hear. Because they're kind of saying that your most intimate desires and relationships are founded on violence and injustice.

And I'm trans so I'm used to constantly having to defend my sexuality but straight people, this might be new to you. So, strap in. - You should put your seatbelt on. - (laughing) You should put your seatbelt on. - Sex-negative feminism is a backlash against the sexual revolution of the '60s and '70s. The general idea of the sexual revolution was that sexuality should be liberated from marriage, from the state, from religion, and from the imperative to procreate. The radical feminist objection to it is basically that, in practice, the sexual revolution was only a "liberation" of

men's desire to dominate women. Radical feminist Andrea Dworkin says, quote, "Freedom, that hallowed word, is valued only when used in reference to male desire. For women, freedom means only that men are free to use them." Sexual libertarians sometimes imply that sexual repression is inherently bad. But many women experience violence at the hands of men whose sexuality is not repressed enough. To those women, freedom of sexuality may seem less important than freedom from sexuality. Sometimes sexual repression is good. Freedom for the lion is not freedom for the lamb. The question is, is it possible to liberate

sex without liberating violence? And for sex-negative feminists the answer is basically, no. As they see it we have to choose between sexuality and women's rights, and we should choose women's rights. This is a tough sell for most people, but okay, let's hear it out. The final boss of sex-negative feminism is former academic Shiela Jeffreys. Quote, "The demolition of heterosexual desire is a necessary step on the route to women's liberation." Good luck with that! Now, I love Sheila Jeffreys, I think she's hilarious. But I'm an intellectual masochist. I get off on bad ideas. - My tastes

are very singular. - These days Sheila Jeffreys blends in as just another generic English transphobe, these people are a dime a dozen. - That problem is that men doing woman-face is insulting to women. When they're just walking down the street or sitting at a cafe, activities for which they need an unwilling audience of women in order to get sexual excitement. - She goes podcasts and talks about how trans women are perverted fetishists parasitically occupying female bodies, which, yeah yeah yeah, that is now the mainstream conservative view, so thank you for that Sheila. Sheila Jeffreys actually

pioneered a lot of these transphobic arguments. She walked so J.K. Rowling could run. Give the devil her due. Sheila's 2020 autobiography is titled "Trigger Warning", which should give you some idea of where she stands in the current culture war. Like a hack comedian who hasn't been funny in 30 years. I guess even lesbians aren't immune to boomer brainworms. Sad! But back in the '80s and '90s, Sheila was actually saying some genuinely subversive things. Not good things, but subversive. That quote about demolishing heterosexual desire is from her 1990 book "Anticlimax, A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual

Revolution". Which is an amazingly bad book on sex and gender, not just because of the transphobia, not just because of bizarre claims like that women today are required to wear mandatory "slut pumps" at the office, but also because of the absurdly bold stance she takes on abolishing heterosexuality. Which I realize may sound based, as the kids say. - I'm down with the kids. - But it is in fact cringe. This book is bad, but it's bad in a way that is legitimately fascinating. In a way that we can all learn from. So according to Sheila,

the end goal of feminism is quote, "the destruction of heterosexuality as a system." She was influenced by radfem Jill Johnson, who in 1973 said, "Feminism at heart is a massive complaint. Lesbianism is the solution. Until all women are lesbians there will be no true political revolution." These people were dead serious, this is not a bit. In 1979, Sheila Jeffreys co-authored with the Leeds Revolutionary Feminist Group, a paper titled "Political Lesbianism: The Case Against Heterosexuality". If I try to summarize the it, you will think that I'm drawing a caricature. So I'm just going to read you

some direct quotes, and I encourage you to go read it yourself to verify I'm not taking things out of context. Quote, "Serious feminists have no choice but to abandon heterosexuality." "Men are the enemy. Heterosexual women are collaborators with the enemy." "Attached to all forms of sexual behavior are meanings of dominance and submission, power and powerlessness, conquest and humiliation." "Any woman who takes part in a heterosexual couple helps to shore up male supremacy by making its foundations stronger." So, how do you think this paper was received by the women's liberation movement? You probably won't be surprised

to hear that it was not hugely popular. When Sheila presented these arguments on a panel, the socialist feminist Lynne Segal said the speech made her feel as if she had been shot. Sheila says, "At the time we were not able to understand why the paper had provoked such a virulent attack." I can't imagine why feminists would be so hostile to my simply pointing out that all women in relationships with men are counterrevolutionary traitors. One hears such arguments, what can one say but, "Sheila Jeffreys." As Jack Halberstam said, "If Sheila Jeffreys didn't exist, Camille Paglia would

have had to invent her." I promise it's funny if you know who these people are. Please clap. I mean it's one thing to seek community with other women who renounce relationships with men and are excluded from the vicarious power that comes with that. Every marginalized community has separatist fringe, which can be a valid choice. But where things get cuckoo-bananas is when you start insisting that all feminists must renounce relationships with men. Because, I'm sorry to say, that will literally never happen. And this kind of thing only divides the left, when we should be united against

the real enemy, the Vaushite counterrevolutionaries. But there's an abstract kind of logic to Sheila's argument. You could put it like this: Premise one, power imbalances in sexual relationships are oppressive. Premise two, under patriarchy, men as a class have power over women. Therefore, any sexual relationship between a man and a woman involves a power imbalance. Therefore, all heterosexual relationships are oppressive. Therefore men are the enemy, women who date them are gender traitors. Is this argument wrong? Why is it wrong? Well it's wrong because libido laughs in the face of reason. You can't just reason people into

being LGBT, Sheila. I've tried. - It's not a lifestyle choice, Bella. I was born this way. I can't help it. - So in "Anticlimax", Sheila makes an interesting shift. She still advocates abolishing heterosexuality but now she redefines "heterosexuality" as "sexual desire that eroticizes power difference." The reason for the redefinition seems to be that instead of feuding with heterosexual feminists Sheila is now feuding with lesbian sadomasochists, whom she argues are, in fact, heterosexual, because they "eroticize power." And eroticizing power includes anything from top/bottom dynamics, to kink, to interracial relationships, to good old-fashioned penetration. So according to

this view, gay men who have penetrative sex are in fact heterosexual. Because they uphold the oppressive power of the phallus that subordinates women. Gay women who identify as butch or femme? They're heterosexual, because just roleplaying oppressive heterosexuality. The only true homosexuals, according to Sheila Jeffreys, are couples who "eroticize equality." So what does that mean? It means, no penetration. No tops and bottoms. No kinky fuckery. And no gender expression, apart from the androgynous Spock-core aesthetic Sheila Jeffreys was rocking. So what is left of sex when you only eroticize equality? Well, egalitarian sex turns out to be

two ideally non-transsexual women, who are the same age, race, and class; with the same androgynous haircut; lying side by side, no one on top or on bottom, just gently, non-aggressively whispering sweet words of consciousness-raising to each other throughout the night. Join the revolution. The tender loving twincest revolution. You're probably getting very irritated listing to this. I am also irritated. But I want to be very clear about why I'm irritated. I have no problem at all with Sheila Jeffreys defining sex as whatever it means to her. A courtesy she's never extended to anyone else in her

entire life, but we should extend it to her on principle. If sex for you means tender consciousness, raising sessions between the sheets with your androgynous galpals, by all means continue. We also should acknowledge egalitarian sex is genuinely marginalized. There are ways of having sex, like, you know... where both participants are equally active, and there's no clear dichotomy of giver and receiver. Mainstream straight and gay culture dismisses egalitarian or non-penetrative sex as as immature, as "not real sex," as not going "all the way." Gay dating app Grindr only added "side" as a selectable position in 2022.

The unthinkability of egalitarian sex to many people shows how deep DHSM goes. So Sheila Jeffreys is correct to defend the legitimacy of egalitarian sex against DHSM. But again the problem is when you declare that your version of egalitarian sex is the only legitmate one, and that everyone else is "upholding the oppressive system." I find this to be a deeply lazy, incurious, and unempathetic way of thinking. It's unpsychological, this attitude of total indifference to what is going on in other people's minds. Why is Sheila like this? I think it's because she feels like she used to

be a heterosexual. Until the age of 28, when she made a rational, conscious choice to become an egalitarian, androgynous, trans-exclusionary, non-sadomasochistic lesbian. And she thinks that every other woman can and should make that choice. She says in "Trigger Warning", quote, "In the late 1970s, I rejected heterosexuality and chose to become a lesbian." Lynn Alderson explained to me in patient detail the reasons to become a lesbian." She describes how one evening she was with her boyfriend and his guy friend, watching a TV drama in which a schoolboy puts his hand up a teacher's skirt. Quote, "I

looked at the two young men beside me, neither of whom looked particularly affected, and then I had an epiphany. I could not see the point of spending time in the company of those who were members of the oppressor class. I chose, from that day to the present, to have only women in my personal and emotional life. I was suddenly open to the feelings I was increasingly having towards other women, not necessarily sexual but profoundly emotional feelings." So this is the story of how Sheila Jeffreys quit heterosexuality. And so can you! (upbeat music) And again, I'm

not saying that Sheila Jeffreys "isn't valid" or that's she's "not a real lesbian." No, we're not doing that. Her experience is valid, for whatever that's worth, but it isn't typical. Most people do not experience their sexual orientation as the result of a rational process of consciously deciding the correct course of action after considering the advice of trusted colleagues. Many heterosexual women totally agree with Sheila Jeffreys, that hashtag men are trash and they love to say, "I wish I were a lesbian", and talk about how gross and cringe heterosexuality is, and yet they continue being straight,

because libido doesn't follow reason. For most of us, Eros is an archer. We feel penetrated by something outside ourselves. Possessed by this alien desire. I can't help but wonder if what sex-negative feminists fear in sexuality is in fact Eros. Not just the physical penetration of heterosexual intercourse, but the emotional penetration of romantic love. And the loss of self-possession that comes with it. - None of them belong to themselves anymore. And the sickest part is, their genes tell them they're happy about it. - Telling yourself that everything you do is because of reason and logic soothes

the anxiety of uncertainty, and disguises the reality that none of us really have that much control over anything, not even our own desires. And isn't that the point of fantasies like "Twilight"? They make it feel safe to surrender to this frightening, overwhelming force inside us. I feel like the only reasonable view for radical feminists to take is that changing society will change sexuality. But instead Sheila argues the opposite. That we should change society by changing sexuality. By abolishing it. Sheila is aware that most people can't freely direct their own sexual orientation through acts of the

will. She even cites a feminist therapist who quote, "Encouraged her clients to democratize their relationships. The couples kept returning to her with a new problem, they were 'unable to summon up desire. Love yes, but not desire.'" I think many, even most people, find that equality, like wisdom, is not exciting. And Sheila's solution for these people is celibacy. So to recap, Sheila thinks that women should live in female-only communities, where no one has sex but everyone shares, a kind of vague homoeroticism. And I feel like this type of utopia already exists, and in fact has existed

for hundreds of years. It's called a convent. Doesn't Sheila Jeffreys want to be a nun? - This is where I belong. It's my home, my family. It's my life. - Has she reinvented Christianity? Well no. She's invented something worse. Because at least Christianity is honest about the fact that our will does not control our lusts. - You have to live the life you were born to live. - In mainstream Christianity the idea that we can simply choose to live a sinless life is known as Pelagian heresy. This was refuted by Augustine, the North African theologian

who argued that we have all lusted in our heart because we are of a fallen nature, we inherit the sin of Adam, we are stained from birth by the filth of concupiscence. And you might say, aren't you overthinking "Twilight"? - No, but it's the children who are underthinking it. Augustine's claim is that our will can overcome temptation with God's grace. But Christians don't make the psychologically batshit claim that we can consciously direct our lust toward virtue. Sexuality can be repressed or resisted or it can be sublimated into creative or spiritual energy, but free will plays

very little role in either love or lust. So Sheila Jeffrey's feminism is actually more repressive than Christianity. Because at least in Christianity, you get to talk about how sinful and wretched you are. My favorite activity! Part five, death. (soft music) Sometimes late at night I read "Twilight" and I wonder, am I prepared for death? Is anyone? I've argued that sex-negative feminists are wrong about psychology, freedom, and fantasy. But are they wrong about sex? Well, not entirely. It sounds like an extreme provocation when radfems say things like, "Attached to all forms of sexual behavior are meanings

of dominance and submission, power and powerlessness, conquest and humiliation." But among theorists of sexuality across the ideological spectrum there's a surprising amount of consensus on this point. Radical feminism's mortal enemy Doctor Father says, "The history of human civilization shows beyond any doubt that there is an intimate connection between cruelty and the sexual instinct" Sexual libertarian Camille Paglia says, "All phases of procreation are ruled by appetite: sexual intercourse, from kissing to penetration, consists of movements of barely controlled cruelty and consumption." In other words, there's a pretty wide consensus that human sexuality is, in fact, vampiric. That

is, it's ruled by hierarchy, cruelty, and consumption. The real disagreement is about why that is, and what we should do about it. Let's address the why question. Why is sexuality vampiric? The radical feminist response is, "because of patriarchy." Radfems argue sadomasochism simply mirrors the social reality of male supremacy, even when inverted in female dominance, or when practiced by same-sex couples, who radfems say are just imitating heterosexuality. And sure, I do think patriarchy is responsible for default male dominance, but I think sadomasochism in general has roots deeper than political inequality. Let's start by thinking about why

sexuality even exists in the first place. Why can't we just be normal? (kid screaming) We can't be normal because we're not bacteria. We can't reproduce by mitosis. In the scene where Bella and Edward first introduce each other, they are in a science lab, looking through a microscope at the stages of mitosis. - Prophase. - It's metaphase. - Anaphase. - Now you could say "maybe it's just a coincidence, it doesn't mean anything." Okay, well maybe everything's just a coincidence. Maybe nothing means anything. Maybe life is pointless. Asexual reproduction is fission. The cell duplicates its chromosomes and

rips itself in half, creating two daughter cells. So what happens to the mother cell when it divides? Is fission death or is it eternal life? Well it depends on what we mean by "death." I promise this is still about "Twilight". Wait for it. Death is the dissolution of the boundaries that define individual existence. Each individual thing is distinguished from other things by its edges: the membrane of a cell; the skin of an animal; the border of a country. In asexual reproduction, the life of the species requires the death of the individual, the mother cell must

split to reproduce. Sexual reproduction also contains a paradox of life and death, but instead of fission we have fusion, in fertilization, where two gametes merge to create new life. Sexuality also involves fusion at a social and emotional level. Your partner is "your other half" because in love two people have become one entity. The Bible says two married people leave their father and mother and "become one flesh." Even if they don't biologically reproduce, the couple is a new social union that comes into being, at the expense of the their former family ties and of the boundaries

that used to define two separate individuals. So love and sex create new life, but they also involve a kind of death. In 1912 the psychoanalyst Sabina Spielrein published a paper called "Destruction as the Cause of Becoming," which sent Freud reeling into a thought spiral that led him to theorize the death drive. The question Spielrein wanted to answer is quote, "Why does this most powerful drive, the reproductive drive, in addition to the expected positive feelings, harbor negative feelings, such as anxiety and disgust? Spielrein is trying to explain the ambivalence, the element of fear and trembling in

every sexual encounter. - (sighing) Don't be a coward. - She sees the cellular merging of the two gametes, this creation of new life from the destruction of the parent cells, as as an image representing the emotional conflicts of sexuality. Erotic love is always a threat to our sense of self, to our identity as a distinct individual. - I have begun to blur. (dramatic music) - It's similar to the terror and awe of mystical experiences, encounters with God or psychedelic oneness, where you both fear and desire losing the edges of your ego. In St. Teresa of

Avila's mystical encounter with the angel she quote, "saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails. When he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be

rid of it." The obvious atheist thing to say is that this is just like a repressed Renaissance woman getting off on Jesus. And yes, there's obviously a sexual element to it, but is that all? Couldn't it also be that both mystical and sexual experiences penetrate the edges of the self? Blurring the line between self and other can be ecstatic or terrifying or both. It's like when you eat too many mushrooms and melt into the universal mind lattice. Whenever boundaries become unstable, a crisis of identity occurs. Xenophobic people experience immigration as a violation of the nation's

borders. - Build that wall, build that wall, build that wall, build that wall. - It's a crisis of national identity they conceptualize as "invasion." I think that paranoia about vaccines is of a similar type. The physical boundary of our bodies is our skin, which is punctured by the needle. (needle stabbing) The government is coercing us into being injected, penetrated. It causes deep fears about bodily integrity that people rationalize with conspiracy theories. For radical feminist Andrea Dworkin, intercourse is inherently invasion, it's occupation, it's annihilation. Dworkin views penetration as an atrocity committed against women by men, tantamount

to colonization and war crimes. I think she overstates the case somewhat. Is it really an invasion if the "invader" was invited in? The argument is that women are coerced into consenting. That no woman would consent intercourse without coercion. You can decide for yourself if you find that empowering or extremely condescending. I think penetration can be re-conceptualized as giving, as offering, an act of service. But if we're being honest, most of the time penetration is associated with dominance. (needle stabbing) (wood cracking) Don't men have sexual paranoias of their own? In romance men fear viscosity, the overly

attached girlfriend. (eerie music) In sex men sometimes fear engulfment, devouring, castration, losing part of themselves in the woman, their precious bodily fluids. - Women sense my power, and they seek the life essence. - Not all fears are equally valid. I do think the penetrated partner is made more vulnerable in most cases. If I may adjudicate as the Tiresias in this debate. In both penetration and devouring, the boundaries between people are violated. Violation may be fundamental to sexuality, even when there is no penetration. Freud's partial drives, oral, anal, and phallic, all involve the movement of a

substance into or out of the body. Simply the act of stripping naked destroys a boundary. And at the interior, emotional level, desire is a wound. Subjectively, desire feels violating. Anne Carson says, "When I desire you, a part of me is gone, your lack is my lack. I would not be in want of you unless you had partaken of me, the lover reasons. 'A hole is being gnawed in my vitals' says Sappho. Theokritos says you have "sucked my blood". This is why vampirism is a metaphor for sexuality in "Twilight", and in most vampire media. In "Midnight

Sun", we learn what Edward is thinking next to Bella in biology, holding his breath to avoid quote, "sinking my teeth through that fine, thin, see-through skin to the hot, wet, pulsing-" - [Stephenie] There's a reason my books have a lot of innocence." - Masculine and feminine sexual hazards are blended in vampires, who both penetrate you and devour your precious bodily fluids. They have an androgynous appeal, both male and female vampires are capable of penetrating and capable of sucking. It's probably one reason there's so many LGBT vampires, and lesbian vampires in particular. The lesbian vampire is

an oral sadist. For Freud the oral stage is quote, "cannibalistic pregenital sexual organization. Here sexual activity has not yet been separated from the ingestion of food. The sexual aim consists in the incorporation of the object." Adult sexuality develops out of infantile roots, beginning with the hunger for mommy's milk. Freud considers it an infantile regression but I for one stand by the oral stage. I think it's a fine stage. (grand orchestral music) Babies are little vampires, they drink sustenance from what they love. Vampirism is a sub-genre of cannibalism. And cannibalism is usually connected in some way

with the urge to merge. - I don't even know where you end and I begin. - Reddit user Succy-Memebavaran explains, "The thing about vore that appeals to me is the closeness and intimacy between the two parties involved. I mean, it's literally letting someone inside you. In a weird and abstract way, it's really cute. Think of it like cuddling taken to the extreme." Awww. These are not realistic cannibal fantasies. Most people into "vore" have no interest in literally consuming human flesh. But, of course, there's always that one-in-a-million psycho who takes things too far and ruins it

for everyone. Cannibal lust killer Jeffrey Dahmer claims he selected victims based on physical beauty, killing and eating them quote- - Not because I was angry with them, not because I hated them, but because I wanted to keep them with me, possess them permanently. It was a way of making me feel that they were a part of me." - Male serial killers, they don't even make use of the skin. Even Dahmer's outlandish crimes are just a morally deranged enactment of totally commonplace erotic themes. Possession, dominance, fusion, eternal life in death. French philosopher and pervert Georges Bataille

says, quote, "The urge towards love, pushed to its limit, is an urge toward death. What does physical eroticism signify if not a violation of the very being of its practitioners? A violation bordering on death, bordering on murder?" Love is fusion and fusion entails a kind of death. Death and reproduction are deeply connected in human symbolism. Most religious traditions connect death to some form of rebirth, reincarnation, resurrection, rapture. Many people feel that having children is their path to immortality. And that's true in a way. But in another sense you are raising the generation that will replace

you. In literature and mythology love often leads to death. Romeo and Juliet, Hades and Persephone, Tristan and Iseult, Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, Jack Titanic. Shakespeare says, "Desire is death". The French call orgasm, Le Pain Quotidien. "Twilight"'s epigraph is Genesis 2:17. "But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it, for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die." The fruit of the forbidden tree brings lust and death into the world. James 1:15, "Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin, and sin, when it is

finished, bringeth forth death." Is there any other YouTuber who quotes scripture as much as I do? I feel like we're always cracking open the goddamn bible. Well, crack open your bibles. Romans 6:23, "For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord." So lust is death, sin is death, but the death of Jesus Christ is eternal life. Christians are united with Christ and incorporated into his sacrifice in the ritual blood-drinking of the Eucharist. Sacrifice, desire, crucifixion, reproduction, death, and resurrection, all of these ideas are symbolically

related in the Western imagination. And this is the network of associations that Stephenie Meyer evokes in "Twilight". Before her wedding, Bella has bloody nightmares anticipating vampire transformation and, I assume, symbolizing defloration. - Wedding jitters. - The marriage is violently consummated leaving Bella bruised and instantly pregnant. The baby is a vampire, sucking the life from her body. Childbirth is agonizing death. Has any other popular author ever dwelled so much on the violence of childbirth? Bella's body is destroyed giving birth to Renesmee. The baby cracks her spine, it bites her breast, her baby-crazed sister-in-law performs a C-section

without anesthesia. The book even is more graphic. Bella is vomiting blood, it's nauseating to read. Edward saves Bella by injecting his venom and doing chest compressions, which begins her excruciating transformation. Quote, "I wanted to raise my arms and claw my chest open and rip the heart from it, anything to get rid of this torture." So she suffers for three days on the slab, after which she rises, reborn as a vampire. ♪ Hallelujah ♪ - Can you think of anyone else who died in agony only to be resurrected three days later? I'm coming up blank. I've

got nothing. For Stephenie Meyer childbirth is crucifixion. It's death that gives eternal life. If "Twilight" makes explicit some of the sadomasochistic subtext of Christianity, "Fifty Shades of Grey" takes it even further. Christian's name is literally Christian. Ana is tied in cruciform pose while sacred music by Thomas Tallis plays. (choir singing) Anastasia is Jesus in this scene. Like Bella is Jesus in childbirth. We're meant to understand that this is sacred pain, sacred sex, sacred violence. Does Christianity have sadomasochistic subtext, or does BDSM have a Christian subtext? (soft electronic music) Take a hit. Leave a comment. Either

way, my argument has a lot of Biblical support. In the book of Genesis, God creates the sex binary through the violence of fission. He takes the rib out of Adam and makes Eve. Adam calls her "flesh of my flesh, bone of my bones." Then in marriage the two sexes become one flesh again, through the violence of fusion. Can we talk about the sanctity of sex and violence? I promise this is about "Twilight". Okay, I'm not gonna go off on some wild tangent in a video about "Twilight". Like eroticism, sanctity is a matter of boundaries. The

sacred is contrasted with the profane. The word "profane" comes from the Latin profanum, meaning before the temple, outside the temple. So the sacred is what's in the temple. It's what's set apart, as close to God or gods. Religion and ritual impose order on the world, creating distinctions between the sacred and the profane. It sounds weird to say that sex and violence are sacred, because aren't sex and violence the number one things that religious people are always whining about? Well, yes and no. God said to Moses "thou shalt not kill." A simple commandment, the sort of

thing you can carve in stone. Nevertheless, Deuteronomy 20:16 says, "in the cities of the nations the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them, the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the (muttering). As the Lord your God has commanded you." Well that sounds an awful like killing to me, a-ding! (triangle ringing) It's only the Book of Deuteronomy and we're already wiping out entire cities? - [Divine] Kill everyone now! - So maybe the commandment "thou shalt not kill" only means don't kill Israelites. In fact,

that is what it means. The Canaanites don't have a covenant with God so, (beep) 'em! - [Divine] Condone first degree murder. - But killing Israelites is not entirely off the table either. For example, according to Leviticus 20:13, say it with me! "If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination, they shall surely be unalived." (kids cheering) Okay, so no killing, except the Canaanites and the gays. The exceptions are stacking. So the commandment isn't really "thou shalt not kill", it's "thou shalt not kill, (dramatic music) unless." Likewise

Leviticus 17 seems to prohibit the slaughter of animals, (dramatic music) unless, you kill them sacrificially at the tabernacle, in the sacred space. Christians tend not to read Leviticus, but I do. Because I enjoy violence and I hate myself. Leviticus is important context for the entire story of Christianity. Jesus is "the Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world." What does that mean? What does it mean? It doesn't make any sense, unless you're familiar with Leviticus and you understand that killing a lamb is a ritual of atonement. Is a ritual of atone- (laughing)

The tabernacle of Moses was in a goddamn shantytown slaughterhouse, the sacred barbecue. Sorry, I'm doing a lot of blasphemy, but frankly I think God is bored with you people. I think he enjoys my innovative interpretations. A lamb had to be sacrificed every morning and every evening, in addition to all the sin and guilt sacrifices. When Solomon dedicated the temple we're told he sacrificed 22,000 oxen and 120,000 sheep. Imagine the blood. Imagine the blood. The elevator in "The Shining" doesn't even come close. We can't talk about vampire romance without understanding the symbolism of blood. A paradox

in Leviticus is that blood is both cleansing and unclean. We're told that menstruating women are unclean; a woman who gives birth is unclean; eating blood is forbidden, sorry vamps. But when a woman has been made "unclean" through the blood of irregular menstruation or childbirth, how does she atone and become clean again? Well, by sacrificing an animal and spilling its blood. People have been trying to understand this paradox for literally thousands of years, I'm not gonna pretend that I have it figured out. But I feel like it has something to do with blood representing a transition

between life and death. Leviticus 17 forbids eating blood because "the life of every creature is its blood: its blood is its life." When is blood spilled? When a child is born, beginning life; and when a lamb's throat is cut, ending life. - What a stupid lamb. - Could we said that blood is liminal? (soft music) It's super, it's liminal. It's uncanny. It's abject. Another explanation comes from Georges Bataille who argues quote, "Whatever is the subject of a prohibition is basically sacred. The sacred world depends on limited acts of transgression." So all societies have taboos, usually

governing food, sex, reproduction, blood, violence, dead bodies, you know, the good stuff. Bataille's argument is that every taboo has exceptions, paradoxically "permitted transgressions." And those permitted transgressions simply are the sacred. "Thou shalt not kill, (dramatic music) unless" The "unless" is the permitted transgression, is the sacred. The commandment "thou shat not commit adultery" could be rephrased as "thou shalt not have sex, (dramatic music) unless" Unless it's with the person you're married to, for the purpose of procreation, or whatever it is you people do. Sex is probably taboo for the same reason that killing is. Rene Girard

says, "Sexuality is impure because it has to do with violence." Unregulated sex leads to abuse, seduction, assault, disease, parentless children, defenseless women, cheating, jealousy, rivalry, literally the Trojan War. And we could argue about how effective marriage really is at preventing those things. But in theory, sex, like killing, has to be contained within the boundaries of the sacred, in this case marriage. Bataille says, "The initial sexual act constituting marriage is a permitted violation." If sacrifice is sacred slaughter, then, marriage is sacred sex. I wonder if a wedding is also a kind of sacrifice. It takes place

on an altar, usually where sacrifices happen. Who's the sacrificial lamb? Well I assume the bride. She's the virgin on the altar, at least the symbolic virgin. "Twilight" uses evocative imagery of red splashed all over white. Purity and blood, life and death. People say "your wedding is your first funeral." The bride is going to die to beget life. That makes her sacrificial, Christ-like. A wedding is a ritualized transgression of the usual taboo on sex. And these dynamics of taboo and transgression make human sex and violence fundamentally different from "natural," animal sex and violence. I think it's

wrong to conclude, as Paul Shepard does, that quote, "There is a danger in all carnivores, including humans, of confusing the two kinds of veneral aggression, loving and hunting." Human sexual aggression is not like animal predation. It's conceptual rather than instinctive. Bataille says, quote, "The object some undiscriminating animal is after is not what is desired; the object is 'forbidden,' sacred, and the very prohibition attached to it is what arouses the desire." The idea that the taboo creates the desire explains the element of profanation in sadistic sexual fantasy. The word "sadism" is named after 18th century French

author and sex criminal the Marquis de Sade. De Sade was convicted on charges of "debauchery and immoderate libertinage" and imprisoned in the Bastille, where he wrote "120 Days of Sodom", a heartwarming classic beloved to this day by children of all ages. "Debauchery and immoderate libertinage" sounds very quaint very charming, but let's be clear, De Sade was drugging and abusing sex workers. He tortured some folks. - We tortured some folks. - Gen Z is canceling the Marquis de Sade. Is nothing sacred? "120 Days of Sodom". I don't know if I can accurately summarize this book in

a way that's even allowed on YouTube. I'll try. Uh, four wealthy libertines imprison a group of youths in a castle where old prostitutes tell stories about every conceivable blasphemy, crime, and perversion. - And you did it at my birthday dinner. - Then the whole thing escalates into an orgy of, you know, grape and unalivement. Still a better love story than- I'm bringing this up because De Sade illustrates Bataille's point that the transgressive is desired because it is forbidden. Personally I don't find Sade's work sexy. If anything it's funny, like the way John Waters is funny.

- Advocate cannibalism, eat shit. - Because comedy, like sexuality, relies on transgression. The things described in "120 Days of Sodom", like, bodily fluids are excreted on a crucifix, which is then deployed in unspeakable acts of- - Oh my God. - This is not "natural," animal aggression. When Sade's champion Camille Paglia says, "Nature's reality is Sadean, red in tooth and claw," this is a misuse of Sade's name. Because there's nothing "natural" about "120 Days of Sodom". There is aggression in nature. Dolphins, for example, are sexually violent. Don't Google it, you don't need this in your brain.

But dolphins to do not commit sex crimes, because dolphins do not have laws. - [Announcer] In the criminally justice system, sexually based offenses are considered especially- (dolphin chirping) ♪ There'll be no accusations ♪ ♪ Just friendly crust- ♪ - Only human violence is ritualized, it always stands in some relation to taboo, whether it's a sacred permitted transgression, or a profane criminal transgression. Jeffrey Dahmer sketched a diagram of a shrine he was planning to create, an altar on which to display his victim's skulls. This is not animal predation. Lions do not build shrines for the skulls

of the lambs. The element of blasphemy in De Sade is the most telling. In sadistic fantasy, the sacred is invoked so it can be profaned. Bataille says quote, "Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled." The "polluting" or "despoiling" of beauty is a major theme in male-oriented smut films. There's a lot of fluids being, you know, blasted everywhere. I think this a real point of conflict within heterosexuality. A lot of women want to be intensely desired by men, a lot of women fantasize about being virtuosically ravished by men, but far fewer women swoon

at the prospect of being "befouled." I mean, some women do. Right? For anything you can think of, there's someone who is into it. But feminine submissive fantasies if anything tend to sanctify sexuality. Before it was called "Fifty Shades of Grey", this "Twilight" fanfiction was titled "Master of the Universe". "Master of the Universe" is not what you call a man, it's what you call a God. ♪ What if God was one of us ♪ - By submitting to a God-like man, the masochistic woman elevates herself. Whereas a sadistic man elevates himself by putting down a woman.

Masculine sadistic fantasy usually involves degradation and despoiling of the woman. Her beauty is a sacred temple that he profanes with his, in this case, not-so-precious bodily fluids. - We want to drench your angel wings that carry you to heaven with our sticky, gooey, disgusting (beep). - So in a way, sadism and masochism are in fact not complementary at all. The philosopher Deleuze recounts a joke that "tells of the meeting between a sadist and a masochist. The masochist says, 'Hurt me.' The sadist replies, 'No.'" Christian Grey is not, as he claims, a sadist. - I get

off on punishing women, women who look like you- - Like your mother. - He's masochist's fantasy of a sadist. In reality a sadist and a masochist do not belong together. The ideal pairing is probably two masochists who alternate taking the active role in masochistic play acting. You know what, maybe we should abolish heterosexuality. I'm sorry Sheila Jeffreys, you were right. Let's return to our question from three tangents ago, why is sexuality vampiric? Why is it so hard to make sexuality conform to humane political ideals of pacifism and equality? I think part of the answer is

that sexuality inherently enrolls the violation of boundaries and the overcoming of barriers. Something has to rip the bodice. And there's a lot of bodices to be ripped. It's not just Freud's guilt, shame, and anxiety, it's not just Nancy Friday's "lifetime of women's rules against sex." It's also the taboo against sex that allows society to function. It's the fear of reproduction and death, the fear of losing your identity and boundaries to desire and to fusion. All of this must be overcome for climax to be reached. And we can conceptualize the overcoming as a conquest or as

a surrender but there is no pacifying the emotional experience of eroticism. It is conflicted by nature. Bittersweet. Eroticism is a dialectic of life and death, love and hate, tenderness and violence, taboo and transgression, separation and unity. And that's why Edward Cullen is a vampire. The threat of losing yourself, of losing your boundaries will always be a source of ambivalence, no matter how egalitarian or how permissive society's attitudes toward sex become. Sadomasochistic fantasy has psychological origins that cannot be fully explained by leftist analysis of social hierarchy, nor abolished by consciousness-raising or revolutionary action. Sexuality is not

a pure innocent thing that gets "perverted" by corrupt society. No, I agree with Augustine that lust is inherently perverted, and society's role is to channel it into outlets that minimize violence. And those outlets may include novels and movies and erotica and "problematic ships," none of which are to blame for "perverting" sexuality. These things are an expression of something inherently turbulent within us, which for me is symbolized by the sea. The inherently erotic sea. Why is the ocean inherently erotic? Well, because of the rhythmic expansion-contraction cycles of her wave motion, yes of course. But also because

she's mother, because she's life; she's birth, she's death. She's the primal horror of horrors and the sweet womb of mother night. She's erotic because she beckons and we come. Stephenie Meyer is of course aware of all this. Maybe not consciously, but it's all there, it's all in "Twilight". Edward and Bella's ecstatic union takes place where? In the sea. As Emily Dickinson said, "Rowing in Eden, ah, the Sea! Might I but moor, tonight, in thee! (alarm blaring) Penetration! (alarm blaring) I know what you get up to Emily, and I'm reporting you to Sheila Jeffreys. (blowing) (harpsichord

music) Part six, identity. I am once again wearing an evening gown at home in the middle of the night, to film a YouTube video by myself. I do it for you. The longest "Twilight" book is "Midnight Sun". This thing is like a blunt weapon. Midnight Sun is the book that retells "Twilight" from Edward's perspective. Here's a question. If the wish fulfillment fantasy element of "Twilight" relies on readers identifying with Bella, then why would Stephenie Meyer rewrite it from Edward's perspective? Why would Snowqueens Icedragon copy Stephenie Meyer yet again, rewriting "Fifty Shades of Grey" from Christian's

perspective? Well because she's a hack who likes money and wants to wear Stephenie's skin. But a lot of "Twilight" fans actually wanted "Midnight Sun". Why? Why would you want to spend 800 pages inside the head of the world's most dangerous predator? Well, let's maybe put it this way, (book thudding) when you were a kid, what was the most popular week of programming on the Discovery Channel? Kelp week? Sardine week? No. (beep) Shark Week. Why? Because sharks do murders. - [Edward] I'm the world's most dangerous predator. - Humans are attracted to predators because we're attracted to

power. And we're usually attracted to power not because we're masochists who want to be preyed upon, but because we want to be powerful ourselves. It's what philosopher Frederic Knudsen (dramatic orchestral music) called the will to power. We're attracted to predators because it flatters our ego to recognize part of ourselves in sharks or cats or wolves. Whereas prey animals, calling someone a sheep or a pig is usually an insult. In my video on Envy I argued that people resent power. Actually that's a pretty terrible summary of that video. Just go watch the video. And there's a,

usually, rightwing version of this argument that says we live in a "victimhood culture," where all discourse is grievance, privilege is despised, everyone rhetorically positions themselves as the innocent lamb, Christ on the cross, I'm so oppressed. But resentment is just frustrated will to power, it's derivative of the will to power. You hate it 'cause you ain't it. And resentment hurts. Envy is the sin that gives no pleasure. So usually the path of least resistance is to feel powerful by identifying with power. Why do poor, downtrodden people support rich, powerful politicians? It's not just because they see

themselves as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires." It's because people identify with the politicians they support. And that makes them feel powerful vicariously. Why are so many weird nerds ready to die in battle for Elon Musk? Isn't it because they identify with him, and so they feel like his power is also theirs. It's like the boy who resolves the Oedipus complex, his feelings of rivalry and jealousy toward his father, by identifying with his father. For similar reasons, women sometimes identify with male predators. In the 1980s, California was terrorized by Richard Ramirez AKA the Night Stalker, who brutally murdered

at least 13 people. Fangirls and crime groupies adored him throughout the trial, with one admirer eventually marrying him. Many such cases. Ted Bundy also married one of his fans. Jeff Dahmer got lots of fan mail from women who thought they were attracted to him. Ramirez himself offered a theory about his appeal to these women, saying, quote, "I think the girls are attracted to me because they can relate to me." I think that's essentially correct. The attraction to serial killers is based on identification with the criminal. These women are not masochists who want to be victims.

They're aspiring to be the final girl. To vicarious power. In her book "Savage Appetites", Rachel Monroe says of serial killer groupies, quote, "in a world where masculinity meant power and power meant violence, some women would always opt to align themselves with that violence, and exert their own perverse power through love. It was a way to feel special, chosen. But it was an ugly kind of special, tainted with other people's pain." In 2018, a small publisher told Rachel, "We used to do zombies and vampires, but that's going nowhere. It's all true crime now." Has true crime

has replaced the vampire romance? If so, I think that's unfortunate, because Jeffrey Dahmer has real victims, and Edward Cullen does not. I feel like this is an area where fiction is superior to reality. Whenever I finish a serial killer "research" binges, I'm always left with a feeling of disappointment. These are men with something less, not with something more. What we really want serial killers to be is Hannibal Lecter, powerful, glamorous, artistic, and deadly. He combines the power of raw animal aggression with the power of sophisticated, civilized culture. That's why he's daddy. True crime is Shark

Week for grown ups. We're transfixed by the beauty of power and the power of beauty. And in case this needs to be said, the desire for power is a facet of human personality that is not going to be solved by lesbianism. As if lesbians never desire powerful women. As if no gay woman has ever wanted a mommy to step on her. Like come on. Pay attention. But it's true that for most women, identifying with power means identifying with men. For most of history, merging with a man has been many women's only plausible path to power.

Traditional marriage strongly incentivizes women to identify with their husbands and enjoy his power vicariously. As a 1966 supreme court opinion put it, "though the husband and wife are one, the one is the husband." Most married women still take their husband's surname, symbolically subsuming her identity into his. On the altar Isabella Swan becomes Mrs. Edward Cullen. She is he. Now even it's anti-feminist for a woman to fantasize about obtaining power by merging with a man, it has to be said that this is not really masochism, it's still a kind of power fantasy. Masochism would be if

in "Breaking Dawn" Bella just gets eaten by the vampires, the end. But that's not what happens. According to stepheniemeyer.com, "Breaking Dawn's cover is a metaphor for Bella's progression throughout the entire saga. She began as the weakest player on the board: the pawn. She ended as the strongest: the queen." Likewise "Fifty Shades of Grey" concludes with Christian's admission that Anastasia is "topping from the bottom." - You're topping from the bottom. This is great. But I can live with that. - Isn't that the fantasy? That it's really the woman who controls male power, who's "topping from the

bottom"? I think some degree of male identification is a normal part women's experience. In "Wuthering Heights", Catherine says, "I love him because he's more myself than I am, I am Heathcliff" Ursula K. Le Guin says, "I am the generic he, as in, 'a writer knows which side his bread is buttered on'. That's me, the writer, him. I am a man." Men are viewed as "default," and women tend to be fluent in adopting a masculine perspective. - It makes me sad that when a woman writes a book from a woman's perspective, pretty much only women read

it, whereas I read books written by men about men's perspective all the time. This could be why men don't think they understand women. Because you don't read our perspective as much as we read yours. (laughing) - This is relevant to understanding "Twilight" as fantasy. Because if readers are identifying with Edward rather than Bella, then this isn't "female masochism", is it? The reader isn't being dominated by Edward because she is Edward. On this interpretation romance fantasies with an alpha monster hero are simply vicarious power fantasies. But to reduce the reader's experience to "male identification" is also

too simple. I've been sitting in front of this fruit tart for 40 minutes. I'm gonna start eating it. It's happening. In her essay "The Androgynous Reader," romance writer Laura Kinsale argues that romance novels have nothing to do with women's relationships with actual men, but rather, quote, "the whole adventure is an interior one." Romance fantasy then is a psychodrama between different elements of the reader's own personality. Quote, "Romance reflects the exploration and reconciliation of male elephants..." Male elephants? Are you fucking kidding me? "Romance reflects the exploration and reconciliation of male elements within the female reader." The

romance hero represents the reader's animus, the man within; her aggressive, adventurous, masculine side. So unlike the strict subject/object dichotomy Laura Mulvey describes as "the male gaze" in cinema, the female viewpoint in romance is inherently genderfluid. Kinsale says, quote, "It is myopic to believe that just because the reader is female she is confined to the heroine's character. The female reader is the hero, and also is the heroine-as-object-of-the-hero's-interest." The heroine of a romance novel is not a character the reader "identifies" with, in the way you might identify with a Superhero in some aspirational way. Instead the heroine

is a "placeholder" for the reader, who both identifies with the hero and wishes to be loved by him. - Every girl projects her fantasies onto her. So it was weird playing the part 'cause I didn't feel like it was a big departure. There was no distinct character I was playing. I was really just this girl. - This makes sense in the light of the way the "Twilight" fandom reacted to Kristin Stewart in the role of Bella. Kristen Stewart was widely hated in the role of Bella, I think in part because fans of "Twilight" didn't view

her or Bella as an ideal they could identify with, but rather as a kind of rival. In the book Bella is described in a mildly depreciatory sort of way. "Clumsy, ordinary." This makes her not enviable, and therefore not an intimidating rival. Many critics find Bella to be bland, but her blandness is part of the appeal. It suits her function as placeholder. And then Kristin Stewart ruined everything by being gorgeous, how dare she. So let's contrast the difference between two fantasy structures, the genderfluid identifications of feminine romance fantasy versus the subject/object splitting of the male gaze.

John Berger, who coined the term "male gaze" says, "Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. The surveyor of woman in herself is male, the surveyed female." "The male gaze" exemplifies what we could tentatively call a masculine fantasy type, where you identify with a masculine subject desiring a feminine object. And in the feminine fantasy type, identification is split between the desiring masculine subject and the feminine self-as-object-of-desire. So you simultaneously identify with Edward, and you imagine yourself as the beloved object of Edward's desires. A distinguishing feature of the "feminine" beloved fantasy is that in

a sense the object of desire is yourself. This has led some people to conclude that feminine fantasy is essentially autoerotic, or narcissistic. De Beauvoir says, "In solitary pleasure, it may happen that the woman splits into a male subject and a female object." She describes a female patient of psychoanalysis who said to herself, "'I'm going to love myself,' or more passionately, 'I'm going to possess myself.'" Margaret Atwood says, "You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur." There is definitely an autoerotic aspect of feminine fantasy, though I think it's

unfair and stigmatizing to say that narcissistic love is specifically feminine. But think about the concept of a trophy wife. Is that not erotic narcissism? A man wants a beautiful woman because of what having a beautiful woman says about him. Or a pick-up artist who wants a high body count because that inflates his ego. Freud says that "Ego is the original reservoir of the libido." There's an awful lot of narcissism to go around. Now that I think about it, there's many kinds of narcissistic love. There's, I love that you love me. There's, I love what I

see of myself in you. There's, I identify with you and love myself as the object of your love. There's I love what having you says about me. It's like when Bella shows up at school for the first time with Edward as her cool new boyfriend, proving to everyone everyone that she's cool too. - You know, everybody's staring. - He's totally gorgeous obviously. But apparently no one here is good for enough for him. - [Natalie] But Bella is! Bella is good enough for him! She has what everyone wants. - Even though she's not the captain of

the volleyball team. I'm just kidding, I'm just kidding. Or the president of the student council. - Half the feminine fantasy is loving yourself through the eyes of the hero, so the more powerful and esteemed the hero is, the more elevated the woman becomes as his beloved. And you may as well shoot for the moon. Darcy is one of the richest men in England. Edward is a quote "godlike creature," a "perpetual savior," "the world's most dangerous predator." Christian Grey is "master of the universe." I feel like this grandiosity compensates women for generally being stuck playing second

violin. The escalation into theology is just the inevitable conclusion. Saint Angela of Foligno claims Jesus told her, "My daughter and my sweet spouse, I love you so much more than any other woman." I'm not like other girls in the eyes of God. In Harry Potter fandom there were these women called Snape Wives. Why is it always Harry Potter? Can we go one video without talking about Harry (beep) Potter? Snape Wives believed that Severus Snape was a literal God, with whom they could have a personal erotic relationship on the astral plane. In her seminal paper on

Snape Wives, Zoe Alderton quotes a Snape wife who claims that Severus Snape would use her husband as a "vessel" during the physical act of love, so that while making love to her husband, she felt she was metaphysically making love to her Lord and Master Severus Snape. And it seems like Snape was chosen because these women identify with him, for the same reasons women have always identified with Jesus, because of he has relatable feminine-coded trauma, abused, humiliated, penetrated even in the case of Jesus. But he also happens to be the God who loves you. It's like

a fantasy of being Mary in the Pieta. The feminine urge to be daddy's mommy. So if you take the feminine beloved fantasy to its extreme, this is what you end up with, narcissism escalated theology proportions. And if you take the masculine lover fantasy to its extreme, you get objectification to the point of predation, this desire to pursue and possess that can get a little Jeffrey Dahmer, a little Ted Bundy. Now, every generalization about gender and sexuality is an overgeneralization. And I've been calling these two fantasy types "masculine" and "feminine" because that's how most people recognize

them, but now we need to question the assumption that lover equals masculine and beloved equals feminine. This assumption is part of DHSM, default heterosexual sadomasochism. And it's oppressive and imprecise and I hate it. But both straight and gay people frequently conflate the dyads: Masculine, feminine. Top, bottom. Dom, sub. Lover, beloved. And again, I really want to emphasize that masculine-feminine refers to gender expression. Top and bottom are sexual positions. Dom and sub are roles in a power dynamic. And lover and beloved are relationship roles that correspond to different ways of structuring desire: the lover is captivated

by beauty and pursues it. The beloved either desires the desire of the lover, or narcissistically enjoys themself as a beautiful object, as that which is desired and pursued. I don't buy the anatomical destiny argument that says men naturally pursue because their anatomy is pointed outward, and women are narcissists because their anatomy is pointed inward. Like, do men not have holes? Do men not have holes? Do women not have external anatomy of their own? You can be feminine top or a masculine submissive or even a dominant bottom. The lover fantasy structure does not inherently take a

feminine person as the beloved. But DHSM is so prevalent that it's easy to make this mistake. I'm sure you can find examples of me doing it. Like a lot of trans women, early in transition I brought a lot of misery on myself by unconsciously assuming that woman equals submissive equals attracted to men. Which, no. This is so cringe and homophobic and misogynistic. Stop it. I forgive myself because this prejudice is extremely prevalent. There are sophisticated theorists of gender who still slip into this. Even Simone de Beauvoir, still one of the best commentators on gender ever

in my opinion, makes this mistake. She says, quote, "Man, with his hard muscles, his scratchy and often hairy skin, his crude odor, and his course features, does not seem desirable to woman, and he even stirs her repulsion. If the prehensile, possessive tendency exists in woman more strongly, her orientation will be toward homosexuality." So she's conflating femininity with the beloved, and assuming that women aren't actively attracted to course, hairy men. Simone, that's just the lesbianism talking. And I mean same, but this is our emotional bias. There are absolutely people, some of them women, who go wild

for hairy, smelly, masculine bodies. It's like their entire thing. In fact, I can name at least three people who are attracted to men. Now it is interesting to ask, what is left of femininity, when you separate it from its associations of submission, passivity, and the role of the beloved, that which is desired? Is femininity just an aesthetic? I think gender expression is not just aesthetic, it's style. And style is more than aesthetic, it's a way of doing things. If a dominant woman can be a daddy domme or a mommy domme, depending on how she stylizes

dominance. We could maybe say that femininity is a stylization of the female, and masculinity is stylization of the male. DHSM is bad, first, because it treats as equivalent all these dyads that are not even necessarily correlated. And second, DHSM is bad because it doesn't recognize the versatility that is possible within each dyad. DHSM assumes that in a relationship one partner has to "be the man" "wear the pants." And it also assumes that top-bottom, dom-sub, lover-beloved are fixed binary roles. Which is just not true. In fact I think it's often dysfunctional to split sexuality in half

this way. Like in a common heterosexual dynamic, the man desires the woman's body and the woman desires the man's desire. I think this is dysfunctional because in order to maintain separation where he is the subject and she is the object, the man has to degrade and objectify the woman. But the woman's ego is wounded by the degradation, so to compensate she has to imagine that instead of the mediocre schlub she's married to, she's instead surrendering to the master of the universe, her Lord and Savior, Severus Snape. I've noticed that even conservative straight people reveal at

times a repressed longing for versatility. Like so many straight men who complain about "male loneliness" and involuntary celibacy think that RETVRNing to traditional gender roles will solve their problems. But if you really get into it with these men, it's often clear that what's really eating them up inside is that they've never felt desired by a woman once in their entire lives. What they want is to feel desired. There's some part of them that wants to be the beloved. But they don't have the words for that. It doesn't fit into their idea of masculinity. The "traditional

gender roles" they want to RETVRN to assign the beloved role to women. And so many men feel like masculinity requires them to be dominant and in control all the time, but that's unbalanced. You know, learning to enjoy submission builds character. And it's a valuable life skill. Don't we all have to surrender, in the end? Likewise a lot of women yearn to explore the more active, virile side of sexuality. In her book "Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys", Lucy Neville argues that male-male erotica, Boys Love, slashfic, yaoi are very popular among women in part because

they make more space for versatility and fluidity than heterosexual conventions will allow. This channel is a fujoshi safespace. I see women's sexual identification with men, whether in slash fiction or in mainstream romance that includes a male perspective, I see it as disproving a basic assumption of DHSM. If women were submissive by nature, why would they sexually identify with men to this extent? Even Stephenie Meyer's heterosexual "world of innocence" has its subversive genderfluid elements. Edward Cullen, while in some ways a typical lover/father/God figure of feminine fantasy, also has a alluring, demure, feminine appeal. He sparkles, he

glowers, sometimes he needs rescuing. Don't women sometimes want to pursue and enjoy a beautiful person's body? Bella clearly does. In "Breaking Dawn" Bella as a newborn vampire because stronger than Edward, it's even implied that she becomes the dominant. - It's your turn not to break me. (grunting) - Top Bella is canon. I rest my case. So if even something as conservative and painfully heterosexual as (beep) "Twilight" contains a quiet but persistent protest against DHSM, then maybe DHSM has got to go. Now I don't think "abolishing heterosexuality" is realistic. I would bet a lot of money

that, for the foreseeable future, most men will continue to be attracted to women, and vice versa. And I've also argued that sadomasochism is here to stay. Some people may find it easy to embrace a tender egalitarian sensuality, but I think for most people, versatility is as close to sexual equality as it's possible to get. The receiver becomes the giver, and the giver becomes the receiver, and it all balances out. I'm not saying that perfect equality is possible, there's no sexual utopia on the horizon. But equality through versatility is an ideal we can strive for, like

American democracy. You know, it's a thing that we say we believe in, and God bless us for trying. For me versatility is less about some ideology of sexual Maoism that says we have to abolish all hierarchy. It's more just that I think we all contain masculine and feminine potential within us and it's more satisfying to express both. Unlike bourgeoisie and proletariat, or colonizer and colonized, I see masculinity and femininity as a duality inherent to human existence. This, by the way, is why trans women and feminine men are not "appropriating" womanhood. Woman is not an ethnic

group. And masculinity and femininity belong to all humanity. Now am I saying that gender is binary? No. Gender not a binary in the sense of 0/1, but a duality in the sense of yinyang. Yin and yang are interpenetrating opposites that constitute each other. There is no yang without yin. Giving implies receiving. There is no doer without a done to. There is no top without a bottom. Yin and yang consume each other, as darkness grows, light shrinks. They transform into each other, night becomes day, day becomes night. They are infinitely divisible. Yin contains yang, yang contains

yin. Men contain femininity, women contain masculinity. And you can keep subdividing and transforming. There's femme tops and masc bottoms. There's power bottoms and service tops. Femininity is supposedly passive, but isn't there activity contained in such feminine gestures of inviting, seducing, exhibiting, demurring? "Receptive" is a better word than "passive," because receptivity can be its own form of activity. Pseudo-questions like "how many genders are there?" Or slogans like "two genders" or even the well-intentioned idea that "gender is a spectrum", I see these all as symptomatic of a misunderstanding of duality. Yin and yang mean dark-side and light-side.

There are "two genders" in the sense that there are two sides of a mountain, the sunny side and the shady side. There's still shade on the sunny side, and light on the shady side. Depending where the mountain is, the shady side might become the sunny side. There is no shade without light. So, in a sense, the binary is non-binary. In a way it would be equally true to say there is one gender, the human gender, which has been split into two, into three, into many. Because yin and yang are mutually dependent, they're both a duality

and a unity, yinyang. Now you might object, won't this sort of thinking turn us into a nation of cucks? Are you trying to destroy masculinity, are you trying to destroy the West? No, I'm not trying to cuck the West, okay? I'm not trying to turn anyone into cuckolds, I'm trying to bring the West into harmony with the Dao. Is that so wrong? Is it possible "Twilight" isn't even about romance? Could this all be an allegory for more a spiritual quest? If a romance novel dramatizes the internal struggle to integrate the masculine and feminine elements of

ourselves, then Bella and Edward are not just characters, they're projections of our inwardly conflicted nature. The predator and the prey, the lion and the lamb, the lover and the beloved. How can these be reconciled? In the last chapter of "Breaking Dawn", Bella opens to Edward not only her body but her mind. Edward's vampire power is that he can read minds, but Bella's is that she can shield herself from other powers. It's because Edward could not read her mind that he fell in love with Bella. Because desire needs a boundary, it needs separation. But at the

end Bella says, "I knew my shield better now. I understood the part that fought against separation from me, the automatic instinct to preserve self above all else." And she begins to lower her shield, letting Edward into her mind. Simone says, "The supreme aim of human love, like mystical love, is identification with the loved one." When all barriers fall, the two become one. As their minds begin to meld, Bella thinks, "We continued blissfully into this small but perfect piece of our forever." Now you could call that cheesy romance writing, but sometimes you get out of art

what you put into it. So I prefer to see "Twilight" as a bold statement about the paradoxical equivalence of love and death and immortality. The end of separation is the end of desire. It's life, it's death, it's unity, it is the absolute. It's perfect. Forever. (gentle piano music) (gentle piano music continues) (gentle piano music continues) (gentle piano music continues) (gentle piano music continues) (gentle piano music continues) - And you've probably heard that JK Rowling has a Twitter account now. - Does she really? - She did. - Wow. - Have you ever considered, maybe in the

future, 'cause I know you don't have one now, in the future, possibly getting on Twitter for us? - Absolutely not. Oh my gosh, no. I would not be a good tweeter. I don't- - All the cool authors are doing it. - I'm not a cool author. I'm not cool. I'm a nerd, okay? Can you imagine going to the grocery store, buying lettuce? I just, I think it's, I'm kind of a private person- - Oh yeah? - And I just don't think that people need to know every little dumb thought that passes through my head.