Touched by a Vampire (8 page)

What it means to be female isn’t an easy question. Most of us feel tension here. Maybe we, like Alice,
like
traditional girlie things and enjoy lipstick and dressing up. Maybe we don’t. Or, like Rosalie, maybe family and motherhood are a huge part of the way we hope to live our lives as women. This isn’t true for all women though; maybe family is much less important to your sense of what it means to be female and love God. Maybe
some other passion or talent is the stuff you dream about. Girliness and maternal feelings aren’t bad, but they’re not all that there is to being a woman created in God’s image.

Maybe, like Bella, your sense of being feminine isn’t particularly about girliness or maternal feelings. In Bella’s character, though, I wish there were another passion or talent important to her ideas about what a happy life is all about. Losing ourselves to a boy or a man, erasing our personalities and interests and goals, is a huge problem, a danger that damages lots of lives. If Bella’s story makes it seem like a happy life is best found in losing all the things that make us who we are, then we need to think twice about her story.

I don’t mean to suggest that happiness is all about “being yourself” or that we should put the happiness of our individual selves above the good of existing in relationships and communities. But part of what makes relationships and communities fun and interesting and good is that they’re full of people with passions and talents, people who want to use those passions and talents
for
each other and for the good of the whole. If we flatten ourselves, erasing our personalities, we bring nothing to a relationship or a community.

In Bella’s eyes, Edward is all a man ever could be. While she is ordinary, he is beyond extraordinary. He’s her ideal. Bella says,
“I wasn’t interesting. And he was. Interesting…and brilliant… and mysterious…and perfect…and beautiful…and possibly able to lift full-sized vans with one hand.”
⁵
Edward is a knight in shining armor, a perfect superhero. While snuggling up to Edward, Bella compares him to Michelangelo’s statue of
David
, “except this perfect marble creature wrapped his arms around me to pull me closer.”
⁶

All through the Twilight Saga, Edward protects Bella from her own clumsiness and stupidity and from the various monsters who want to destroy her. Edward says that protecting her has become “a full-time occupation that requires my constant presence.”
⁷
Edward is a leader; he’s the responsible one in the relationship, the one who takes on the tasks of maintaining Bella’s safety. He’s a fearsome hunter, a loyal brother and son, and commands his dark urges with formidable self-control. Edward is the dangerous bad boy who is attractive because he is supposed to be off-limits, and, of course, he’s incredibly gorgeous.

We can’t discuss the male characters in the Twilight Saga without paying attention to Jacob Black. Bella’s close friendship with Jacob isn’t normal for her. While she usually holds people at a distance, she and Jacob spend happy hours together, getting to know one another well, and their friendship becomes
truly intimate. Jacob is characteristically happy; he’s big and strong, warm and safe.

While Jacob and Edward are presented in contrast to each other, they share a number of attractive characteristics, characteristics the series suggests are typically male. Both boys, after all, are something out of the ordinary. Both are supernatural creatures, heroes with enormous amounts of power. Jacob, like Edward, is a natural leader. Both are incredibly attractive, and both would do anything for Bella. Both boys, too, are ready to do battle against any enemy who threatens Bella, who thinks this is a natural male trait, saying, “The urge to fight must be a defining characteristic of the Y chromosome. They were all the same.”
⁸

The two extraordinary boys fight over the ordinary girl. “She is mine,” Edward tells his rival with resolve. “I didn’t say I would fight fair.”
⁹
There is a particularly charged scene in
Eclipse
in which Jacob, radiating werewolf heat, keeps Bella from freezing through the night. Edward, as a cold vampire, is fiercely jealous of Jacob’s ability to provide the comfort, safety, and physical closeness Bella needs.

Jacob and Edward represent two possible paths Bella could take, but there is never a question of her going down a third path. She unequivocally rejects the attentions of her classmate Mike, a nice, ordinary boy who can’t compete with two superheroes.
Mike’s ordinariness makes him an afterthought in comparison to Jacob’s and Edward’s extraordinariness.

Edward is an impossible ideal. If we want boyfriends or husbands to look like Edward, we’re demanding more from those boyfriends and husbands than anybody can or should give. Demanding that someone squeeze himself into an Edward mold would truly be a cruel requirement.

No real man is a marble statue of perfection. What’s more, no real man
should
be. Part of the fun of loving someone is in loving him flaws and all. A perfect marble statue can’t cry with you, or share your weakness for potato chips, or allow you to see if he is struggling or afraid. It’s disturbing that Edward has to shoulder all the responsibility for self-control in the relationship. Reading the Twilight Saga, I want Bella to take some of that responsibility too.

Bella actually hints at this nicely when she explains that one of the reasons she longs to be transformed into a vampire is so she can stand on equal footing with Edward. In their marriage, perhaps, they can share responsibility in the way she imagines, when she says, “It just seems logical…a man and woman have to be somewhat equal…as in, one of them can’t always be swooping in and saving the other one. They have to save each
other equally.”
¹⁰
In Bella and Edward’s relationship, though, this problem of unequal footing is solved by her giving up her ordinary humanity. She becomes a superhero too. It’s a fun story, but this misses the true beauty of human love stories in which two ordinary people make a go of it together despite not being perfect.

When thinking about what it means to be male and female, it’s hard to avoid the various stereotypes we associate with the two. For example, we tend to believe that girls are emotional and boys are aggressive. Different products are advertised to girls and to boys. You can walk down the toy aisles of your local superstore, and it’s easy to see which is the boy aisle and which aisle is stocked for girls. The girl aisle is full of bubblegum pink, princess dresses, and toys for playing house. The boy aisle has a nice selection of wheeled vehicles and action figures equipped for battle. Though the “toy aisles” for teens and adults aren’t quite so obvious, things are still carefully marketed to the two genders.

While everyone knows it’s not as simple as all that, we certainly have models about what normal—or even ideal—women and men should look like and act like. We say things
like, “She’s a girlie-girl,” or “Boys will be boys,” and everyone has a pretty good idea of what we mean by these expressions.

We dress baby girls in pink and baby boys in blue. Seems normal and natural, right? It’s hard for us to imagine baby clothing any other way, and it seems particularly odd to think about putting a little boy in pink. This gender rule isn’t natural though. That is, it doesn’t follow from anything inherent in the way God created baby boys and girls. In the United States, pink and blue color norms for baby clothes didn’t take root until the 1920s.
¹¹
In fact, at the time, some people even argued that pink, as a strong, manly color, was obviously more appropriate for boys. The point of this example is that the things we assume are “natural” for boys and girls, like Bella’s assumption that fighting must be characteristic of boys, aren’t necessarily as natural and normal as we believe. And Christians have an especially good reason for raising this question.

As Christians, we learn from the Word of God that we have to be suspicious of the ways we tend to see things. We live in a sinful world, under a condition of sin, and sin influences our viewpoints. It affects our ability to see what is true and what is false. It affects our ability to distinguish between what is natural (as God intends it to be) and what is sinful (the way selfish human beings want it to be). Paul talks about this in the first chapter of Romans. Because of sin, human “thinking became
futile” and “foolish” human “hearts were darkened” (verse 21). God shows us how God intends things to be, but our ability to see those things clearly has been damaged by sin.

Sin messes up our way of looking at the world, which means we need to be suspicious of ourselves when we’re convinced we know exactly how things ought to be. We need God to heal our abilities to see and know the world. Questions about women and men, about what it means to be male and female, are areas where we especially need to keep these two things in mind. Because being male and female is natural, because it’s a basic part of who we are, we tend to think we get it. When we’re overly confident, though, we’re likely to be deceived.

Rules and ideals about what it means to be male and female have done a lot of damage in this world. For instance, ideals about thin female bodies are linked to anorexia and bulimia as well as to the feelings of self-loathing so many girls and women feel when comparing themselves to fashion models. Ideals about muscular male bodies are becoming more tyrannical too. Ideals about male power and female weakness are linked to violence against women and the choices of many women to act weak, step down, and let men take the spotlight. These are just a few examples of the ways that stereotypes hurt people and interfere with both men’s and women’s abilities to serve God with all that they are. If a woman or a man doesn’t fit the mold for what people expect women and men to be, that person is often mocked or socially isolated.

The self-erasure we see in Bella is a harmful feminine stereotype, a result of sin and not of what God wants for girls. The crazy demand to be a superhero that we see in Edward and Jacob is a harmful masculine stereotype, a result of sin and not of what God wants for boys. As Christians seeking God’s truth and asking Him to heal our ways of seeing and knowing, we want to look for God’s perspective on what being male and female is all about. We can’t just buy into stereotypes and assume they reflect God’s will for our lives.

If sin twists our ability to know what God wants for us as men and women, how can we hope to know God’s good intentions for us? How can we hope to be godly men and women? Thankfully, we’ve been given a way to see what God’s good intentions are through reading Scripture. God heals our brokenness and gives us the power of the Holy Spirit to help us live lives that match up with those good intentions.

The fact that God created us male and female (Genesis 1:27) is an important place for us to start. Though sinful eyes make it tough to see what God wants for us as male and female, we know from the very beginning of Scripture that the simple fact that we exist as male and female
is
God’s intention, part of the good plan He has for us. It means that God created us to live with each other and to be different from one another.
Dangerous stereotypes are instruments of sin, but difference itself is a good thing. God made us to be different from each other and to love and be there for each other through our differences. When God created us male and female, God looked at the situation and called it good (verse 31).

God’s Word also gives us encouragement as we think about challenging the way stereotypes cause harm in our lives. When we look at the way Jesus lived His life as a man, we see that some of our worst stereotypes about what it means to be male must not be true. Jesus is a savior who chose to accept death on a cross. When Jesus was being arrested, one of His friends cut off the ear of a servant of the priest. Jesus told the man to “put your sword back in its place” (Matthew 26:52). This flies in the face of our assumption that boys have to love violence. Jesus also interacted with women in ways that surprised His friends. He treated women not as lesser beings, but as valued friends.

Paul affirms that what Jesus has done for us as Christians includes both men and women. So “there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). When the Holy Spirit is poured out on God’s people, Peter explains that a prophecy from the book of Joel is being fulfilled. “In the last days, God says, I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your young men will see visions, your old men will dream dreams. Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my Spirit in those days, and they will
prophesy” (Acts 2:17–18). Sons and daughters, men and women, male and female, all witness to God’s power.

Figuring out how to love and give glory to God as the male and female people we are isn’t easy. It’s not as simple as saying, “Look, we’re all the same; there shouldn’t be any difference.” After all, God created us this way. It’s also not as simple as looking at the way “traditional” roles dictate that we live and assuming that “tradition” reflects God’s will. After all, tradition may well be sinful.

We can work together, though, as sisters and brothers in Christ, to love and glorify God as we are created—male and female. We can work together to discover what that means, to challenge sinful assumptions, and to honor and care for each other in our differences. We can work together to learn from Scripture and from the Spirit’s presence in our lives what it means to be who we are and to give glory to God.

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