My Fiesty, Feministy Fourth

I am having a very strangely fiesty, feministy Fourth of July.

First, I was overcome with a sudden wave of anger when I walked into church this morning and hear the choir rehearsing “America.” I explain to my sister that I’m not sure why I’m angry but that it might have something to do with the imperialist, capitalist sentiment that seems to ooze from patriotic songs. We sing nothing but patriotic songs for the rest of the mass, except for The Prayer of Saint Francis and Let There Be Peace On Earth, which I think are very hypocritical for the day when we’re celebrating the proclaimation of the document that started us out on the path to being the world’s warmongers. Which, by the way, I think we should actually read on the Fourth, just like they used to do in the good old days.

Second, I keep seeing this headline on the CSM page -- Fourth of July: Female power triumphs at the movies

When I first read that, I thought “Oh, gee, what cool, feminist, uplifting-for-womenfolk film is coming out this weekend that is getting great reviews at the box office?”

Do you know what the story’s really about? The fact that New Moon is breaking box office records with a primarily female audience. Talk about misdirection on my part.

I finished reading all four books the other day and I have to say I wasn’t impressed. As so many other feminist bloggers have stated, Twilight is a harmful book for young women to read because among other things it glamorizes relationships with abusive characteristics, normalizes relationship violence in Native communities, glorifies a protagonist who thinks she doesn’t mean anything without a man in her life, and above all of this from my perspective, is just second-rate writing to begin with. Heck, it might even be third rate. Maybe my standards are too low. I only started enjoying myself halfway through New Moon when Bella becomes a vampire and actually starts, you know, enjoying her life, or un-life, or whatever you want to call it. Even then I still wasn’t enjoying it much – I rushed through the book in a day and a half and then refused to read anything else for a few days afterwards because I didn’t want to look at another book for fear it’d be just as bad.

Here’s what scares me about the mix of supposed 'female power' and Twilight -- Twilight doesn’t promote female power, it dampens it considerably( for all the reasons listed above and more.) And that women are getting together (in droves, apparently) to share this story instead of another story about the power of female bonding, about healthy love, about…anything else, really, is quite frightening.

I skipped the usual Fourth festivities – My dad and brothers went to go partake in RibFest and the manly activity of eating large hunks of meat (my brother seems to be under the delusion that if he eats a vegetarian meal, he’ll lose face or something) and no one in my house felt like going to the parade or the fireworks. So I went for a four mile bike ride with my mom. And we had fun.