This morning, Leslie complained that the dude cast to play Gale in the Hunger Games looks really… “big”. Gale isn’t buff and beefy! In our eyes anyway, he’s lanky and brooding. Then we further complained about how the boy heros in Twilight are either man-like or all hunked-out. Melissa told me once that she was traumatized by the hunky “man” cast as her beau on Little House, when she was sweet 16 and still interested in “boys”. As a tween viewer, I was equally alarmed. Almonzo scared me. Laura and I…we were still “girls”. He was a man.
Tween idols are a uniquely female rite of passage, the birth of romantic fantasy, and can have a profound affect on women’s psychosexual development. It’s a phenomenon that began before there even were teenagers as we know them, with “Byromania,” a term coined by the woman who would become the Lord Byron’s ex-wife. These are not just movie-star crushes, they are actually a girl’s boyfriend….. before a real boyfriend.
My sister and I were apeshit over a teeny, snub-nosed Brit named Jack Wild. He was more moppet than man, with an impish face and adorable accent. He got an oscar nomination for playing the scrappy Artful Dodger in Oliver!, but it was as the marooned boy with a creepy, talking flute in “H.R. Pufnstuf” that made Jack a star. He was probably 16 or 17 at the time, but looked 12. Despite never topping 5′ tall and seemingly devoid of a single muscle other than a brain, Jack Wild was an indisuptable teen heartthrob.
All of our tween dreams were like that: skinny as lampposts, pretty as pictures. David Cassidy and Leif Garret didn’t just look like very pretty girls, they were so sexually non threatening that they seemed almost like girls. So, as gazillions of teenaged girls hit puberty in movie theaters across America at the sight of the vampire guy and the werewolf guy in Twilight, I have to ask the question: What happened to boys? When did they get all…pumped up, when did they become….like men?? And, what happened to pre- pubescent girls that they suddenly want their boys muscle-ripped, pants hanging below groin level? Or do they want that?
What do they want?
Kudos to Utah’s Stephanie Meyer. I mean, she could barely out-write a soft-shell crab, yet made gazillions by tapping into the pulsing vaginal vein of the 21st century, American tween girl fantasy. And kudos, too, to the geniuses behind the Twilight movies, for tapping into the psyche of the “average” twelve year old girl who only thinks in antediluvian, romantic cliches, and then swoons at anything that comes close to that imagined archetype – be it human or inhuman. The Vampire is lanky and pale, and despite his obvious feminimity, is an indisuputable superman, a self-described monster with all kinds of cool, superhuman powers. The Wolf, with the ballooning head and mammuthus teeth is buff and bronzed, his eight-packed torso shining through thick layers of baby oil. The Vampire, although pretty and androgynous, exudes alarming passion. He is a romantic hero, both intensly sexually charged and chaste, essential components, I suppose, of the modern teen idol. Diametrically opposed beloveds, one feral and hot-blooded, the other pale and cold as stone.
In my day, the teen idol’s masculinity took on an actual feminine form. They were uniformly beautiful, smooth faced and feathery haired, delicately featured with long, wilting lashes and pillowy lips. Their bodies were hairless and hipless, the lean, rubbery bodies of youth. They never had a single tuft of body hair. Ever. Anywhere. They were displayed for our delectation, perched on grassy knolls, reclining back with their arms looped behind their heads, or sprawled on their sides. Yet, we weren’t ever encouraged to imagine an actual, naked boy. These were about dreams, love notes and pensive gazes. As far asany of us were concerned, these boys had no penises. Their pants were smooth and flat. Their penises were the elephant in the room that everyone ignored and refused to talk about.
Goofy to the point of idiotic, these cover boys were parodically sexually non-threatening and accessible. Don’t confuse them with the Biebs or Jonas Brothers – the flagship weapons in the culture wars – pushing abstinence-only messages from a Christian fundamentalist perspective, with their purity rings and their faux conservative values, marauding through the psychotic, hyper-sexual, Disney meta-verse, alluding to obtainable lives of glamour and cool to their soggy eyed fans. When Davey and Scott and Leif had down time, they posed relentlessly for Tiger Beat and Teen Beat with teddy bears and valentines and puppies, sometimes shirtless, but not in a virile way that’s real and potentially scary. Some cursory text beside the photos told us the boys’ favorite things, favorite colors, best place to take a date, and they never ever mentioned drugs or alcohol or sex.
Maybe they are to blame for all of it, The Vampire and The Werewolf. For introducing sexually mature men into the delicate, impressionable psyches of young girls. A world of brooding man-vampires and ripped, Native American werewolf torsos – dark, dangerous antiheroes for a helpless, self-centered heroine, utterly vacant but for the odious bits of prom-queen drama, who can barely walk without falling on her face. Who knows what girls want, if the chicken came before the egg? The good news is, that the physical manifestations of young passion are usually ripped from the bedroom wall and put out with the trash well before the college applications are due anyway.