So my friend's brother-in-law wrote this review for the book Twilight and I thought it was hilarious! He gave me a copy to show all of my friends{because I knew they all would want to hear it}. Warning it is a bit long, and it is written by a guy... here it is...
"It turns out we don't need Dr. John Gray to tell us that men are from Transylvania and women are from Venus. We just need to read Stephenie Meyer's books. For example, from this book we learn that the millions of women who have wolfed down the Twilight series{pun intended} want men who:
1. Talk about their feelings. Either Meyer's husband is the single-most communicative male on the planet and she doesn't realize how unusual he is, or she, like most of her female readers, is using her fiction to imagine a world where men not only have deep emotions but want to admit to having them and talk about them over and over, articulating even the most subtle of their internal dramas.
2. Make them flutter. But just being a sensitive new-age kind of guy doesn't cut it. A man has to be hard-bodied, chiseled, dashing, and have eyes that pierce the soul, if not the skin{even as they never look at your chest}. This book suggests that a real man makes you constantly stumble over your words, bite your lip to refrain from exclaiming adulations, and lose yourself in the sweet smell of his breath.
3.Are fiercely devoted. That a girl of no spectacular beauty, who lacks any trace of conversation skills--whose only virtue is that she smells really yummy--can inspire an immortal creature of godlike power and grace to alter his entire existence to serve and protect her, watching over her by night{more on that in #4}. This is a woman's ultimate fantasy-- to have the perfect man, perfectly devoted, for no good reason at all.
4. Want them so bad that they won't take them. This, alas, is the most transparent aspect of this book's appeal. It speaks volumes about the differences between men and women to have so many women toss their bodice-ripping romances aside in order to read how a feral man with otherworldly physical desires can contain his passion and lust out of his pure and perfect love for his beloved. It says that women really do wish they could have it both ways, to be an object of lust and devotion at once, to want to have even a little peek under the covers-- now that's hot fantasy for today's woman who is otherwise told on a regular basis that to be her best self she has to engage in casual and risky sexual behavior.
To see just what an indulgent fantasy this book is, just imagine the male-centric version of Twilight, in which a troubled teen boy moves to a small town to find the hottest girl in town is a vampiress. Such a book would be about 100 pages long {all the unnecessary internal dialogue would be removed}. No one would talk except to comment on the awesome size of, um, one's videogame library. The vampiress would be simple: relatively dumb, incredibly hot, wearing almost nothing, and with no expectations of her man but drawn to him only by the smell of his gym bag. She wouldn't hold herself back from trying to bite her intended, but would get so distracted with his bedroom technique that she would never get around to it.
We would laugh at such a book{in fact, we know it would never be a book since men don't read; it would be a movie, and it would be a smash summer hit called American Vam-Pie-Er, I'll start the screenplay right away}. Somehow, when this story is told in a similarly indulgent female-centric vein, we don't reject it, but sympathize with it. I believe this is because women get to indulge in their fantasies so rarely outside of Jane Austen novels while men are surrounded with theirs. So far I have yet see spam email inviting one to "read hot things devoted husbands would say to their wives" or "see pictures of hunks promising not to get nasty out of respect for their women" or "buy this purple pill so you can stay us late and share your feelings--seven times in one night!." So hats off to Stephenie Meyer for figuring out what it is that women really want and giving it to them."
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