The Twilight Saga:Seduction and Seductive Writing

The Kiss (Twilight)

Seduction has virtually disappeared but Twilight has breathed new life into this practice, this ritual of sexual play. The pill put an end to it but Stephenie Meyer has brought it back. How did she do it? Her secret is very simple. She has followed Jean Baudrillard's strong suggestion. If you are going to write about seduction, then you must write even more seductively than what you are writing about. Twilight particularly the first book, and a great amount of New Moon, does exactly that.

This is what fanfic - thousands of them -  do not understand. They may borrow for awhile Stephenie Meyer's imaginary characters to create the illusion of seduction, but all of them deteriorate into pornography, that explicit hyperreal depiction of sex that leaves nothing to the imagination, no room for feelings, no time for contemplation, for illusion. Pornography is opposed to the Symbolic Order of Seduction. Pornography is within the Exchange Order of Production. Sex is produced. Orgasms are produced and required. Woman has lost her freedom by gaining liberation.

And has Stephenie Meyer described and elucidated seduction so perfectly because it has ended? Because it has disappeared? In Forget Foucault Baudrillard has said the same of Foucault's detailed and  excruciatingly perfect analysis of power in his spiraling powerful prose that leads you inexorably to the exposing of power and its finality, its disappearance.  


Cosmopolis by DeLillo continues beyond the end of history into simulation as does Meyer in Breaking Dawn.

Soft Porn Versus Hard Porn of Fanfic

Not much seduction here is there?

Stephenie Meyer did her best but the forces of production are aligned against her.

Seduction by Baudrillard Cover Photo Man Ray