To date, Stephenie Meyer’s young-adult novels about a teenage girl (Bella Swan) and her vampire boyfriend (Edward Cullen) have sold well over 100 million copies worldwide, and the movie versions are still coming.  When a phenomenon is of this scale it doesn’t matter what a book is, artistically; you have to take such a cultural behemoth as seriously as an ocean liner takes an iceberg.  What, then, is the meaning of the Twilight series?  And why should you—who are probably not a teenager—care?

Mrs. Meyer has no declared high literary ambitions and few pretenses.  She says she wrote the first book of the series with no thought of publishing it, but to entertain herself, and she shows gratified astonishment at her success.  It is evident even to some of her fans that her ability to entertain millions of others as well as herself does not mean the Twilight books are very good.  They are not well written, not richly inventive and imaginative in the world they create, and the pacing of the plot jerks from peace to chaos and back again.

Mrs. Meyer does have two strengths, which I think explain the series’ enormous appeal as much as any sunspot is explainable.  First, she is tirelessly willing both to maintain the sexual suspense between her two main characters and to describe their hunger for each other, for hundreds of pages.  This is not done skillfully, but no matter—it’s done persistently: the longing, the physical ache, the kisses along the throat.  It is titillating, and meant to be so, and like all titillation it has a predictable effect on the reader.

Still, there’s a lot of physicality in young-adult books these days—more than you can imagine, if you have never read teen fiction or left it behind two or three decades ago.  In this Mrs. Meyer is not unusual.  What has solidified the appeal of her books is her second strength: She has tapped a very powerful, apparently universal, impossibly idyllic, highly irritating, but evidently ineradicable female romance fantasy, and in doing so she has fulfilled that fantasy’s every requirement.

Of course, sexual tension and the satisfaction of living a happy love affair vicariously through a book is part of the appeal of many works of literature, and I wouldn’t want to go without it in any of a thousand better-written novels or plays whose central story line is a courtship.  What would Pride and Prejudice be without the attraction and obstacles between Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy?  Much Ado About Nothing, without the sparring of Beatrice and Benedict?  But just as there is a great difference between literature and pulp, there is a great difference between a reader’s urgent interest in the tension of a love affair unfolding socially and emotionally, and a reader’s urgent interest in descriptions of physical love.  Twilight (and I’m speaking here of the first book in particular—there is more plot in the others) is pure in one way, at least: It is a story purely of desire, without the distractions of wit, social commentary, observations on the ins and outs of family life, or even landscape.  (Anyone who has seen any part of the Washington coast knows how beautiful it is—even and perhaps especially in the rain.  You would never guess that from these books.  There is no description.)  But then, Mrs. Meyer rarely gets off message.  Though the first book has some drama, it is all jammed at the end, tacked on, really, because this is not an adventure story, or a horror story, but a romance—and a romance is all about meeting, misunderstanding, and the bumpy road toward fulfillment of heart’s desire.

Caitlin Flanagan—who loves the series—put her finger on it in an essay she wrote for The Atlantic in 2008.  She says the novels bewitch their young readers with this heady mixture of romance and sexual exploration, the appeal of an impossibly idealized lover, locked between the pages of a book, read by a girl safe at home in her room.  For a lonely woman of any age who is not demanding about style, that romantic fantasy is a powerful draw.  For a teenager it is irresistible.  And to solidify her hold Mrs. Meyer set every hook that might attract a girl as she struggles to define her identity, her sexuality, and her growing wish for independence from her parents and her hometown: the exquisite, taboo, wealthy, initially hostile and mysterious boy, who is both monster and hero, for whose eternal love she will gladly trade her family, friends, and in this case her humanity and perhaps even her soul.  And who is entirely Worth It.

It’s funny: These books are remarkable for their cultural thinness and near lack of any cultural references at all.  I saw a Disney quotation, and no doubt missed some references to the pop music Mrs. Meyer cannot write without, but there isn’t much else.  She claims some influence from Austen, Wuthering Heights, and a few of Shakespeare’s plays, but by that she only means she borrowed a detail or two.  (The most apparent borrowing, in the fourth book, is from Alien.)  Mrs. Meyer didn’t even do much vampire research—didn’t even read Bram Stoker’s Dracula, because she didn’t want to spoil her own vision of these creatures.  But as for that most fundamental of culturally deep-rooted youthful female fantasies—of being new to a place, miserable, unpopular, and clumsy, and then chosen, loved, saved, and carried away—she tapped into that and hit a gusher with every cliché.  Bella has her good qualities, but she is putty in Edward’s cold hands from the day she meets him, and while her loving passivity will make certain readers tear their hair, it is her all-too-willing weakness that is precisely the point.  Her powerlessness is an essential part of the fantasy, and 40 years of Gloria Steinem hasn’t made a dent in it.

All of this would be mostly unremarkable were it not for the age of a lot of Mrs. Meyer’s readers.  Though a good portion of her audience is grown up, the Twilight series has been marketed as young-adult novels.  As such they are aimed at high schoolers, with a good bit of inevitable drift (given their popularity) down to middle and even elementary school.  I know of second graders who have read Twilight, and the series is extremely popular in fifth and sixth grades.  Whatever dispensation we might want to give Mrs. Meyer for her first book, written in isolation and for herself, by the second at least she knew precisely who her targeted audience was.  Thus her continued emphasis on Bella’s and Edward’s mutual obsession, their secret overnights in her room with Dad snoring downstairs, and finally their marital callisthenics cannot be excused as a grown woman’s wish to write a bodice-ripper for other ladies.  However wrapped this story is in an appealing romance, whatever sop this author gives to parents about waiting till marriage, Mrs. Meyer is appealing overtly and at length to her readers’ sexual feelings and responses.  And many of these readers are 11.

Well: If Mrs. Meyer has shown no qualms (and I am not aware of any) about having very young readers, nevertheless the age of her readers is not within her control.  If hordes of fifth graders are reading Twilight, it is their parents’ doing; parents who see nothing wrong in a child this age being immersed in a high-school Harlequin Romance.  There is sexual violence in the books, too, as there must be in a vampire story: from the constant threat that Edward will devour and destroy Bella if he can’t control himself, to the bruises he unwillingly gives his still-human bride on their wedding night, to the threatened rape Edward saves Bella from in book one, to the gang rape another character recounts in book three.  We live in a frightening world, and the possibility of sexual violence is something we have to discuss with our children, probably earlier than we would like.  But who gives her daughter, whatever grade she may be in, such a scenario as entertainment?

A lot of people, apparently, for many readers are as calmly accepting as Bella is of the violence necessary to a life with Edward.  Bella watches him feed on the large animals whose blood he drinks, and sees him decapitate an enemy vampire with his teeth, yet never turns a hair.  Neither do we, for this is a story that has come from the pen of a socially conservative woman who is proud to say she has never seen an R-rated movie, and whose fan club includes a lot of straight arrows.

When I was a teenager, pornography for young women (if not young men) was relegated to those over 18 and able to purchase it legally.  Judy Blume’s detailed 1975 novel Forever . . . was an anomaly; teen-girl fiction was generally of the Daddy Long-Legs sort.  To the extent girls read sexually suggestive or graphic books, these were adult novels we either stumbled into or sneaked.  But that was 30-odd years ago.  When I read about teenage sexual statistics now, or see the trailer for a new MTV series, I know the relative innocence that I and many of my high-school friends had is long gone.  I grew up in a world in which it was possible for a kid to read the paper, watch some television, attend high school, and nevertheless remain ignorant of the more exotic and promiscuous details of sexual expression.  Almost no one can shelter her children to that extent now.  Parents may be able to help their children guard what they do, but not what they know.  And the expectation of what is “normal” knowledge for children has shifted so far toward the explicit that the appropriateness of a book like Twilight, even for middle-school readers, is open to debate.

Stephenie Meyer is a pretty woman who in video clips appears pleasant and friendly and carefully respectful of her readers’ enthusiasm.  On YouTube you see nothing threatening, brittle, supercilious, or dark; she is humorous and very much the mom-next-door.  But in the inanity lies the insanity.  Here is a clean-living mother of three who has written titillation for teenagers, and she is very happy to tell you more about it.  And the terrible thing is that compared with many teen novels the Twilight books are relatively clean and do advocate some measure of physical if not emotional restraint.  But only in comparison; so far have we sunk.