My first paying job was at a public library, and I worked that job for almost four years. In that time, I had a lot of exposure to the Twilight books, mostly via people asking me where they were.* Initially, my instinct was to dislike the books just because I was sick of hearing about them, but after I read the series, and the icky feeling wore off, I kind of fell in love with them. This wasn’t because of the writing, which is horrendously purple, or the characters, who (with a few notable exceptions) are abhorrent, or the underlying themes, which make me want to watch Skins just to be contrary. I enjoy the Twilight books with the kind of glee that can only come from reading something ovary-crushingly fucked up (see Cleolinda Jones’ recap of Breaking Dawn for a near-perfect example).

When I ask a lot of guys I know (not all, but a lot of them) why they Don’t Like Twilight, they don’t explain that they find the prose awful, or the characters unlikeable, or the message detestable. They say it’s because “the vampires sparkle.”

Now, there are no hard and fast rules about what makes a vampire a vampire, aside from the blood-drinking thing (and that’s not really necessary either—the vampires from Peter Watts’ Blindsight are cannibals). Even the “No Sunlight” rule is a 20th century invention. Any writer who chooses to introduce vampires into their story is going to have to pick and choose what traits they want for “their” vampires. So if Stephenie Meyer really, really wants to make her vampires sparkle, she can go right ahead. Edward the Sparklepire’s meebling about what a monster he is becomes doubly hilarious when he’s wearing the kind of body glitter most women (and a lot of gay men) would kill for.

I explain all this to the guy friends, and they adamantly reply, “vampires do not sparkle.”

See, in modern pop culture, the classic vampire is a masculine power symbol. The vampire is sexually potent. He has mesmerizing power over people (especially women). He easily, and happily, disobeys the laws and breaks the taboos of humanity because they are weak and he is not. His interaction with these weak humans he has power over is penetrative: fangs into the neck. He doesn’t require your love, only your deference.

(The same rules apply to female vampires. Vampire lesbians!)

So when men see this masculine power symbol being in any way feminized (by, say, sparkling), their reaction is immediate and vehement. All of us, men and women, are still ruled by the principles taught to us in elementary school. Tattling, sucking up to the teachers, and being into “girly stuff” will get your ass kicked. When girls get their gross girl cooties all over a masculine idol, it’s diminished in the eyes of those who revered it.

That’s not to say that all men think this way. MovieBob, a male critic, did an excellent review on the unpleasant implications of the Twilight series’ approach to sex, and a significant amount of guys read into the books and movies on the same level. There are plenty of reasons to dislike Stephenie Meyer’s work, excellent reasons. But “the vampires sparkle” is the most superficial and telling of them.

*Incidentally, the answer to that question was never, “on the shelf,” because the queue in our hold system was so mind-bogglingly long that no book with “Stephenie Meyer” on the spine ever stayed in one branch for more than an hour.

If you take away the hideous purple prose and appalling implications regarding female sexuality, one of the Twilight series’ major failings is that its main cast is a parade of equally unlikeable people. Your female lead is so vacant that if you looked in her ear you’d see daylight, your male love interest is an emotionally uninvested non-character who needs to match his foundation more closely to his actual skin tone, and all the other vampires and werewolves are defined by singular character traits (“Compassionate!”, “Maternal!”, “Muscle-y!”, “Wears pants!”, etcetera).

Less the case with the book version but more the case with the movie version: I find myself more emotionally invested in the lives of the peripheral characters, Bella the Reader Proxy’s classmates, than I am in the central love story (also Charlie, who is a total badass and made of moustache). This is not a good thing. If you’re spending 400 pages/2 hours fixating on the least interesting part of the story, you’re taking the exact wrong approach with the plot.

I’ve come to the conclusion that Twilight would have been a much better book if written from a plural first person perspective, the collective “We” of the student body, bewildered and fascinated as they observe these two self-created social outcasts, Bella and Edward, drawn together by sex and hate and obsession, orbiting each other, spinning faster and tighter until they’re both found dead in a meadow, eternally bound together through a mutual suicide pact. End with a description of the memorial shrine outside the couple’s lockers at school.

Sadly, the publishing world has yet to take my advice on what makes good fiction and keeps on churning out vampire novels instead while Stephenie Meyer rakes in metric shit-tonnes of cash. Such is the universe.