Unconditionally and Irrevocably Asexual
I remember staring at a picture of Robert Pattinson when I was in high school, one from that scene in Twilight where he walks across the school parking lot sporting his famously goofy sunglasses and sleek leather jacket, and wanting to scream – please, somebody, tell me what the big deal is!!
The trailer for the first Twilight movie had just come out, and I had expected to fall as truly and deeply in love with movie-version Edward as I had with the Twilight series as a whole. But despite the insistence of all my friends that he was the zenith of human perfection, I only saw…a regular guy (who also sparkled.) I scrutinized images of Edward (and Bella too, for good measure), hoping that if I stared long enough, this mysterious “hotness” that seemed obvious to everyone else would pop out of the screen like an optical illusion.
Spoiler alert – it didn’t.
A lot has changed since the mid-to-late aughts when I read and re-read the Twilight series as a high schooler, devoured the leaked partial draft of Midnight Sun, and despaired upon realizing that we might never know what Edward was thinking during the famous meadow scene. Now I’m an adult, I have a PhD, and somewhere along the way, I figured out that I’m asexual.
When I settled into a Zoom call with my brother to read the newest installment of the Twilight Saga that 2020 had miraculously brought us, I was ready for a major throwback (and ready to confront the age-old question of why I thought it was okay for anyone to sneak into someone’s room at night to watch them sleep.) What I wasn’t expecting was to relate so strongly to Edward’s inner monologue – not his stalkerish vibe or mind-numbing self-pity, but his struggle to create a relationship with someone who experiences attraction differently than he does.
Before I get into my thoughts, it might be helpful to begin by describing what asexuality is. Coincidentally, I like to use an example from Twilight to explain asexuality. Asexuality is different for everyone who identifies that way, and it exists on a spectrum – it ranges from not being interested in sex at all and not experiencing sexual attraction, to only being interested in sex once an emotional connection is formed. Just because someone identifies as asexual, or ace, doesn’t mean they can’t or don’t have sex or don’t enjoy sex. When people ask me about it, I explain it with this metaphor: The Twilight vampires don’t have to breathe. Their bodies physically don’t need oxygen and there’s no relief associated with breathing. However, many vampires choose to breathe because it helps them get to know their environment better. It can also make them appear more human.
It’s ironic that I use the Twilight vampires to explain asexuality and that I saw a reflection of my own experience in Midnight Sun because I spent the entirety of my Twilight-obsessed years having absolutely no idea I was asexual. One might wonder why it took watching the movie trailer and seeing the incarnations of Edward and Bella in the flesh to give me the inkling that maybe I didn’t understand the whole idea of sexual attraction the way other people did. Because wasn’t the whole Twilight series about attraction and desire and smelling each other and finally becoming a vampire so you could have sex all night? I think the answer is yes, and no.
In high school, I thought about sexuality in much the same way I thought about quantum mechanics. From what I’d heard, both topics were cool and mysterious and very serious things that I would come to understand eventually but that didn’t apply to anything I was doing at that point in my life. I figured that someday, I would take a college class in quantum mechanics, and I looked forward to the mind-blowing and life-altering effect it would have on me. But at the time, I wasn’t too preoccupied – with the Schrödinger equation or with sex.
And interestingly enough, Twilight validated my perspective on sex. Bella is pretty much the statistical mean of all high school girls, so of course I related to her, as can anyone who either likes to read, is clumsy, dislikes rain, or does laundry. But what I related to most was that, at the start of the book, Bella had never been interested in relationships (and by extension, sex). So even though Bella spends the majority of Twilight describing the perfection of Edward’s body in excruciating detail, I didn’t feel abnormal for not having those thoughts. Edward was Bella’s quantum mechanics class, and I was still in AP Chemistry.
There were, of course, details in the books that I couldn’t quite write off as “I guess I’ll understand when I’m older.” Like how offended I felt on Edward’s behalf after he and Bella have sex for the first time and she describes it as better than anything she’s ever experienced – even better than the time Edward saved her life from a murderous vampire. Seriously?? One night of this and you think it’s better than your entire relationship including the time when you literally were about to die but then didn’t?? That, to me, was suspect.
Maybe at this point in my life, I’m so tired of not understanding, so starved for representation in media and pop culture, that I saw what I wanted to see in Midnight Sun, a problematic vampire romance novel published ten years too late. But when Edward is sitting in that meadow wishing he were different so he could give his partner the kind of relationship he thinks she probably wants – nothing has ever so perfectly summarized what it is to be asexual and in a relationship with someone who’s not.
Critics and readers poke fun at Twilight for the face touching and neck-smelling and all the talk talk talk, but that’s what happens when you have two people with a mismatch in their interest or comfort levels with sex. It’s discussions and compromises and weirdly specific questions that aren’t necessarily romantic but need to be asked. You find creative ways to physically connect. You ask your partner for metaphors and analogies so you can understand their attraction in a language that makes sense to you.
“So what you’re saying is, I’m your brand of heroin?”
I’ve always felt like the discussions about sex and attraction in Twilight were unfairly ridiculed, but it wasn’t until I read Midnight Sun that I understood why. Maybe it sounds silly to some people when bloodlust (which is a pretty clear proxy for sexual attraction) is described as a drug addiction, or a preference for strawberry ice cream, or a lion falling in love with a lamb. But these are the kinds of conversations I have with people when I try to understand sexual attraction and they try to understand my lack thereof. When scenes like this are laughed at, it makes my asexual experience feel erased.
In Midnight Sun, Edward struggles with experiencing attraction in a different way than his partner, and then faces the distinct challenge of trying to explain it. Reading Twilight from his point of view made me feel like someone – albeit a fictional vampire – understands.
Sure, there’s a difference between an asexual person who doesn’t see the draw to sex, and a vampire who is afraid of ripping his loved one to shreds in the act. And is it sad that this is the closest thing to my experience portrayed in pop culture? Yes, particularly because we all know that the only intentional form of diversity portrayed in Twilight is the make and model of each character’s car. But there’s not much out there I can relate to, so I’ll take what I can get.
The attitudes towards sex in the Twilight Saga have been dissected everywhere from scholarly journals to the comments of fanfiction. Is it a religious metaphor? Is it commentary on the dangers of sexual attraction?
For me as an asexual person, it’s a tiny hint of reality.
