But counter to all that giggling and squealing comes a certain amount of disdain.

The most popular article in the history of Blast and its dozen or so blogs is and remains titled “Twilight sucks… And not in a good way.”

In that article Blast reporter Kellen Rice argues about the writing style of the series, citing “sickeningly purple prose (and) the lack of general writing quality.” But the biggest part of Rice’s passionate argument came not as a literary critic but as a woman.

“The books present a female heroine who can hardly take a step without needing some boy to rescue her,” Rice wrote. “In fact, the books represent sexist views in almost every way, from the fact that Bella gives up her ambitions and plans for college to get married to Edward, the fact that she is portrayed as a modern Eve, begging the noble, moral gentleman for sex while he desires to preserve their virtue, the fact that their relationship is dangerously unhealthy, and finally to the fact that nearly every single female character in the book is a hopelessly negative caricature.”

Kellen got a lot of responses. More than 3,600 comments as of Sunday night have come in the past 13 months, (its follow-up article has more than 1,000). These comments included women saying to her: “All of your opinions are completely FALSE!” and “YOU JUST THINK TOO MUCH JUST LIKE EVERYONE ELSE !”

And this: (punctuation cleaned up)

“Why don’t you goddamn feminists go shave your legs,” wrote a commenter named Kristen. “If you don’t like the idea of women needing help, then DON’T read the books or go out into the real world, because women should just stay in the kitchen and clean. I’m a girl, and I think women usually do need a man to help them with things, and that’s why we aren’t all lesbians. … Seriously, no man wants a girl who’s all about womens’ rights, so shut up and be happy you can vote.”

At first glance, these comments beg for remarks about the girls eventually attending college to get their “MRS” degree and pump out a few kids. They’re laughable, and to come the comments are contemptible.

But are they wrong?

This back and forth argument is nothing new.

Northwestern University communications professor Janice Radway 1984 book “Reading the Romance” is one of the seminal looks at how women are affected by romantic literature.

Radway’s arguments, written before most “Twilight” fans were born, illustrated that both sides are correct. Romance novels, she argued, have the ability to provide escapism and empowerment for woman, allowing them to dream of and aspire to a “a different life,” or “revolt against male domination,” wrote critical theorist Douglas Kellner, in his essay “Cultural Studies, Multiculturalism and Media Culture.” At the same time, however, the books may be understood by some as enforcing traditional gender roles on woman, forcing them to live in a world of female submission to “prince charming” — which is universally seen as an attractive male force.

In contemporary American literature and cinema, no where is this conflict more visible than in “New Moon,” the second installment in the Twilight Saga, due in theaters in November.

In “New Moon,” the male hero, Edward, leaves the female protagonist, Bella, for “her own safety.” Distraught, she goes on autopilot for months, disengaging from reality and eventually putting herself through life-threatening, self-destructive acts to get her man back.

Analysis of Bella’s dangerous rebellion — and author Stephenie Meyer’s writing thereof — can go both ways as well. Some will see “New Moon” as anti-woman and vehemently anti-feminist, while others will see (and have read) Bella’s actions as heroic and empowered.

Kellner touched on the idea of rebellion as well when he cited media scholar John Fiske in writing about how teenage girls in the 1980s saw Madonna’s rebellious fashion statements as empowering examples of how to express themselves.

The only logical conclusion is therefore the same conclusion we can draw in most social science theory: No one’s totally right.

Here’s a snippet:

Late last week, John McCain picked his running mate, the relatively unknown Sarah Palin, Governor of Alaska. Aesthetically, for McCain, it was a great pick. The grumpy, ugly, old man picked a smiling, attractive, young woman as his potential Vice President. The excitement over the first woman Republican VP nominee in history also probably blunted Obama’s poll bounce after his rousing convention speech on Thursday.

But while McCain’s pick got relatively good press over the weekend (and made him some money: The campaign has raised over $10 mil since Friday), it’s about to explode in his face, and I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if she is off the ticket for good by the end of September. I had to make this a bulleted list because it is extremely long and probably will need to be updated almost hourly because right now, there is an army of progressive bloggers vetting her much more thoroughly than the McCain campaign ever did.

So, author Kellen Rice continued the debate with another article. Here’s a bit:

I decided that it was only right for me (as the author of the original article) to try and help out all those people who would love to engage in literary criticism but don’t yet have that right to freedom of thought. So, here it is:

…

1. Abuse the thesaurus (correct word usage optional; purple prose is a must). If you want to ‘spice up’ your writing so that it sounds just like Meyer’s, a handy thesaurus is key. Then you too can write glorious and dazzling (and dazzlingly glorious) passages like the following:

He lay perfectly still in the grass, his shirt open over his sculpted, incandescent chest, his scintillating arms bare. His glistening, pale lavender lids were shut, though of course he didn’t sleep. A perfect statue, carved in some unknown stone, smooth like marble, glittering like crystal.

If you do not have at least three modifiers* for every noun, you’re doing it wrong. Some authors like George Orwell (1984, Animal Farm) have rules like “Never use a long word where a short one will do” and “If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out”, but since Stephenie Meyer is apparently the golden standard for writing young adult literature these days, it’s probably best to ignore Orwell and follow her example instead.

* Bonus points if you use the same modifier multiple times in close proximity of one another. Good examples of words to use this way include “chagrin”, “murmured”, and “chuckled”.

Read it all at the Blast PSA Blog

She did not like it. No, ma’am, not one bit.

“Thankfully, the ‘Twilight’ series is over. Not as great is the fact that millions of girls are reading this sexist tripe without a care in the world, obsessing over the “perfect” Edward Cullen and the “hot” Jacob Black, pretending to be Bella Swan and ignoring the unhealthiness of the relationship just as successfully as the character does. What happened that two hundred years after feminist hero Elizabeth Bennet is put down on the page, we get one of the most awful excuses for a female literary hero that I’ve ever seen?”

Take a read: PSA Blog.