Mylie Cyrus vs Twilight

So, I'm a compulsive reader, and that means I read through most of the news sites on an hourly basis. Today I run across a tid-bit of something I usually file in the “who cares” section. Mylie Cyrus is caught on video giving a 45 year old man (who isn't her father) a lap dance.

My first thought was, whatever followed closely by I really don't care but I continued reading. It seems this was lap dance was given back when she was 16.

My new first thought was, “Wow, her dad needs to be doing a better job of being a dad.” followed by “If I had a 16 year old daughter, that sure as heck wouldn't be happening.” Then I moved on to the next news headline, which had something to do about Twilight. Which I can care even less about than Mylie Cyrus. And that is really hard to do, get me to care about something less that I care about Mylie “Hannah Montana” Cyrus.

But then something occurs to me; Bella from Twilight is a high school girl that engages in a relationship with Edward, a man old enough to be her father.

This is followed closely by, “Why is it okay, encouraged even, in the Twilight novels for a young girl to engage in a sexual relationship with an older man but it's not okay for Mylie to do the same thing?”

Now before you answer with some trite line about men being pigs keep in mind that the primary audience for Twilight isn't men in their middle years. In fact, I could be safe in saying that men are so far down on the target demographic list that the only middle-aged men who've seen or read the books was either as part of a job or because their wives made them.

Which leaves women, young, middle aged, and older, as the audience.The author is a woman. Women are not only engaging in this fantasy they are paying money for it. Women are the center of the story, they are creating it and they are expanding it.

With some further thought, this older man/vampire involved with a young woman thing isn't isolated to Twilight. Buffy was in High School when she met Angel (Joss Whedon is the creator/writer of the series). It's in most of the vampire stories, and it's not just a girls and men relationship. There are fewer examples of young men and older women, but they do exist. It's almost a trope of vampire fiction that the human protagonist be a late teen.

By comparison, Mina in the original vampire story, Bram Stocker's Dracula, is in her twenties and has a career as a school mistress. Which makes this younger protagonist thing a modern development.

So, why is it okay for our fiction (which is the mirror of the real) to reinforce the young woman and older man relationship but it's not okay when it happens in real life?

For the record, I have yet to fully read any of the Twilight books, watched the movies, I am a fan of the Buffy series, and I am not advocating having sex with underage teens, male or female, under any circumstances.