As one of the Independent’s resident teenage girls, I would like to weigh in on a topic of utmost importance to my demographic group: sexy vampires.

Perhaps you are not teenaged or not a girl. This is okay. We teenage girls accept people like you and greet your thick-skulled ignorance of sexy vampires with pity and forgiveness. Maybe you don’t know who Robert Pattinson is. Maybe you don’t know why the combination of sparkles and spidermonkeys is attractive. But don’t despair: with a little study, you can be squealing over Edward with the best of them (or at least be aware of why they’re doing it). To this end, I humbly present TDI’s “Pocket Guide to the Twilight Phenomenon.”

1. Sexual repression: It’s not just for Gregor Samsa anymore.

Perhaps the least acknowledged aspect of sexy vampires is their sexiness. Ever heard of an ugly vampire? No? Well, there you go.

But in this chauvinistic, male-dominated society, with hormones sloshing around our developing bodies and the devil spouting lies from his MTV soapbox, teenage girls are in a difficult position. Namely, we’re extremely interested in destroying the family honor, but we don’t want to be pregnant during the SATs.

Furthermore, we’re extremely confused by why you won’t date us. We’ve ruled out the obviously wrong answers (e.g., you don’t want to), which leaves behind only the depressing truth: we’re too good for you. You’re neither sexy nor chivalrous enough to merit our attentions. 

We have here two clear needs:
1. A Minas Tirith-style battlefield for our hormones to rage across
2. A male paragon of sexiness and chivalry to show you up and help you improve your dating technique

Enter Edward Cullen.

Edward Cullen, like 80% of My Pretty Ponies, can sparkle. Like a high school senior’s car, he can go places swiftly. Like air conditioning, he can be cold. Like his BYU-grad creator, he’s family-friendly. Like an abusive boyfriend, there’s always a chance he could snap your neck and feast upon your blood. And like Botox, if you stick with him, you can be young forever!

We also prefer Robert Pattinson to you. This is self-explanatory. However, we preferred Adrien Brody, too, so you never know.

2. Book-to-movie franchises: What happens when you run out of Harry Potter?

Many teenage girls – especially the ones currently in college – grew up on an all-American diet of Lunchables and Harry Potter. This was an excellent system: you could accessorize with a thick, sophisticated-looking tome, tell lots of in-jokes, and watch a movie that filled in your imaginative gaps. You could also buy J-14 and get Harry Potter posters for your room. Harry Potter combined the appeal of a Charles Dickens serial with the marketing of a Nickelodeon commercial.

Eventually Harry Potter fulfilled his messianic mission of dying, being resurrected, and making Voldemort feel very bad about himself. But in the process, he left the wider community of teenage girls hanging. We needed books, goshdarnit! We needed midnight parties at Barnes & Noble and movie stars to stalk. A Series of Unfortunate Events tried to satiate this need in 2004, but it flopped. Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson and the Olympians series is trying again, and it will be interesting to see how this unholy alliance between author and Hollywood plays out. But Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series is ahead of the curve. It sold its soul to the movie industry ages ago.

3. Communal scorn: Those books are, like, so badly written.

Finally, let us address the most peculiar phenomenon of all: what I like to call Inverted Sexy Vampire Syndrome. This is where teenage girls detest sexy vampires and think they are “stupid.”

I’m not referring to the usual concessions that teenage girls make to unbelievers like you. We’ll admit Stephanie Meyer is a “bad writer” or “worse than J.K. Rowling,” and we'll explain her plots as “addictive.” But Inverted Vampire Syndrome victims will go beyond this. They will even call Meyer’s plots stupid, and then they will bond over their mutual hatred.

It is an extensive, all-encompassing scorn for sexy vampires in the aggregate. As far as scholarly inquiry can tell, this has two main sources:
1. Genuine literary taste (it’s been known to exist)
2. A need for some teenage girls to appear smarter than other teenage girls

Concerning the first, we encourage you to talk to an English professor. Concerning the second, we will only point out how mysterious it is that all the sophisticated teenage girls criticizing Twilight already know significant portions of its plot.

There’s a small community of teenage girls who enjoy Twilight ironically. One of them once told me she was going to the New Moon opening dressed as a Twilight fan dressed as a Twilight character. That is called postmodernism, and it is scary.

In conclusion, sexy vampires are an important part of America’s economy, film industry, psychosexual development, and literature. They are as entrenched in our culture as fangs in a certain Washington resident’s jugular. You might as well get used to them, and go see New Moon in theaters everywhere.

Also, look at this!