Venus in Furs and Twilight

My intense distaste for Twilight comes primarily from how poorly it is written; I used to work at the writing center, wherein my eye became attuned to picking out badly written sentences, and Twilight was consequently a sensory overload to me. I'm more on the Oscar Wilde side of text evaluation; a book is either well written or badly written, and Twilight is most decidedly badly written. It has caused me to question the old maxim that "at least it gets people reading books." With books like these, who needs illiteracy?

The book's defenders, especially LDS ones, say that Twilight at least champions chastity before marriage. I was willing to allow this single insignificant data point until I read last semester Venus in Furs by Leonard von Sacher-Masoch, the author from whence we get the term masochism. In this book, a man falls for a woman whom he glorifies as Venus, the ideal of love and beauty; he loves her more as an ideal, as a statue, than anything else. Against her wishes, he begs her to whip him and torture him, to generally treat him like a slave, demanding his undying devotion. He begs her to do this because he is a "super-sensualist," and intense pain, both physical and emotional, is how he gets off.

Though very sensual, Venus in Furs is utterly devoid of sex; but then, the point of masochism isn't the sex itself, but the prolonging of sex, the stretching out of the sexual tensions for as long and as tortuously as possible. In Twilight we have the same scenario; a man falls passionately in love with a character so life-less she might as well be a statue; he tortures himself for her love; and the sex act is prolonged as long as possible. In sum, Twilight is not a chaste novel; it is a masochistic novel. It promotes not chastity before marriage, but masochistic torture before consummation. With chastity like this, who needs deviancy?