I am a thirty-five, soon to be thirty-six, year old woman who despises the Twilight series and everything that it stands for. However, I have no personal anathema or particular hatred towards Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, or anyone else involved in the whole shebang. In fact, I rather like some of the actors and actresses.
With that disclaimer out of the way, let me start this off by giving you the two links that started my tirade.
IndieWire: The Public Shaming of Kristen Stewart
Trampire: Why The Public Slut-Shaming Matters For Young Women from RKEC on Tumblr.
Go ahead and read, I'll wait here.
Done? Good.
This is going to make me a very unpopular person, but no, it really doesn't matter. You know why?
BECAUSE KRISTEN STEWART HAD A CHOICE. Let me say that again: Kristen Stewart had a choice. She and Robert Pattinson were in a relationship; good for them! I'm glad they were, and if they really love each other, maybe they'll be able to patch things up and get past this. But my point is, she did have a choice. For whatever reason, she could have told Rupert Sanders "No, I won't sleep with you." Would it have made her job more difficult? Probably. Would it have sunk her career? I sincerely doubt it.
You know why I doubt it? Because of Twilight. She is Bella Swann, like it or not, and even if she never has another role in her life, she's already been a success. She'll always be Bella, but she also had an acting career before Twilight, and I can't imagine how refusing to sleep with one director would kill an entire career. Maybe I'm naive, maybe I don't know how things work in Hollywood, but I just can't buy the idea that sleeping with someone was her only choice, ever.
But it was the choice she made, and it was her choice. Nobody held a gun to her head and told her to do it; she chose to do it, like hundreds and thousands of other people choose to cheat on a daily basis. A few other names spring to mind; Kenneth Branagh, for one, chose to cheat on Emma Thompson. She moved on, she is married, she's got kids, and is supremely happy. Is Branagh? Don't know. He's directing, he's acting, and while he hasn't been linked to anyone else consistently, I imagine he's having a fine time of life. But at the time, Branagh took a lot of heat, just like Kristen Stewart is taking now, because he was the one who chose to step out with Helena Bonham-Carter during Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
And I'm tired of hearing about how poor ickle Kristen is being vilified in the media. You know what? She ought to be. Not because she's famous, not because she's a woman, but because she is the one who did the cheating. Robert Pattinson is the innocent victim here; Kristen Stewart is not. She made the choice; she slept with another man, and got caught.
R.K.E.C. mentions Chris Brown and intimates that he got off scot-free. Um, no. He didn't. There was incredible amounts of public backlash against him, his reputation suffered for quite some time, and if you pay a moderate amount of attention to celebrity media, he and his reputation still hasn't recovered despite the fact that Rihanna has forgiven him. There's also a mention of how Chris Brown is still played on the radio and still wins awards; there's a mention of how nobody burnt Ashton Kutchner at the stake or demanded he be fired from Two and a Half Men.
Kristen Stewart movies are still playing, on movie channels, on DVDs, they're still being sold in stores. Chris Brown albums are still being sold; Kutchner is still on TV and DVDs and movies. Personal lives and professional lives diverge at a certain point; you can stop buying Chris Brown's music if you're mortally offended that he's a woman beater (which, FYI, you should be offended) but that doesn't mean he's going to stop making music. You can stop watching Two and a Half Men if you're offended about Ashton, but that's not going to stop CBS from making more episodes. At the end of the day, there's a lot of professional considerations that go into making decisions like that, and the fact that Kristen, Chris, or Ashton have unpleasant things in their personal lives is only a single factor.
Do I agree with the idea that Kristen Stewart should be staked on an anthill and covered with honey? No. C'mon. That's a little extreme. But do I think that she should be held responsible? Of course I do.
And that's one of the lessons that young girls need to be learning from this debacle; you're free to make whatever choices you want, but you are also going to be responsible for the consequences of those choices. And in this case, her choice was to completely ignore common sense and decency and have an affair with a married man. Now she's having to deal with the consequences.
If your daughter, your sister, your mother, step-child, aunt, cousin, whatever is having trouble with this, then that's the cue that a serious talk needs to be had about distinguishing between reality and wishes, and the fact that we the general public do not "own" any celebrity, and what they do is their own business. We go along for the ride, and we cheer and we love and we cry and our hearts break or swell with their losses and victories, but in the end, we're just spectators. Our investment in them isn't tangible, and once the camera is off, they don't owe us anything else.
They don't even owe us an apology. There is only... well, I'll say one, but I'll actually mention two people, that she owes an apology to. One of them? Robert Pattinson. (The other would be Rupert Sanders' wife, but he can handle that one on his own; no woman really wants to hear from her husband's mistress.) The general public isn't owed an apology; she did nothing to harm us. The only people it harmed were herself, Robert Pattinson, and the Sanders family. That she did put out a public apology is brave of her, and I applaud it, even as I'd really like to tell her, "Honey, it's okay, you really didn't need to do that."
I do agree with one thing from IndieWire: the idea that the depths of this hullabaloo is rooted in the Twilight fandom. Twi-hards, or whatever they're calling themselves these days, have completely invested in the books and the movies to a degree that's just plain terrifying (and I say this having been a member of some pretty kooky fandom corners, like Supernatural and Lord of the Rings) and have lost all ability to make distinctions between Bella and Kristen, Edward and Robert, and their epic romance versus the real-life relationship. One's a fantasy; Bella and Edward live happily ever after, but they're not the real folks involved. Kristen and Robert are the real people, and that means there's gonna be bumps in the roads, and maybe they do break up permanently.
Until that fervor dies down, Kristen's just gonna have to accept her lumps. And so far, she's done a pretty fine job of it, all things said. If the tabloid headlines are true, she's having a rough time with the separation, and that's normal. I feel for her; everybody has a hard time when there's a breakup or a break. They both look kind of miserable, and if everyone would get out of their faces for ten seconds, they both might be able to come to some kind of reconciliation or conclusion or something.
But that will never happen. Kristen Stewart is always going to be under the microscope, worse now than ever before. And given that she's always kept a fair distance from the media to begin with, I'd say she's handling things okay. It's the rest of the world that's having a problem with it.
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