Why women still love Twilight

Anybody who has been a teenage girl will know how dark and swampy the sexual imagination of that demographic can be. At 14 and 15, after watching Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet (1996), and then James Cameron’s Titanic (1997), I became so obsessed with Leonardo DiCaprio that I’d lie for hours on my bed hatching feverish plans for going to New York and meeting him; comparing fictional fling Kate Winslet to me (similar body type, I told myself) and broodingly calculating my chances. It wasn’t a funny light-hearted thing, but deadly serious, awash in life or death longing. The same quality applied to Will, Pete, Travis, Chris, and the other boys at school on whom I developed all-consuming crushes.

No wonder, then, that the Twilight saga had the epoch-defining impact on girlish sexuality that it did. It’s been 15 years since the release of the first Twilight film, the first in a series based on Stephanie Meyer’s novels (2005-2008) that would gross £3.4