the twilight of
SEX
By: Aoibheann Holland Art By: Cammy Lee
As we inch ever closer to the month of March, our time spent in quarantine is encroaching on a full year. One bright spot that exists in my life is my being able to live, both at Dartmouth and off campus, with two of my closest friends. The reality of remote classes has us each emerging from our rooms at the day’s end, faces red with exhaustion, twitchy with irritability, and stomachs aching for a meal. During the fall term, no longer able to deal with the monotony of putting pen to paper or looking blankly into a blue screen for hours on end, we decided every night to forget about our commitments and anxieties for a while. Every evening, my friends and I grabbed our sweaters, walked out the door of our barely-on-campus apartment, and walked the seemingly endless distance to Foco. Once there, we kept our heads down to try and avoid people whose masks were askew or who were completely disregarding the glaring green arrows on the floor telling them where to go. We would scour the room for food that we wanted and that could fit into our lime green plastic containers. As we exited, we tried to balance two plastic cake containers and a drink in our numb hands as we hurried back to the warm yellow light of our apartment. Once there, we would pick our places on the floor, set up our dinner, and welcome the familiar chime of
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logging on to a streaming service. I wish I could say that we watched movies and shows that we had always been wanting to watch but never had time for, or that were beloved by fans, or that were well-written. Unfortunately, with our chronic Zoom fatigue and ever-present four-hundred-page readings breathing down our necks, we ended up choosing to consume that which did not require any effort or brain power to watch. We sat in awe with Glee as the horrible all-for-one show choir sound poured into the room, as the chiseled abs and utterances of the phrase “endgame” in Riverdale slowly turned our brains into a sort of soupy sludge. As the leaves began to turn, fall to the ground, and form a soft carpet outside our living room window, we realized that we desperately needed a change. Thus, for no apparent reason at all, we decided to watch a movie series that would stay with us for the rest of the term, forcing us to think about our time in quarantine, and ultimately what our time would be like outside of it. The name of that immortal series? The Twilight Saga. So, it is probably not news to anyone that the Twilight movies are incredibly, painfully, shockingly awful. Even though the series catapulted Robert
