Romney as the "Twilight' candidate

Republicans and Democrats alike seem agreed that Mitt Romney lost the young women's vote when he touted his ludicrous "binders full of women"; when his running mate Paul Ryan helped advance the concept that politicians can decide when a rape has been "forcible" enough to grant the victim an abortion; and when the GOP at large declared that giving women universal access to contraceptives would violate religious freedom.

But if you'd seen any of the five films in the wildly popular Twilight series, you'd know that those issues are irrelevant— that his mistake was his failure to position himself as the Twilight candidate.

Much like Romney, I too was clueless about Twilight until 2008, when my teenage sister-in-law insisted I join her for the first of the Twilight films, starring Kristen Stewart as Bella Swan, a moody Washington State teen, and Robert Pattinson as her lover Edward Cullen, a vampire who's been 17 since he perished in the influenza epidemic of 1918.

At the theater, I noticed the obsession of the women around me. So I puttered through the Twilight novels and the subsequent films to see what the fuss was all about.

Abstinence only

Bella and Edward, it seems, exemplify all the principles that liberal American women claim to fear.

In three of Meyer's four Twilight novels, the question of whether or not Edward will have sex with Bella provides as much suspense as the question of whether he'll turn her into a vampire. In fact, the whole Twilight saga, despite its billing as a "spellbinding romantic epic that has entranced millions," reminds me of nothing so much as the abstinence-only curriculum popular with American evangelicals and conservative politicians.

Students of this agenda learn that sex before marriage means an immediate, irrevocable and probably damning change to body, mind and spirit— much like, say, becoming a vampire. Similarly, in Twilight Edward counsels his amorous fiancée that sex before their wedding will condemn her in God's eyes (even if God is noncommittal about being a vampire).

According to Edward, there are "rules that have to be followed" for "a shot at heaven." First among them: Pre-nuptial nookie is a no-no.

Where do babies come from?

In the novels, Edward turns for sexual advice to his vampire patriarch, who informs him that sex is "a very powerful thing, like nothing else" and that "physical love was something I should not treat lightly."

Edward might have received more useful advice from, say, Planned Parenthood: Later, in the story, Edward is shocked when his wife becomes pregnant.

Like conservative politicians, the vampires of Twilight seem fixated on marriage. Bella insists that she loves Edward but would rather not marry him at age 18. But Edward strikes a bargain: he will make love to her and initiate her into vampirehood (so she can stay with him forever) in exchange for her promise to be a traditional human wife as soon as she graduates from high school.

"I just want it to be official"“ that you belong to me and no one else," Edward explains in the third Twilight novel.

A forcible C-section

If this argument doesn't raise alarm bells in the female autonomy camp, consider the unsettling course of Bella's honeymoon pregnancy. When the bride conceives a voracious half-vampire child that emaciates her from the inside out, she dutifully insists on carrying the baby to term even as her own bones are snapping (yes, this gestational condition makes for some bizarre and chilling visuals in the fourth Twilight film).

Author Meyer, while dispensing only PG-13 hints of what transpires in Edward and Bella's boudoir, has no reservations about the creative violence of the child's birth: With "a blood-curdling shriek of agony," Bella vomits "a fountain of blood" before her husband performs an emergency C-section with his teeth. And you thought only rape could be forcible.

All this to preserve a sense of love and duty to family"“ and millions of young American women of voting age are going belly-up for this story line.

All-Caucasian family

Did I mention that Twilight's all-Caucasian Cullen family (consisting of three other heterosexual married couples, besides Edward and Bella) are fabulously wealthy (due in part, as the novels explain, to a clairvoyant family member's success in the stock market), live strictly apart from the rest of the community, and, except for their patriarch, lack any careers to speak of?

If only Mitt Romney had aligned himself with Edward and Bella— instead of, say, Todd Akin, Richard Mourdock and Donald Trump— Republicans could have courted America's young women without compromising Republican social principles.