The exhibition hall in downtown San Diego was divided by sex. By dawn on the second day of Comic Con—this was back in late July—the men figured out they were beat. Hundreds of young girls had spent the night camped out on the sidewalk and so they packed the first 50 rows of the 6000-seat convention room. The unmoving estrogen division—girls in plastic fangs, clingy tops and body glitter—sat patiently through the morning's promotional panels for disaster movies and action hero sagas. But the girls began to screech and jostle as their obsession approached: Twilight.

When the star of the young adult Twilight movie franchise, Robert Pattinson, finally took the stage, he was greeted by a swell of withering sighs.

When that panel's frenzy eventually climaxed and petered out, a smaller squadron of females emerged from the bubbling mass. Together, they rode the escalator to the second floor so that they could have their own conversation about the Twilight world's attendant online fan fiction. I went up the escalator expecting to sit in another room filled with gasping girlies. I was completely wrong. READ MORE 44