The Yahoo homepage streamed the red carpet premiere of Twilight: Breaking Dawn (Part 2) this week; the final film adaptation of Stephenie Meyer's series of teen vampire novels has finally escaped. The novels sold more than 100m copies, and are considered so significant that the Vatican, ever in search of devils, has attacked them – as it attacked the more benevolent Harry Potter novels before. But this is only partly a story about the power of marketing, even if a group of Boston schoolchildren decided that vampires did exist and, in a strange and tiny re-enactment of the Salem witch trials, accordingly looked for a victim to punish.

This is a story about the swelling of female masochism in popular fiction. Like Fifty Shades of Grey by EL James, which Meyer's novels inspired, Twilight is a loving-slave fantasy – Fifty Shades for teenage girls, except with vampires, because teenagers are too young for shades of grey, and prefer their disempowerment fantasies to look like fairytales. (Older women, I think, like them to look like expensive hotels or adverts for Audis.)

Two of Twilight's themes are particularly disturbing. One is the sexual violence of the central relationship. In a fascinating blog, the anonymous Live Journal user kar3ning detailed 15 signs of an abusive relationship, as named by the American National Domestic Violence hotline, and found many of them in Twilight. Kar3ning was attacked online by angry fans, in the same way you might be attacked for suggesting the Mr Men books were racist, but kar3ning is right.

There is the controlling male, the female with low self-esteem, the threats of suicide and murder, and so on. The day after her wedding night Bella examines the bruises on her body with something like aroused awe: "There was a faint shadow across one of my cheekbones, and my lips were a little swollen … the rest of me was decorated with patches of blue and purple."

The other is the anti-abortion agenda, which could be ignored were the premiere not live on Yahoo, as Meyer acts as the cultural arm of Abort67. Bella conceives a child on her wedding night. She resists all pleas to remove it: it breaks her ribs, her pelvis and, in an unconscious homage to early Ian McEwan, her spine; then it kills her. All this is noble, because Bella is a good mother and dies for her child as a loving martyr to the weakness of her own body. (The star of the movies, Kristen Stewart, is also rather unlucky in real life. She was photographed kissing a married man last year and, because abstinence porn can bleed into life, she is now talked of as "unbankable", Hollywood's own death, and her personal morality is – in ways the actresses of the 1950s would recognise – a public issue.)