At the last Twilight movie, my girlfriend and I decided there should be a drinking game where you did a shot every time Jacob (18-year-old actor Taylor Lautner) took off his shirt and you heard the gasping chorus of all the teenage girls in the theater.

When you gasp you gulp. When you gasp you gulp. Big gasp. Big gulp.

Had we been playing I would have been just as tipsy as the Clearasil crowd.

I know that some people will be appalled to hear that even middle-aged moms can still swoon at the sight of a beautiful teenaged werewolf man-boy. I can understand their reaction. Every year I get a little closer to having a teenaged son of my own and then I understand their reaction even more. But here’s the thing: somewhere inside every grown up lives the child-and the teenager-they used to be.

Admittedly, I may be more in touch with my inner 13-year-old than many of my peers-though certainly not the ones who attended Tuesday’s night’s Angels Foster Care benefit screening of Eclipse at the Arlington Theatre. This is sometimes great and sometimes downright annoying, but it definitely helps me appreciate pop culture.

When I watch the Twilight movies I’m not someone’s mom and I’m not someone’s wife, I’m a teenaged girl, just like the rest of Team Jacob.

Clearly I’m not alone.

Describing the indescribable pull of the Twilight series (both books and movies), a 36-year-old mother of two told CNN reporter Breeanna Hare: “As grown women we know that we never forget our first love, the first time our heart was really broken. I just think that so many women can kind of identify with the experiences and emotions and underlying message of how difficult it is to make choices in life.”

New York Magazine columnists Em & Lo eloquently put it, “Twilight taps into a time when passion is as much about fantasy as reality, before drunken college hookups, before booty calls, before scheduling sex into a marriage. Twilight reinvents sex for women who might have placed it at the bottom of a to-do list.”

Some of my friends feel the same way (though not passionately enough to let me use their real names).

“Every time I look at R-Pat (tabloid-speak for Robert Pattinson, who stars as dreamy vampire Edward in the films), I feel like I am 12 years old again,” says Gena.

“Of course we don’t read the books or watch the movies for their literary merit,” laughs Serena, another mom friend. “But Twilight is the ultimate teenager girl’s fantasy. Two beautiful, sweet and undemanding boys fall madly in love with a plain, ordinary Jane. How can any woman, of any age, resist the spell of that daydream?”

Author Stephenie Meyers sounds a little surprised by the attraction to these characters. She told Time magazine, “I didn’t write these books specifically for the young-adult audience. I wrote them for me. I don’t know why they span the ages so well, but I find it comforting that a lot of thirtysomethings with kids, like myself, respond to them as well-so I know that it’s not just that I’m a 15-year-old on the inside.”

I think she’s wrong-Meyers is a 15-year-old inside, and a 9-year-old and a 25-year-old and so on. We all are. But sometimes it takes a cultural phenomenon like Twilight for us to realize it.

Share your Twilight theories with Leslie@LeslieDinaberg.com. For more columns visit www.LeslieDinaberg.com. Originally appeared in the Santa Barbara Daily Sound on July 2, 2010.