Women mooning over teen 'Twilight'

It has been three days since The Twilight Saga: New Moon opened, and it's increasingly obvious that adult — even mature — women are making as much noise as teen girls over this tale of a great love between a teenage girl and a vampire, with a few werewolf complications.

"We call it brain porn," jokes Jenny West, 32, a New Jersey finance executive who co-runs an adults-only blog, Twitarded.blogspot.com. She set her boyfriend's eyes rolling with the life-size cardboard cutout of heartthrob vamp Edward Cullen (Robert Pattison) in her dining room.

Her blog has picked up hundreds of female followers since launching in January, ranging in age from 20s up to 60s, all of them nuts about the four-book series about Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) and her vampire swain that has spawned two movies.

"There's no shame in loving a book about struggling vampires," West says.

No shame, indeed, not when there's so much money to be made. New Moon took in $140.7 million this weekend, according to studio estimates from Nielsen EDI.

But though "Twi-hard" teens have captured most of the attention since the first Twilight book was published in 2005 (85 million sold), adult women are just as smitten with New Moon.

It's moms and grandmas standing in line at theaters, reading and rereading the books, spending big bucks on the merchandise (such as Nordstrom's Twilight-themed apparel and jewelry) and writing reams of fan fiction (17,000 stories on just one fan-fiction site alone). They follow scores of blogs and Web sites, such as TwilightMoms.com, aimed at bringing together other adult fans all over the world.

"The appeal to a lot of us who are not teenagers is the community (of fellow fans) we've founded," West says. "It has really bloomed and become huge because we feed off each other."

Teens identify with Bella in fantasizing about their first love, says Lori Joffs , 35, a stay-at-home mom in Nashville and creator of TwilightLexicon.com. "But as an adult who has faced reality, it's escapism of a different kind, remembering those first twitches of falling in love and reliving it through Bella."