Vampires are almost always a comment on sexuality, most often a comment on dominance and submission. A vampire biting his or her victim is an act of penetration, and usually the victim is in some way seduced or overpowered to this point. I think the idea of being bitten by a vampire is a way of being seduced sexually without having actual sex.
I think what Anne Rice made a point of in her books is that vampires by their nature are usually meant to be sexual. Her vampires aren't gay, they're sexual to male and female alike. The idea behind it was that they see everything and everyone as beautiful and sexual. They're highly sexual books, yes, but there is almost never sex in them.
The same goes for Dracula. It's Victorian literature, of course there was no overt sex in it. Everything the vampires did in it, however, had a strong sexual undertone to it. And what about his three brides? I think it's a not-so-subtle nod to lesbianism.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that vampires are almost always sexual. Sometimes they can have sex, sometimes they can't. Somethings they're heterosexual, sometimes homosexual, sometimes they have no preference. But one thing they almost always possess is the promise of pleasure in some way.
I think categorizing all vampires into one distinct idea like this is ridiculous. This guy needs to read a lot more vampire fiction before he can make that assumption, if you ask me. I've been reading/watching anything I can about vampires for 20 years now, and I can honestly say there's a lot of diversity as far as sexuality goes.
@Sayachan: My girlfriend JUST wrote an essay about how Vampire-as-Other completely fails (and is really actually rather offensive). I totally word your comment with the exception of the Dracula's Brides-as-lesbians thing. That's a stretch and a half. A far better example of that is found in one of Stoker's inspirations for Dracula, fellow Irishman James Sheridan Le Fanu's novella Carmilla, which sets the template for every lesbian vampire story ever. And Le Fanu wasn't even subtle about it, which is rather remarkable considering it was first published in 1872.
One of the reasons I loved Anne Rice's works before she went batshit insane and Lestat turned into an insufferable Mary Sue is because a good number of her vampires were bisexual long before they were ever turned. Lestat and Armand both were. Lestat lost his virginity to a woman (an Italian traveling player) and ran off to Paris with his boyfriend. Armand was basically in a polyamorous triad with Marius and the courtesan Bianca. Rice also did a great deal of interesting commentary on gender in those books also. Lestat's mother Gabrielle was a sort of feminist poster child, in spite of her flaws (her rich Italian family married her off to a hick French Marquis, where her gender dictated all she was good for was popping out babies, many of which died as infants). Her life didn't arguably start until she became Lestat's first fledgling.
The problem with these contemporary "vampire" stories is that to a one, they're all following the Anne Rice template--and FAILING. It's not simply that the vampire is an urbane, beautiful sophisticate. It's that beneath all of that, they're monsters. They're sexy because they're dangerous, and not "kinda sorta" dangerous. The "vampires" nowadays are basically defanged. Without that element of danger, it's meaningless.
This reminds me of articles about 'Why women "don't like porn" (movies made for men).' Where's the counterpart asking why men don't read romance novels? And where's the article asking why men are obsessed with lesbians?
Thanks for this timely post; it's made me smile today even as it's made me a bit sad. I would always forward these sorts of stories (like that women love gay porn fiction) from Jez to my friend, and we would get a good chuckle and conversation from them. We met at a vampire LARP about 10 years ago, so this post would have been super awesome to send to him. Yesterday was his funeral but I want to forward this to him and still wish we could chat and laugh about it...
The modern romance has to look somewhere for heroes who are somehow extraordinary. Historical romances can just use nobility, your classic Harlequins make them doctors to the heroines nurse, brooding billionaires to the heroines nanny (to his dead siblings kids, of course). There was a time in the 80s and early 90s when big business types were used, usually with the heroine being an entrepreneurial type (zomg the dastardly tycoon wants to mow down her quaint B&B but she *resists*!!). I have a feeling (though I'm not familiar with the genre over the past decade) that a few years ago authors were working with the *Internet* billionaire type, so hot rich nerds.
In a world with more equality on a socioeconomic level, supernatural heroes are a *great* way to play that angle without having to make the heroine poor or powerless. Really not counting Twilight, since that's YA, and she's not poor or powerless compared to other teenagers. Sookie Stackhouse is poor and powerless (except for superpowers) but so is her entire community. In your *standard* paranormal romance, though, you've got a lot of female detectives and intelligence operatives, I can think of at least one auto mechanic, there's a variety of things going on on the career front, and they tend to be 30ish. That's another power differential that used to be built in - the heroine would be a teenager, the hero would be 35 - that has to be gotten around because of modern sensibilities. There has to somehow be a power struggle, that's what romance is about.
Has this writer or many commentators on there never heard of the internet plague that is FANFIC/ SLASH FIC? its nothing but teenage girls writing stories about pop culture favorites (Harry Potter, Twilight, etc..) as soft-core to hard-core gay porn. Every story turns (what many times are normally straight characters) into gay lovers in the fanfic. Harry Potter is suddenly boning every one of his Hogwarts buddies. They give this treatment to almost every remotely popular, character driven storyline that 14 year olds are aware of. I was stunned when I first happened upon these very poorly written, overtly homoerotic stories. I can only assume that many of these teenage girls aren't comfortable with their own female sexuality, or are threatened by male aggressiveness towards women, so instead they turn to boy on boy action for their cheap thrills. Some like to draw very detailed depictions as well. Maybe I'm wrong and maybe these young girls like gay boys like heteromen like lesbian porn - but that's not the vibe I get from them. I think the girls find focusing on boy on boy non-threatening, taking the focus off their own bodies and insecurities. But I just hope someone down the road does an in-depth psychological study on it (if they can bear the awful writing) to figure it out, because it is BIZARRE.
@BunnySkull: I was a tween slash fan. I was actually into it for the same reasons that your average frat boy likes "lesbian" porn -- because if one attractive, naked (desired gender) is hot, then two are twice as good.
Teenage girls aren't the only ones who are uncomfortable with teen female sexuality... everyone else is, too, but within that subset of the slash community, there's a baseline acknowledgment of it existing naturally and for the enjoyment of teen girls themselves that there just isn't in mainstream society -- it was kind of a sisterhood of anonymous Internet horndogs that I remember fondly. If we were young boys, it wouldn't be considered bizarre at all.
@BunnySkull: Actually, and I can only speak from my experience, but I and some of my friends, from our 20something year old, straight point of view, the idea of watching two dudes getting it on is pretty sexy.
@beastybeatsy: & @justine - I'm probably 2 or 3 years too old to have caught that wave on tween internet behavior. I can also say because I was exposed (through gay friends) to gay bars and gay porn by the age of 14 and saw the actual reality of boy on boy sex - it never entered "fantasy" realm for me. In fact it rather disturbed me as a 14 year old, but I probably shouldn't have been seeing hardcore gay porn being showed openly thorugh-out a gay bar either. Oh well. Maybe if I had never seen so graphically the "real thing" I could have had some fantasy about two boys together, and romanticized it. But the shock of that reality has insured I have never been attracted to watching two guys get it on. I can only imagine a lot of teenage girls can view through their own imaginary rose color glasses, and viewing actual, real gay porn is not on the menu.
@BunnySkull: Wow, so much fail in your comment I don't even know where to start. First of all, slash fiction has been around since the 1960s, did not start with the Harry Potter fandom or the internet (it started with Kirk/Spock stories in fan 'zines), and is written by an age group consisting of tweens all the way up to grandmothers in their 70s. And it's a HUGE genre, of which plotless porn is only one subset. It runs the gamut, really. My own work consists of everything from saccharine going-to-the-grocery-store fluff to hardcore BDSM.
There is nothing "bizarre" about slash's popularity unless you believe the popular culture's attitudes that women are not sexual beings. One man is hot, two men together is hotter, it really is not rocket science. Also, a great number of slashers are queer women, self included, who also write f/f fiction and het.
Also, keep in mind Sturgeon's Law. 90% of everything is absolute crap, and fanfiction is no different. Some of the best writers I know are slashers, including some ficcers who've gone on to professional writing careers.
@BunnySkull: Not all fanfic is slash. Slash is a subgenre. And not all slash is poorly written (like romance novels, the quality varies wildly between authors), nor is all fanfic poorly written (or written by 14 year old girls).
@KarmaChameleon: Full of Fail? Beside that being two year old, and very tired 4chan meme I consider not being an "expert" on all the details of slash/fan fic and their subgenre a big "WIN" I won't deny there might be a few decent writers involved in the industry due to financial incentive of some kind, but the only good that has managed to come from that vortex of barely literate magnum opuses to a pregnant Capt. Kirk corn-holing a furry Spock is the joy of mocking its awfulness; and maybe occasionally indulging in few pages of its mind-numbingly horrible excesses. I guess maybe because you write/enjoy it you are defensive about this subject, but its as much the subject of giddy ridicule as it is seriously digested.
Sorry, but I do find something a bit bizzare about 1000's of pages worth of text devoted to Mighty Morphine Power Rangers giving reach arounds to cast members from CSI Miami.
"Erm, Eddie, can you stop crushing my windpipe. Dude? Urrrgh." *thud*
"Sorry, what you were saying? There's glitter under my thumbnail."
Oh, about the article? Oh look, there's a gay vampire in my window. Sorry, gay vampire, I'm a lesbian, but come back with your gay vampire friend so I can watch you fang each other. Thanks.
Also? All those girls who are lusting after gay men? They're writing *explicitly pornographic* slash fic on them there internets. They don't need vampire abstinence pap.
Uh, I've heard.
1. That since vampires are generally portrayed as more sensitive, detail-orientated, poetic, caring individuals, and since those traits are not "typical" of straight males, that somehow makes them gay.
2. That gay men, by their preference for male partners, somehow immediately understand woman with a preference for a male partners (because lord knows liking the same set of genitals is the basis of a great friendship)
3. And thus, gay men are the perfect partners for straight woman, yet they are sexually incompatible, so turning them into "vampires" allows straight woman to fantasize about fucking gay men.
I always thought that vampires represent a longing not for gay men, but for that tortured, eternal soul, a man who is allowed to deviate from "manliness" because he is supernatural. His theory actually is the opposite of what vampire culture seems to represent, which is a desire for less strict gender roles (or at least, less strict but still acceptable to the right-wing traditional woman) and the sexual fantasy of being with someone who is not the norm, and can’t be categorized into things like "straight,"
"gay" or "bro."
@Keep it cool: Well, you took more away from it than I did, because all I got was:
vampires = other
gay men = other
vampires = gay men!
Which also seems to fail a sixth grade rule of logic, actually.
No, not all. And not most. But certainly some--or rather, they have a fascination with an idea of gay men. I think this is perfectly natural for teenagers to be curious about alternatives to what must seem a pretty shitty hand dealt to both sexes. Certainly gay adolescents often idealize and romanticize women in the same way (not sure if lesbian girls idealize selected men).
As to vampires, well, if it flies in through the window and rapes you with its mouth I'm going to guess it's gay. And Twinkles The Magic Disappearing Glitterstick Boyfriend up there is gayer than a purple unicorn singing Garland's greatest hits to an audience composed exclusively of Aubrey Beardsley drawings.
Of course all women don't want gay vampires, but this woman maybe wants Ed Westwick as gay vampire fiction writer from last week's episode of Californication. Ahem.
10/14/09
I think what Anne Rice made a point of in her books is that vampires by their nature are usually meant to be sexual. Her vampires aren't gay, they're sexual to male and female alike. The idea behind it was that they see everything and everyone as beautiful and sexual. They're highly sexual books, yes, but there is almost never sex in them.
The same goes for Dracula. It's Victorian literature, of course there was no overt sex in it. Everything the vampires did in it, however, had a strong sexual undertone to it. And what about his three brides? I think it's a not-so-subtle nod to lesbianism.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that vampires are almost always sexual. Sometimes they can have sex, sometimes they can't. Somethings they're heterosexual, sometimes homosexual, sometimes they have no preference. But one thing they almost always possess is the promise of pleasure in some way.
I think categorizing all vampires into one distinct idea like this is ridiculous. This guy needs to read a lot more vampire fiction before he can make that assumption, if you ask me. I've been reading/watching anything I can about vampires for 20 years now, and I can honestly say there's a lot of diversity as far as sexuality goes.
10/14/09
One of the reasons I loved Anne Rice's works before she went batshit insane and Lestat turned into an insufferable Mary Sue is because a good number of her vampires were bisexual long before they were ever turned. Lestat and Armand both were. Lestat lost his virginity to a woman (an Italian traveling player) and ran off to Paris with his boyfriend. Armand was basically in a polyamorous triad with Marius and the courtesan Bianca. Rice also did a great deal of interesting commentary on gender in those books also. Lestat's mother Gabrielle was a sort of feminist poster child, in spite of her flaws (her rich Italian family married her off to a hick French Marquis, where her gender dictated all she was good for was popping out babies, many of which died as infants). Her life didn't arguably start until she became Lestat's first fledgling.
The problem with these contemporary "vampire" stories is that to a one, they're all following the Anne Rice template--and FAILING. It's not simply that the vampire is an urbane, beautiful sophisticate. It's that beneath all of that, they're monsters. They're sexy because they're dangerous, and not "kinda sorta" dangerous. The "vampires" nowadays are basically defanged. Without that element of danger, it's meaningless.
10/14/09
10/14/09
10/14/09
Thanks for this timely post; it's made me smile today even as it's made me a bit sad. I would always forward these sorts of stories (like that women love gay porn fiction) from Jez to my friend, and we would get a good chuckle and conversation from them. We met at a vampire LARP about 10 years ago, so this post would have been super awesome to send to him. Yesterday was his funeral but I want to forward this to him and still wish we could chat and laugh about it...
10/14/09
In a world with more equality on a socioeconomic level, supernatural heroes are a *great* way to play that angle without having to make the heroine poor or powerless. Really not counting Twilight, since that's YA, and she's not poor or powerless compared to other teenagers. Sookie Stackhouse is poor and powerless (except for superpowers) but so is her entire community. In your *standard* paranormal romance, though, you've got a lot of female detectives and intelligence operatives, I can think of at least one auto mechanic, there's a variety of things going on on the career front, and they tend to be 30ish. That's another power differential that used to be built in - the heroine would be a teenager, the hero would be 35 - that has to be gotten around because of modern sensibilities. There has to somehow be a power struggle, that's what romance is about.
10/14/09
10/14/09
Teenage girls aren't the only ones who are uncomfortable with teen female sexuality... everyone else is, too, but within that subset of the slash community, there's a baseline acknowledgment of it existing naturally and for the enjoyment of teen girls themselves that there just isn't in mainstream society -- it was kind of a sisterhood of anonymous Internet horndogs that I remember fondly. If we were young boys, it wouldn't be considered bizarre at all.
10/14/09
10/14/09
10/14/09
There is nothing "bizarre" about slash's popularity unless you believe the popular culture's attitudes that women are not sexual beings. One man is hot, two men together is hotter, it really is not rocket science. Also, a great number of slashers are queer women, self included, who also write f/f fiction and het.
Also, keep in mind Sturgeon's Law. 90% of everything is absolute crap, and fanfiction is no different. Some of the best writers I know are slashers, including some ficcers who've gone on to professional writing careers.
10/14/09
10/14/09
Sorry, but I do find something a bit bizzare about 1000's of pages worth of text devoted to Mighty Morphine Power Rangers giving reach arounds to cast members from CSI Miami.
10/13/09
"Erm, Eddie, can you stop crushing my windpipe. Dude? Urrrgh." *thud*
"Sorry, what you were saying? There's glitter under my thumbnail."
Oh, about the article? Oh look, there's a gay vampire in my window. Sorry, gay vampire, I'm a lesbian, but come back with your gay vampire friend so I can watch you fang each other. Thanks.
What?
10/13/09
Uh, I've heard.
10/13/09
Also, ick.
10/13/09
Does this statement remind anyone else of Mad Libs? It is so odd and arbitrary.
10/13/09
1. That since vampires are generally portrayed as more sensitive, detail-orientated, poetic, caring individuals, and since those traits are not "typical" of straight males, that somehow makes them gay.
2. That gay men, by their preference for male partners, somehow immediately understand woman with a preference for a male partners (because lord knows liking the same set of genitals is the basis of a great friendship)
3. And thus, gay men are the perfect partners for straight woman, yet they are sexually incompatible, so turning them into "vampires" allows straight woman to fantasize about fucking gay men.
I always thought that vampires represent a longing not for gay men, but for that tortured, eternal soul, a man who is allowed to deviate from "manliness" because he is supernatural. His theory actually is the opposite of what vampire culture seems to represent, which is a desire for less strict gender roles (or at least, less strict but still acceptable to the right-wing traditional woman) and the sexual fantasy of being with someone who is not the norm, and can’t be categorized into things like "straight,"
"gay" or "bro."
10/14/09
vampires = other
gay men = other
vampires = gay men!
Which also seems to fail a sixth grade rule of logic, actually.
10/15/09
10/13/09
As to vampires, well, if it flies in through the window and rapes you with its mouth I'm going to guess it's gay. And Twinkles The Magic Disappearing Glitterstick Boyfriend up there is gayer than a purple unicorn singing Garland's greatest hits to an audience composed exclusively of Aubrey Beardsley drawings.
10/13/09
10/13/09
10/13/09