Vampires, Sex, Feminism, and other things that probably shouldn't sparkle but sometimes do.
So there's something that's been on my mind for a while now--or, really, two things that have been on my mind that combine fairly nicely to make this post. That's probably because both of them have to do with vampires, sex and depictions of women in literature of questionable quality (read: trashy), all things which are often on my mind.
'Cause. You know. I'm cool like that.
Remember when vampires were scary?
So there's this complaint I come across relatively often, particularly from men, but also from women who either 1) are not themselves into vampires, or 2) fancy themselves as fans of "real" horror, and not this schmaltzy urban fantasy/horror/romance stuff. It essentially boils down to this: vampires aren't scary anymore. Oh, they used to be. They have a proud history of being terrifying, whether as dark, sinister noblemen, or as fast, inhuman, and terrifying zombie forerunners. Or so this argument goes. And some people can more or less back it up with citations, while a lot of others sort of waffle around and mumble (or type more slowly and with less confidence, I guess) something about folklore.
Well, vampire folklore has a long and diverse history, so being a generous soul, I'll give that to them and not point out that vampires also have a long history of being sexy, attractive, or just compelling depending on the origins of the legend and what particular part of the psyche we as a species are interested in tickling at any given time. Instead, I'm often willing to shrug this complaint off and take it for what it is--people saying what version of vampires they personally enjoy better. Often doing it in a sort of annoying way, framing it as real appreciation for monsters and horror rather than tragic pasty gentlemen in leather pants, as though those are the only two options and never the twain shall meet, but different people have different tastes and I'm cool with that. Vampires are a favorite monster of mine, and I'm more than happy to accept that different people are in it for different things.
It's hardly the first time someone's thrown their personal preference around as fact, and if I got upset everytime someone did that in fandom, I'd never have time to sleep, eat or pee.
Where this starts bothering me is when you have this sort of person--who wants vampires to be scary monsters, not sexy--but then they allow, admit, and even claim to enjoy vampires as sexual monsters. The argument that comes up, in this case, is that vampires feeding, written/filmed/whatever right, should be like rape. And this is where things get sticky for me. I realize that it's probably not meant this way, but there's something vaguely skeevy to me about recognizing the sexual symbolism of vampires, but then dismissing the idea of people who are into that sex.
So it's sex... but it's sex you're not allowed to consent to. Wait. Why not?
Vampires: sexing up the tuberculosis and drug addiction longer than Gothic Literature!
The first, most obvious, and probably most dismissive answer is that it's because it's sex that those particular whiners don't want to consent to for whatever reason. They're dead! They're evil! They're parasites! They're (almost always) dudes, and I'm not into dudes! And if they're not dudes... well, that is opening up an amazing box of all the twisted up notions that come out with powerful women and sexuality. You have female vampires as baby/child killers. Female vampires as succubi, corrupting and killing men with their sexuality. You have lesbian vampires, either rejecting men or becoming their enemy, because, you know, that's what chicks do when they get a little power and maybe some agency with their own sexuality.
I could keep going. Vampires can be a stand in for sex, but also for "sexy" diseases, like TB, STDs or addiction. Clearly that's a reason to reject them! And because of the sort of muddled way that symbolism and analogues and such work in fiction (and the way diseases and addiction work in real life), vampires become both the dangerous life style made flesh, and also the nasty jerkass boyfriend that Nice Guys everywhere know women all want, but that hurt them with their selfishness. The vampire can be that drug addiction that women should kick and are apparently too stupid to know to avoid without someone pointing it out? At least, that's the traditional narrative, from back when vampires were scary. But on top of that, they're also the drug addict for the Nice Guy to save you from.
Vampires don't have to be these things. Of course, they can just be death. They can just be monsters. They can be TB without the luminous eyes, fragile pale since and ethereal glow of popular media. But the thing is, when you go with vampires as sex, and treat it like people who want a kind of sex that you don't want, or that you disapprove of, then at best, you're wandering into the puritanical, and at worst, protesting a departure from the Dracula/Carmilla model of vampirism.
Vampirism: the sex Victorian gentlemen don't think you should want to have.
Because don't you hate it when girls hook up with weird foreigners? Or other women?! And they're not even doing it for your titillation. Those bitches. We definitely need some heroes to step in and protect them from unnatural penetration.
I think you get the point.
The problem is, women--the traditional victims in these older stories--do actually enjoy sex. They enjoy sex with men, sometimes with men who aren't totally the people their daddies approve of. Sometimes, they enjoy it with women. Not all women enjoy sex, no. But the fact is, a lot of us do. And as women get more and more of a voice in fiction, vampires got sexier. Because let's face it, if a vampire feeding can be like rape, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to reverse engineer the fact that maybe, just maybe, feeding a vampire consensually could be like sex. Sex which women can enjoy, even if they're not supposed to.
If you're operating from the perspective that women aren't quite full members of society, that their sexuality belongs to some kind of guardian--a father, a husband, a fiancé, then fighting off the awful monsters after their virtue--whether that's their Christian souls or their ladytype naughty bits.
However, we're not doing that so much now. Some people, a little, yeah, but it's definitely not as widely accepted as it was pre-sexual revolution. And it seems that vampire fiction has been shifting to allow for that. Which, at this point, I feel the need to include that not all vampire fiction reflects this. Not all vampire fiction even reflects vampires as a sexual stand in. Is the sexy, accessible vampire popular now? Yes. Has the vampire as the monstrous damned complessly disappeared, leaving these poor pro-monster vampire lovers with nothing at all of their own? ...wtf, no. Off the top of my head, most vampire movies still utilize the vampire as a villain. There are exceptions, but they are that. Exceptions. TV and novels are friendlier to the idea of vampires as heroes or anti-heroes, but in the end of the day, the blood thirsty, ugly monster vampires haven't been completely replaced by the sparkly kind.
But yes, fiction has made room for this shift--so now, we get more of the kind of vampires who are the kind of sex some women consent to having.
Girls like it and now they've ruined it with their girl cooties.
Which of course means it's ruined now. Because, damn it, those girls accepted it, and liked it, so of course someone had to come along and roll it in glitter. I mean, how else do you market things to those chicks?
Yeah, I'll admit, I'm not into the Twilight vampires either. I'm not into a number of the exceptionally kind and gentle vampires myself. That's my own preferences. It is also my point of view that sparkling, like looking like marble (I'm looking at you, Anne Rice), is pretty ridiculous. It doesn't make sense, even. If you're a predator, feeding on the blood of innocents, do you really want to be drawing their eyes like that?
Okay, okay, now I'm doing it. But honestly, I don't give a shit if other people like that kind of vampire. I judge them for liking the books, sure. The writing in those things is fucking terrible. But if the kind of vampire that makes you squirm is the type that glitters...
Well.
That's your business. I guess.
Fucking glitter.
But even if I'm not totally down with this far end of the spectrum, where apparently vampires have become the sex that you don't have until you're married because it makes you a bad Mormon, the backlash against it can be pretty telling when it talks about how, essentially, sexifying vampires ruined them. Maybe it's just my experience, but I've seen people (mostly guys in this particular example) use words like "domesticated," "tamed," and most tellingly of all, "neutered."
That's right. Look what happened. Girls went and stole Dracula's balls. It's like Daughter of the Blood all over again.
And, you know, actually, it is. It's saying that girls ruined vampires by removing the wild, dangerous, unpredictable masculinity from the myth. This construction goes back to a sort of gendering and gender essentialism that's grating. First off, if you don't like it, do what I do--mock the shit out of those glittery eyesores. Mock the writing. Role your eyes. Or just avoid them. But don't construct this as somehow the emasculation of a classic movie monster.
For fuck's sake, when you do that, you make me not care. Because that's my reaction whenever I hear about emasculation, or domestication of men. Not caring. You know what? If you lost your balls, metaphorically or literally, unless some woman actually cut them off you, it's not a woman's fault. The female as a drag on the dangerous, dynamic male awesomeness is a ridiculous stereotype, a ridiculous way of constructing gender, and more than a little offensive, thanks.
So we can be our own heroes. Sorta.
But backing away from the glittery fringe where only madness and twee baby names lies, we get into the meat of what is, admittedly, a pretty weak genre. Now, I say this as someone who likes some vampire romance, and someone who'd like to be happy with how many of these books feature female leads.
And in a lot of ways, this genre as it exists now does reflect a more modern suite of sexual mores. You have women, often as heroes. Often written as competent adults--and amazingly enough, as people who have sex drives, and who generally speaking, often come to consent to feeding in all it's sexualized glory.
But you may have already noticed problem one. There's still some puritanical, Victorian trappings on this one, because the good girl hero doesn't seek out sex or feeding. (As a gross generalization--there are exceptions to this.) She is convinced. She's won. She's seduced. She is one who starts out against the idea, and eventually submits to it. And this is one of my two big complaints with the characterization of female leads in the whole Urban Fantasy genre. The first is, I admit, that it's a breeding ground for Mary Sues. I'm not really going to dive into that at the moment, because it would just about double the length of this post, but suffice it to say, female leads in the genre seem very prone to a certain kind of bad writing.
And the second complaint I have is that while they've come far enough to consent to the sex they weren't supposed to want in ages past, they're still not showing full agency. They are not, to extend the metaphor a bit, getting to be the vampire. They're not the sexual aggressors in these world.
But when do we get to be our own vampires?
Or the werewolves. Or the monsters in general. If you see a werewolf/witch/vampire threesome being advertised, you know who the witch is without even having to look at the book. The witch is the woman.
In this, it actually extends past sexual agency to a sort of in group/out group writing. Though sex is certainly part of it. In Urban Fantasy, male leads often have a great deal of history with the evilness in the world. They may or may not be human, but if they're human, they're not naive. There's a very good chance that is the detective in your fantastic murder mystery is male, he'll be Noir-ish. He'll know what he's about. If someone needs to be ignorant so the author can provide an infodump, it's probably not him. He's much more likely to be dropping the exposition bomb to someone else--a woman or a child--than he is to have to sit through it without getting bored. There are exceptions, again. But as a rule... male leads in these books, in my experience, they've been around.
And there's a very good chance that they're a vampire, or a werewolf, or some other magical monster.
The lead woman, on the other hand, no matter how well educated she believes herself to be (it varies), won't really know shit. She sits there while Mr. Exposition Fairy does his song and dance, because she is the stand in for the reader's own ignorance. In High Fantasy, I rarely see the naive roles so gendered. In Urban Fantasy, though...
She will also, generally, be human. Oh, don't worry, she'll be special. She'll be a witch or a psychic or something. If she does become a vampire, it's a transformation we see, and normally something that shows her joining her love interest in immortality. It's not something that she angsts over. She doesn't get to be the analogue to recovering alcoholic PI, struggling to control her bloodlust. She doesn't have to worry about controlling her bloodlust with her love interest, because a female vampire lead with a human male love interest? What madness am I speaking here.
It may be we've come a long way, but somehow, even after we've gotten to rescue ourselves from distress, we damsels still don't get to be the ones doing the biting.
As though no women could ever sympathize with that.
Ha.
Now, there are certainly exceptions. Forgive my overgeneralization and all. But you know? I'd really like to see more books where the woman gets to be the monster. Not all of us female readers dream about projecting on the female lead as she's wooed by the supernatural. Some of us really would like our escapism to give us the opportunity to explore that ourselves. And preferably without being told we're ruining everything with our consent.
'Cause. You know. I'm cool like that.
Remember when vampires were scary?
So there's this complaint I come across relatively often, particularly from men, but also from women who either 1) are not themselves into vampires, or 2) fancy themselves as fans of "real" horror, and not this schmaltzy urban fantasy/horror/romance stuff. It essentially boils down to this: vampires aren't scary anymore. Oh, they used to be. They have a proud history of being terrifying, whether as dark, sinister noblemen, or as fast, inhuman, and terrifying zombie forerunners. Or so this argument goes. And some people can more or less back it up with citations, while a lot of others sort of waffle around and mumble (or type more slowly and with less confidence, I guess) something about folklore.
Well, vampire folklore has a long and diverse history, so being a generous soul, I'll give that to them and not point out that vampires also have a long history of being sexy, attractive, or just compelling depending on the origins of the legend and what particular part of the psyche we as a species are interested in tickling at any given time. Instead, I'm often willing to shrug this complaint off and take it for what it is--people saying what version of vampires they personally enjoy better. Often doing it in a sort of annoying way, framing it as real appreciation for monsters and horror rather than tragic pasty gentlemen in leather pants, as though those are the only two options and never the twain shall meet, but different people have different tastes and I'm cool with that. Vampires are a favorite monster of mine, and I'm more than happy to accept that different people are in it for different things.
It's hardly the first time someone's thrown their personal preference around as fact, and if I got upset everytime someone did that in fandom, I'd never have time to sleep, eat or pee.
Where this starts bothering me is when you have this sort of person--who wants vampires to be scary monsters, not sexy--but then they allow, admit, and even claim to enjoy vampires as sexual monsters. The argument that comes up, in this case, is that vampires feeding, written/filmed/whatever right, should be like rape. And this is where things get sticky for me. I realize that it's probably not meant this way, but there's something vaguely skeevy to me about recognizing the sexual symbolism of vampires, but then dismissing the idea of people who are into that sex.
So it's sex... but it's sex you're not allowed to consent to. Wait. Why not?
Vampires: sexing up the tuberculosis and drug addiction longer than Gothic Literature!
The first, most obvious, and probably most dismissive answer is that it's because it's sex that those particular whiners don't want to consent to for whatever reason. They're dead! They're evil! They're parasites! They're (almost always) dudes, and I'm not into dudes! And if they're not dudes... well, that is opening up an amazing box of all the twisted up notions that come out with powerful women and sexuality. You have female vampires as baby/child killers. Female vampires as succubi, corrupting and killing men with their sexuality. You have lesbian vampires, either rejecting men or becoming their enemy, because, you know, that's what chicks do when they get a little power and maybe some agency with their own sexuality.
I could keep going. Vampires can be a stand in for sex, but also for "sexy" diseases, like TB, STDs or addiction. Clearly that's a reason to reject them! And because of the sort of muddled way that symbolism and analogues and such work in fiction (and the way diseases and addiction work in real life), vampires become both the dangerous life style made flesh, and also the nasty jerkass boyfriend that Nice Guys everywhere know women all want, but that hurt them with their selfishness. The vampire can be that drug addiction that women should kick and are apparently too stupid to know to avoid without someone pointing it out? At least, that's the traditional narrative, from back when vampires were scary. But on top of that, they're also the drug addict for the Nice Guy to save you from.
Vampires don't have to be these things. Of course, they can just be death. They can just be monsters. They can be TB without the luminous eyes, fragile pale since and ethereal glow of popular media. But the thing is, when you go with vampires as sex, and treat it like people who want a kind of sex that you don't want, or that you disapprove of, then at best, you're wandering into the puritanical, and at worst, protesting a departure from the Dracula/Carmilla model of vampirism.
Vampirism: the sex Victorian gentlemen don't think you should want to have.
Because don't you hate it when girls hook up with weird foreigners? Or other women?! And they're not even doing it for your titillation. Those bitches. We definitely need some heroes to step in and protect them from unnatural penetration.
I think you get the point.
The problem is, women--the traditional victims in these older stories--do actually enjoy sex. They enjoy sex with men, sometimes with men who aren't totally the people their daddies approve of. Sometimes, they enjoy it with women. Not all women enjoy sex, no. But the fact is, a lot of us do. And as women get more and more of a voice in fiction, vampires got sexier. Because let's face it, if a vampire feeding can be like rape, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to reverse engineer the fact that maybe, just maybe, feeding a vampire consensually could be like sex. Sex which women can enjoy, even if they're not supposed to.
If you're operating from the perspective that women aren't quite full members of society, that their sexuality belongs to some kind of guardian--a father, a husband, a fiancé, then fighting off the awful monsters after their virtue--whether that's their Christian souls or their ladytype naughty bits.
However, we're not doing that so much now. Some people, a little, yeah, but it's definitely not as widely accepted as it was pre-sexual revolution. And it seems that vampire fiction has been shifting to allow for that. Which, at this point, I feel the need to include that not all vampire fiction reflects this. Not all vampire fiction even reflects vampires as a sexual stand in. Is the sexy, accessible vampire popular now? Yes. Has the vampire as the monstrous damned complessly disappeared, leaving these poor pro-monster vampire lovers with nothing at all of their own? ...wtf, no. Off the top of my head, most vampire movies still utilize the vampire as a villain. There are exceptions, but they are that. Exceptions. TV and novels are friendlier to the idea of vampires as heroes or anti-heroes, but in the end of the day, the blood thirsty, ugly monster vampires haven't been completely replaced by the sparkly kind.
But yes, fiction has made room for this shift--so now, we get more of the kind of vampires who are the kind of sex some women consent to having.
Girls like it and now they've ruined it with their girl cooties.
Which of course means it's ruined now. Because, damn it, those girls accepted it, and liked it, so of course someone had to come along and roll it in glitter. I mean, how else do you market things to those chicks?
Yeah, I'll admit, I'm not into the Twilight vampires either. I'm not into a number of the exceptionally kind and gentle vampires myself. That's my own preferences. It is also my point of view that sparkling, like looking like marble (I'm looking at you, Anne Rice), is pretty ridiculous. It doesn't make sense, even. If you're a predator, feeding on the blood of innocents, do you really want to be drawing their eyes like that?
Okay, okay, now I'm doing it. But honestly, I don't give a shit if other people like that kind of vampire. I judge them for liking the books, sure. The writing in those things is fucking terrible. But if the kind of vampire that makes you squirm is the type that glitters...
Well.
That's your business. I guess.
Fucking glitter.
But even if I'm not totally down with this far end of the spectrum, where apparently vampires have become the sex that you don't have until you're married because it makes you a bad Mormon, the backlash against it can be pretty telling when it talks about how, essentially, sexifying vampires ruined them. Maybe it's just my experience, but I've seen people (mostly guys in this particular example) use words like "domesticated," "tamed," and most tellingly of all, "neutered."
That's right. Look what happened. Girls went and stole Dracula's balls. It's like Daughter of the Blood all over again.
And, you know, actually, it is. It's saying that girls ruined vampires by removing the wild, dangerous, unpredictable masculinity from the myth. This construction goes back to a sort of gendering and gender essentialism that's grating. First off, if you don't like it, do what I do--mock the shit out of those glittery eyesores. Mock the writing. Role your eyes. Or just avoid them. But don't construct this as somehow the emasculation of a classic movie monster.
For fuck's sake, when you do that, you make me not care. Because that's my reaction whenever I hear about emasculation, or domestication of men. Not caring. You know what? If you lost your balls, metaphorically or literally, unless some woman actually cut them off you, it's not a woman's fault. The female as a drag on the dangerous, dynamic male awesomeness is a ridiculous stereotype, a ridiculous way of constructing gender, and more than a little offensive, thanks.
So we can be our own heroes. Sorta.
But backing away from the glittery fringe where only madness and twee baby names lies, we get into the meat of what is, admittedly, a pretty weak genre. Now, I say this as someone who likes some vampire romance, and someone who'd like to be happy with how many of these books feature female leads.
And in a lot of ways, this genre as it exists now does reflect a more modern suite of sexual mores. You have women, often as heroes. Often written as competent adults--and amazingly enough, as people who have sex drives, and who generally speaking, often come to consent to feeding in all it's sexualized glory.
But you may have already noticed problem one. There's still some puritanical, Victorian trappings on this one, because the good girl hero doesn't seek out sex or feeding. (As a gross generalization--there are exceptions to this.) She is convinced. She's won. She's seduced. She is one who starts out against the idea, and eventually submits to it. And this is one of my two big complaints with the characterization of female leads in the whole Urban Fantasy genre. The first is, I admit, that it's a breeding ground for Mary Sues. I'm not really going to dive into that at the moment, because it would just about double the length of this post, but suffice it to say, female leads in the genre seem very prone to a certain kind of bad writing.
And the second complaint I have is that while they've come far enough to consent to the sex they weren't supposed to want in ages past, they're still not showing full agency. They are not, to extend the metaphor a bit, getting to be the vampire. They're not the sexual aggressors in these world.
But when do we get to be our own vampires?
Or the werewolves. Or the monsters in general. If you see a werewolf/witch/vampire threesome being advertised, you know who the witch is without even having to look at the book. The witch is the woman.
In this, it actually extends past sexual agency to a sort of in group/out group writing. Though sex is certainly part of it. In Urban Fantasy, male leads often have a great deal of history with the evilness in the world. They may or may not be human, but if they're human, they're not naive. There's a very good chance that is the detective in your fantastic murder mystery is male, he'll be Noir-ish. He'll know what he's about. If someone needs to be ignorant so the author can provide an infodump, it's probably not him. He's much more likely to be dropping the exposition bomb to someone else--a woman or a child--than he is to have to sit through it without getting bored. There are exceptions, again. But as a rule... male leads in these books, in my experience, they've been around.
And there's a very good chance that they're a vampire, or a werewolf, or some other magical monster.
The lead woman, on the other hand, no matter how well educated she believes herself to be (it varies), won't really know shit. She sits there while Mr. Exposition Fairy does his song and dance, because she is the stand in for the reader's own ignorance. In High Fantasy, I rarely see the naive roles so gendered. In Urban Fantasy, though...
She will also, generally, be human. Oh, don't worry, she'll be special. She'll be a witch or a psychic or something. If she does become a vampire, it's a transformation we see, and normally something that shows her joining her love interest in immortality. It's not something that she angsts over. She doesn't get to be the analogue to recovering alcoholic PI, struggling to control her bloodlust. She doesn't have to worry about controlling her bloodlust with her love interest, because a female vampire lead with a human male love interest? What madness am I speaking here.
It may be we've come a long way, but somehow, even after we've gotten to rescue ourselves from distress, we damsels still don't get to be the ones doing the biting.
As though no women could ever sympathize with that.
Ha.
Now, there are certainly exceptions. Forgive my overgeneralization and all. But you know? I'd really like to see more books where the woman gets to be the monster. Not all of us female readers dream about projecting on the female lead as she's wooed by the supernatural. Some of us really would like our escapism to give us the opportunity to explore that ourselves. And preferably without being told we're ruining everything with our consent.