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Last week, Stephen Marche, author of Esquire's A Thousand Words About Our Culture column, regaled us with his latest epiphany: “Vampires have overwhelmed pop culture because young straight women want to have sex with gay men.”
I'll be the first to say Marche makes a few good points. There is a correlation between desire and the vampire phenomenon, but it has little to do with sexual liberation and even less with a secret desire harbored by heterosexual women to hook up with gay men.
If you were a foreign species paging through the rubble of a post-Apocalyptic Earth to get a sense of our species at this particular time period, and stumbled on Marche's piece, you'd think we were all sexually aware and liberated. We aren't. There is still repression, there are still many shameful things: let us not forget the abstinence-only curricula, the gay-rights battle we're still waging, the fierce come-back of the born-again virgin and chastity oaths, the prominence of the XXX Church at porn conventions, Apple's refusal to even devote a section of the iTunes store for 18+ adult entertainment applications, the ghetto in which sex bloggers reside on the web, Australia's mandatory internet filtering system, the fact that science still doesn't understand female desire—do I need to go on?
We're not an orgy of wild, good times. We're not, as Marche claims, processing “a newfound acceptance of what so many once thought strange or abnormal.” There may be a sexual revolution underway, but the battles are still being waged and we're caught in the crossfire socially and emotionally. The conflict that is delineated by themes in contemporary vampire fiction is two-fold: as I elaborated above, we know there are many ways to enjoy sex but we are not all quite there yet, and neither is society—by a long-shot. Secondly, we have discovered the zipless fuck isn't exactly enough for everyone in terms of in-depth sexual exploration.
Oh, the zipless fuck, the purest thing there is, the great encounter of sex for the sake of sex, free of emotion, commitment, motives and a whole lot of information about the other person. Don't get me wrong—that was an important step in getting to where we are, and a modus operandi that continues to work for many. But the themes in vampire fiction point to a specific need for something more.
This “something more” involves a concept with which many people in BDSM (bondage discipline sadism and masochism) are already familiar—that of aftercare. I'll explain: BDSM experiences are intense, often pushing participants to the limit physically, emotionally and psychologically. Aftercare is the period following one such experience, during which all parties cool down and provide one another emotional reassurance and tenderness. The trend in vampire fiction highlights the importance of aftercare, but it goes further: it explicitly demands respect, devotion, and loyalty.
Let's go over everything vampires are and work our way back to that last point.
The vampires in our two most popular chronicles, Twilight and True Blood, are much older than their human counterparts. By having lived so much longer, they walk into sex with the level of experience that makes it comfortable for us to go to that place where our deepest desires hide. With them, we can go there, not the same way our husbands or boyfriends let us go there, when they agreed to try it out, blindfolded us—half-giggling—and tried to figure out how to tie us to the posts of our beds. Our vampires know the ropes with the certainty and comfort of someone who has been practicing shibari for a lifetime—and then some.
And yet despite having lived dozens of lifetimes before meeting our heroines—and enjoyed at least a million trysts during these—our vampires never go in with the jaded look of someone who's done it all and is simply waiting to be surprised. Our fantasy demands that they relish in it every time. And they do.
In Twilight, which Marche uses to make his point about women's apparent desire for gay men, the vampire Edward is repulsed by the human Bella only because he desires her so intently that he fears he may kill her. He can hardly kiss her because the experience is so transcendent, he can't entirely control himself. Sex is rampant among our contemporary version of vampires, yes; but despite how common it is, these vampires give themselves so wholly to it, they nearly lose themselves every time.
This is not a man who is panting over you, worrying about whether he is pleasing you or not,
