“My roommate is hooked on the damn Twilight series and won’t shut the fuck up about Edward Cullen. She has a legitimate, full-on crush on this fictional character. She talks constantly about vampires and how much she wants to have sex with one. And several of her friends agree. They are all now obsessed with how sexy vampires are because of these books and all the movies out right now. What is wrong with them?”

There are a few ways I can answer this: the Freudian-Jungian route, the film class snob route and the route where I copy the straight-to-the-gut response written in the comments of an online article on why the Twilight books are so bloody sexless.

ClicheLaMoron writes:

“The book is TOTAL porn. But not the scary kind with dicks. The kind that’s PERFECT for teenage girls, which is all about getting off on the pain of loving someone so hard and not being able to have him. Which is a sexual feeling, even though that makes no sense to dudes. But in reality, you cannot have your idol because you are hideous and unpopular, not because HE LOVES YOU TOO MUCH TO EVER ENDANGER YOU WITH HIS LOOOOOOOVE, but the good/bad feeling is much the same.”

For those of you who have, through either luck or sheer force of will, escaped the cultural phenomenon that is the Twilight series of books and movies about vampires written by terrible Mormon writer Stephanie Meyer, let me bring you up to speed. The main character, a whiny uninteresting pretty girl named Bella, meets and falls in love with a vampire named Edward Cullen who is maddeningly attracted to her and must use every ounce of strength not to drink her blood… because he is a pansy ass “vegetarian” vampire who only eats animals. They are in love, they don’t have sex. And now you know everything you need to know.

And ClicheLaMoron has a point. With apologies to my good friends who love these books, they are fantasy for girls who haven’t got what they want in the romance department… which is most women, really. The tale is of a girl who moves to a new town and is instantly desired by the sexiest creature ever. It’s appealing to girls who stare longingly across a classroom day in and day out at a boy who cannot see what an amazing, wonderful, beautiful princess she is. These are young adult fiction with a target demographic that has more orthodontic appointments than real life sexual partners.

But I don’t want to sound like this new crop of vampire fans are wrong. They are the latest in a long line of people entranced by the sexiness of vampires. Even though Bram Stoker’s Dracula was a creepy, monstrous creature (a far cry from the gay rave that is Robert Pattison’s chiseled torso), he was an incredibly sexually appealing character.

He was the foreign man who looked different and smelled different and could seduce away even the most chaste and pure of white Victorian women. He had a castle and harem of sexually aggressive vampire bitches, like a bloodthirsty Hugh Hefner. After a single night of necking and exchanging bodily fluids, women were drawn to him for the rest of eternity, dropping everything they had ever known (including their duties as wives and mothers) and becoming rapacious creatures of the night.

Move along to Anne Rice’s series of vampires: Interview with the Vampire, etc. There’s the homoerotic tension so thick it can be cut with a stake, pedophilic and incestuous undertones, nudity and the allusions to sexual assault and BDSM that permeate her telling of turning humans to vampires.

And as we continue on, there are developments in the legends of vampires. There are scads of vampire stories about lesbians, plenty of exploitation films chock full of nudity, sex-drenched gore fests like True Blood and glamorous nightclub vampires like in Blade. Vampire stories are told with sex in them. If not the kind that is appealing to our deep subconscious (as Jung and Freud would have pointed out in Dracula), than straight up fucking like you find in modern fang flicks. Vampires are sexy. But why?

Vampires:

• are immortal and allow us to fantasize about eternal youth, power and beauty
• have supernatural powers and are free from moral constraints about how to use them ethically so we can live our fantasies we’re too afraid to consciously consider
• are outsiders, monstrosities and able to destroy everything: the very things many humans fancy themselves as being on their darkest days.
• Can have access to and control of any desirable person they want forever
• are linked inextricably to nighttime, darkness, and sin
• act with both violence and seduction to get what they want
• seek pleasure and are compulsively predatory and aggressive about obtaining it

So as much as Stephanie Meyer’s tomes of teenage angst and longing might annoy you, your roommate and her friends are merely allowing themselves to enjoy the wish fulfillment fantasy that is available to them. May we all be so lucky to find something we’re so excited about.

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