Why "women" "like" "vampires"

[modernwizard]

On the eve of the movie debut of Twilight, much pissing and swooning occurs on the subject of vampires as depicted in this film. Lots of articles wonder about the attraction that the Twilight vampires have to their audience.

Rosemary Black, New York Daily News: 1) Women are drawn to Byronic heroes. 2) We desire them because the intense fear provides orgasmic arousal. 3) They're the ultimate symbol of a chaste sensuality. 4) They're perpetually young, sexy and intensely devoted to their mortal lovers.

Kate Harding, Broadsheet [Salon]: 1) New York Daily News is full of shit. All the article's arguments represent tired stereotypes about female sexuality. 2) Women are attracted to the recent crop of vampires because they are written by women and /or because there's a focused on well-rounded female characters.

Henly 424, Salon commenter: The current iteration of the vampire, an intensely devoted, magical, eternally loving being with awesome superpowers, recapitulates the old fantasy that a supernatural creature can somehow rescue an ordinary kid from a life of boring normalcy and transform him/her into something powerful and stupendous, merely by association with the undead.

There's not anything particularly attractive to women as a whole about vampires as a whole. For women as a whole to be attracted to vampires as a whole, both women as a whole and vampires as a whole would require definition as monadic entities. However, women are diverse in their attractions; vampires are diverse in their manifestations. The idea that "vampires" can reveal something "essential" about "feminine sexuality" can just go to hell.

Even if we're talking about the type of vampires shown in the Twilight saga [which we probably are, even though it's never explicitly stated], the question is still not "Why do women love vampires?" The question is "Why are these particular characters extremely popular among a huge subset of U.S. readers who are mostly teenaged and female?" There's no ahistorical answer. I can't stand it when people can't frame their inquiries with appropriate exactness.

As to why the Twilight vampires are so popular with their audience, I think Laura Miller's analysis of Bella as Mary Sue is an insightful start.

The LHF vampires are amused about the amount of critical ink being spilled in an attempt to explain their attractiveness to mortals. :p

Comments

[damsel-ophelia.livejournal.com]

Rosemary Black needs to read LHF. The amount of deconstruction of this topic is really amusing, because the act of biting during sex or sex play and the arousal that comes from the receiving end of the bite(s) is most assuredly NOT LIMITED TO WOMEN! Shit, having someone sucking your blood is downright sexy - it is an incredibly intimate act.

[pugnacioun.livejournal.com]

I'd say that Edward Cullen (and I'll agree that these articles are probably focused on him, or at least the kind of vampire/character he represents, ie, at once dangerous (Grr! Vampire!) and completely harmless (I think he kisses Bella's collarbone in the books at some point)) is probably attractive to the people he's attractive to (Twilight's serious audience*, which is overwhelmingly made up of pubescent American girls and women who are married, with kids, in their thirties) because he calls on a number of stereotypes and trite fantasies (he plays piano, he's chivalrous, he doesn't want to have sex until marriage, he's almost obsessively loyal and protective - all traits that look good on paper, but can become annoying when collected in an actual person) in a book that is really marketed towards people who buy into those same fantasies - teen girls who either haven't had time to read a lot of good, literary books, girls who are just frustrated with the immature, quasi-pubescent, unromantic boys they know, or women on the cusp of middle age who more or less know exactly how the rest of their lives are going to play out (since they are both married, which is theoretically a life-long commitment, with children, also an unbreakable obligation). I don't think it really has anything to do with female sexuality as a whole, but rather how the specific combination of characteristics that make up Edward (who is both flat and static) and how obsessively he reacts to Bella, who encompasses all of the shortcomings that someone could have (she's completely unremarkable, without significant intelligent, beauty, grace, talent, or any kind of wider importance - in essence, a mirror of the people her story is trying to appeal to). People don't read these books for the plot, the action, the profundity, or the intrigue - they read them because they like the idea of an unremarkable human having a perfect romance with a completely remarkable creature.

*As opposed to what livejournal blogger cleolinda calls "lolfans"