Powers of Creation

So I was browsing around Aeclectic Tarot, idly looking through decks by theme, and of course I checked out the Vampire grouping. Among these I found not strictly a vampiric deck, but a dark and moody one in general, the Bohemian Gothic from Magic Realist Press. The deep, cool blues and jewel-like brights, the profusion of skulls and the disturbingly staring eyes, all in the style of Victorian lithographs, are heavily influenced by Gothic and Romantic tropes. Admire many of the cards at the deck's own Web site. Then weep because it's out of print and commanding nearly $400.00 on Amazon.com. Dammit...and I really liked that deck!

In an interview with Nylon, Stephen Moyer, currently playing dead cheeseface vampire Bill in True Blood, expounds upon the appeal of vampire characters to a female audience:
Let's look at his claims, shall we? First, Moyer thinks that he knows "a female point of view." He, as a man, now speaks for what women want. He, a white heterosexual male, has authority on what women want! We need no input from actual women to determine what those strange feminine creatures desire. Let the authoritative man tell us. He's an expert because he's not a vampire, but he plays one on TV.

Moyer believes that women desire "an old-fashioned gentleman...who is a fucking killer." Yes yes, polite murderers! They're really sexy! They hearken back, claims Moyer, to a "romantic time when men were men, but they were still charming." Yet what were men doing during this time? Crawling "out of the mud and [raping] their partners," as his character Bill does to Sookie in one scene apparently.

Have you got that? There was a time, in Moyer's dim, ahistorical, misogynist view of things, when men raped women, and women liked it. It was a "romantic" time, so lovey-dovey. Women didn't have to do anything so difficult as saying what they wanted. They could just count on men to screw them against their will...politely, though, and with manners.

Moyer may be talking about vampires as vectors of rape fantasies, which have nothing to do with real non-consensual sex and everything to do with the fantasizer forcing herself to let go and experience pleasure, something she may have a hard time doing outside of her head. I acknowledge that these fantasies of masterful, sweep-you-off-your feet sex partners exist. I acknowledge that these fantasies may be framed as non-consensual. I acknowledge that part of the allure of vampires as portrayed in True Blood and other modern media is their masterful, sweeping-off-feet tendencies. I do not dispute the existence of these things.

I do object, however, to Moyer's characterization of feminine desires. Whether he's referring to sweep-you-off-your-feet fantasies or not, he's doing so inaccurately and misogynistically. By calling rape "romantic" and claiming that "men were men," he's confusing an observation about vampire as sexual fantasy with some stupid essentialist drivel about masculine aggression, not to mention the misogynist bullshit idea about women secretly yearning to be raped. Therefore, instead of providing an insight into the popularity of the vampire figure [as other actors who have played vampires have demonstrated that they can do with intelligence and humor and WITHOUT misogyny], Moyer ends up providing insight into how much he loathes both men and women. I've just lost all respect for him. D:

Available online as an E-book. Looks like published conference proceedings covering Carmilla to BTVS. Super-chouette!

EDIT: This collection of rather short essays is at its best when covering modern vampires, although Hyun-Jung Lee's analysis of LeFanu's Carmilla as a threat to the very foundation of subjectivity is particularly good. In the section on vampires of today, one especially interesting essay by Elizabeth McCarthy addresses the importance of bodily mutilation inflicted by people on vampires to modern conceptions of the vampire legend. In another unusual essay, Pete Remington takes a look at Anne Rice's vampires and their relation to the experience of the depressive self. Five essays treat BTVS and Angel, mostly the sexually problematic characters of Angel and Spike, who both embody and undermine tropes of magnetic, violent, brooding, Byronic heroism. This is a varied collection with essays of uniformly high quality, although I do wish most of the pieces were longer, with more in-depth analysis.

Also possibly of interest: Monsters: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil, edited by Paul Yoder and Peter Kreuter, in the same series.

Also possibly of interest: The Monstrous Identity of Humanity, edited by Marlin Bates, by the same press.

Natalie Angier writes a New York Times article about non-human organisms that subsist wholly or partly on the blood of other organisms. Most illuminating for my purposes is the commentary here:

Moreover, even though we rightly cherish our own blood as the indispensable elixir of our lives, it turns out that, as a foodstuff for others, it is surprisingly thin gruel. Blood is more than 95 percent water, with the rest consisting mostly of proteins, a sprinkling of sugars, minerals and other small molecules, but almost no fat. Tiny creatures can do fine on such light fare, which is why the great majority of exclusive blood eaters are arthropods.... For larger sanguivores, though, it is as much of a challenge to survive on blood as it is to acquire it.

Small wonder that wholehearted exclusive blood feeding is rare among vertebrates, and that two of the three species of vampire bats are found in such low numbers they are at risk of extinction....

The moral of the story is that blood, while rich in symbolism, is impoverished in actual food value. Therefore I suspect that most attempts to make an exclusively sanguivorous vampire biologically convincing are pretty silly insofar as they ignore the basic fact that a human-sized biped that runs solely on blood would have to be drinking it constantly [and pissing out all the watery plasma constantly, HAH!]. Much more believable to create an opportunistic sanguivore that likes blood and drinks it whenever possible, but does not get more than, say, 25% of its diet therefrom. Maybe like the LHF vampires, who are all united by their taste for human blood, but who also eat omnivorously??

P.S. Here's Angier's general paean to human blood, a "marvelous fluid tissue...that not only feeds us and cleans us," but also tastes delicious.

Got your attention, didn't I? Listen to this story.

In the 1800s, tuberculosis, then commonly known as consumption, was one of the most common, deadly and feared diseases. One of the families it struck was the Brown family of Exeter, Rhode Island. First the mother, Mary Brown, died of consumption in December, 1883. A little over half a year later, the eldest Brown daughter, also named Mary, succumbed. When a son, Edwin, contracted consumption a few years later, he was sent out west in the hopes that the salutary air of Colorado would halt his sickness. It didn't. When Edwin returned to Exeter, his sister Mercy got sick with the "galloping," or fast-acting, version of consumption. She died in 1892.

Edwin's condition worsened. Alarmed at the mortality rate of the Brown family, friends, neighbors and other townspeople began to worry that the Browns suffered from a vampire. What else could be systematically draining the vitality of parents and children except for some hungry relation come back from the grave? Encouraged both by this speculation and by desperation, the remaining Brown men took drastic action.( Read more... )
 

Thinking the of ep of Moonlight in which vampires were pretending to be human [The Mortal Cure] and its inverse, B.C. [summarized here, in which humans take drugs to feel vampiric], I got to wondering... What if there was a synthetic drug for modern American vampires [as opposed to the many other kinds running around in my universe] that simulated the effects of being human: i.e., reduced strength and speed, reduced sensorium, reduced immune system, tolerance for daylight, garlic and major religious symbols? 

I like supernatural creatures. Partly I like them because they are a testament to human inventiveness in the face of the unknown and inexplicable. They're beautiful creations of folk logic ["Well, if it looks like the corpse's nails and hair are growing and it's in a pool of blood when we dig it up, that means it must be alive and feeding on blood!"], fear and wonder. That's why I will devour stories about them: because, as human creations, they are clever, rich and powerful, full of meaning... They've got a hold on us.

I also like supernatural creatures because they work as lovely metaphors, which partly explains their continuing fascination, even to people who do not believe in them.