The Vampire Thing

Of all the mythic creatures that have been around for centuries, if not eons, vampires seem to reappear in our consciousness a great deal. The ancient myth, it's been argued, was created to explain the existence of human killers. It does seem reasonable to assume that the psychological type inclined to kill for fun has been around longer than we've been able to solve their crimes. In fact, there are some documented cases of people in history who killed repeatedly, for no particular reason. So, in the days before police procedures, when townspeople went missing or bodies turned up bloodied and mangled, monsters were invented to explain these events.

The Victorians really took to the vampire story. Bram Stoker's Dracula was written in 1897, and draws on the true horror for its time: sex. Vampires, particularly in the early industrial period, are sexual creatures. They stalk and seduce their victims. Their attack is a sensuous experience. And those who are attacked are often turned to vampires themselves, a metaphor for being corrupted by sexual license. Anne Rice's vampires play up this aspect, as anyone who's read her other works would find unsurprising.

Vampires can also be pretty gay, and represent that other threatening form of sexual license - homosexuality. The Victorians were pretty terrified of that, too. The vampire in Dark Shadows gave off some gay vibes, and indeed, the show was campy as all hell. The secretive nature of the vampire comes in to play here, as gays can be among us and yet not known. The coffin in which the vampire sleeps comes to symbolize the closet in which the horror of the unknown other is hidden.

But, with the 20th century came a shift in priorities. Mass production brought consumerism, and as a result, the straight-laced mores of the Victorians gave way to permissiveness. Now we are presumed to want sex all the time, and practically shunned if we fail to live up to that image. Vampires and sex both came out of the closet, and latter-day monsters tend to be a lot more like regular people. The "vampires as people, too" motif came front and center with Buffy, in which the appetites of the vampire are not all that different from the appetites of the humans with which they co-exist. They are still evil, though - unless they have souls.

So I'm not entirely sure what to make of the Twilight thing. I find it interesting that the vampire has now been so normalized that the vampire who romances the human starts to look more like West Side Story than Dracula. These vampires seem to actually have souls, and choose abstinence - a parallel I find somewhat disturbing. It does seem to echo the cultural backlash against permissiveness in which abstaining from pleasure is seen as a virtue in its own right.

Still, these chaste, shiny vampires seem custom-made to appeal to very young women, and feeds their beliefs in non-threatening-yet-dangerous men who have no life outside of obsessing over their girlfriends. I don't find this a healthy dynamic at all, and the assertion that Bella "chooses" to be with Edward as a manifestation of her liberated self is kind of ludicrous. It's exactly the easiest and most dangerous road for a teenage woman to take, and hence not really that much of a choice. Choosing to live her own life, now that would take some guts.

On the other hand, one can cast it in more of the West Side Story mold, in which loving Edward is tantamount to interracial love. In that case, I guess it does take courage to choose the relationship. But I still don't agree with the abstinence part. If being with Bella means constantly fighting his most fundamental longings, then Edward is basically a kinky guy trying to be with a vanilla girl, and promotes the lie that people can actually repress their desires and still be happy.

If any twilight fans are actually reading this, let me know what you think. I'm going to stick with the vampires that actually have sex for the time being. Besides, that guy who plays Edward in the movie is not my type. He has the Frankenstein forehead, which always turns me off.

If you were a slave...

I confess, I don't like the term "slave" applied to BDSM or D/s relationships. I feel that it is inevitably inaccurate, since slavery is, by definition, non-consensual. People who keep slaves in real life are doing so for economic gain, not for anyone's personal satisfaction, least of all the slaves'. They are operating outside of the law and do not have any abiding interest in their captives' well-being. Slavery is conducted in many parts of the world - women are sometimes abducted but more often lured with false promises of legitimate work, only to find that they are dependent on criminals for their livelihood and expected to earn money for them through prostitution, drug smuggling, or other illegal labor. For instance, if you were a slave...

...you would be prevented from leaving through coercion, brainwashing, and violence
...you would not be fed adequate, nutritious food
...your captors would compel you to use harmful, addictive drugs through which they could control you by controlling the drug supply
...you would be raped by your captors
...you would not receive adequate medical care
...you would most likely be murdered by your captor as soon as you became too much trouble or were no longer profitable
...if you became pregnant, your captors would most likely take the baby away and sell it, or murder it

I think what most people refer to as a "slave" role in BDSM is actually closer to that of a servant in the service of an English or American household in the 18th - 19th centuries. The servant in this situation was kept in place by the constant threat of being dismissed and losing both their livelihood and shelter, and was expected to follow an elablorate set of rules in order to keep that position. It is still more coercive than consensual, but servants were not killed or brutalized nearly as much as slaves are. They were sometimes physically punished, and probably molested and/or raped by their employers more often than people of that era would be inclined to admit.

Now, playing at being a slave or a servant is different from claiming to actually be one. I can actually see myself really enjoying slave play in small doses and under controlled circumstances.

She doesn't take this argument to the degree that I do, but Mistress Matisse did say in one of her Control Tower articles that no matter how much you may want it not to be so, you do have the right to leave the relationship, even if you call yourself a slave, and that believing otherwise is a nice fantasy, but not reality. So I'm not the only one.

I've come to accept that people in this community use the term slave to refer to something that is not actually slavery, and I accept that this is what they want to do. I just think it would be more accurately called something else.

Gender Matters Less

It doesn’t take a very detailed observation to notice that non-threatening, conventionally femme girl-on-girl sexiness is heartily approved of among straight men. Indeed, it’s a staple of the adult entertainment industry, from strip clubs to the “Girls Gone Wild” franchise. It even shows up in the weirdly incestuous “twins” theme – apparently two women making out is even sexier if they look exactly the same, never mind the fact that they have identical DNA. (I could go on at length about the challenge same-sex, intragenerational relations pose to that most ancient of social customs, the incest taboo, but not here.)

Still, it’s assumed that the ladies in these scenarios are not actually lesbians. If they were, they would, by definition, have no interest in men as sex partners. No, the assumption is that these young, attractive women would enthusiastically welcome a man into the mix. In fact, they may even be presumed to feel that the girl-on-girl fun is good for a laugh, and gets the guys turned on, but falls more under the category of drunken rowdiness or “being wild”, whatever that means. Do those girls really get off on it themselves? That seems to be beside the point.

The taboo for women, then, is not making it with other women. The taboo is not making it with men. At all. Ever. The heterosexual male world seems not to take the rejection very well, and treats actual lesbians with a fair amount of contempt, not to mention outright hostility and violence. Not only do real lesbians decline to have relations with men, they also tend to neglect the work that goes into being femme. Not having a reason to live up to the standards of attractiveness straight men go for, lesbians may very easily forego shaving, makeup, femme clothes, long, tousled hair, and so on. A certain subset of men seem to take this as a personal affront, and will enthusiastically call such women out with slurs such as “dyke” or worse.

For men, on the other hand, making it with another guy is the taboo, the big one, from which one cannot come back. While bisexual women get a big thumbs-up from most men (but not, sadly enough, most gay women), bisexual men are treated as dangerous. Women tend to shy away, out of fear that they will be a disease vector, that they are really gay and only want a woman for social approval, or just because they can’t stomach the idea of man-on-man sex. Thus, the straight/gay dichotomy holds up more solidly with men than with women. When a man comes out as gay, the assumption is he’s strictly for the fellas and no gray area at all. Bisexual men, and it’s certain that they exist, are more likely to repress and avoid bringing it up or ever experimenting with it. If they can get off with ladies, it’s just as well to stick with that and not open up such a big can of worms. Until you find him trolling Craigslist or airport bathrooms.

Perhaps the dichotomy has some connection to biology, though. I have heard of research which finds that men really are more either/or in their sexuality – either it gets them up or it doesn’t. Women, lacking such a distinctive and obvious meter for their arousal level, are more apt to try something to find out if it has any potential. Guys pretty much already know.

When it comes to BDSM, the whole situation gets even more complicated. Some of the foregoing holds true – bisexual women are quite common in the scene and ladies are quite apt to get intimate with each other to varying degrees. Many female subs are quite content to bottom for another woman, even though they are more likely to settle down with a male Dom. The poly kinky family frequently sports a male Dom and more than one female sub, an arrangement facilitated by flexibility with regards to women, sex, and gender. Men, on the other hand, tend to want either ladies or men, and not a lot of in between, at least when it comes to sex.

Still, BDSM is not always sexual, and many people are really quite firmly hetero when it comes to sex but much more flexible when it comes to straight-up BDSM play. Some go as far as to label themselves bi-kinky, because it is hard to take the sex out of it completely. Women often play together like school friends at a slumber party, and some men are perfectly content to play with other men or even have male submissives who are not their sex partners.

I’m not entirely sure what to make of this, except that BDSM is, at the same time, sexual and not sexual. Yes, one can conduct all manner of perverted fun without even exposing anyone’s genitals, much less connecting them. But at the same time, the vast majority of us do those things because it gets our motors running. It’s a very compelling reason to get into something, and many of us really need a compelling reason to do something so socially unaccepted. When these ideas start creeping into one’s head around the same time that they start getting tingly feelings down there, it doesn’t go away easily, if at all, and the connection can never truly be severed. While there are a few strange-even-for-us people who are really very asexual about it, I suspect that a lot of the “It’s not sexual” crowd are really just trying to bowdlerize it to make it seem more acceptable.

In the end, all I can really say is that clearly gender matters less to us than it does to the vanilla. It’s not a huge stretch – transgression in one area tends to bleed into others. Gender queerness is part and parcel of the scene. This is one reason why hardcore female supremacists and Gorean types turn me off; they want to codify the gender structure more strictly than even vanilla folks do. But then, a lot of us actually get off on codifying things. So perhaps I can forgive them that. D/s as the fetishization of OCD, in a sense. Still, as much as I like things organized, and rules can be very sexy, I like my gender fluidity and flexibility, too, and I think that’s because, deep down, I’m really in love with humans. I enjoy studying them and puzzling over their complicated natures, and as much as they sometimes annoy me, they are endlessly fascinating. And if both halves are fascinating, then I can’t limit sexiness to just one half.