In Which We Discuss Twilight and the Defence of Sparklepires

Do you remember when the media-cycle last turned around to Vampires?  Twilight was a big part of that zeitgeist, but so was True Blood, Being Human and a re-release of LJ Smith's Vampire Diaries, which was part of a previous vampire cycle in the mid-nineties.  If I recall correctly, it was preceded by witches - remember Charmed and T*Witches? - and followed by werewolves.  Then aliens, some more witches, and now we're stuck on zombies.  We've been stuck on zombies for a while now, actually.  It's a bit interminable.

I read the first Twilight book in order to see what all the fuss was about.  It was okay.  Went down easily, like junk food, but when you thought back over what it contained you felt a little bad.  Like the whole magical soulmates aspect; for a species that doesn't breed via sex why would you even need sexual attraction?  How would the mechanism for establishing one perfect soulmate even work, and what possible benefit could it have?  Especially because the same or a related factor made Bella smell delicious so Edward nearly ate her before realizing that she was his true love anyway.

There's also the way the book presented certain behaviours as romantic when they'd more typically come under domestic violence in the real world.  Abusers make their victims stay by convincing them that this is what love is - we don't need popular fiction helping to maintain the charade.  From my recollection, Edward hits three out of this list, and hits fifteen out of the one used by Kar3ning. For both, the point of concern is one.

At this point you may be wondering why I've entitled this post 'defence of sparklepires'.  That's because I've been thinking about vampiric abilities and the various explanations for them.

My favourite vampire story is David Sosnowski's Vamped.  The author has a wonderful way with words, and the world he's built is amazing.  Marty, the main character, is one of the original vampires who decided to take over the world.  Now they've succeeded.  Blood is grown in vats and can be ordered by the pint, all flights are red eye, and everyone's gone back to their day jobs.  There's some great world building in the book, and you can tell the author's considered every little aspect.  One thing he doesn't really go into though, because it's not strictly relevant and because Marty doesn't know, is how and why vampires work.

It was LJ Smith, I believe, who came up with my favourite theory for vampiric bloodlust.  I think it was in The Vampire Diaries where vampire blood was described as a virus which attacked bone marrow.  Someone who had been infected would not be able to produce normal, oxygen-carrying blood, and if they did not obtain some would go on to die of oxygen-starvation.  When they do drink human blood, their own blood rapidly kills the red blood cells, hence why they require regular top-ups.

What neither Smith nor Sosnowski cover is why vampires are photosensitive.  Traditionally, it's because the sun is 'holy' and vampires are 'evil' which isn't saying much.  What do the words 'holy' and 'evil' mean in this context, apart from two things that are in opposition?  What is the actual mechanism that causes damage?

In some ways, it would make more sense for zombies to be photosensitive.  Heat speeds decomposition; the virus which encourages the host to only be active at night, when it's cooler, and to hide in cold places during the heat of day would last long and spread further than a virus which ignores that and speeds the decomposition of the host.

Meyer, at least, address this in Twilight.  Her vampires avoid sunlight because...they sparkle.  She even has an explanation - the sparkling attracts prey.  She also explains the mechanism, which is to do with the structure of vampiric skin.  If you don't reject it on principle as non-traditional it explains itself very nicely.

It does, however, beg another question.  What was the vampires' original prey?  Humans certainly don't provide the arms race necessary to produce super speed, strength, and sparkly attractive skin.  We're very good specialized tool-users, but a predator could get by on just one of those, never mind all three and psychic abilities on top.

Which leads to my personal theory; the vampires are aliens.  The vampire virus originally came from somewhere it was necessary for those traits to exist, for survival.  Then they were dropped on this planet, where they vastly outclass their prey.

The other alternative is that their prey either disappeared - possible since they'd have to be very fast, probably became nocturnal, and very good at hiding - and at the same time vampires developed the ability to eat humans.  If vampires developed the ability to eat humans before their prey became so good at hiding the arms race would have ended there and then; why try to go after the hard prey when the easy one is right there, being a sitting duck?  And, of course, if they developed it much later they would have have starved.

In short; I like the sparklepire thing because it makes sense, but only if you then assume that vampires are aliens.  Which is still more logical than sunlight being holy.

I have mentioned this before, but I'm a huge fan of Luminosity and Eclipse, Twilight rewrites by Alicorn, with Bella as a rationalist heroine.

In Which We Discuss Neutering the Vampire and Blood in Fiction

This post was originally written a while back and posted to another of my blogs. It was inspired by two different books;  Daughters of Darkness: Lesbian Vampire Stories, collected by Pam Keesey, and Alicorn's re-imaging of Twilight, in which Bella is a rationalist thinker.

I feel that I should mention, at this point, that I don't like Twilight.  I do love Alicorn's take on it.  Her take on Bella is fantastic, and someone I feel I can relate to, as a person and a feminist, far more than to Meyer's original.  I highly recommend checking it out, especially if reading Twilight made you feel dirty.  Seriously, go check it out right now, I'll wait.  For days, if necessary.

Finally, this post was inspired by a thread on GoodReads, which began with the assumption that Jacob was the 'nice guy' who 'finished last', while Edward was the 'bad boy'.  I disagree, both with that idea and with the entire concept of nice guys, bad boys, and women preferring one over the other.  This is, at least in part, because every person I've ever seen whining about how nice they are, and how women don't appreciate them, has been a whiny selfish jerk, who thinks the world owes them something, ie Nice Guys TM.  But, I digress.

Daughters of Darkness (which I've yet to finish) has a very interesting introduction.  Keesey talks about how, before Bram Stoker's Dracula became the vampire story, stories of lesbian vampires were very common.  (Incidentally, I also highly recommend Angela Carter's The Lady of the House of Love, which as published in The Flying Sorcerers and The Bloody Chamber).

In our society, as in most, if not all, others, the young female virgin is the ultimate symbol of sexual innocence.  She is rarely allowed control of her sexuality; she is a prize, to be taken.  She is someone who something is done to, not someone who does.  L. Sigel does an excellent job of describing this idea in her essay, which discusses reactions to her study of pornography.

Before quoting a short extract from her essay, I should explain that the 'Bella' she refers to is not Bella Swan; rather, she is Bella of the Victorian erotica story, The Autobiography of a Flea, a character who is seduced by several characters, including her own uncle.

As a woman who studies sexuality, I find myself understood as part of my work. My intellectual work gets positioned where it doesn't belong--on my body. The idea that women are so finely tuned sexual creature that the contagion of sexuality must be kept from them or they will be polluted remains central to our understanding of gender. As a woman I find myself continuously positioned as Bella or against Bella. I can either be deviant or I can be against deviance. I cannot just think about the process or the performance of deviance. The process by which I have been disciplined is voyeurism overlaid with threat, intimidation, and shame. Here are two examples of the process: When I was in London for a number of months doing my research I met an interesting man. I went out for coffee with him and told me he didn't want to get involved (with me) because he had a girlfriend in California. We agreed to that. We talked, went to a movie, and drank coffee. He propositioned me and I said "No." And I said "No". And I said "No." He told me that he only wanted to sleep with me because of my research. He thought I would be adventurous in bed. I had to say "no" a number of times because at some level, perhaps on the surface, perhaps unconsciously, he couldn't believe that I was unaccessible as a sexual partner. As a woman who studied sexuality, I was sexually accessible and sexually voracious. He made that clear when he referred to my research. By referring to my research, he also meant to insult me. The sum of my worth as a sexual partner came from my "adventurousness" predicated upon my intellectual leanings. I had teased him as a woman because of my studies and he could retaliate by denigrating my worth with an "only." As a woman I did not deserve attention, my value "only" came from my deviant sexuality.

Normative discipline works as the flip side of deviant discipline. Women are to be protected from sexuality, or scorning that, women become sexualized and accessible. Consider this: Customs, by pre-arrangement, met me when I came home. Both Customs and I wanted to make sure that I didn't bring home any illegal materials. The Customs agent, who was generally very nice, said "What does your mother think? Isn't she ashamed of what you're doing?"

Customs, in searching for child pornography and/or bestiality which are illegal in this country, has a right to decide boundaries of normative and deviant sexual representation. Behind the practice of search, seizure, and arrest is the theory that children should not be sexual objects for adults. Representations that picture sexualized children 1) encourage adults to sexualize children and 2) provide lasting testimony to the children's shame which adults can continue to take pleasure in. The belief that the state should protect the weak is implicit in its stance towards child pornography. However, bestiality is usually just seen as wrong. When it gets considered at all, it is generally seen as degrading towards the humans involved and not the animals. Instead of protecting animals, restrictions against bestiality protect humans from the contagion of deviant sexuality by discouraging thinking about such acts and from advertising the degradation in such acts.
In the cases of bestiality and child pornography, humans-- children and adults-- need to be protected by the state from the thought of deviancy. Voyeuristic moralism cannot be strong enough to overcome titillation or excitement. The state can only stop them in tandem, by stopping the trade in articles. However, in my experience with Customs, it was neither bestiality nor child pornography which constituted deviance. The agent hadn't seen my research materials at all and couldn't know if were deviant according to the legal definition of restricted materials. The problem was that I had pornography, that I looked at pornography, and that I thought about pornography. I broke a boundary situated in gender through which normative behavior gets defined. I thought about bad things. To demonstrate that he re-positioned me as a child by referring to my mother to place me under the protective umbrella of family and state. I was re-positioned in the materials, as one who needs protection, rather than out of them as one who studies them.

Lesbian vampires stories were common because vampires were, and are, the most sexual of all supernatural creatures (except, possibly, the succubus/incubus, who would appear to have missed out on fame due to a lack of subtlety.  There's no slow burn with succubi or incubi; they are fucking.  That's it.).  The fact that they were lesbian vampires adds a layer of deviance; not so deviant that they cannot be discussed in public (unlike, say paedophilia), but deviant enough to be interesting).  Vampires are, traditionally, creatures who prey on female innocence (incidentally, Daughters of Darkness is not a book of erotica, despite the description; it contains stories of sexuality, few of which are explicit.  It seems that it is classed as erotica purely by virtue of focusing on lesbian sexuality).

Edward Cullen displays none of the normal seduction of a traditional vampire.  He is not dark and interesting; he sparkles.  He does not want to seduce Bella; he wants to marry her.  He does not come alone, in the night - he brings an entire family, with parents who approve.  Meyer has effectively neutered the raw sexuality of a vampire, trapped him in marriage and a cosy homelife.  Not just Edward - the plot point of the mate bond means that all vampires are loyal husbands and wives waiting to happen.

Instead it is Bella who is mysterious; he cannot read her mind.  It is Bella who attempts to seduce him, who would prefer not to wait till marriage.  It is Bella who has the choice to leave him, as, when she is human, she is not tied by the mate bond.

Werewolves have been used to symbolise female sexuality, or, at the very least, contain links to menarche and menstruation, due to their mimicry of the monthly cycle  (though, sadly, not nearly often enough).  The moon, after all, is female.  Tanith Lee's Wolfland, in Red as Blood, makes the symbolism very clear.

Again, Meyer has twisted this.  Female werewolves lose their ability to menstruate entirely, something a character describes as making her feel less of a woman, as if the whole point of being a woman is to be a mother and a wife.  The fact that (only) male werewolves imprint on (female) children also has the effect of robbing them of their sexuality; these children are explicitly groomed, in Meyer's stories, growing up with an enormous pressure for their sexuality to grow in a set, pre-defined way.

Give me womanist female werewolves, growing into their power and sexuality.  Give me vampires who won't be caught, who won't go willingly to domesticity, who are as hard to tame as tigers.

Put the blood back in my myths, menstrual and otherwise.

Please?