Really?

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October 14, 2009 , 6:41 am

Women, Vampires and Gay Men

Today’s idea: American women are attracted not so much to vampires as to the gay men they represent, a writer argues. This is part of society’s effort to process, through vampire stories, a “newfound acceptance of what so many once thought strange or abnormal.”
Culture | “Vampires have overwhelmed pop culture because young straight women want to have sex with gay men,” Stephen Marche writes in Esquire. “Not all young straight women, of course, but many, if not most, of them.”
He says consider the subtext of the relationship between Bella, the young heroine of the “Twilight” series, and the boy vampire Edward, to whom she is attracted “because he is strange, beautiful, and seemingly repulsed by her.” Marche explains:

“Twilight”/Summit Entertainment Gay boy meets straight girl?

“Twilight’s” fantasy is that the gorgeous gay guy can be your boyfriend, and for the slightly awkward teenage girls who consume the books and movies, that’s the clincher. Vampire fiction for young women is the equivalent of lesbian porn for men: Both create an atmosphere of sexual abandon that is nonthreatening. That’s what everybody wants, isn’t it? Sex that’s dangerous and safe at the same time, risky but comfortable, gooey and violent but also traditional and loving. In the bedroom, we want to have one foot in the 21st century and another in the 19th.

Marche thinks today’s vampire stories — whether their gay themes are taken by implication, as in the “Twilight” series, or explicit as in HBO’s “True Blood” — are “symptomatic of something much larger: a quiet but profound sexual revolution and a new acce