The XX Factor: What women really think.

Bad Girls Aren't Bad Anymore

Hanna, I haven't seen Twilight, but I confess I'm dying to. I heard about the books for the first time this summer. A few 13-year-old girls I was around were obsessively devouring them, lounging on one another and gasping periodically. I asked them what made the Twilight saga good; they liked the story, they said. The marketing must have helped too: Target had HEAPS of the books on sale for a sticker price of $9.99. (Now it's on sale for $6.04.) I probably will see the movie, if for no other reason than to have a séance with a previous self—all those shots of pale, earnest teenagers in the preview sent me right back to yesteryear's adolescent yearning.

More meaningfully, I am struck by how many vampire-related cultural artifacts are cropping up around us, from Twlight to True Blood and more. Why? Your theory—that Twilight paradoxically advocates for safe sex by describing dangerous sex—is ingenious. But to me, the trend in vampires also has something to do with what I take to be a broad cultural anxiety about sex. Namely, this: Are we reaching a kind of sexual end point—a point of total saturation? At this point, our screen culture is so oversexed that liberals and conservatives alike are getting fed up with it. Turn on the TV, open a magazine, or take a walk, and you'll find that sex is everywhere. So what makes it sexy? (The other day a friend and I passed a subway ad that read "Bad Girls" and featured a clutch of skinny girls wearing cheap satin dresses. My friend rolled his eyes and said, "Bad girls are such a cliché—they're not bad anymore.")

I also wonder, though, if True Blood and Twilight might be read as an economic metaphor. Like Twilight, the vampires in True Blood mostly drink nonhuman blood (synthetic, in this case). But they still have to exercise a hell of a lot of restraint. Is there some coded message here about Americans and decadent materialism? It's as if the shows secretly convey some note to self: Too much appetite will get you fleeced. What looks sexy (a great mortgage) is actually deadly. I don't mean it's that literal, of course; but the subterranean anxiety of True Blood does seem to me to be as cultural as it is sexual.