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Natasha Vargas-Cooper delves into the universe of Twlight
fan-fiction, where Bella and Edward generally exchange more than
longing looks. We get some heavy breathing and if not bodice-ripping,
definitely thong-ripping ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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The real root of the vampire trend, according to Stephen Marche at Esquire, is that straight women want to have sex with gay guys. It’s an interesting thesis, but I’m not buying it ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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By Lauren Bans
Oh, MTV. The meaningless acronym channel that killed Daria in favor of Date My Mom has latched onto the 1985 Michael Fox classic Teen Wolf. The film that taught us all about the joys and compromises of male puberty is in the hands of the network that made "Speidi" a household name. Happy Wednesday!
Yeah, I know, it makes sense. Just not to my heart. Mythological creatures are in, particularly the blood-sucking variety. ... (Read more in DoubleX)
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Or so argues Grady Hendrix in Slate today. Hendrix hates emo-boy vampires, with their all-swoon, no-suck brand of human relations. Latoya Peterson argued here in Double X that Twilight and True Blood are bad for women because they're all about pigeonholing female characters into a virgin/slut binary ... (Read more in Double X.)
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Hey ladies—are you weirded out by the strange sexual power dynamics in Twilight? So is Buffy the vampire slayer, and she's got something to say about it. Like to hear it? Here it goes... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Hanna and Melinda, did you read the Times article yesterday about the evangelical approach to marital sex? In mid-November, the Rev. Ed Young, pastor of the Fellowship Church in Grapevine, Texas, was up in the pulpit, urging his flock to fortify their unions with Seven Days of Sex. "A sexperiment," he called it as he sermonized in front of a big bed to an audience presumed to be not getting nearly enough of it. In my uptight, blue state way, I found myself wondering about the kids ("a word that Mr. Young told church members stands for ‘keeping intimacy at a distance successfully' ")—particularly teenagers.
Talk about a sex-ed message that seems tone deaf to adolescents, no matter how you slice it. For any teens who might have been in the congregation listening to the exhortations to parental "whoopee," can you think of any greater gross out? And if they could bring themselves to think about it, the reverend's diagnosis of sex-starved couples undermined the promises preached to youth: These teens are being told to save themselves, the better to enjoy the bliss that arrives with marriage. I wish I thought the spectacle of their elders' confusion could help kids see what a complicated business sex can be, but somehow I don't think that's what sinks in.
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Oy. All due respect, et cetera. True love does not wait. True love necks, cops a feel. True love tries to put off the inevitable and distracts itself giving a blow job. True love gags a little bit, momentarily forgets it is true love, re-evaluates itself—if this does not feel particularly loving, does my selfless dedication to this higher purpose at least underscore its truth?—oh crap here come the Park Police …
Now, I speak as an avowed nonbeliever in the sacredness of sex. I have committed the act hundreds of times, not always under the influence of alcohol, and never once felt the presence of the Holy Spirit.* And I am one of those heathens who has run the numbers on America's Gross National Sin way too many times to be particularly inclined to get up in the morning if not for some deeply-ingrained irrational hope that some savior, perhaps under the guise of a cleverly formulated stimulus package designed amid a powerful resurgence of cultural humanism, might descend and forgive the bulk of them. I feel the Holy Spirit all the time, at the deli and the movies and sometimes even looking at pictures of children that light up when they call their parents' iPhones.
You never hit "ignore" on your kid. That feels like a sin. And adultery—not redefined Clintonesquely to include premarital sex, but full-on cheating— feels like a sin. Merely flirting with cheating generally feels bad enough to deter wusses like me, and maybe that is why I haven't married, but anyway, the point of this is that the older I get the more confounded I am that so many Americans strive so hard to ask our kids—who are, to be sure, the byproducts of our screwing but we hopefully weren't thinking of them at the time—to take sex seriously as a sin.
I grew up the eldest child in a very conservative Catholic family (whose conservatism has basically been all but decimated by time and events and exposure to the Simpsons, thank Jesus or this week would be painful). Growing up, I thought premarital sex was sinful. But I had spent a few formative years during the first Bush administration in China, a society that had declared an entirely different battery of activities to be sinful: reading, expressing opinions, owning stuff—especially if it in any way acknowledged the past—failing to renounce one's parents if they happened to be bourgeois counterrevolutionary running dogs, etc. etc. Even at 12, it occurred to me that (protected) sex, if one could find a place to have some, might be the one uncorrupted joy experienced in the lifetimes of most of the dreary-faced adults I saw (bicycling, very mirthlessly, to work each day) on the street. I remember feeling so awful for them. I remember feeling terribly sinful that I could not, or didn't want to, give anyone "half" of what I had, as Jesus would have, not that there was any real practical way of doing that, which, by the way, is a big reason communism didn't work out.
But anyway, the point is that I never felt remotely that sinful about sex. I think most of the guilt that we feel about sex has to do with confusion we've created by dubbing it a "sin." Of the various reasons I've felt guilty about honest, unadulterated sex—does he think I am his girlfriend now? why did I watch that porn?—it always seems to go back to fundamental dishonesty. Elevating sex to sin, that is to say, was the original sin.
*Ha ha, boner joke optional here.
(And P.S., any future kids of mine who might ever stumble across this blog post or anything else I've ever written on the subject, there are a LOT of conditions, footnotes, and appendices to all this and by the way, I was nearly 19 when I lost my virginity, and as far as I'm concerned, you can wait that long, too.)
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Not sure this is a liberal-vs.-conservative divide exactly, Hanna, or even a religious-vs.-secular one, though that's probably closer to the mark. It's definitely not only in red states that parents would prefer that their kids delay having sex. How to communicate that while also teaching them about birth control—does the one message undercut the other?—is an old, old problem. And because people being people it's not always communicated perfectly or received gladly doesn't mean there's no point in trying.
At a meeting on sex ed in Sunday school at our church last spring, one of the other parents remarked that even those of us who don't believe everything the church teaches about sex want our kids to believe it, and everybody laughed. Only, when it came down to actually talking to my kids, I felt compelled to explain both the church teaching on birth control and why I see it more as an ideal than an absolute. Did I worry about this obviously mixed message? Yes. Do I get the appeal of a more clear-cut approach in either direction? You betcha. But I see risk in punting on either the moral or the practical dimension of sexuality, and in the end, that's a line every parent has to locate for himself. One of my many hopes for Obamamerica is that we will no longer see "red state sex'' as a distinct phenomenon.
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Melinda, it’s a fine idea to tell teenagers to wait. Except that it really doesn’t work. This is not liberal wishful thinking. Researchers have pried into the sex lives of abstinence-pledgers and discovered that at best, taking the pledge delays sex by 18 months. But it also encourages more of them to have unprotected sex. (See my review of the book, Forbidden Fruit, for Slate.) Teens who have pledged don’t really admit they are having sex until they’ve already had it, which is kind of too late for the condom (Witness Bristol. Also read Margaret Talbot on the messy realities of red state sex.) My other favorite sexy virgin of the screen is Lyla Garrity, the True Love Waits hottie on Friday Night Lights. For the first couple of episodes, she is snuggling with her boyfriend and dreaming about their wedding. Then she stumbles into an accidental kiss with her boyfriend’s best friend, and one scene later we see her getting up from his couch, pulling on her underwear. This is reality. It’s only in the vampire version that what the preacher said comes true: Go beyond the kiss, and you’re risking your life.
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True Love Waits (and waits and waits) was also the theme of my favorite show as a kid: Dark Shadows, starring the tortured, sorta good-guy vampire Barnabas Collins, who loved eyeliner, juggled relationships, and mostly kept his baser instincts in check. His girlfriends included trashy fellow bloodsucker Angelique—see what giving in got her?—and Josette, the love of his 18th-century life, who had only one dress and it was white; get it? Though long dead, Josette did sometimes walk out of her portrait to hang out with Barnabas. He was also much taken with, but never put the bite on, her modern-day doppelganger, Victoria WInters, the governess at Collinwood—played by Alexandra Isles, for whom I named my dolly in the first grade. (Sadly, Alexandra's later career included a real-life stint as Klaus von Bulow's mistress; Victoria would have known better.) Did the True Love Waits abstinence movement really fail, though, Hanna? Or is it more like AA, which doesn't work all that reliably but is still the best option we've got? Not saying sexuality is a medical condition, but if these programs help kids wait even a while, until they're maybe not ready but readier, isn't that a good thing?
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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.
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I have to say, I never saw the appeal of vampire cinema. Classic Dracula lit, steeped in metaphor, or even Anne Rice variations on a theme, OK, but I missed the cultural wave of Buffy and never saw the draw of bloodsucking dudes on-screen, even cute ones. Hanna's observation that the movie Twilight, a giant hit, by the way, is a template for Christian tenets of sexual abstinence, has changed my perspective. For sexually developing young women of all religious persuasions, timid about the physical and emotional risks of early sex, I suddenly see the allure of a nice safe vegetarian vampire.
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I know none of you are 13-year-old girls, but did any of you see Twilight this weekend? It's a movie about vampire love based on the Harry Potter-for-girls blockbuster series by Stephenie Meyer, a Mormon mom. I loved it, but what struck me most is how much it's an advertisement for the True Love Waits movement. High-schooler Bella Swan falls in love with Edward Cullen, who it turns out is a vampire. He thirsts for her blood, gives her desperate yearning looks. But he controls himself. He is part of a clan of "vegetarian" vampires who have taught themselves to live on animal blood and pass in the human world. In one amazing erotic scene, he shows up in her bedroom and says he will kiss her if she holds really, really still, because if she moves he won't be able to control himself. (By which he means kill her.) They kiss once, and then spend the night talking and snuggling in her room. The problem the True Love Waits movement could never solve is how to get teens to stop after one kiss. This is why the movement failed, except among a small minority of the super committed, who saved even the first kiss until after marriage. The answer, which never seems to have occurred to conservative Christians, is to date a vampire.