-
sponsorship
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.)
-
sponsorship
Nina, I’m glad you brought up Grady Hendrix’s complaint that vampires aren’t doing enough blood sucking these days, because I have a bone to pick, too ... (Read more in Double X.)
-
sponsorship
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.)
-
sponsorship
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!)
-
sponsorship
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.
-
sponsorship
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.
-
sponsorship
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.
Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum
What did you think of this article?