Of vampires and necrophiles

We live in interesting times. Women’s sexuality has never been more prominently displayed than it is today, in all it unbridled glory and strange perversions. We have Miley Cyrus riding her wrecking ball and dancing half-naked with teddy bears, teen age angst and distress over the Twilight vampire who sparkles, and millions now anxiously awaiting Christian Grey in 50 shades on the silver screen.

I read the Twilight series and 50 shades, or rather I skimmed through them as best I could and read the synopsis and reviews. Sexual perversion is one thing, but literary perversion is downright horrifying.

Twilight actually really rattled my cage, here we have this woman writing for 12-13 year old girls who happen to be right at the sexual bonding peek where their perceptions of love and romance, their sexuality, are going to be formed…permanently, for life. So who is to become the object of their affection? Do you long for bestiality or necrophilia? Team Jacob or Team Edward? Do you throw yourself into torment and angst over the dead guy or the werewolf? What could possibility go wrong with those archetypes in a young girl’s mind??

To make matters worse, so many lines between good and evil were blurred in those books, so Edward the sparkly vampire becomes good, even though he is undead, even though he feeds off human blood or sacrifices a few small animals instead, even thought he is a vampire. It’s okay to love a soulless man without a pulse. You can heal him your love. Besides, you are totally powerless and free from all personal responsibility. You are mesmerized by his gaze. Also somewhat suicidal, but don’t let that distress you.

It’s okay that he sat by her bed side and watched her sleep as a small child, fantasizing about her. There are an awful lot of “yes, it’s evil, but it’s okay” in the Twilight series. Love transcends all boundaries apparently, even moral ones.

Just when you thought it was safe to come out of the secret underground bunker and lay down your garlic and cross, along came 50 shades of Grey and another soulless man without a pulse. Ah yes, because what woman doesn’t need yet another excuse to seek out and align themselves with a broken man? To make it even better, here, you can just learn to sexually bond with abuse and then everyone will be happy! Anastasia Steele really is happy, although what she seeks she is also compelled to destroy, hence the break up, the attempts to fix him, to marry and civilize him.

So what makes it all perversion? Well dead people, animals, children, BDSM, the elimination of any sexual boundaries, treating of people as if they were flat, two-dimensional sexual objects, are all good markers. The exploitation of natural biology, the distortion of women’s sexuality, the blurring of lines until we are seduced, or rather herded away by the crowd from all that is good and golden and healthy there.

What really makes Twilight and 50 shades a perversion of women’s sexuality however, is that unlike love, what you seek you are compelled to destroy. Love lifts people up, it encourages, it nurtures, it supports. Love gone wrong destroys. In the Twilight series we are introduced to the idea that “what we seek, we must destroy” because one of the first issues Edward faces is having to make Bella a vampire, to kill her. He wrestles with this, struggles against it, but in the end she is turned, killed basically. Christian Grey must crush Anastasia and she speaks of this often, of feeling as if she is being erased, of being concerned she is loosing herself. She in turn is driven to try to “fix him,” to alter who and what he is, no doubt in an attempt to survive herself.

Toying with power is a huge component of women’s sexuality. Not a bad one, not an unhealthy thing, but what really becomes problematic is when there are no sexual boundaries to contain that. Boundaries create safety. This blurring of lines that you see all over our society is not healthy, especially for women. That is what is at the heart of these books and those are the questions we wrestle with as a society. Is she strong and empowered or devoid of all agency? Who is responsible here, Bella or Edward? Christian or Anastasia? Do women own their own sexuality or are we easily lured off like prey? Just how much agency do we have? How much do we even want?

What fascinates me is that the more feminism you see in the world, the more female dominance, the more women will seek to be dominated. It’s a rather interesting phenomenon and one that often proceeds a major social upheaval. Sometimes I wonder if women don’t psychically have a way of just knowing when it is time to align themselves with more powerful men, right before the poo hits the fan. Call it a 6th sense survival skill.