Men, Women and Vampires
Dec. 29th, 2010 12:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
roginDoing the crossposting thing.
I wrote this little rant some weeks ago when that silly DH vampire poll went down and decided to post it friends locked now. Fortunately Season 8 is going to be over soon and when it is, I intend to disengage with the comics completely, but as it is I'm reading them and I'm reading the wank and I can't help contemplating it, so I'm posting.
As I said his was triggered by the Darkhorse vampire poll. They asked for comments detailing people's favorite vampires and Spike somewhat dominated the poll, so did another bunch of vampires, Angel, Lestat (and many more, even Edward Cullen was mentioned). The contest was from the get go said to pick the comments the people at DH liked best, not the ones the commentators preferred and of course that's what happened. They picked your typical evil Dracula vampire or goofy cartoonish versions of them.
The announcement of the winner was signed with:
"Old school vampires always win"
And though this was hardly a surprising outcome, given DH's history, it was yet another poignant moment of "this tree house is for boys only" that DH likes to enforce so often. Let me get more specific, while of course not every boy likes count Dracula and every girl Edward Cullen I find it hard to deny that at the centre of this old/new vampire idea IS a male/female cultural conflict in my eyes. Let me go into more detail:
The vampire myth is one that is commonly associated with sex, that's old news. It comes out clearly in Dracula. Dracula is a monster who preys (mostly) on women and if they stray of the path of virtue (aka submission) they become animalistic monsters completely controlled by their urges and Dracula himself(see Lucy and the three vampire ladies). The vampire is a monster that's here to remind women that sex is bad. At the same time the vampire is a great vehicle for rape fantasies from the aggressors side. The male gaze dominated cultural world is in order.
As it happens, women gained a lot of cultural ground in the last 100 years and most of the struggle has been for serious issues like not depicting women as some kind of cleaning happy subhuman, fighting objectification and for general self determination. But of course like men women are not all serious business. We have fun, and sometimes that fun is not of great cultural value, or totally healthy in every way, guilty pleasures if you will. And though there are some amazingly good "new" vampire stories a lot of them fall into that category (at least for me).
it's not like cults around sports events or a fondness for the purely monstrous vampires are any better, they are all more or less silly, not exactly healthy in overdoses but somehow it's only the women who should call their pleasures guilty. Somehow the "old school" vampire who's a predator on sexually active women is "better" than the newer version that (predominantly) female authors play with.
Pop culture writers of the recent years have been subverting the vampire stereotype for a while now. The vampire is gradually turned from predator to sex object, who's bad habits like biting and stalking become merely exciting parts of a sex game instead of threatening dominating behavior (let's put the question if that's entirely healthy aside for a moment,we're not questioning the healthyness of the old school fantasy either after all) . A lot of people have fun with that take one the vampire and a lot of them are female. There's Anne Rice, who created Louis, Lestat and a whole bunch of vampires, who can't bang each other, have zero homophobic inhibitions, angst a lot and kill bad people. There are Charlaine Harris' southern vampires who are basically as good or evil as humans. There's Nail Gaiman's vampire surrogate father in the Graveyard book. There are the Vampire Diaries vamps with all their moral range. There's even Stephanie Meyer who's vampires are about as scary as my little pony. Don't understand me wrong, Meyer is the opposite of a feminist. Bella reads like Renfield from the old Dracula novels. But one point remains the same. The woman creates the vampire, he sparkles and doesn't bite, might not be everyone's cup of tea, certainly isn't mine, but it's her fantasy. The girl doesn't have to pay some horrible price for wanting sex with that vampire.
The heroine (or hero) finds a friend and ally in the vampire. Many writers turned the vampire from a women eating monster into their Bagheera. Still dangerous but THEIR friend. I'm not sure how widely known Angela Sommer-Bodenburgs books about "the little vampire" are in non German speaking territories but I loved them as a kid. It's a series about a little boy making friends with a vampire kid and his family. Another alliance between human and monster. A darker spin on a similar story is "Let the right one in" (written by a guy this time and also sadly in the hands of DH now who are continuing the story against the expressed wishes of the author). In this story the vampire girl Eli is deffinitely a monster in many ways, but watching her forge a relationship with Oskar, help him stand up to the human bullies in his school and indeed killing them is still a kind of outlaw love story.The vampire/human couples often have an "Us against the world" quality to them.
One that seems to be threatening to conventional patriarchy. Love outgrows nature. The women refuses to either become the victim/whore of the monster (Lucy) or to guard her virtue and stick with her human "good guy" (Mina), instead of being scared into submission she shacks up with the monster and is happy (again we're talking fantasy here). And that somehow seems to piss off the boys club at DH. "Hey, why aren't the girls running and screaming any more ?! Let's pay them back and make a poll just to tell them how stupid their shit is!"
It's less and less surprising to me that they have no idea what to do with Angel and Spike any more because they both represent this cultural journey in a fascinating way.
When Joss started out with Buffy he wanted to subvert the vampire trope too, but in a different way. In the take he planned the vampires were every bit as evil and sexually predatory as the tradition says, but instead of running scared or falling victim the girl fights and wins. Great take.Nothing wrong with it.
The Angelus storyline however is something that's a lot more conventional in what it's aiming to teach. Here it goes against the "good vampire". In Joss' take he's a scam. He's not really on the girl's side, her having sex with him turns him into the old school monster. Not sure Joss made some great feminist point here instead of just saying "no, you're not allowed to have fun with them, pick a good guy!". The unsubtle repeat of this storyline in S8 makes the whole thing even more creepy and less empowering.
On the tv show other influences came to the project. Fan favorites were played and Angel returned to be a good guy with a dark half. Finally Spike showed up and went from unrepentant monster to the only monster on Buffy that ever willingly wanted a soul and to defy his nature for personal reasons.
In children's books therms Spike is Rüdiger (from the little vampire), Spike is Bagheera, dangerous but fighting by Buffy's side. Not to break completely with the set up and not to destroy Angel completely they inserted the AR at some point (and of course to illustrate how "wrong" Buffy still is to give in to her sex drive with vampires) but essentially after he gets his soul, they come out on top.Harsh Ending for the boys club.
So now that they have Buffy in their hands and can go full throttle on propagating that everything perceived as girly is crap, we get the full dose of latent misogyny heaped on the story.
Buffy being in love with Angel turns her into a unlikeable simpering lackwit. Her and Spike never even existed as an emotional connection and his character is just there to get a few fangirls to buy more comics and then to laugh at them because nothing even remotely interesting is going down between the two characters.
Hahah, you really showed us silly girls, didn't you DH? Old School vampires always win.
Or maybe both variants could be fun and we could explore both takes on the myth and even a few more without proclaiming the inferiority of new(er) takes every step of the way. Probably not with DH though.
I wrote this little rant some weeks ago when that silly DH vampire poll went down and decided to post it friends locked now. Fortunately Season 8 is going to be over soon and when it is, I intend to disengage with the comics completely, but as it is I'm reading them and I'm reading the wank and I can't help contemplating it, so I'm posting.
As I said his was triggered by the Darkhorse vampire poll. They asked for comments detailing people's favorite vampires and Spike somewhat dominated the poll, so did another bunch of vampires, Angel, Lestat (and many more, even Edward Cullen was mentioned). The contest was from the get go said to pick the comments the people at DH liked best, not the ones the commentators preferred and of course that's what happened. They picked your typical evil Dracula vampire or goofy cartoonish versions of them.
The announcement of the winner was signed with:
"Old school vampires always win"
And though this was hardly a surprising outcome, given DH's history, it was yet another poignant moment of "this tree house is for boys only" that DH likes to enforce so often. Let me get more specific, while of course not every boy likes count Dracula and every girl Edward Cullen I find it hard to deny that at the centre of this old/new vampire idea IS a male/female cultural conflict in my eyes. Let me go into more detail:
The vampire myth is one that is commonly associated with sex, that's old news. It comes out clearly in Dracula. Dracula is a monster who preys (mostly) on women and if they stray of the path of virtue (aka submission) they become animalistic monsters completely controlled by their urges and Dracula himself(see Lucy and the three vampire ladies). The vampire is a monster that's here to remind women that sex is bad. At the same time the vampire is a great vehicle for rape fantasies from the aggressors side. The male gaze dominated cultural world is in order.
As it happens, women gained a lot of cultural ground in the last 100 years and most of the struggle has been for serious issues like not depicting women as some kind of cleaning happy subhuman, fighting objectification and for general self determination. But of course like men women are not all serious business. We have fun, and sometimes that fun is not of great cultural value, or totally healthy in every way, guilty pleasures if you will. And though there are some amazingly good "new" vampire stories a lot of them fall into that category (at least for me).
it's not like cults around sports events or a fondness for the purely monstrous vampires are any better, they are all more or less silly, not exactly healthy in overdoses but somehow it's only the women who should call their pleasures guilty. Somehow the "old school" vampire who's a predator on sexually active women is "better" than the newer version that (predominantly) female authors play with.
Pop culture writers of the recent years have been subverting the vampire stereotype for a while now. The vampire is gradually turned from predator to sex object, who's bad habits like biting and stalking become merely exciting parts of a sex game instead of threatening dominating behavior (let's put the question if that's entirely healthy aside for a moment,we're not questioning the healthyness of the old school fantasy either after all) . A lot of people have fun with that take one the vampire and a lot of them are female. There's Anne Rice, who created Louis, Lestat and a whole bunch of vampires, who can't bang each other, have zero homophobic inhibitions, angst a lot and kill bad people. There are Charlaine Harris' southern vampires who are basically as good or evil as humans. There's Nail Gaiman's vampire surrogate father in the Graveyard book. There are the Vampire Diaries vamps with all their moral range. There's even Stephanie Meyer who's vampires are about as scary as my little pony. Don't understand me wrong, Meyer is the opposite of a feminist. Bella reads like Renfield from the old Dracula novels. But one point remains the same. The woman creates the vampire, he sparkles and doesn't bite, might not be everyone's cup of tea, certainly isn't mine, but it's her fantasy. The girl doesn't have to pay some horrible price for wanting sex with that vampire.
The heroine (or hero) finds a friend and ally in the vampire. Many writers turned the vampire from a women eating monster into their Bagheera. Still dangerous but THEIR friend. I'm not sure how widely known Angela Sommer-Bodenburgs books about "the little vampire" are in non German speaking territories but I loved them as a kid. It's a series about a little boy making friends with a vampire kid and his family. Another alliance between human and monster. A darker spin on a similar story is "Let the right one in" (written by a guy this time and also sadly in the hands of DH now who are continuing the story against the expressed wishes of the author). In this story the vampire girl Eli is deffinitely a monster in many ways, but watching her forge a relationship with Oskar, help him stand up to the human bullies in his school and indeed killing them is still a kind of outlaw love story.The vampire/human couples often have an "Us against the world" quality to them.
One that seems to be threatening to conventional patriarchy. Love outgrows nature. The women refuses to either become the victim/whore of the monster (Lucy) or to guard her virtue and stick with her human "good guy" (Mina), instead of being scared into submission she shacks up with the monster and is happy (again we're talking fantasy here). And that somehow seems to piss off the boys club at DH. "Hey, why aren't the girls running and screaming any more ?! Let's pay them back and make a poll just to tell them how stupid their shit is!"
It's less and less surprising to me that they have no idea what to do with Angel and Spike any more because they both represent this cultural journey in a fascinating way.
When Joss started out with Buffy he wanted to subvert the vampire trope too, but in a different way. In the take he planned the vampires were every bit as evil and sexually predatory as the tradition says, but instead of running scared or falling victim the girl fights and wins. Great take.Nothing wrong with it.
The Angelus storyline however is something that's a lot more conventional in what it's aiming to teach. Here it goes against the "good vampire". In Joss' take he's a scam. He's not really on the girl's side, her having sex with him turns him into the old school monster. Not sure Joss made some great feminist point here instead of just saying "no, you're not allowed to have fun with them, pick a good guy!". The unsubtle repeat of this storyline in S8 makes the whole thing even more creepy and less empowering.
On the tv show other influences came to the project. Fan favorites were played and Angel returned to be a good guy with a dark half. Finally Spike showed up and went from unrepentant monster to the only monster on Buffy that ever willingly wanted a soul and to defy his nature for personal reasons.
In children's books therms Spike is Rüdiger (from the little vampire), Spike is Bagheera, dangerous but fighting by Buffy's side. Not to break completely with the set up and not to destroy Angel completely they inserted the AR at some point (and of course to illustrate how "wrong" Buffy still is to give in to her sex drive with vampires) but essentially after he gets his soul, they come out on top.Harsh Ending for the boys club.
So now that they have Buffy in their hands and can go full throttle on propagating that everything perceived as girly is crap, we get the full dose of latent misogyny heaped on the story.
Buffy being in love with Angel turns her into a unlikeable simpering lackwit. Her and Spike never even existed as an emotional connection and his character is just there to get a few fangirls to buy more comics and then to laugh at them because nothing even remotely interesting is going down between the two characters.
Hahah, you really showed us silly girls, didn't you DH? Old School vampires always win.
Or maybe both variants could be fun and we could explore both takes on the myth and even a few more without proclaiming the inferiority of new(er) takes every step of the way. Probably not with DH though.