Saturday, March 15, 2008

Don't Play With Your Food

There has been a recent supernatural phenomenon and he is hot! Sometimes sweet, strong, or tortured. Sometimes blond, blue-eyed, with a face of an angel or raven-haired and angsty. He's always impeccably dressed with lots of money and fab abs. He knows how to show a lady a good time and he also subsists on a diet of human blood. What is he? The new and improved vampire, because for some women the perfect man just doesn't exist.
I find this new creature intensely illogical. Why? Why go there? If you must love a monster, why can't he be human? An assasin, a dictator, an evil scientist. And if he must be not human, can he at least not eat people? And if he must eat people, why can't he consume them more figuratively? Take their souls, take their youth, take over their bodies. While blood also has figurative and metaphorical meaning, it also has such physicality. There's the biting and the sucking and the desecration of flesh. There are only two ways to desecrate flesh: the physical and the sexual. Both ways in one being typically means psycho killer. Do I have a problem with vampires being psycho killers? No. Do I have a problem being attracted to psycho killers? YES.
But vampires are obviously very attractive psycho killers. Ladies, really, how do you justify it? There's the distinction between vampires and people. If vampires killed and ate their own kind, that would be something. But to humans, pshaw. That leads to another difficulty, though. Why would vampires want to play with their food? It is so problematic. Try looking at it from their perspective. Why would you be attracted to lesser beings? Don't give me the argument that humans and vampires are on the same level. Me and Wilbur aren't on the same level. Maybe me and Koko would be a better example, but imagine that Koko was edible. And if I thought we were, I'd become vegetarian. There's a host of psychological hurdles about eating sentient beings and the easiest way to get over that is to think that humans are dumb and only fit for consumption. There's also the problem of bestiality, which in even an open-minded society is still an alternative lifestyle. How do you reconcile that and still have a sexually attractive vampire? He has to be A) a freak (actually believes people are equal) B) a monster (he has intimate relations with his food) or C) has such a different psychology and culture that he resists such simplistic categorization.
A) is perhaps the most viable. We, women, always liked men (men-like creature) that went against the grain. It also builds up the potential to have a very tortured, angst-ridden artist of a vampire. But still, why a vampire? Why not a magical person? You know, an elf that doesn't think of me as a steak. Why make it so difficult?

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