Saturday, March 12, 2011

Some thoughts on the hotness of vampires

Sexy vampires are all the rage with young people, but I think this is a case of the grass is always greener. Sure, they never get fat or out of shape, they get to stay out all night like your parents won’t let you do, and they don’t have to go to school or work at lame jobs like White Castle and stuff, but that’s because they’re living corpses who never get to do anything during the daytime. Sure, I know that some authors cheat and let vampires run around in the daylight, and some even go to school, but think for a moment about how silly this idea is: one kid just goes to school in the same grade for, like, 100 years or something? You think school was boring for you? I think the Cullens had to keep moving around not because of the “never aging” thing, but because their kids kept getting so frustrated with hearing the same crap over and over again that they just killed everyone once in a while. Couldn’t they just have said that their kids were being home-schooled? If they really wanted to be left alone, why didn’t they just say that they were Jehovah’s Witnesses or something?

But the idea that vampires are such hot lovers is really kind of funny. I know that comes from the idea that they are evil, and sensual pleasure is evil, so there you are. Stoker’s Dracula showed the vampire as a kind of a perverse inversion of Victorian values, and as such vampirized women became very sexually liberated, as indeed all vampires seem to be in fiction. But when you consider the fact that what we’re talking about here is ambulatory corpses, it just starts to become silly that they are such objects of sexual desire in our culture. I mean, for one thing, since they are reanimated dead bodies, they would have no body heat to speak of, so they’d most likely be about room-temperature if you’re lucky. You know what it feels like when you get into bed and warm up under the covers, and then your lover gets into bed next to you and touches you with their freezing-cold hands and feet? (It’s enough to make you jump out of bed while yelling, “Yaaah! Cold, cold, cold!”) Well, that’s what vampires would be like in bed, except that they’d never warm up! And in addition, since they can’t see their own reflection in a mirror (or any other surface), they would always have bed-head, not to mention other potentially more disagreeable and unsightly conditions like having yucky yellow plaque-covered teeth and dried blood all over their faces and stuff: yummy! And since they can’t stand running water, they’d never be able to bathe either, so they would smell pretty bad, I’d reckon. (Old unwashed corpse: Mmmm!)