Photo by Flickr user stephentrepreneur. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Olvlzl of Echidne of the Snakes makes such a great point about the whole vampire fetish

The idea of a man slipping into a woman’s bed room at night and vampirizing her as romance might be less sick than the romanticizing rape only due to the fact that vampires don’t exist. At least I hope there aren’t kids trying out biting people in the neck as a lifestyle choice, now that Hollywood is presenting the blood sucker as a white bread teen idol. I just don’t get it. But then, I never got The Leader of the Pack either. I haven’t done a study of it, but I’ll bet that female vampires preying on males are not generally portrayed as sympathetic, romantic characters. They might be seductive but they the ones I recall are only the more evil for that.

Read the quote in context here.

I hereby nominate Bram Stoker’s original Dracula as the official novel of the “no-sex” class paradigm. I mean, think about it! A charming, inexplicable, and wealthy… but also relentless, carnivorous, and overwhelmed by animal compulsion man sets his sights on an innocent and (by definition in this case) disinclined flower of a girl, mesmerizes her so that she has no idea what her role is, warps and corrupts other men and women in his pursuit of her, and is finally defeated when he’s penetrated by the custodial men of his would-be paramour. Extra bonus features? The female vampires of Dracula’s castle initially want to seduce/consume Jonathan Harker but are frustrated by the male vampire who makes them settle for the blood of an infant or small child he brings them! (Note also that the vampire Lucy, a proper Victorian, intuitively preys only on children.) Oh yeah, and what awaits Mina and befalls Lucy for succumbing is, literarily literally, a fate worse than death!

Interestingly, at the end of the novel when his soul is “released” even the vampire’s expression carries gratitude and relief… before it crumbles to dust. That’s all that foreshadows the vampire’s later incarnations as conflicted seducers — beginning I’m pretty sure, with the soulful Barnabas Collins in the Gothic 60s soap opera Dark Shadows and extending through Anne Rice’s novels, Sting’s Burbon Street, and more recently Buffy, True Blood, and, evidently, now Twilight.

But anyway I’m with Olvlzl — the very different attitudes and fantasies about male vs. female vampires come from the same place.