The Republic of Dogs

Via Feministe , this guy has this theory about chicks and vampires and stuff.  In Esquire magazine:

Edward, the romantic hero of the Twilight series, is a sweet, screwed-up high school kid, and at the beginning of his relationship with Bella, she is attracted to him because he is strange, beautiful, and seemingly repulsed by her. This exact scenario happened several times in my high school between straight girls and gay guys who either hadn’t figured out they were gay or were still in the closet.  Twilight’s fantasy is that the gorgeous gay guy can be your boyfriend, and for the slightly awkward teenage girls who consume the books and movies, that’s the clincher. Vampire fiction for young women is the equivalent of lesbian porn for men: Both create an atmosphere of sexual abandon that is nonthreatening. That’s what everybody wants, isn’t it? Sex that’s dangerous and safe at the same time, risky but comfortable, gooey and violent but also traditional and loving. In the bedroom, we want to have one foot in the twenty-first century and another in the nineteenth.

Huh.

left: fictional vampire; right: actual gay guy

The resemblance is uncanny!

Look, it’s not exactly front-page news in the Cultural Studies Times-Picayune that since the 19th century, vampires in popular culture have been largely “about” sex and the whole tangle of anxieties around desire and contamination that is part and parcel of sexuality in the western world – as much now as in Bram Stoker’s day, if for somewhat different reasons.  Drilling all that down to “girls all just want to date the gay guy – it totally happened in my high school, for realz!” seems a little silly, though.  Also: maybe just a few inches from “crazy chicks, they only want what they can’t have!”, which is just centimeters north of anxieties about being emasculated by castrating, unsatisfiable bitches.

Hey Steve, I have a crazy idea: the girls in your high school liked the gay guys because they didn’t have unibrows or reek of Axe Body Spray, and they could talk to a woman without gawking at her boobies.  Mystery solved – no vampires required!