Showing posts with label ethics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ethics. Show all posts
Thursday, March 27, 2014
Hungry Vampires and Vampires That Just Want to Live
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Writers seem to keep topping each other and making the hunger increasingly severe. I fully predict that eventually someone is going to write a Vampire story where our protagonist has to be hooked up to a constant feed of blood and has all these Renfields constantly grabbing more people off the street to keep it going.
Here are a lot of other common threads:
- Vampires have no satiety, or almost none. They crave blood constantly. They see a person, and their bodies basically react thusly: ‘hey, someone brought blood!’ They need a tremendous amount of willpower just to avoid killing everyone around them all the time. Why any Vampires that aren’t completely and utterly evil even bother living in society at all is anyone’s guess, but they do, and they rack up enormous body counts simply by existing.
- They crave blood regardless of all utility. They’re like reverse bloody Kantians (I must have blood regardless of utility). Twilight and Being Human take the cake, here: their Vampires don’t even need blood to live at all. In Being Human it’s basically an addiction that they have because…um, they’re Vampires and Vampires are supposed to drink blood?
In Twilight, Vampires are technically immune to starvation, according to the Illustrated Guide. Blood makes them stronger, I guess – even though they’re already strong enough to juggle minivans, so it seems redundant. Blood also makes them less hungry – kind of, temporarily – but they’re hungry most of the time anyway. Really, these guys should just take one for the team and accept that they’ll be hungry forever and live in the woods.
If real predators were that hungry all the time, they’d end up wasting most of the energy they ingested just trying to get more food in a loop that wouldn’t favor long-term survival.
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Many Vampires are creatures conceived in the mindset that says all predators are just trying to hurt us all the time and aren’t actually acting in their own self-interest by trying to frigging eat. It’s the same mindset that produces stories where predators seek out one particular target at all costs and pass up plenty of other viable food sources along the way and paints predators as having more in common with serial killers than hungry animals. Vampire fiction often tries to have it both ways.
- Vampires’ desire for blood is constant, but their need is not desperate. I don’t usually see Vampires that are on the verge of death if they don’t get blood right that minute. You’d never know it, given how hungry they are, but we’re definitely supposed to think that it’s the human in danger and not them. The writers severely downplay the conflict that’s actually associated with feeding on people. In the aftermath of the murder, the Vampires mourn the death of their victims or don’t, but there’s rarely any sense that they narrowly avoided dying themselves.
Twilight helped popularize that whole idea that if you get so much as a bloody paper cut around a Vampire you’re screwed. I’ve seen that in plenty of other places too, but it’s a pretty iconic scene in New Moon.
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| Jasper, is that how you reacted when one of your high school classmates misused the stapler? |
Still, though, the Cullens have got their wilderness animals to binge on, and even then, they can take long breaks in between feedings. Edward and his family certainly don’t go ‘camping’ all that often. There are huge sections of the books where their actual consumption of blood doesn’t come up at all. They may crave it all the time for some reason, but they’ll survive with relatively infrequent feeding periods. As we’ve established, they don’t even frigging need the blood at all, and their need to feed never puts them in any real danger.
My condition is exactly the opposite.
Get a nosebleed around me; I’ll get you a tissue. Cut yourself with a knife, and I know first-aid. Get a paper-cut around me – I honestly probably wouldn’t even notice, because my nose isn’t any better than a normal person’s and most people don’t bleed as much as Bella did after getting a frigging paper-cut. Paper is not razor wire, and I don’t have any razor wire at my house anyway.
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| Yes, that is the correct reaction. |
I just need to do it every day, or I’ll die.
If I fed Tuesday, but not Wednesday – well, every Thursday henceforth is going to be cancelled forever. I could drink from eight different people on Tuesday, and it wouldn’t matter – I’d still need blood Wednesday. Hell, I could drain a person dry on Tuesday if I was an evil idiot monster with an unlimited stomach capacity, and it wouldn’t matter. My body wouldn’t use the excess, and it has no way of storing it for later. You wake up the next day, and the stopwatch resets. I also can't use animal blood as a substitute and hospital blood is completely out of the question. I need a fresh, human, near-constant supply.
For Hungry Vampires, their lives are basically battles of wills between their urges and their sense of moral and physical restraint.
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Yeah. My type of vampire doesn’t get days off, but we at least get to take breaks.
With many Hungry Vampires, it’s unpredictable. Today may be another good day for you where nothing happens and you can forget about having to clean up after yourself that last time you fucking killed someone. Or it may be the day you kill some people or infect them against their will and have to deal with the consequences.
With me, it’s a daily grind. That’s not random. The only unknown is how I’m ultimately going to get blood today.
You can plan ahead, at least a little. But you have to be ready to change plans and reschedule at the drop of the hat.
My people have tried to respond to this by building an enormous social network around our need, or at least trying to. It’s by no means a stable network, but I thank each and every one of our hosts every day for what they do for us. Having said that, just plain running that network and maintaining it is a full-time job.
Hungry Vampires don’t do much in the way of planning when it comes to their condition. Their lives are all about picking up the pieces when their passions inevitably overpower them.
Their experience is one huge cycle of hunger, euphoria, and guilt.
Vampires of all stripes and types are not necessarily philosophers or even philosophy nerds, but they do tend to be the cause of philosophy in others.
Hungry Vampires? They bring out everyone’s inner Puritanical Ascetic. Your natural desires are evil! There is absolutely no way to fulfill them in a way that is safe and mutually beneficial for others. You will either spend life in a state of perpetual deprivation where you are constantly relying on nothing but your noble willpower to save you and other people, or you are a shameful, ruined monster whose only joys lies in your continual destruction of sapient life which will ultimately prove unfulfilling and get you killed. Enjoy your dystopia!
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My people bring out everyone’s Consequentialist Utilitarian, including our own. Is it ethical to give one person an indefinite lifespan if it means that an indefinite number of people will get hurt? Hurt, but not killed – so the math balances out?
Sadly, even consensually and safely getting blood from hosts isn’t completely morally unambiguous. There are emotional consequences for getting involved with a paranoid, shady society of criminals. Our hosts have to live almost as much of a double life as we do, with all that that implies. We’ll never be able to get around the fact that even when we help our hosts financially, socially, or otherwise, there’s always that background motivation of: ‘see, this way, they’ll be less likely to leave us.’
And that’s not even the worst of it. No matter how much time and energy we invest in finding hosts, we never seem to have enough. Our blood requirement is that persistent. When we inevitably come up short, we resort to parasitic vampirism, either on an individual level or a societal one. In our slang, it’s called ‘red-lighting.’ Our victims don’t die, but they do get hurt. On a relatively good day, you can incapacitate someone relatively peacefully and seamlessly remove a pint of their blood, followed by a smooth memory erasure. It may still be an act of violence, but at least the suffering level is low.
On a bad day, you have to chase them down and maybe beat them up first. On a really bad day, you might not even be able to successfully incapacitate them, and they’ll feel everything that happens until you can wipe their memories. The rule is that you minimize harm as much as possible, but there’s no way of minimizing it all the way.
But at the end of the day, they’re still alive. And I’m still alive. The thousands of people we’ve sired all get to live. Is it worth it?
It’s hard to be objective about utilitarian dilemmas when they involve you personally. How can you give an objective answer to the trolley problem when you’re the one that might get run over? But I’ve been on the other side of this issue, too. I’m a sire. Every time we add someone new to the community, we ask that question again.
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| Alternatives? |
I’ve sired ten people, but I’ve rejected way more people than that.
Plenty of people in our culture think that not siring people is tantamount to killing them, since they’ll all die of aging eventually. Plenty of other people think we should stop siring people altogether, since it would ease the pressure off the hosts. They disagree about how the math works out, thinking that the current system causes too much suffering.
I do think siring is saving someone’s life. Ultimately, give me a utilitarian moral dilemma, I say: take the third option. Try to save every person involved in the trolley problem. In this case, the third option is ‘find an artificial blood substitute.’ Sadly, none of the ones that medical science has come up with yet have worked, and scientifically researching vampires is a huge hot-button issue in our society. Taking a third option is turning into a long-term goal, whether I like it or not. So at present, I’m still stuck with the same moral dilemma and I haven’t figured out a way to cheat.
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I’m still here. I still think about this question, but in practice it doesn’t really matter what solid opinion I’ve formed if I’m living my answer every day.
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Image Sources in order of appearance:
Flickr user celesteh: http://www.flickr.com/photos/celesteh/102616364/sizes/o/
Flickr user rcrhee: http://www.flickr.com/photos/rcrhee/10864891045/sizes/m/
http://images2.fanpop.com/images/answers/43000/43618_1252760153049_400_310.jpg.
http://s.mcstatic.com/thumb/7707125/28846117/4/flash_player/0/1/interview_with_the_vampire_the_vampire_chronicles_1994_releasing_louis.jpg?v=4
http://s3.amazonaws.com/data.tumblr.com/tumblr_l6m0zkEeqO1qa4ey1o1_1280.jpg?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAI6WLSGT7Y3ET7ADQ&Expires=1396011196&Signature=jXHwPFcL9fRL%2FhckCvOQd01Z1zA%3D#_=_
http://images4.fanpop.com/image/polls/252000/252138_1293840783196_full.jpg
http://theteenphilosopher.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/split-track.jpg
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a7/Immortality.JPG
Thursday, May 9, 2013
Historical Apologism – Apologize For No One
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| A stroll down Memory Lane. |
Can we judge historical people by the standards of our times?
It’s a popular topic of discussion amongst high school and
college students the world over. I know, because I get into conversations like
that all the damn time.
In the vampire community, it’s a hot-button political issue that has never been resolved.
For me, it’s even a relationship problem.
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I was born during the Reconstruction after the Civil War. I
was born into a family of abolitionists who supported the Radical Republicans –
who, among other things, had representatives who supported racial equality a
century before we actually achieved it in this country.
My parents weren’t exactly perfect on race relations. I
still cringe whenever I think of things they said about the Native Americans,
especially my father. And I know that if someone more liberal had ever called
them out on it, they probably would have said something like: ‘I refer only to
the wild Indians – there live some civilized Indians’ – yeah, that’s not much
better.
But if I can think of one group my parents taught me to
hate, absolutely hate with no caveat or qualification – it would be the
Southerners. Especially my father. My mother was fresh off the boat from Norway;
when I was born, she’d been living in Wisconsin for less than five years. My
father was a born and bred Norwegian American whose own father was killed in
action in the Civil War. Seeing as how my father was born in 1851, he was still a child by today’s
standards. Goddammit: he was a child one way or another.
I grew up being told that the South was an evil society who wanted to own people like us Northern folk owned livestock, and that those traitors to our country deserved far worse than what our overly lenient government dished out to them. My father tended to call them ‘rebel bastards.’
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| Young adults in any era. |
I grew up being told that the South was an evil society who wanted to own people like us Northern folk owned livestock, and that those traitors to our country deserved far worse than what our overly lenient government dished out to them. My father tended to call them ‘rebel bastards.’
I was twenty years old when I first fell in with the vampire
community and met Cathy. She confessed that she’d been a slave-owner. An
English one, mind – she didn’t come to America until after the Civil War. But
she was a slave-owner.
And yes, this was when she was a vampire. She was indeed
using the slaves for as much blood as they could give and still survive.
She didn’t kill any of them. And she did eventually set them
free. To her credit, she never tried to use that to rationalize what she did.
Also to her credit, she did disclose early on. And when I
met her, she was a huge supporter of racial equality, labor rights, women’s
rights, temperance – the very model of a modern major Progressive Era progressive,
even for a progressive of the era.
That’s what I kept telling myself, as I obsessed about it over and over again and tried to square it in my head.
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That’s what I kept telling myself, as I obsessed about it over and over again and tried to square it in my head.
It wouldn’t have affected my decision to be sired, I can
tell you that much. I might have asked to be switched, so Charles could sire me
instead (I was just friends with both of them at the time, and there wouldn’t
have been a conflict of interest).
He’s done his own share of unethical things, but most of
them fall into the category of: ‘he was poor and desperate and starving to
death, and while no society on Earth ever legalized what he did, most juries
would be lenient.’ At this point in my life, I’m not much better.
Charles didn’t do much socially sanctioned evil. Not even in
Byzantium. During the Enlightenment, he was a liberal on the Jeremy Bentham level and more.
As for Cathy – yeah.
Given my own attempts at being the very model of a modern major Progressive Era progressive, I tried to tell myself that ‘those were the times.’ Yep. I was going through a huge period of self-education at the time, and that probably only made it worse.
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| Jeremy Bentham: a product of his time. |
Given my own attempts at being the very model of a modern major Progressive Era progressive, I tried to tell myself that ‘those were the times.’ Yep. I was going through a huge period of self-education at the time, and that probably only made it worse.
Shockingly, Cathy didn’t actually agree
with me, and was somewhat disturbed by my opinion, as she is by any modern
person who makes the same argument. I just dismissed that as her being extra
redemptive: not, you know, correct.
Yes, what she did was horrible – but should I really be
putting early 1900s standards on 1700s people? I mean: here we were living in a time
of great social and technological progress beyond what the people of the 18th
century could even have comprehended. I mean, look at us – we’re on the verge
of getting the vote, we’re showing the Robber Barons who’s boss, we’re
conquering the vile specter of drunkenness – we’ll be in a utopia before we
know it, and any point in history is going to pale in comparison.
Of course our standards would be better – that’s what
supposed to happen. History is, of course, the process by which we get better and better
morals and learn from the mistakes of the past, and should we blame the people
who couldn’t have known better and managed to suffer them for us?
Yep, that was pretty much what I convinced myself, well into
my forties.
Then people started saying the same things about the
Progressive Era.
I still remember the day in the 1960s when I got into an
argument with a then-modern feminist about the Suffragette Movement and the
bastards that tried to stop us.
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| Circa 1912 |
Her: Oh, Lyddie. You can’t judge those guys by modern
standards. You shouldn’t hate them for what they did – you should understand
that they did what they did because it made sense in their time.
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Another anti-suffrage cartoon, showcasing the conservative position on the issue. |
Bear in mind, anyone who calls me ‘Lydia’ or some variant is
a member of the vampire community, human or non, because that’s only my
Masquerade name and has never been my legal one. She did indeed knowingly say
this to someone from the Suffragette Movement. In fact, here’s what happened
next:
Me: Yeah? I sure hated ‘em then.
Her: Well, I guess that’s okay; you’re actually from those
times.
Me: But I can’t hate ‘em now?
Her: No.
Me: So when was I supposed to stop hating them? 1920, when
we got the vote? 1930s? 1940s? Does this shit have a half-life?
Apparently, yes.
In my culture, we call this phenomenon ‘historical apologism.’
That’s okay. Nowadays, people do the exact same thing to the
1960s. Sometimes.
Sometimes the 60s were those crazy liberal times when
everyone was all crazy and liberal. Sometimes they were those terrible times in
that primitive conservative dystopia where no one was crazy or liberal. Other
times, they were those nobler conservative times when everything was as it
should be: ten years of conservative nostalgia.
I know, that used to be the 1950s. It still is, mostly, but
now it seems that the 1960s are making that transition. Just in time for the
1950s to fade out of living memory. I’m sure that’s just a coincidence.
As far as living memory goes, people who were children in the 1950s certainly don't count.
Trigger Warning
I expected this phenomenon to level off at some point during
my lifetime. Not a chance. I at least figured the 1980s were untouchable. No
one’s going to say that the 1980s were a time before liberalism, when, among
other things, professors who sexually harassed their students couldn’t be held
accountable for their actions.
Then someone said that to Naomi Wolf. About her own
experiences being harassed by a college professor in the 1980s, I might add.
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| Naomi Wolf: historical figure from an earlier age. Who is currently living. |
What amazes me the most is that those people were probably
under the impression they were being sensitive and enlightened.
Oh, but don’t worry. It’s happening to the 1990s too. Yes.
The 1990s. Any conversation about the homophobia in movies in the 1990s, and
some people will be falling all over themselves to talk about how you can’t
blame people from the 1990s – everyone was homophobic back then!
Yes. Gay marriage was a hot-button issue in the 1990s and a
major topic of national discussion, but somehow, if someone was homophobic in
the 1990s, it was the decade’s fault and not theirs.
I can’t wait to see what won’t be someone’s fault two decades
from now. I can’t wait to see someone defend Bush and Cheney. I mean, geez:
that was five whole years ago – it’s totally a separate era completely out of
the bounds of contemporary moral judgment, right?
Well, I fully expect and predict that it will be in twenty
years.
God knows, Bush may beat us to it.
Image links in order of appearance:
http://www.likecool.com/Looking_Into_the_Past--Projects--Gear.html.
http://willcountyhistoricalsociety.org/civil_war.html.
http://whynoteight.wordpress.com/2010/08/10/pioneer-day/.
http://www.nwhm.org/online-exhibits/progressiveera/peace.html.
http://utilitarianphilosophy.com/jeremybentham.eng.html.
http://www.radford.edu/rbarris/Women%20and%20art/amerwom05/suffrageart.html.
http://www.radford.edu/rbarris/Women%20and%20art/amerwom05/suffrageart.html.
http://www.jewishjournal.com/hollywoodjew/item/mad_men_comes_out.
http://www.nndb.com/people/454/000117103/.
http://terrenoire.blogspot.com/2009/01/why-is-this-man-smiling.html.
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Image links in order of appearance:
http://www.likecool.com/Looking_Into_the_Past--Projects--Gear.html.
http://willcountyhistoricalsociety.org/civil_war.html.
http://whynoteight.wordpress.com/2010/08/10/pioneer-day/.
http://www.nwhm.org/online-exhibits/progressiveera/peace.html.
http://utilitarianphilosophy.com/jeremybentham.eng.html.
http://www.radford.edu/rbarris/Women%20and%20art/amerwom05/suffrageart.html.
http://www.radford.edu/rbarris/Women%20and%20art/amerwom05/suffrageart.html.
http://www.jewishjournal.com/hollywoodjew/item/mad_men_comes_out.
http://www.nndb.com/people/454/000117103/.
http://terrenoire.blogspot.com/2009/01/why-is-this-man-smiling.html.
Tuesday, February 26, 2013
Bloodsucker Am I
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I don’t mind being called a bloodsucker. It’s not insulting;
it’s descriptive: I am a bloodsucker. Literally. Calling me a bloodsucker would
be like saying it to a flea – it’s just a simple reference to their feeding
habits for good or ill. And I can’t even spread disease like a flea: I win!
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Now see – it is an insult to call a mainstream person a
bloodsucker. When you say that to me, it’s literal. Call a mainstream person a
bloodsucker, and you’re implying that they’re exploitative or a selfish drain
on society.
Although, I suppose you could try applying that one to me.
Real Bloodsuckers
I can’t help but notice that the people who get called
‘bloodsuckers’ in mainstream society tend to be people like politicians,
lawyers, and people collecting for charity. And don’t forget that delightful
quasi-mythological ‘welfare queens.’ We also tend to say things like ‘they’re
draining me dry,’ usually in reference to money.
I’ve said before that my people in particular would actually
be the perfect libertarian bad guys: we’re literally charity bloodsuckers! We
have this enormous, complicated social network whereby we solicit semi-regular
donations from those more independent than us, and we are really and truly
asking for blood and living moment by moment on the altruism of others. And
that’s fresh blood, right from the source, and much more than just the
bloodiness equivalent of the spare change a libertarian wouldn’t give to a guy
on the street (and, unfortunately, sometimes we have to steal it). I am honored
to be a libertarian’s bogeyman, and promoting the evil altruist agenda.
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| I don't like you either, Ayn Rand. |
But lo! We’re also a group that’s evaded federal government
detection (kind of – they don’t know we’re anything other than regular citizens
anyway – I guess that’s good enough for a libertarian fantasy). Sure, we have a
socialist, underground society with high taxes from our citizens, where people
live under frequent surveillance by a government capable of lie detection – but
we never force anyone to join! Such is our respect for freedom of choice.
Conundrum!
Fantasy Racism
Whenever Vampires are portrayed as a persecuted minority in
fiction, one of the most common racial epithets for them is ‘bloodsucker.’
Without going into whether you should really be using Vampires as a metaphor
for oppressed minorities or not, I want to say that I find it interesting that
it’s almost always ‘bloodsucker’ that makes the list. Or leech.
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| Eyes on the 'evil' setting. |
You know, say I wanted to insult one of the many Vampires
that deserved it, like, say, Edward Cullen. He deserves it more than most because
the books and most of the characters present him as reformed or at least
fundamentally good-natured when he is nothing of the sort. Maybe I’d give him
one of those brutal Richard Dawkins polysyllabic numbers that truly did him
justice: ‘you unrelenting obsessive abusive control-freak; you mass-murdering
megalomaniacal monstrosity; you stalking sexist sadistic kleptocratic conservative
criminal irrational racist wannabe-genocidal bully!’
I guess that’s kind of long to yell during a riot, so how
about just ‘murderer?’ That’s a pretty good insult, in that it could not possibly
be interpreted in a positive or neutral way, and any person with even the most
basic level of human decency shouldn’t want to hear it. That’s a pretty good
reason not to like someone like Edward. Saying ‘also you drink blood!’ sounds
like a case of misguided priorities.
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|
Erzsébet Báthory:
front-running candidate for the most prolific female serial killer in history.
Also, she drank blood.
|
Are writers trying to say that people in real life wouldn’t
actually be prejudiced against Vampires for any substantive reason; that they’d
just be grossed out by the blood drinking? They’re not entirely wrong. God
knows, we’ve had that happen in our community, and it’s such a small population
cross-section. Even some of our hosts have been like that, but then there are
thousands who haven’t been. A little nuance would be nice. Particularly when
you’re dealing with a group of people that have actually done bad shit.
Seriously, if you’ve killed people: who cares whether or not
you wasted their blood afterwards? I still can’t get over Stephenie Meyer
saying she couldn’t watch Interview with
a Vampire because: ‘gross.’ Not: ‘I hated watching people die,’ but:
‘people dying is icky.’
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| Geez, Lestat, couldn't you just slaughter her politely? Or use a napkin? |
Another thing I see a lot in speculative fiction is Vampires
or aliens or Atlanteans making up similar racial epithets for humans, which
also sound unintentionally ridiculous. ‘Air-breather,’ ‘solid,’ ‘ugly/large
bags of mostly water.’ Yes – they are actually saying ‘You inhale air and
that’s terrible somehow.’
I can’t wait for a gelatinous alien to insult humans by
saying: ‘you have bones!’ I bet it never occurred to anyone to be ashamed of
that. ‘Bone people!’
I’ve spent half my life trying to help stop this from
developing in my community and crushing it fiercely when it does, but now I’m
wondering about what kind of equally ridiculous things we could call humans.
‘Round-teeth!’ ‘Bread-eaters!’ Uh: ‘solar panels?’
Some Vampires insult humans by calling them ‘mortal.’ One of
the fundamental beliefs in my own vampire culture is that aging is a disease,
and we’re the only people who currently have any acquired immunity. Calling a
human ‘mortal’ would be on par with insulting someone by calling them a ‘cancer
patient.’
Most of the rest of these epithets sound like a frigging Cosmo article title: ‘How Having Bones
Can Hurt Your Figure.’
Taking a completely benign biological trait and making it
something to be ashamed of, without even giving a reason why – yeah, that’s
pretty much the standard for a lot of insults. People don’t say ‘you’re ugly
and that’s bad;’ they just call you ‘ugly.’ Same thing goes for most racial
insults. I guess that’s a strength of speculative fiction – take an issue like
racism outside of its preferred real world context and you can see how
absolutely absurd it is.
Morals versus Insults
Plenty of people think bloodsucking is inherently wrong,
even if you do it safely and consensually. They’ll point out that you have to
hurt someone one way or another, since you still have to break the skin. And it
isn’t as if humans have pints and pints of blood to spare without any health
consequences.
And it’s not like establishing a hosting relationship
doesn’t have many indirect personal consequences for both parties that make the
whole process more complicated than a simple exchange of blood. And nearly
everyone in our community chose to be vampires, and therefore consciously said,
after years of thinking it over, that yes: they were willing to make themselves
difficult burdens on an ever-expanding number of people for the rest of their
indefinite lifespans.
And I can actually respect that position well enough,
because at least it’s a real moral argument. I’m a professional sire. I’m a
professional recruiter. I’ve lived well past the maximum natural human
lifespan. This position more or less flies in the face of everything I do and
the entire basis of my continued existence on Earth.
But at least it’s an argument and they’re not just calling
me icky.
Images in order of appearance:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vampire_bat.
http://hardinmd.lib.uiowa.edu/fleabites.html.
http://www.bradwestness.com/ayn-rand-was-a-not-a-republican,1629/.
http://www.breakingdawnmovie.org/images/2010/07/Edward-Cullen-bad-vamp-2.jpg.
http://hardinmd.lib.uiowa.edu/fleabites.html.
http://www.bradwestness.com/ayn-rand-was-a-not-a-republican,1629/.
http://www.breakingdawnmovie.org/images/2010/07/Edward-Cullen-bad-vamp-2.jpg.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_B%C3%A1thory
http://staticmass.net/the-emporium/interview-with-the-vampire-movie-1994/.
http://vampirelegends.wordpress.com/2010/05/19/vampires-online-and-bats/.
http://staticmass.net/the-emporium/interview-with-the-vampire-movie-1994/.
http://vampirelegends.wordpress.com/2010/05/19/vampires-online-and-bats/.
Sunday, November 25, 2012
Edward Cullen is Not Gay
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In the late nineteenth century, the two main tropes for Vampire sires were:
1. Lesbian Vampire seducing innocent young girls to ruin.
2. Male Vampire, also seducing innocent young girls to ruin.
It occurred to me after getting educated on Vampire fiction in my late twenties (after I’d already been sired) that according to some definitions, I got ‘em both, as an innocent young girl pre-ruination.
Hey, there are plenty of people who believe ethical siring is an oxymoron, and that may never change. Although maybe Charles is off the hook, since Cathy’s the one who actually sired me. He was more of a siring enabler; really, depending on what the hell you insist siring is a metaphor for.
One interesting thing I’ve noticed is that people usually still assume Charles is the one who sired me. And I’ve gotten some fun responses over the years from the more conservative human members of our community after I set the record straight:
1950s: “Oh. I see. Well, you are vampires, what did I expect? If you’re already damned you may as well get magnificently damned, right?
1980s: “Oh, fuck. Oh right, you guys are immune to that, right? Right?”
1990s: “Oh, hey, that’s cool. You know, that’s you guy’s choice, and I totally respect that. What you guys do in your bedrooms is perfectly fine – there is nothing wrong with that as long as you don’t shove it down other people’s throats.”
2010s: “Holy shit, you’re a lesbian! That’s awesome!”
 |
| Nicely done, ~Bilesuck on deviantART - you got the expression just right. |
Indeed, 1950s-2010s. As we all know, bisexuals still don’t exist, omnisexuals are just something they made up for Torchwood and to piss off conservatives (that’s just a bonus, man), and of course, siring is exactly like sex. Who doesn’t grow fangs and start drinking blood after sex? I know I do now – so I guess that means everyone does. It’s logic!
Also, sex makes you immortal.
If Twilight fan reactions are any indication, my conservative hosts are by no means distant outliers.
 |
| Brilliant |
If you spend any time reading Team Anti-Twilight screeds against Edward Cullen, it doesn’t take too long for people to start calling him gay.
Well, he’s not.
Here’s how I know: he never expresses any sexual attraction to men. Or does anything sexual with men. Also, he expresses sexual attraction to women in his interior monologue, and has sex with women. Homosexuality is defined as exclusive attraction to one’s own sex. If you express attraction to the opposite sex, you cannot be gay, and if you never express any attraction to your own, you cannot be bisexual.
 |
| You kissed a girl?! That is so gay! |
See, I think this is a pretty solved issue, but no. As it turns out, there is a multitude of ways you can be gay without actually being gay.
The unmistakable airtight case:
1. Edward is sparkly: Sigh. Folks, sparkling is a biological trait for Meyer’s Vampires. Applying body glitter to look ‘fabulous’ and naturally producing body-glitter, as part of a skin disease really can’t be judged by the same standards.
Fun fact: guys who were not gay have worn body glitter. When your hasty generalizations keep getting trampled by hordes of outliers, it’s time to let them run you down.
 |
| Set 'em straight, Eddie Izzard. |
Also, prettiness is a biological trait for Meyer’s Vampires and all other Mary Sues. What are they, a Species of Gay?
3. Edward is thin: Nothing burns calories like homosexuality. Is it because of all the gay sex? Which is weird; if these stereotypes were any indication, you’d think gay men didn’t even have sex. They just sit around and sparkle together while dressing nice and writing poetry. I mean, if they didn’t even need gay attraction to be gay, where’s the sex?
Also bears and chubs don’t exist – gay men only like skinny guys or want to be skinny guys. To suggest otherwise is to suggest diversity of the kind liberals have invented as an insidious plot.
4. Edward is stylish: Fun fact – in the early 20th century (and most throughout most of Western culture before and after), men were encouraged to dress nicely. It didn’t make them ‘gay’ or anything (well, ‘gay’ meant something different back then). If Edward were somehow frozen in his 1910s perspective, you’d think he’d be pretty flabbergasted by the macho culture ‘men are slobs’ ideal. Also, he should wear hats.
I take it back. All men before the 1980s macho culture were gay. Look at Teddy Roosevelt.
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| Fierce big game hunter, and tough-as-nails politician. |
6. Edward hates Jacob, which means he’s attracted to him: Yes. You know what? All my friends go through a stage where they hated me and tried to kill me before accepting my awesomeness. In fact, Cathy and Charles both teamed up to destroy my life and torture me before declaring me their beloved poly partner. It’s how all courtship works, and is a necessary stage in all romance.
 |
| So well drawn. |
Edward also threatens to kill Jacob on multiple occasions. He actually toyed with the idea of slaughtering Jacob’s entire tribe in Midnight Sun. And they fight all the time, usually over Bella. Abusive dominance games are exactly like love and attraction, and that is something normal and healthy people think. Also, guys paternalistically fighting over a women like a prized possession aren’t misogynists, they’re secretly into each other.
Stop following us, Freud. Don’t make me get my zombie hammer.
 |
 |
| I'll show you 'penis envy.' |
We’ve already established that bisexuals just don’t exist. I guess asexuals don’t either. Also, men never voluntarily stay virgins. Entire religious and spiritual philosophies have been built around abstinence, but it has never happened in recorded history. No – even men who know that having sex with women WOULD KILL THE WOMEN (which is true for Vampires and human women in Twilight) cannot abstain from sex. Such is the male sex drive that it trumps all moral concerns and overrides every other personal conviction. Which is why prostitutes in the real world are respected professionals with waiting lists of hundreds of people every single night and promiscuous women are considered the world’s greatest humanitarians.
 |
| We all have testosterone and oxytocin, goddammit! |
Whenever I hear people say that stupid ‘Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus’ cliché as a segue to the opposite gender stereotypes way of thinking, I want to say “Could you guys make it any more obvious that you’re talking about weird space aliens that don’t exist?” I also want to ask: “Which planet do you think gay people are from?”
One of the interesting things here is that a lot of these very same critics actually accuse Meyer of homophobia in other areas, like not including any openly gay characters. Yeah, a lot of them are otherwise pretty liberal.
And some of them have even imagined the existence of critics like me, and have preemptively asserted that they are not homophobic for saying these things about Edward. No, Meyer is. She’s the one perpetuating gay stereotypes by making Edward not a straight stereotype.
Yes. They’re using gay stereotypes to diagnose someone with homosexuality in the absence of any actual homosexual behavior – but they’re not perpetuating or validating gay stereotypes. I’m sure some of their best friends are gay, and they asked those gay friends, and those gay friends didn’t mind, too.
Hey, why stop there? You know what – Emmett Cullen is gay. I know, I know – he’s all ‘big’ and macho and weightlifting and sarcastic and aggressive and making fun of Edward. Don’t you see – he’s a bear! He’s big, he’s hairy, he likes hunting, and wrestling – bear. Rosalie is just his beard. Anyway, when Emmett goes blood hunting, his favorite animal to hunt is a grizzly bear, so clearly he’s trying to tell us something.
 |
| He looks like Joseph Smith. |
Also, Carlisle is gay. Esme is also just a beard. The first guy he sires is a pretty teenage boy – totally the move of one of those depraved homosexuals they warned us about on TV during the 1950s that totally exist. Edward was your ‘companion’ Carlisle? Snort – you are you kidding? Men don’t have friends; just people they hope to have sex with (ask any Pick-Up Artist). Also, siring is exactly like sex.
Rosalie’s gay, too. Don’t let all that femme ‘world’s hottest woman’ thing fool you – she’s a lipstick lesbian. I mean, when she was eighteen, she didn’t even care about marrying the guy her parents wanted her to marry for social reasons – she just wanted a baby. And all lesbians want kids, and all girls love being practically sold into marriage. Plus, she likes fixing old cars, and straight women don’t do that, they get men to do it for them. And hey – she went to college and studied electrical engineering, medicine, astrophysics, and business – straight women just study liberal arts, which are inferior. She’s a lesbian. That’s probably the reason she hated Bella all those books – she was into her. Animosity is always attraction.
 |
| Gay couples. |
Also, Alice is gay. She has short hair, for one thing. And look at how she’s always hugging Bella – clearly indicative of sexual intent, because women never do that under any other circumstances. I guess she’s a lipstick lesbian though, what with the whole fashion plate thing.
As for Esme, um – I don’t know; she’s so underdeveloped as a character she could be anything. Oh right – she wasn’t into any guy after she met Carlisle that one time, but really that means she just wasn’t into guys and is a lesbian.
Jasper’s tougher, what with his highly manly psychopathy, but he does wear designer clothes and is also really pretty, so there’s no hope for him either.
The werewolves are easy – they’re a bunch of shirtless guys hanging out together. They’re all gay.
Wow. In one page we went from a book with no gay characters to a Cast of Gay. And I didn’t even get to all the reasons Bella, her mother, and her father were gay.
And here’s the best part: Edward used to hunt men and then torture them, who turned gay in response to his gay Vampire bite. Aw. Not only were they criminals, they died gay, too. And now he’s infecting everyone with gay with his gay presence, because the level of gay grows with age.
No, wait: this is the best part: the Cullens are rich. And gay. And we have no idea where all their money went, except towards all of their gay interior designing in their gay house, and gay clothes. I bet they were using it to fund the homosexual agenda. Think about it – the gay agenda has only gotten steadily worse in the twentieth century, and that’s when the Cullens were sired. It wasn’t the Progressives because we failed at everything according to practically everyone today, but now the Cullens and their ilk have won and everything is gay gay gay through gay osmosis of gay!
Sigh.
Homophobia is like any other form of paranoia. You’re afraid of something enough, you start seeing it everywhere – even ‘guilt by faint association’ can be enough.
I understand. Really. Some of my best friends are homophobes. Or were, anyway. I’m old – there were people in favor of gay rights when I was young, but they were just as closeted as the gay people. Well – we’re out and proud now, folks.
Obviously, I’m not actually interpreting the ‘Edward Cullen is Gay’ phenomenon as anything resembling an argument. It isn’t. They’re just making fun of him. They’re making fun of him by using homosexuality as an insult. I know a lot of people are under the impression they can insult people by calling them gay while somehow not implying homosexuality is bad, but every one of them who isn’t lying is wrong.
Folks – Meyer did not intend for Edward to be gay. She wrote him as, gasp, a non-macho straight male lead. What with Twilight being a formulaic vanilla straight romance novel with a female protagonist and all, Edward being heterosexual is pretty much central to the plot. It’s no minor detail. If she did intend for Edward to be gay then, yes, he would be a gay stereotype. But if you’re saying that someone can unwittingly write gay character despite clearly writing a straight character – that’s you.
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| How do you make a drawing look airbrushed? |
Part of the ‘pretty men are gay’ thing is a denial of female sexuality. If anyone thinks a guy is hot, it must be another man, because why would women think that? Part of it is projection – if you notice a guy is hot, well, are you gay? Better accuse him of being gay, just to be on the safe side.
Mainly, though, the Edward Cullen is Gay phenomenon is pure old-fashioned gender policing. It’s not coming up with a list of behaviors straight guys don’t do, but can’t do. Homosexuality is just a bogeyman synonym for ‘not manly,’ in a culture where men are taught to hold ‘masculinity’ as the ultimate ideal. Femininity is essentially a contaminant, and gay men have been so poisoned by it they have the same sexual preferences as women. Not too long ago, that was practically a mainstream belief in psychology.
Give me five reasons why that isn’t implying that women are inferior, and the first ten don’t count. Also give me ten reasons why this attitude is actually socially useful or non-injurious to the psyches of millions of men and women, and the first fifty don’t count.
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| Say it, brothers and sisters. Forever. |
1. Piety – Translation: That’s one hobby that won’t interfere with housework.
2. Purity – Translation: Sex is for men only, somehow, even when they do it with women.
3. Submissiveness – Translation: Get Out of Argument/Reciprocity Free Card for men.
4. Domesticity – Translation: Your home is your cage.
And of course, they were just as afraid that liberating women would somehow emasculate men. Back in my Suffragette days, I got to plow through loads of delightful comics like these:
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| Wait until she votes for a liberal. |
I guess masculinity is a limited resource, and voting is manly because it’s manly. Also, men should not love or care for their own children.
Well, we’ve certainly made progress. But we still have gender boxes full of junk that people desperately want to be true for some horrible reason. It’s more than obvious that people already know what it’s in them, too.
Today, the misogynists who are trying to enforce it aren’t conservatives trying to keep things the same; they’re reactionaries trying to bring things back to the way they used to be. I was there. The least I can do is put up a road sign, or something.
Misogyny and misandry have always been natural allies. You put women in a box; men get a complementary box. If you think in terms of opposite genders, you can’t have it any other way than that: they all get put in boxes, little boxes. Well, brothers and sisters, I say burn the boxes like the artificial boundaries and good fuel sources they are. Be whoever you want to be, have whatever hobbies, clothes, and personal expressions you want, and let everyone else do the same goddamn thing without fear of your superlatively lame reprisal. Stop wondering whether the hell they’re masculine or feminine, and stop pretending those terms mean anything.
Sadly, this means you’ll also have to give up the bad jokes, like randomly accusing pretty Vampires of homosexuality or treating homosexuality as something random pretty Vampires ought to be ashamed of. I understand. I’m a comedy writer, and there’s nothing worse than laying down a joke and getting a room full of awkward, angry stares as your reward. But it’s not always everyone else’s fault. If society’s growing, comedy should grow with it. Or you’ll turn into Krusty the Clown telling TV dinner jokes while dressed like an Asian stereotype.
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| It wasn't funny the first time, Krusty. |
Image sources in order of appearance:
Saturday, July 14, 2012
I Want to Be Forever Knight
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| carling2u.co.uk |
You know what – I like the night. Even when they find a
treatment and I take back the daytime, I’ll still be nocturnal. I like it that
way – I am biologically and culturally nocturnal.
Any sunlight treatment would eliminate the huge risk
vampires run every time we’re away from a nice windowless shelter – which is
great, because that’s the real problem.
On a smaller, universal scale with nocturnal living, you
have the limited job opportunities, the inconvenient hours for anything worth
doing (Museums, galleries, libraries – they almost always close at five) and
the lack of bargain matinees.
No bargain matinees. Hey, that was a big deal before Netflix
and the wonders of the Web. Ah, the wonders of the Web, where there are no
hours, either for jobs or for entertainment.
I’d still be working the night shift, sun treatment or not. I
don’t miss the sunshine.
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| article.wn.com |
Part of this might be generational. I spent my early
childhood on a frontier farm. Sunlight dictated our schedules in the other
direction.
Sunshine meant work. On a good day, I’d be doing the
housework indoors in my honored capacity as ‘eldest child.’ More likely, we’d
all be doing the hard labor outdoors. And then fiddle music later, hopefully
distracting us from the fact that we had no air conditioning, no electric fans
or even electricity, no sunscreen, and not even a hat with a brim. And we
didn’t even know it.
A decade later,
I was in the city working inside all day, as one of the first generations to do
that. Another decade, and I was with the vampire community, slowly adjusting to
their schedule. Actually being in the sunshine, instead of seeing it on TV, is
a distant memory from another world. Almost as much as the frontier. I’m a city
slicker now – I can’t go back.
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| truebie.blogspot.com |
When Sophie-Anne Leclerq had her little artificial beach
party on True Blood, it made her even
more alien to me. How can she miss the sun after 500 frigging years? I’m 142. I
did at first. Now? It’s like that isn’t even the way the world looks anymore.
I feel like I live in a different climate than everyone else
I know, where everything’s usually several degrees cooler, it’s always dark,
and the wildlife is a lot more like me. Sure, I’ll talk to them about their
weather, but I don’t want to move there.
Don’t tell that to Nick Knight, the protagonist of Forever Knight. He wants to move there
for life, regardless of the cost. Which is death.
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| (God, it's hard to find a picture of Nick where he looks normal. Stop snarling at me, Nick.) yuchtar.com |
Forever Knight.
Love the title. You could interpret that four different ways: Nick’s last name
is Knight, and he’s immortal. He’s also a Vampire with a traditional sun
problem, and thus has a ‘forever night.’ Also, he was an actual knight in
medieval France, so he’s a knight made immortal. And most importantly, now he’s
a knight-in-shining-armor cop who happens to be immortal, with all that that
implies.
Too bad it’s a misnomer.
Nick doesn’t want to help people forever, because he doesn’t
want to live forever. His main goal throughout the series is to become mortal
again. He tries that even if it consequentially puts humans in danger, because
his domineering sire LaCroix won’t stop hounding him and anyone in his way.
Atonement is a secondary goal, and Nick jumps at every opportunity to be human
even if that would mean cutting short his life and time to help people.
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| home.sprynet.com |
Nick – you spent nearly 700 years killing people. You can’t
make up for that. You’ve gone 100 years without killing anyone – you’re not a
threat anymore. All you can do is help people now. You can save people who
wouldn’t be saved by a conventional police officer – and that’s more or less
the organizing principle behind this series, so you should have realized this
by now.
You’re a philanthropist who’s given millions of your
ill-gotten gain to help the needy with your De Brabant foundation – awesome.
One of the things I’ve liked best about the show is its emphasis on real-world
good deeds. Nick doesn’t do good works by saving people from a never-ending
supply of demons like Angel – he does it the sort of bureaucratic, down-to-earth
way that makes society function.
During the Civil War, Nick was working as a medic for the
Union Army (despite not completely giving up killing). During the Civil War
Angel was – uh, still evil, but I guess 150 years later is when he’d be running
his unlicensed PI service that repeatedly butted heads with the actual police
force. Which was, of course, useless in the fight against demons despite
overwhelming evidence of the existence of demonic activity.
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| en.bestpicturesof.com. |
Angel the Series
makes up for it with the gray Wolfram and Hart plot arc, where the Fang Gang
tries reforming an evil law firm. And Angel signs away his opportunity to be
human, because it meant fulfilling his scheme and saving the world. Nick? Not
so much.
He has all the time in the world to use his gifts for the
good of the society he’s supposedly trying to repay. And he’s throwing it all
away to feel redeemed, without actually being redeemed.
Dying for your own sins, which is Christian in kind of a self-absorbed
way, is easier and more selfish than the hard work, difficult decisions, and
moral ambiguity that constitutes redemption through good works.
Becoming human would be less moral, Nick. You may feel like
you’d be on the side of good, because your understanding of metaphysics is
stuck in the Middle Ages. But all the people you could have helped will still
be dead. And then you’ll be dead.
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| mybeutifulroses.blogspot.com |
But I have to say; the absolute worst is when I have to
listen to Nick frame his desire to be human as the desire to see a sunrise. The
theme narration says it all: ‘emerge from his world of darkness, from his
endless forever knight.’ Yes – Classic Vampire Angst in a nutshell: seasonal
affective disorder.
Louis had that same thing in Interview. I kinda liked that scene, I guess – at least Louis was
getting enthusiastic about new technology. Hah: some of our elders flinched the
first time they saw a sunrise film. I was mostly just excited about the film
itself.
Films were exciting for just being films back in the
Progressive Era. It was just so cool that they could do that with pictures.
Seeing the sunrise itself on film was like looking at old tintypes: ‘Oh yeah. I
forgot about this.’ Commemorating the past, not looking toward the future.
Nick - it’s the early 1990s. Watch a video if you want a
sunrise. You can fast-forward through it, too – and you have color, not like us
poor slobs a few decades before. YouTube is less than two decades away – you
can get all the sunrises you want, all over the world.
Wait a little while longer, and we’ll have Augmented Reality
technology that can simulates the sunrise so it’ll look more real than the real
thing. Constant simulated sunrises that never stop, and all you may need is a
high-bandwidth Internet connection and decent AR glasses. ‘Sun’ = ‘human?’
Wouldn’t that make you superlatively human?
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| simple.wikipedia.org |
Why are you pining for what you lost in 1228, when you have
the whole twentieth century at your disposal, and the 21st is right
around the corner?
I know that sunlight is a symbol, and the sun represents
‘humanity’ for Nick. Well, Nick – think of it this way. Our technology will
allow you to see the sun, meaning technology has created a bridge over which
you can rejoin the human race. We’ve advanced to the point where we can all be
‘human’ together. If that’s what you want, and you don’t know how to feel good
about yourself in any other way.
The sunrise is great: if people like the sun, awesome. We
all have our preferences. And Nick, I’m sure you’d start tearing up if you saw
the sunrise again. You know something that made me cry? Seeing a picture of my
planet from space.
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| collthings.co.uk |
That Big Blue Marble photo from the Apollo 17 mission? It’s
one of the most published photographs now, and barely even raises an eyebrow.
But I saw it and I couldn’t stop thinking: that’s the earth. That’s us –
everything that’s ever happened in human history – right there. Even the Lunar
Orbiter 1 photo from 1966 was exciting – we saw this little scrap of the Earth,
but it was still Earth.
Now you can watch videos on YouTube that pan out from our
planet through the universe.
Here’s an artist’s rendering of the Earth from the 1400s:
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| en.wikipedia.org |
It makes me cry for a different reason.
The amount of scientific and social progress that has
occurred in my lifetime boggles the mind. It’s genuinely humbling to look back,
and think where we were in the 1870s, and where we are now. And I got the
opportunity to be a part of it, to whatever extent I could.
Nick, I don’t know why you’d genuinely give up everything
for the sake of moral symbolism.
I haven’t led a blameless life either, Nick, and I’ve done a
lot that I’m not proud of. But I don’t regret still being here for a moment.
And, in the words of Daria, ‘there’s nothing like seeing the
sunrise, except seeing the sun set in reverse. Get a VCR.
Or better yet, a spacesuit.
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