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Hungry Vampires and Vampires That Just Want to Live

These days, the vampiric need for blood tends to be portrayed as an uncontrollable and all-consuming hunger. On a genre level, the vampiric hunger just seems to keep on getting worse.

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.


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.

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.

Yes, that is the correct reaction.

I’m not Louis either. I can easily take one pint from someone at a time, and no more. I know my mouth capacity. I know how many swallows I need to get to a pint. My fangs are not poisonous, and my bite is neither lethal nor infectious (infecting someone with my vampirism is pretty hard to do unintentionally). I can stop when I get to sixteen ounces, withdraw, and start cleaning the wound. No problem.

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.

My life is a lot more like a survival narrative. This is what I need. What do I have? What do I need to do every day to get what I need? What are my obstacles? When can I rest?

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!

The only difference between this and the worldview of a shocking number of both modern and historical people is scale. I can see why so many social conservative types like many modern Vampire stories.

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.

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.
.
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.


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

1271977774new-moon-paper-cut.jpg

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What is This Thing You Call Boredom?

One of the standard objections to mass immortality is that if we lived a long time, we’d be bored.

Obviously, I have plenty of objections to that:

1. “So – boredom is a fate worse than death?”

Flickr user Julie Edgley

2. “Seriously – you'd really rather die than be bored? Wouldn't that disqualify you from half of all jobs? Hey, if you don't want to live forever, it can only mean that someday you want to die.”

(Trigger warning for suicide)

3. “People don’t get bored because they’ve just been alive way too long, and they'd better kill themselves so they can cross 'death' off their bucket list. They get bored because they're dissatisfied with their lives at present, and it's time for a change. They usually get new jobs, meet new people or move. They don't off themselves.”

4. “Suicidal people aren't tired of living. They're hopelessly depressed and looking for some way out. They can't imagine their lives getting better or they don't want to live through it until it does. I sincerely hope that if you ever meet a suicidal person and they just say that they're bored and that they've somehow 'seen it all,' you don't take them seriously.”

5. “So – you're okay with people that have indefinite lifespans offing themselves? Really? You wouldn't get a suicidal immortal person help, because their suicide is obviously just a natural consequence of their immortal ennui? What if it wasn't? What if the immortal was suicidal for all the reasons people are actually suicidal – how would you even know? You'd be a suicide enabler?”

6. “What difference does it make if the suicidal person is 213 years old instead of 13 or 81 or 31 years old? Would you pull a double standard and say suicidal tendencies are okay past a certain age? If so – what age? Can we vote?”

7. “Well – if we live long enough, maybe we'll be able to put people in living stasis if they just get tired of living anyway, and then they can be revived and be immortal again. That's a way better deal than we have now.”

Source: Wikimedia, Tomas Castelazo

But I have to say, as a 143-year-old, my initial emotional reaction is as follows:

“What is this thing you call boredom?”

Really. If we’re talking about sustained, prolonged periods of boredom where you just don’t have a clue about what to do with yourself, everything you can think of sucks, you're tired of absolutely everything – yeah, I've never felt that.

I've had boring jobs before, sure. At those times, I was always thinking about the way to get a better job. Shockingly, I never blamed it on my supposed immortal ennui – I blamed it on the job. Being bored to death is a bad joke and a dead metaphor, not a career path.

Flickr user XPeria2Day

It's also difficult to be bored when you're always with people. Seeing as how lots of modern conversation topics didn't exist when I was younger, I sure as hell haven't heard them all. And if meeting new people could ever get boring, most people would get bored of it way before age eighty.

I've also never spent one day alone.

Some of my younger friends will talk about days they slept in when they were single or their parents were away, and they just hung around the house or apartment alone and bored out of their minds. That's literally never happened to me.

I grew up with six siblings, and we sure didn't have separate rooms. Most of my early jobs – well, suffice to say, I didn't get days off, and if I did, I spent them with family. During those years, my family barely saw each other, and we wanted something to remember us by.

Vampire life – you definitely don't get days off. Spending an entire day without some form of contact with another person would literally be a death sentence for me. And I'm alive!

That is one thing about my own version of vampire life: it is a surefire cure for boredom. How do you be bored when life never gives you any time to be?

Really though – I thought the Internet was supposed to be a mass cure for boredom. You're bored? Have you read all of this Indie author's books? Have you read all the blogs on this subject? Or the most highly recommended fanfics? Have you read every new science journal that is freely available to the public now? Have you tried this new game? You know everything there is to know about the Byzantine Empire and you couldn't read more? You've watched every video on Youtube?

You couldn't possibly have seen every cat video yet, come on.

I grew up on the frontier. I'm pretty sure the worst boredom of my life was in my preteen years, before the family moved to Chicago. I couldn't have made my hundred teens that boring if I tried.

Somehow though, immortal ennui is practically the default theme in vampire and immortal fiction, and that's with folks that are way older than I am and should know full well how lucky they are to be here.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Better yet, for some mysterious reason, it's still usually the good Vampires in fiction who want mortality, and the evil ones pointing out the obvious.

Hey, even if you're a stereotypical reactionary conservative who thinks that all social and technological progress is just leading us further and further from the promised land of your youth – don't you still want to live a long time, just to see if the world goes back? It's happened before.

There's an oft-repeated saying about immortality: millions long for immortality who don't know what to do with themselves on a rainy day.

That seems like a pretty good test to me: have you ever had a moment where you didn't know what to do with yourself on a rainy day?

Me neither.

So we're fine.

Flickr user epSos.de

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Twenty-Six For a Year, Immortal Forever

Youth and Time

All my life, I’ve been getting into some variation of the following conversation:

Generally Well-Meaning Host or Recruit: “How old were you when you were sired?”

Me: “Oh, I was twenty-six.”

Generally Well-Meaning Host or Recruit: “And you’ve been twenty-six ever since.”

Me: “No. I was twenty-six for one year. And then I turned twenty-seven! Next month, I turn 143.

That’s what I’ve said to everyone who asked me that question this month. Yeah, it comes up a lot.

I was born on September 22, 1870. I’m not the same person I was in 1896.

This shows up all the time in immortal fiction. Nothing wrong with asking an immortal when it happened – the only thing I take issue with is the assumption that ‘twenty-six’ is was pretty much when my life and my personal development ended.

Some immortal fiction has that same conversation almost word for word. Tuck Everlasting, Let the Right One In, and Twilight all come to mind. Except the immortals almost always respond differently than I did.

And almost all of those protagonists were ‘turned’ as frigging children. I always hope that’s just for pathos and not wish fulfillment. Some days I don’t feel like giving the writers the benefit of the doubt.

Jessie Tuck says he’ll be seventeen until the end of the world. Eli says xe’s been twelve for a long time. Edward Cullen says he’s been seventeen for a while.

Seventeen for a while? Whose fault is that?

Guys – you’ve gotten older since this conversation started. You can’t stop chronological aging, and it will never be the same thing as physical aging.

My people don’t turn into vampires overnight. In most Vampire fiction, it happens in a few minutes, or at least a few nights. For us, it takes one and a half to three years between the infection and your full transition. Hell, it took me a full three years.

We’re not entirely sure when the aging process stops during the transition, so really: my age at my ‘time of siring’ was twenty-six to twenty-nine. God knows: you age so fucking much between the ages of twenty-six and twenty-nine.

And it doesn’t matter, because I’m still 142. But the idea is that I can somehow be over a hundred years old and only twenty-six at the same time.

Ah, but did I officially stop ‘aging’ when I was twenty-seven? Twenty-eight and three point five months? Really – what is my number?

I still remember what happened with my initiate Adam. He was getting nervous about his impending thirtieth birthday and tried getting me to sire him a few months early so he’d be sired at twenty-nine. I’d already spent the requisite five years evaluating him, so I did it – a few months weren’t going to make any difference to me. They apparently meant a world of difference to him, though.

Logan's Run came out the year the youngest Baby Boomers turned thirty. Clever.

Yeah, the Baby Boomer youth obsession hit him pretty hard. Trusting people over thirty was one thing, but being over thirty? I was quite a bit over thirty myself at the time, so you can imagine the depth of my sympathy for his plight.

To this day, he still insists he was just kidding. And to this day, after a round of chuckles, I still insist that I believe him. Yeah, we’re both liars.

Sigh. You know, as a sire, I was supposed to teach him to be a good liar, too. I failed.

Dorian Gray: the Poor Man's Immortality

I’ve said this to every one of my initiates before and after: “Babe – I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but you will turn thirty. Vampirism only cures physical aging. We already have a cure for chronological aging – it’s death! The only alternative to getting old is dying young. And our business is saving lives, not validating absurd societal prejudices.”

People who actually care about things like chronological age don’t care how young you look or how healthy you are, not usually. If they did, they wouldn’t go by chronological age at all – they’d go by your appearance, health, and abilities. They sure as hell wouldn’t care about the difference between twenty-nine and thirty.

I know these people. I know that back when I was in my eighties, a lot of them would start getting real uncomfortable around me. I mean – I was older than their grandmother. Who cares if I look like I’m still a twenty-something?

Jeanne Calment, 20

I don’t have these problems so much anymore, though. I’m 142! They have no basis of comparison between this and what I’m ‘supposed to’ look like. There’s no accepted and highly stereotyped social role for a 142-year-old. I’m free from their expectations and judgments!

Yep. The Immortal Ageism Paradox. When I was eighty, I was a granny in disguise. Now that I’m sixty-two years older, I’m young again!

Other thresholders go through the same thing. 123: yeah, that’s pretty much a twenty-something, right?

It's actually considered a major threshold when you hit 123 in vampire culture (at least today). Jeanne Calment (RIP) was deceased at 122 and holds the record for the oldest verified human lifespan. If you're a 'thresholder,' you're older than the oldest human who ever lived. Naturally, that threshold is subject to change, with improved medical advances. I look forward to the day when the threshold is two hundred or more.

Jeanne Calment, 121

At 142, I’m not treated like a forty-something. But in my privileged position, I get to see how the ageists of the world treat them.

Jeanne Calment, 40

Aging and gaining life experience aren’t the same thing – you can stop your aging process in your twenties and it wouldn’t change your ability to accumulate life experience. Aging is the accumulation of damage, not wisdom. And maturation is kids turning into adults physically and psychologically – you can be mature and inexperienced.

Life experience happens just over the course of your being alive – twenty-somethings aren’t ‘twenty-something-shaped’ because their bodies are too healthy; they’re ‘twenty-somethings’ because they haven’t had enough years to be anything else (literally and metaphorically). Except for all those twenty-somethings who are wise beyond their years, of course.

People need to recognize aging and maturation for what they are. And they need to recognize chronological aging for what it is – the earth has made this many revolutions around the sun since you were born. Congratulations!

It is not a statement of a person’s worth, life experience, or even an exact measurement of the amount of damage they’ve accumulated, really. People can be healthier than their years, and visa versa.

This crap goes away in an immortal society. I figure it’s a relief for a lot of human members of the vampire nation. I mean, they turn forty, their American friends give them cards that say crap like: ‘you’re over the hill and its so fucking funny that we’ll laugh at you at make jokes about failing memory, weight gain (because that’s also so fucking funny), and other stereotypes that we’ve decided you’d love to hear about!’

Come to us and you can celebrate your birthday in a place where the forty-somethings are impossibly young, the people under three hundred are hip, and the people over three hundred are revered and respected.

There’s no double standard here – ask most vampires, and they’ll tell you that humans never get old. They all die far too young.

But obviously this stuff can’t go completely mainstream until we discover the cure for aging in humans. In the meantime, all we can do is try to fight this nonsense through education, cultural change, and as much mockery as possible.

I am not Peter Pan.

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Bloodsucker Am I

Real Bloodsuckers

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Edward Cullen is Not Gay

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.

2. Edward is pretty: Ah, yes. Prettiness and homosexuality are genetically correlated in men. I love Imaginary Genetics. Or maybe it’s just that gay men spontaneously develop prettiness after puberty once they realize they’re attracted to men, to suit them in their gay dating lives. Magic Biology is fun! Or maybe pretty men realize women will never want them because women only like ugly guys (as is evidenced by the obsession over men like Robert Pattinson in real life – clearly it’s only gay men that are into him), and thus ‘choose’ to be gay, which is totally a conscious choice. Pseudo-sociology is even more fun!

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.

Fierce big game hunter, and tough-as-nails politician.

5. Edward is well spoken: He is? Okay, I’ll play along. Did you know that in the early 20th century the idea of a good woman writer was still controversial, and we were still using goddamn male pseudonyms to make a damn sale? Yeah, the ‘verbal skills are for women’ phenomenon is pretty modern, too. It’s almost like it’s a cultural construction or something. As is the idea that gay men are women.

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.'

7. Edward was a virgin before he met Bella: Yes. Virginity is a sign that you like having sex with men. See, I’d think that not having sex for a hundred years would be a sign of being, um, asexual (or traumatized, or religious, etc.). But no. Apparently the only explanation is closet homosexuality.

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.

How do you make a drawing look airbrushed?

Now it’s true – Edward is a stalker. And an abuser. And frankly, he fits a lot of the criteria for Antisocial Personality Disorder. And Meyer didn’t intend any of that, either. But those are real conditions with real documented symptoms, and you can make a diagnosis. Diagnosing homosexuality by using anything other than, um, homosexuality is endorsing homophobia in every way, shape, and form.

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.

Say it, brothers and sisters. Forever.

When I was growing up, we had the Cult of Domesticity (i.e. True Womanhood). Here were the basic ideals:

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:

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.

It wasn't funny the first time, Krusty.

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