I didn't much like Caitlan Flanagan's piece on Twilight in last December's Atlantic, with its confused, contradictory, and overly personalized depiction of what all teenage girls want from sex (perhaps the most revealing sentence in the piece is the one noting that dental dams make Flanagan want to hurl, which says far more about her views on sefe sex and lesbian sexuality than I'm sure she ever intended) and I'm not sure I think very much of Stephen Marche's argument in Esquire that vampires are the gay boys teenaged girls really want to date, either. I suppose I agree with both of them that the popular depictions of vampires are more marble statue than menacing monster, but I'm not sure either of them is really getting to the weird heart of the matter.
First off, the idea that there all teenage girls feel the same way about sex is dumb, and obviously so. Flanagan seems to think that all teenage girls want to be ravished, but not really, and Marche seems to think that "many, if not most" teenage girls want to have sex with gay men. Both of these positions are just wildly incomplete. Of course some girls want to get ravished. Some girls like the idea of being ravished but don't actually want it to happen yet, or at all. Some girls want to ravish the guy. Some girls want to have sex with other girls, and couldn't care less about the broody dude in the corner, no matter whether he has fangs.
But leaving aside the great variety of sexual desire for teenage girls, I've kind of come to wonder if what's strange about the current vampire craze is not the chasteness and sensitivity that characterizes the new, safer vamps, but that a lot of teenage girls seem into the idea of romance with a guy who can kill them, for whom sex and death can be the same thing. One of the things I've always liked about Buffy is not only that they got her first sexual experience with Angel right, but that the show is clear about the annihilating possibility of sex. Buffy and Riley get so into each other that they nearly get eaten by a giant plant. The first time Buffy and Spike get together, they tear down a house and tear each other up. And Buffy's second time with Angel isn't during a brief period when he's human in Los Angeles: it's when he sucks her dry to save his own life. I don't even really mean this as an AIDS metaphor, although that's been a popular theory. I just mean that any force that physically consuming can liberate you, it can elevate you, and it can pull you under. One overarching theme of Twilight and The Vampire Diaries is that the brooding boys want to suck their girlfriends dry as much as they want to have sex with them. And the girls don't exactly run screaming from that dichotomy. If, as Marche argues, the vampire craze is really about Americans coming to terms with their inner freak, a lot of parents and a lot of critics may have to reckon with the fact that American girls think sex, particularly sex tinged with danger is risky, and want it anyway.