First?

Wonderful. I was thinking something similar earlier– Vamps are those who are repelled by the symbols of sacrifice.
Undead boobies?

FIrsT! Yes!

Very interesting. I like the idea of a vampire recoiling just because the idea of not wanting power is so confusing to them.

curse you, Lori! in a nice way, though. with gold filigree

http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=62968786
and here we be.

We were just talking about vampires and crosses the other day. This is proof that Fred actually reads our crap!

first? and I’m in Southamerica

Every time I see someone wearing a diamond cross I think, “If you saw Jesus walking down the street, you not only wouldn’t recognize him, you’d likely call Homeland Security about the ‘suspicious-looking Arab’ you just saw.”

ay hijuepu… I wanted to be first!!
“A filigreed gold or bejeweled cross refutes itself, denying its own representation of powerlessness. Likewise the oxymoronic martial crosses — a problem since at least the time of Constantine — that attempt to present themselves as sanctified symbols of power. Crosses like that aren’t the least bit disturbing to a vampire — they merely proclaim vampirism by other means.”
You speak my mind

Garlic is the universal seasoning, fitting into the cuisine of every nation and culture in the modern world, though used in different dishes and in different ways. Garlic represents commonality, adaptation, and ultimately togetherness.
The vampire, on the other hand, is ultimately alone, and cannot comprehend actual community.

So either keep a picture of Gandhi around or have a nice simple cross cobbled together from pieces that an old man made, that you overpaid for because you knew he needed the money badly. That will keep me safe from vampires, awesome.

Does this work on vampires like Ray Comfort, Ken Ham or anyone from the Discovery Institute?

Gold crosses actually work, but that’s not because it’s a cross, it’s because it’s gold. Gold is to silver as sun is to moon as vampire is to werewolf.
Also, I’d always thought the reason crosses work is because Hounds of Tindalos are the natural predators of the vampire.
Random aside: one of my favorite ways to deal with a vampire is to give them a bag of small objects (like grains of sand or rice), because they’re obsessively-compulsively compelled to count things. Sesame Street’s Count isn’t just a pun, there’s an actual mythological basis for him!

I haven’t read The family yet, although it is on my enormous TBR list. I’ve seen interviews with the author though and it does sound like the vampire title is fair.
I always feel a little naive when I hear stories like the one about The family and the C St house. Part of me is always surprised that people are willing to be so blatantly horrible. Saying flat out that Jesus really meant to support the powerful and holding Mao up as an example to follow is just so obviously evil. Who does that?
@Josh: Sorry I assure you it has never happened before and is unlilely ever to happen again.

But the question remains: does just making a cross with your fingers work?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4yrL6rc6bU

I actually am not a big fan of most vampire stories, but I greatly enjoy stretching the vampire concepts in weird ways. F’rinstance, do crosses work on vampires, period, or does the religion of the vampire matter? Does the religion of the person warding the vampire matter? Will the light of any sufficiently nearby star hurt a vampire, or just Earth’s? What about simulated sunlight? Is it a particular kind of radiation, or something magical about the sun? (Probably the latter, as otherwise you’d expect them to be at least a little hurt by moonlight.) They don’t show up in mirrors — what about other devices based on light, like photographs and security cameras? What about the motion sensors used in automatic doors?

Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot had a similar take on crosses and vampires, where the cross was only an effective locus of power if the feeling and faith behind it was genuine and complete.

Fred is not merely following along with the comments on vampires/crosses, he’s actually come up with quite a good explanation and proved he’s still one step ahead.
My personal theory is that garlic has actually become *more* effective against vampires lately, as they shallowly worry it might give them bad breath, which would spoil their chances of kissing all those Mary Sues. It’d at least reduce the vampires’ sparkle factor.

Is this a record for most instances of “First!” in a single thread?

This seems to be related to the question as to why in the Buffyverse they’re all so sure of the demon dimensions and their various denizens, but can’t quite seem to decide amongst themselves which, if any, god or gods might be extant.
Maybe I was entirely wrong in my assumption that they were all hopelessly confused in their going around waving crosses at vampires while at the same time not really believing that the cross actually meant anything. Holy water on the other hand seems a far more pressing problem.
In any case, in case of vampire attack I think I’ll stick to the garlic eau de toilette. Less potential religious confusion for the atheist, there.

This seems to be related to the question as to why in the Buffyverse they’re all so sure of the demon dimensions and their various denizens, but can’t quite seem to decide amongst themselves which, if any, god or gods might be extant.

I’ve always gotten the impression that, in the Buffyverse, the supernatural is inherently evil. The good supernatural creatures are all either formerly evil (Angel was Angelus, Spike was William the Bloody, even the Slayer was originally a demon of pure violence before being bound to a human girl) or formerly non-supernatural (Willow, Oz, Anya).
Also, there are at least two known gods in the Buffyverse: Glory and Jasmine — and they’re both essentially super-powerful demons with good PR.

Oh, and, I always assumed the use of crosses in the Buffyverse was a reversal of causation: Christians started using the cross as a symbol because it kills vampires. This would imply two things.
(1) Vampires are MUCH more common in Europe than the rest of the world, which would explain why only Christianity adopted the symbol, and handily also explains why the Watcher’s Council seems to be focused entirely on NATO countries (are there *any* non-British members?)
(2) Somebody involved in the early Church was a Slayer or Watcher, possibly both. The obvious choice is Mary-Magdalene as a Slayer, but for some reason I like the idea of it being Priscilla.

I have a home-brewed Dungeons & Dragons (Edition 3.5) gameworld with a strong Middle-Earth flavor. Vampires are destroyed by sunlight, but also slowed and weakened by moonlight because of the roles of the sun and moon in Tolkien’s mythology. Likewise, lycanthropes become ravening beasts at the _dark_ of the moon. (True shapeshifters a la Beorn are something else.)
I think Fred articulates the central point very well. Note also that some vampire myths have vampires (always men, apparently) showing up to demand food and sex from their widows, who then become sick and die; again, the vampire is that which consumes, literally and figuratively sucking the lives out of others. Salt, garlic, running water, and so forth originally, IMO, were vampire repellents because they preserve and cleanse.

Didn’t Willow appeal to Osiris to raise Buffy from the dead, and then again when attempting to resurrect Tara (with Osiris actually appearing before her to tell her no)? Maybe it wasn’t Osiris (my memory is fuzzy around the edges…and in the center), but there was definitely a god that she called on.

What about simulated sunlight? Is it a particular kind of radiation, or something magical about the sun? (Probably the latter, as otherwise you’d expect them to be at least a little hurt by moonlight.) They

There’s a dandy little story I read some years ago, can’t recall the name now, which mentions that on a cloudless night, a vampire will *sting a little* from starlight. (But no, moonlight doesn’t work, for the same reason that a vampire is not visible in a mirror)

Random aside: one of my favorite ways to deal with a vampire is to give them a bag of small objects (like grains of sand or rice), because they’re obsessively-compulsively compelled to count things. Sesame Street’s Count isn’t just a pun, there’s an actual mythological basis for him!
And that reminds me of this video. (You’re welcome or I’m sorry. I’m not sure which one is more appropriate for that link.)

@Jon: You’re right. Three confirmed gods, then, at least one of whom isn’t (as far as we know) totally evil.
Although, it might be that Osiris only appeared because she called on Osiris, not because there’s an actual Osiris. In at least some forms of paganism (not that Whedon and co. did ANY research on paganism whatsoever), the gods are simply forms taken on by divine principles, and the same principle can take the form of many different gods depending on the needs of the worshipper. Grant Morrison claims to have communed with Metron, a god from DC Comics, this way.

Holy water on the other hand seems a far more pressing problem.
Holy water is a liminal symbol — “over it the Holy Spirit hovered in the beginning of Creation; through it You led the Children of Israel out of bondage into the land of promise…” ; it symbolizes the acceptance of change, failure, and death, which we will we will transcend through, hope, love and grace.
Vampires are terrified of change. Vampires reject death. Vampires have no hope.
That’s why Rapture eschatology is the favored doctrine of vampires.

Didn’t Willow appeal to Osiris to raise Buffy from the dead, and then again when attempting to resurrect Tara…

Well, yes. Which is even more troubling, since Willow is notionally Jewish. It’s all very confusing.

In his notes for Dracula (some of which are reprinted in the Norton Critical edition of the novel), Bram Stoker opined that any attempt to replicate the image of a vampire will fail. Either you’ll get no image at all (as with a mirror), or you’ll get the image of a corpse or skeleton (which he suggested would happen with paintings or photographs). Sadly, he doesn’t appear to have worked out a way to incorporate that tidbit into the novel.
Interestingly, Stoker!vampires are not actually hurt by sunlight, they just lose their powers. Or possibly this is just the case for Dracula himself, since he’s so much more powerful than the vamps he spawns.

Well, yes. Which is even more troubling, since Willow is notionally Jewish. It’s all very confusing.

Well, yes, but there’s such a thing as being ethnically Jewish. I think it’s pretty clear that over the course of the first couple of seasons, she converts to whatever it is that Ms. Calendar follows.

I love you, Fred.
Incidentally, what you’ve said is part of the reason I’m not a Christian. I’m far more worldly than radical, and I’ve always felt it was a disrespectful perversion of Christianity to let it do the work of vampires.

Some iterations of the ‘cross rule’ state that it must be a crucifix (a depiction of Christ on the cross, not merely the cross itself) to be effective. Fred’s take on it seems to fit in nicely with that.
I know vampires are getting overdone, but damn if that didn’t give me some plot bunnies . . .

A friend of mine who played a lot of Vampire:The Masquerade LARP recalled this (paraphrased) quote from a Vampire player confronted with both a cross and garlic simultaneously:
“Ah, yes. I’m supposed to be repelled by the Cross because it blazes with the light of true faith, and repelled by the garlic because its odour reminds me of the smell of the grave. Or wait… is it the cross that reminds me of the smell of the grave, and the garlic that blazes with the light of true faith? I always confuse them. Pardon me.” (takes garlic and bites into it)

Also, re: gods in Buffyverse, when Amy calls on Hekate, something changes her into a rat, so the potential existence of the classical gods can be extrapolated.
There’s also a couple of other gods/supernatural beings addressed in various spells, including Cassiel and Lamia.

I love you people, too, and your glorious meta.
Group hug!

♥ to Froborr for discussing Stoker. There’s an Annotated version of the book floating around in various bookshops that I’ve always coveted but never purchased. Too expensive, even though it is a pretty fancy looking book.

Oh, and Ethan Rayne’s spell involving Ianus

“The Curse of Fenric”, an OldWho story had an interesting take on this: Vampires are repelled by objects which represent something in which the welder really beliefs. Thus the cross a disillusioned priest uses is useless for him while a soviet soldier repels them with a soviet badge. The Doctor uses the faith in his former companions.

Chris: In fairness, I have friends who identify as Jewish and have no problem calling on various pagan gods in rituals. In some cases, it’s that their Jewish identity is an ethnic/family thing, in others it’s that they’re cool with the idea of other gods/forms of God/blah existing. In Willow’s case, given S6, it’s probably sloppy writing, but there’s at least some room to fanwank.
I was under the impression not so much that all magic is evil–there’s the coven in England, and the woogy source of Goddess blah blah blah that Willow taps into at the end of S7–but that the supernatural stuff that takes a proactive interest in humans, or is willing to interact with them, generally is.
Ilyria also goes on the list of “not totally evil gods”.

Garlic smells really pungent, extract of garlic is great at killing mold and repelling bugs, and folk medicine has long observed that eating it is an immune system booster. Making it an anti-vampire thing is just taking an obvious additional step.
As far as holy symbols go, the ironic parallel paths of having the Magpyrs writhe in pain because they’ve learned to see “holiness in everything” thanks to the Count’s flashcards while Mightily Oats is busy discovering the same thing was the most awesome part of Pratchett’s Carpe Jugulum.
For those of you RPG fans, White Wolf did an interesting shtick in Demon: the Fallen, where Demons basically play the role vampires are playing in this post (actual Vampires had a different and somewhat schizophrenic shtick), with the idea that Faith in a Demon was what gave the Demon power over humans, and the only thing that could truly oppose this Faith was True Faith, which was a faith that, unlike Demons’ modus operandi, didn’t involve Faustian pacts because it didn’t involve *desire* but involved a truly selfless devotion to something external. (A Demon can reap Faith from a mortal who believes the Demon will give her supernatural powers or great wealth or revenge against her enemies in return for devotion; the only way the mortal can break free from the Demon’s control is to trade it for Faith in another Demon. The only way to be *free* is to put your Faith in something that doesn’t make that kind of promise at all. Heady symbolism, especially in a game that cast you as the Demon.)

Oh, and, I always assumed the use of crosses in the Buffyverse was a reversal of causation: Christians started using the cross as a symbol because it kills vampires. This would imply two things.
(1) Vampires are MUCH more common in Europe than the rest of the world, which would explain why only Christianity adopted the symbol, and handily also explains why the Watcher’s Council seems to be focused entirely on NATO countries (are there *any* non-British members?)
Meh. This isn’t really historically accurate when it comes to Christianity — Mediterranean Christians had already become associated with the cross as a symbol by the 2nd century — but it’s also not historically accurate when it comes to crosses, which are one of the simplest and most common religious symbols ever (I mean, you just put two lines together). Crosses are common enough already that crosses being an objectively useful anti-vampire device doesn’t necessarily imply anything about the secret history of religion.
Peter Watts’ Blindsight actually tries to tweak typical “realistic” vampire portrayals by taking one of the *least* traditionally “realistic” vampire traits, recoiling at the cross, and making it a central part of his vampire mythology, with a completely scientific explanation. (The genetic mutation that makes someone a vampire makes their brain vulnerable to epileptic seizures at the perception of “interesting” right angles, specifically when an obvious right angle takes up more than 30% of their visual field.) It mentions that the “Crucifix Glitch” may have influenced the adoption of the cross as a holy symbol by ancient human cultures, though in this storyline vampires became effectively extinct so long ago that specific stuff like Christian crucifixes repelling vampires has to be treated as a coincidence.
If the Crucifix Glitch is literally true, of course, an actual cross is unnecessary — even being inside a building is likely to present enough right-angled shapes to a vampire to shut them down immediately. This is cited as being linked to the “Can only enter a home by invitation” idea (as in a vampire could only enter a human habitation if it’d been specially prepared to keep any right angles from being visible, which is as good as saying they only come when invited) and to some Native American traditions mandating that sacred spaces be circular because “demons get caught in corners”.
(2) Somebody involved in the early Church was a Slayer or Watcher, possibly both. The obvious choice is Mary-Magdalene as a Slayer, but for some reason I like the idea of it being Priscilla.
I think Joss actually said that he wanted to invoke the idea that the Watcher’s Council either was or at least strongly overlapped with the Church hierarchy, in order to justify the fact that at least in the olden days he drew heavily on “classic” vampire-hunter mythology which is mostly Catholic in origin.
Certainly this seems to be the case with the Knights of Byzantium, who are clearly some kind of 13th-century monastic-martial order who, despite their religion being something Buffy greets with skepticism and contempt, nonetheless are completely accurate insofar as their knowledge of fighting supernatural bad guys go and whose clerics’ religious powers *actually work* against bad guys (and, incidentally, against Willow).

“The Curse of Fenric”, an OldWho story had an interesting take on this: Vampires are repelled by objects which represent something in which the welder really beliefs. Thus the cross a disillusioned priest uses is useless for him while a soviet soldier repels them with a soviet badge. The Doctor uses the faith in his former companions.
That is a good episode and it brings back the Brigadier, which I really want the new series to do.

Am I the only Buffy fan who raised an eyebrow at the notion of Allyson Hannigan’s character being Jewish? OTOH, re-reading that, I’m just hearing John Candy in Spaceballs going “Funny, she doesn’t look Druish…”

@ Froborr: historically (or would that be folklorically?), vampires weren’t toasted or whatever by sunlight. That came along when the film Nosferatu was made and it’s been a staple ever since. In the novel Blood Groove, a similar case is made using the examples you gave about starlight. In the book, the main reason why vampires are weaker during the day is because they’re used to being asleep at that time.
@ Chuck: That’s cool. I never thought of garlic that way.
Which reminds me of Dracula lamenting in Love at First Bite:
“How would you like to not have Christmas presents. Easter egg hunts. Garlic toast!”
And then later the vampire hunter tries to defeat Dracula with a Star of David and fails.
Which reminds me of some other vampire novels like I Am Legend and The Keep but I won’t go into those for fear of looking even more like a vampire fanatic…

Vampires don’t reflect in mirrors because they have no souls. They don’t cast shadows for the same reason.
Your cross theory is an interesting idea, Fred.
Garlic, like salt, is something of a preservative. Vampires are dead. Garlic reminds them of this, just as salt reminds zombies they are dead.

Given that Willow calls on various gods when casting a lot of her spells, I’m not sure there’s really any distinction between a witch and a spell-casting cleric in the Buffyverse.
I like the idea that the supernatural isn’t intrinsically evil, it’s just that the kinds of supernatural beings that would meddle with human affairs are much more likely to be evil than good.

I have a theory that crosses work on vamps because they were (at least the equal length armed ones) a sun symbol long before Christians used them as a symbol. I also agree with St. Carlin that jesus would never want to be represented by a symbol that was a guy nailed to apiece of wood, especially if that guy was him.
I’ve met Jewish pagans who were not just ethnically Jewish but believed that Astarte and Baal were members of the same pantheon as Yahweh (as wife and son or brother respectively) before his priests staged a power grab.

@Jason: The Brigadier was brought back in Sarah Jane Adventures, but that’s hardly the same thing. There’s one novel in particular I want to see them make into an episode, involving the Eighth Doctor (but it could work with the Eleventh), the Brigadier, and the Ice Warriors, where UNIT gets to be completely awesome and kick the butts of a British fascist movement. I wish I could remember the title.
@damnedyankee: Nah, there’s plenty of Jews who don’t “look Jewish” by American standard. Almost the entire Jewish population of Israel, for starters. Not to mention the Ethiopian Jews, who look, well, Ethiopian. Alyson Hannigan doesn’t bother me.

@VamperGreen: Wasn’t Varney the Vampire (A pulp fiction vampire contemporary of Dracula) toasted by sunlight? Also, in Dracula, the narrator mentions that Vampires *can* go out in the sun. Seems like a strange thing to have to explicitly mention if it wasn’t a common folklore element for them to be unable to do so.

@Frobor: UNIT vs British Fascists was the premise of Big Finish’s UNIT audio series. They make a play to replace UNIT as england’s alien-fighting service. Their first act is to send the silurians and all humans who aren’t ethnically british to concentration camps.

@Ross: That sounds very similar to this novel. Honestly, it’s how I wanted to see Torchwood (not the series, the idea) end: charismatic new leader turns it into a power play to conquer Britain in the name of protecting against the alien threat, and then UNIT and the Doctor take them out.

I don’t want to see the Torchwood series end. That would require seeing the Torchwood series.

First!
[[Is this a record for most instances of "First!" in a single thread?]]
Now it is!!! LOL

@Jeff: Please tell me you did not actually count how many Firsts were in each thread here?
Also, is this a record *for* slacktivist, or overall? Because I’m sure it’s nowhere *near* the record for overall — I’ve seen YouTube videos with more Firsts.
Also: Thirst! Furst! Versed!
…Man, I’m really bad at this.

So what does this say about all the Twilight fangirls?
(I have not touched the Twilight series; can’t stand vampire stories to begin with, and from what I know about it it sounds sickening. But I figure it must be affecting people on a deep level for it to have taken off like this – ensnared even intelligent adult women that I respect…)

More weird takes on vampires:
Chinese vampires are much scarier than their Western counterparts. They can fly and turn incorporeal for starters, and instead of blood they steal your breath. Also, they have no feet.
I have always *loved* one little detail of the otherwise entertaining-but-forgettable Master of Mosquiton: a stake doesn’t kill a vampire, but it turns him into a shrivelled, immobile husk. Once you remove the stake, however, one drop of human blood is sufficient to restore the vampire to life.
An old SNL skit had whatsisname, the Scientologist guy that isn’t Tom Cruise, as a vampire scared of AIDS, questioning potential victims about their sex lives and drug use. It was actually pretty hilarious.
I was once involved in a campaign which included both a Federation starship captain and a vampire swordsman among the player characters (also a Fey wizard and a Pikachu). We decided that, just as the vampire had to sleep in his home soil, so too did only his home sun burn him. However, we also agreed that a holodeck simulation of his sun was adequate.

@rootedinsong: The Twilight fandom, alas, is rooted in the more common modern interpretation of vampires, that they’re basically one big rape fantasy.

Oh, I forgot the main reason Chinese vampires are scary: they have no weaknesses. At all. They can only be turned aside by magic, and only beaten by *really powerful* magic.

They don’t show up in mirrors — what about other devices based on light, like photographs and security cameras?
I read a book once (can’t remember which) where that was only true of old silver-backed mirrors, and it was because of the silver.

@jamoche: Huh. Nifty. However, what about film? That uses silver bromide to record the image.

A picture of a cotton-spinning wheel should work as effectively as a picture of Gandhi as a symbol of resistance against vampiric predation.

Okay, to deal seriously with the topic of Fred’s post for a moment… the problem is that the ideals you’re talking about aren’t new to the “vampires”. They’ve heard it all before, and either they’ve come to ignore it or, more often, they’ve co-opted not only the symbols but the ideals themselves into their rationalizations. Given *any* action and *any* ideal, a sufficiently agile rationalizer can justify the one in terms of the other. The number of murders committed in the name of peace proves that.
Your typical vampire doesn’t recoil at ideals — he laughs and goes on feeding.

Hmm. Maybe it was the TV series “Forever Knight”, because I’m pretty sure there was an episode where the plot hinged on the vampires not showing up on film – or maybe it was that they didn’t show up on film, so they weren’t expecting it when they *did* show up on videotape doing stuff that humans obviously couldn’t.

(I have not touched the Twilight series; can’t stand vampire stories to begin with, and from what I know about it it sounds sickening. But I figure it must be affecting people on a deep level for it to have taken off like this – ensnared even intelligent adult women that I respect…)
The Twilight fandom, alas, is rooted in the more common modern interpretation of vampires, that they’re basically one big rape fantasy.

Do you think? It seems to me that Twilight mainly feeds into the desire that people have to feel special (I’ll leave it to you to decide if the word “snowflake” should be added). Bella is supposedly totally blah and ordinary, but she manages to attract Mr. Special McSparklepants. His overwhelming “love” for her proves that deep down there’s obviously something special and worthwhile about her too. I think people get so caught up in that aspect of it that they don’t see all the things about the story that are just squicky.
I haven’t read any of them (so not my thing). I am quite familiar with the plot of the first book because for a while it was tough to avoid hearing about it everywhere. Does the series get more rape-tastic as it goes on?

I’m just sick of how vampires are supposed to be sexy now, instead of disgusting monsters, though I guess I can go all the way back to Bella Lugosi for that, since I think his Dracula was the first suave one who always bit beautiful women on the neck.
But at least he was still a bad guy.
But yeah, vampires, they feed on innocent people’s blood to cheat death. That’s the important thing. Not what their weaknesses are or how that works exactly, or whether they can get around it somehow by only feeding on animals or stealing from the bloodbank and actually sunlight doesn’t kill them it just makes them sparkle…
It’s like… hello? Missing the point much?
Though, I have wondered about the cross thing before. Garlic makes sense because it’s a purifying agent (being all antibacterial and antiviral and anti[insert unhealthy thing here] then why not work on vampires too). But the cross thing, I just assumed it was made up by people going Vampires = Evil, Christianity = Good, therefore crosses kill vampires.
I had been wondering if a Thor’s hammer would work as well.
But I like Fred’s point about it being a symbol of sacrifice for others, which is completely contrary to what vampires are all about, which is feeding off others to keep themselves alive for way longer than their fair share.
As I understand it, not too long ago people were, for some reason, VERY WORRIED about dead people not staying dead. It seems to be a cross-cultural phenomenon. And for some reason, the restless dead always end up EVIL, and not like, “oh yay, Uncle Bob managed to rise from the grave. He’s such a nice old man.”
(Also, I figured the sunlight was effective because vampires are Creatures of the Night, like all EVIL THINGS, including cats, bats, aye-ayes, and whip-poor-wills. Also, sunlight is warm and cozy, and vampires are cold dead corpses walking around.)

I’m a big fan of China Mieville’s take on vampires in The Scar: vampires as pathetic junkies, always craving the next blood fix, puffing themselves up on their own mythology.

Why would it be a problem for a Jewish girl to a Jewish girl on TV? Alyson Hannigan’s parents divorced when she was very young, and she was raised mostly by her Jewish mother. Check her bio…

“A Jew even though he sins is still a Jew” Maimonidies.
Jewishness, much to the chagrin of people like Leon Trotsky, is viewed as lifelong and inherent to every person born a Jew or who becomes a Jew. A Jew is a Jew forever in traditional Jewish thought. You can stop going to synagogue, eat pork and shellfish on Shabbat, and even commit the grave act of idolartry, one of Judaism’s top three sins along with murder and sexual immorality, and still be a Jew. Orthodox Jews would still view Willow as a Jew because she was born one an even though she might be a very bad Jew with her Wiccan practices.
Making Willow a Wiccan really pissed me off. Wheldon is an intelligent guy and not afraid to do the research. If he wanted Willow to cast magic, couldn’t she just have become a Kabbalist and practiced the Jewish tradition of magic (yes it exists). Why did Willow have to become a Wiccan? Cause its cool and Judaism is dorky? I’m annoyed that Judaism comes up short in lets fight supernatural horror media. Why can’t vampires shy away from a mezzuzah or tremble before the she’ma for once. Let Jews fight the supernatural using Jewish tradition. Chrisitians, Muslims, Shintoists, Daoists, Hindus, Buddhists, and Pagans are allowed to fight the forces of darkness using their own beliefs. In the Doctor Who verse even Communists are allowed to do so. Jews are stuck using science or other people’s belief systems. This is totally unfair. It must change. I want to see a Jewish monster hunter/vampire slayer using Jewish folklore to defend humanity from the supernatural just once.

@Froborr: Torchwood pretty much ended with the five episode season three: Children of Earth. It’s both some of the best TV I’ve watched this year and blacker than a binbag. (How they can get things back on track after the destruction of {spoiler}, the death of {spoiler} (and Jack Harkness. Repeatedly – but it didn’t take) and the departure of {spoiler} is beyond me.)

Yeah, Jews haven’t had a fair shake in horror since the Golem of Prague.

[[Please tell me you did not actually count how many Firsts were in each thread here?]]
I may be strange and twisted [*] but I’m not THAT strange and twisted.
[*] I came out with a bit of random tomfoolery with a co-worker the other day. He looked at me and asked “What goes on inside that brain of yours? (He’s somewhat used to my random tomfoolery)” I thought about it for a minute and replied “I have NO idea!”!!!!
=======================
[[But yeah, vampires, they feed on innocent people's blood to cheat death. That's the important thing.]]
That’s why authors will go to great lengths to show that their vampire is so GOOD, he (almost always a he) won’t drink human blood.
There are a few non-evil blood-suckers (in Sturgeons “Some of Your Blood” and Octavia Butler’s Fledgling [one novel GUARANTEED to NEVER become a move!]), but they are not “un-dead” nor are they “vampires” in the traditional sense.

Willow, in fairness, wasn’t explicitly a Wiccan/religious pagan at any point in the series; she got referred to as “a powerful Wicca” or something by writers who didn’t know what they were talking about, making most anyone who did know anything about the religion cringe. And in S6 she and Tara got sort of conflated into being Wiccan–and every other fucking Granola Girl lesbian stereotype–because, well, fucking S6. Ass. I don’t think she ever stopped identifying as Jewish, actually.
Twilight: What Lori says. The palatable parts of the first book honestly seem very Sixteen Candles–”I’m an ordinary girl, and this pretty awesome guy wants me!”–which I could totally sympathize with and even enjoy if not for, y’know, the other ninety percent of the book.
And having just watched the Nostalgia Chick version of Labyrinth, I want to maintain that *my* generation’s sexy effeminate stalkerrific creatures of the night were *way* better. I mean, really. Kids these days.

I was about to add: Golems show up a lot in fantasy, actually. The kaballah (unsure about spelling, sorry) does so less often, but (for example) in China Mieville’s Iron Council, the character who is arguably the hero/antihero is named Judah Low (based on Rabbi Loew, creator of the Golem of Prague [there have been others, I think]), and makes golems. Awesome, awesome golems. Out of literally anything.

Lee Ratner: Then you’ll like Being Human because in it George who’s Jewish (and a werewolf but that’s another story) uses his star of David quite effectively as vampire repellent. It’s also a good series aside from that.
Re: Chinese vampires.. They don’t have feet? That means they can’t be made to dance and are immune to the power of NRH’s bass! We’re doomed!

Nonono, Fred, the actual reason why vampires can’t stand crosses can be found here and here, which I think would appeal to the F&SF fans here.

I think Thor’s hammers only work on zombies. Christian zombies. Because draugr are bad news, whereas Jesus died and came back…
Alternately, with the right-angles explanation, there are plenty of historical hammers and crosses that look a lot alike. Plus sunwheels and whatnot.

and every other fucking Granola Girl lesbian stereotype– because, well, fucking S6. Ass. I don’t think she ever stopped identifying as Jewish, actually.
Is it sad that I hit this point and thought, oh, one of Izzy’s posts…

checking to make sure I didn’t break the italics…

yayy!

Vampires don’t reflect in mirrors because they have no souls. They don’t cast shadows for the same reason.
That’s just displacing the problem : why do things with no soul not reflect in mirrors ?
Do rocks have souls ?

@Froborr: I guess it’s because between the name and the hair, she just seemed so very, very Irish that I was expecting her to be Catholic or something. You’d think the last name “Rosenberg” would have tipped me off. I dunno.
Still don’t know what the thing is that somebody referenced before, where a group of science fiction fans drove off a pack of vampires using the Vulcan “live long and prosper” sign. I imagine the IDIC symbol would work in much the same manner, for the reasons Fred cited.

Tricksterson- there’s still the cannabinized phlebotinum. And even if I can’t make ‘em dance, I bet could get them banging their heads.
Over the years, I have started writing and abandoned and started writing and abandoned again what I call the Great American Vampire Novel.
It’s the story of a young woman who gets a job as secretary to a Jungian analyst who she eventually figures out it a vampire. Seems he mostly feeds on the energy released during therapy- it’s a sort of symbiosis- the clients get their ya-yas out, and eventually gain Insight and work through their problems, the vampire gets fed, and paid, and he keeps his appetite for blood under control by drinking a kind of gross mixture of tomato juice, raw eggs and olive oil that’s close enough for jazz to the actual taste and texture of actual blood that he doesn’t feel the need to actually bite people. And also, erm, eating living things- stuff like shrimp and crawfish that he has shipped in live and squirming.
And he really doesn’t like being a vampire, because what with the immortality, he has to watch generations of his friends grow old and die, which is really crappy, and keep changing his identity every forty years or so which is a real hassle.
I never quite seem to finish it, because I have no real idea of how the story should go, but somewhere I want to work in the line “I’m not going to quit my job just because my boss is dead. If he stops paying me, that’s another story.”
But I like the idea of vampires being repelled by the symbol of ultimate sacrifice. Very cool, Fred. You rock.
Um… hey, it’s Thurdsay… did I miss the Flame War? Or has the Mobile Empire of Texas annexed another state while I was taking a nap?
It’s awfully peaceful around here today.

Your typical vampire doesn’t recoil at ideals — he laughs and goes on feeding.
*falls over laughing*
And how many ‘typical’ vampires are you personally acquainted with? That’s the whole thing about vampires–they are myths and therefore whatever we damn well feel like making them. And, if you ask me, they tend to be a hell of a lot more interesting when they’re used, as Fred is using them, to make a larger point about the world we actually live in.

I haven’t read any of them (so not my thing). I am quite familiar with the plot of the first book because for a while it was tough to avoid hearing about it everywhere. Does the series get more rape-tastic as it goes on?
Bella literally has to ask her husband what happened on their wedding night because she gets knocked unconscious early in the proceedings.

I’m annoyed that Judaism comes up short in lets fight supernatural horror media. Why can’t vampires shy away from a mezzuzah or tremble before the she’ma for once. Let Jews fight the supernatural using Jewish tradition. Chrisitians, Muslims, Shintoists, Daoists, Hindus, Buddhists, and Pagans are allowed to fight the forces of darkness using their own beliefs.
AFAICT Western pop culture has given Kabbalah a much more positive treatment than Islam in general.
I’m actually struggling to think of a real, mainstream example of a Muslim who fights the forces of darkness using their own beliefs from USA media and coming up short.

Well, let’s see if we can’t clarify a few of the finer points:
1.) Vampires are predators. Human beings are omnivores, and can choose not to eat meat. Vampires, though, are purely predatory. No one views vampires stores as allegories for cannibalism, which means vampires are not the same species as humans. This may seem like a minor point, but the ‘othering’ of vampires matters somewhat.
2.) Vampires chose intelligent prey as their primary diet. While the jury is still (a little) out on whether there are any other species on earth that are self-aware and sentient on the same level as human beings, there’s a general hope that if there were other species that had human-like sentience, we would regard the killing & eating of them as wrong. (on my bleaker days, I suspect it wouldn’t matter if cows could talk, recite sonnets, or write CBS procedural crime dramas, we’d still be making them into hamburger)
3.) Points #1 & #2 lead us to think of vampires as inevitably, inexorably evil. Sure, they might start out with good intentions*, and they might have been good people in life**, but if given the conditions of your survival, human beings will see you as evil.***
The tricky thing about the cross/crucifix/holy symbol is to realize it’s not really about the symbol. Crosses on walls or over doors never seem to bug vampires that much. I like Fred’s overall take that the symbol of the crucifix represents an antithesis of belief to a vampire, but over & over, whether it’s movies, books, or D&D, the heart of the matter isn’t in owning a cross, it’s in presenting the cross before the vampire; if we follow Fred’s theory out, the cross might be a symbol, but it’s the willing presentation of it, the act of tying one’s self, one’s identity and reason for being, to that symbol that really bugs the big V. It’s a display of personally embracing sacrificial powerlessness that leaves the vampire stunned & reeling.
*And we all know where good intentions will lead you!
**There’s this lovely notion that somehow a decent person could become a vampire & retain their “goodness”. While I’d like to think that, there’s the whole “dying and being dead for a certain period of time” business in becoming a vampire that leaves a lot up in the air. I suspect if your consciousness survives the process, well, dying, being dead, and re-animating under an entirely new set of living conditions would have some drastic consequences on your psyche’.
***If you subscribe to moral relativism, then “evil” only matters from the perspective of Human Beings, not Undead Vampires. If you believe in moral absolutism, then a sentient being who makes a daily choice to survive via parasitism and murder rather than see the last sunrise of their life is probably Evil.

In case I didn’t make it clear, it’s not the cross, or even the person’s faith that does it.
It’s that, when faced with a hungry predator intent on doing them harm, they choose to stand and face down that predator not with violence or wrath, but calm, loving certainty & faith. Frankly, even non-vampires might be baffled at that…

The Chinese chiang-shih was a very nasty customer. Razor sharp nails, poisonous breath, apparently killed just for the sake of killing. They were vulnerable to sunlight though, according to one story I’d read about them:
Two travelers were looking for a place to stay for the night, and stopped at a farm. The farmer agreed to put them up in his barn for the night. What the farmer didn’t mention was that also in the barn was the corpse of his daughter (funny how that sort of information slips people’s minds in these tales).
The two men bed down for the night, not seeing the body as it was hidden by the growing gloom. Eventually, as the darkest part of the night came, the daughter’s corpse rose up. It grabbed the first of the two men and breathed its poisonous breath into his face. The man died instantly.
The second man happened to wake up just at that moment, and stared into to green, glowing eyes of the chiang-shih as is stooped over the body of his friend. Fear gave him wings as he bolted out into the night.
The chiang-shih shrieked like a scalded cat and pursued him. Terror gripped the man when he looked over his shoulder and saw those same terrible eyes behind him.
Finally, he could run no more, and the creature lunged at him. Using the last of his energy, the man dodged its attack and the chiang-shih found that its dagger-like nails were embedded in the trunk of a tree. Try as it might, it could not pull loose.
The man did not question his good fortune, nor wait to see if the creature would pull free. With a fresh burst of energy, he ran away.
With the coming of the morning, he found new courage and returned to the spot where he had left the monster. Instead of the fiend he had encountered the night before, he found a skeleton with its fingers still buried in the trunk of the tree.
The end.
Anyway, that’s the story I know. Don’t know if it actually has a basis in folklore.

@Sheila: I was in fact using “vampire” as shorthand for the kind of people Fred is talking about. And I’ve met *lots* of those. So, you know, up yours.
On Twilight: Well, in this case, there’s the special snowflake thing, but there’s also the constant *threat* of rape, in the sense that Sparkles the Vampire could go out of control and suck her dry at any time.
The vampire-sex thing is a lot older than Bela Lugosi, too. It’s definitely there in Stoker’s novel, where elements of a male fantasy of being raped is quite apparent in the attack by Dracula’s “daughters”, and a male fantasy of committing rape is clear in staking of Lucy Westenra. Even before that, in the absolutely terrible female-vamp novel Carmilla, the male fantasy of being raped is obvious. However, these are all very much from a masculine point of view; Bela Lugosi may be the beginning of a vampire rape fantasy from the female POV.

or write CBS procedural crime dramas

This could be construed as a point in favor of hamburgering.

Wait there’s a show about Torchwood? I remember Torchwood and Captain Jack Harkness being featured occasionally on Doctor Who, but when did they get their own series?

Chinese vampires are much scarier than their Western counterparts. They can fly and turn incorporeal for starters, and instead of blood they steal your breath. Also, they have no feet.

Some Western vampires can also fly, and some of them can turn to mist. Vampire myths actually have had a lot of blending across cultures, which is kinda interesting.
I’ve always loved the fact that Chinese vampires get around by hopping everywhere.
Actually, we seem to be talking about two different Chinese vampire myths. The ones I know of are re-animated corpses, controlled by magical inscriptions placed on their head. They hop everywhere with their arms outstretched. They are, in many ways, like zombies, but rather harder to defeat.

“The idea of the cross, in other words, suggests that vampires have it wrong, that they have it backwards, in fact, and that those others they regard as prey are actually, somehow, winning.”
Brilliant.
Here’s my take. Before they became merciless bloodsucking monsters, selflessness was a part of their lives, at least as an option. They were human children once. For non-sociopaths, becoming a killing machine would require taking the most innocent part of their self and pushing it deep, deep down. A symbol, presented in a way they understand, might remind them of what they were and could have been. Perhaps they freeze because they wonder if redemption might still be possible.
(Note: if so, then the vampire has to have true faith in the symbol for it to be effective)
“I had been wondering if a Thor’s hammer would work as well.”
Thor’s hammer can smite just about any baddie you can name. The problem is that you have to be Thor to lift it.

Yes, Virginia- er, Jason, there is a Torchwood series. In fact, BBC America just this past weekend had a marathon (the entire Torchwood: Children of Earth mini-series, for the record).

>Wait there’s a show about Torchwood? I remember Torchwood and Captain Jack Harkness being featured occasionally >on Doctor Who, but when did they get their own series?
Season 3 was quiet good scifi actually, imho.

Grant Morrison claims to have communed with Metron, a god from DC Comics, this way.
I don’t think I have enough sarcasm in me to respond appropriately to this. 8-(

I read a story in which St. Margaret (I think) defeated a tarrasque (different from the D&D version — the classic tarrasque was basically a lion-headed dragon) by picking up two charred pieces of straw and presenting them in the form of a cross. Then she led the cowed and tamed dragon out to the village it had been terrorizing and tried to explain that she’d tamed it… only to have the villagers stone the beast to death out of revenge.
So, not only can a focus of faith be made on the fly by someone with sufficient faith, but arguably the more humble the materials for a cross, the better.

@damnedyankee-
Check the link on that last comment……. I know there’s a Torchwood series.
@Froborr-
The Brigadier was brought back in Sarah Jane Adventures, but that’s hardly the same thing.
Is that show any good? I’ve been tempted to rent a disc of it, but I get the impression its Doctor Who dumbed down for pre-adolescents and that slows me down. It also looks like it could have the trope a lot of kids shows have where the kids figure out the things that the dumb adults can’t, which I also find annoying.

“The Curse of Fenric”, an OldWho story had an interesting take on this: Vampires are repelled by objects which represent something in which the welder really beliefs. Thus the cross a disillusioned priest uses is useless for him while a soviet soldier repels them with a soviet badge. The Doctor uses the faith in his former companions.
Those remind me of Stephen King’s vampires from Salem’s Lot. In that, the cross drew its power from the faith of the holder that they could defeat the vampire, that they were stronger – without it, the cross was nothing more than a piece of wood, and loses its power.

Stoker’s vampires didn’t require a wooden stake, either; if memory serves, Dracula was actually killed by a Bowie knife to the heart. Wasn’t the wooden stake thing actually originally intended to pin them to the ground, so that they were unable to get back up? In other words, they weren’t killed, just immobilised.

Bella literally has to ask her husband what happened on their wedding night because she gets knocked unconscious early in the proceedings.

Eww! I somehow managed not to hear about that. Call me hopelessly vanilla, but I think that if one of the participants is unconscious then the “precedings” shouldn’t proceed.
…

It’s that, when faced with a hungry predator intent on doing them harm, they choose to stand and face down that predator not with violence or wrath, but calm, loving certainty & faith.

Well, in most of the vampire stories I’ve read or seen the presentation of the cross isn’t made all that calmly and there’s often quite a lot of violence and wrath.

>It also looks like it could have the trope a lot of kids shows have where the kids figure out the things that >the dumb adults can’t, which I also find annoying.
Nah, the show actually averts this trope most of the time. Personally, I find it quiet entertaining for a children’s show.
On topic: Whew, chinese vampires sound nasty.

Willow, in S1, wards off vampires with a cross and apologizes for it because she’s Jewish… even then I thought the Seal of Solomon should have been just the thing against the demon, and later Buffy-theology-kedgeree seems to bear that out. Shorter: I agree with Lee.

I forget who said:

It’s that, when faced with a hungry predator intent on doing them harm, they choose to stand and face down that predator not with violence or wrath, but calm, loving certainty & faith.

I read an online review of this movie called Star Crystal in which a fearsome alien is converted to Christianity by absorbing a Bible from a spaceship’s computer banks, and thereafter becomes a “good guy” — the same kind of “the Bible is a magical book which will convert anyone who reads it” fallacy that we see in Left Behind.
I left the comment:

Now, if I were to write a story in which an alien is converted to Christianity (I wouldn’t, I’m just playing with ideas here), I sure as hell wouldn’t have it convert by reading the Bible. After all, that doesn’t necessarily work for humans, and we’ve got (some) cultural context!
No, I would make my alien something that absorbs information by consuming flesh, like the one in The Creeping Terror. The human crew figures out that the alien is using information from the dead crewmembers’ brains against them, and that its attitude towards humanity has been influenced by the mental state its victims were in when they were killed. A virtuous Christian crewmember asks herself, “WWJD?” and decides that to save humanity, she should allow the alien to devour her, while keeping herself in as serene a mental state as she can. (Naturally, there’d be a scene of her standing before the alien with her arms held out, reciting prayers to steady herself.) The alien, absorbing all of this, is suitably impressed and decides that it should look into this religion that so inspired her.

On topic: Whew, chinese vampires sound nasty.

I respect the “hard to defeat” aspect, but the mental picture of re-animated corpses hopping everywhere with their arms outstretched doesn’t exactly fill me with dread. I think it’s the hopping. I just can’t take that seriously.
Which means that if we experience an invasion of Chinese vampires I’ll either be the first to die because I fail to take them seriously, or the last one left standing because I’m not impressed and therefore don’t panic. Which one happens will of course depend on whether I’m the heroine of the story or just a random extra.

Interestingly, the modern Western vampire folklore originated in Britain, somehow never quite caught on in Western Catholic culture, and sort of migrated Eastward, into the Orthodox parts of Christendom.
In Western Catholic belief, the failure of a body to decompose is considered a sign of great holiness and purity (we have a couple of saints whose bodies are happily not rotting away, and their, I guess tombs would be the wrong word, are sites of pilgrimage.)
In Orthodox belief, if a body doesn’t properly rot, it is considered to be a sign that the Earth has refused to receive the corpse, which is considered a sign of evilness. Coincidentally, in many parts of Eastern Europe and Greece, particularly the areas where belief in vampires is still strong, the composition of the soil is such that it is not conducive to decomposition of a corpse (it will rot eventually, but it takes a lot longer). So if someone has recently died, especially of causes unnatural, and within a couple of months, people around the village start falling sick, folk may start to suspect vampirism, and dig up the suspect corpse. Then they start doing things like driving stakes into the ground to keep the vampire pinned in its grave (the stake to the heart is a literary descendant of this practice), or if that doesn’t work, cut the head off the corpse and lay it beneath the feet, mouth stuffed with either garlic or grave dirt, depending on local custom, and lips sewn shut. If all else fails, the corpse is burned, but this is generally done as a last resort.
Also, the mirror thing comes to us from German folklore- if someone dies, all the mirrors in the house should be turned to the wall before the body is carried out, lest the person’s soul become trapped in one and haunt the place.
OK, now for a short list of thing that can cause someone to become a vampire-
-committing suicide, especially if the death is mistaken for an accident and the body given a Christian burial
-committing murder and not getting caught
-death by long-term predation by a vampire (single bite will not do)
-generally living a life of crime
-being a werewolf
-mother not having enough salt in her diet during pregnancy
-having a cat jump over the corpse before it is buried
The actual list is quite a bit longer, these are just the things I can remember.

>I think it’s the hopping.
Don’t they sort of hover?

Thor’s hammer can smite just about any baddie you can name. The problem is that you have to be Thor to lift it.

Or Captain America. Or Superman. I think there’s two or three other people who’ve pulled it off in Marvel canon (yes, it is Marvel canon that Superman has lifted Thor’s hammer).
On Morrison and Metron: I don’t see it as any more or less absurd than any other claim I’ve ever heard regarding the divine.
On Stoker and stakes: No, earlier in the novel (the staking of Lucy Westenra) Van Helsing lays out the rules for killing a vampire, and wooden stake to the heart is definitely in there. The fact that they apparently kill Dracula with a Bowie knife has been noted by critics, with three main responses I’ve seen:
1) Stoker screwed up.
2) Dracula is still alive at the end of the novel; the characters just think he’s dead. Van Helsing may or may not be in league with Dracula.
3) Since staking Lucy is a metaphor for male-on-female rape (seriously, that scene is crazy blatant, because they have to repeatedly *pound* the stake with a hammer to get it all the way in and the whole time Vamp!Lucy is writhing and shrieking), staking Dracula would be male-on-male, and that’s Not Allowed, so Stoker stabs him with a Bowie knife instead.

When contemplating the rape fantasy appeal of vampire stories, and the definite aristocratic appeal of vampire stories, and their current popularity, I figure they’re becoming a rape fantasy about being put in one’s (low) class place and liking it. Then I get really depressed.

@ Ross: Holy crap, someone else who’s heard of Varney the Vampire. He had an issue with moonlight–like Lord Ruthven before him, he could die but moonlight would bring him back to life. Sunlight did nothing to him, but he finally died by throwing himself into a live volcano. It seems just high temperatures in general will do the trick to kill a vampire.
Re: Chinese hopping vampires. At least get a good laugh before you died.
@ Izzy: Labyrinth totally beats Twilight any day. http://bellechevalier.deviantart.com/art/I-grew-to-appreciate-this-136518918
*crosses fingers hoping url tag worked*

Dammit!
Anyway, missed a few pages:
Re: Dracula’s death. I think Stoker intended on bringing him back, as the method Van Helsing describes for killing him and they way they dispatch him at the end don’t match up.
Another way to be a vampire is if you’re a redhead.

VamperGreen: Ooh, I like!
Mind you, I’d trade my hypothetical baby brother for the chance to have a turn on David Bowie any day, but babies always seem like more trouble than they’re worth, and the goblins seem to have a good time. But the “let me dominate you” thing…not so much.

Varney was mentioned in my Horror Lit class, but I’ve never actually read any of it. Worthwhile?

@Not Really Here: Huh, that makes the bit of The Brothers Karamazov where the “saint’s” body begins to decompose and stink aboveground more interesting…if the Earth is rejecting you when you don’t rot, what happens when you rot before entering it?
@Everyone who’s been asking about Twilight: Kit’s got an interesting post at her blog about there which boils down to (more or less) that it’s a BDSM fantasy (amongst other things). It’s actually quite interesting, you should go read it if you can.

Froborr: I thought they cut his head off with the knife. It’s been a while.
Shifter Cat: I would totally read that story.
As for Morrison and Metron since I think the gods are (yeah I know this is pseudoscientific gibberish but it works for me) basically manifestations of the earth’s natural, probably electromagnetic energy given form by the human mass subconcious I have no problem with that. My favorite version of Dad is Bugs Bunny.

Still don’t know what the thing is that somebody referenced before, where a group of science fiction fans drove off a pack of vampires using the Vulcan “live long and prosper” sign.
That was me, and it was in the first series of the Fans! webcomic, in this storyline (Most Dangerous Game, if linky no worky). I adored that series, until the conclusion of the first series left such a bad taste in my mouth that it has poisoned all the rest for me.
Lee Ratner, check out Mike Mignola’s HELLBOY. Hellboy himself isn’t Jewish (many of the supporting characters are) but he does use a great deal of Kabbalah and other Jewish mystical lore to defeat evil. Also, it’s just cool.
Bella isn’t exactly knocked unconscious on her wedding night (although she *did* get knocked about [and other prepositions as well] quite a bit.) She doesn’t “remember” it because she was in such a haze of blissful ecstasy.
Yeah, I know, it’s Rilly Rilly Stupid. But it is a different kind of stupid.

Clew: When contemplating the rape fantasy appeal of vampire stories, and the definite aristocratic appeal of vampire stories, and their current popularity, I figure they’re becoming a rape fantasy about being put in one’s (low) class place and liking it. Then I get really depressed.
Given that, in literature at least, they’ve always been a code-word for a sexualised “plague” (yup, even Carmilla), I rather think that the above might well say far more about Rice, Meyers, Hamilton and the rest than anyone else. With Meyers we might be able to put the Sparkledammerung down to the faith in which she was raised but, though Rice might well have the same excuse, she did write a trilogy of novels exploring smoe of the more extreme elements of bondage and submission. I don’t really know what to say about Hamilton, barring the notion that we all club together and buy her a Junior Patrick for her birthday. We should probably be thankful that Mieville chose to take the less sexualised – and somewhat logical route – of portraying them as junkies in need of a fix.
I feel like I’m rambling now, so I’ll shut up.

I always thought that the Twilight series was a BDSM fantasy, but I read it exactly the opposite from the way Kit does — as a sort of Ladies Against Women anti-feminist revenge fantasy where Bella is the Dom and Edward is the Sub.
I know that I’ve posted about this extensively somewhere. Was that here, the last time we talked about the series?

Oh and Izzy: you can get in the queue for Bowie. Wimpy-looking blokes are not normally my thing, but that guy is so seriously fucking cool it takes my breath away (he’s the only reason I’ve even seen The Hunger, damnit!). Apart from that weird interview he did with Wogan (or was it Parkinson?) and spent ten minutes talking about his trip to the lavatory at the bottom of his garden, obviously. That was just weird.
Also – your generation got both sides of the coin. The Princess Bride and Labyrinth? That’s just cheating.

@Launcifer: Pratchett also takes the junkie route, complete with 12-step programs.

I’ve read Dracula a few times, and IIRC, Dracula isn’t stabbed with a Bowie knife, he’s decapitated with a kukri, which is a long, heavy, curved knife. Here’s some pictures.
Oh, and in some vampire lore I’ve read, you have to pound the stake into the vampire’s heart in a single stroke, or the vampire will wake up and bite you.
And you know what I really hate? Anne Rice’s vampire novels. I developed a love-hate relationship with “The Vampire Chronicles” because I found them totally unbelievable, was revolted by the notion that being a vampire was this great, glorious, wondrous, romantic thing, and yet, felt compelled to keep reading. I stopped at Tale of the Body Thief
I’ve often thought that someone should pound a stake through Anne Rice’s heart while and English Lit professor stands by reading Coleridge’s essay on the suspension of disbelief.
Oh, and “Christabel” is probably my favorite bit of vampire lit.
I really need to get a new copy of that collection of Coleridge poems I used to have. It had “Christabel” and the lyrics to an Iron Maiden song in it.

I’m another one who has heard of Varney the Vampire. Apparently, it started off as a rather well-written serial, which eventually was supposed to come to an end with Varney’s death, but the character became so popular with readers that the author contrived to bring him back, again and again. Eventually, IIRC, other authors started writing continuations of the series, and the quality of the writing and the storylines deteriorated rapidly.

She doesn’t “remember” it because she was in such a haze of blissful ecstasy.

Oh for the love of Flying Spaghetti Monster. The description has gone from icky to stoo-pid. That’s like something an extremely sheltered preteen would dream up. Isn’t Myers a little old for that?
Now I remember why I swore off talking about these books—they make it very difficult for me to stick to my commitment not to judge people based on their taste in reading material. The Twilight saga trips my “What? Are you blind? It’s right there” reaction in a major way.

Froborr: so he does, I’d forgotten that. Do we take things like photography and coffee to be ersatz-methodone, in that case? It’s actually quite a clever position, as far as the gestalt mythology is concerned.

It’s weird: if Twilight had been published as straight BDSM, something by Black Lace or Secrets, with an author and a fanbase who know that the relationship is a wacky fantasy, I wouldn’t have had a problem with it.* Your Kink Is OK and all that.
But Meyer has gone on record as talking about how awesome and wonderful it all is, how Edward’s the ideal man, and the fandom seems to think so too, and it creeps me the fuck out. Plus, her explanation for vampire reproduction…oh my God, no. The woman’s a twit, and I want her to go away. Except I kind of don’t, because she’s also hilarious.
She’s not, however, as actively batshit as Rice. There was a time when I’d have said otherwise–the Beauty series was a pretty good example of writing kink *as* kink, and not presenting it as an actual awesome way to live–but that time was before her flip-out on Amazon, and her decision to write the autobiography of Jesus, and similar.
Bleah. It doesn’t help that I don’t find vampires particularly sexy: I can dig individual ones, but there’s no automatic “ooh, vampires, hot” reaction here.
Launcifer: Hee, yeah. Life was wonderfully unfair like that–people my age hit our early teens in a good time for movies with attractive men wearing very tight pants. Conversation on “Labyrinth” with a friend:
“You can learn a lot from that movie.”
“Yeah. I learned that I was heterosexual.”
I get the feeling that the queue is a lengthy one…insert double-entendre here.
*Okay, I would’ve had a problem with the unlikable main character. And the other unlikeable main character. And the entire Oral Cesarean of Twu Wuv/soulbonding to infants/pit o’suck that was the final book. But.

I had fun imagining Fred reading his column in Lugosi’s Hungarian accent.
If we were living on the alien planet in the EC Weird Science comic story “He Walked Among Us,” would vampires be repelled by miniature stretch-racks?
A filigreed gold or bejeweled cross refutes itself, denying its own representation of powerlessness. Likewise the oxymoronic martial crosses — a problem since at least the time of Constantine — that attempt to present themselves as sanctified symbols of power.
I never thought of those crosses that way. I read once about how worshippers in the Middle Ages allegedly sacrificed to build beautiful ornate churches while living in hovels. In retrospect, that may have simply been church hierarchies solidifying their own power and position.

She’s not, however, as actively batshit as Rice.

If this is not part of the Wikipedia entry for “damning with faint praise” it should be

From what I read, this is mainly coming from tvtropes.org, a lot of our current vampire mythology comes from 19th century vampire literature, vampires as decadent and deadly aristocrats, and early horror movies like Nosferatu, like Sunlight killing vampires. The original vampires were more like zombies than vampires as modern people know them.

Izzy: It’s weird: if Twilight had been published as straight BDSM, something by Black Lace or Secrets, with an author and a fanbase who know that the relationship is a wacky fantasy, I wouldn’t have had a problem with it.* Your Kink Is OK and all that.
See, the thing about this is that, even then, it’s not entirely a case of “Your Kink* is okay with me*. For the first book, yeah, okay, I’ll maybe give you that but it very quickly starts to move to the wrong end of what I’ve seen of dom/sub relationships in the sense that there’s no choice to relinquish control involved; there’s certainly no get-out for Bella (and the fact that she doesn’t seem to want one makes her vaguely foolish in my eyes). Rape fantasies and pretence to virility aside, there’s so much I would question about the relationship. It’s not some blind-spot, parasitic symbiosis: it’s just brutal, with a hint of paedophilia when Jacob starts his trippy-shit imprinting thing. There’s so many planes of wrong that I almost don’t know where to start. I’m willing to accept that I might somehow be throwing my own issues onto her novels, however.
But Meyer has gone on record as talking about how awesome and wonderful it all is, how Edward’s the ideal man, and the fandom seems to think so too, and it creeps me the fuck out.
In a weird sort of way I can understand this, though. SMeyers probably sees Cullen as a man willing to take what he wants, without asking questions – and while committing numerous criminal offences – and she deems this somehow “hot”. The fandom I can vaguely understand, too, in a weird sort of way. A friend of mine, Steven Savile, wrote a “traditional” vampire trilogy for Games Workshop’s fiction arm, the Black Library, and pretty much everyone who appeared at his signings was a stereotypically goth or emo’ teenage girl. He used to joke that it was the only way their boyfriends could get them interested in their hobby, but I sometimes wonder if there’s more than an element of truth to that.
It doesn’t quite apply to Twilight, though it does seem that the whole vampire schtick is a way to entice a certain sub-culture within the general morass of humanity into the stylised “strong and forthright man teaches the errant, feisty woman the error of her ways” kind of bollocks. ‘Course, it would help if SMeyers actually gave us proof that Bella was, in any way, feisty. As it is, there have been ocassions where “but she’s read Twilight” has seemed to be adequate defence for all manner of ungodly crimes.
Can you tell I’m trying to sell a vampire novel at the moment? *coughs and shuffles away, not daring to look up from the carpet*
* I’m going with Ray Davies, unless anyone has any objections.

I have been reading about the world of darkness and it has an interesting take on the vampire curse. For one thing crosses only injure vampires when the wielder of the cross has sufficient faith in the cross’s ability to repel vampires. This means that you could pick up a rock and if you truly believe that the rock can repel vampires it will. In the setting of the world of darkness holy warriors are just religious mages and since there are so few in number most vampires think crosses are useless and follow the advice of Jack, “Crosses, Pfft, shove it right up their ass hehehe.” (for best effect read the quotation in the voice of Bender from Futurama.)
Another thing going for crosses don’t work is because most vampires are powerless . They live in a society where the strong bully the weak and build massive empires to save their own skin. Just because your a creature of the night doesn’t mean that you are above the injustice you had to deal with in life.

Fascinating theory, Fred, and I buy it! As one of the people who has had to deal with this issue for a book (I’m the author of “How to Catch and Keep a Vampire,” I know this is an issue that comes up. In my book the vampires don’t mind crosses (or Stars of David, etc.). But here’s how I would address your point: modern vampires don’t necessarily still espouse “predator as way of life.” In that case, it would be logical for them to not be irked by a cross, true?
–Diana Laurence (www.howtocatchandkeepavampire.com)

Launcifer: Yeah, that creeps me out too. In my most attempting-to-be-open-minded, hangs-around-on-fanficrants-way-too-much state, I can make allowances for that–Bella doesn’t need a safeword or a choice because this is Idealized Kink Fantasyland, where the dom automatically knows how far is too far and what the sub really secretly wants and there’s no danger of him making a mistake–but man, it still squicks me. I don’t know if this is because “lifestyle” BDSM is *also* one of my squicks, or because it’s badly done, or what.
But Bella is for sure a moron, and the thing with Jacob is a world of Not Okay, and I feel pretty confident that it’s not just my no-thanks-on-the-rape-fantasy-guys impulse saying as much.
I hear you on the fandom. I just…man, that sort of thing icks me out. It’s one thing to want a guy with some confidence, and it’s another, also fine thing to be turned on by fantasies of Conan/Jareth/Rhett/Toppy McTopperson from Topsfield, but girls who really say they want Want Take Have Guy in actual life? Kind of strike me as dumbasses.*
Can you tell I’m trying to sell a vampire novel at the moment? *coughs and shuffles away, not daring to look up from the carpet*
Hey, there are good ones out there. (I seem to be writing a vampire or incubus or something as the plot device in the current. Didn’t mean to, but hey.) Best of luck–it sounds like something I’d like to read, since you apparently don’t subscribe to the Rice/Meyer/Hamilton school of Hot Undead Lovin’.
Also: hee! on the Ray Davies.
*Hade a date, once, with a guy like that. Initiated a Serious Business Relationship Talk (on the third date, yet) and when I started to talk, said “I think I know what you’re trying to say,” and, for serious, did the grab-dip-kiss thing. I was torn between punching him and having a fit of the giggles.
Made funnier, actually, because what I was going to say was something along the “Well, let’s just keep things casual and see what happens,” rather than whatever-the-fuck torrid dialogue he was clearly expecting. Like, no, Drama Major, you clearly *don’t* know what I’m trying to say, so…shut up and let me say it.

Point of order: In the World of Darkness (2nd Edition, that is, not the crappy new one), True Faith is different from Awakened magick. Virtually anyone can have True Faith, which causes holy icons (i.e., objects considered holy by the one who possesses True Faith) to harm vampiers; however, you have to have an Awakened Avatar to be a Mage. A Mage can also hurt vampires in a variety of ways (Prime being the all-time favorite, or Matter since they’re technically not alive), but the mechanism for doing so is different from True Faith.

Izzy, Twilight bothers me largely because neither the author nor most of the fans seem to be aware of most of the objectionable (or kinky, depending on ones take) parts of the story. To them, it is normal for a guy to break into his would-be girl friend’s home to watch her sleep. Or disable his girl friend’s car. Order her not see her friends. Etc.
Out here in the real word, several of those are so far beyond creepy that they’re illegal. And that’s before we get to death baby, vampire c-sections, and imprinting on infants.
(How can one series be both so very creepy and so very unintentionally hillarious? At the same time. … Twilight and Left Behind: separated at birth?)

Smuraski: Yeah, pretty much.
Also? You can sing “Death baby” to the tune of “Goldfinger”. Or “Moon River,” if that’s the way your fancy takes you. This is both awesome and a problem, as I’m gonna be going around for the next hour all “Deaaaaaath baaaaby, wider than a mile…”
…okay, I’m going to bed.

Izzy (to whom I should probably stop speaking, unless she swears): I don’t know if this is because “lifestyle” BDSM is *also* one of my squicks, or because it’s badly done, or what.
See, this isn’t what’s going on, here. Lifestyle BDSM makes a certain degree of sense because it’s at least grounded in either an acceptance or reversal of certain lifestyle choices that I can understand. Bella’s situation amounts to either literal or emotional suicide, depending on the track that you might wish to take. She willingly cuts herself off from all avenues of literal and social escape and “imprints” (there’s that word again) a certain type of familial togetherness upon the Cullens that’s quite difficult to accept. They’re predators, for crying out loud – and the fact that they play baseball (when any vampire worth their salt would play rugby) is neither here nor there. Nor is totally useluess precognition. Or super-strength which might be somewhat protective if it didn’t leave you with welts and gouges the first time you played slap-and-tickle. I repeat: it’s not even a submission fantasy so much as abject surrender.
But Bella is for sure a moron, and the thing with Jacob is a world of Not Okay, and I feel pretty confident that it’s not just my no-thanks-on-the-rape-fantasy-guys impulse saying as much.
I could handle this (but would struggle to accept it) if it occurred within certain parameters, though I’d still be in your camp, but it’s the point at which we discover that Jacob’s merely imprinting upon Bella’s unborn (and as-yet un-conceived child) that I seriously start to worry. There’s entire dimensions of wrong involved in that one, that not even Mormonism can entirely excuse.

Vampires don’t reflect in mirrors because they have no souls. They don’t cast shadows for the same reason.
This makes zero sense. Chairs don’t have souls either, but they reflect in mirrors and have shadows. Ensoulment obviously has no effect on an object’s transparency.
I’ve met Jewish pagans who were not just ethnically Jewish but believed that Astarte and Baal were members of the same pantheon as Yahweh (as wife and son or brother respectively) before his priests staged a power grab.
It seems like he was married to Asherah for a bit too, before his priests managed to get rid of her. I find that a little hard to credit, myself, given his general hysteria about sex, but maybe that was a product of a bad divorce.
He actually turns around at the end of the Garden of Eden bit and starts talking to the rest of his pantheon. It’s kind of hilarious to watch the exegesis as people scramble to explain that part away.
And for some reason, the restless dead always end up EVIL, and not like, “oh yay, Uncle Bob managed to rise from the grave. He’s such a nice old man.”
That’s… not quite true. Most cultures have things analogous to ghosts that are protective spirits- guardian angels and revered ancestors and so on. It’s the people who reanimate their own corpses who are considered problematic, and that makes sense, given that it’s an upset in the standard progression of life -> death -> fertilizer. It’s a threat to the social order, so the living naturally discourage it and people who are willing to do it are by definition transgressive and therefore threatening. Especially since you’re working against entropy to stay reanimated and generally have to steal some life force from the living to keep going.

“Hey, Vern! Wanna go out for a bite?”
                                          – Earnest Goes to the Crypt (Jim Varney the Vampire)

Froborr: I’ve read some Varney, and own a copy. It’s readable for free online at the University of Virginia Library. The stories are good, but the writing style is atrocious–penny dreadful, and all that. Thanks to the craziness of the medium, Varney’s backstory keeps changing, and his personality swings between decent guy, violent bloodsucker, self-loathing angst-bucket, tortured romantic, and apathetic scam artist. Taken altogether, though, Varney’s easily one of my favorite vampires in all of literature. Unlike the evil aristocrat vampire, he’s a normal bloke who uses his longevity and powers in order to *gain* wealth, and constantly fails. (cue Nelson “HA-ha.”)
And hey Launcifer, any info on your novel? It doesn’t take much to make me interested in anything vampire-related. Unless it’s Twilight, and much has been said on that subject already.
And since Launcifer got away with it, I might as well pimp my own webcomic…>.>

I read an online review of this movie called Star Crystal in which a fearsome alien is converted to

HOLY. FREAKING. CRAP. Not five minutes ago, I was browsing through the special features for some DVD I own, and happened to find a trailer for Star Crystal and watched it. Total creepy coincidence.
The trailer, by the way, gives absolutely no hint of the religion angle. It looks liek a bog standard alien-attacks-space-station story with a budget approximating that of two episodes of Doctor Who.
Seems weird to describe Twilight as a rape fantasy, given that Stephanie Meyer does her level best to castrate the entire vampire genre.
Isn’t the basic appeal of the vampire romance “Hot steamy sex with a DANGEROUS DANGEROUS BOY your dad would TOTALLY NOT APPROVE OF!”? And yet Edward is somehow not only undangerous for a vampire he even seems *undangerous for a teenage boy* — and he’s *a guy your dad would totally approve of*.

You know, another take on vampirism is that it reprents an STD. The symbolism matches up–vampires are supposed to be extremely attractive, they seduce you, and then they kill you. Not only do they kill you, but they turn you into one of them. I’m fairly certain that the dread of syphilis, along with the extremely pleasant way it was contracted, played some kind of role in the creation of the classical vampire.
If you take the “STD as vampirism” theory to be true, the idea of garlic fits in nicely. Garlic has always had a reputation as being a medicinal plant, and during the black plague it was not unusual for doctors to wear masks containing garlic and other herbs as a measure of protection when treating victims. So garlic would get blended into the vampire myth as a way to prevent diseases.
The cross fits into this, then, not as a symbol of belief, but more as a symbol of a preventative measure. If you don’t sleep around, as the church usually admonishes, you won’t get syphilis or gonorrhea. So the vampire being repelled by the cross makes sense in that respect.

VamperGreen: And hey Launcifer, any info on your novel? It doesn’t take much to make me interested in anything vampire-related.
There’s sort-of two, actually. The first, which I’m currently attempting to sell, is a Reformation-era historical fantasy set during the second Italian War involving numerous historical personages. The central plot revolves around a female vampire attempting to deal with the fall-out of siring a strapping and somewhat sociopathic young man who appeared in the guise of a “knight in tarnished armour”, purely for the purposes of sexual gratification. The second, when I finish it, will be a satire on Regency – specifically Goldsmith’s and Sheridan’s comedies, utilising an Austen-era Bath and an entirely different host of historical personages. I’ve also deliberately taken elements from more recent vampire-type novels for the purposes of satire (I had a lot of fun with LeStat’s author-shouts, for example).

Ross, Edward may be undangerous for a vampire, but I’d say being a controlling asshole stalker makes him very dangerous for a teenage boy. Mind you, the author isn’t aware of what she’s writing so his watching Bella sleep, disabling her car, isolating her from her friends, and other real life gigantic red flags somehow don’t come off as such. Twilight isn’t a rape fantasy so much as a “date a guy you can never (and I do mean never) leave” fantasy. Which is far worse.

Point taken Bugmaster. I wasn’t sure how Mages worked in the world of darkness and was going off info supplied to me from another forum that was talking about mages as a aside.

From what I read, this is mainly coming from tvtropes.org, a lot of our current vampire mythology comes from 19th century vampire literature, vampires as decadent and deadly aristocrats, and early horror movies like Nosferatu, like Sunlight killing vampires. The original vampires were more like zombies than vampires as modern people know them.
This is absolutely true.
However, as folklore, vampires are what they need to be at the time of the telling. Right now they seem to be morphing more steadily into representing forbidden sexuality (which is what, for example, Edward in Twilight seems to represent). Because our culture has a very mixed relationship with sexuality, that conflict plays out in our stories. You end up with Twilight, for example, where it is OK for a boy to sneak into your room at night as long as you don’t tempt him too much, and acting on your sick, filthy desires will get you killed – until you are properly married, of course, at which point you can be immortal and fulfilled.
This isn’t really a new interpretation of vampires. Sexy vampires have been around since penny dreadfuls published concurrently with Dracula. Although vampire “purists” will nevertheless nerdrage endlessly about somebody having a different interpretation than their own of their pet trope, claiming it’s raping vampires, etc. (Whenever somebody says that a pet subject has been “raped” or “murdered” by a writer, it’s a pretty good sign they are taking this way too seriously.)
So while Fred’s explanation for the vampire fear of crosses and the implications of vampirism are not strictly speaking “true,” in the sense that they do not bare any relationship to the actual history of these tropes, they are “true” in that they are perfectly valid interpretations that accurately communicate Fred’s worldview – which is exactly what folklore is for, after all.
As for the actual history of vampires and crosses, everything I’ve read suggests that vampires were originally spreaders of diseases and plagues. The corpse may or may not rise from its coffin, and the vampire may or may not literally feed off its victims. Crosses kept vampires at bay for the same reason that faith healing works today: if you pull out a cross and the vampire still makes you sick, it’s your own damn fault for not having enough faith. Vampires were dealt with by digging up the corpse and staking it to the ground so that its spirit could not continue to spread diseases (no magic at all in the stake – it’s just a means of pinning the vampire in one place), or wedging a brick or rock in its mouth so that it couldn’t chew on its shroud – corpses chewing on shrouds being a common cause of airborne disease, dontcha’know. Of course there were probably hundreds of other local solutions beyond these.
(Obviously the word “originally” above refers only to vampires as they first appeared in written documents referenced by that name or a name to which the word vampire is clearly related. I’m quite sure the concept arose out of ancient traditions that probably extend back to pre-human superstitions.)

@Belisarius: I’m a big fan of China Mieville’s take on vampires in The Scar: vampires as pathetic junkies, always craving the next blood fix, puffing themselves up on their own mythology.
I mention again The Reformed Vampire Support Group, which takes a similar attitude.
Also in the vampire-as-invalid sweepstakes is the SF series Crosstime Engineer. The first book is pretty hard sf and then a character makes a throwaway reference to vampires. It’s about the third or fourth book before a vampire shows up “onscreen,” and then it turns out to be a rabies victim. (No spoiler – it’s very much a side issue, not even a subplot.)
Getting back to garlic– canines don’t like it because it messes up their sense of smell. Perhaps vampires (who, per Stoker, can turn into wolves) have the same objection. Imagine if a vampire depends on his/her ability to sniff out blood-borne diseases (vital in this age of AIDS) and has it taken away? Just supposin’…

@Launcifer: That Reformation-era one sounds cool.
In regards to Edward the creepy stalker: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZwM3GvaTRM

If I were to tie vampirism to a specific disease, I probably wouldn’t pick an STD; I’d pick rabies. Think about it: a really weird-acting bat bites a guy, and pretty soon he’s hiding in darkness, avoiding running water, biting people, and generally acting like the bat was.

Getting back to garlic– canines don’t like it because it messes up their sense of smell.
They also don’t like it because it causes their red blood cells to dissolve.

{Vampires not showing in mirrors because they don’t have souls}
This makes zero sense. Chairs don’t have souls either, but they reflect in mirrors and have shadows. Ensoulment obviously has no effect on an object’s transparency.
I don’t know. What if the world these vampires exist in were, like, animistic? I mean, granted, it would be a stretch to say that even chairs had spirits, but if everything in the prosaic world had a spirit, wouldn’t the soullessness of vampires be even more horrifying?

Ross said:

The trailer, by the way, gives absolutely no hint of the religion angle. It looks liek a bog standard alien-attacks-space-station story with a budget approximating that of two episodes of Doctor Who.

According to Badmovies.org, they spring the religious crap on the audience right at the climax, and give no hints about it anywhere previously.
VamperGreen, I see your Buffy/Twilight crossover and raise you a Sarah Haskins.
“Hi mom, I’ve met this awesome new guy… he’s a drug dealer!”

And yet Edward is somehow not only undangerous for a vampire he even seems *undangerous for a teenage boy* — and he’s *a guy your dad would totally approve of*.
I’m pretty sure if a guy had peeked into my sister’s window while she was sleeping or had disabled her car’s engine, my dad would not have approved of him, he would have killed him. Seriously. Dad often joked about introducing my sister’s dates to “Mr. Ka-Bar,” but in an extreme case like that it wouldn’t have been a joke.
Thanks to my unnatural and deep-seated hatred of the phenomenon, I find Twilight threads here far more enjoyable than I should.

Bella literally has to ask her husband what happened on their wedding night because she gets knocked unconscious early in the proceedings.
Fade to black – ur doin it rong.
That’s like something an extremely sheltered preteen would dream up. Isn’t Myers a little old for that?
She’s *exactly* that.
A virtuous Christian crewmember asks herself, “WWJD?” and decides that to save humanity, she should allow the alien to devour her, while keeping herself in as serene a mental state as she can.
Ooh! There was a short story in Omni, way back in its first few years when it had stories by the likes of Roger Zelazny and pre-Brain Eater Orson Scott Card, that had a similar premise. Pretty sure it was in one of the “best of” volumes. Alas, I can’t find a complete list of Omni stories; I’m sure I’d recognise the title.

My favorite vampire romance story is Let The Right One In. It’s massively twisted, and nothing I’d want to see modeled in real life, but it doesn’t pretend not to be twisted at any point, and in places it can be quite sweet. It’s a nice antidote to Twilight and that kind of stuff.

People who say Twilight is about a scary rapist dude and is creepy because it idolizes the rapist/stalker/controller attitude way too much are right.
People who say Twilight is about an emasculated harmless nancy-boy and is lame because it totally neuters the vampire genre and subtracts all real menace from it are *also* right.
That’s just what’s so fucking annoying about Twilight. It wants to have it both ways. It’s the quintessential immature-teen-girl-fantasy in that respect — it works very hard so its male love interest can both be terrifyingly virile and reassuringly harmless.
Edward constantly seethes with desire to rape and murder Bella. He won’t fucking shut up about it. It’s all he ever seems to think about. But he *doesn’t do it*, and in Twilight-morality-land this gives him points — the fact that he constantly wants to cause Bella grievous, grievous harm and yet every time he wrestles with his desire to do this the conscience comes out on top and he stops just short of actually violating her, draining her body of blood and discarding her corpse — stops short at the level of, yes, sabotaging her car, sneaking into her bedroom, etc., but still *doesn’t do it* — is, in Stephenie-Meyer-land, sexy.
Stephenie Meyer doesn’t find Want-It-Take-It sexy, in other words, she finds Want-It-Hover-Near-It-Drool-Over-It-And-Yet-Stop-Short-Of-Taking-It sexy.
IMO you could go on for a whole PhD dissertation’s length as to why, although it all boils down to the rather obvious patriarchal bullshit in the end — it stems from the belief that all “real” men, or any men manly enough to be worth caring about, are seething cauldrons of desire to rape-and-kill inside but that virtue comes from the constant herculean struggle to tame said cauldron of desire to rape-and-kill, a recurring theme in conservative RTC and especially Mormon discourse about “lust” that seems to those of us in mainstream liberal America to seem to be a dreadfully fucked-up way of framing the situation. (Telling teenage boys that they will inevitably be seething cauldrons of desire to rape-and-kill is problematic in that it takes normal sexual desire and twists it into something nasty and in so doing disrespects and demeans men — in real life, wanting to have sex is *not* equivalent to wanting to rape-and-kill and saying it is is going to fuck up your head — and it’s also problematic in that it makes a fucking *hero* out of any guy who successfully avoids raping-and-killing as though this were medal-worthy behavior instead of the baseline of being normal and decent.)
The creepy thing about Twilight is that it doesn’t see the BDSM rape fantasy as being, well, a fantasy — rather than seeing rape fantasy as some rather interesting but disturbing detritus thrown out by our reptile brain plus vestiges of past cultural baggage that can be fun to throw oneself into with a sense of irony, detachment and, well, fantasy, it sees the rape fantasy as *something real and normal as part of everyday sexual interaction*.
And so from the point of view of rape fantasy we have a *frustrated* rape fantasy — Edward doesn’t reveal his true colors as an amoral vessel of pure virile power who just takes what he wants, he angsts and angsts and angsts about what he wants endlessly and whines and moans about it until somehow tying the matrimonial knot with Bella instantly and magically makes his psychotic frenzied-animal concussion-inducing sex drive okay.
From the point of view of non-fantasy models for actual relationships… eww, eww, eww. “I really really want to rape and kill you but I’m heroically restraining myself” is *not* a good model for an Ideal Man and Edward needs several years’ worth of therapy (or, if this condition is intrinsic to being a vampire, he needs to be staked in the heart and to have his miserable unlife ended) rather than constantly juicing up his rape-and-kill instinct by hanging around its object. (Twilight fans think the whole “You’re my personal heroin” thing and Edward *knowing* that his attraction to Bella is transforming him into a monster but being *unable to resist* sitting right there by her bedside heroically resisting the urge to rape and kill is romantic. It isn’t, and it’s actually a well-worn formula for prolonging an abusive relationship long past its natural expiration date to the detriment of both parties.)

Also, re: mirrors –
Things that are supposed to have souls and do are reflected in mirrors normally. Things that aren’t supposed to have souls and don’t are reflected in mirrors normally.
Mirrors’ magic ability to reveal the “truth” only matters for things that are supposed to have souls but don’t. Arguably this should also apply to revealing the “truth” of things that aren’t supposed to have souls yet do (mirrors revealing a horrific demonic face superimposed on a seemingly innocuous yet possessed artifact, for instance).
It makes enough sense to pass the folklore test. A physicist working from a 21st-century perspective could tear plenty of holes in it (“What *parts* of the vampire become invisible? What if you cut off some of his hair?”, etc.), but they could do that with anything.

In nWoD (which I infinitely prefer for oWoD; no metaplot, for starters!), vampires do show in mirrors, in photographs and on TV… blurred, like the cursed people in “The Ring”.
A vampire can suppress this effect temporarily, with mental effort, so they can use mirrors, but the default is “roughly human-shaped blur”.
VtR also has “Lancea Sanctum”, a pretty warped Vampiric variant of Christianity (mostly), which teaches that God damned them with vampirism for a reason, and they should be good monsters and put the fear of God and dark places into the people.

EnglerP “The Curse of Fenric”, an OldWho story had an interesting take on this: Vampires are repelled by objects which represent something in which the welder really beliefs. Thus the cross a disillusioned priest uses is useless for him while a soviet soldier repels them with a soviet badge. The Doctor uses the faith in his former companions.
Jason: That is a good episode and it brings back the Brigadier, which I really want the new series to do.
“Battlefield” was the one that brought back the Brigadier. “The Curse of Fenric” doesn’t feature him.
Froborr: There’s one novel in particular I want to see them make into an episode, involving the Eighth Doctor (but it could work with the Eleventh), the Brigadier, and the Ice Warriors, where UNIT gets to be completely awesome and kick the butts of a British fascist movement. I wish I could remember the title.
Lance Parkin’s “The Dying Days”, available as a free ebook on the BBC website.
Francis D: Torchwood pretty much ended with the five episode season three: Children of Earth. It’s both some of the best TV I’ve watched this year and blacker than a binbag. (How they can get things back on track after the destruction of {spoiler}, the death of {spoiler} (and Jack Harkness. Repeatedly – but it didn’t take) and the departure of {spoiler} is beyond me.)
Russell T Davies and company have plans for Season 4 (so /he/ sees a way forward) but it’s basically down to the BBC to commission it (which, given Children of Earth’s ratings and audience appreciation index, is quite probable, fingers crossed).

the fact that he constantly wants to cause Bella grievous, grievous harm and yet every time he wrestles with his desire to do this the conscience comes out on top and he stops just short of actually violating her, draining her body of blood and discarding her corpse — stops short at the level of, yes, sabotaging her car, sneaking into her bedroom, etc., but still *doesn’t do it* — is, in Stephenie-Meyer-land, sexy.
I think we should be wary of interpreting Edward’s vampiric tendencies too literally. My understanding is that the movie actually has more violence than the books, and the movie has maybe two scenes of fighting and almost no blood. The look of glee on the vampires’ faces when Anton gives them leave to tear the bad guy to pieces is the closest the film comes to depicting actual vampire violence, so whatever Edward does or longs to do remains comfortably abstract. And anyway, the fantasy it’s tapping into is not to date a boy who sucks your blood. It’s to date a boy that everybody else disapproves of, but only because he’s misunderstood. He offers the rebelliousness of a bad boy and the tenderness of a sweetheart in the same package.
As for the book’s depiction of conscience as sexy, could that have something to do with the general pop culture image of men as wanton sex maniacs? Like, do young girls believe that every guy is struggling with similar urges as Edward? His wait-until-marriage-to-make-you-one-of-the-soulless-undead policy could be symbolic of a fantastical boy who will constantly tell his princess how beautiful she is and how he just wants to jump her bones from now until the end of time (or, more likely, for about 6-8 minutes or so, if you’re lucky), yet actually pushes her away when she offers herself to him? The message would be, if he really loves you, then he won’t have sex with you for your own good.
Depending on how you look at it, that could almost be subversive, since the typical American way is to make it the girl’s responsibility to turn down sex (and avoid provocative dress, lest she drive the menfolk mad with lust!). Abstinence only programs, particularly the most blatantly religious, often carry the implicit or even explicit message that boys can’t help themselves, so girls must keep their sexuality in check so they don’t get raped in an alley, or have their stomach pumped after swallowing gallons of semen, or whatever the popular cautionary tale is with the kids these days.
On the other hand, it reinforces the old fashioned ideal of the chivalrous man protecting his lady’s chastity. It just so happens that he’s protecting it from himself, in this case.

Froborr, I not going to try to change your mind about “Carmilla” being a terrible novel (not because I agree with you – I don’t), but – “the male fantasy of being raped”? “These are all very much from a masculine point of view”? Protagonist/narrator of “Carmilla” is a *woman*.
I didn’t read the last page yet, maybe someone already said it.

Marvel Canon states that Thor’s Hammer (Mjolner) being a Holy Weapon wielded by a God can kill vampires, even Dracula, if you can get them to stand still long enough to wack them with it.
(From the book of The Mighty Thor, issue 303, page 4, panels 3-5 inclusive.)

I’ve read Dracula a few times, and IIRC, Dracula isn’t stabbed with a Bowie knife, he’s decapitated with a kukri, which is a long, heavy, curved knife. Here’s some pictures.
Posted by: Not Really Here
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That a kukri killed Dracula just shows that you shouldn’t mess with a Ghurka.
Ayola Ghorki!

>>>Children of Earth’s ratings and audience appreciation index
I might be wrong, but I used to think that ratings only demonstrate that people *watch* Show X, they don’t demonstrate that people *like* Show X.
“What do you mean, of course they like what they see, or they’d turn off their TV already!” – umm, not necessarily. I’m a big fan of spoilers – they tell me what I might want to avoid and what I might probably like to read/watch even if premice is not all that appealing for me. So, spoilers for TW:COE told me that I must ignore it. Some of the people who avoid spoilers and who were hurt by the resolution of Day 4 *couldn’t know* that they absolutely, definitely *won’t* get Deus Ex Maxina the next day, and if they *did* know, no fact they’d come back. For that matter, no fact that they’d watch Day 4 at all, if they knew what’s in store for them. But no one cares if they hated
the last series, because they *watched*, and that’s the only thing that counts.

I might be wrong, but I used to think that ratings only demonstrate that people *watch* Show X, they don’t demonstrate that people *like* Show X.
Ad rates are not determined based on how much you like something, only whether or not it draws eyeballs. How much anybody like a given show has nothing to do with whether or not it gets another season. If everybody in the world watched it but hated it, they would keep making more of ‘em.

>>>How much anybody like a given show has nothing to do with whether or not it gets another season. If everybody in the world watched it but hated it, they would keep making more of ‘em.
Unfortunately.
(My love-hate relationship with capitalism, let me show you it. Or don’t.)

redcrow: I might be wrong, but I used to think that ratings only demonstrate that people *watch* Show X, they don’t demonstrate that people *like* Show X.
Mm. That’s why the UK has the Audience Appreciation Index (which is a different measure from the ratings) – in effect, how much people liked the show, rated out of 100 (as I understand it, the actual survey asks people to rate a show on a 1 to 10 score, and the average score, recorded as out of 100, is the AI)
Children of Earth’s AI:
Day One: 88
Day Two: 90
Day Three: 91
Day Four: 91
Day Five: 90
It should be noted that for a terrestrial programme to achieve AIs of 90 and 91 is very, /very/ rare in TV terms, since it means that the majority were rating it 9 or 10 out of 10.
Something with solid ratings and average AI (say around 70) is likely to get a recommission; it might not be getting people /excited/, but it’s getting people /watching/. Something that gets solid ratings and /excellent/ AI is likely to have its chances of recommission improved, since people are watching it and liking it.

Whoops. Day Three should be a 90 there.

If everybody in the world watched it but hated it, they would keep making more of ‘em.
Unless one of the people who hates it is in charge of the network – Nikita and Dresden Files leap to mind.

Well, that’s more… forgot the proper English word again, sorry. (Coherent? Convincing? No, neither… Okay, that’s more *Something Or Other*.) I’m still not going to put much trust in ratings, indexes and surveys, but that’s my problem.

Oh, and I need to clarify that “Coherent? Convincing? No, neither…” isn’t a jab at you or something like that – I really forgot the word, and those are only ones that i can think of, but not what I’m looking for.

In his notes for Dracula (some of which are reprinted in the Norton Critical edition of the novel), Bram Stoker opined that any attempt to replicate the image of a vampire will fail. Either you’ll get no image at all (as with a mirror), or you’ll get the image of a corpse or skeleton (which he suggested would happen with paintings or photographs).
I wonder what that would do to biographies and news reports about them?
I have not touched the Twilight series; can’t stand vampire stories to begin with, and from what I know about it it sounds sickening. But I figure it must be affecting people on a deep level for it to have taken off like this – ensnared even intelligent adult women that I respect…
I see truth is life has mentioned my post; here it is: http://www.kitwhitfield.com/2009/08/innocent-libertinism.html.
There were some very interesting comments added too.
I always thought that the Twilight series was a BDSM fantasy, but I read it exactly the opposite from the way Kit does — as a sort of Ladies Against Women anti-feminist revenge fantasy where Bella is the Dom and Edward is the Sub.
I’d be very interested to hear you elaborate on that, hapax, if you’re willing.
When contemplating the rape fantasy appeal of vampire stories, and the definite aristocratic appeal of vampire stories, and their current popularity, I figure they’re becoming a rape fantasy about being put in one’s (low) class place and liking it. Then I get really depressed.
Let’s not be judgemental about other people’s sexual fantasies, eh? We’re supposed to be liberal around here, which means people can fantasise whatever they like as long as they act reasonably.
I mean, any rape fantasy is a fantasy of being overpowered. If the imaginary rapist is aristocratic, that’s just another quality he uses to overpower, along with physical strength and all the rest of it. It’s not a particular fantasy of mine, but I can see how it would work: the desire is to be overwhelmed with sensation and emotion, and the vampire lover is simply a personification of the force that accomplishes this. If he’s in your imagination, he’s under your control; he’s just one element of your personality that you’re using to excite yourself. It’s a submissive fantasy, but submissive doesn’t mean weak. I personally see no harm in it.
It’s weird: if Twilight had been published as straight BDSM, something by Black Lace or Secrets, with an author and a fanbase who know that the relationship is a wacky fantasy, I wouldn’t have had a problem with it.* Your Kink Is OK and all that.
But Meyer has gone on record as talking about how awesome and wonderful it all is, how Edward’s the ideal man, and the fandom seems to think so too, and it creeps me the fuck out.
See, I’ve got some sympathy for that. Assuming I’m right in seeing a BDSM element to the books – it’s just a theory, and one of Twilight’s big selling points is that it lends itself to different interpretations unsually well – I’d say it was a way for mildly kinky women who for whatever reason (social pressure being a likely one) have difficulty accepting their own tastes to get access to their fantasies. And why not? An they harm none, everyone’s entitled to sexual happy time, I reckon.
And as to saying Edward’s the ideal man – well, if you’re a kinky woman who wants to feel normal, then yes, yes he is. If nothing else, he has the distinct advantage of being imaginary. I’d say Meyer’s probably being honest in calling him ideal, inasmuch as he’s her ideal man; I’ve only read the first book, but they definitely read like someone writing down their private fantasies for fun, and again I don’t have a problem with that. They didn’t float my boat, but my boat doesn’t get to say what should work for anyone else’s.
that time was before her flip-out on Amazon
I have some sympathy for Anne Rice there too, actually. I think it was injudicious, but I don’t see it as a big crime. She just reacted in public they way a more politic woman would have reacted in private. If someone makes a comment on my stuff that pisses me off, I vent spleen to my husband and keep it out of the public sphere. Rice, if I remember right, had been widowed fairly recently, so I feel bad for her anyway, but the kind of thing she said, however inadvisable, was the kind of thing I’d be prepared to bet a lot of writers say when they’re blowing off steam. It was unprofessional, but writers work from home and interact with fans and it’s always a fine balance to keep the personal and the professional separate.
So I think she made a mistake, but it didn’t seem like a big deal mistake. She just reacted like a human being in a place where she should have reacted like a public persona.
You are, of course, not obliged to sympathise. I’m just saying that I did, a bit.
I’ll maybe give you that but it very quickly starts to move to the wrong end of what I’ve seen of dom/sub relationships in the sense that there’s no choice to relinquish control involved; there’s certainly no get-out for Bella (and the fact that she doesn’t seem to want one makes her vaguely foolish in my eyes).
Well, but it’s a fantasy. A fantasised dom/sub relationship doesn’t need the negotiation of a real one. Rice is an example: in her BDSM trilogy, her heroine doesn’t have safe words or pre-scene discussion or anything like that; stuff just happens to her and she doesn’t get any say in it and that suits her fine. Same way that in a romance novel the beautiful heiress can marry her impoverished mechanic lover without needing a pre-nup, or a vanilla porn novel doesn’t need to talk about condoms. A great advantage of fantasy is that it’s safe, which means you can leave out the safeguards. A book of fantasy isn’t supposed to be a primer.
That’s just what’s so fucking annoying about Twilight. It wants to have it both ways. It’s the quintessential immature-teen-girl-fantasy in that respect — it works very hard so its male love interest can both be terrifyingly virile and reassuringly harmless.
But what’s wrong with immature teen girls? It’s a natural developmental stage. In discussing Flowers In The Attic the journalist Zoe Williams says:
The feminist critic Edith Birkhead maintains that as fairy tales are necessary for children, so Gothic novels should be the next stage in our development as adolescents.
And I think that’s a fair point. A fantasy designed to appeal to girls in their early teens – or women who want to relive the experiences of their early teens – is necessarily going to be immature: it’s not addressed to adults. The fantasies of teenage girls can’t be mature because teenage girls aren’t mature, and blaming them for that is as unfair as blaming children for being childish.
That’s the whole thing about vampires–they are myths and therefore whatever we damn well feel like making them.
Sheila has a point: there’s no reason not to reinvent vampires according to our own ideas and let the traditions go hang. You can have a badly-done traditional vampire or a well-done vampire that completely contradicts all the traditions. Why not?

another take on vampirism is that it reprents an STD…
Wow, I would never have thought of that metaphor. Snopes would describe it as wooden-spoon story.
But he *doesn’t do it*, and in Twilight-morality-land this gives him points…
I haven’t read Twilight – is that aspect of the story really a Beauty and the Beast concept, where the female deserves most or all the credit for taming the vampire beast?
it stems from the belief that all “real” men, or any men manly enough to be worth caring about, are seething cauldrons of desire to rape-and-kill inside but that virtue comes from the constant herculean struggle to tame said cauldron of desire to rape-and-kill
An apocryphal story about Margaret Atwood: she apparently said that women and men both feel threatened by each other, but for different reasons – men are afraid women will laugh at them, and women are afraid men will kill them.
Abstinence only programs, particularly the most blatantly religious, often carry the implicit or even explicit message that boys can’t help themselves
Why is that the case? That attitude pisses me off.

I haven’t read Twilight – is that aspect of the story really a Beauty and the Beast concept, where the female deserves most or all the credit for taming the vampire beast?
I’d say that Twilight isn’t strongly plotted enough for that interpretation to really work: its focus is entirely on the romance, which is dreamy from the outset. Edward the vampire is non-human-eating before he falls in love with Bella, so he doesn’t need much taming. Such tension as the book contains revolves around the fact that she desperately wants to be with him, right down to getting vamped, and he equally wants to be with her but keeps holding back because he has reservations about dragging her into his world. It’s ‘I love you but I can’t be with you for your own good’ rather than Beauty and the Beast.

Abstinence only programs, particularly the most blatantly religious, often carry the implicit or even explicit message that boys can’t help themselves///
Why is that the case? That attitude pisses me off.
It makes it easier to put all the blame on girls if any sex takes place.

Oh, hm. I would have thought abstinence-only education would make the assumption that boys CAN help themselves, because that’s the point, right? That everyone has full control of themselves, so everyone can be abstinent?

“No, I would make my alien something that absorbs information by consuming flesh, like the one in The Creeping Terror. The human crew figures out that the alien is using information from the dead crewmembers’ brains against them, and that its attitude towards humanity has been influenced by the mental state its victims were in when they were killed. A virtuous Christian crewmember asks herself, “WWJD?” and decides that to save humanity, she should allow the alien to devour her, while keeping herself in as serene a mental state as she can. (Naturally, there’d be a scene of her standing before the alien with her arms held out, reciting prayers to steady herself.) The alien, absorbing all of this, is suitably impressed and decides that it should look into this religion that so inspired her.”

That sounds like what happened to Majin Buu on Dragon Ball Z!

I would have thought abstinence-only education would make the assumption that boys CAN help themselves, because that’s the point, right? That everyone has full control of themselves, so everyone can be abstinent?
From what I can gather, yes, but they still prefer to blame the girls more than the boys. The idea that men are lecherous beasts and it’s women’s responsibility to control them is an old one.

I haven’t read Twilight – is that aspect of the story really a Beauty and the Beast concept, where the female deserves most or all the credit for taming the vampire beast?
Not really. Bella’s both the special temptation and the special influence to resist temptation. He wasn’t generally beastly before she turned up (more generally an uptight preppie dick). It’s hard to say what the story is, but the first ninety percent of it seems to have very little to do with Bella having any kind of power.
Oh, hm. I would have thought abstinence-only education would make the assumption that boys CAN help themselves, because that’s the point, right? That everyone has full control of themselves, so everyone can be abstinent?
You’d think so. Some programs do, but most of them put anything from a disproportionate share to all responsibility on the woman. They tend to feed on the whole “Men have lots of nearly uncontrollable lust, but women have little sexual desire and can be expected to focus their energy on not inflaming the desires of men!” cultural meme. (Complete with the whole warped “All you have to do is not get him horny! Which means following these eight million recommendations, and whatever else someone comes up with! It’s that simple!” load of crap.) There’s definitely a pattern of portraying men as having lust and women as controlling lust, which shows how much abstinence-only programs tend to be a cesspool of unexamined cultural toxins.

I wonder what that would do to biographies and news reports about them?
Surely they would appear to be fiction, cf. Dracula.

Launcifer: Nah, I pretty much agree. I sometimes make a token effort at “oh, well, if that’s what you want”…but at the end of the day, it’s badly written, and it’s creepy, and knowing that the author is Mormon just makes it more disturbing, because it feels like she’s trying to push her own particular sex-is-bad babies-are-awesome values. Ew.
Kit: Yeah, but I don’t have a lot (by which I mean any) sympathy for a supposedly-modern woman too invested in…whatever…to come out and say “yeah, I’m kind of kinky, and this is wrong but hot”. It’s the twenty-first century: grab some fanfic and get the fuck over it.
And…I mean, you’ve got the right to your ideals and your dreams and blah blah blah, but if those are “an-uber controlling guy who really wants to rape me but doesn’t”, “objectivisim for everyone yays!”, or “a land where nobody contradicts Jesus and there are steaming piles of produce wildly available”, well, I have the right to think you’re a moron, and to say so. Because really: dumb. (See also: people who think Romeo & Juliet is the most romaaaantic thing ever. Pfft.)
And yeah, teen fantasies are immature, but I don’t remember every teen fantasy as being this dumb. (See my comment upthread: sarcastic, but also kind of true. And there are modern teenage romances that are reasonably non-idiotic–not a lot of them, given Hollywood, but still.)
On Anne Rice: Yeah, I…don’t, really, at all. If you can’t go out in public without making a scene, don’t go out in public. If you can’t deal with reasonable criticism (like “your main character, who you’ve openly drooled over for fifteen books and now write nonfiction letters to newspapers as, IS A FUCKING MARY SUE”) without flipping out at the critics, don’t be a public figure. The woman’s old enough to have learned professionalism, and she hasn’t, so…again, no sympathy.
The vampire-as-forbidden-sexuality thing, while I can see it, makes me roll my eyes a little, mostly at the fact that we still, in this day and age, *have* forbidden sexuality for vampires to represent. I mean, it doesn’t surprise me most days, but a discussion like this makes me look at the societal attitudes when _Dracula_ came out, and the ones today, and be fairly disappointed that we haven’t changed more.
Also, so much hate for the “men can’t help themselves” bullshit. I’ve worn amazingly skimpy clothing around most of the guys I’ve known, and not one of them has ever made an inappropriate move. Either I’m way less hot than I think, my friends all have Magic Not Being Psychopathic Powers, or that particular theory is a pack of lies. Being too vain for the first theory and too realistic for the second…yeah.

Kit: Yeah, but I don’t have a lot (by which I mean any) sympathy for a supposedly-modern woman too invested in…whatever…to come out and say “yeah, I’m kind of kinky, and this is wrong but hot”. It’s the twenty-first century: grab some fanfic and get the fuck over it.
You’ve got something here. The thing with a lot of rape fantasies and related kinks is that the ideas, when spread in the wrong context, have the power to do a lot of harm. This doesn’t mean people shouldn’t have their kinks, or that they shouldn’t express them where people can see. It does mean showing a reasonable amount of consideration for the potential harm of expressing “This is hot” poorly, and making it clear that your particular public expression (more private expressions don’t fall under the same rules) is meant as a way of thinking that gets some people’s rocks off, not a grand expression of How Things Should Be.
And yes, both ‘clear’ and ‘reasonable’ are messy words, extremely subject to interpretation. However, I’d say it’s not only a right, but morally right to express your views when you think that people haven’t clearly expressed “My fantasy is not how I think everyone in the world should live” or they haven’t made a reasonable effort to show that they’re writing fantasy porn and not statements about human nature. I haven’t heard any serious talk about banning Twilight or other such books, and I’m all for the right of people in an open and liberal society to point out the skeevy implications, and express when they don’t think that the author adequately distinguishes between “Logically skeevy, but hot in my head” and “Hot, therefore okay.”
(If anyone cares, I’ve got a few kinks along the general dominance and rape fantasy lines, and when I do public or semi-public work on the issue, I do try to distinguish between “Certain kinds of domination/control/powerlessness are hot in my imagination” and the objective reality of what it”s like. And I’d rather hear it if someone thought I was advocating something immoral, so I could at the very least look at my phrasing, than seem to be in favor of actual rape and abuse and not have anyone tell me what I sounded like.)

Yeah, but I don’t have a lot (by which I mean any) sympathy for a supposedly-modern woman too invested in…whatever…to come out and say “yeah, I’m kind of kinky, and this is wrong but hot”. It’s the twenty-first century: grab some fanfic and get the fuck over it.
Well, hang on a second. That assumes everybody has heard of, or wants to read, fanfic. Most of the people I know aren’t even aware it exists; I’m aware it exists but I don’t want to read any. Outside geek circles it’s a pretty obscure thing, and Meyer doesn’t strike me as having a geek sensibility. (I have the suspicion that one reason why she’s unpopular with geeks is that she’s using a trope geeks are fond of in a high-school-popular context. I personally don’t see why she shouldn’t, as nobody owns tropes, but anyway.)
And also, Meyer is targeting a fairly young audience. At that age it’s perfectly possible you haven’t really figured out what your sexuality is. How many people come out as any kind of alternative sexuality at that age? Meyer could be seen as a kind of starter pack, maybe.
A lot of women are uncomfortable with more direct porn. (Not me, free speech and proper working conditions is my line, just so you don’t think I’m saying Porn Is Bad.) This may be because they haven’t encountered the right kind, but if their starting point is discomfort they’re unlikely to go looking for it and find the right kind. Romances full of sexual tension seem like a natural outlet.
And come to that, isn’t the ‘clean exterior, naughty subtext’ a fairly classic kind of thrill in itself? ‘Forbidden’ can be a turn-on. I think it’s possible to see Twilight as the literary equivalent of the demure convent girl who’s secretly a tiger in the sack. The tension between the secrecy and the kink can be part of the appeal, no?
I’m not at all saying you shouldn’t think what you think. I can totally see where you’re coming from. I’m just chatting, really…

Battlefield” was the one that brought back the Brigadier. “The Curse of Fenric” doesn’t feature him.
oh yeah, you’re right. I watched them both recently and they are also both the only 7th Doctor stories that I’ve seen so they got all mixed up in my head.

I’m tired of vampires. The Pirates of the Caribbean movie, which I personally thought was mediocre at best, came out and then we had several years of nonstop pirate obsession. Now Twilight has come out and vampires are the new pirates.
I only like vampires when they are scary and disturbing, which seems to be in the minority of their portrayals. Usually they are some thinly veiled excuse to explore kinks instead. I like zombies much better. There’s no way to make zombies sexy.

The thing with a lot of rape fantasies and related kinks is that the ideas, when spread in the wrong context, have the power to do a lot of harm.
Oh now hang on a second. Do you have any proof of that?
The thing is, I think it’s asking Meyer to have more distance from her own fantasies and fiction than she seems to have to hold her to that standard. I agree with you it’s a standard I’d try to adopt if I was writing romance or erotica, but I think the whole point of the Twilight books is that they’re so hynotically immersed in the fantasy that they don’t have any perspective on it. I don’t know what’s going on in the head of Meyer the person, and I don’t think it’s really my business, but the sense I get off the writing persona is that if it/she had had that kind of distance, she wouldn’t have been able to write that kind of book in the first place.
The thing is, saying ‘grab some fanfic’ is all very well, but what did Stephenie Meyer do that was so different from a fanfic writer? She wrote fiction based on her own fantasies; she just made up her own characters, for which I feel I have to extend some respect. Reading Meyer is pretty close to grabbing some fanfic, as far as I can tell.
She wrote a series of books based on her own fantasies in a way that was immersed in the fantasies rather than distanced from them. People do it every day; they just don’t usually get published, or published to such extreme success. But we can’t blame Meyer for her success: she just wrote the books and sent them off; she didn’t make anybody buy them, and if you get that kind of success I can’t blame you for being pleased – heck, I’d love it if I had half as many readers as she does. If she really does think this is an ideal relationship – well, she didn’t set out to be an authority on relationships, she just set out to be a writer and circumstances dropped a lot of listeners at her door. It seems unreasonable to expect her to stop being herself just because she made it big.
I’m not saying I like the sexual politics in the Twilight books. In a way I’m not holding Meyer to professional standards by taking this line, which may be a criticism of her books in itself. I just find it hard to blame her: she just did her thing and stuff happened.

See, Kit, it’s tricky. Because the same exterior can be used to convey naughty thrills to one person, and poison (of the “You should let your stalker control your identity, because he’s the most romantic person you’ll ever meet!” sort, for instance) to someone else. And a lot of the ethics of internet porn, as I understand them, involve making a reasonable (messy word, again) effort to minimize possible harm while still allowing a reasonable (messy word!) degree of pleasure. And it’s hard in my mind to get to a point where critiquing the skeevy in Twilight isn’t a good thing, that doesn’t involve assuming you can’t critique anything skeevy if it might lead to someone feeling bad about their kink, which is rather extreme for my tastes. Honesty may not be comfortable for many, but it has certain important ethical implications when it comes to distinguishing between “Let’s play pretend with the immoral, because we enjoy imagining things about it” and “Immoral things are hot and good.” I don’t see a good replacement, and I’m not big on not looking at the moral implications of publicly expressed ideas.

I’m not big on not looking at the moral implications of publicly expressed ideas.
Oh, me neither. I think it’s perfectly legitimate to point out that the sexual politics in Twilight can be problematic at best. I’m just a bit sceptical at the suggestion that books can corrupt minds, which seemed to be a suggestion floating around, and at the implication that there was something necessarily unhealthy in liking the Twilight books, which again seemed like a conclusion we could drift towards.
So many people slam the Twilight books that I feel a bit inclined to speak up for them even though I didn’t like the one I read. I see a certain innocence in them – not in their politics, but in their lack of self-awareness. They read so much like someone’s daydreams – and daydreams tend not to be self-aware, that’s kind of their purpose – that they feel naive rather than malign to me. Others may differ.

I don’t know how well it lines up with vampire folklore, as I’ve never delved too deeply into it, but it’s always seemed to me that the various weaknesses and vulnerabilities attributed to vampires were a way of explaining how they could exist even though most people have never seen one and how it is that despite their ravening blood lust and supernatural powers the world isn’t overrun with them.
Peasant 1: There are vampires living in those woods.
Peasant 2: Really? I was just working in those woods yesterday afternoon and didn’t see any.
Peasant 1: Well, the sun was out. They can’t stand the sunlight.
Peasant 2: Oh, well, my family and I live right next to the woods. Why haven’t they come streaming out at night to devour us?
Peasant 1: There’s a rushing river between the woods and your house. They can’t cross moving water.
Peasant 2: Yes, but the river has dried up during the drought we’ve had this season. So why haven’t they come to devour us in our sleep?
Peasant 1: They can’t enter a home unless they’re invited in.
Peasant 2: I’ve got a big sign over my front door saying “All are welcome to enter.”
Peasant 1: Ummm…well, your wife makes a lot of Italian food. It must be all the garlic keeping them away.
…and so forth.

I’m going to have to look for evidence on the whole thing about how rape fantasies, when spread within the wrong context, having the power to do harm, thing. I’m not terribly focused right now, and while I get the feeling I’ve read stuff that strongly supports that claim, I haven’t got anything solid at the tip of my fingers. I’ll poke around and see what I get.
I’m just a bit sceptical at the suggestion that books can corrupt minds, which seemed to be a suggestion floating around, and at the implication that there was something necessarily unhealthy in liking the Twilight books, which again seemed like a conclusion we could drift towards.
This is where it gets complicated. I know perfectly healthy, functional adults in good relationships who have a soft spot for the Twilight books, so I wouldn’t say there’s anything necessarily unhealthy about enjoying them. I’d agree with you that reading the books and enjoying them doesn’t say anything about a particular person (my sister-in-law loves them, and the most serious objection to how she acts I have is that she doesn’t quite believe that I gave the books a fair chance and still don’t like them. She’s an awesome person, and I respect her, even if about half the books she adores I can’t stand).
On the other hand, I simultaneously have a soft spot for something I can’t pin down about Ayn Rand’s writing style, and deeply dislike her ideology. And as much as I personally can read Atlas Shrugged without going all Objectivist, I think it’d be disingenous to pretend the book doesn’t promote certain ideas just because I haven’t absorbed them. There’s a middle ground between “Doesn’t push any particular belief” and “Has the magic power to force a particular belief on you”. I don’t think that Twilight books force anyone to look at relationships a certain way. I do think they present an unhealthy ideology before young adults in an appealing package.

Someone was looking for an Annotated Dracula: is this it? Alibris will hook you up for under $10, including postage.

Kit: Fair enough. I was kind of using fanfic as shorthand for kinky porn.
I can totally get where you’re coming from too, and chatting’s good, especially on a slow Friday. (Going to LARP this weekend. Concentrating on work today? Not happening.)
My objections to the books are basically threefold, the first being that, well, they suck. Even without the sexual politics, you still have the kind of main character with whom I wouldn’t spend five minutes in a room unless I had a baseball bat and an alibi. Speaking of Bella, I should note that, even more than the stalkerness, the part that turned me off the book was the bit where Edward dumps her and she starts doing increasingly dumb things, ending with her jumping off a cliff and thinking, basically, “I might die, but it’s for him so it’s okay.”
I mean, there’s kink and then there’s…that…and holy God WTF NO.
Anyhow, yeah, some people might get off on that kind of thing, and some people might be uncomfortable saying “oh, it’s hot but wrong”–which I don’t really get, because even in non-kink terminology, there are ways to say that–but that doesn’t oblige me not to say that the books, especially when presented as straight fiction, suck. (Pun not intended.)
And the presentation is my second objection. Selling Twilight as an awesome wholesome relationship with vampires is like selling the Dark Tower books as an awesome wholesome Western with magic and stuff. (Or “Watership Down” as a kids’ book.) You’re going to get an audience who wants and expects one thing, gets something else altogether, and is rather understandably pissed off about it. The fact that Meyer actually thinks it’s an awesome wholesome relationship with vampires makes her an idiot, and also a bad writer: if I try to write a heartwarming novel about, I don’t know, telepathic puppies, and the telepathic puppies eat your face in the middle of the night, then I probably have failed. If my personal definition of “heartwarming” includes having your face eaten, then I’ve still failed: I’ve just also failed as a reasonable human being as well as a writer.
Third is what Ako said, basically, and also related to presentation. *If* you present something as “well, it’s supposed to be disturbing,” or “it’s wrong, but that’s kind of hot”, you give yourself a certain protection from criticisms about the work being disturbing or wrong. If you don’t, you don’t have that protection: that’s why, for example, it makes little sense to criticize Stephen King for having creepy violent imagery, but plenty of sense to criticize him for having annoying stereotypes about people of color. The way I see it, you can either say “well, it’s supposed to freak you out” or “oh, I totally didn’t mean that, I’m pure and innocent, how can you say this is creepy?” but not both.
And no, Meyer shouldn’t have to stop being herself because she’s made it big–any more than Goodkind has to stop being an Objectivist asshat or McCaffrey has to stop having I-get-my-ideas-from-Mars notions about The Gay–but the self she’s revealed strikes me as kind of dumb, and I’m happy to say as much.

IIRC Stoker at least somewhat wrote Dracula with vampirism being analogous to syphilis. And it wasn’t just the penny dreadfuls that injected (heh) sex into the story. I still find the scene with the Three Brides one of the hottest scenes ever written.

There’s a middle ground between “Doesn’t push any particular belief” and “Has the magic power to force a particular belief on you”. I don’t think that Twilight books force anyone to look at relationships a certain way. I do think they present an unhealthy ideology before young adults in an appealing package.
The trouble is, fundamentalists say something similar about the Harry Potter books: that they present an unhealthy ideology in an appealing package. And I don’t think any of us like it when they do that. It seems like Golden Rule stuff again.
I do think there’s a major difference between Meyer and Rand: Rand was explicitly, didactically ideological: she pushed political ideas and ran what was effectively a cult to push them further, some of whose members became quite powerful and successful. Meyer just wrote a little romance story.
I don’t think of the Twilight books as having an ideology. They have a worldview, but every book has that. That worldview is one much encouraged by an ideology I profoundly disagree with, of course. But like I say, I don’t think Meyer is pushing it, I think she’s just speaking out of it. Possibly it feels more like pushing when it’s a worldview we find antithetical to our own beliefs?
I’m wary of concluding any book is a bad influence without some definite evidence. From what you say, I don’t think either of us have personally encountered any about Twilight, so I feel it best to go with ‘innocent until proven guilty’.

Ako: Yes, and thank you for expressing this.
I’m not in favor of banning the Twilight books–I’m not in favor of banning anything, especially not when I can mock it–or even of not letting teenagers read them, because teenagers should get to read whatever the hell they want. And I sure read all kinds of crap when I was a kid, and turned out mostly functional. Nor does reading and enjoying the books make you a bad person: there’s nothing wrong with enjoying stuff despite the skeevy bits. (q.v. earlier discussion about King, the fact that I like Kipling, etc.)
However! I, as mentioned elsethread, like romance novels. I started reading them when I was a kid–at which point there was still a fair amount of the creep-tastic “nice women don’t want it” mindset in the industry, plenty of “forced seduction” scenes, etc. (Probably not helped by the fact that I bought my reading material from the local used bookstore, so I wasn’t exactly seeing the latest releases.) My mom basically said that I could read and enjoy whatever I wanted, and that was okay*…but she also made a point of telling me, basically, that love didn’t actually work anything like that. A decade or so later, I’m really really glad she did.
So I don’t think books have awesome power to corrupt young minds… as long as people are willing to criticize those books and the ideas they express, and to make those criticisms as public, in whatever way, as the books themselves.
*She did make a token effort to forbid them when I was ten or so, for the same reason she wouldn’t let me see R-rated movies, but it was never more than token and she gave up after realizing I just snuck the damn things in anyhow.

@Izzy-
I would definitely read a book about telepathic puppies that eat your face in the middle of the night!

And I don’t have a problem with anyone criticising them. I hope we can agree that defending a book isn’t the same as trying to stop someone else criticising it?

Kit: Yeah, but I think the fundamental difference is that Harry Potter doesn’t actually present an ideology *about magic*–it presents a world mechanic, which is different. It does, notably, present ideologies about other stuff, or could be read as doing that–”emotions are strength,” “ambition is evil,” “the people you meet in high school are your best friends ever,”–and similar. I’ve seen a fair amount of criticism about these and, while I mostly disagree*, I can see where they’re coming from.
Also, of course, that getting up in arms about a message that magic is okay offends me as someone who’s into the occult. But.
*The high school thing, in particular, seems like a necessary artifact of the setting. “…so Sandy and Danny dated for a little while, but split up when she went to college, and half the T-Birds died in Vietnam…” is not what most people want in an ending.

“…so Sandy and Danny dated for a little while, but split up when she went to college, and half the T-Birds died in Vietnam…” is not what most people want in an ending.
Personally, I think that would be an awesome ending. But that’s just me.

I think the fundamental difference is that Harry Potter doesn’t actually present an ideology *about magic*–it presents a world mechanic, which is different.
That world mechanic seems to be an ideology as far as the fundamentalists criticising it are concerned. Their big objection seems to be that it promotes the idea that you can be a good, indeed a heroic person without being a Christian – while, in fact, doing stuff the Bible explicitly forbids. That seems pretty ideological to me.
I think, again, it comes down to the fact that we’re inclined to think of ideology as what the other guy has: Rowling does have an ideology that does fly in the face of fundamentalist Christianity; it’s just that we agree with it so much that it’s hiding in plain sight.

Kit: Oh, totally. Just sort of clarifying my position on media-as-influence, halfway to myself. (Because it is a good question: would I want my hypothetical twelve-year-old reading Twilight? Would I want my hypothetical eight-year-old playing Postal, for that matter? Well, I wouldn’t be crazy about it, and I’d want to talk to them afterward, but…)

Jason, this is for you: http://www.vampirates.co.uk/

Kit: True. And it’s also true that I wouldn’t object to a book which presented the ideology that, say, homosexuality is a valid life choice, or that women should be able to have and want sex as much as men do, or any of the above. I’d object to one that did so in an anvilicious manner, for stylistic reasons, but on general principle? Excellent!
I guess my objections come down not to the fact that Twilight presents the author’s ideology, but that I find aforesaid ideology repressive, offensive, and just plain dumb. I’m comfortable admitting as much.

It has become fashionable in modern vampire stories to portray these monsters as unaffected or somehow immune to the cross. Don’t you believe it. This confusion arose due to the ridiculous, contradictorily cruciform objects being bandied about these days as “crosses.”
Also, as a side note: Vampires wernt originally portrayed as sicked by crosses. Brahm Stoker created that concept for his novel of Dracula.
Also, at least in his novel, vampires went out in the daytime. Although I’m not sure when that first became part of vampirec lore.

Izzy: The high school thing, in particular, seems like a necessary artifact of the setting. “…so Sandy and Danny dated for a little while, but split up when she went to college, and half the T-Birds died in Vietnam…” is not what most people want in an ending.
Except that I’d read that version of Grease. Then again, I’m far too much in the “life’s shit and I don’t want anyone to pretend otherwise for my benefit” camp to be saved.
Regarding Potter, which I admit to struggling to enjoy, I think that I had an issue with Rowling’s setting, but only in the sense that it felt a bit like how someone who had never been to an English Public School imagined an English Public School to be. It wasn’t exactly a deal breaker – and she’s entitled to make her fictional look and work however she wants – but the Public Schools I’ve known have all been closer to Gormenghast than Hogwarts. I think this was really more a case of personal experience getting in the way than anything else.
The thing I don’t like about the Sparkledammerung is that Meyers lacks any real technical ability. Therefore I can’t sit back and read her novels in a way that I can read others, saying “well, it’s not my thing, but I get where s/he’s coming from and I like this or that part of how s/he’s put it all together”.

That Christian-absorbing-alien idea reminds me of the Ursula LeGuin story “Vaster than Empires, and More Slow.”
I could have sworn Jason knew about Torchwood and had objected to the way the showrunner put his own fantasies in it on another thread. Does anyone else remember this? Maybe I’m confusing Jason with someone else?

“Some mistakenly think that this is because the cross is a holy symbol, imbued with religious power. But this is wrong. The symbol, like the thing itself, is powerless. And that’s the point. That is why vampires can’t tolerate it.”
Nice theory. Doesn’t quite match up with the “text” of vampire lore and legend, though, in which, until very recently, a vampire really was thought of as an evil spirit inhabiting a corpse. This kind of vampire doesn’t “choose” to be a vampire, it simply is one. It doesn’t equate preying on others with power, it simply preys. And it really does believe in the cross. Also, the “symbol of powerless” held by the cross, as you put it, does not go far in explain the effectiveness of holy water.
I think the notion of vampires being resistant to crosses, which really only goes back around 30 or 40 years, is the idea of choice entering the vampire legend. The vampire has become an individual, not just an incomprehensible monster or a force of (super)nature. In other words, modern vampires aren’t predators anymore. They are individuals with problems, compulsions, drives they fight to control. In a case like this, I think, it would seem unkind to brand them evil or unholy.

@lonespark-
I could have sworn Jason knew about Torchwood and had objected to the way the showrunner put his own fantasies in it on another thread. Does anyone else remember this? Maybe I’m confusing Jason with someone else?
Yes, that was me. That was a while ago too. Basically my reaction to Torchwood is this: Russell T. Davies has sexual fantasies. I also have sexual fantasies. I don’t share mine because a lot of people would probably think that is TMI. I don’t want to know most people’s because unless they are similiar to mine they will probably squick me out, which is why they fall into the category of TMI. For this reason, if I had my own science fiction series, I would not try to write episodes that catered to my kinks, because that would alienate parts of the audience that don’t share those kinks. I prefer the Doctor Who universe to be free of the writers’ various kinks as well, because I watch Doctor Who for science fiction stories not any kind of sexual arousal. The Doctor having a hot companion is enough for me. Because of this, I don’t personally care to watch Torchwood. If others do, more power to them. It just doesn’t interest me and I don’t include it in my personal Doctor Who canon.

1. Thanks for the suggestions on media where Jews use Jewish folklore to fight supernatural horrors.
2. I realize that Muslims are rarely shown fighting supernatural beasties using Muslim folklore. OTOH, I’ve never seen Muslims or any other non-Christians having to resort to Christian folklore the way many Jewish characters have been shown like Willow using a cross. I’m wondering if this is a bit of a take that at Judaism by nominally or specifically Christian writers, as a way to show that Judaism is impotent compared to Christianity. Kind of like those old statutes where Judaism is shown as a weak, blindfolded woman while Christianity is depicted as a vigorous young man.
I had an idea for book/movie/TV series/comic where only Jewish folklore is useful against the supernatural forces of evil. The protagonist would be a young Christian woman from the midwest or South who comes to New York City to work. Walking back to her apartment late one-night, she is confronted by a vampire. She takes out her crossm, it does not work. She gets scarred. She is saved by a young Jewish monster hunter, you wards the vampire away with a mezzuzah and defeats it with the kabballah ma’at, the practical kabballah. The rest of the series will deal with the young Chrisitan woman coming to terms with the fact that “Christianity is wrong” while having to deal with supernatural horrors. To bad, I can’t write.
3. When God refers to himself in the plural it is nothing more than the holy equivalent of a human monarch refering to him or herself in the plural. It shows that when God speaks, it is for the entire univerve. God is afterall the adom olam, the King of the Universe.
4. God is not anti-sex and does not have hangups about it. He did create it afterall and made it necessary for procreation.

@redcrow: Right, because any novel with a female narrator obviously cannot possibly have been written to entertain and titillate men.
Off-topic, but I have to mention it because it’s creeping me the hell out: The paper this morning reported that Joshua Bowman, 28, of Falls Church, VA was arrested for trying to bring a shotgun into Obama’s speech to Congress. I went to high school not far from Falls Church with a Josh Bowman, and I’m 28. I think it might be the same guy — and I remember him as being goofy, nebbishy, and quite smart. What the hell happened?

Mark E. Rogers wrote a series of humorous books about a six-foot bipedal tabby cat who happened to be an eighteenth-century Japanese samurai. Miaowara Tomokato, or Samurai Cat, travels in time and space through unexplained means to hunt down the villains who conspired to murder his lord; in the fourth, Tomokato faces down a vampire, with an exchange along the following lines:
Tomokato (brandishing cross): Stay back.
Vampire: If you truly had faith, you wouldn’t need that cross.
Tomokato: Come again?
Vampire: If you truly believed in the power of Christianity to drive me away, your faith alone would be power enough. Since you must use that symbol as a crutch, your belief is clearly not strong: therefore that cross can do nothing to me. (Steps forward, smugly grabbing the cross from the cat’s hand)
Tomokato: Look, buddy, I’m a Buddhist, and all I believe is that you really really wanted me to drop that cross.
(Vampire screams as the cross bursts into flame in his hands)

I don’t, *in principle*, mind hearing other people’s sexual fantasies/romantic daydreams/blah. On the other hand, because romance in general and sexuality in particular is such a goddamn subjective thing, sharing any of these on a wide scale is likely to turn off a few people, even as it turns others on, in a ratio that leans more toward the turn-off the less common the fantasy is. A really really good writer can keep the ratio keyed more toward the turn-on or neutral reaction than would otherwise follow from the fantasy, but even then…well, while watersports or furry…dom or extreme body piercing are all totally cool kinks, I’m unlikely to read even the best novel featuring the above, and I’m going to get a little annoyed at any work where the author springs the above on an unsuspecting audience.
This is a risk you take when deciding to tackle such issues. It’s a legitimate risk–there’s reward there too–but that’s how it goes. To paraphrase Dan Savage: we all have the right to our fetishes, but we don’t have the right to demand that other people don’t go “ew” when we discuss those fetishes in public.

OTOH, I’ve never seen Muslims or any other non-Christians having to resort to Christian folklore the way many Jewish characters have been shown like Willow using a cross.

I have! Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Ms. Calendar and Tara are both pagans and use crosses. Also, I think it’s worth noting that Joss Whedon (who both decided that Willow would be Jewish and that crosses would work on Buffyverse vamps) is an atheist.
Also, how many explicitly non-Christian characters *are* there in Western supernatural horror? Not a whole lot that I can think of.

If I were to tie vampirism to a specific disease, I probably wouldn’t pick an STD; I’d pick rabies. Think about it: a really weird-acting bat bites a guy, and pretty soon he’s hiding in darkness, avoiding running water, biting people, and generally acting like the bat was.

The biggest transmitters of rabies to humans are dogs, not bats. The bat rabies strain is very, very bad at infecting people.
However, vampires also have a strong mythological tie to wolves (pets, shapeshifting, and so forth), so it still applies….

A really really good writer can keep the ratio keyed more toward the turn-on or neutral reaction than would otherwise follow from the fantasy, but even then…well, while watersports or furry…dom or extreme body piercing are all totally cool kinks, I’m unlikely to read even the best novel featuring the above, and I’m going to get a little annoyed at any work where the author springs the above on an unsuspecting audience.
Doesn’t that assume, though, that the writer will be completely self-aware about their own turn-ons? I don’t think everyone is that self-aware; they may just find certain subjects strangely interesting and hence keep returning to them, or assume they’re normal and that everyone considers ‘childishly small breasts’ or ‘thickly-haired back’ to be a short-hand for ‘attractive’.

Lee Ratner: old statutes where Judaism is shown as a weak, blindfolded woman while Christianity is depicted as a vigorous young man
Not quite. In medieval art, both Judaism (“Synagoge”) and Christianity (“Ecclesia”=”Church”) were depicted as women (like most personifications of abstract ideas, which tend to be of feminine gender in Latin).
Synagoge was indeed depicted as blindfolded (signifying that she didn’t recognize that Jesus was the Messiah, which was taken to be blindingly obvious by medieval Christians) and usually either losing her grip on the tablets of the Law (since she didn’t grasp the supposedly “true” allegorical meaning of the Law) or holding a broken staff. Ecclesia was depicted usually wearing a crown and holding either a cross or a chalice, or both, referring to her power as coming from the sacrifice of Christ on the cross (the chalice representing the reenactment of that sacrifice in the Eucharist).
In other words, the symbolism was triumphalist (and understandably offensive to Jews), but no sexism was involved in the representation.

On Chinese vampires:
There’s a hysterically funny scene in the Korean drama Hong Gil Dong where two characters compare and contrast the horrors of Chinese and Korean vampires, and imagine what a fight might look like. There’s no youtube, but the whole episode’s online (it’s the second half of the show, AFAIR).

Kit: It does, but I think that a certain amount of self-awareness is one of the necessary attributes of a good writer–and, indeed, a functional adult–particularly about kinks and squicks. For instance, liking your chicks on the small-busted side is a perfectly valid preference; going on about how gorgeously flat so-and-so is, and reacting to more voluptuous women with “oh my God, don’t you think that’s icky?” will not make me want to spend more than five minutes around you, let alone give you money for a book that expresses said views.
I don’t, in general, have a lot of patience for people who haven’t examined their reactions and the reasons behind them at least a little before opening their mouths or their word processors–I am not anyone’s mother or kindergarten teacher, and I am not, in LARPer terminology, a new-player mod–but then, I don’t have a lot of patience in general.

Ah, and that would be episode two, available at http://www.mysoju.com/hong-gil-dong/.

@Izzy-
You managed to much more eloquently sum up the reasons why I don’t care to watch Torchwood.
Doesn’t that assume, though, that the writer will be completely self-aware about their own turn-ons? I don’t think everyone is that self-aware; they may just find certain subjects strangely interesting and hence keep returning to them, or assume they’re normal and that everyone considers ‘childishly small breasts’ or ‘thickly-haired back’ to be a short-hand for ‘attractive’
There’s a difference between using physical descriptions that turn you on personally and revolving entire plot points around your various sexual kinks. I find it hard to believe that John Norman didn’t know what he was doing when he wrote Gor. I don’t think that its possible to write a story that involves kinky stuff without realizing what you are doing.

A friend of mine opined that the cross repels vampires because it’s a symbol of resurrection; undeath is a cheap knock-off edition of resurrection and therefore vampires recoil when they are reminded of the genuine article.

Froborr: Also, how many explicitly non-Christian characters *are* there in Western supernatural horror?
It depends how you mean, really… I mean, I’m not entirely certain that Constantine, for example, is a Christian as such. He simply knows that’s what’s up there. I’m sure that plenty of others would fall into that category.
Izzy on kinks (I’ll take Peter Quaife for ten, please, Bob): I think that the trick is that it can’t be all about the kink, certainly not if it’s one of those less well-known, or more potentially squickiful. Then again, if your particular kink is a well-dressed, volutuous woman verbally sparring with a hardboiled detective, well there’s an entire genre out there for you.

I don’t think that its possible to write a story that involves kinky stuff without realizing what you are doing.
Er, one person’s kink can be another person’s perfectly normal. And we were talking about incomplete self-awareness, so I don’t really think this contention stands.
That a person would never realize it at least to some extent after the fact does seem a bit unlikely in the days of the internet unless they are in a very sheltered subculture, but who knows.

Then again, if your particular kink is a well-dressed, volutuous woman verbally sparring with a hardboiled detective, well there’s an entire genre out there for you.
That’s the kind of thing I thought of when Jason said hot Doctor companions are enough for him. If your kink lines up with popular tropes, you can access it more easily.

I don’t see what’s so bad about criticizing public expression for its potential moral effect. It doesn’t equate to censorship of those ideas any more than criticism of said criticism equates to censorship of criticism. And it’s a hugely relevant part of anyone’s reaction to a fictional work — as Orwell said, all art *is* propaganda just as much as it is art in the “abstract”, all art reflects the ideology and the moral agenda and the Way I Wish Things Would Be of the artist, and talking about what that is — especially when America, at least, appears to be in an increasingly heated and high-stakes Culture War — matters.
In any case obviously there will never be *proof* that Twilight has had a specific negative influence on our nation’s youth unless someone can find a way to do an empirical scientifically controlled survey on the matter, which I think is basically impossible (there’s basically no way you can scientifically analyze the “impact” of one cultural work in isolation, since any Before/After comparison is also going to be Before/After a ton of other things that happened at the same time as Twilight).
That said, there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence that people are taking this book to heart on a level dissimilar to that of other books, which is the whole reason there’s a multibillion-dollar hype machine built up around it and it’s become a “phenomenon” and whatnot. When there’s a proliferation of over a dozen YouTube videos all on the theme (I’m not making this up or exaggerating) of “How To Get Your Boyfriend To Be MOre Like Edward Cullen”, then no, I don’t think you can say Edward-As-Ideal-Man is only being propagated in a safe, purely-fantastic sense.
And it’s not just about Edward-As-Ideal-Man; the series is chock-full of other memes that I think of as destructive and ugly, like Women Only Have Worth If They Can Bear Children, which is a constant assumed background fact about the series (one of the werewolf chicks says it explicitly when she explains why she’s bitter about being an immortal-but-sterile werewolf, for instance) and it’s definitely one reason the book has been so wholeheartedly embraced by the RTC Right and it’s something that disturbs and upsets me. Of course Twilight is not personally responsible for spreading this belief system and the belief system would not vanish if Twilight vanished, but I still have leeway to be mad at an incredibly popular cultural phenomenon that advances this ideology. (It’s not like Ayn Rand is personally responsible for the existence of the asshole libertarian right-wing — something most people, including herself, give her way too much credit for — but I’m mad at her books nonetheless.)
And this isn’t about “blaming” Meyer as a human being. I don’t hold particular ill will toward her as a person — if I were forced to speculate on it, I’d think of her as a victim of a certain belief system just as much as any of her fans (the whole “Why can’t real men be more like Edward?” mindset is not the mindset of a fulfilled person who’s been given reasonable expectations about romance, IMO) but in the end it’s irrelevant. Meyer didn’t set out to make the books a phenomenon, but they are a phenomenon. She probably didn’t set out to make Edward an idealized role model (though she certainly hasn’t resisted him becoming so), but he is nonetheless. The books have to be engaged on the level of what they are, not what the author intended them to be. (Although one reason people find the author annoying is that when she’s been given a public soapbox about the books she’s wholeheartedly embraced their runaway success and shown that she has the same attitude as the fangirls, when generally fandom expects authors to at least kind of be the Voice of Reason for a fandom gone wild.)
As for criticizing Harry Potter for pushing a certain ideology, plenty of people do, and they aren’t all fundamentalist Christians who “hate magic”. See this essay, for example.

Jason: Thanks! I do disagree on the possibility of unconscious kinkfic, though: I think it’s certainly possible, but that the story *tends to be* worse, and that the authors of said stories *tend to be* among the flip-outiest when confronted with the “…so, is this a thing for you or what?” question. And the “oh my God of course not I write from PURE ARTISTIC SENSIBILITY” tantrum annoys me far more than a calm “…yep, I like feisty blondes who get tied up more than you might expect,” ever could.

@Launcifer: Hence my use of “explicit” — I’m restricting to characters explicitly stated to not be Christian.

OTOH, I’ve never seen Muslims or any other non-Christians having to resort to Christian folklore the way many Jewish characters have been shown like Willow using a cross.
That’s because Muslims basically do not exist in Western pop culture except in very limited settings, none of which overlap with “horror/paranormal romance/gothic adventure”.
I mean, srsly, the reason you keep picturing Jewish people getting the short end of the stick is that Jewish people *exist in these stories at all* — when someone wants to take a character and make them interesting by giving them a “non-standard” religion that religion is Judaism. It’s never Buddhism or Hinduism unless the story specifically takes place in an Eastern country where that becomes part of the “local flavor”, and it’s never Islam. At all.

I think that a certain amount of self-awareness is one of the necessary attributes of a good writer
I don’t think anybody was calling Stephenie Meyer a good writer, though. Or at least, not an accomplished one in the artistic sense. I’ve been sort of assuming that went without saying.
She’s clearly good at getting people hooked on her books, so there’s a certain kind of talent there. Personally I think one of her main attractions is that the books are kind of hard to remember in detail and limited in strong characterisation and action – they’re mostly talking and thinking, and those thoughts and talks all revolve around the same subject – which makes them not so much stories as blank screens onto which readers can project their own fantasies. Which means that a lot of people will remember the books as perfectly satisfying, because in their own minds they’ve molded them into something that perfectly meets their personal desires, and the books are vague enough that they won’t contradict them very much.
It’s an interesting thing, I think: people are unusually prone to ‘remember’ this or that element of Twilight that simply isn’t there, and I suspect that’s a selling point – books you consume by misremembering them. I think I said this in one of the comments on my blog post: Twilight isn’t exactly a book you read, it’s a book you fantasise about. Or mock, or analyse, but actually reading it doesn’t seem like the way it’s consumed. Which is interesting as a phenomenon even if it’s not the most gripping of books.

In re: Art’s link: Yes, that’s *exactly* what I hated about the seventh book! Well, that and the final abandonment of everything that made Hermione interesting or admirable.

In re: Art’s link: Yes, that’s *exactly* what I hated about the seventh book! Well, that and the final abandonment of everything that made Hermione interesting or admirable.

(not caught up yet but posting this before I forget)
Re Froborr’s point about the Count earlier: there’s a folk belief that you can keep the Devil out of your house by hanging a sieve or colander on the door. Being compulsively curious, the Devil will stop to count the holes. But three signifies the Holy Trinity, so every time he gets up to three, he has to start over.
Re Chinese vampires, I am reminded of this great commercial featuring traditional Thai ghosts and monsters.
Lori: Which means that if we experience an invasion of Chinese vampires I’ll either be the first to die because I fail to take them seriously, or the last one left standing because I’m not impressed and therefore don’t panic. Which one happens will of course depend on whether I’m the heroine of the story or just a random extra.
Maybe you’re the Plucky Comic Relief!

Launcifer: Yeah, pretty much. Likewise, if your kink is “mostly vanilla het sex in romanticized historical surroundings”, you will do well in mainstream romance. Go to. And anything that’s explicitly marketed as porn, of course, *can* be all about the kink; that’s the point of the genre.
It’s also worth noting, as a sort of balance to the stuff I’ve been saying, that it’s nigh-impossible for anyone to create a completely kink-or-squick free work, either for themselves or for others. Since most authors write at least partly because they enjoy it, many of them are going to assign values and appearances that appeal to them to the sympathetic characters, and the reverse to the villains. (Some don’t, and that’s great, but the other way is fine too.) And even the most vanilla romance will inadvertantly turn a few people off because the lead has the same name as their father or their rat-bastard ex was from Texas or whatever. Author Appeal isn’t good or bad–it depends on the author.

For another take on the cross/etc symbol and power of vampires, I think someone in a previous thread touched on the way they’re presented in Jim Butcher’s “Dresden Files” series.
In this case, it’s the belief and faith that matters. The protagonist uses a pentagram necklace that was given to him by his mother, and clearly states that a cross wouldn’t work for him. Another character – who is a Christian Knight – obviously uses something different
And Butcher takes it a step further: if someone is truly in love, his/her blood is toxic to vampires. A home is protected by the love/etc of the people who live there, which gives the threshold effect (and, in turn, explains why public places are not protected the same way). Part of the power of Dresden’s pentagram is that it came from his mother, and her love has protective power (perhaps even moreso than religious belief).
Anyway, it seemed like an interesting take, in line with Fred’s suggestion that the real power isn’t necessarily the symbol itself, so much as the emotion behind it.

Froborr, I still don’t see where you get “the male fantasy of being raped” in “Carmilla” unless it’s “the male fantasy of *a woman* being raped”, or there are much more straight men who like to imagine themselves asa virginal damsels in danger than I thought. But, truth be told, I’m not interested in arguing about it, sorry. I don’t think either of us is really so desperate to change the other’s point of view.

I don’t see what’s so bad about criticizing public expression for its potential moral effect.
If you can substantiate your claims, nothing at all. But there is something very wrong with treating assumptions, worries and/or anecdotes as if they were hard data. Which I don’t think anyone here was doing, but precisely because it’s so difficult to prove we need to be careful before we say anything is corrupting. It involves massive speculation about the states of mind of people who aren’t us, which is an extremely difficult proposition.
When there’s a proliferation of over a dozen YouTube videos all on the theme (I’m not making this up or exaggerating) of “How To Get Your Boyfriend To Be MOre Like Edward Cullen”, then no, I don’t think you can say Edward-As-Ideal-Man is only being propagated in a safe, purely-fantastic sense.
Okay, I just typed that phrase into YouTube and found nothing. If you can link me to something that proves it, please do.
As for criticizing Harry Potter for pushing a certain ideology, plenty of people do, and they aren’t all fundamentalist Christians who “hate magic”.
I don’t think that’s relevant to the point I was making, which is that if we condemn Twilight as pushing an ideology (rather than seeing it as the brainchild of someone who happens to subscribe to that way of thinking) we’re being about as sensible as Christians who see Harry Potter as pushing an ideology. The fact that other people criticise Harry Potter for other reasons neither refutes nor supports that point.
The main point I’m making is that if we’re talking about morality, we have to be consistent. Criticising a book because you don’t like its worldview is fine – as I keep saying, I’m no fan of Twilight either – but if we’re going to start talking about its morally corrupting effect without any proof, I think we’ll find ourselves in company we wouldn’t wish to keep. ‘Has bad values’ is a different proposition from ‘teaches bad lessons’; the former is easy to argue, the latter very, very hard. Provide evidence and it’s fair, but without evidence it’s inadvisable. And if we want the right to criticise people we don’t agree with for sweeping condemnations of stuff we think is harmless, that means we should apply the same standards to ourselves when condemning stuff we don’t like: we need to be precise and careful rather than sweeping.

That’s a great ad, Lila, thanks!
Also agree with Lonespark about one person’s kink is another person’s normal.

Re fear of the dead: the Malagasy traditionally dig their ancestors up periodically.
Re good vampire novels: Steven Brust’s Agyar is the only one I really like.
Re Alien Eats Self-Sacrificing Christian: a different take on a similar theme is the excellent short story “Food to All Flesh” by Zenna Henderson, found in the anthology The Anything Box. Tangentially, Zenna Henderson was also a Mormon, but I find her use of that background (in her novels of The People) much more interesting and congenial than Meyer’s.
I have not read the Twilight books, but I am inherently suspicious of anything aimed at an audience of preteen-to-teen girls that glorifies stalker behavior. As Gavin de Becker can testify, there are plenty of people out there in the real world who act like this, and they are the people you need to STAY THE FUCK AWAY FROM. Would I ban the books? No. But if I were a teacher or parent of a preteen girl, I think I’d have a little talk about People In Real Life Who Remind You of Edward, and how relationships with them tend not to go too well. (Regulars here may recall that this past April I witnessed a triple murder, the perpetrator of which was the husband of one of the victims. This is not entirely irrelevant to my feelings on the matter.)

A fantasy designed to appeal to girls in their early teens – or women who want to relive the experiences of their early teens – is necessarily going to be immature: it’s not addressed to adults. The fantasies of teenage girls can’t be mature because teenage girls aren’t mature, and blaming them for that is as unfair as blaming children for being childish.

One of the reasons that Twilight as a phenomenon bugs me so much is the way that so many adult fans engage with it. I’ve met, in person and online, so many adult women who love it and talk about it in a way that is clearly not framed as enjoyment in reliving a past, immature part of their lives. They are instead totally immersed in it, in the now. That gives me the creeps in so many ways I can’t even list them all. (Obviously not all adult fans treat the books that way and I’m not suggesting that they do. However, the ones who do are not a tiny minority.)
Also, it seems to be somewhat contradictory to say that Twilight is an immature fantasy and that we shouldn’t blame children for being childish while simultaneously saying that Meyer simply wrote her personal fantasies and shouldn’t be held responsible for their implications. Meyer isn’t a child.
I absolutely agree that Meyer was simply writing down her fantasies, but that makes me more critical of her work, not less. Like Izzy, I have no issue with people writing about their fantasies, kinky or not. However, I also agree that a certain level of self-awareness is necessary to be a good writer and a functional adult. I don’t expect or even desire perfect awareness, but there’s a base level that I do expect. On that score I think Meyer fails miserably and I can’t bring myself to cut her much slack over it.

I don’t think everyone is that self-aware; they may just find certain subjects strangely interesting and hence keep returning to them, or assume they’re normal and that everyone considers ‘childishly small breasts’ or ‘thickly-haired back’ to be a short-hand for ‘attractive’.

Using this an an example, I think that any adult who thinks that everyone considers ‘childishly small breasts’ or ‘thickly-haired back’ to be a short-hand for ‘attractive’ is engaging in a level of willful blindness that’s pretty inexcusable for anyone, but more so for a writer.
Meyers certainly isn’t the only author to have this problem. It turns up with some regularity in romance novels and erotica and I gripe about it all the time. One of the worst criticisms that I can make about a romance writer is “she is showing me way too much of the inside of her head”. I’m giving my time and money to read a novel, not the author’s diary. Having enough distance from the subject matter to make that distinction is sort of the minimum I expect from a person being paid to write.
Of course that doesn’t mean that I “blame” Meyer exactly. I just think she’s a very bad writer. I also think that the success of Twilight is likely to be reinforcing in a way that pretty much guarantees she’ll never get any better. I also join Izzy in having impression that she’s sort of dumb and that I wouldn’t last 20 minutes in a room with her without wanting to pull out my hair, but that’s another issue.

Someone has already mentioned Peter Watts’ Blindisght, but you MUST make the time to sit down and watch his presentation on vampire evolution and biology. It’s wickedly smart and funny.
(I’ll quote myself from elsewhere):
The mythical corporation FizerPharm (“Trust. Profit. Deniability.”) share their detailed research into the evolution and possible commercial applications of Homo sapiens whedonum. You will learn: How and why the “crucifix glitch” came about. Why you should run from a blushing vampire. How many kilograms of human are needed to make one kilogram of vampire. How vampires resemble two year old humans, domestic shorthaired cats, and lungfish. And why “survival of the fittest” should be reconceptualized as “survival of the least inadequate”.
If you don’t want to stream 36 minutes of Flash video, you can download the WMV or a PDF transcript from here.

Lori, re S. Meyer: “…I wouldn’t last 20 minutes in a room with her without wanting to pull out my hair….”
I think I’d be more likely to want to pull out HER hair.

Lori: Which means that if we experience an invasion of Chinese vampires I’ll either be the first to die because I fail to take them seriously, or the last one left standing because I’m not impressed and therefore don’t panic. Which one happens will of course depend on whether I’m the heroine of the story or just a random extra.
Maybe you’re the Plucky Comic Relief!

That’s probably true. I think I’m definitely more likely to be Plucky Comic Relief than the heroine.

That Thai commercial made my day. I tried to listen to it in Thai, but the subtitles kept messing me up. Oh well.

The Eccclasia statues always looked masculine to me for some reason. I guess I was wrong.

Lori: I absolutely agree that Meyer was simply writing down her fantasies, but that makes me more critical of her work, not less.
In a very strange sort of way, this makes me feel a little sorry for her. I don’t want to sit here and bash them, because that’s not exactly fair, but I am somewhat surprised that they’re so… I don’t know – unformed? Maybe I really am being unfair here, but I would have hoped that, if I were to write down my own extended romantic/emotional or lifestyle fantasy and call it a novel, that it would have more definition to it; I daresay it’d have been bouncing around my head for quite some time for me to physically write it out. Then again, maybe Meyers set out to tell a really good – and entirely different – story and her subconscious simply beat her to the keyboard every morning.
However, I also agree that a certain level of self-awareness is necessary to be a good writer and a functional adult.
I do think that this is an issue, though. It may well come down to craft, but I would have thought that something as central to the plot and ‘explicitly’ realised would entail some degree of awareness on the part of the writer. If she isn’t aware of her own stake in the thing, then that really would make me doubt… well, lots of things.

this past April I witnessed a triple murder, the perpetrator of which was the husband of one of the victims.
Horrible. How are you doing now?
Also, it seems to be somewhat contradictory to say that Twilight is an immature fantasy and that we shouldn’t blame children for being childish while simultaneously saying that Meyer simply wrote her personal fantasies and shouldn’t be held responsible for their implications. Meyer isn’t a child.
Yes, that’s a fair point. The reason I said that, though, was simply because Art was saying ‘immature-teen-girl’ as if there was something inherently wrong with immature teen girls – actual teen girls rather than adult women who haven’t moved on. Adults are a separate question; I trying to defend Meyer’s teenage fans rather than Meyer herself at that point.
Thing is, I’m not saying that Stephenie Meyer is a good writer; I never did. At least, not by the standards I judge books by. I think she’s an interesting writer because she’s been so successful, but that doesn’t mean I think the books are, in any conventional sense of the word, good.
As to whether she’s a functional adult – who knows? We’ve never met her. She’s clearly a successful adult, at least. Beyond that, she might be a charming and sensible person who’s the light of everyone’s life, she might be a monstrous disaster, she might be an ordinary human being with faults and virtues like the rest of us. I really don’t feel comfortable pronouncing on whether a total stranger who I’ve encountered only through their fiction is a functional person.
Aside from it not being my place, I’ve found from reading slush piles and the like over the years that the nicest, most reasonable person in the world can produce a book that, were you to read it with no knowledge of the author, would lead you to assume the author was half-crazed. It takes a certain amount of artistic talent to write a book that doesn’t make you look screwed up one way or another. You create a world to the best of your abilities, and if your best isn’t great that world is going to wobble at the corners and be populated by strange half-human characters and generally feel like Bizarroland – just because you haven’t the aptitude to write something that feels like reality. What could be interpreted as immaturity in Meyer could equally be interpreted as just the limitations of her skill.
At base, I think, I don’t take Meyer’s writing seriously enough to hold it up to professional standards. Like I said, she wrote some not-very-good stuff; people do it all the time, and it doesn’t say very much about them except that they’re not brilliant writers. She feels to me like something between a vampire fan writer who got published and one of those people with an unconscious knack for channelling something that resonates in a lot of minds. I think it’s possible that other people here are assessing her as a writer and I’m assessing her as a fantasist who happened to write the fantasies down and sell them. If I was judging her as a writer I’d probably be a lot more judgemental, but I don’t want to judge anyone for their fantasies.
(And I feel, for the record, like that’s saying a very unkind thing for which I feel rather guilty. I’d be crushed if someone read my books and said it about me. I can only hope that Meyer wouldn’t take it in the same spirit.)
Question: the adult fans who you say are absorbed in Twilight with no perspective: would you say, in cases where you know them well enough to comment, that they were mature people? What are they like outside their enjoyment of Twilight?

3. When God refers to himself in the plural it is nothing more than the holy equivalent of a human monarch refering to him or herself in the plural. It shows that when God speaks, it is for the entire univerve. God is afterall the adom olam, the King of the Universe.
Yes, that’s the scrambling exegesis I meant. I’m not talking about “Elohim” (although I think there’s a pretty strong case to be made for that originally being an address to the whole pantheon that got redefined when the Israelites went monolatrist). I’m talking about the “Man has now become like one of us” bit- you can’t have “one of” a category consisting of a unique thing that encompasses the entire universe. So what the heck are “us”?
4. God is not anti-sex and does not have hangups about it. He did create it afterall and made it necessary for procreation.
…Yahweh has no hangups about sex. So why exactly are menstruating women niddah, and why did he chose to mark his covenant by asking his men to lop off part of their penis? Face it, Lee, vaginas and things that go into them make our God kind of twitchy. Also shellfish and crop rotation, but most of the other laws made some sort of vague sense at the time. The sexual stuff is all Yahweh.
Anyway if you go by the rib version of Genesis apparently he originally made us parthenogenic, since he wasn’t going to make a woman until Adam started whining that he was lonely.
————
Jews vs. the supernatural: try this story
I don’t remember it well, but IIRC the Tree of Life shows up somewhere and kicks some ass.
————–
I don’t see what’s so bad about criticizing public expression for its potential moral effect.
Me neither. Especially in a children’s book. I don’t bear Meyer any ill will because I think she’s a moron who doesn’t know what she’s doing (I have a lot more problems with, say, Orson Scott Card, who knows exactly what he’s doing and deliberately slips some pernicious ideas into his books), but she’s got a horribly warped view of how vanilla heterosexual romance should work, and I think girls could be dangerously misinformed by her books. I’m not advocating censorship or anything, but I would certainly object vehemently to, say, the Twilight series being placed on a summer reading list.
Kinky kids will manage. I have a pretty strong dominance/submission kink that predated my literacy; I was making up Land Before Time slave fanfiction in kindergarten. But I don’t think my life would have been improved by someone handing me a Gor book and acting like it depicted normal relationships. Vanilla is vanilla for a reason; it’s the average, and departures from it risk venturing into territory in which people can get lost or hurt. Exploring that territory is great if you know what you’re doing, but teenagers are inexperienced by definition, and we should show them how to swim in shallow water before sending them out into the undertow.

html closure fail. Let’s try again:
try this story
I don’t remember it well, but IIRC the Tree of Life shows up somewhere and kicks some ass.

Launcifer: Well, yes and no–the woman put ‘em out there. And if someone I’m not close friends with starts, unasked for, telling me all about how she wants a white knight to come and sweep her away and take care of her forever, I feel absolutely justified in saying “My God, that’s stupid and antiquated–learn to take care of yourself, woman! Also, why do you think I care? We’re in line at the Post Office here…” But then, I’m mean.
Lori: Yep. Even when I share the author’s fetish/worldview/whatever, it can get irksome–q.v. the recent thread about King. I’m not the biggest fan of the military-industrial complex, and I totally get why the man feels the way he does, but after a while…dude, you grew up in the sixties. We get it; now please get over it.

Kit: Makes sense. Personally, I’m much more inclined to think that the face you show to the public–including whatever work you produce and the way you respond to criticisms of that work–is the face the public gets to judge you on. If Meyer wants me to percieve her as a functional adult, she can either start writing less creepy stuff or say something more “Oh, well, I know these guys are creepy in real life,” when asked about them. But again: mean.

I was talking with my roommate last night, she’s never read the Twilight books or seen the movie. So she’s not heard that in those books vampires aren’t even hurt by daylight.
“What?! The one constant about vampire lore is 1) drinking blood 2) can’t go out in sunlight.”
Everything else seems mutable.

@Izzy-
Well, yes and no–the woman put ‘em out there. And if someone I’m not close friends with starts, unasked for, telling me all about how she wants a white knight to come and sweep her away and take care of her forever, I feel absolutely justified in saying “My God, that’s stupid and antiquated–learn to take care of yourself, woman! Also, why do you think I care? We’re in line at the Post Office here…” But then, I’m mean.
THIS! There are things that go on in my mind that I realize that a lot of other people may not appreciate, may be squicked out by, and probably don’t care to know about, so I don’t share those things. I might if a close friend asked in private, but that person would have to assure me that they *really* want to know. People are free to share their fantasies just as I am free to not want to hear about them, which is why neither Twilight or Torchwood appeal to me.

Fred will you pretty please write more about The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power? Pleeeeassse! Why is Doug Coe a vampire?

Izzy: Then again, they’re out there, but in a way that’s unavoidable. You don’t have to buy the books, or watch the films. It’s not quite like being trapped in a queue with someone who won’t shut up about them (though here I recommend responding with a sentence containing the words “Cleveland Steamer”, “chocolate milkshake” and “munchies”. That always works for me). I think it’s like people have said already: they’re her fantasies, which is fair enough, but getting them into print means asking people to treat as something else entirely. I don’t have Kit’s forebearance where that sort of thing is concerned.

Hmmmm…so maybe Doug Coe is a “Twilight” vampire then. The kind that CAN go out in daylight.

“…but not in a way that’s unavoidable”, Throne it!

>>>The one constant about vampire lore is 1) drinking blood 2) can’t go out in sunlight
1) – yes, 2) – not really. Lord Ruthven didn’t have any problems with sunlight, and, if I’m nos mistaken, so did(n’t) Dracula.

Question: the adult fans who you say are absorbed in Twilight with no perspective: would you say, in cases where you know them well enough to comment, that they were mature people? What are they like outside their enjoyment of Twilight?

The adult Twilight fans that I know who have no perspective fall into 2 broad categories.
One group is kinky and just can’t or won’t own it. They’re immersed in the world of Twilight precisely because it presents their kink as The Way Things Really Are/Should Be and thus allows them to get off without dealing with their own reality. I tend to think that failure to own one’s kinks is a mark of stunted emotional growth so I would describe them as rather immature, at least in that respect. One of the reasons that I have a negative impression of Meyer herself is that she seems to fit this category.
The second group is made up of women who are having a tough time in their lives and as a result are experiencing an extreme need to be either seen as special or to be taken care of. They’ve attached themselves to the fantasy of Twilight to meet those needs because they aren’t being met in real life. (This is different than the sort of “escapist” reading that many people, including me, do—like the difference between taking a break and running away.)
I don’t think that’s necessarily a sign of immaturity, but I don’t think it’s particularly healthy either. For at least one of the women I think Twilight fandom is one of several things that are keeping her stuck rather than facing her situation squarely and improving it. The problem with it, as with many things, is one of degree not kind. (And just to be clear, the fault for that lies with the woman, not with Meyer or the fandom in general.)

but I would have hoped that, if I were to write down my own extended romantic/emotional or lifestyle fantasy and call it a novel, that it would have more definition to it; I daresay it’d have been bouncing around my head for quite some time for me to physically write it out.
There’s an idea that’s been kicking around in my head for a few years that I think could make for an interesting novel, but I’ve been reluctant to do anything with it because in many ways it’s simply a catalog of some of my assorted kinks. (Actually, it’s more or less slash fiction based on some real people I’ve known.) However, while my personal kinks provide the genesis of the concept, there is much more to it, and if I were to actually write it down those other elements would be the primary focus, not the kink aspects.
Still, even with all of the other elements to work with, I still have difficulty contemplating writing it simply because of the kink aspects and the attendant fear that I’d fall into some of the traps that others have mentioned here.
Also, I’m lazy.

NewsCat: In fairness, Dracula could too–he just didn’t have as much power, I think.
Launcifer: Pretty much. Basically, I adhere to the fandom_wank principle that anything public is fair game for mockery, if it deserves that, so…y’know, if you want to maintain the pristine shiny awesomeness of your personal fantasies, keep ‘em personal. Heat, kitchen, etc.
Also, hee! One of the benefits of reading books about serial killers is that they usually keep people in lines or on the T from talking to me.

Redcrow: If I recall, though, Dracula called down the fog, or at least some heavy cloud cover, in order to create at least a vague barrier between himself and the sun.
Lori: They’re immersed in the world of Twilight precisely because it presents their kink as The Way Things Really Are/Should Be and thus allows them to get off without dealing with their own reality.
That said, though, there’s absolutely no reason why they should own up to it. Their peccadilos are their own business – and I fear there’s enough of that going on already, what with the bottom-feeding celebrity subculture and its scrutiny by the red-top and tabloid media. If people are self-aware enough to know that this is why they enjoy them, then that’s fine by me, though I don’t want to hear about that, either. I know you’re suggesting that the ones you know seem not to be, but as long as they don’t somehow dump it into my lap, I might be able to live with that as well.

Izzy: Also, hee! One of the benefits of reading books about serial killers is that they usually keep people in lines or on the T from talking to me.
Hey, whatcha readin’ there, looks interesting, oh, what a coincidence, I’m into serial killers too, uh, I mean, I’m not some kind of wannabe serial killer or anything – oh, and I’m sure you’re not either – I’m just saying, I think that book shows we have something in common, so, er, hey, wanna go get coffee or something so we can talk about, uh, you know, like, serial killers and stuff, and, um, …

I think it’s like people have said already: they’re her fantasies, which is fair enough, but getting them into print means asking people to treat as something else entirely. I don’t have Kit’s forebearance where that sort of thing is concerned.
Again, I think it may come from having worked in publishing. By slush pile standards, Meyer’s work is excellent. Wanting to get your stuff published is nothing unusual; pretty much everybody does.
Too, when you send a book to publishers, you know they’re free to say no. You know that readers are free not to buy your book if you don’t write it. You hope your stuff will meet a receptive audience (and Meyer was right in hoping that) but if you have half a brain you know that people have the perfect right to refuse to take you seriously; you just hope there will be others who do. Now admittedly a lot of people who try to get published seem not to have half a brain, but they’re generally worse writers than Meyer. I don’t see anything wrong with just asking: people can always refuse. I mean heck, I’m mostly seeing them as fantasies, so clearly it’s an option.
One group is kinky and just can’t or won’t own it … The second group is made up of women who are having a tough time in their lives and as a result are experiencing an extreme need to be either seen as special or to be taken care of.
See, I feel rather sorry for both those groups. It’s tough if you can’t accept your own sexuality; it means you’re at odds with yourself and are almost certainly haunted by the sense that there’s something shamefully wrong with you. Better if you can learn to accept yourself, but we all have different pressures put on us and it’s not always easy. And if you’re having a tough time and feeling unsupported and undervalued, that’s just sad.
I do agree with you that fantasising about a better life is no substitute for fixing things. It can be very dangerous. But like you say, that’s a matter of individual choice; people can obsess about pretty much anything if they want to shut the world out.

Raj: and how often do you really think that Izzy’s going to be approached by Geoff from Coupling?

Basically, I adhere to the fandom_wank principle that anything public is fair game for mockery, if it deserves that, so…y’know, if you want to maintain the pristine shiny awesomeness of your personal fantasies, keep ‘em personal. Heat, kitchen, etc.

I tend to agree, especially when someone is getting paid for their work. I tend to hold back on public ridicule of stuff that people put on the internet for free. I think it, but I don’t usually say it unless the person does something to seriously deserve it. (I’m mean, but not as comfortable with it as Izzy is–the lingering effects of my upbringing.)
@Launcifer: I also feel a bit sorry for Meyer, but somehow that feels even more judgmental to me than being critical. I think that’s because, if forced to chose, I would prefer to be irritating than pathetic.

There are things that go on in my mind that I realize that a lot of other people may not appreciate, may be squicked out by, and probably don’t care to know about, so I don’t share those things.

Exactly. I have felt compelled on more than one occasion to point out that there exists an absolutely perfect container for one’s deepest fantasies—it’s called your head. I absolutely think that sex should, within certain boundaries of appropriate time and place, be discussed openly and honestly. US culture has far too many hang-ups about sex and it would be to our advantage to get rid of them. However, that doesn’t mean that most people need to know every detail of what gets you off. If you chose to share you have to accept that many people are going to react badly to it.

The problem with not owning your kinks is really that people–especially people like me, disinclined to give anyone the benefit of the doubt–will then take whatever-it-is as your view of The Way Things Really Are/Should Be, and get pissy about it. “I like being dominated by men,” in the right context, will get an “oh, cool, have a beer” or similar from me. “I really like this movie because the hero puts the heroine in her place as a woman,” will get either a fairly irate discussion about what a woman’s “place” is/should be and feminism and agency and what the fuck is wrong with you, dipshit, or will make me suddenly remember that I need to refill my drink and never speak to you again, depending again on context.

I don’t think anyone here has said that Twilight isn’t fair game for mockery. All I’ve said is that I personally find it more interesting to think about why it’s so popular than to take the mickey; I mean, it’s a fairly naive book and when it comes to mickey-taking it feels like a bit of a sitting target – but that doesn’t explain why it’s such a huge seller, which is its most distinctive feature.

Raj: Bwah! Okay, good point.

@Lori-
I think it, but I don’t usually say it unless the person does something to seriously deserve it. (I’m mean, but not as comfortable with it as Izzy is–the lingering effects of my upbringing.)
…but usually when Izzy says something, she has some sort of problem with the values behind it and that’s why she’s making fun of it, rather than just making fun of it because she thinks its stupid. Its kind of like how Fred snarks on Left Behind because he thinks its a horrible version of his faith and wants to discredit it, while the MST3K guys snark on movies just for the pure sport of making fun of movies (though I don’t find the MST3K guys mean, mainly I just find them funny and likable). Izzy is usually snarking for much the same reason that Fred is.
I think that the perfect example of meanness just for the sake of meanness on the internet is the website Something Awful. It seems to be where those who post are dedicated to ridiculing anyone who is not exactly like them in the most insulting way possible.

Jason: Well, I’m flattered, but…yes and no. I have no intrinsic problem with making fun of the merely bad and/or stupid; I just don’t do it a lot because there’s a whole lot of stupid out there and I have a day job, seventeen roleplaying games too many, and a novel. So I prioritize, and “stupid *and* offensive” floats naturally to the top of the pile most of the time.
There’s a Punchclock Villain trope or something I’m fulfilling here, I expect.

Its kind of like how Fred snarks on Left Behind because he thinks its a horrible version of his faith and wants to discredit it … Izzy is usually snarking for much the same reason that Fred is.
Yes, that’s a good point. I don’t know what MST3K is, but I think there’s another element to good faith versus pointless mocking, which is who it’s talking to. Fred puts his attacks on Left Behind up on a public blog with a religious and political focus – which is to say, it’s effectively an open letter to LaHaye and Jenkins and their supporters. Izzy, here at least (I can’t speak for her private life) tends to unleash the fireworks directly upon the offender.
Both of them, in short are using sarcasm and invective as an engaged attack, a contribution to a dialogue with whatever is pissing them off. That’s good.
Sitting around in a small circle taking the piss out of persons not present, which is what Something Awful sounds like, is disengaged and contributes nothing; it’s just a snark circle jerk. And in those situations, being nasty to no purpose beyond your own amusement isn’t so likeable.

Kit: Well, in *that* regard, it helps to have a low opinion of humanity.
Somewhat more seriously, after being around for the madness that was the DaVinci Code, I think quality has almost nothing to do with what makes a book successful. Twilight, like DVC (and I don’t know what before it, but probably something) seems to have found some bizarro instant-route-to-lizard-brain niche in the culture. I’d guess it’s the increasing popularity of the supernatural *plus* the teenage I-want-to-feel-special thing, and part of me fears it reflects an increase in sexual conservativism among American youth.
It’s like the hula hoop, or McDonald’s, or crack: there are probably a whole lot of factors, none of which really explains the popularity. I personally don’t like analyzing the reasons in this case very much, because doing so makes me fairly depressed, but it *is* quite interesting academically.

Izzy: The problem with not owning your kinks is really that people–especially people like me, disinclined to give anyone the benefit of the doubt–will then take whatever-it-is as your view of The Way Things Really Are/Should Be, and get pissy about it.
Depends how it comes across, though. I mean, someone saying, “I like especially liked that bit, with the tassles and the blindfold, but I don’t know why,’ is a perfectly valid thing to say, surely? Not everybody’s going to be that emotionally aware (how the frigging buggery have I ended up on this side of the debate?), certainly not where more sexualised elements are concerned. Also, if a given kink is new to them, they might not be entirely sure how to catalogue it in terms of their own preferences. This doesn’t hold true for everyone, though, obviously.
That said, I am now trying to come up with a set of circumstances where the phrase “I really like this movie because the hero puts the heroine in her place as a woman” wouldn’t get some kind of wide-eyed stare from me.

I would have hoped that, if I were to write down my own extended romantic/emotional or lifestyle fantasy and call it a novel, that it would have more definition to it; I daresay it’d have been bouncing around my head for quite some time for me to physically write it out. Then again, maybe Meyers set out to tell a really good – and entirely different – story and her subconscious simply beat her to the keyboard every morning.
I don’t know, I feel like it’s more a version of what Fred discussed in reference to Kirk Cameron; not holding respect for the craft of writing as a value. And therefore the ideas, or even really vague ideas about ideas, are more the point than the style, or the details, any consistent theme or message. Like Kilgore Trout? And that allows readers to experience it very passionately and personally, because the same vague ideas trigger their own passions…
Then there are specific details put in that make it safe and acceptable (passionate sexy passion! but no sinful premarital sex! etc.) in circles where other supernatural fiction would be considered dangerous, and, like Kit says, can serve to make it an adolescent best of all worlds.

Lori: They’re immersed in the world of Twilight precisely because it presents their kink as The Way Things Really Are/Should Be and thus allows them to get off without dealing with their own reality.
That said, though, there’s absolutely no reason why they should own up to it. Their peccadilos are their own business – and I fear there’s enough of that going on already, what with the bottom-feeding celebrity subculture and its scrutiny by the red-top and tabloid media. If people are self-aware enough to know that this is why they enjoy them, then that’s fine by me, though I don’t want to hear about that, either. I know you’re suggesting that the ones you know seem not to be, but as long as they don’t somehow dump it into my lap, I might be able to live with that as well.

I think I may have expressed this in a less than clear way. When I said that the women don’t own their kink I didn’t mean “own it to the general public” I meant “own it to themselves”. They aren’t self-aware about it at all. They see the sort of obsessive, overwhelming relationship portrayed in Twilight as a reasonable reflection of the real world. As far as they’re concerned women who claim not to want that are either in denial, lying or somehow “unnatural”. And they will dump that in your lap if you give them half an opening to do so. Ironically, the reason that I know way more about their kink than I would prefer to is that they insist that they don’t have a kink. A certain amount of self-awareness is required to avoid TMI. Hence Meyer’s problem.

See, I feel rather sorry for both those groups. It’s tough if you can’t accept your own sexuality; it means you’re at odds with yourself and are almost certainly haunted by the sense that there’s something shamefully wrong with you. Better if you can learn to accept yourself, but we all have different pressures put on us and it’s not always easy. And if you’re having a tough time and feeling unsupported and undervalued, that’s just sad.

I agree. The fact that I see the first group as somewhat immature doesn’t prevent me from having sympathy for their situation. My sympathy ends when they start trying to put their issues off on other people, but that’s a separate issue.

I do agree with you that fantasising about a better life is no substitute for fixing things. It can be very dangerous. But like you say, that’s a matter of individual choice; people can obsess about pretty much anything if they want to shut the world out.

Of course. I don’t blame Meyer or Twilight for anyone’s actions, or lack thereof. It’s just difficult for me not to feel a certain amount of distaste for something that seems to provoke that reaction in so many people.

why did he chose to mark his covenant by asking his men to lop off part of their penis?
I have a theory that involves sand…

Question: the adult fans who you say are absorbed in Twilight with no perspective: would you say, in cases where you know them well enough to comment, that they were mature people? What are they like outside their enjoyment of Twilight?
I’ve got a few friends who got into Twilight and some of the other supernatural-horror-romance novels. Most of them seem to be relatively well-balanced and have (as far as I can tell) good marriages/relationships. (One even got their husband to read it, and he liked it–although I can’t understand why.)
I don’t know that I’d see eye-to-eye with them on a general philosophical level, but at least I think they realize how absolutely fscked-up the genre can be. (Which, really, if you’re going to get into fantasy/sci-fi/romantic fiction of any stripe, you have to be willing to admit where the realism breaks down.) I don’t know whether they’d fit into either of the two camps that’s been previously mentioned. Maybe they would and maybe they wouldn’t, but that’s none of my business at this point.
The flip side of that, though, is I got pretty quickly and soundly justfriends’d (yes, it should be a verb) by a woman I was dating, who I was convinced was a pretty mature person. It hurt, but it took a while for me to step back and get the big picture on the whole situation, and when I analyzed it further, the fact that she happened to be really into Twilight felt like one piece of the puzzle. She is, I think, still waiting on her hot sparkly vampire who will make her feel amazing things, and anything less just feels like leading a guy on. So yeah.

@Kit-
MST3K is Mystery Science Theater 3000. It is set up to look like a cheap low budget science fiction show. The premise is that a mad scientist has trapped a man in space and he and his robot friends (puppets made out of random junk) are being forced to watch the worst movies ever made.
The majority of the show is some old B movie (sometimes accompanied by a 50′s educational short if its a short movie) being shown with a silhouette of movie seats at the bottom of the screen with the guy and his robots. There is a constant running commentary of snarky remarks from the 3 of them. It is a very funny show and while not what I would call mean spirited, I was using it as an example of snark for snark’s sake.
Here’s a youtube clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Hh4M4vipAo&feature=related
Sitting around in a small circle taking the piss out of persons not present, which is what Something Awful sounds like, is disengaged and contributes nothing; it’s just a snark circle jerk. And in those situations, being nasty to no purpose beyond your own amusement isn’t so likeable.
That is pretty much what it is. They take screenshots of forums for fandoms they don’t like and then snark on the posts. They also go into online games and purposely antagonize people and then post screenshots nad video of that.

Mystery Science Theater 3000, or MST3K, was a two-hour comedy program that ran for most of its life on the American “Comedy Central” cable network. They would take an old movie, usually one with a fairly poor script or direction, and show it with three characters making fun of it from an imaginary “front row” at the bottom of the screen.
Fairly intelligent, and done with love, not malice, the program grew quite popular and ran for ten seasons. Some directors were quite complimented to hear their movies had recieved the MST treatment. (Others, not so much.) The show isn’t to everyone’s taste, but I recommend that anyone with a weakness for cheesy movies or wry humor give it a try once. There are DVDs available in the stores and through Netflix, and one can also download the episodes from certain sites on the Web.

… and Jason beats me by the two minutes it took me to write the post

Bucket of ears!

First off, Jason, sorry about the Torchwood thing. Next time I’ll click the link before posting.

And Butcher takes it a step further: if someone is truly in love, his/her blood is toxic to vampires.

IIRC, that applies only to the vampires of the White Court, who feed upon lust instead of blood. And instead of being confined to the blood, White Court vampires can’t even bear the touch of true love. This makes for a tragic subplot of two White Court vampires (one of them Harry’s brother) who are madly in love with each other and can’t touch each other at all.
On stakes, I remember reading a German folk tale where a rampaging vampire was staked in his grave, and he mocked the would-be vampire killers for doing it. He said that he would use the stake as a club to drive off dogs.
Vampires and disease: The ratlike Graf Orlock also brought the plague to Bremen in Nosferatu, giving himself the perfect cover for his depredations.

@Jason: I wasn’t criticizing Izzy. I used the term “mean” because she does. Most of the time I can just nod and say “What Izzy said” when she goes off on a rant. That’s because the complaints are grounded in issues about the values and not just of the “point and laugh” variety. My mocking reflex tends to be triggered the same way. Something that is merely bad is usually not worth bothering about.
My comment was more poking fun at myself because, even when it’s a values issue, I often think something mean but can’t bring myself to say it unless the person makes me really mad. I’m naturally pretty mouthy and I was raised in an environment that didn’t exactly see that as a positive. There are aspects of the “be nice” thing that I’ve never been able to overcome.

Some directors were quite complimented to hear their movies had recieved the MST treatment. (Others, not so much.)

And Joe Don Baker, not at all.

@Dylan: I know people like your friends. I put them in the category of fans with perspective and not either of the non-perspective groups.

Wakboth, I prefer the revamped (ha, ha) World of Darkness also. Admittedly, I still have some nostalgia for the old WoD, but the new one fixed so many things. Forgive me for rambling on a specialized topic, but:
Changing how Torpor works fixed a lot of things right there. In the old WoD, becoming a vampire meant that you were an entry-level employee in a company whose CEOs will never die or retire (without foul play, which is really hard to pull off successfully against an elder). In nWoD, going into a coma underground for years and years will do wonders to restore your sanity, but makes you weaker again. The power levels aren’t static anymore.
Then, add in the way that Torpor now muddles a vampire’s memories — that means that past events are in some doubt, just as they are in human history. Just because an Elder firmly believes that she played a major role in some mythological event doesn’t guarantee that that mythical event actually happened. And the business about elder vampires becoming obsessive about journal-keeping is an interesting bit of character development, especially when they might sabotage their own efforts by saying, “Wait, these events aren’t as I recall them! Someone has tampered with my memoirs!”
Werewolves are not self-righteous assholes anymore! All the self-righteous asshole players have walked off in a snit because the new werewolves are just as messed up as the other races and recognize it, too. Yeah, don’t let the door hit you on the way out, guys.
Changelings are interesting now! And the new Changeling game actually fits into a system that calls itself World of Darkness!
The various supernatural creatures are more recognizably not human, rather than humans with Kewl Powerz. Each one has rules they have to stick to if they don’t want to become monsters. The consequences are spelled out more clearly, and with less wiggle room.
And finally, the various supernaturals no longer have irrational hatreds of one another. So you can play a mixed group without having to either a) Have all the characters be pariahs among their own kind or b) Waste session time having characters snarl irrationally at one another.

Freaking laggy typepad…
Kit: I try to, more or less. My standard is not to say anything behind someone’s back that I wouldn’t be willing to say to their face, though I admit to making exceptions in about three cases: when I have to work with (or, God forbid, for) the person in question, when the person is involved in my social circle such that direct confrontation would trigger a giant dramasplosion*, and when I recognize that they don’t need to hear what I say because it’d just make them feel bad. The first two are relatively self-explanatory; the third covers things like “…dude, could she wear any *more* green eyeshadow?” or websites like, I don’t know, International House Of Chicks Who Are Married to Snape, where I feel like engaging would count as trolling. (Although if someone asked me for my honest opinion of their eyeshadow, or told me in conversation that she was married to Snape, I’d be willing to say about the same thing I say elsewhere.) In LJ or on here, I usually give a somewhat abbreviated “dude, you suck” and take longer rants to my own journal, in a not-always-successful attempt to avoid filling a forum with the flames of…phlogiston? Damn alliteration fail.
Anyhow: I try to be pretty honest about stuff, and where direct confrontation is an issue, I at least try not to be overly friendly, which would feel deceptive. Idiosyncratic morals, yes, but mine own. SAwful *could* count as the third exception, much like fandom_wank does, but its members do in fact seem to be troll-tastic at various places.
Launcifer: Good point, and yeah. “I just like this, I don’t know why,” is totally valid, especially when the speaker is then willing to admit that it would be not so awesome in RL, or that not everyone likes or should like that particular thing (as a sidenote: oh my God, Lori, your acquaintances sound like they would drive me up the wall). “People can genuinely not like your hobbies without being broken,” needs to be, I swear, tattooed backwards on the foreheads of half the population, so they see it every time they look in the goddamn mirror.** So it does depend on phrasing and context and just how unaware of the RL implications they seem to be.
I’ve never had anyone use that phrase on me, for the record. I have, however, had some wide-eyed chick in college explain how it was a really really good thing that Romeo and Juliet happened the way it did, despite all the death, because their lives would’ve been worthless if they hadn’t met their soulmates. Hon, please go away before I a) punch you, and b) get cavities just from sitting here.
I like the 50s shorts in MST3K the best, particularly The Home Economics story. The juxtaposition of uber-wholesome fifties idealized version of college chicks and Mike and the Bots’ more-aware-of-what-college-is-really-like comments particularly struck me, for some reason. (“Kegs will be tapped, men will be used.”)
*Oh, friends’ annoying SOs, how much lunchtime conversation you’ve provided…
**It would be “hobbies/kink/lifestyle/god”, but you’d need to be Dawson Leary to fit all that on your forehead.

Aw, man, ShifterCat, you may have just sucked me back in after I thought I was free of the urge to play WoD.
(claps a hand over the Book of Nod tattoo on his right shoulder)

“This seems to be related to the question as to why in the Buffyverse they’re all so sure of the demon dimensions and their various denizens, but can’t quite seem to decide amongst themselves which, if any, god or gods might be extant.
Maybe I was entirely wrong in my assumption that they were all hopelessly confused in their going around waving crosses at vampires while at the same time not really believing that the cross actually meant anything. Holy water on the other hand seems a far more pressing problem.”
I had a good explanation for my fanfic and roleplaying version of the Buffyverse for the cross: it’s originally a sun symbol and brings the light of the sun into darkness. This allowed Watchers to be agnostic about Christianity. I never did work out a good explanation for the Holy Water thing though thus allowing Watchers to agnostic about their agnosticism.
“(1) Vampires are MUCH more common in Europe than the rest of the world, which would explain why only Christianity adopted the symbol, and handily also explains why the Watcher’s Council seems to be focused entirely on NATO countries (are there *any* non-British members?)”
Plenty in the ‘approved’ novelisations and stories. In the TV series I can only think of Sam Zebuto, Kendra’s Watcher. (One of my rpg scenarios featured him in a WWII adventure where he was a cheeky first year from one of the colonies when the Watcher’s Academy got evacuated to Scotland.)
“(2) Somebody involved in the early Church was a Slayer or Watcher, possibly both. The obvious choice is Mary-Magdalene as a Slayer, but for some reason I like the idea of it being Priscilla.”
Again I fancied Simon Magus as the Watcher agent sent to check out this new cult and being so impressed he tried to join.
BTW, I’ve often wondered whether Joss intended to refer to the Grigori, the choir of angels in the BOOK OF ENOCH who are corrupted by their desire for mortal women, father the Nephandi and teach mankind magic. Grigori means ‘watchers’ of course.

Some directors were quite complimented to hear their movies had recieved the MST treatment. (Others, not so much.)
I think there was at least once case where the director actually *requested* that their movie be featured on MST3K and I think I recall once a director actually sitting in on a taping of the episode that featured his movie.

>>>I am now trying to come up with a set of circumstances where the phrase “I really like this movie because the hero puts the heroine in her place as a woman” wouldn’t get some kind of wide-eyed stare from me.
…There once was a pretty liberal country, but then evil dictator came to power and things got worse. Marillan Suerlindor grew up believing everything that official doctrine tought her. In particular, she knew that woman are inferior to men.
Then good guys owerthrown the dictator. But Marillan – who was still fairly young – still believed in what she was told most of her life. They tried to show her documents, but she couldn’t read. She didn’t want to listen to other women who tried to explain her what was wrong with dictatorship – they were bad women, they rebelled against nature! Then the hero desided that maybe she would listen to him. He explained her everything the way she could understand, he also told her that “the woman’s place” is not where she used to think it is. Women must take their rightful place in society! Sadly, at first she believed him because he was a powerful man, not because she really understood (The Man told me I’m a human being, He knows better, so I’m independent because He said so!), but she grew up, got some character development, grew some brains on her own… He didn’t make her a feminist – she had to come to some conclusions herself. But, well, he *tried* to put her in her Rightful-Place-In-Society. She just wasn’t ready then…

Michael: That would be an awesome, awesome plot. (Have far too much fondness for Book of Enoch plot myself; I blame reading Many Waters at a young age.)* And I like the sun explanation too–was it via Mithraism, which is an explanation I’ve heard, or just an abstract representation?
I’m fond of holy water, even in an agnostic/polytheistic setting, because you can tweak it so much: swimming pools! Sprinkler systems! Squirt guns: suddenly lethal! Holy soda: shake it up and it’s damn near a grenade! (Actually used that one in a story once.) Hilarity ensues.
*Wherein I was disappointed that the nephilim were evil and lost, because their wings had much prettier colors than the seraphim’s, by and large. Youthful Izzy Misses the Point.

Depends how it comes across, though. I mean, someone saying, “I like especially liked that bit, with the tassles and the blindfold, but I don’t know why,’ is a perfectly valid thing to say, surely? Not everybody’s going to be that emotionally aware (how the frigging buggery have I ended up on this side of the debate?), certainly not where more sexualised elements are concerned. Also, if a given kink is new to them, they might not be entirely sure how to catalogue it in terms of their own preferences. This doesn’t hold true for everyone, though, obviously.

Thinking about this I don’t believe that we see things very differently. I don’t mind what other people like. I hope for their benefit that they understand and accept their own desires, but ultimately it’s not my business—unless they make it my business. I’ll give an example that has nothing to do with Twilight.
Lifestyle D/S is one of the kinks that gives me the icks. Like pretty much all kinks I think consenting adults have a right to do what works for them, but for me it pushes a very bad button so I try to avoid contemplating it. I know two couples who practice lifestyle D/S. One I have no issue with, the other I would walk across hot coals to avoid. The difference is in their attitude toward their kink and how they relate to others with regard to it.
The first couple is well aware that they’re kinky and that what works for them is not what works for most people. They don’t think that says anything negative about them or about other people. They do think that many people have weird hang-ups about sex, but that assessment is made based on far more than how people react to D/S.
The second couple doesn’t acknowledge the kink. Their perception is that the man is simply so inherently Alpha that it’s natural for him to be in charge. The woman doesn’t see herself as a submissive. As far as she’s concerned she submits to her man because of his natural Alpha-ness, not because of anything particular about herself.
Aside from the fact that it triggers my gag reflex I could care less about their little dream world if it weren’t for the fact that they need for other people to play along. I basically have no poker face so it was fairly obvious when I met Alpha Man that I wasn’t the slightest impressed by him. I certainly wasn’t gong to defer to him or take orders from him. This disrupted their little fantasy, which ended up creating some unpleasant conflict.
That was an extreme case, but I’ve met plenty of other people who have the same underlying attitude, including those Twilight fans I mentioned earlier. Some folks just have trouble understanding that the rest of us have no interest in playing in the LARP they’re running based on their kink.

Jason: How about Satanic kittens on a rampage? http://sluggy.com/comics/archives/daily/20000629

Izzy: so, somewhere on this great, wide interweb, there’s a blog’ filled with nothing but your colourful and creative abuse? I’m trying to decide whether that’s rather funky or an egregious case of sensory overload.
Thinking about this kink ownage business, the most interesting (and I used that term loosely) reactions I’ve encountered are from people who think of themselves as pretty aware or self-assured, only for something to blindside them. I have one close friend who has, in the past, literally clamped her hand over my mouth to prevent me from setting people off like this. I think it’s because I have a certain natural tendency to be a wee bit vicious when in physical proximity to people that I actually know.
Oh, yes, the one that really gets me where Shakespeare’s concerned is The Taming of the Shrew. I can just never quite work out what I’m supposed to think of that one.

I have, however, had some wide-eyed chick in college explain how it was a really really good thing that Romeo and Juliet happened the way it did, despite all the death, because their lives would’ve been worthless if they hadn’t met their soulmates.

Congratulations, wide-eye chick. You have COMPLETELY missed the point.
This is why reading R&J in high school is a Bad Idea.

Oh. My. Eru. So many typos… I’m sorry, I thought I re-read before posting. Seems that I wasn’t. (I’m not going to kill myself with sheep, since there’s no Judith around to resurrect me, but I’m ashamed.)

I’m fond of holy water, even in an agnostic/polytheistic setting, because you can tweak it so much: swimming pools! Sprinkler systems! Squirt guns: suddenly lethal! Holy soda: shake it up and it’s damn near a grenade! (Actually used that one in a story once.) Hilarity ensues.

There’s a seen in Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter where Jesus is fighting some vamps in a bar. He grabs a beer, makes a sign of the cross over it, takes a mouthful, and sprays it in a vampire’s face. Vamp burns.

“There’s a scene…”
Tanj-nabbit.

…and yeah, it’s a slow day at work.
Launcifer: Well, sometimes it’s abuse. There’s a substantial amount of “Oh, fuck, I don’t have a staff for this LARP, can anyone help a girl out?” “It occurs to me that [academic rambling blah],” “How did I end up owning four red dresses, exactly?” and “Yay Cadbury Creme Eggs!” as well, plus probably stuff of even less usefulness. I’m funwithrage.livejournal.com, though, for interested parties.
Also, I know what you mean about the blindsiding. I had a lot of that, especially in my fandom_wank days: “I’m a big girl who’s had a liberal education and extensive Internet, I knew what a safeword was before I got breasts, surely there’s nothing that can…vore. VORE. I…the Hell…I gotta go drink a lot.” Now I’m usually doing it to other people, often accidentally–”Oh, yeah, like that guy who married his horse…” “The WHAT? Who WHAT? How do you KNOW THESE THINGS?” “The Internet, my friend, the Internet.”–but it still happens to me on occasion. (The Fetish Fuel page of TVTropes is an education in itself.)
Froborr: High school? I wish–this was college. But yeah.

Also–Jesus, I need to go write the damn novel or something if I’m gonna play in Verbose Mode this much–yeah, Taming of the Shrew is one of the big two “…ohkaaay, either irony or vast Elizabethan moral dissonance, I’m gonna go with the first so my head doesn’t explode” Shakespeare plays; the other is Merchant of Venice. (Although Midsummer Night’s Dream also has its moments.)

Izzy: VORE. I…the Hell…I gotta go drink a lot.
At the risk of… yeah… shredding or swallowing ? It was quite surprising to discover that one my favourite internet cartoonists did a LOT of this kind of thing, actually. Dolcett’s the one that always get to me, though, if I happen to across it.
In general, I don’t think I’d allow anyone to read R&J, ever, not when there’s fantastic, batshit-insane stuff like Titus Andronicus to show them first.

Kit: I’m functional, thanks for asking. The degree of support all of us got from each other and the community was staggering. (Also: the MST3K guys are now doing this.)
Raj: or my daughter’s probable response–”Ooh! Have you read Devil in the White City??”
Re kinks, I think a general rule of “do not recruit unwilling passersby to play supporting roles in your game” is a rule of which Miss Manners would approve.

Seconding Ako’s love for “Let the Right One In”
(Rent it if you can! Netflix has it!)
And yes, to whoever posted the link for the Annotated Dracula on Alibris– that’s the one. From the glance throughs it’s gotten at the local Borders, it looks like a really nice volume of Stoker’s story.
Lots of stuff, some of it not worth reading, but an intro by St. Gaiman! Can we resist?

And how have we not started talking about True Blood?

Izzy, re The Merchant of Venice:
the problem with this one, though is that there’s some very odd going on. For a start, it’s two completely different plays bolted together. You’ve got the issues with Bassanio (funnily enough, I once played Bassanio in a production of this, purely because I turned up to the audition in leather. The producer then tried to convince the cast to break setting, just so he could have me in my leather kecks during the courtroom scene. Kink much?) being nothing more than a broken plot cipher, plus the extreme ambiguity around Shylok. For one thing, distasteful though the character appears to be, he’s also the only one that plays straight with anyone over the course of the entire play, with the possible exception of Antonio.
The real problem I have with the play is that it muddies something could have been very meaningful by welding it to some piece of sub-Two Gentlemen of Verona-type pap. Then again, that could well have been the intention.

Jessica: And how have we not started talking about True Blood?
I got through precisely one half of one episode before the positioning of the teeth pissed me off to the point where I had to change channels.

I’m a big girl who’s had a liberal education and extensive Internet, I knew what a safeword was before I got breasts, surely there’s nothing that can…vore. VORE. I…the Hell…I gotta go drink a lot.” Now I’m usually doing it to other people, often accidentally–”Oh, yeah, like that guy who married his horse…” “The WHAT? Who WHAT? How do you KNOW THESE THINGS?” “The Internet, my friend, the Internet.”–but it still happens to me on occasion.

Yes to this. I frequently get the “How do you know that??!!!” reaction. (almost never on purpose) and yet occasionally I still happen across something that makes me feel like my head is going to explode.
My rule is pretty much, think of the wildest, weirdest, kinkiest thing you can imagine and there is someone out there who considers that a dull Tuesday evening. Conversely, there’s nothing so vanilla that someone isn’t horrified by the very idea.

Another entry in Judaism and vampires: Greenberg the Vampire based, I think, on a story by Harlan Ellison. http://www.marvunapp.com/Appendix/greenber.htm
And if you want fiction about Jewish mysticism in general may I reccomend Lisa Goldstein? I also remember a book (science fiction, not fantasy) in which the Kabbalah was key to interdimensional travel but don’t remember the title or author, sorry.

Oh, watched Vampire Diaries out of curiousity last night and the verdict is…meh. Started with people dying which is always fun and the villain has potential but over all the writing and acting are just bland. Just a bunch of bland, pretty people trying to evoke drama and failing.

The idea that people get off on Vore, really really freaks me out.
I think a general rule of “do not recruit unwilling passersby to play supporting roles in your game” is a rule of which Miss Manners would approve.
Lots of people in Second Life need to learn this rule. Second Life being an online community is a place that some people choose to use to explore their sexuality. I don’t mind this most of the time though I personally find some of what goes on there to get a little closer to emotional abuse than I would like.
There are those who choose to practice their kinks or put them on public displays in places that were not designed for enacting those kinks. When asked “please take your kink to a place in Second Life designated for that. It squicks me out and I don’t want to look at it.” Those people act as if they are some sort of horribly oppressed minority.

Oh, yes, the one that really gets me where Shakespeare’s concerned is The Taming of the Shrew. I can just never quite work out what I’m supposed to think of that one.
The local Shakespeare Tavern (and if you ever are in the Atlanta Metro area, do go see them) did Taming of the Shrew a year or so back with extensive commentary on the “Troubles of Taming.” In the end, they played the final monologue mostly as a giant running in-joke between Kate and her husband. It was a nicely done juggling act, but it was still clearly a “aaah! What do we do with this?” moment.
“I’m a big girl who’s had a liberal education and extensive Internet, I knew what a safeword was before I got breasts, surely there’s nothing that can…vore. VORE. I…the Hell…I gotta go drink a lot.”
In college many moons ago, I first encountered Furry and Vore all in one fell swoop. I think there was an audible *pop* from my head.
My rule is pretty much, think of the wildest, weirdest, kinkiest thing you can imagine and there is someone out there who considers that a dull Tuesday evening.
We refer to this as the Cream Corn Principle based upon stories of an acquaintance who wrestled (professionally) in large vats of cream corn. For some, wrestling in cream corn was so vanilla as to barely rate a yawn. For others, it was the height of kink. It’s all a matter of where you stand.

And how have we not started talking about True Blood?

I’m sort of burnt out on vampires so unless an idea strikes me as particularly interesting I tend to pass. I thought the small Southern town angle of the books had promise, but they ended up not working for me for reasons that I can no longer remember and I stopped reading after the 2nd or 3rd one.
I didn’t have HBO when the show started and wasn’t interested enough to catch up. (I admit that part of my reason for avoiding the show is petty. One of the actors was in another show where I thought he was, um, quite attractive. When I saw him in True Blood I found him decidedly not hot and I can’t get past the disappointment/annoyance with the TB make-up people.)

I got through precisely one half of one episode before the positioning of the teeth pissed me off to the point where I had to change channels.
I *thought* they looked too close to the incisors, but the very next teeth are the canines, which would be fangs, right? I actually think they’re positioned correctly for biting someone on the neck (shots in the show seem to support that conclusion).
I also really like the opening credits, especially the church sign that says “God hates fangs”.
Fantastic

Launcifer: I think just the concept–one advantage of always having a slightly-too-old computer is that you miss a lot of disturbing imagery.
Also, interesting about Merchant. Totally didn’t know that.
Lori: Yep. More Tales of FFRants: people have gotten bitched at for not warning about graphic, detailed…kissing. Yeaah.

I was disappointed that the nephilim were evil and lost, because their wings had much prettier colors than the seraphim’s, by and large.
Also better animals. The good angels had lame crap like pelicans, whereas the nephilim got cobras and vultures and stuff. Plus that circle of annihilation thing they did was wicked cool.
It’s kind of interesting, because usually L’Engle gets you to root for the side she wants- I found a lot of the good guys condescending and irritating, but there was never any risk I was going to wind up siding with IT or the Etchthroi. But the nephilim totally carried that book.
Let the Right One In was excellent. Not many vampire movies address the practical problems with subsisting on human blood in a world with cops and newspapers.

We refer to this as the Cream Corn Principle based upon stories of an acquaintance who wrestled (professionally) in large vats of cream corn. For some, wrestling in cream corn was so vanilla as to barely rate a yawn. For others, it was the height of kink. It’s all a matter of where you stand.

I can’t wrap my head around the vanilla vs kinky aspect of this because I’m stuck on the practical aspect. All I can think is that cleaning up after wrestling in creamed corn would be nasty. There are some places I just don’t want corn kernels to go, you know?

As was already proposed by Jenny Islander and others, my garlic theory is that garlic (preservative) is a symbolic antithesis of vampires (corruption).
–
My favorite fact about vampires, in the symbolic mode you’re working in here, is you have to invite them in.
–
> “Your typical vampire doesn’t recoil at ideals — he laughs and goes on feeding.”
Froborr – I’m very sorry.
–
Re: the lack of God in the Buffyverse… let’s not forget that when she died, her soul ended up in a place of “no pain, no fear, no doubt,” from which her return to Earth was experienced as a kind of Fall. The Buffyverse doesn’t lack symbols of Grace. We’re just so attracted by Fighting Evil that we don’t pay much attention.

Spearmint: True, though there was at least one owl seraph, and I like owls.
I kind of feel like MW was the weakest of the four main Murray books–the only one where the wackiness happens as an accident, also the only one where the women divide into evil (or at least misguided) vamps and good virgins and mothers, which bugs. I do like it, but I absolutely love the other three.

I dunno.
I read R&J in high school, whilst involved in disturbingly intense us-against-the-world relationship. I didn’t love the play, but I kind of thought it provided a bit of perspective in a similar manner to Heavenly Creatures.

In general, I don’t think I’d allow anyone to read R&J, ever, not when there’s fantastic, batshit-insane stuff like Titus Andronicus to show them first.
Acccchhh!
(But Alan Cumming and Jessica Lange were oh-so-hot in Julie Taymor’s movie. And yet, eeeeccchh.)
I guess I’m slightly more a Richard III kinda gal.

So I checked out Vampire Greenberg and I was like “lol, the blood from a kosher butcher isn’t kosher; the meat is kosher because you got rid of the blood! Even I know that!” and then I realized…
There’s really no way to be a vampire and keep kosher (or halal), is there? I think even an artificial blood substitute would violate the kosher prohibition against consuming things that make it look like you’re consuming animal blood, although a Muslim vampire might be able to get away with it. What a discriminatory form of unholy corpse reanimation!
There don’t seem to be Middle Eastern vampires, but this must be a big problem in Malaysia.
Clearly this should be the source for the next emo vampire’s dolor, rather than being sparkly or whatever.

There are those who choose to practice their kinks or put them on public displays in places that were not designed for enacting those kinks. When asked “please take your kink to a place in Second Life designated for that. It squicks me out and I don’t want to look at it.” Those people act as if they are some sort of horribly oppressed minority.

This is why exhibitionism and voyeurism, outside contexts created to allow for them, are two of the only kinks that draw my disapproval on principle, as opposed to simply not being my thing.
Many people have expressed surprise that kinks that are far more out there inspire nothing more than a “Not my kink dude” from me, but exhibitionism and voyeurism set off a rant. It’s not actually contradictory though. To me the most important principle WRT kink is informed consent. Exhibitionists and voyeurs violate that and as far as I’m concerned that is Not Cool.
This has gotten me into rather heated discussions with some gay men defending park cruising and with a few people who live in high rise apartments and own binoculars or a telescope.

I kind of feel like MW was the weakest of the four main Murray books–the only one where the wackiness happens as an accident, also the only one where the women divide into evil (or at least misguided) vamps and good virgins and mothers, which bugs. I do like it, but I absolutely love the other three.
This is because Meg and Charles Wallace are like twelve times more interesting than Sandy and Dennis. Also, cherubim + giant garden snakes and pegasi + Fortinbras are twelve times better than implausible desert mini-mammoths. Mammoths are not a desert animal, Madeline. Also desert herders do not keep housepets.
Plus the creepy sexual politics. Although actually there’s some creepy stuff going on in the other books, too, on a deep level, because of course Meg can’t just stay mousy and learn to value her giant brain, she has to grow up to be beautiful in the end.

Spearmint: True, but I’m a sucker for fuzzy elephants, so I’m more okay with that. (That said? So much love for Wind in the Door going against the “reptiles are abhorrent” trope. If I ever write HP fanfic, it’s going to involve a heroic Parselmouth, dammit.)
I’m generally okay with the “ugly person learns to value their other qualities, then grows up to be pretty” broken Aesop: I’m a big fan of wish fulfillment, and there’s nothing wrong with having it all if you can.

Louise rocked so hardcore. Every garden should have a giant, quasi-sentient black ratsnake.
I’m generally okay with the “ugly person learns to value their other qualities, then grows up to be pretty” broken Aesop: I’m a big fan of wish fulfillment, and there’s nothing wrong with having it all if you can.
I wasn’t actively bothered by it. It was more of a missed opportunity than anything else, because she didn’t have to turn out hideous, she could have grown up to not think about her looks at all. But instead L’Engle has to slip in the fact that she’s gorgeous.

Meg’s depiction in aWiT and WitD were quite influential in my early years in forming my likings for meganekko, mousy nerd-girls, and tsunderes (though Lina Inverse has to take most of the credit for that last one), so I was pretty annoyed to find her going all pin-up-y in STP.

Izzy: I’m generally okay with the “ugly person learns to value their other qualities, then grows up to be pretty” broken Aesop: I’m a big fan of wish fulfillment, and there’s nothing wrong with having it all if you can.
See, much as I wish it were otherwise, this one drives me through the roof. I harbour an instinctive jealousy (And, yup, I’m okay with admitting it’s jealousy) towards anyone who in any way resembles this aesop. Though it would take the other half of that particular Stones chorus to really make my apoplexia telekinetic.

This disrupted their little fantasy, which ended up creating some unpleasant conflict.
Yeah, that’s creepy. Not because of the D/S thing, but because you were being expected to act like his mini-girlfriend. If D/S is part of their relationship, submitting to him is acting like you’re in a relationship with him too, and stuff that without everybody’s consent. Sounds like their desire to feel normal was causing some fairly serious problems.
Many people have expressed surprise that kinks that are far more out there inspire nothing more than a “Not my kink dude” from me, but exhibitionism and voyeurism set off a rant. It’s not actually contradictory though. To me the most important principle WRT kink is informed consent. Exhibitionists and voyeurs violate that and as far as I’m concerned that is Not Cool.
Yeah, I agree with that. Doing it with consenting adults includes doing it only in the presence of consenting adults.
Have to own I was a vore-virgin and had to go look it up. Good golly does that one raise some ethical complications if you actually got consent to do it in real life (looking at you, Armin Miewes). Mostly I’m glad idea that doesn’t do anything to me: sounds like one inconvenient fetish.

Art – thanks for that link, it’s one of the main things I hate about HP.

@Kit: I am now delighting in the term “vore-gin”.

Spearmint: Good point. And it was pretty obvious that she was going to grow up to look at least decent–her main complaints in Wrinkle were glasses, which (q.v. Froborr) not everyone minds *and* which can be replaced pretty easily, and braces, which come off everyone eventually–so yeah, not sure why it had to be a big deal.
Also with you on Louise.
Launcifer: Understandable, though I’m not coming up with the Stones chorus. In fairness, most of us *do* grow up to look better than we did at thirteen or fourteen (I think Meg was about there as of Wrinkle), puberty being a pretty hard cape to round and fashion sense et al taking a while to develop. But “okay, thirteen doesn’t last forever and there are things you can do to improve your appearance” strikes me as a better lesson than “learn to value other stuff and you’ll get pretty anyway.”

“…so Sandy and Danny dated for a little while, but split up when she went to college, and half the T-Birds died in Vietnam…” is not what most people want in an ending.
See the ending of “Animal House”
Torchwood… doesn’t really have anyone’s sexual fantasies. It’s more along the lines of someone who’s just got over the idea of sex=ew! but hasn’t yet got the idea that it takes more than a couple of naked bodies going at it for something to be sexy. Doesn’t help that John Barrowman, who could have chemistry with a table and thus salvage a badly written sex scene, doesn’t do much of anything in season one; his comeback scene in S2 was *hot* – not for any kink, but because there was real emotion between the characters. S2 cut back on the “ooh, we can show sex scenes” but didn’t pick up that much in the alien-fighting. S3 – well, why should I care about any new characters? “Anyone can die” builds tension; “Everyone will die” doesn’t.
I have this plot bunny floating around where Thursday Next has to investigate a terrible outbreak of vampire books – not books about vampires, but books where the main characters appear to be Generics at first glance, but – being voids – slowly absorb the reader, sucking away their personality. The readers don’t realise what’s happening, they only think that the character is just so amazingly like them! that they keep coming back for more. The books, of course, are Twilight.

Superstitions aside for a moment; I’ve met a few self-proclaimed vampires. They seem to be of two varieties. The fun loving fetishists who love the style and the sexyness, and then the other kind whom I’ve met; the really pathetic ones who are delusional over it and are into some sort of controll thing; bipolar with a personal history of great pain in their earlier lives which seemed to be compensated for by being hatefull and scornfull…which I guess is better than being pushed around by one’s pain and fear. The commonality of kinky sex and blood, whether for symbolic satisfaction or merely for its shockingly decorative qualities is part of the scene for sure, but next time you encounter one think about how their desire to act like some predator is really a deep fear of being either found to be insignificant or their fear of being victimized and revisited by some undescribable pain and their abiding fear of it.

Lori:
The second couple doesn’t acknowledge the kink. Their perception is that the man is simply so inherently Alpha that it’s natural for him to be in charge. The woman doesn’t see herself as a submissive. As far as she’s concerned she submits to her man because of his natural Alpha-ness, not because of anything particular about herself.
This is actually what I think about those creepy Cult of Femininity blogs. It’s a very mainstreamed kink, and maybe it works for them, but DO NOT TELL ME YOUR KINK IS THE ONLY RIGHT WAY. It makes me almost physically ill to read some of them.

Louise rocked so hardcore. Every garden should have a giant, quasi-sentient black ratsnake.

I know this is pedantic, but it really annoys me.
Sentient: capable of emotions, being aware, capable of responding to perceptions
Sapient: intelligent, thinking, wise
All snakes are sentient. Louise is awesome because (among other things) she’s also (semi-)sapient.

Izzy: You can’t always get what you want/but if you try sometimes/you might find/you get what you need…
I think I’ve broken it up correctly though I can see where you’re coming from with specific version of the Aesop. Certainly it’s more appealing than the latter, which is something of an untruth to begin with. My natural cynicism does tend to kick in afterwards, though, plus the aforementioned jealousy. I think I was thinking of the Aesop more generally, rather than in that context. I guess even I’m not enough of a bar steward as to deny pubescent children a little hope.
Kit: Have to own I was a vore-virgin and had to go look it up. Good golly does that one raise some ethical complications if you actually got consent to do it in real life (looking at you, Armin Miewes). Mostly I’m glad idea that doesn’t do anything to me: sounds like one inconvenient fetish.
Also, real-life vore would normally be cannibalism (unless you can find a ludicrously small person, in which case swallowing them whole might qualify as soft vore) and cannibalism’s arguably an entirely different fetish, though still part of the same “family”.

@Lee Ratner, Check out Hebrewpunk by Lavie Tidhar from Apex. Excellent use of Jewish myth and Kabbala

Absolutely loved Wrinkle In Time and Wind In The Door. Third book not so much, it’s story just seemed to have too many random pieces that never seemed to cohere properly. Keep planning to read Many Waters but never seem to get around to it.

Launcifer: Ahh, gotcha. I tend to be more optimistic than not–and I tend to read/watch/blah for escapism rather than relevance–but I can see how that one would bug.
RL Vore…yeah, either cannibalism or getting way too excited about a good steak dinner. I mean, I’m pretty damn enthusiastic about those myself, but not *horny*.
Rebecca: Oh, so much word. I do think that wanting someone else to make all your decisions isn’t the healthiest of attitudes, by and large–I’m big on the notion that adults should be independent*–but BDSM is at least the most up-front and non-everyone-should-do-this way to have that happen, if you want to do it. Prairie Muffins et al make my skin crawl.
*And admittedly, part of this, and my general squicked reaction to lifestyle B&D, is revulsion against the mainstream notion that women really want to be taken care of and bossed around. Ew.

Yeah, that’s creepy. Not because of the D/S thing, but because you were being expected to act like his mini-girlfriend.
Erp. This reminds me a bit too much of an odd group dynamic (hopefully not a repressed kink as mentioned earlier) that’s sprung up. We’ve got a tight-knit group of friends, and because of that one couple has taken to referring to others within the group as “Wife 2,” “Wife 3,” “Husband 2,” “Husband 3,” etc.
It works disturbingly well with the single girls in the group; it’s generally ignored by us single guys, as we think it’s kind of silly (although, I find it a bit patronizing and emasculating). It’s gotten a rather… shall we say, chilly reception when they tried it with some of the marrieds. Sad thing is, they don’t realize how disturbingly weird and uncomfortable it is for the rest of us.

@Spearmint
I said:
Vampires don’t reflect in mirrors because they have no souls. They don’t cast shadows for the same reason.
You said:
This makes zero sense. Chairs don’t have souls either, but they reflect in mirrors and have shadows. Ensoulment obviously has no effect on an object’s transparency.
True, but what we call the reflection and shadow are actually the body of the soul (haven’t you read your Oscar Wilde?). This is why vampires and ghosts don’t have them. It’s also why when Bart sells his soul on the Simpsons episode, automatic doors don’t see him.
It’s mythology. It’s supposed to make sense?
And are you sure about chairs being unensouled? A pantheist would argue the point.

Izzy: And admittedly, part of this, and my general squicked reaction to lifestyle B&D, is revulsion against the mainstream notion that women really want to be taken care of and bossed around. Ew.
I think there’s also a lot of ways to manufacture the sort of situation where control can be taken without it initially being too obvious that this is what’s going on. It’s only as the particular relationship delveops that it takes on that kind of form. Admittedly, that’s something closer to abuse than a straight (heh) Dom/Sub relationship dynamic.

@damnedyankee: since I don’t think anyone else has brought it up yet, Alyson Hannigan actually is Jewish, according to her IMDB page: “Irish-American on her father’s side and Jewish-American on her mother’s side, Hannigan was raised in the Jewish faith.”

Yeah, that’s creepy. Not because of the D/S thing, but because you were being expected to act like his mini-girlfriend.

It wasn’t so much that I was expected to be a mini-girlfriend or submit to him in anything like the kink sense. It was more that everyone was supposed to recognize that he was the natural leader in whatever situation he found himself because he’s Just That Alpha. That is not what I saw when I looked at him and I did a poor job of hiding that. He’s a very average guy. I’m smarter than he is, so I certainly wasn’t about to simply defer to his judgment in order to feed his delusion. This created some major waves in their pond and they didn’t handle it well. Totally co-dependent and f’ed up.

Rebecca: Oh, so much word. I do think that wanting someone else to make all your decisions isn’t the healthiest of attitudes, by and large–I’m big on the notion that adults should be independent*–but BDSM is at least the most up-front and non-everyone-should-do-this way to have that happen, if you want to do it. Prairie Muffins et al make my skin crawl.
*And admittedly, part of this, and my general squicked reaction to lifestyle B&D, is revulsion against the mainstream notion that women really want to be taken care of and bossed around. Ew.

I can second Izzy’s word on this. The overlap between lifestyle D/S and the whole fundie “man is the head of the household and women are happiest making house and making babies” is a big part of the reason that lifestyle D/S is such a major ick for me. I know that plenty of people can separate those attitudes, but on a gut level I just can’t. I acknowledge that that’s my issue, but I still want to stay far away as much as possible. And the existence of the Prairie Muffins makes my stomach churn.

my general squicked reaction to lifestyle B&D, is revulsion against the mainstream notion that women really want to be taken care of and bossed around.
I will point out that not ever lifestyler couple features a male-dom and a female-sub. That may be the most common one, but I know of a number of alternate pairings. That said, I also cringe at 24/7 when it’s taken to such extremes as handing over control of bank accounts, paychecks, and other such details.

BDSM seems to be dominating the discussion. I hope it doesn’t tie up the thread. Perhaps I should whip up a new topic to break the chain.

I know this isn’t quite the place, and I’ve not read the whole thread, but I know some of us on here were talking about it a while back.
Gordon Brown (the British PM) has apologised to Alan Turing.
Woop! Go us!

@redcrow-
>>>I am now trying to come up with a set of circumstances where the phrase “I really like this movie because the hero puts the heroine in her place as a woman” wouldn’t get some kind of wide-eyed stare from me.
…There once was a pretty liberal country, but then evil dictator came to power and things got worse. Marillan Suerlindor grew up believing everything that official doctrine tought her. In particular, she knew that woman are inferior to men.
Then good guys owerthrown the dictator. But Marillan – who was still fairly young – still believed in what she was told most of her life. They tried to show her documents, but she couldn’t read. She didn’t want to listen to other women who tried to explain her what was wrong with dictatorship – they were bad women, they rebelled against nature! Then the hero desided that maybe she would listen to him. He explained her everything the way she could understand, he also told her that “the woman’s place” is not where she used to think it is. Women must take their rightful place in society! Sadly, at first she believed him because he was a powerful man, not because she really understood (The Man told me I’m a human being, He knows better, so I’m independent because He said so!), but she grew up, got some character development, grew some brains on her own… He didn’t make her a feminist – she had to come to some conclusions herself. But, well, he *tried* to put her in her Rightful-Place-In-Society. She just wasn’t ready then…
*awards redcrow another shiny new internet*
Now then…
redcrow, I’m going to have to ask you not to participate in any more threads for at least three months. There are only a finite number of internets, and you have to give the other children a chance to win one.
@Froborr- There’s a seen in Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter where Jesus is fighting some vamps in a bar. He grabs a beer, makes a sign of the cross over it, takes a mouthful, and sprays it in a vampire’s face. Vamp burns.
I once read a short story, IIRC in one of those collections Barnes and Noble puts together, about a Catholic priest who had been captured by a vampire and locked in a basement. So, he’s trapped, he’s tired, he’s hungry, he’s scared, and he desperately needs to take a piss. So, the vampire comes down to the basement to finish him off, and
the priest unzips his pants, says “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit”…
I think that author should have been awarded some kind of literary prize for Most Creative Method of Disposing of a Vampire.

Raj: I would suggest either flagellation, necrophilia or bestiality, but you’d just be flogging a dead horse.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCFHxvvNswY

Raj, are you going to submit some new topic?
(Oh, I type so slow that I’m sure someone already beat me to it!)

Sorry for the annoying naked link.
This link is one of the many videos telling people how to be more like Edward Cullen.
They used to be easier to find on YouTube before a massive backlash of parodies and mockery buried them in the rankings.

Has anyone here read Peeps by Scott Westenfield (I think that’s his last name)? It’s a new(ish) take on vampires, and quite a good book. It basically posits vampirism as a sexually transmitted, parasitic form of the plague. In it, the reason vampires avoid crosses, etc. isn’t because of the people wielding them, but because over time the parasite evolved to make the vampires away from the things they loved/respected; vampires that didn’t stay away were quickly dispatched by non-vampires. There’s more to it, and the author writes it better than I’m explaining it here. It’s a relatively quick read, too.
Maybe the whole vampires don’t reflect because they have no soul is more that they lost their soul, rather than never had one to begin with? Or, more likely, it was a convenient explanation for people who didn’t stop to ponder the idea of material objects having or not having souls.
I’ll chip in with my two cents about Twilight, too: I don’t like it, but I get a somewhat perverse joy out of mocking just how bad it is (I’m the same way with the DaVinci Code, and of course, Left Behind). It’s mostly the bad writing that annoys me, but I was a little disturbed when my friend Emily and I watched the movie, paused it about 3/4 of the way through to look up “signs of an abusive relationship” and Edward & Bella’s relationship matched 7 of the 11 on the website we found. And I say that as someone who’s down with rape fantasy and/or BDSM as a kink. The difference is that Meyer isn’t portraying their relationship as a kink or a relationship that embraces kink, she’s portraying it as non-kink, and arguing that any girl would want to be stalked/adored by Edward.
As for the comparison with Harry Potter, Rowling’s portrayal of Hogwarts/magic/etc. as normal is not the same thing because that book basically delights in pointing out the differences between Muggle and Magic, and how what is normal for the Magic world is not for the Muggle world. At times she even shows ways that the Magic world, for all the fun it is, can have adverse effect on the Muggle world.
Anyways, I know plenty of sane adults that do enjoy Twilight. I don’t, but if it works for them, I can’t judge anything but their taste in writing.

NRH, can I at least talk to Judith? She’s my slash dealer, I can’t ignore her.

redcrow-
yes, you can talk to Judith to get your slash fix, as long as you do so in a boring, non-clever, non-potentially internet-winning fashion.

All snakes are sentient. Louise is awesome because (among other things) she’s also (semi-)sapient.
Etymologically correct, but you have to concede that standard usage is on my side, not yours.
True, but what we call the reflection and shadow are actually the body of the soul (haven’t you read your Oscar Wilde?). This is why vampires and ghosts don’t have them. It’s also why when Bart sells his soul on the Simpsons episode, automatic doors don’t see him.
It’s mythology. It’s supposed to make sense?
It’s supposed to be self-consistent and plausible. Placing bricks in a vampire’s mouth to prevent it from chewing on its shroud and spreading contagens makes sense. Turning the mirrors in your house to the wall before a death to prevent a soul from becoming trapped makes sense. Assuming that reflections or shadows indicate the presence of a soul, when you as a good medieval Christian know that only humans have souls and yet animals and chairs have shadows and reflections, makes zero sense.
I’m not denying it’s in the folklore, but it’s a stupid piece of folklore.
And are you sure about chairs being unensouled? A pantheist would argue the point.
If there’s a soul in my chair I’m hiring an exorcist.
I mean, if Shinto vampires want to be transparent on account of soulessness, that’s cool. But our Western ones need to get their act together, because Europeans don’t roll that way. Some places have souls in the land or big rocks, but no one has them in their furniture.
LOL at the pissing priest, NRH.

I’m actually struggling to think of a real, mainstream example of a Muslim who fights the forces of darkness using their own beliefs from USA media and coming up short.”
There was a JLA story a few years ago which introduced Janissary, a female Middle Eastern super-hero. Puzzlingly, her magic is Arthurian (there’s a reason why she has Merlin’s spellbook and Excalibur but it escapes me) rather than Islamic, but she is a devout Muslim and drives out the demonic Iblis when he possesses her by kneeling to pray to Allah (which according to the story is anathema to Iblis, since it implies humility).

I remember some college studies about rape and near-rape imagery in mainstream media being worryingly influential, but I can’t find any sort of easily-citable source, and all the potential relevant studies that turn up on Google involve signing up for some research library, so I think we’re going to be stuck at ‘mutually unconvinced’ on Twilight pushing people towards holding certain attitudes.
On the fundamentalists and Harry Potter thing, I mostly tend to think it’s ridiculous when they make the massive nonsensical jumps (“HARRY POTTER ADVOCATES SATAN WORSHIP!!”), or get the contents of the book wrong. If they’re bothered because it pushes a distinctly non-fundamentalist approach to life, and they think it’s a bad influence, then I recognize the real issue isn’t their idea that the book can influence children, but that I think it’s good for kids to be encouraged to see things in non-fundamentalist ways, and they think it’s bad.
There don’t seem to be Middle Eastern vampires, but this must be a big problem in Malaysia.
The penanggalin of Malaysia (local versions of vampires) tend to feed on the blood of pregnant women and fetuses. And they’re not undead, but generally practitioners of black magic who’ve had it backfire on them. The whole “Not being a good Muslim” rarely comes up, because it’s mostly people who’ve voluntarily done stuff like make deals with demons. There are stories of women being cursed into becoming penanggal (only women are penanggal), but they’re quite rare. I also haven’t heard of any living off animal blood, so I suspect the whole eating-people thing would be a bigger issue than not being halal about it.
(Penanggalin also fly around as a head dangling internal organs when in attack form, and leave an empty body behind. Which may win them the prize for grossest vampire.)

Froborr, I know Superman handled Mjolnir in Avengers vs. Superman but Thor implied it was because Odin had a “Well, if the cosmos is about to end, and someone needs to pick it up to save the universe, go right ahead” failsafe. So it would be an exception.
It is possible if someone of a virtuous heart defeats Thor to wield the hammer, as happened to Beta Ray Bill.And robots can pick it up–using machines to steal the hammer was a tactic used in several sixties stories.

On True Blood, I mostly avoided it because my dad kept trying to pester me into watching (and reading the books) right after my sister-in-law nagged me into reading the Twilight books. (The whole “Just read one more book, and you’ll like it!” thing was a consistent theme, and after “I hate everyone in these books but Alice and Jacob”, she nagged me into reading the third one, which lead to “Okay, now I hate Jacob.”) It was really bad timing for anyone trying to get me to enjoy vampire romance stories.

I should’ve known this couldn’t possibly be merely about Vampires and crosses. Well, literally anyway.
Another great post.

I also haven’t heard of any living off animal blood, so I suspect the whole eating-people thing would be a bigger issue than not being halal about it.
But suppose you repented and wanted to reform? It seems like you’re pretty much out of luck at that point. Unless they’re not obligate haemovores?
(Although I agree with you on the general principle that for most penanggalin the not-being-halal issue is only part of a larger ‘eating babies’ problem.)
Penanggalin also fly around as a head dangling internal organs when in attack form, and leave an empty body behind. Which may win them the prize for grossest vampire.
And least practical. I mean, if you get attacked you can just grab a handful of intestines and yank. Organs are internal for a reason.

Am I supposed to understand that Froborr has also seen “Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter”? I think I’m in love….

Ad rates are not determined based on how much you like something, only whether or not it draws eyeballs. How much anybody like a given show has nothing to do with whether or not it gets another season. If everybody in the world watched it but hated it, they would keep making more of ‘em.”
There are the Q ratings, however, which determine if the viewers really, really like what they’re watching. And a show can sometimes hang on on the principle that if the people who do watch it love it, maybe if they can get more people to watch …
Or so I’ve read in media articles over the years.

But suppose you repented and wanted to reform? It seems like you’re pretty much out of luck at that point. Unless they’re not obligate haemovores?
I think they can’t stop with the blood. And I think it has to be human (although the pregnant women, small children, and fetuses thing is only a preference). I don’t know what the cursed or reformed ones would do. Sounds like they’re pretty much out of luck.
If you touch the internal organs, you get a nasty sore, but yeah, it’s still not very practical. I’d pick sores all over my hand over death by vampire any day.

There are the Q ratings, however, which determine if the viewers really, really like what they’re watching.

Based on what I learned from people I know in “the business” Q scores are generally a bigger deal for actors than for shows. As has been proven again & again, intensity of fan love does not make up for a lack of numbers when it comes to shows. Low ratings + high Q score may buy you a little time, but if the ratings don’t go up the show gets the axe.
For actors, a high Q score helps when it comes to getting hired. The suits pretty much always have some form of casting approval and a high Q score makes it more likely that they’ll be willing to sign off on an actor. The logic being that if an actor is well-liked people are more likely to watch the show s/he is on.

Huh, this is annoying. There was a minor Marvel superhero called the Arabian Knight but when I checked him out seems he got his magical toys (flying carpet, really, really sharp sword that also fired force blasts and a super stretchy sash that functioned like a whip/lasso)not from Allah but from “the Eastern gods” whoeverthehell they’re supposed to be.

not from Allah but from “the Eastern gods” whoeverthehell they’re supposed to be.
In fairness, not many non-Arabian superheroes get their powers from Christianity. (Bibleman, maybe, but I rather think that’s the exception that proves the rule.) You’re much more likely to have powers bestowed by Thor or Athena. So it’s not quite as icky as it initially seems.

Catching up…
Spearmint:

Anyway if you go by the rib version of Genesis apparently he originally made us parthenogenic, since he wasn’t going to make a woman until Adam started whining that he was lonely.

He made Lilith and Adam at the same time. Then Adam threw a fit because Lilith insisted on acting like she was his equal or something (the nerve!) and tried to rape her, and Lilith spoke the secret name of God and was teleported out of the garden. Later, Adam was all, “I’m lonely, get me another one,” and God was all, “Sure, I’ll give you one whose backstory encourages subservience. Go to sleep.”
Now, as far as Jews vs. the supernatural goes, there’s a story in one of the Time/Life Enchanted World books I’ve got downstairs involving a young rabbi facing off against a werewolf.
Michael Cule said:

…the Grigori, the choir of angels in the BOOK OF ENOCH who are corrupted by their desire for mortal women, father the Nephandi and teach mankind magic. Grigori means ‘watchers’ of course.

I think you mean Nephilim, not Nephandi.
@Froborr: Jesus Christ, Vampire Hunter is awesome. I don’t always find that intentional schlock works for me, but that one was just so good-natured I found it impossible to dislike. It’s also made in Ottawa, so I had fun playing, “Spot the location”.
Lori said:

I can’t wrap my head around the vanilla vs kinky aspect of this because I’m stuck on the practical aspect. All I can think is that cleaning up after wrestling in creamed corn would be nasty. There are some places I just don’t want corn kernels to go, you know?

Same here. I don’t even like eating creamed corn — with some exceptions (usually desserts) I don’t like things with a gummy, gluey texture.
Rebecca said:

This is actually what I think about those creepy Cult of Femininity blogs. It’s a very mainstreamed kink, and maybe it works for them, but DO NOT TELL ME YOUR KINK IS THE ONLY RIGHT WAY. It makes me almost physically ill to read some of them.

Greta Christina has a great piece about Christian Spanking Porn (link not worksafe, durr).
jamoche said:

Torchwood… doesn’t really have anyone’s sexual fantasies. It’s more along the lines of someone who’s just got over the idea of sex=ew! but hasn’t yet got the idea that it takes more than a couple of naked bodies going at it for something to be sexy.

Agreed. I’ve been racking my brains to remember any episodes which made me go, “I am seeing way too much of this author’s desires” and coming up short. “Titillate the audience” /= “induldge the author’s kink”; there can be some overlap, but the former is about trying to cater to the audience‘s tastes, which, really, aren’t the writers supposed to do that? Usually, my beef is that writers and directors assume that the only audience whose tastes matter are heterosexual college boys, and that’s one problem Torchwood doesn’t have.
Leum, you’re not alone — I’ve been trying to change my habit to saying “sapient”.
Art, I’d seen at least one of those “How to find/make your own Edward” videos, but I didn’t think to bookmark it. I couldn’t even watch it all the way through.

FrenchRoast, I mentioned Scott Westerfeld’s Peeps and its “drive the vampire back with Elvis memorabilia” scene on another thread.

Um, I’m thinking right now that if Fred is right, and crosses work against vampires because they are a symbol of sacrificial powerlessness, then the image of a Bodhisattva should work just as well. I mean, somebody who is willing to give up Nirvana to help others along the road to attaining it, that should make for some uber-powerful vampire repellant, shouldn’t it?

This Will Be Long:

on my bleaker days, I suspect it wouldn’t matter if cows could talk, recite sonnets, or write CBS procedural crime dramas, we’d still be making them into hamburger

But tasty, anapestic, onomatopoeic hamburgers! [Drool!]
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Whenever somebody says that a pet subject has been “raped” or “murdered” by a writer, it’s a pretty good sign they are taking this way too seriously.

If someone takes a children’s classic and uses it for their own twisted fantasies (such as the Alice in Wonderland Horror game), I think a charge of “____ raped my childhood” might be in order, especially if the twisted fantasy gains popularity.
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phenomenon

Doo Doo Da Doo Doo
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That a kukri killed Dracula just shows that you shouldn’t mess with a Ghurka.

A Kosher Dill would do the trick too (all that garlic — yum!)
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There’s definitely a pattern of portraying men as having lust and women as controlling lust, which shows how much abstinence-only programs tend to be a cesspool of unexamined cultural toxins.

This is nicely lampooned in “Glee” (everyone who can IS watching “Glee”, right? RIGHT?). The “Cheerios” (the cheerleading squad) has set up the Chastity Club to “tease but not please” (that’s their actual motto). The female protagonist invades and tells the guys “girls like to have sex asd much as guys do!” Pop!
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Either I’m way less hot than I think

I’ve seen you on FaceBook and definitely NOT! You’re probably HOTTER than you think! Fourth Option, though: They know about the Flamethrower and the Chainsaw and know what they’d be in for if they DID try an inappropriate move!

I don’t have a lot of patience in general.

OH RLLY? [stunned]
===============
I have certain “hot but wrong” fantasies. But I KNOW that they are wrong, so I keep them contained as fantasies (often adding an SF or fantastic element to them just for that reason). I also wouldn’t publish anything about these fantasies without making it clear that I know that they’re “hot but wrong” and anyone who thinks they’re right in the Real World belongs under guard.
=====================

And a lot of the ethics of internet porn, as I understand them, involve making a reasonable (messy word, again) effort to minimize possible harm while still allowing a reasonable (messy word!) degree of pleasure.

Very much YES. On the “hot but wrong” forums I frequent, the line between fantasy and reality is VERY strong. When a real life situation occurs that mirrors the “hot but wrong” fantasy, the ONLY comments are sympathy for the victim and anger (or rage) at the perp.
======================

Nor does reading and enjoying the books make you a bad person: there’s nothing wrong with enjoying stuff despite the skeevy bits.

My neice ADORED New Kids On The Block when she was younger (about which I gave her no mercy) and she’s turned out AWESOME (she just reminded me of her NKOB fandom the other day).
========================

Maybe you’re the Plucky Comic Relief!

So she’s the last to die (because “Now it’s personal!!!!!!” 165 people have been brutally murdered, but you don’t REALLY have to do anything until a loved one is a victim? So. Much. Hate!)
=========================

Raj: and how often do you really think that Izzy’s going to be approached by Geoff from Coupling?

I haven’t seen an episode, but I could easily imagine Dexter haing that conversation.
=========================

If you chose to share you have to accept that many people are going to react badly to it.

One of the wonderful things about the Internet is that there are other people you can share your “hot but wrong” fantasies with. It’s a GREAT relief to know that you’re not alone, and that you’re not a terrible person who is going do someone wrong AT ANY MINUTE!!!!! Sharing “hot but wrong” fantasies is highly cathartic.
======================

That said, I am now trying to come up with a set of circumstances where the phrase “I really like this movie because the hero puts the heroine in her place as a woman” wouldn’t get some kind of wide-eyed stare from me.

Hero to heroine: I hereby declare you to be the President of the United States!
======================

I guess I’m slightly more a Richard III kinda gal.

“Was ever woman in this manner woo’d? Was ever woman in this manner won!”
======================

Also, real-life vore would normally be cannibalism

Or dress-up.
This is too long already, and I’m still not at the end, and I have to go home, so To Be Continued!

Maybe you’re the Plucky Comic Relief!
So she’s the last to die (because “Now it’s personal!!!!!!” 165 people have been brutally murdered, but you don’t REALLY have to do anything until a loved one is a victim? So. Much. Hate!)

It depends on the story. I guess the Plucky Comic Relief does tend to die toward the end (if at all) but the “Now it’s personal” death often takes place right at the start. That’s usually when it’s what I refer to as a “dead girlfriend story”.
In a DGS the hero’s wife or girlfriend (and sometimes child) is killed in order to give the hero license to go off on his heroic killing spree. The dead girlfriend isn’t an actual character. She’s just beautiful and perfect and she and the hero are so in love. She has no purpose in the story but to die to facilitate the hero’s rage. I hate DGSs with a passion.

(because “Now it’s personal!!!!!!” 165 people have been brutally murdered, but you don’t REALLY have to do anything until a loved one is a victim? So. Much. Hate!)
The related trope I hate is where your stupid sister and her stupid boss get a bunch of people killed, but the movie has a “happy” ending because you go get a bunch more people killed to save your stupid sister. Yes, Vertical Limit is the worst movie I personally have seen, why do you ask.
(I watched that movie for the Siddig, which was highly insufficient. The only redeeming feature of the whole shitfest was the existence of health and safety officer character. Nobody listens to him, of course. But at least the movie leaves one with the idea that they probably should have. I think there should be way more stories of heroic H&S officers.)
(And also more movies with believable sexyactionscientists. Which is one of the reasons I can tolerate Jurassic Park III, besides the slashability. Lab coats are sexy too, but overdone.)

The idea that men are lecherous beasts and it’s women’s responsibility to control them is an old one.
I see your point, and yes, that’s a puerile attitude. But it doesn’t explain why many of the advocates of that type of abstinence education are women.
There’s definitely a pattern of portraying men as having lust and women as controlling lust, which shows how much abstinence-only programs tend to be a cesspool of unexamined cultural toxins.
Now you’ve got me interested, and not in a prurient way. I have some ideas of what those toxins may be, but what do you think they are?
The Pirates of the Caribbean movie, which I personally thought was mediocre at best, came out and then we had several years of nonstop pirate obsession. Now Twilight has come out and vampires are the new pirates.
And there’s a young adult series that combines the two – Vampirates. No joke.
I think that a certain amount of self-awareness is one of the necessary attributes of a good writer
And in tribute to our host, Fred’s dissections of LB strongly imply that L&J seem to be remarkably self-unaware. He may have even stated this explicitly.

Jeff said:

If someone takes a children’s classic and uses it for their own twisted fantasies (such as the Alice in Wonderland Horror game), I think a charge of “____ raped my childhood” might be in order, especially if the twisted fantasy gains popularity.

Bollocks to that. I would argue that a “remake” or sequel to a children’s classic which completely twists and dilutes the story, characters, and overall tone of the original and then has the nerve to market itself to fans of the actual classic* deserves that charge a lot more than a derivative work which is upfront about what elements it’s changed, shows a genuine love and respect for the source material**, and doesn’t market itself to the same crowd.

Hero to heroine: I hereby declare you to be the President of the United States!

Because a woman’s place is in the White House.
*See The Duck Speaks on The Cat in the Hat.
** I love American McGee’s Alice, and I love the original Alice books (preferably with annotations and the Tenniel illustrations). It’s my impression that the people who are all, “Alice as a horror heroine? Think of the children!” are not only missing that the game isn’t marketed to children, but are also basing their opinions more on the sugar-coated Disney film than on the actual book.

cyllan, re the Atlanta Shakespeare Tavern: if you happened to see the recent Henry VI, that was my eldest daughter playing Joan of Arc.

The idea that men are lecherous beasts and it’s women’s responsibility to control them is an old one.
I see your point, and yes, that’s a puerile attitude. But it doesn’t explain why many of the advocates of that type of abstinence education are women.
More Just World Fallacy – “If I do all the right things, I don’t have to worry about anything bad happening to me!”

Jeff: If someone takes a children’s classic and uses it for their own twisted fantasies (such as the Alice in Wonderland Horror game), I think a charge of “____ raped my childhood” might be in order, especially if the twisted fantasy gains popularity.
Erm, you do know that Lewis Carroll might have had a certain… special interest in children, right? He seemed to collect – and take – pseudo-sexual photographs of children and some of his letters were truly terrifying. I remember watching an episode of the UK version of Antiques Roadshow where the valuer was delighted to discover a trove of Carroll/Dodgson’s private correspondence. Until he read them aloud. There’s something both squicky and hilarious about a man petitioning another man, who is also a village parson, that he be allowed to visit his daughter, or even that the man allow his daughter to stay with Carroll. She also had nice calves, apparently.
I shall endeavour to find the clip in question, if possible.

Tonio said:

The idea that men are lecherous beasts and it’s women’s responsibility to control them is an old one.
I see your point, and yes, that’s a puerile attitude. But it doesn’t explain why many of the advocates of that type of abstinence education are women.

Reason 1 would be that that’s what they’ve been taught all their lives. Reason 2 is that it gives them an illusion of power.
I read somewhere that some rape victims freak out and get very upset when they’re told “It wasn’t your fault, you had no way of controlling that situation”. The little lies they’ve been telling themselves — “if only I hadn’t provoked him by doing X, Y, Z” — make them feel like they did have control, but just didn’t use it wisely. Finding out that they were essentially helpless is upsetting.
My suspicion is that facing up to the fact that supporting a patriarchal system makes them and the young women they’re trying to help more vulnerable (and gives carte blanche to predatory behaviour on the part of young men) would cause cognitive dissonance, so they tell lies to the effect of, “Oh, we’re the ones with real power here.”

Launcifer said:

Erm, you do know that Lewis Carroll might have had a certain… special interest in children, right?

Oh yeah. And while American McGee could have used that as an excuse to tart Alice up, he didn’t — videogame Alice, despite being a teenager rather than a little girl, is not presented in a sexy way.

Shiftercat: Yeah, I think the game you mean. I wasn’t really aiming that comment in any particular direction: it was more the notion that, well, if this is what the author might well have been about, then it becomes virtually impossible to make any re-interpretation more warped than the original.
Then again, if that’s what I meant then I probably should have said so…

More Just World Fallacy – “If I do all the right things, I don’t have to worry about anything bad happening to me!”
I see your point, although any resemblance to the JWF would seem to be superficial. My perception of the JWF is that it’s about blame and guilt, where people long for scapegoats for what appear to be random events.

On the abstinence thing-
I was reading an online article about the Purity Movement, (you know, where teenage girls vow to remain virgins until their wedding nights, and in some cases, this involved their fathers putting a ‘purity ring” on the third finger of their left hand- squick!). Apparently there’s a version of this for teenage boys, who make vows to their mothers…
to protect the purity of girls. Not to remain pure themselves, and save themselves for their future wives.
Apparently chastity is a one-way street.
So, anyway…
Vampires can be thwarted by scattering small seeds in their paths, because the undead have OCD and will be compelled to count the seeds.
McDonald’s wastes about a kajillion sesame seed bun tops every year, because the bottoms go into the middle of Big Macs, because making three-layer Big Mac buns would make too much sense.
There are a few female popular singers that have such large gay male followings that they have become part of the gay stereotype, but there don’t seem to be any male singers that have similarly large lesbian followings. This situation causes a dangerous unbalance in the universe.
So… wait… I’ve got it.
All the lesbians are busy saving our asses from the vampires by scattering sesame seed bun tops in their paths, thus forcing them to count the seeds, meanwhile, the Universe Itself goes careening out of control…
Drat you, Raj, look what you’ve done!!!

Now you’ve got me interested, and not in a prurient way. I have some ideas of what those toxins may be, but what do you think they are?
Pretty much the standard stuff. Misapplied ideas about cleanliness, contamination, and purity (they’re very fond of metaphorical ‘demonstrations’ of how some object that gets used and passed around is Dirty, Therefore Undesirable And Ruined – also, Purity Balls). Fear and discomfort with adolescent sexuality (it’s complicated and raises a lot of uncomfortable issues for adults, and there can be a certain appeal in the idea of telling kids “Just don’t do anything!”, especially if you can make yourself believe it might work). Thinking of sex as something men do and women have done to them. Assuming ‘traditional’ gender roles (which tend to be about equal parts actual tradition and cultural myths about the ‘good old days’) are right for everyone. That kind of thing.

Ako, could all those toxins have a common root? It’s a psychological cliche to say that “prudes” are terrified of their own impulses and are projecting that onto others. That sounds incomplete to me because it doesn’t explain the concept of sex as something men do and women have done to them.
Aside – I didn’t know that the homophobia variant, where homophobes have gay impulses or are fearful that they might be gay, actually has a psychological basis. That sounded to me like a simple argument tactic, a way of mocking the homophobes.

I see your point, although any resemblance to the JWF would seem to be superficial. My perception of the JWF is that it’s about blame and guilt, where people long for scapegoats for what appear to be random events.
In my experience, it’s mostly about control. I’ve seen people use the JWF in a perfectly well-meaning way, not trying to inflict guilt on someone else or enjoying the prospect of the other person being blameworthy and guilty. Just really attached to the idea that bad things mean you’ve done something wrong, because then you can control whether bad things happen to you.
And I’ve seen a lot of people get caught up in the fallacy because they find blame and guilt for what happened to them painful, but easier to bear than a feeling of helplessness. Not always people who have any desire to feel guilty or blameworthy, either.

I wouldn’t say they all have a common root. I think some of them are part of being human. We’ve evolved with a lot of good-enough-for-most-purposes mental wiring about cleanliness and dirt, which is helpful if you’re a hunter-gatherer who doesn’t have much information on toxins or the resources to test anything, but also makes it easy to fall into sloppy thinking about dirtiness and things being tainted. Other tendencies involve a whole heap of cultural baggage that came up at different times for different reasons. There doesn’t seem to be a single ‘explains it all’ factor.
The homosexuality thing surprised me, because it’s actually supported by research. It sounds, in my head, like “If you don’t like gays, you’re gay!”, but apparently, in men at least, hostile attitudes towards homosexuality tie in with a tendency to get aroused by gay porn.

“What about simulated sunlight?”
Sometimes works. Batman has killed Dracula with a sunlight-generating machine at least once…

In Roman Polanski’s “The Fearless Vampire Killers” (aka “Dance of the Vampires”) a potential victim brandishes a cross in front of Shagal, the Inn-Keeper, who says, “Oy vey, have you got the wrong vampire.”

The homosexuality thing surprised me, because it’s actually supported by research. It sounds, in my head, like “If you don’t like gays, you’re gay!”, but apparently, in men at least, hostile attitudes towards homosexuality tie in with a tendency to get aroused by gay porn.

Just wanted to point out that sexual arousal, especially erection, and sexual attraction and desire are not always the same thing. It’s possible that simply seeing nudity is so tied up in some people’s minds with sex that it automatically results in a sexual response, that the erections are in response to potential competition, or triggered by anxiety (see below).
The science, and the technology, are both suspect. From the Skeptic’s Dictionary on penile plethysmographs (PPGs):

viewing homosexual stimuli causes negative emotions such as anxiety in homophobic men but not in non-homophobic men. Because anxiety has been shown to enhance arousal and erection, this theory would predict increases in erection in homophobic men. Furthermore, it would indicate that a response to homosexual stimuli is a function of the threat condition rather than sexual arousal per se.
…
Decreased arousal may not be strong evidence for decreased tendency to engage in criminal sex acts (Leum’s note: i.e. child molestation). Strong arousal need not imply strong desire for what causes the arousal; and weak arousal need not imply weak desire. Furthermore, no test can determine whether a person will act on his feelings and desires. Nevertheless, many of those who treat sex offenders swear by the PPG even though there is no compelling evidence that PPG readings validly indicate a tendency to commit or not commit sex crimes.

@Jeff: Since you mention Alice, and I know you’re a Lewis Carroll fan, I was wondering if you’ve ever read John Crowley’s Little, Big? If so, what did you think? I read it this week while I was sick (an interesting book to read while you’re feverish!), and it’s very Carrollian, in a Reagan’s-America instead of Victoria’s-England sort of way.

Feed off the blood of others and great power will be yours. This is demonstrably true. It’s how the pyramids were built.

IIRC, at least some of the pyramids were built by salaried farmers in their off-season, who enjoyed pensions as a result.

And someetimes went on strike, successfully. And made up nicknames for their work crews that they used to sign the stone blocks that they personally dragged up the ramps. (I think one of them was “Rams of Amun.”)
The Great Wall of China is probably a better example.

*And admittedly, part of this, and my general squicked reaction to lifestyle B&D, is revulsion against the mainstream notion that women really want to be taken care of and bossed around. Ew.

The vast majority of “lifestyle” B&Ders are male doms and female subs (I refuse the stupid caps/lower case nonsense that most of the B&D community seems to have absorbed), but there are some female doms and male subs. Plus, just to be egalitarian, female doms with female subs and male doms with male subs. So at least to some extent, B&D is also about men wanting to be bossed around.
====================

The suits pretty much always have some form of casting approval and a high Q score makes it more likely that they’ll be willing to sign off on an actor. The logic being that if an actor is well-liked people are more likely to watch the show s/he is on.

Victor Garber. Neil Patrick Harris (He and Tony Shaloub did “Stark Raving Mad” about 10 years too soon. If they did it now, it would run for 20 years!) Either of the “Supernatural” “brothers”. Read the forums on TWoP: there are tons on people who will watch a ghastly show just because their heart-throb is on it. Bonus points if there’s HoYay and/or taking off of shirts.
======================

It’s my impression that the people who are all, “Alice as a horror heroine? Think of the children!” are not only missing that the game isn’t marketed to children, but are also basing their opinions more on the sugar-coated Disney film than on the actual book.

Erm, you do know that Lewis Carroll might have had a certain… special interest in children, right?

As a huge fan of not only the Alice books, but Slyvie and Bruno and the rest, I’m aware not only of the snarky edges of AiW, but of the lies and slanders against the Rev Dodgson as well. He admired the prepubescent female form (and lamented when Alice’s namesake entered her teens), but he also believed in the innocence of children — I believe he was more asexual in that regard than Michael Jackson. So pfffffhhhhhhhttttbbbb :-p
And trying to read ANY of Carroll’s work as sexual: Does. Not. Work. There’s a lot going on (see the White Knight for a whole basketful of psychological studies) and TtLG can be read as a child growing into an adult, but trying to put his nude photos together with the novels says more about the one doing the merge than it does about Carroll.
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Ahem — Jeff catches his breath
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they’re very fond of metaphorical ‘demonstrations’ of how some object that gets used and passed around is Dirty, Therefore Undesirable And Ruined

You mean like… money? [I’d love to use that example on ‘em!)
===============================

“What about simulated sunlight?”
Sometimes works. Batman has killed Dracula with a sunlight-generating machine at least once…

I think both Blade and Underworld had guns that shot “solid sunshine” in one form or another, but I’m too tired and too drunk to look either up.
==========================

Since you mention Alice, and I know you’re a Lewis Carroll fan, I was wondering if you’ve ever read John Crowley’s Little, Big?

From the wiki description, it sounds more like Charles de Lint (whom I love) than Carroll. It looks worth a read. (After all the books I bought at the last library sale I went to, and the third novel of the Sharing Knife trilogy, and…)

Another side to Rev. Dodgson’s issues with children comes from the custom of the day for men of the middle and upper classes to marry in middle age, their brides being much younger. (IIRC, at about the time he published AIW, 16 years was considered the ideal age gap.) So, according to what I’ve read, he approached Alice’s parents about perhaps courting her when she was of age. Her parents demanded that he cut the connection, not because they thought he was a perv, but because they knew he was a parson. Utterly unsuitable for a girl from Alice’s higher social stratum!

It’s my impression that the people who are all, “Alice as a horror heroine? Think of the children!” are not only missing that the game isn’t marketed to children, but are also basing their opinions more on the sugar-coated Disney film than on the actual book.
Erm, you do know that Lewis Carroll might have had a certain… special interest in children, right?

Jeff, the first quote is me, but the second is not.

What creeps me out the most about the Twilight phenomenon: Reports that mothers of teenage girls love the series because it presents their daughters with such a wholesome role-model of teenage courtship and premarital abstinence.
Izzy is right that our generation got all the best stuff. When I was of that age to enjoy the Mary Suedom of “I thought I was ordinary but this very troubled, dangerous, sexy man thinks I’m special, and that my very existence saves his soul,” I was watching Ron Perlman play the awesomest, kick-assiest poetry-reciting cat-man ever. Vincent could kick Edward’s butt any day and doesn’t need to sparkle about it, either. (Have I mentioned this before? I may have. It inevitably is the next thought in my head at this point in any Twilight conversation.)
Speaking of sparkling: the trend seems to be to write away all the traditional downsides to being a vampire. It’s not so much that tradition needs to be immortalized, but that immortality and power are supposed to have a price. Make it painless to forgo human blood and eat deer or visit the butcher instead, that doesn’t bug me, plenty of vampire fiction takes care of the blood angle that way if they want their vampire characters to be at all sympathetic. But when you replace “dies or loses power in sunlight” with “skin is revealed to sparkle like angel marble, thus exposing my perfection to human eyes, woe and alack,” it’s like, well, why *not* be a vampire then? Also, it’s so very very Gary Stu that I want to drop-kick it.

This sounds vaguely familiar – I recall hearing of some variant of a vampire story (it was in a comic book, I think) where someone tries to hold off a vampire with a crucifix, and it doesn’t work because he’s not a Christian and doesn’t actually believe in it – it turns out, though, that this person was a committed socialist and for him, holding up a copy of the Communist Manifesto, something he did strongly believe in, was enough to repel the creature. This seems to make most sense if you do take this approach of treating vampires as basically a metaphor made real, the specific metaphor in this case being their ability to dominate and prey on the mentally weak or confused, those who have no strong conviction or world view to guide them – not necessarily a religious view; even a strong sociopolitical position seems to work. Perhaps even a nihilist, if he were absolutely certain of life’s meaninglessness, might be safe (or, perhaps, a nihilist might not have any quality such a vampire would wish to prey on anyway).
Although the realised-metaphor vampire conception is somewhat appealing from a literary point of view, my favourite (for reasons of plausibility) is the more scientific, disease-based vampire concept that you typically see in more recent incarnations of the long-standing myth; movies, TV shows, computer games, etc – it’s generally treated as a kind of communicable symbiotic or parasitic blood condition, which preserves, strengthens and improves the senses of the host whose mind and body remain active although apparently biologically dead, and is sustained by consuming the energy of the host’s blood which, because the normal digestive system and any other organs apart from the circulatory and nervous systems are dead and cannot produce more, must be topped up manually. It also only takes over a severely weakened person largely drained of blood, explaining why there isn’t a new vampire created every time anyone ever gets bitten for feeding, which would result in an immediate and untenable population explosion and subsequent Malthusian collapse. This particular version remains bound by fundamental physical concepts, conservation of mass, the laws of thermodynamics, etc, so stuff like turning into a bat is out, and sunlight probably won’t turn them to dust or make them burst into flame, but is avoided because it overwhelms the heightened senses and causes pain. Religious symbols do nothing, though the pathogen could plausibly be susceptible to some chemical component of garlic.

I frequently get the “How do you know that??!!!” reaction.

I get that a lot, too. Once, a friend told me a story about a kink her abusive ex-husband had, while her current husband swore the act the ex had performed was physically impossible. Clearly, they both expected it to shock me. My response: “I’m pretty sure there’s a word for that act, but I can’t remember it at the moment. But I’ve seen pictures of it.”
My default response to “How do you know that?!?!?!” has become, “I click on the links Warren (Ellis) tells me not to,” whether or not I actually learned about it that way, because it just generally conveys my attitude about these things.

Conversely, there’s nothing so vanilla that someone isn’t horrified by the very idea.

I’m sometimes horrified by things because they’re too vanilla…
I have to say, re: Blindsight, that I hate and despise it when authors try to come up with scientific explanations for vampires and other occult and folkloric figures and occurrences.* It is not original, and it is not at all interesting to me, and I refuse to consume any story containing it. I also decline to read sexy-vampire books. It squicks me.
*Although there’s some fuzziness in the border. If it’s about paranormal investigators looking for the EM signatures of ghosts, that’s one thing; vampirism being an actual virus or mutation is something else, and I hates it.

implausible desert mini-mammoths

If they’d been island mini-mammoths, they’d have been perfectly correct.

I have this plot bunny floating around where Thursday Next has to investigate a terrible outbreak of vampire books – not books about vampires, but books where the main characters appear to be Generics at first glance, but – being voids – slowly absorb the reader, sucking away their personality. The readers don’t realise what’s happening, they only think that the character is just so amazingly like them! that they keep coming back for more. The books, of course, are Twilight.

Brilliant! If you ever turn it into something, I want to read it.

And are you sure about chairs being unensouled? A pantheist would argue the point.

Er, my understanding of pantheism is that everything is a part of some ultimate deity, and that the universe itself is that deity. Belief that everything has a soul is, I think, called animism. I could be mistaken, but merriam-webster.com’s definitions are pretty close to mine.
I am, btw, both an animist and a pantheist, and I do believe that chairs have spirits. (I don’t care for the word “soul,” as it has too many connotations which are inimical to my worldview, one of which is the connotation that it is something specific to humans.)

The overlap between lifestyle D/S and the whole fundie “man is the head of the household and women are happiest making house and making babies” is a big part of the reason that lifestyle D/S is such a major ick for me.

Er, then how do you feel about the three-or-more other styles of lifestyle D/s? Because it’s not all M/f, there’s F/m, F/f, M/m, and variations with more participants, including versions with entire hierarchies, not all of which involve men automatically being dominant of women. (Cyllan got to pointing it out first, but I actually do want to know how you feel about it. 24/7 does generally creep me out, too, with a few exceptions, but for different reasons, most of which have to do with having seen it in action.) Also, as it happens, B&D (which someone else used in the lifestyle context) stands for Bondage and Discipline, and while it is often part of lifestyle D/s, it is not an accurate term for it in general.

It basically posits vampirism as a sexually transmitted, parasitic form of the plague.

AAAAAAUUUUUUGH! THIS is exactly the sort of thing I object to. Haaaaaaate.

Etymologically correct, but you have to concede that standard usage is on my side, not yours.

Sometimes the distinction between two words is useful enough that we should fight to maintain it, even if we are fighting against the tide. I find sentient and sapient to be one such instance, and gender and sex to be another.

Some places have souls in the land or big rocks, but no one has them in their furniture.

They’re there, they’re just usually not very loud or large or noticeable.

If someone takes a children’s classic and uses it for their own twisted fantasies (such as the Alice in Wonderland Horror game), I think a charge of “____ raped my childhood” might be in order, especially if the twisted fantasy gains popularity.

NO. Using “rape” this way belittles actual rape. No one can retroactively take your childhood and rape it. Your childhood is not a person, it is a period in your life, and fictively mistreating things you loved as a child is nothing like raping an actual human being.

I see your point, and yes, that’s a puerile attitude. But it doesn’t explain why many of the advocates of that type of abstinence education are women.

It allows them to believe that they are better than other women, for one thing, and also, in a bassackwards way, superior to, and in control of, men.

I didn’t know that the homophobia variant, where homophobes have gay impulses or are fearful that they might be gay, actually has a psychological basis. That sounded to me like a simple argument tactic, a way of mocking the homophobes.

Actually, that hypothesis is based on this study, which did show a connection between homophobia and homosexual arousal. I’m not saying it’s concrete — as Leum pointed out, there are methodological problems — but that’s where it comes from.
There. I got through the whole damned thread. By the time I get to the new TF tomorrow, y’all are sure to be into the 300s, so I may skip it. I’m a little busy these days.

Art: Was it me or did that woman in the video seem like she’d had more than a few drinks? She had the look and sound of “desperately trying to maintain focus” I’ve seen all too often.
Out of curiousity is there any symbol other than the Koran that a Muslim could use to repell a vamp?

Tricksterson: I dunno, perhaps the crescent that is the symbol of their faith?

I thought that too except I’ve never seen a Muslim actually wearing a crescent. Of course I’m sometimes prone to critical Spot Check Failure so I could be wrong.

MadGastronomer: NO. Using “rape” this way belittles actual rape. No one can retroactively take your childhood and rape it. Your childhood is not a person, it is a period in your life, and fictively mistreating things you loved as a child is nothing like raping an actual human being.
Thank you. Everybody? THIS.
(Weren’t you also the one who objected to the phrase “riding bitch” in the second thread of its use? I got to both of those threads wayyyyy too late to have a say, but, thank you for that too.)
Attempting this “signing in via Twitter” thing. If my “Posted by:” byline is different, it should still be pretty obvious who I am.

(Weren’t you also the one who objected to the phrase “riding bitch” in the second thread of its use? I got to both of those threads wayyyyy too late to have a say, but, thank you for that too.)

That was me, although for entirely different reasons. “Bitch” is a word I prefer to reclaim — “Black Bitch” is one of my Goddess’s epithets, and so it’s a word I wear proudly — but I feel it’s inappropriate when applied to Hades. On the other hand, while I reclaim it for myself, it’s not a word I apply to other women, unless I know that they, too, reclaim it.
I’m also reclaiming “douche” and its variants as a feminist insult. Douches are useless and can be quite harmful, much like the people to whom I apply the insult.

@Art: okay, I listened to that YouTube thing. I’m far from convinced that Twilight is encouraging women to want stalkers. In fact, it suggested to me that at least some Twilight fans have basically good ideas about what a relationship should be and are simply hanging those on Edward and conveniently overlooking or misinterpreting the bad things about him.
The thing is, here’s her list of rules:
1. Treat your girl with respect.
2. Try to sound educated.
3. Be courteous.
4. Don’t let your friends’ opinion of her carry too much weight.
5. Give her some space and maintain a healthy interest in things other than her.
6. Don’t be overbearing and don’t call her non-stop.
7. Show her your sensitive side, be compassionate rather than macho.
8. Smell nice.
9. Call just to talk sometimes.
10. Refer to Edward Cullen if you’re unsure what to do.
With the exception of the last one, they’re all very sensible advice – and a lot of them, based on what I recall of Twilight, are actually things that Edward Cullen does the exact opposite of (giving space and having other interests being top of the list). If she sticks to those rules, I don’t see that girl going for bad guys, I see her just having reasonable standards.
Then I went and listened to another. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6d5YLGgYtM&feature=related
It’s full of talk about manhood and strength, but if you strip that off, this is what her seven points boil down to:
1. Be deep, not shallow – which translates as ‘go for inner beauty.’ (She describes Bella as more interested in other people’s feelings than her own, which again suggests projection because the Bella of the books is not like that at all.)
2. Show the girl how you feel without making her responsible for your feelings.
3. Put her best interests first.
4. Take charge of your sexual boundaries. (Which I think is an elliptical way of saying ‘Don’t push for sex.’)
5. Learn to compromise and treat her as an equal partner.
6. Love her a lot and make sure she can trust she’s important to you.
7. Make sure your feelings are mutual. If she doesn’t want you, back off.
The more I see of this kind of thing, the more convinced I am that the Twilight books’ success depends on people creatively misremembering them and projecting their own ideas into them rather than than observing them too accurately.
People frequently read books through rose-tinted glasses, and I get the strong impression that this is what’s happening with Twilight a great deal. But neither of those videos gave me much reason to suppose that Twilight encourages girls to take leave of their senses in anything except their ability to accurately assess the characters of Twilight.
And admittedly, part of this, and my general squicked reaction to lifestyle B&D, is revulsion against the mainstream notion that women really want to be taken care of and bossed around. Ew.
Not something I have vast experience of, but I think there’s another way to interpret it. If D/S is the way you’re heavily kinked, then D/S means relating in a sexual manner. A D/S lifestyle, then, is possibly just the way some people find best makes them feel like they’re in a sexual relationship: if you have a non-standard definition of ‘sexual’, then a sexual relationship is going to look unusual.
NO. Using “rape” this way belittles actual rape. No one can retroactively take your childhood and rape it. Your childhood is not a person, it is a period in your life, and fictively mistreating things you loved as a child is nothing like raping an actual human being.
Yes, thank you.
Too: a work you loved in your childhood is not your childhood. Whatever they did to the work, they did to the work, not to you. You are not your tastes, you are not the books you read. However much they meant to you, they are separate from you.

Religious symbols do nothing, though the pathogen could plausibly be susceptible to some chemical component of garlic.
I don’t see why a “scientific” version of vampires would have to be immune to religious symbols — vampire “weaknesses” can just as easily be explained as psychological weaknesses as actual physical/magical ones if you’re doing a deconstructive take on vampires, and the aversions/compulsions that can be induced by neurological tinkering can be awfully specific. (Remember the drug to treat restless leg syndrome whose side effects include compulsive gambling?)
Saying that your vampires recoil from religious symbols doesn’t have to be purely metaphorical — there are plenty of vampire narratives that say that vampires fear symbols of holiness because of their raging guilt over the horrible things they’ve done. You could make that universal and “scientific” by saying that vampires develop a strong aversion to anything they thought of as beatific, holy, communitarian, etc. in their old life because the vampire disease is steadily converting them into predatory sociopaths and until the process is complete they suffer deep internal cognitive dissonance because of it. (Which ties into the idea that it matters more what the vampire considers holy than what the victim does, though if the victim makes it clear she’s using a holy symbol as a holy symbol this might trigger the aversion anyway. Also that very old, very depraved vampires might eventually become immune to the use of holy symbols, but only on the way to becoming a completely out-of-control bestial monster.)
Or you could go with Peter Watts’ Crucifix Glitch, though that’s a somewhat more extreme solution.

MadGastronomer said:

NO. Using “rape” this way belittles actual rape. No one can retroactively take your childhood and rape it. Your childhood is not a person, it is a period in your life, and fictively mistreating things you loved as a child is nothing like raping an actual human being.

Yes, I should have noted this also. In my own defense, I was too busy spluttering, “Of all the takeoffs on a children’s classic for him to slam that way, why pick a good one?”

ShifterCat said: I read somewhere that some rape victims freak out and get very upset when they’re told “It wasn’t your fault, you had no way of controlling that situation”. The little lies they’ve been telling themselves — “if only I hadn’t provoked him by doing X, Y, Z” — make them feel like they did have control, but just didn’t use it wisely. Finding out that they were essentially helpless is upsetting.
Hey, I wrote a little paper about that way back when I still wanted to be a psychologist*! It was ages ago, but I remember the conclusion was that the difference lies in the extent to which victims could have controlled certain circumstances. So ‘You were asking for it, with that body of yours’ = blaming the victim = bad, whereas ‘Next time, don’t go through that dark alley at 1 am’ = enforcing the victim’s internal locus of control = good. (Having an external locus of control – i.e. ‘I can’t help what happens to me’ – has been linked with clinical depression.)
In other words: ‘enabling’ your own rape (e.g. by walking through a dodgy area alone or inviting a creepy guy into your home or whatever) is not the same as causing it; the rapist is still 100% responsible and you are not to blame. But crucially, it does not mean that you were helpless either; you can learn from what happened to you and do things differently in the future.
*I’m a linguist now, and much happier.

Kit Whitfield :

The more I see of this kind of thing, the more convinced I am that the Twilight books’ success depends on people creatively misremembering them and projecting their own ideas into them rather than than observing them too accurately.

I haven’t read Twilight, but an impulse I often get when I take a liking to “bad” characters in fiction, is to… un-generalize ? personalize ? Anyway, consider the character as a completely unique entity isolated from the tropes and generalities of the world around. Hence, I might concede that Edward behaves superficially like a stalker, but I know from his internal thoughts (and my own interpretation of his character…) that he’s not like that at all. Where you see many actions that add up to “stalking”, I see a number of actions that are each justified by the circumstances and his (fundamentally good) personality; “adding them up” would be reductionist.
If you do that, you can accept criticism of general behaviors while not admitting they apply to that specific example.
Then again, you can also do that for your stalking boyfriend…
As for the influence of the Twilight books, I guess they wouldn’t “pervert” someone who already has progressive ideas on sex and relationships… but if you take someone living in a socially conservative environment, they’ll be one more drop building up that worldview. And depending on the individual, it could be a big drop.
Tricksterson :

Out of curiousity is there any symbol other than the Koran that a Muslim could use to repell a vamp?

Oh is that what the burqa is for ?
Slightly more seriously, during the debate about banning obvious religious wear in public schools in France, people made a point of saying a small “hands of Fatima” pendant would be allowed. That argument made it an analog to a (small) cross, although I imagine the truth is more complex than that.

The overlap between lifestyle D/S and the whole fundie “man is the head of the household and women are happiest making house and making babies” is a big part of the reason that lifestyle D/S is such a major ick for me.
Er, then how do you feel about the three-or-more other styles of lifestyle D/s? Because it’s not all M/f, there’s F/m, F/f, M/m, and variations with more participants, including versions with entire hierarchies, not all of which involve men automatically being dominant of women. (Cyllan got to pointing it out first, but I actually do want to know how you feel about it. 24/7 does generally creep me out, too, with a few exceptions, but for different reasons, most of which have to do with having seen it in action.) Also, as it happens, B&D (which someone else used in the lifestyle context) stands for Bondage and Discipline, and while it is often part of lifestyle D/s, it is not an accurate term for it in general.

I’m well aware that Male Dom/Female sub is not the only form of D/S, lifestyle or otherwise. That’s why I said that the overlap with fundies is a big part of the reason it makes me uncomfortable, not the only reason. The connection is made in my head partially because Male Dom/Female Sub the most common variant, but mostly because of the way I’ve seen MDom/FSub couples talk about their relationships.
Fundie issues aside, there is no variant of lifestyle D/S that doesn’t give me a bad feeling. I just can’t get comfortable with such an extreme power dynamic. I don’t think that anyone is obligated to care about my opinion and I certainly don’t think anyone should change how they live because of it, but it’s one of the things I try to avoid dealing with because it rubs my fur the wrong way.

McDonald’s wastes about a kajillion sesame seed bun tops every year, because the bottoms go into the middle of Big Macs, because making three-layer Big Mac buns would make too much sense.

I see comments about this every now & then. Is this one of those Slacktivist running jokes that pre-date my arrival? I mean people know that this is not how the bun thing works, right?

Spearmint :

I mean, if Shinto vampires want to be transparent on account of soulessness, that’s cool. But our Western ones need to get their act together, because Europeans don’t roll that way. Some places have souls in the land or big rocks, but no one has them in their furniture.

I think there’s a way to make it work. Say all your everyday objects, your furniture, you’re attached to them on some level. You own them, you see them every day, even if they don’t have sentimental value to you there’s still a link. Especially in a medieval setting, where you’re likely to have made them or know the person who did. Same thing with your immediate surroundings. Say that attachment imbues all those objects with a bit of your soul : then they can have a reflection in the mirror.
As for the objects that are attached to nobody, well they’re unlikely to ever encounter a mirror, and if they do it’s unlikely there will be a human to witness their lack of a reflection. Schrödinger to the rescue !
By that logic, a vampire is something that has lost all attachments and human contact. The ultimate outsider. Actually pretty neat. It even explains the drinking blood and turning others into vampires : a desperate and doomed attempt to make contact.

“Erm, you do know that Lewis Carroll might have had a certain… special interest in children, right? ”
No ‘might’ about it: he very definitely did but only in little girls. I don’t know if it was ever clear in his own mind that this was a sexual interest: a little Lolita would not be of interest to him and I don’t think he would have been into genital contact with other people (possibly not even himself). But it was definitely a romantic interest. He was polite and gallant to all his little girl friends and probably creepy as all get out. Certainly Alice’s mother eventually decided that contact with Mister Dodgson was bad for her little girl.
And yes, I meant Nephelim not Nephandi. Rassenfrassenn…. Blame posting late at night when people are talking about the WoD. (For I too have frolicked in those fields though not since OldMage days.)

So ‘You were asking for it, with that body of yours’ = blaming the victim = bad, whereas ‘Next time, don’t go through that dark alley at 1 am’ = enforcing the victim’s internal locus of control = good. (Having an external locus of control – i.e. ‘I can’t help what happens to me’ – has been linked with clinical depression.)

It’s true that in general an internal locus of control is healthier than an external one. However, there are some circumstances that really aren’t in our control and that has nothing to do with our locus/view of the world. Also, with control comes responsibility. That’s way this whole subject gets really dicey really quickly when it comes to rape.
Reinforcing a woman’s internal locus on control can be helpful to her in terms of making it possible for her to function, and that’s obviously important. However, it can also result in her taking on a great deal of self-blame and the line between help and blaming the victim isn’t clear-cut.
I think the bigger issue is that the sense of control that may be helpful to an individual victim is incredibly destructive on a societal scale. Rape is always the fault of the rapist. There is nothing that a woman can do, up to and including walking through the park buck naked at 3 AM, that “invites” rape. As a society we’re not particularly good at supporting victims and giving useful personal security advice in a way that keeps that ultimate responsibility where it belongs.

Where you see many actions that add up to “stalking”, I see a number of actions that are each justified by the circumstances and his (fundamentally good) personality; “adding them up” would be reductionist.
If you do that, you can accept criticism of general behaviors while not admitting they apply to that specific example.
Then again, you can also do that for your stalking boyfriend…
The main justification within the story for Edward’s behavior is that he literally can’t help it the way we might expect a human to — a vampire is fundamentally a predator, the smell of human blood drives them into a frenzy, and Bella, specifically, has some chemical component in her blood that is, for Edward, his “own personal brand of heroin”.
Given that he’s thus depicted as being even more fucked up than a junkie craving a fix and that he’s super-strong, telepathic and has a whole bevy of other supernatural powers that would allow him to take Bella and chain her up in a vampire sex dungeon with basically no effort, the fact that he *only* goes so far as to sabotage her car, hide in her bedroom, etc. is actually a sign of immense restraint and to be lauded.
All this is more or less *self-consistent* within the book’s mythology. But it’s 1) immensely disturbing to apply this metric to real human males who aren’t vampires, and 2) still doesn’t strike me as the ideal solution even within the book’s world.
I mean, fuck, if vampires like that really existed I would think they should be killed or, at the very least, locked up while the government searches for a cure. Bella’s toleration of Edward doesn’t come off as romantic to me, it comes off as *insane* — by any reasonable metric of what Edward is he’s a psychopath who BY HIS OWN ADMISSION has a highly debilitating mental illness that makes him fundamentally untrustworthy, and while a compassionate person might consider his conscious attempts to act well despite his illness praiseworthy this doesn’t make it prudent to let him keep wandering around doing as he likes.
If we’re going by Fred’s metaphor here this could well be applied to real-life relationships — there are people who get called “emotional vampires” because they can’t seem to help being selfish and damaging in their close relationships, and their partners often make excuses for them by talking about how much worse they *could* be and how hard it is for them to exercise the degree of restraint they do (“He hardly ever gets violent anymore even when you can tell he’s really mad”). It’s a framework for relationships that seems to me intimately tied to a fucked-up conservative/RTC view of how male/female relations work (“Men are roiling cauldrons of terrifying passion that is horribly dangerous yet inherently admirable because it is masculine”/”Women’s job is to be the object of this passion and to ‘tame’ it as best they can”) that Meyer seems to be reproducing wholesale without much thought. This comes out in, for instance, having an initially likable snarky “regular guy” main character, Jacob, who suddenly transforms into an Edwardesque stalker once he admits what his “real feelings” are — because that’s how men act when they really fall in love, or at least cool badass supernatural magical men who are worthy of Bella’s attention. (Cf. all the passages where Bella expresses annoyance at receiving overtures from ordinary mortal human boys who don’t matter.)

Great news, everyone! My shoes are reflected in mirrors! They do have soles after all!

The reason vampires don’t have reflections is, of course, because the other side of the looking glass doesn’t have vampirism, so the vampire’s unvamped reflection-self is off doing something else, rather than hanging around (not?) looking at hirself in the mirror.

PepperjackCandy :

The reason vampires don’t have reflections is, of course, because the other side of the looking glass doesn’t have vampirism, so the vampire’s unvamped reflection-self is off doing something else, rather than hanging around (not?) looking at hirself in the mirror.

Actually, they don’t have reflections because the vampire is the reflection-self, who came through the mirror, killed their cismirror-self and took over their life.
They’re scouting for the eventual takeover. Next time you look at your reflection ? Remember, it hates your guts.
(I actually avoided reflective surfaces for a bit after reading that story)

Lori – Rape is always the fault of the rapist. There is nothing that a woman can do, up to and including walking through the park buck naked at 3 AM, that “invites” rape.
Of course, absolutely. But that was my point: the fact that this is true doesn’t mean that you have to tell rape victims that there was nothing they could’ve done to prevent what happened. If I’m advising a victim to carry an alarm with them from now on, I’m not implying that by not carrying an alarm last time they were in any way responsible for what the rapist did.
(The main reason (popularised) New Age thought like ‘The Secret’ makes me sick is that it essentially tells people they ARE responsible for everything that happens to them. So if you were raped, you must ‘deep down’ have wished for it to happen. (Also, the complete absence of ethical questions like ‘is it even good to have everything you wish for?’ ‘what if your wishes/thoughts will negatively affect someone else?’ irks me.))

@ Caravelle:
That was a very clever explanation, but I see two potential problems with it:
1) Objects that no human has ever interacted with, like trees, may still reflect in the surface of a pond.
2) This would explain the transparency of strange vampires, but what about when a vampire bites your sister and she becomes a vampire? Shouldn’t your love for her endow her with a piece of your soul, even though she’s now lost hers?
I like the “There are no vampires in the world on the other side of the mirror” explanation, but how do we explain the lack of shadows?

caravelle: “Next time you look at your reflection ? Remember, it hates your guts.”
As this bird knows all too well. (Actually somewhat better with the sound off, IMHO.)

I know that the discussion has moved on here, but I did promise to give my take on the Dom / Sub dynamic in the Twilight series. I’ll try to keep this short, but succinctness isn’t my forte, so please skip if you aren’t interested. A lot of points I refer to become more explicit in the later books and online side stories, but I do think they are present in the first book as well (not so much the movie.) FWIW, all of the teenage girls I have talked to in depth about the topic pretty much agree with my take on this; they are also in unanimous agreement that they would find the Real Life enactment of such a relationship incredibly creep and wrong. Maybe I’m just lucky in the young women I know, but that might be some comfort to folks who find the whole Twilight phenomenon somehow harmful and damaging.
As I see it, Bella’s romance is, in the end, a Power Fantasy of a type particular to some adolescent females. In adolescence, girls-become-women see (usually) themselves caught in the Biblical curse: the object of their desire shall “rule over them” – men are generally bigger, stronger, and (in our society), have more choices, are more free and economically powerful than their mates. I think we can all agree that the last ones suck, but that’s how many young women see it – especially young women who are raised with a very conservative, traditionalist understanding of gender relations which is probably quite alien to most of the people who post here regularly. So what kind of wish fulfillment can these girls hope for?
There’s the Buffy fantasy – to be even bigger, stronger, and more empowered, and gain power that way. Or there’s the Beauty and the Beast fantasy – to find a mate who loves you so damn much that he voluntarily cedes power to you – that he is transformed by, not your love for him, but his for you.
Yes, this is all a very passive fantasy, maybe (in the great cosmic scheme of things) an “unhealthy” fantasy, but it’s a tremendously attractive fantasy. And that’s what the books in the Twilight series look like to me – a delicious wallowing in this dream, of being ordinary, weak, powerless, but having the Biggest Baddest Beautifullest Beast of All absolutely helpless and subservient beneath the uncontrollable power of his love for me.
As someone who read a lot of “rape fantasy” romances in the Seventies, I’ve always thought that they fell into two distinct classes. There was of course the “classic rape fantasy”, in which a woman could freely experience sexuality without being responsible for it, subjugated beneath an Alpha Male. But there was also a a definite trend of … maybe “passive dominance”, in which women *who had no other conceivable access to power* could revel in the fact that they could use their very “feminity” to literally crack and destroy what makes men “masculine” – their dominance, their control, their rationality. I always think of the archetype of this model as Margot in THE SCARLET PIMPERNEL, who in one scene literally drives her husband to his knees to kiss her footprints through the sheer “madness” of his devotion for her. (There’s a lot of other nifty D/S subtext in that book, btw, but I’m talking about Twilight here, so…)
Bella is very much a Dom of this type. From the very first, she expresses love through controlling and infantilizing the objects of her affection – look at her weird relationship with her parents, the way that she is literally incapable of understanding her fellow classmates outside the context of power exhanges. In her entire romance with Edward, she is *always* the one in control, always the pursuer, always maintaining power by tantalizing and withdrawing. She is never more fulfilled than when she makes Edward lose control – by kissing her, by following her, by being forced to cater to her whims, above all on her infamous wedding night. When she “loses” Edward in the second book, her fantasies of him are not about their physical relationship, let alone of happiness or mutual pleasure; they are always about forcing him to worry about her, to come to her against his will.
Which is why criticisms of Edward as “controlling” and “abusive” always crack me up. Edward is the ultimate *submissive.* He’s ALWAYS looking for someone to submit to – duty, honor (remember how he wanted to join up and fight in WW I before he died?), Carlisle and his mission, even Esme. For all the talking about how he stalks and orders about Bella, he is NEVER seen as successful in dominating her. Bella always gets exactly what she wants, how she wants, in matters large and small, and almost always causes Edward maximum shame and pain in the process. And Edward adores that about her.
I also think he’s a classic masochist – I truly believe he deliberately seeks out things that degrade and punish him, not just because he thinks he “deserves” it, but because he also derives great satisfaction from it. (Realize I’m not condemning him here – who knows what made him this way? – but merely trying to understand him) How horrible for him to end up as a creature that is inherently dominant, and pain-dispensing!. As such, human Bella is indeed his dream mate – her very scent is inexhaustible torment to him, her will is adamantium, her mental shield negates his overwhelming advantage over any other possible being, yet her fragility and “ordinariness” make his total helpless devotion to her even much more “monstrous” and thus deserving of punishment.
This is especially obvious in the side stories that show Edward’s POV. His mental powers (and remember, vampiric powers are supposed to be amplifications of human personality) are all about being dominated, invaded, buffetted helplessly by others’ thoughts and feelings. And he HATES that most of the stray thoughts about himself that are at all admiring or positive or affirming; he dwells on, revels in, wallows in those that humiliate and pain him. When he leaves Bella in the second book to look Victoria, he doesn’t take the sensible comfortable anonymity that he can easily afford and give him best access to his quarry; he seeks out filth, rats, suffering. When he submits himself to Jacob in the fourth book, the orgasmic subtext is almost embarrassing – it sure makes Jacob uncomfortable.
Which is why I find a lot of the criticism (by the diehard fans, not the quite legitimate “Awful writing and ZOMG Death Baby!” type) of the last book very interesting. Because in Breaking Dawn, a lot of what is subtextual and unhealthy in this relationship becomes overt, consensual, and even joyful – and the biggest gripe of many of the fans is that Edward and Bella’s relationship becomes *boring.*
The earliest, more popular sections have a lot of these same lovely squicky fantasy elements. Bella totally gets her Cinderella fulfillment, her handsome Prince utterly at her feet in the first book. In the second,we get to see Edward suffer as much, or even more, than even he would want – my Lord, he even grovels to *Jacob*! He gets totally pwned by *Rosalie*.
But, awhile remaining true to their essential character – both of them managed to eventually learn to, well, “own” their fantasies. Whatever you may think of the whole “motherhood is a woman’s destiny”, trope, Bella discovers through her pregnancy that there is more to love than validating her own sense of worth by proving someone else is willing to suffer for her. Throughout the series, the times I have liked Bella best – when risking her life to save Rene, when going to Italy, when acknowledging how she hurt Jacob was selfish and wrong – is the times not when she obsessed about how her actions might hurt someone else, but when she acknowledged that, went beyond it, and said, “I’m going to do the right thing anyways.” With Renesmee, Bella finally grew out of her equation of “love” with “trading power points” and needing to prove herself “worthy” of being loved. (There is also the whole factor of how Renesmee serves as Bella’s Mary Sue, much as Bella serves as Meyer’s, but this post is already way to long.) When she is transformed into a vampire, the thing that struck me most is the gradually evolution away from being pretty enough, strong enough, “good” enough *for Edward* – and she finally focusses on becoming worthy *of BELLA*. And I loved to see that.
As for Edward – well, let’s just say that I think he really really enjoys the fact that newborn Bella is stronger than him, both physically and in her “talent.” I suspect in a decade or so, Bella might want to start investigating the vampiric equivalents of handcuffs and leather. But I also think the strength that Bella finds in accepting herself, helps Edward also make the distinction between being submissive and *requiring* domination; between enjoying pain and *deserving* punishment. To put it simply, Bella becomes a vampire and does NOT become a “soulless monster” – not in his eyes, not in Jacob’s eyes, not in Nessie’s eyes, most importantly not in her own eyes. Only once he has accepted and loved the VAMPIRE Bella, is Edward truly able to accept and love the vampire Edward. And that is why Bella cannot drop her shields for him until the last two pages; because until then, he wasn’t able to drop his own.
So yeah, I think there are a lot of interesting psychosexual subtext in the whole series that is not being acknowledged, especially in the context of the cultural mores in which the books were written and best loved. I’m not sure that the fantasies indulged here are necessarily empowering or healthy, but they are a good deal more complex and understandable than “Omigosh, I so totally wish somebody would stalk me and order me around!”

Great news, everyone! My shoes are reflected in mirrors! They do have soles after all!

I should have you fileted for that, Raj.

@Lori- I see comments about this every now & then. Is this one of those Slacktivist running jokes that pre-date my arrival? I mean people know that this is not how the bun thing works, right?
Um, I think I’ll let Raj field this, since he’s the one who told me that. Somehow, he thinks the discarded bun tops should restore balance to the universe, though he has never satisfactorily explained how.
Raj?

Um, I think I’ll let Raj field this, since he’s the one who told me that. Somehow, he thinks the discarded bun tops should restore balance to the universe, though he has never satisfactorily explained how.
Raj?

So that’s what it’s about. Well, I should think the answer is obvious.

My rule is pretty much, think of the wildest, weirdest, kinkiest thing you can imagine and there is someone out there who considers that a dull Tuesday evening. Conversely, there’s nothing so vanilla that someone isn’t horrified by the very idea.
Posted by: Lori
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“One man’s meat is another man’s person.” – Spider Robinson
================================
This is actually what I think about those creepy Cult of Femininity blogs. It’s a very mainstreamed kink, and maybe it works for them, but DO NOT TELL ME YOUR KINK IS THE ONLY RIGHT WAY. It makes me almost physically ill to read some of them.
Posted by: Rebecca
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“One of the greatest sexual disfunctions of the age is the belief that your own preferences are The Only Right Way To Be.” Also Spider Robinson
=================================
Raj: I would suggest either flagellation, necrophilia or bestiality, but you’d just be flogging a dead horse.
Posted by: Launcifer
——————
Sadistic bestialic necrophilia.

She TOTALLY looks Jewish to me: Red hair is really common among jews.

@hapax:As noted, I never made it through any of the Twilight books so I really can’t judge whether Edward or Bella is the Dom in their relationship.

But there was also a a definite trend of … maybe “passive dominance”, in which women *who had no other conceivable access to power* could revel in the fact that they could use their very “feminity” to literally crack and destroy what makes men “masculine” – their dominance, their control, their rationality.

I’m certainly familiar with this type of story. I’ve always had mixed feelings about them. I’ve read historicals were it worked, but I’ve always had issues with the dynamic in contemporaries.

Edward is the ultimate *submissive.* He’s ALWAYS looking for someone to submit to – duty, honor (remember how he wanted to join up and fight in WW I before he died?

There’s nothing necessarily submissive about wanting to join the military. Is there something special about the way Edward’s interest is portrayed?

Somehow, he thinks the discarded bun tops should restore balance to the universe, though he has never satisfactorily explained how.

They don’t exist, so I hope Raj’s level of comfort in the universe isn’t too dependent on the power of those discarded bun tops
This seems to somehow tie back to the theist/atheist arrangement but I a bit to brain fried this afternoon to make the link.

Lori-
so, you’re telling me Raj has been messin’ wit’ me ‘ead?
Figures.

Great news, everyone! My shoes are reflected in mirrors! They do have soles after all!
Posted by: Raj
I should have you fileted for that, Raj.
Posted by: damnedyankee
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My shoes didn’t reflect until I put some Dr. Scholl’s foot pads in.

Lori: I’ve read historicals were it worked, but I’ve always had issues with the dynamic in contemporaries.
Well, here’s the thing. The women (like Meyer) who are seeking this kind of fantasy are, in many ways, actually living in a “historical” culture, rather than a “contemporary” one. I have mixed feelings about the attitude as well. Would I prefer that they were more aware of, and desirous of, a more gender-equal society? Sure. But given the mental universe they live in, I guess I can empathize that they fantasize about *breaking* men, rather than happily *submitting* to them. (See also “The Patriarchy Hurts Men Too!”)
There’s nothing necessarily submissive about wanting to join the military. Is there something special about the way Edward’s interest is portrayed?
There’s very little discussion of his human life *at all*, but in the context of the way he is continually portrayed as searching for authority figures and almost literally re-making himself to submit to their visions and demands, I would say that yes, his interest in the military (and the way he spoke of it, in vague terms of “honor” and “ideals”) was all of a piece in his search for a system of heirarchical submission.
It makes an interesting contrast to the tidbits we are given about Jason’s actually military experience, which was anything but ordered, let alone glorious. Of course, Jason’s eventual relationship (like every “good” relationship in the series) eventually ended up in the same Passive Dom / Mighty Sub pattern as the main couple’s, but it had potential to be something much more interesting.
Golly. I haven’t thought this much about these books in over a year. I really really don’t want to have to dig ‘em out and re-read them.

Hawker Hurricane: Rule 34

Reinforcing a woman’s internal locus on control can be helpful to her in terms of making it possible for her to function, and that’s obviously important. However, it can also result in her taking on a great deal of self-blame and the line between help and blaming the victim isn’t clear-cut.
I think the bigger issue is that the sense of control that may be helpful to an individual victim is incredibly destructive on a societal scale. Rape is always the fault of the rapist. There is nothing that a woman can do, up to and including walking through the park buck naked at 3 AM, that “invites” rape. As a society we’re not particularly good at supporting victims and giving useful personal security advice in a way that keeps that ultimate responsibility where it belongs. </i.
This. So very much this. Within the context of a counseling session, or other private conversation, if it makes the specific person who’s been assaulted feel better to here about what they could have done different, and how they can do things differently in the future, fine. Totally cool. It makes their issues and needs very different from those of most of the people I’ve talked to about sexual assault (who were mostly in a culture where Girls Should Protect Their Virginity, and thereby tended to see control over the situation as indicating a responsibility to prevent it, and themselves as having failed everyone up to and including God if they could have prevented the rape but didn’t). But people respond to trauma in all kinds of different ways, and have different long-term issues to deal with.
However, society at large gets way too fixated on what potential victims, particularly women can (and often, it’s implicitly suggested, should) do to minimize their chances of being raped, in a way that contributes to a lot of blame-shifting. And quite often, well-intentioned and potentially helpful “If you do this, it may lead to not getting raped”, in the wrong context, gets twisted into “If you get raped, it’s because you didn’t do X”.
Which leads to an unfortunate tendency to yo-yo between extremes. I’ve had a few safety trainings, and they tend to be either “Women! Don’t do these eight million things, do these eight million others, and don’t screw any of them up if you don’t want to get raped!” or “Well, you can try stuff like self-defense and running away and hope it works, but a lot of the time it doesn’t. So I will now spend the rest of the time talking about what to do after being raped.”
Basically, it’s hard to talk about rape and rape prevention without getting into ugly territory. And I want at least as much lessons and peer pressure on “Make sure your partner is sober and aware, don’t get violent or threaten no matter what, don’t assume someone who wants to do one thing will want to do something else, and understand that the appropriate response to not being able to get this person to sleep with you by decent means is accepting that you’re not going to sleep with them,” as there is on the current, semi-accurate “Don’t walk alone at night while female, only accept beverages in sealed containers if you’re female, don’t enter a parked car without a male guard and a complete search if you’re female, don’t let men into your dwelling if you’re female and not guarded by a familiar male,” litany.
(And yes, I know it doesn’t only happen to women. Ninety percent of the sexual assault information I’ve seen doesn’t.)

Italics, begone!

Awesome!
And sorry about leaving them running. I was ranting and they snuck up on me.

Glad to help you out, O Antichrist.

Looks like Jason’s position as Banisher of Italics may be in some jeapordy, here. Spearmint and MadGastronomer can both do it.
I wonder if Jason can play the drums…

I always think of the archetype of this model as Margot in THE SCARLET PIMPERNEL, who in one scene literally drives her husband to his knees to kiss her footprints through the sheer “madness” of his devotion for her.
I always loved that scene. Would you believe I was driven to read that book by the Garfield Saturday morning cartoon show, of all things? I went on to read all of Baroness Orczy’s other Scarlet Pimpernel books, which everyone always forgets about, but which my library thankfully had a sizeable, though not complete, collection, and I read every damn one of those. I sort of view the character as a pre-James Bond or pre-superhero. Of course, this was before my immersion in literary criticism, so I’m sure some themes have escaped my notice, but at the time I read them, I loved all the books.
He gets totally pwned by *Rosalie*.
Well, if nothing else, when I first read the books I thought Rosalie was totally fucking metal (in a Dethklok sort of way) for having dispatched of her attackers in such a fashion. The fact that she was so hung up on babies did make for a bit of cognitive dissonance later, though. Alice was always my favorite character. I can definitely see the BDSM subtext there, which I am sure is part of the reason I enjoyed the series, even if now I consider it even worse literary junk food than Anita Blake. That’s why I loved the part in the first book where Bella is all, why don’t you just kill me and drink my blood, where most everybody else would be like, well I don’t want to *DIE*, but for some of us there’s a great eroticism power in death. I like to think of it as maybe a holdover from people who held this attitude as virgins; for virgins, there are (at least) two Great Unknowns, the first is Sex and the other is Death, so stories in which both are a factor tend to heighten the arousal for persons for whom this is a turn-on. For me, it also largely explains vore fantasies.
And that is why Bella cannot drop her shields for him until the last two pages; because until then, he wasn’t able to drop his own.
Thanks for this; what a beautiful explanation, from such an unexpected and credible (as you are demonstrably literate and well-reasoned) source. I loved it when I read it, and even when now I can read back and cringe, you and Kit remind me why I was drawn in in the first place.
I don’t know when I’m going to re-read them for the litcrit value, but it will have to be when the hubby is not watching to avoid uncontrollable snickering at my expense.

Hapax, that’s a fascinating theory. I’ve pasted it onto the comments of my own blog piece, hope you don’t mind but it was just so interesting.
I’ve only read the first book so I can’t much comment on the later books. Certainly I can see your point. I still think my theory works as well – the thing about Twilight is that because it’s flexible and metaphorical it lends itself to a lot of different theories without having much to contradict them.
I think it’s also possible you could argue that Bella is emotionally dominant without being sexually dominant; they’re two different things, and Edward wouldn’t be the only self-hating dom out there. (Again I’m thinking of James Spader’s Edward in Secretary: he may be sexually dominant but there’s no question of who the stronger personality is, or indeed who the sexual pursuer is: it’s Lee all the way.) ‘Passive dominance’ doesn’t seem that incompatible with the sadomasochistic dictum that the power in a relationship ultimately resides with the submissive, as their consent is required for absolutely everything that happens.
And again, the fact that Bella is assertive to other people in her life doesn’t necessarily make her sexually dominant. There’s the stereotype of the captain of industry who regularly visits a dominatrix, after all: sexual submissiveness can go with a forceful and powerful personality in the wider world.
As to forcing him to come to her against his will – well, I can see your point, but just to be contrary, if his will is to stay away from her and she wants him with her, then I’m not sure what else her desire for him to come to her could be classed as whatever their sexual roles. He isn’t doing what she wants, she doesn’t like that. That seems like a human thing rather than a dominant one.
I do agree with you that in fantasies like this one there’s a strong element of power: women dreaming of ruling over those around them because those they desire are overwhelmed by love. It’s a power fantasy just as much as James Bond. But I think I’d separate emotional dominance out from sexual dominance, and class Bella as the former.
As I said, I’ve only read the first book, so I can’t say much about the later ones. It’s an extremely interesting theory, anyway. I’d like to hear any others you have, if you have some time to kill, either here or on the blog thread – you have many intriguing things to say.
who BY HIS OWN ADMISSION has a highly debilitating mental illness that makes him fundamentally untrustworthy
Okay, we’re not saying that people who have debilitating mental illnesses shouldn’t be in romantic relationships, are we? If we consider vampirism a mental illness, Edward is actually doing all the right things. He’s on a program (vegetarianism) to make sure that his illness doesn’t lead to hurting other people. He engages in all sorts of activities (pretending to be the age he looks, baseball) to keep him functional in the community on the community’s terms. Knowing that Bella may trigger his symptoms, he initially tries to keep away from her, and when that proves impossible he gradually acclimatises himself to her and, as the fans keep pointing out, exercises iron self-control so he never actually does bite her.
If it’s a mental illness, then Edward is the guy who takes his meds and visits his shrink regularly and keeps his routines in place to prevent a relapse – the guy, in fact, who’s handling his mental illness very well. Such an illness would indeed be a factor in a relationship – the books I’ve read on mental illness say that if one member of a partnership is ill, the ‘It’ of the illnesses is the third member of the relationship and you have to work round it – but the whole point of the books is that he refuses to let his illness hurt anyone.
Again, this is me saying ‘let’s not stigmatise the mentally ill’ – but actually if we cast vampirism as a mental illness, a lot of Edward’s behaviour becomes more excusable. He knows there’s something wrong with him and he struggles with some success not to let it ruin things. The fact that it dominates the relationship … well, if you’ve ever known a couple where one partner is ill, that will look a bit familiar; if one partner’s seriously sick that does have to take centre stage, and you do have to shape your decisions around it. (If your boyfriend has OCD, then however much you like organic farming it’s not reasonable to expect him to come spread manure with you. If your wife is too depressed to get out of bed, it’s not reasonable to expect she’ll come to a big, lively party. Expectations that would be fair in a relationship between two well people have to adjust.)

Oops, lost the end of the post I was making. To continue the ‘mental illness’ thing:
So if we cast vampirism as a mental – or indeed a physical illness – Edward’s insistence on controlling the relationship looks less like a bad man trying to control his girlfriend and more like a guy who knows his illness can be set off, knows certain limits just can’t afford to be negotiable, and is trying to be responsible about it. And I think that’s what a lot of fans see: the vampirism isn’t his fault, it’s a serious enough problem that he’s right to worry about its consequences, and his apparently ‘controlling’ behaviour is an attempt to control the disease rather than Bella – and his insistence that he knows how things should be better than she does is not the arrogance of a patriarch but simply the certainty of someone who knows he has much more experience of his illness than she does. In this context, saying certain things she does set him off isn’t ‘blaming the woman’, it’s just a fact.
Unless we conclude mentally ill people should stay out of relationships, casting vampirism as mental illness seems to come down rather on Edward’s side. And it seems very unfair to conclude that mentally ill people should all be celibate. If you’re sick you’d be well advised to find a partner who’s steady enough to manage the additional strains it’ll place on things, but you shouldn’t have to spend your life in romantic leperdom.

QUOTH MadGastronomer: “Bitch” is a word I prefer to reclaim — “Black Bitch” is one of my Goddess’s epithets, and so it’s a word I wear proudly — but I feel it’s inappropriate when applied to Hades.
Fair enough. In the general case (and speaking as someone with a deep appreciation for Kali and Hekat), I am with you on the reclaiming.
But in the specific, I have a hard time finding anything reclaimable in the use of the term as popularized by the motorcycle culture that gave us shirt-backs that say “If you can read this, the bitch fell off.”
On the other hand, while I reclaim it for myself, it’s not a word I apply to other women, unless I know that they, too, reclaim it.
I really appreciate that. When men use this word to refer to women, I flinch hard, which makes the reclaiming a little fraught for me. I am touchy along not entirely internally consistent lines.
THERE IS SURELY some sort of clever pun to be made crossing the streams (“…that would be bad”) of Raj’s poor discarded sesame bun tops and the responsibilities of the D/S kink in re: bystander consent.
ALSO, I SEEM to have missed out on the whole Carmilla sub-discussion. I read it very recently thanks to the Viable Paradise Public Domain SF/F Library (along with The King In Yellow and other delights), and it occurred to me at the time that it was a breathtakingly entertaining specimen of a male author’s fantasy of lesbian seduction.

But in the specific, I have a hard time finding anything reclaimable in the use of the term as popularized by the motorcycle culture that gave us shirt-backs that say “If you can read this, the bitch fell off.”

Fair enough.

I’ve seen people use the JWF in a perfectly well-meaning way, not trying to inflict guilt on someone else or enjoying the prospect of the other person being blameworthy and guilty. Just really attached to the idea that bad things mean you’ve done something wrong, because then you can control whether bad things happen to you.
That seems to mix up two disparate phenomena – where the person believes that his or her own troubles are deserved, and where the person believes that others’ troubles are deserved. I’ve never heard of people believing both. In my experience, JWF involves the latter belief combined with the belief that one’s own good things are deserved. Rosie O’Donnell can safely fling the lying-causes-cancer myth as long as she or no one close to her gets cancer. If that happened, would she drop her belief? I’m not even sure that the term JWF should apply to the former, where the belief is focused only on the believer, since the belief doesn’t seem to be applied to others.
viewing homosexual stimuli causes negative emotions such as anxiety in homophobic men but not in non-homophobic men. Because anxiety has been shown to enhance arousal and erection
I’ve never heard of the latter – I would have guessed that anxiety would produce the opposite effect. Of course, there’s still the question of what causes the anxiety in the first place – are they afraid they may be gay, or are they afraid that others will think they’re gay?
I have a hard time finding anything reclaimable in the use of the term as popularized by the motorcycle culture that gave us shirt-backs that say “If you can read this, the bitch fell off.”
Is it reasonable to suspect motorcycle culture of being inherently sexist and misogynistic, stemming from the false believe that power (specifically the power of the motorcycle engine) equals masculinity?

@Tonio

viewing homosexual stimuli causes negative emotions such as anxiety in homophobic men but not in non-homophobic men. Because anxiety has been shown to enhance arousal and erection

I’ve never heard of the latter – I would have guessed that anxiety would produce the opposite effect. Of course, there’s still the question of what causes the anxiety in the first place -
I never would have guessed that anxiety would increase erections, myself. Does this mean not so many peoples’ evenings are being ruined by performance anxiety after all?

@Jeff, if you’re still reading:
From the wiki description, it sounds more like Charles de Lint (whom I love) than Carroll.
Hmmm. I haven’t read any deLint in years, so I don’t know. But what with the the Alice character, and the sister-and-brother called Sylvie and Bruno, and the dialogue on page 151 (but I was thinking of a plan), and the banquet table in the woods, and mostly because of that sense of much more going on than the actual words would seem to say…I found it Carrollian. Carolingian? No, that’s something else.
It looks worth a read. (After all the books I bought at the last library sale I went to, and the third novel of the Sharing Knife trilogy, and…)
Yeah, I know how that goes!
—
Using “rape” this way belittles actual rape. No one can retroactively take your childhood and rape it. Your childhood is not a person, it is a period in your life, and fictively mistreating things you loved as a child is nothing like raping an actual human being.
Well, of course that’s perfectly true. And yet…and yet…people use serious words metaphorically and hyperbolically all the time. Shakespeare said that Macbeth had “murdered sleep.” Yes, he literally killed a sleeping man–but then neither he nor his wife/accomplice ever slept well again: he’d metaphorically murdered “innocent sleep, the sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care.” And the phrase passed into idiom, and is often heard in reference to sleep deprivation in much less serious contexts. Or when people say things like, “I’m so hungry, I could murder a cheeseburger right now,” is that trivializing the sin of murder?
Or is the problem that rape as a crime is not taken seriously anyway? So we shouldn’t be using language that might contribute to that attitude?
I don’t know, I’ll have to think about it some more.

Unless we conclude mentally ill people should stay out of relationships, casting vampirism as mental illness seems to come down rather on Edward’s side. And it seems very unfair to conclude that mentally ill people should all be celibate. If you’re sick you’d be well advised to find a partner who’s steady enough to manage the additional strains it’ll place on things, but you shouldn’t have to spend your life in romantic leperdom.

Doesn’t this rather depend on what the mental illness is? Mental illness is a very broad term and saying something about one type of illness doesn’t necessary apply to all mental illness.
If Edward is mentally ill he doesn’t have OCD or depression, he’s got something that makes him homicidal. And not just homicidal in general, but homicidal toward his partner. It would map more to a violent form of schizophrenia maybe. If he has a relapse or does the equivalent of going off his meds Bella is going to end up dead, and while iron control is admirable it’s far from fool proof.
In that case I don’t think that saying that such a person shouldn’t be in a relationship, and possibly shouldn’t be allowed to wonder around in society unsupervised, is some untoward stigmatizing of the mental ill. I’m quite concerned about and sympathetic toward the problems faced by those with mental illness. However, if a friend was in a relationship with a guy whose illness meant that there was a decent chance he’d lose control and kill her I would do everything in my power to get her out with not one wit of concern about the guy’s feelings.

I never would have guessed that anxiety would increase erections, myself. Does this mean not so many peoples’ evenings are being ruined by performance anxiety after all?

No, anxiety is generally an erection killer and it ruins plenty of evenings. The anxiety that causes erections, rather than killing them, is part of the “fight or flight” reaction. In some but not all men getting an erection is a normal fighting response. That’s partially responsible for the whole “danger = horniness” idea.
That’s the reason that gay porn could cause erections in severely homophobic straight men, but not in straight men who aren’t so homophobic. If the man is homophobic enough he perceives gay sex as not just personally uninteresting or distasteful, but as threatening. That triggers the fight or flight response and produces an erection.
Erections happen for lots of reasons. (There’s a whole website dedicated to photos of “awkward” erections, which happen in less than desirable/appropriate circumstances. It doesn’t seem to lack for material.) They don’t necessarily signal a desire to have sex, any more than a certain degree of lubrication necessarily indicates that a woman is ready to go. Sometimes it really does just do that on it’s own.

If Edward were literally a mentally ill person and his mental illness literally caused him to commit criminal acts like breaking into Bella’s house without her knowledge or sabotaging her car in order to control her movements, it would be grounds for arresting and institutionalizing him.
That’s the whole point — Edward is *trying* to control his problem but he’s not actually succeeding. He never actually bites Bella, yes, but that doesn’t mean the lines he does cross early and often in the story don’t matter. If his problem is so bad that he can’t *actually* stay out of Bella’s life even when he’s exercising all his reserves of self-control to do so and he *does* commit criminal acts on a regular basis, he needs to be locked up.
I’m not saying the mentally ill don’t deserve to be in relationships, I’m saying mentally ill people whose mental illness is uncontrolled to the degree that they commit crimes shouldn’t be in relationships with the people they commit those crimes against, the fact that Bella retroactively finds Edward’s breaking-and-entering to be sexy and desirable notwithstanding.

Erections happen for lots of reasons. (There’s a whole website dedicated to photos of “awkward” erections, which happen in less than desirable/appropriate circumstances. It doesn’t seem to lack for material.) They don’t necessarily signal a desire to have sex, any more than a certain degree of lubrication necessarily indicates that a woman is ready to go. Sometimes it really does just do that on it’s own.
And you have just perfectly summed up my entire problem with every bit of “this is what really makes women horny” research I’ve ever seen.

That a kukri killed Dracula just shows that you shouldn’t mess with a Ghurka.

A Kosher Dill would do the trick too (all that garlic — yum!)
Ghurka vs. gherkin?
==================================
@ako: Bill Gothard’s seminars (and I have nothing whatever good to say about his views on women in general) include what I have to admit is a nifty trick to remove guilt from a woman who gets raped. According to his interpretation of the Bible, a woman’s responsibility if rape seems imminent is to scream aloud for help, using a specific verbal formula (which I don’t remember at the moment). He tells them that if they have done THAT, then they have done everything they could and are not responsible in any way for anything further that happens.
Weird, creepy, dependent on a magical formula, but as an inventive coping strategy, rather cleverly constructed.

I would like to ask Bill Gothard if a man was approached my a mugger, who pulled a knife or gun, and who told the man if he yelled for help or fought back he would kill him and then proceeded to mug him does that mean the man is “responsible” for getting mugged because he did not yell or fight back. I’m sorry, I know that’s not your personal attitude but that really touches a nerve. It is so incredibly offensive and damaging to victims. It feeds the gnawing guilt and shame that the attack is somehow your fault and if you wanted to you could have stopped it. A vicious, nasty, blaming the victim lie.

Since the discussion is converging on the topics of rape and anxiety*-induced sexual response, I’d like to add that another way rapists’ justify their attacks is that the victim was lubricated or erect.
Oh, and is there seriously someone out there who blames cancer victims for being liars? *seethes*
*and other reasons not related to being turned on

I have a hard time finding anything reclaimable in the use of the term as popularized by the motorcycle culture that gave us shirt-backs that say “If you can read this, the bitch fell off.”
Is it reasonable to suspect motorcycle culture of being inherently sexist and misogynistic, stemming from the false believe that power (specifically the power of the motorcycle engine) equals masculinity?

No, but it is reasonable to understand that there are multiple motorcycle subcultures, and that at least one of them IS like that. Various members of my family belong the other motorcycle subcultures, but I’ve spent enough time at Bike Week in Daytona to acknowledge the others.

Or is the problem that rape as a crime is not taken seriously anyway? So we shouldn’t be using language that might contribute to that attitude?

Yes, that is exactly the problem. In a world where women (yes, and men) are blamed for their own rapes, where it is absurdly difficult to get a conviction for rape, or even to get rape victims to come forward, where rape victims are vilified in the press, where accused rapists are defended vigorously by the public, responsible people should not contribute to the trivialization of rape by using the word hyperbolically.

Since the discussion is converging on the topics of rape and anxiety*-induced sexual response, I’d like to add that another way rapists’ justify their attacks is that the victim was lubricated or erect.

People who make that argument, I want to whack over the head with a one-volume (for maximum hurt) encycopaedia opened to the entry on “involuntary muscle control”…

Oh, and is there seriously someone out there who blames cancer victims for being liars? *seethes*

Yes, unfortunately there are plenty of people who think that cancer is caused by negative emotions and behaviors like lying. IIRC Rosie O’Donnell is a proponent of the “lying causes cancer” idea. (At some point that woman lost her entire mind.) People who take the ideas in The Secret to their logical conclusion also tend to assume that cancer is in some way the fault of the victim.
Of course the one thing that people who push this idea tend to have in common is that neither they nor any of their close friends and family have had cancer, but someone they really don’t like does. The whole idea is illogical and childish.

Michael Cule,

He was polite and gallant to all his little girl friends and probably creepy as all get out. Certainly Alice’s mother eventually decided that contact with Mister Dodgson was bad for her little girl.

Actually–and I’m no expert on this, so Carroll’s Wiki page is the best list of citations I can give you, but–the Dodgson family papers suggest that people weren’t worried about Carroll and Alice. Rather, he was said to be courting the Liddells’ governess and/or Alice’s older sister, and hanging out with the younger kids as an excuse to get to them. That seems to have been what made Alice’s mother decide to break contact with him.

I think that New Age woo-woo like The Secret, along with Word Faith theology, represent a highly narcissistic spirituality combined with an unhealthy dose of JWF.
In some cases, especially in churches that teach Word Faith, someone who falls on financial hard times, or worse, develops a life-threatening illness ends up being ostracized by the congregation or by New Age woo-woo believing friends because the person obviously doesn’t have a strong faith/has a lot of negative energy, and there seems to be a belief that this negativity can become contagious.
As far as victim-blaming in rape goes…
I think it’s wise in rape prevention to encourage girls and young women to dress somewhat conservatively and moderate their alcohol intake, and not drink from containers they didn’t open themselves when going out to parties and such where there will be numbers of young men, not because they’re “inviting rape”, but because in the minds of a certain segment of people, especially drunken college boys, skimpy dress is considered to be a sign of sexual availability, and the greater number of guys around, the more likely it is that at least one of them will subscribe to this mindset, which, in turn, increases their chances of being sexually assaulted.
I don’t see this as so much “blaming the victim” as saying, “It’s a good idea to take certain precautions”.
And an RTC coworker once actually tried to defend the idea that if a woman is raped and “she didn’t scram out”, it is her fault, and she must have wanted it (and therefore, at least in Biblical times, was justifiably subject to death by stoning). ‘Cause it’s in the Bible, doncha know, and some victims would never not scream because they feared that their assailant would kill them, or just flat-out freeze when frightened.
And in Bible class at an RTC school I went to, the teacher of the girls’ class flat out said, “Every woman who has ever been raped has asked for it”, and then proceeded to explain that if your slip is showing, even a quarter of an inch, even if you don’t know it you’re saying “come on” to any males in the vicinity.
She is the only person I have ever wished to be the victim of a violent crime, just so that she could sit and go through her mental checklist of “what did I do to bring this on myself?” over and over again…

I think that New Age woo-woo like The Secret, along with Word Faith theology, represent a highly narcissistic spirituality combined with an unhealthy dose of JWF.
In some cases, especially in churches that teach Word Faith, someone who falls on financial hard times, or worse, develops a life-threatening illness ends up being ostracized by the congregation or by New Age woo-woo believing friends because the person obviously doesn’t have a strong faith/has a lot of negative energy, and there seems to be a belief that this negativity can become contagious.
As far as victim-blaming in rape goes…
I think it’s wise in rape prevention to encourage girls and young women to dress somewhat conservatively and moderate their alcohol intake, and not drink from containers they didn’t open themselves when going out to parties and such where there will be numbers of young men, not because they’re “inviting rape”, but because in the minds of a certain segment of people, especially drunken college boys, skimpy dress is considered to be a sign of sexual availability, and the greater number of guys around, the more likely it is that at least one of them will subscribe to this mindset, which, in turn, increases their chances of being sexually assaulted.
I don’t see this as so much “blaming the victim” as saying, “It’s a good idea to take certain precautions”.
And an RTC coworker once actually tried to defend the idea that if a woman is raped and “she didn’t scram out”, it is her fault, and she must have wanted it (and therefore, at least in Biblical times, was justifiably subject to death by stoning). ‘Cause it’s in the Bible, doncha know, and some victims would never not scream because they feared that their assailant would kill them, or just flat-out freeze when frightened.
And in Bible class at an RTC school I went to, the teacher of the girls’ class flat out said, “Every woman who has ever been raped has asked for it”, and then proceeded to explain that if your slip is showing, even a quarter of an inch, even if you don’t know it you’re saying “come on” to any males in the vicinity.
She is the only person I have ever wished to be the victim of a violent crime, just so that she could sit and go through her mental checklist of “what did I do to bring this on myself?” over and over again…

Re: Muslim vampire hunters –
The crescent moon is a de facto symbol of the Islamic world today, but it’s never really been a “holy symbol” for Islam (Islam generally takes a much harsher stance against the very *idea* of holy symbols as being akin to idolatry than most Christians and Jews, hence all the controversy over visual depictions of Muhammad) and I believe most Muslims would regard the practice of wearing it around their neck the way Christians wear crosses as contrary to the principles of their faith.
The closest thing most devout Muslims would accept as a holy symbol or icon of the faith would be a physical copy of the Quran itself, or a written copy of a significant surah from the Quran. Repelling an evil spirit by orally reciting scripture or the names of God is also something I think has theological precedent.

Brilliant Fred – love it!
And as for mirrors… excuse the pun, but going off of Fred’s logic, the Vampire is not self-reflective enough to see what he really is.

Re: Dracula
ISTR that he was killed by both the the Kukri knife and the Bowie knife at the same time. It turns out not to be that difficult to check. Project Gutenberg has the novel online, so I just downloaded it and jumped to the last chapter. Looks like I was right.
Here’s the relevant passage: By this time the gypsies, seeing themselves covered by the Winchesters, and at the mercy of Lord Godalming and Dr. Seward, had given in and made no further resistance. The sun was almost down on the mountain tops, and the shadows of the whole group fell upon the snow. I saw the Count lying within the box upon the earth, some of which the rude falling from the cart had scattered over him. He was deathly pale, just like a waxen image, and the red eyes glared with the horrible vindictive look which I knew so well.
As I looked, the eyes saw the sinking sun, and the look of hate in them turned to triumph.
But, on the instant, came the sweep and flash of Jonathan’s great knife. I shrieked as I saw it shear through the throat. Whilst at the same moment Mr. Morris’s bowie knife plunged into the heart.
It was like a miracle, but before our very eyes, and almost in the drawing of a breath, the whole body crumbled into dust and passed from our sight.
I shall be glad as long as I live that even in that moment of final dissolution, there was in the face a look of peace, such as I never could have imagined might have rested there.
Also, in Victorian London he would hardly have needed to summon fog. Between the natural fog, and the pollution from burning coal, he would have been pretty well protected from sunlight. Saberhagen’s version of Dracula comments on the English lighting conditions, and also indicates that older more powerful vampires are more resistant to the sun.
The Comte de Saint Germain in Chelsea Quinn Yarbro vampire novels is able to go out in daylight as long as he has some of his native earth on his person. He takes advantage of this fact to convince people that he isn’t a vampire.
There’s a vampire in a Mercedes Lackey novel who has a perfectly reasonable explanation for the running water thing. It’s not that they can’t cross running water, it’s that they’re territorial and rivers make good boundary markers.
I ran across one trilogy of vampire novels where not only do vampires not have problems with water, but at one point a group of them use a lake to hide from the sun. These same vampires are illusionists. They can project any appearance they want, but the illusions don’t fool mirrors. As a result, they only avoid mirrors when they’re projecting a false appearance. There’s one bit where a vampire uses mundane methods to disguise herself because she knows she’s going to doing something in front of a mirror where she doesn’t want her true appearance known.
In the first two Sonja Blue, vampires avoid mirrors because they reveal their true natures. The subsequent novels take place in the World of Darkness, and the seams show badly enough in the one book I read that I didn’t care to read any of the others.
Speaking of the World of Darkness, I haven’t done anything with the reboot, but in the original WoD, vampires avoid water because they sink like rocks and go into torpor. They can cross it with sufficient motivation and some means of avoiding falling in.
Also, the only vampires in the oWoD who don’t have reflections are the Lasombra who manipulate shadows, and the occasional other vampire who manages to learn enough of the Lasombra’s trademark discipline, Obetenebration.
The only vampires who need to rest in their native earth are the Tzimice. It’s theorized that these vampires who can reshape themselves and living animals (including humans) at will need their native earth as a point of stability. They are also the source of the stories of vampires needing to be invited into someone’s home. It’s not so much that they can’t as that they have a code of honor that gives hospitality a high priority. For a Tzimice to enter a home uninvited implies that it (and “it” is often the most appropriate pronoun with them) considers the residents to lack honor. By the same token, if a Tzimice invites people into its home, the invited guests are perfectly safe from the vampire as long as they comport themselves honorably by its standards. Tzimice have even been known to defend guests from attack. One of the templates from the first Tzimice splatbook is tattoo artist who considers customers to be as sacred as guests and will defend them from other vampires as long as they’re in the store.
Re: Holy water
Some kind of holy or blessed water is used in many religions, so it’s not a Christian specific defense. Also, it’s often prepared with salt which is a preservative and in folklore has purifying properties. In such cases, it may be that the salt is what makes it effective and even a non-believer can use it.

Yes, unfortunately there are plenty of people who think that cancer is caused by negative emotions and behaviors like lying. IIRC Rosie O’Donnell is a proponent of the “lying causes cancer” idea. (At some point that woman lost her entire mind.) People who take the ideas in The Secret to their logical conclusion also tend to assume that cancer is in some way the fault of the victim.
Wait… really? Hasn’t Rosie O’Donnell promoted some cancer-related charities, though? How do you square that up? “You got what you deserve, but it’s terrible and I want to help find a cure for your illness, you filthy liar.”
I was a St. Jude’s patient over ten years ago, and I was extremely lucky (one year of treatment, a nil chance of recurrence at this point). I can’t imagine the gall of anyone saying something like that if they’d ever seen what some of those families were dealing with.

Wait… really? Hasn’t Rosie O’Donnell promoted some cancer-related charities, though? How do you square that up? “You got what you deserve, but it’s terrible and I want to help find a cure for your illness, you filthy liar.”

She doesn’t necessarily think there’s no other way to end up with cancer, but she does think that being a liar is one way to get it. It first came up publicly when she was being sued during the debacle over her magazine.

Cindy Spengler, the one-time head of marketing at Rosie magazine, said O’Donnell made the remark after a meeting to discuss the magazine’s problems, reports the Associated Press.
Spengler said O’Donnell told her that her silence in the meeting was the same as lying.
“You know what happens to people who lie,” the witness quoted O’Donnell as saying. “They get sick and they get cancer. If they keep lying, they get it again.”

Rosie later admitted that she said it and to the best of my knowledge never has repudiated the sentiment.

@Dylan: I meant to add to my post—congratulations on your successful treatment. I’m glad that St Jude’s was able to help you and that you’re healthy now. Both of my parents have had cancer (they’re also healthy now) so I don’t have a lot of patience with the idea that cancer patients bring it on themselves with bad attitudes or failure to eat a perfect diet.

Inquisitive Raven,
Some of the vampires in Swamp Thing were killed by running water, but discovered that they did just fine in stagnant water. In fact, they found it much more to their liking than abovewater life, since they had no need for oxygen and could remain active during the day.

NRH:
I think it’s wise in rape prevention to encourage girls and young women to dress somewhat conservatively and moderate their alcohol intake, and not drink from containers they didn’t open themselves when going out to parties and such where there will be numbers of young men, not because they’re “inviting rape”, but because in the minds of a certain segment of people, especially drunken college boys, skimpy dress is considered to be a sign of sexual availability, and the greater number of guys around, the more likely it is that at least one of them will subscribe to this mindset, which, in turn, increases their chances of being sexually assaulted.
I don’t see this as so much “blaming the victim” as saying, “It’s a good idea to take certain precautions”.
But the best precaution would be to educate the potential rapists not to think of a [insert intoxicated/scantily-clad/single/flirting/female] person as a target, n’est-ce pas?
There are several problems with what you’re saying here, but the best analogy I can use is the burqa. You are, metaphorically, advising young women to wear burqas because men do not view burqa-wearing women as sex objects. They’re not inviting rape if they don’t wear one, but in the eyes of that segment of the population that views women who don’t cover as whores, the lack of a burqa indicates promiscuity and sexual availability.
Except we know that doesn’t work. Wearing a burqa when one does not want to is restrictive of personal freedoms and does not work, because women who wear burqas are still raped. Only it might be “I could see her hair/ankles and it turned me on,” not “I could see her thigh/cleavage.” (Putting aside rape within relationships, naturally.) Likewise, women who succumb to pressure not to wear the clothes they like or have fun with alcohol are still raped because all the precautions taken or not taken are nothing compared to the presence or absence of a man who views women as objects to be used.

Well said, Rebecca, well said!
While being careful about drinks at parties and clubs is good advice, rapists will rape no matter how the victim is dressed.

I should probably add a note here: there’s a difference between “dress conservatively and moderate your alcohol intake” and “watch your drink.” In the former case, it’s behaviors thought to attract rapists. In the latter case, it’s a way to avoid falling into the clutches of a rapist who has already decided to target you. In neither case is any responsibility for a rape on you.

Rebecca- your point is taken. Yes, men should be educated not to view women as sex objects, and particularly not to view women who are wearing revealing clothing as advertising their sexual availability, but, human nature being what it is, there are going to be a certain number of men who, perhaps due to upbringing, are not going to get the message. And yes, this goes both ways (although guys aren’t as prone to wearing revealing clothing, they are prone to getting drunk and becoming potential victims).
Dressing conservatively and not getting hammered/being careful about who you accept a drink from are not a guarantee that you won’t be raped, but it can reduce the odds. Also, if you’re dealing with men who are intoxicated, they may have impaired judgement (as may women- people of both genders may well have the experience of waking up next to someone and think, “I can’t believe I slept with this person”) and possibly less likely to properly interpret anything short of a shouted “NO!” accompanied by a kneecap to the groin as a signal of unwillingness.
Having said that, I was going out with a guy who, while we were still in the “just friends” stage, had me over at his house watching a movie, and he put his arm around my shoulder. I moved away, he moved closer, put his arm around me, I moved away… he literally pursued me across the couch in this fashion, until I was pinned against the arm of the couch and had nowhere to scoot to, and he was sober. I was nineteen at the time, and raised to believe that speaking up for myself was not an OK thing to do. That relationship didn’t last long, though, and never did progress to sexual involvement. Still, if there are guys in the world who, while sober, can’t grok that a woman moving away when he tries to put his arm around her means the woman doesn’t want him to put his arm around her, I’m sure that there must be guys who, while pissant drunk, can’t grok that a woman moving away, pushing his hand off places she doesn’t want touched, turning away when he tries to kiss her, etc., is probably a pretty good indication that she doesn’t want to have sex. Some people just do not respect other people’s personal space, and half of these people are men, and a goodly number of them drink to excess on a regular basis.
And I have days when I think wearing a burqa would make my life a lot easier.

Rebecca- your point is taken. Yes, men should be educated not to view women as sex objects, and particularly not to view women who are wearing revealing clothing as advertising their sexual availability, but, human nature being what it is, there are going to be a certain number of men who, perhaps due to upbringing, are not going to get the message. And yes, this goes both ways (although guys aren’t as prone to wearing revealing clothing, they are prone to getting drunk and becoming potential victims).
Dressing conservatively and not getting hammered/being careful about who you accept a drink from are not a guarantee that you won’t be raped, but it can reduce the odds. Also, if you’re dealing with men who are intoxicated, they may have impaired judgement (as may women- people of both genders may well have the experience of waking up next to someone and think, “I can’t believe I slept with this person”) and possibly less likely to properly interpret anything short of a shouted “NO!” accompanied by a kneecap to the groin as a signal of unwillingness.
Having said that, I was going out with a guy who, while we were still in the “just friends” stage, had me over at his house watching a movie, and he put his arm around my shoulder. I moved away, he moved closer, put his arm around me, I moved away… he literally pursued me across the couch in this fashion, until I was pinned against the arm of the couch and had nowhere to scoot to, and he was sober. I was nineteen at the time, and raised to believe that speaking up for myself was not an OK thing to do. That relationship didn’t last long, though, and never did progress to sexual involvement. Still, if there are guys in the world who, while sober, can’t grok that a woman moving away when he tries to put his arm around her means the woman doesn’t want him to put his arm around her, I’m sure that there must be guys who, while pissant drunk, can’t grok that a woman moving away, pushing his hand off places she doesn’t want touched, turning away when he tries to kiss her, etc., is probably a pretty good indication that she doesn’t want to have sex. Some people just do not respect other people’s personal space, and half of these people are men, and a goodly number of them drink to excess on a regular basis.
And I have days when I think wearing a burqa would make my life a lot easier.

unfortunately there are plenty of people who think that cancer is caused by negative emotions and behaviors like lying.
O’Donnell’s specific claim appeared to have little to do with physical effects of negative emotions. Instead, it implied the existence of karma. Of course that wouldn’t rule out natural causes for cancer, and that was my reason for bringing it up. I would expect O’Donnell to attack Spengler and others she doesn’t like with her idea about lying, but to reject that idea if she or a loved one got cancer. I’m suggesting that the JWF involves a double standard, where its believers make exceptions when it’s in their self-interest. An outrageously tough standard justice for everyone and an outrageously forgiving standard for themselves as individuals.

And I have days when I think wearing a burqa would make my life a lot easier.

You too? I’d love to wear one. The idea of being utterly bundled, separate from the rest of the world but still in it is really appealing. Obviously, though, I’d hate to be required to wear one, or even expected to wear in all or most of the time.

That sentence should read, “An outrageously tough standard justice for everyone else.”
it is reasonable to understand that there are multiple motorcycle subcultures, and that at least one of them IS like that
That makes sense. I know plenty of people who ride, and most of them don’t have those misogynistic attitudes, so I didn’t think of them as belonging to a subculture. Similarly, I know some men who hunt, and only some of them seem to have the saddening macho worship that leads them to covet trophy animals.
I guess I was wondering if there is a single reason why some men are fixated on proving their masculinity in misogynistic ways and why some men don’t seem to care about impressing other men. Every time I see a pickup truck with plastic testicles, I wonder if there are really that many men who laugh at the driver’s attempt at humor, as opposed to laughing at the driver’s pathetic posturing.

Dressing conservatively and not getting hammered/being careful about who you accept a drink from are not a guarantee that you won’t be raped, but it can reduce the odds.
Not getting hammered could also improve the chance that as you walk home alone, having avoided unwanted sexual advances, you don’t fall under the train. Getting raped isn’t the only risk. I do think that warnings like that are useful in their own right, though …
“Dress conservatively” is rather more difficult, in that there is a value judgement as Rebecca said – where does the need to hide yourself behind clothing end? In the UK and the USA (and much of Europe) I would word this as “Don’t wear deliberately sexually provocative clothing” If you bought it at the sex shop, to titillate your boyfriend, don’t wear it to the club. If the tee-shirt is emblazoned with a motto that could be taken to mean “Sex on offer”, you might meet a man who is unable to appreciate the feminist post modernist irony of the words. You have a perfect right to wear a bustier and a raunchy tee-shirt to the office party, but it might make your life less stressful if you don’t.

You too? I’d love to wear one. The idea of being utterly bundled, separate from the rest of the world but still in it is really appealing. Obviously, though, I’d hate to be required to wear one, or even expected to wear in all or most of the time.

They’re hot as hell, and heavier than you might think. They restrict your vision in a way that makes it very difficult to walk without tripping and leaves you at the mercy of anyone and anything that comes at you outside the tiny range of vision it provides. Looking at the world through a tiny mesh screen tends to give a lot of people a form of vertigo and if you’re prone to clastrophobia they’ll give you a panic attack before you get 2 blocks out your front door.
In short, wearing a burka would not improve your life.

NRH:
Rebecca- your point is taken. Yes, men should be educated not to view women as sex objects, and particularly not to view women who are wearing revealing clothing as advertising their sexual availability, but, human nature being what it is, there are going to be a certain number of men who, perhaps due to upbringing, are not going to get the message. And yes, this goes both ways (although guys aren’t as prone to wearing revealing clothing, they are prone to getting drunk and becoming potential victims).
Education =/= upbringing?
Leum:
You too? I’d love to wear one. The idea of being utterly bundled, separate from the rest of the world but still in it is really appealing. Obviously, though, I’d hate to be required to wear one, or even expected to wear in all or most of the time.
I know, right? Even in a more trivial sense – back before I cut my hair short, there were days when I’d have loved to wear hijab – but there’s way too much cultural baggage for me as a white non-Muslim who doesn’t usually cover to wear it.
Socks:
Not getting hammered could also improve the chance that as you walk home alone, having avoided unwanted sexual advances, you don’t fall under the train. Getting raped isn’t the only risk. I do think that warnings like that are useful in their own right, though …
Of course “don’t get hammered” is always good advice, but I’ll note here the difference between falling under a train (accident – you are the only actor in the situation) and rape (someone else rapes you – you are not the only actor in the situation).
“Deliberately sexually provocative” is always, always going to be a value judgment. I have some bustiers that I wear because I like how they make me look. I wear them although I have zero interest in attracting anyone. Yours isn’t really a clarification – in a society where women are expected to cover from their crown to their feet, showing an ankle is “deliberately sexually provocative.”

And actually, women who are drunk or dressed “provocatively” are not more likely to be raped than sober or “conservatively” dressed women — although some newspapers do try to claim otherwise.
So can we please stop claiming that women should dress conservatively and not drink so they don’t get raped? There’s no evidence to show that this helps.

Question for the speculative types in the audience:
What’s up with Scientific American? They seem to have spent the past 10 fighting some one-sided battle against Christian creationists and creationism, and recently appear to have moved on to religious belief in general. Their most recent issue, for instance, contains many short blurbs on the origins of things. “Religious belief” is one of the items, and the blurb begins with, “God may or may not exist, but his followers certainly do!” The blurb on the eye specifically sneers at (Christian) creationists. There was an article earlier in the magazine stating something along the lines of, “at best, science is not openly hostile to the idea of a certain sort of disinterested god” (which implies, of course, that it is openly hostile to Christianity).
The magazine seems to be on some unique crusade against religious belief. I can’t imagine that the magazine’s audience is restricted to the atheist-and-deist crowd. Who is funding and approving this kind of writing?

@Hobbes: Well, as far as waging a one-way battle against creationism, I see no problem with that. The magazine is Scientific American, and there is nothing scientific about creationism. Indeed, I would be highly disappointed with a magazine that purported to be about science if it didn’t take a hard line against the pseudo-science and outright lies of creationism that are so desperately masquerading as science.
Now, not having seen the blurbs on origins myself, I am not in a position to comment on specifics. However, creationists have been dishonestly using a partial quote from Darwin on the eye for many years as part of their repertoire, and such dishonesty deserves every sneer it gets.

Can’t speak to Scientific American itself (I didn’t bother to resubscribe a few years ago, really ought to correct that), but from what I pick up and read between the lines in the science blogging community, there’s a battle within the group of scientists who talk about creationism that centers on whether a) creationists* can be persuaded that they are wrong b) outreach to creationists and undecided laymen should treat the problem as one of believing in things that are counter-science or as one of believing in things unsupported by science period c) religion is inherently anti-science d) journalists are the problem or the solution in educating the public.
The battle is connected to others both within and outside of the scientific communities regarding science journalism, science education, atheist activism, religious activism, and politics generally.
Since science is an intensely political world, it’s possible likely that SciAm’s been feeling pressure to take sides in the battle (if I’m right that it exists).
*throughout my comment used to refer to those who believe that God intervened in biological processes in such a way that biological studies that do not acknowledge this intervention are fundamentally flawed (i.e. including IDers and perhaps some theistic evolutionists).

They seem to have spent the past 10 fighting some one-sided battle against Christian creationists and creationism, and recently appear to have moved on to religious belief in general. Their most recent issue, for instance, contains many short blurbs on the origins of things. “Religious belief” is one of the items, and the blurb begins with, “God may or may not exist, but his followers certainly do!” The blurb on the eye specifically sneers at (Christian) creationists. There was an article earlier in the magazine stating something along the lines of, “at best, science is not openly hostile to the idea of a certain sort of disinterested god” (which implies, of course, that it is openly hostile to Christianity).
Do you have any kind of evidence of this “battle?” The origin of religious belief is a legitimate area of scientific study, and none of the statements quoted are inaccurate. Science has no problem with god as long he remains distant and ineffable. But if believers makes specific claims about the nature of the world, then those beliefs are subject to scientific investigation, and that most certainly includes Christian creationism.
I suspect the magazine’s audience are people interested in science, which is going to include probing the nature of faith.

They seem to have spent the past 10 fighting some one-sided battle against Christian creationists and creationism, and recently appear to have moved on to religious belief in general.

I suspect that a big part of the issue is that the battle isn’t at all one-sided. Creationism has been waging war on science for a long time. Scientific American is read by the sort of people who are forced to suit up and go into the battle just in order to be able to do their jobs. I think it’s inevitable that the sort of crap that creationists have been pulling for the last couple of decades will take it’s toll and leave the targets a bit cranky.

Amaryllis asked:

Or is the problem that rape as a crime is not taken seriously anyway? So we shouldn’t be using language that might contribute to that attitude?

Exactly. Or, what MadGastronomer said.
MadGastronomer also said:

So can we please stop claiming that women should dress conservatively and not drink so they don’t get raped? There’s no evidence to show that this helps.

THIS. In rape cases, it’s much more likely that the perpetrator was the one drinking, or drinking harder. One of the things we should do to combat rape is to combat the “binge drinking” trend, which is more encouraged in males. Other things we should do: stop discussing rape in passive language that deletes the presence of the attacker, and start addressing it as a men’s issue — after all, rapists are overwhelmingly male, not female. [/feminist rant]

Brava, ShifterCat!

tl;dr version for all the arguments of why focusing on women doesn’t work for rape reduction:
The only consistent factor in all rapes is the presence of a rapist.

Scientology, for one, is all about blaming the victim. People who are ill or otherwise in trouble must have become that way by doing something contrary to Scientology teachings and must be punished, put through exhaustive Scientology rituals (they’re called training routines, but they are repetitive, precisely orchestrated, and conducive to an altered state of consciousness; therefore, rituals). Or somebody they are connected to must be somehow influencing them to become sick or what have you and must be cut off. People who are victimized, OTOH, somehow contrived it in order to create a bad situation for the attacker. No, I’m not kidding. Read this: http://ocmb.xenu.net/ocmb/viewtopic.php?t=31268
One of my high school teachers spent a year in Afghanistan back in the ’80s. He brought a silk burqa to class for students to try on. Five minutes in that thing, in a 70-degree room, and I couldn’t breathe. And it weighed about twice as much as a heavy winter coat, with all of the weight pressing down on your head.

Hobbes,

What’s up with Scientific American? They seem to have spent the past 10 fighting some one-sided battle against Christian creationists and creationism,

[NCSE staffer lecture mode] In recent years, all the science magazines (including the academic journals like Science and Nature) have been taking on creationism. That’s hardly a one-sided battle; Texas inserted more creationist language in its science standards this year, Louisiana passed an antievolution education bill last year, and the last five years or so have seen tons of money and manpower poured into popularizing intelligent design, promoting other antievolution legislation, and so forth. Heck, in 2001 an antievolution amendment almost got added to No Child Left Behind, courtesy of Rick Santorum. Scientists and science writers have very good reason to take this issue seriously. [/NCSE staffer lecture mode]

and recently appear to have moved on to religious belief in general. Their most recent issue, for instance, contains many short blurbs on the origins of things. “Religious belief” is one of the items, and the blurb begins with, “God may or may not exist, but his followers certainly do!”

I’m not sure what’s wrong with that. Should Scientific American either deny or affirm the existence of God? Should it not recognize that theists exist?
As for trying to explain the origins of religious belief: God may be inaccessible to science, but humans certainly aren’t, and religion is a human activity. Looking for natural explanations of observed phenomena is what science does; that’s not an attack (directly, anyway) on the claim that supernatural factors might also be involved.

There was an article earlier in the magazine stating something along the lines of, “at best, science is not openly hostile to the idea of a certain sort of disinterested god” (which implies, of course, that it is openly hostile to Christianity).
The magazine seems to be on some unique crusade against religious belief.

I’m not really seeing that. It profiled (favorably) geneticist and Dominican theologian Francisco Ayala last November, and Michael Shermer did an article for it on how evolution can fit with conservative Christianity in 2006. In last year’s critiques of Ben Stein’s Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, SciAm’s writers repeatedly pointed out that “many evolutionary biologists are religious and many religious people accept evolution.” And—if I may boast—it’s recently featured articles by and on my boss, Eugenie Scott, who’s as accommodationist as they come on the question of science/religion conflict.
Now it’s quite possible that the magazine’s also published stuff by people like Coyne and Dawkins, who think evolution or other areas of science do argue against the Christian god as they define it. They do represent a significant chunk of the scientific community, and I think it’s reasonable for SciAm to give their position an airing. That’s hardly equivalent to an atheist/deist anticrusade, though.

I’m not saying the mentally ill don’t deserve to be in relationships, I’m saying mentally ill people whose mental illness is uncontrolled to the degree that they commit crimes shouldn’t be in relationships with the people they commit those crimes against, the fact that Bella retroactively finds Edward’s breaking-and-entering to be sexy and desirable notwithstanding.
This, very much. I don’t think the vast majority of mentally ill people should forgo relationships. I think that the small minority of mentally ill people who find themselves incapable of obeying the law need an intensive treatment program and whatever legal interference is needed to keep them from committing crimes against specific people they’re likely to obsessively target. It’s easy to lose sight of how scary Edward’s behavior is in light of what he wants to do, and might do. But he breaks into a teenage girl’s bedroom without her knowledge or consent, steals the engine from her truck, and does other criminal and skeevy stuff in order to control how he acts. This isn’t a healthy degree of control over mental illness, if you read him as having one. It’s a slightly-less-bad instance of acting on the illness.
I’m suggesting that the JWF involves a double standard, where its believers make exceptions when it’s in their self-interest. An outrageously tough standard justice for everyone and an outrageously forgiving standard for themselves as individuals.
Why, though? It sounds to me like you’re describing two separate phenomenon, which frequently, but don’t necessarily overlap. I’ve met enough people who are convinced that everyone, including themselves and the people they care about, only suffer misfortune if they cause it in some way that I want a good descriptive term for it. And there’s nothing inherent in the definition of the Just World Fallacy that requires a double standard.
I can believe that you, in particular, may have only encountered people who apply the JWF to others. But I don’t see why it should be inherent to the definition.
I think it’s wise in rape prevention to encourage girls and young women to dress somewhat conservatively and moderate their alcohol intake, and not drink from containers they didn’t open themselves when going out to parties and such where there will be numbers of young men, not because they’re “inviting rape”, but because in the minds of a certain segment of people, especially drunken college boys, skimpy dress is considered to be a sign of sexual availability, and the greater number of guys around, the more likely it is that at least one of them will subscribe to this mindset, which, in turn, increases their chances of being sexually assaulted.
Leaving aside the problems of factual inaccuracy (which have been thoroughly addressed), it seems stifling, though. A lot of this stuff suffers from simplification of the odds. “If you don’t open all beverages yourself, you’re more likely to get raped” sounds more intimidating than “If you don’t open all beverages yourself, you’re 3% more likely to get raped.”* Being female and functioning in pretty much any society on Earth means taking calculated risks when it comes to the prospect of rape. (Also true for being male, but the risks are much smaller.)
Now I’m in favor of providing factually verified “If you do X, it affects your odds of being sexually assaulted by Y%” information to anyone interested in having it. Risk prevention information, when available, should be provided to people interested in making decision. But, for some reason, a lot of implicit moral pressure and guilt gets applied to people in terms of avoiding victimization (I’m speaking of what I’ve seen in life in general, not in Slacktivist), where it doesn’t belong. Life involves calculated risks. You cross the street, you stand certain chances of being hit by a car. You eat, you stand certain chances of food poisoning. You interact with people, you stand certain chances of sexual assault. Information on risk avoidance shouldn’t come with “You had three drinks without safe female companionship to see you home!” or “You let a strange man in your house, when you weren’t protected by having company around!” guilt (note: I did both these things within the last three days, partially because other factors led me to conclude they weren’t as risky as they sound on paper, and I didn’t get assaulted). The moral pressure should be on people hitting on or fondling someone who doesn’t seem completely alert, pushing for sex when the other person’s expressing discomfort, or saying things that suggest sexual violence is not that bad. But instead, far too often, it’s on the young woman who decides to order a normal drink from the bar, instead of sticking exclusively to sodas in sealed cans.
*all numbers pulled out of my ass, purely as an example.

But if believers makes specific claims about the nature of the world, then those beliefs are subject to scientific investigation, and that most certainly includes Christian creationism.
I agree.
Creationism has been waging war on science for a long time. Scientific American is read by the sort of people who are forced to suit up and go into the battle just in order to be able to do their jobs.
Excellent point.
From my long observation of the matter, creationism’s targeting of science seems to be a proxy for other battles.
The philosophical issue for creationists seems to be less about the Christian god or gods in general, and more about the conclusion that Benjamin Disraeli drew about evolution than a century ago: “Is man an ape or an angel? My Lord, I am on the side of the angels. I repudiate with indignation and abhorrence these new-fangled theories.” Creationists seem to want desperately for humanity to have inherent importance and specialness, and they choose to interpret evolution as undermining either of these. They either don’t understand that scientific theories are value-neutral, or else they do understand it and don’t accept the idea of value neutrality.
And the political issue for creationists seems to be the same one for advocates of returning to mandatory prayer in public schools – in my experience they’re often the same people. One of the dramatic changes that American society underwent in the 1960s was that Christianity was treated less and less as the “default” or “normal” religion by society and (to some degree) by government. This may have been one of the reasons for the resurgence of American fundamentalism in the 1970s – many people wanted a simple explanation for why things seemed so wrong (to them).
I’ve met enough people who are convinced that everyone, including themselves and the people they care about, only suffer misfortune if they cause it in some way that I want a good descriptive term for it. And there’s nothing inherent in the definition of the Just World Fallacy that requires a double standard.
While you may be right about the latter, the JWF believers I’ve met use the concept in their judgments about other people. Maybe they’re simply borrowing the concept to rationalize their judgmentality. It seems to be the inverse of the question in “Farther Along,” where the person justifies his own good fortune and others’ misfortune.

While you may be right about the latter, the JWF believers I’ve met use the concept in their judgments about other people. Maybe they’re simply borrowing the concept to rationalize their judgmentality. It seems to be the inverse of the question in “Farther Along,” where the person justifies his own good fortune and others’ misfortune.
It sounds like we’re discussing two different things. It makes sense that we’d have different ideas of the key elements of the Just World Fallacy if we’ve had such different experiences. I’ve met a lot of people who seem fixated on the idea that a person somehow caused their bad luck, and that it’s controllable, and are less interested in judging the person, or justifying their own judgmental attitudes. It sounds like your experience is different.
I’m tempted to call your experience JWF+double standards, because that distinguishes it from a lot of what I’ve seen (where the essence is believing that the universe is just, even if that means thinking that they and loved ones somehow invited bad behavior). But I’m hesitant to declare myself the arbitrator of definitions in any definitive sense. So I’ll just say that what I would label the JWF is broader than what you would.

I should clarify that my description of creationists is targeted mostly at the people who want creationism taught as science in public schools.
And Ako, good point about the JWF definition. I’m less interested in what constitutes an accurate definition of JWF, and more interested in refuting the overall concept and condemning any double-standard application of it.

And Ako, good point about the JWF definition. I’m less interested in what constitutes an accurate definition of JWF, and more interested in refuting the overall concept and condemning any double-standard application of it.
I definitely understand and agree with wanting to refute the overall concept. Of all the fallacies out there, it’s one of the ones that has caused an exceptional amount of emotional pain. Few fallacies lead to as many people going “I’m bad and I’ve done bad”, in my experience, as that one.
When it comes to the double-standard, it gets complicated. Because that’s a separate issue, in my eyes. So how I approach it is going to be significantly different from how other people (possibly including you) do. In my eyes, it seems fair to call someone out on both issues. And, as they both seem separate, it’s fair to tell someone that doesn’t see the fallacy in the JFW that they’re using a double standard, provided it’s true. But someone who sees them as fundamentally linked is going to to see the connection between assumption A (only people who do bad things bring bad events on themselves) and assumption B (neither I nor the people I care about do things that invite bad events) differently than how I do, so how to deal with it will be different.
From what I’ve seen, what causes teenage girls to stab themselves with scissors (to the point that I had to tear the scissors out of their hands) was the assumption that only people who did bad suffered bad results, and that the bad results were proportionate to the bad actions. If someone’s got a better name for it than the Just World Fallacy, let me know. But I haven’t got a better thing to call it right now.

And actually, women who are drunk or dressed “provocatively” are not more likely to be raped than sober or “conservatively” dressed women — although some newspapers do try to claim otherwise.
There seems to be this idea that the more revealing clothing a woman is wearing the more sexually attractive she is, when I don’t even think that is always the case. I know its not for me personally. A woman wearing a business suit is more attractive to me than a woman dressed like Daisy Duke and I have no idea why that is. I don’t think it would be possible for a woman to leave the house certain that she wasn’t wearing something that happened to really push the buttons of hypothetical creepy rapist guy. This definitely seems to be a case of blaming the victim to me.

@Rebecca- Education =/= upbringing?
Education =/= upbringing if you grew up in a household where the general attitude is one of victim-blaming, and of fathers (and mothers, see my anecdote about my bible class teacher above) say “Well, she was asking for it, going out dressed like that” and the education consists of maybe one class where they’re told “No means no”.
MadGastronomer, thanks for the link. Newspapers, oy vey. Not the first time one has misrepresented the results of a study. I forget who said it, “Believe none of what you hear and only half of what you read. OK, wear what you want, then. Look good, have fun. But still, keep an eye on your drink.
Hobbes- I subscribe to SciAm, and the “blurb” you described was an out of context quote taken from a full-page opinion piece on why people in general have a tendency to believe in things that we have no scientific evidence for. Granted, it was obvious that the author was an atheist, but he certainly wasn’t slamming Christianity.
Oh, and the best anti-ID apologist I’ve ever heard is Ken Miller, who is a believing Catholic.

@Rebecca- Education =/= upbringing?
Education =/= upbringing if you grew up in a household where the general attitude is one of victim-blaming, and of fathers (and mothers, see my anecdote about my bible class teacher above) say “Well, she was asking for it, going out dressed like that” and the education consists of maybe one class where they’re told “No means no”.
MadGastronomer, thanks for the link. Newspapers, oy vey. Not the first time one has misrepresented the results of a study. I forget who said it, “Believe none of what you hear and only half of what you read. OK, wear what you want, then. Look good, have fun. But still, keep an eye on your drink.
Hobbes- I subscribe to SciAm, and the “blurb” you described was an out of context quote taken from a full-page opinion piece on why people in general have a tendency to believe in things that we have no scientific evidence for. Granted, it was obvious that the author was an atheist, but he certainly wasn’t slamming Christianity.
Oh, and the best anti-ID apologist I’ve ever heard is Ken Miller, who is a believing Catholic.

OK, burqas seem unworkable. How’ bout a chador and veil, then.
Actually, when I was living in Vegas, the idea of keeping myself covered head to toe in loose-fitting clothing appealed to me, not only because I was getting tired of being hassled and hooted at and hit on by guys, but also to keep the freakin’ sun off me. (of course, I would want light colors, and at least one tie-dyed one)
I actually started wearing long sleeved light colored blouses in the summertime when I figured out that, hey, it doesn’t feel like my hide is being slowly cooked off of me when I cover up.

OK, burqas seem unworkable. How’ bout a chador and veil, then.
Actually, when I was living in Vegas, the idea of keeping myself covered head to toe in loose-fitting clothing appealed to me, not only because I was getting tired of being hassled and hooted at and hit on by guys, but also to keep the freakin’ sun off me. (of course, I would want light colors, and at least one tie-dyed one)
I actually started wearing long sleeved light colored blouses in the summertime when I figured out that, hey, it doesn’t feel like my hide is being slowly cooked off of me when I cover up.

There seems to be this idea that the more revealing clothing a woman is wearing the more sexually attractive she is, when I don’t even think that is always the case. I know its not for me personally. A woman wearing a business suit is more attractive to me than a woman dressed like Daisy Duke and I have no idea why that is. I don’t think it would be possible for a woman to leave the house certain that she wasn’t wearing something that happened to really push the buttons of hypothetical creepy rapist guy. This definitely seems to be a case of blaming the victim to me.

I think there are a couple of things going on with this. First, people disapprove of revealing clothing and they use the idea that it’s automatically more “provocative” and likely to attract rapists to justify and promote that view.
The second issue is that people continue to believe that rape is about sex and therefore seeming sexually available makes it more likely to happen. Rape isn’t about sex–it’s about power and control. It’s a violent crime, not a normal social activity gone a bit off the rails. The fact that it uses a sexual organ, real or simulated, as a weapon doesn’t make it about sex. Rapists are not desperately, inappropriately horny—they’re criminals.

OK, burqas seem unworkable. How’ bout a chador and veil, then.
How about a long-sleeved shirt, long trousers and a nice headscarf? You can get a square bit of fabric, fold it in a triangle, put it on your head, cross the ends under your chin and tie them at the back of your neck under the flap. That’s pretty concealing and keeps the sun off a treat.
Can’t guarantee it’ll do anything about the sexual attention, but if you feel more comfortable covered up it might be a way to go…
Rapists are not desperately, inappropriately horny—they’re criminals.
Undoubtedly, but I would have thought some rapes happen because the criminal is horny. I’m thinking of date rapes, for instance. I agree that they’re about power and control, but so, for some people, is sex – for some people, power and control are sexy, and it doesn’t seem to make sense to separate the two. To say that rape isn’t about sex at all seems a bit of an oversimplification to me.
I say this never having been a victim of rape, but I did used to volunteer for a charity line where the number of people calling to sexually harass the volunteers was pretty high, so I’ve come in for a fairly large amount of that, which is also considered a crime. And yeah, some of them were about control in a disturbing way, and some of them were horny and doing something crappy but not being that controlling – just skeazy. It varied. Given that rapists are people and people are various, I would have thought there would be variation there too.
Which is not to say that rape is the fault of the victim; it’s the fault of the rapist. And if any guy concludes from a woman’s outfit that it’s okay to rape her there’s something badly, badly wrong with him and he should be off the streets. I’m just a bit doubtful at the idea that rape has nothing to do with sex. Surely sometimes it has something to do with it.

Rape and dress…
Case in Florida in 1984 (anecdote warning!) had a woman doing a little roleplay with her husband by dressing as a ‘bad girl’ and letting him pick her up in a bar to go to a seedy motel. Mutual consent, married couple, nothing wrong with that… until the plan went astray and the husband was late (flat tire), and the other bar patrons made assumptions. She left the bar, was followed and raped in the parking lot.
When brought to trial, the defense used the “she was asking for it, dressed like that” line.
The prosecuter countered: “She wasn’t asking him.”
Since I was of the age when I thought trying to meet girls in bars was a good idea, I took the concept to heart: being dressed provacatively may be a invitation, but it’s probably not addressed to me.

@NRH:
I do realize that the quote was not in context. The context is, as you said, an entire opinion piece, and would be difficult to reproduce here. Sorry about that, but I believe my point still stands.
My objection is more that opinion pieces and actual articles tend to be disproportionately about “why reasonable people are religious”, instead of, you know, about science. Among science articles, the magazine devotes a lot of space, sometimes whole issues, to explaining (mostly re-explaining) basic topics that could be applied to “disprove religion”, such as evolutionary biology, cosmology, and neurology. When whole issues are on these topics, there are always opinion pieces about “why religion is dumb and science is awesome”.
My major problem is that this triumphalism increases the staying power of the fundamentalist religion-or-science false dichotomy. The writers appear to buy into the false dichotomy just as strongly as your everyday young-earth creationist, believing that the only alternative to Biblical literalism is atheism. Any YEC reading Scientific American will find that some of the writers are actively antagonistic toward certain religious beliefs. This serves to strengthen both the persecution complex and the Evolution Is An Evil Conspiracy belief system. (The assumption that SciAm’s opinion pieces accurately represent the general opinions of scientists may be incorrect, but not unreasonable for a non-scientist.)
I guess in a science magazine, I wouldn’t expect the writers’ religious beliefs (or beliefs about religion) to come through so bluntly.

My major problem is that this triumphalism increases the staying power of the fundamentalist religion-or-science false dichotomy. The writers appear to buy into the false dichotomy just as strongly as your everyday young-earth creationist, believing that the only alternative to Biblical literalism is atheism.
Yes, this…. There is this attitude among both fundamentalists and some of the more extreme atheists that the only positions are fundamentalist extremist Chrisitianity or atheism based on science. You are either a fundamentalist RTC and hate science and think its evil or you are a scientist that doesn’t believe in God and hates religion. There is no room in either side’s view for any gray areas and most effectively ignore or dismiss them.

When brought to trial, the defense used the “she was asking for it, dressed like that” line.
The prosecuter countered: “She wasn’t asking him.”
YES. THANK YOU.
I’ve heard this argument: You’re dressed like such-and-such, that means you want sex.
To which the answer is very possibly, yes, I do want sex. With my boyfriend, who’s over there. Or with some stranger, who knows? If a woman deliberately dresses up to look attractive and she does want sex, she wants to look as attractive as possible to as many men as possible so she can take her pick. So that the odds of a the man she finds attractive finding her attractive go up. So that she can choose. Y’know, the way men choose which women they want to try their luck with.
Or possibly she just, y’know, wants to look nice. So she can feel good about herself. Looking nice to your own eyes often translates accidentally into looking desirable in someone else’s, but that’s pretty much a side-effect. Or she wants to look nice so people will think well of her: we do judge by appearances. (And the guys who think dressing nicely means they’ve been promised something are seldom kind about women they find unattractive either; there’s just no way to win with assholes.)
A public presentation isn’t a private message, and thank goodness for all the men who get that.
A side-note, but I’d like some opinions. A female friend of mine was talking about some men she’d overheard slagging off some women’s looks. The women weren’t trying to attract them, they were just in the same bar minding their own business – but she said they guys acted offended, as if the women were actively wronging them by being unattractive to them.
Does anyone know what’s up with that? We had two theories:
1. They don’t see the point of women as anything except sex candy; hence an unattractive woman is a worthless human being wantonly polluting their sightlines and using up oxygen to no purpose.
2. They don’t see the point of women as anything except sex candy; hence the act of being a woman is, to them, inherently the act of propositioning them. And lots of people bristle when they’re propositioned by somebody unattractive. They just couldn’t get their heads around the fact that having a uterus does not translate as ‘Fancy a shag?’
Anyone got a take on this?

Hobbes- since I’ve had my subscription, the only “one of these topics” I’ve encountered is the Darwin’s 200th birthday issue, and I didn’t come across anything remotely like “why religion is wrong and science is awesome”.
Also, the more the YEC/ID crowd tries to push for teaching religion in science class, the more press they get, and the more the false religion/science dichotomy is reinforced, and the more the atheists in the scientific community want to counterattack. Kind of like throwing rocks at a hornet’s nest, and complaining when you get stung.
And really, “why people believe in religion” does fall under the purview of neuroscience, and psychology, which makes it a legitimate subject for scientific study.
I’ve said more than once that the reason I’m Catholic is because I’m just wired that way.

Hobbes- since I’ve had my subscription, the only “one of these topics” I’ve encountered is the Darwin’s 200th birthday issue, and I didn’t come across anything remotely like “why religion is wrong and science is awesome”.
Also, the more the YEC/ID crowd tries to push for teaching religion in science class, the more press they get, and the more the false religion/science dichotomy is reinforced, and the more the atheists in the scientific community want to counterattack. Kind of like throwing rocks at a hornet’s nest, and complaining when you get stung.
And really, “why people believe in religion” does fall under the purview of neuroscience, and psychology, which makes it a legitimate subject for scientific study.
I’ve said more than once that the reason I’m Catholic is because I’m just wired that way.

@MG: thanks. ^_^
Kit Whitfield said:

How about a long-sleeved shirt, long trousers and a nice headscarf? You can get a square bit of fabric, fold it in a triangle, put it on your head, cross the ends under your chin and tie them at the back of your neck under the flap. That’s pretty concealing and keeps the sun off a treat.

Headscarves make some of us look like grannies (or, perhaps, freakishly young grannies). I go retro in the summer with a loose skirt and big floppy hat. I’m looking for a good parasol to go way retro.

@Kit Whitfield- A side-note, but I’d like some opinions. A female friend of mine was talking about some men she’d overheard slagging off some women’s looks. The women weren’t trying to attract them, they were just in the same bar minding their own business – but she said they guys acted offended, as if the women were actively wronging them by being unattractive to them.
Does anyone know what’s up with that? We had two theories:
1. They don’t see the point of women as anything except sex candy; hence an unattractive woman is a worthless human being wantonly polluting their sightlines and using up oxygen to no purpose.
2. They don’t see the point of women as anything except sex candy; hence the act of being a woman is, to them, inherently the act of propositioning them. And lots of people bristle when they’re propositioned by somebody unattractive. They just couldn’t get their heads around the fact that having a uterus does not translate as ‘Fancy a shag?’
Anyone got a take on this?
3)They were just assgaskets?

@Kit Whitfield- A side-note, but I’d like some opinions. A female friend of mine was talking about some men she’d overheard slagging off some women’s looks. The women weren’t trying to attract them, they were just in the same bar minding their own business – but she said they guys acted offended, as if the women were actively wronging them by being unattractive to them.
Does anyone know what’s up with that? We had two theories:
1. They don’t see the point of women as anything except sex candy; hence an unattractive woman is a worthless human being wantonly polluting their sightlines and using up oxygen to no purpose.
2. They don’t see the point of women as anything except sex candy; hence the act of being a woman is, to them, inherently the act of propositioning them. And lots of people bristle when they’re propositioned by somebody unattractive. They just couldn’t get their heads around the fact that having a uterus does not translate as ‘Fancy a shag?’
Anyone got a take on this?
3)They were just assgaskets?

A side-note, but I’d like some opinions. A female friend of mine was talking about some men she’d overheard slagging off some women’s looks. The women weren’t trying to attract them, they were just in the same bar minding their own business – but she said they guys acted offended, as if the women were actively wronging them by being unattractive to them.

I suspect it’s a mixture of both your theories, but I think the big deal is the faux novelty of seeing an unattractive woman. Men are conditioned not to see unattractive woman. That’s why so many men claim they never see a woman they wouldn’t have sex with. To notice an unattractive woman breaks male privilege, and elicits a typical reaction.

Kit- On the clothing issue- I have a collection of rather attractive pashimas that would serve the headscarf part quite nicely. I generally don’t like wearing pants in the summertime, although I usually do because I have one leg shorter than the other, and I have to pad the heel of my left shoe quite heavily or risk being in a world of back pain if I do any significant amount of walking, and it’s hard to find shoes that look good with a dress that I could pad up like that and not end up walking out of them (too bad elf shoes had to up and go out of style, they’d be perfect.)
Oh, and many moons ago, I was watching a documentary and…
It seems that in some Muslim countries where people mostly have started wearing Western clothes, a lot of women, mostly college students and young professional women, had started wearing chadors and headscarves (yeah, I know, but check two different sources, you get two different definitions) as a statement that they wanted to be valued for their intellectual abilities, not their physical beauty.
I keep hoping that modest dress will make a comeback as a fashion statement in the US for similar reasons.
Oh, and I was once sitting outside a mall waiting for the bus home, and I overheard two teenage girls talking. One was wearing jeans and an oversize t-shirt, the other was wearing the revealing clothes that seem to be the teen girl uniform these days, and the one in the baggy t-shirt was telling her friend that she had started dressing in clothes that covered her because she got tired of being in conversations with guys that she frequently had to punctuate with “hello, my eyes are up here”.

Kit- On the clothing issue- I have a collection of rather attractive pashimas that would serve the headscarf part quite nicely. I generally don’t like wearing pants in the summertime, although I usually do because I have one leg shorter than the other, and I have to pad the heel of my left shoe quite heavily or risk being in a world of back pain if I do any significant amount of walking, and it’s hard to find shoes that look good with a dress that I could pad up like that and not end up walking out of them (too bad elf shoes had to up and go out of style, they’d be perfect.)
Oh, and many moons ago, I was watching a documentary and…
It seems that in some Muslim countries where people mostly have started wearing Western clothes, a lot of women, mostly college students and young professional women, had started wearing chadors and headscarves (yeah, I know, but check two different sources, you get two different definitions) as a statement that they wanted to be valued for their intellectual abilities, not their physical beauty.
I keep hoping that modest dress will make a comeback as a fashion statement in the US for similar reasons.
Oh, and I was once sitting outside a mall waiting for the bus home, and I overheard two teenage girls talking. One was wearing jeans and an oversize t-shirt, the other was wearing the revealing clothes that seem to be the teen girl uniform these days, and the one in the baggy t-shirt was telling her friend that she had started dressing in clothes that covered her because she got tired of being in conversations with guys that she frequently had to punctuate with “hello, my eyes are up here”.

Education =/= upbringing if you grew up in a household where the general attitude is one of victim-blaming, and of fathers (and mothers, see my anecdote about my bible class teacher above) say “Well, she was asking for it, going out dressed like that” and the education consists of maybe one class where they’re told “No means no”.
I was using education in a more general sense, inclusive of education from parents, schools, etc.

Rebecca- ah, I see. I tend to view education as something formal.

Rebecca- ah, I see. I tend to view education as something formal.

Hobbes: Any YEC reading Scientific American will find that some of the writers are actively antagonistic toward certain religious beliefs. This serves to strengthen both the persecution complex and the Evolution Is An Evil Conspiracy belief system. (The assumption that SciAm’s opinion pieces accurately represent the general opinions of scientists may be incorrect, but not unreasonable for a non-scientist.)
I partially agree with you, in that it’s hard for me to imagine too many YECs reading Scientific American, unless they are doing so purely to find phrases that will confirm their biases. “Ooooh, look, an article on evil-ution! This proves the gigantic scientific conspiracy of atheists! Oh, and I didn’t come from no monkey!”
But I don’t see that as a failing on Scientific American’s part. They are a science magazine and writing about science. If the creationists want to pretend their lies and pseudo-science are real science, but take offense when their ideas are held to scientific scrutiny, then they really should stop trying to pretend their ideas have anything to do with science, or belong in a science classroom. In other words, scientists are not responsible for curtailing persecution complexes.

I generally don’t like wearing pants in the summertime.
Me too… unfortunately being male makes it a requirement.

Unless we conclude mentally ill people should stay out of relationships, casting vampirism as mental illness seems to come down rather on Edward’s side. And it seems very unfair to conclude that mentally ill people should all be celibate. If you’re sick you’d be well advised to find a partner who’s steady enough to manage the additional strains it’ll place on things, but you shouldn’t have to spend your life in romantic leperdom

I was all set to say “Hey, that makes a lot of sense, and I never thought of it that way. Edward is difficult, but maybe he’s not such a louse as I thought.”
And then I realized: There’s no such mental illness as vampirism.
Edward Cullen is suffering from a “mental illness” that was invented by Stephanie Meyer for the express purpose of infesting someone with her particular set of kinks and declaring him to be the ideal man.

Which is not to say that rape is the fault of the victim; it’s the fault of the rapist. And if any guy concludes from a woman’s outfit that it’s okay to rape her there’s something badly, badly wrong with him and he should be off the streets. I’m just a bit doubtful at the idea that rape has nothing to do with sex. Surely sometimes it has something to do with it.

This. While the starting point (It’s “not a normal social activity gone a bit off the rails”) is true, going all the way to the conclusion that rape “isn’t about sex” is going too far in the opposite direction. It’s a violent crime different in kind from any other sort of violent crime in a particular way that is linked with sex in a way that isn’t coincidental. It isn’t a violent crime that uses a sex organ as a weapon, because the crime is “about” the weapon in a way that normal violent crimes aren’t (I’ll caveat that with understanding that there *are* some criminals for whom other violent crimes are like this. I think it happens a lot with psychopaths.)
I think it’s almost as much of a dismissal of rape to say that it’s “just” a violent crime as it is to say that it’s “just” ‘normal behavior gone off the rails’.

A side-note, but I’d like some opinions. A female friend of mine was talking about some men she’d overheard slagging off some women’s looks. The women weren’t trying to attract them, they were just in the same bar minding their own business – but she said they guys acted offended, as if the women were actively wronging them by being unattractive to them.

This sounds asshattish, but I don’t actually think it sounds particularly indicitive of “men see women only as sex objects.” I hear conversations like this *a lot*, but mostly it’s *women talking about other women*: “How dare she be here looking all slutty. She thinks she’s all that but she’s not.” I think it’s a more primal schoolyard bully class of asshattishness than you suggest, the idea that someone’s presence on *my* playground constitutes a kind of challenge (For the men in your anecdote, yes, their presence is interpreted as a sort of pick-up challenge. For the women in my version, it’s a challenge for some kin dof imagined queen bee status). In this way, I think that it’s more of a territorial thing than anything more specific about the views of these men toward women in general.
(They’re being territorial asshats and acting like children, but I see no need to attribute a sexual dimension to it. I would expect them to behave in a similar way toward a *man* who they perceived as somehow threatening their territory)

Yes, this…. There is this attitude among both fundamentalists and some of the more extreme atheists that the only positions are fundamentalist extremist Chrisitianity or atheism based on science. You are either a fundamentalist RTC and hate science and think its evil or you are a scientist that doesn’t believe in God and hates religion. There is no room in either side’s view for any gray areas and most effectively ignore or dismiss them.

Indeed, I often hear threads over at PZ Meyers’s place slamming “liberal christians” on the basis that “Fundamentalists are assjacks, but at least they’re honest about it. Liberal christians pretend their religion does not absolutely require you to believe in Young Earth Creationism, which it does, and the entire history of religion is really fundamentism and these liberals are whitewashing their past in order to keep their retarded belief in god when it is proven that religion leads only ever to badness.” They insist that christiantiy *absolutely requires* the rejection of science and biblical literalism, and it’s the *non-RTC* christians whodon’t understand their religion.

@Jason-
I generally don’t like wearing pants in the summertime.
Me too… unfortunately being male makes it a requirement.

have ye no kilts, lad?
Seriously, once this online community I used to spend a lot of time on would occasionally have get-togethers, and one of the guys came in a kilt.
I think that kilts should be acceptable attire for men in both business and casual situations, and not just for guys who play the bagpipes.
Oh, and I like bagpipe music, provided it’s played well.
Does that make me strange

@Jason-
I generally don’t like wearing pants in the summertime.
Me too… unfortunately being male makes it a requirement.

have ye no kilts, lad?
Seriously, once this online community I used to spend a lot of time on would occasionally have get-togethers, and one of the guys came in a kilt.
I think that kilts should be acceptable attire for men in both business and casual situations, and not just for guys who play the bagpipes.
Oh, and I like bagpipe music, provided it’s played well.
Does that make me strange

NRH: It seems that in some Muslim countries where people mostly have started wearing Western clothes, a lot of women, mostly college students and young professional women, had started wearing chadors and headscarves (yeah, I know, but check two different sources, you get two different definitions) as a statement that they wanted to be valued for their intellectual abilities, not their physical beauty.
This played a big part in Orhan Pamuk’s book, Snow. It’s all tied into the social debate in Turkey concerning the differences between westernised and ‘traditional’ Turkish culture. I think it was partly concerned with the local government’s dithering over whether headscarves and the like were a religious symbol and contrary to the ethos of the secular(ish) Turkish state. I probably didn’t explain it very well, but, yeah…
Also NRH: One was wearing jeans and an oversize t-shirt, the other was wearing the revealing clothes that seem to be the teen girl uniform these days, and the one in the baggy t-shirt was telling her friend that she had started dressing in clothes that covered her because she got tired of being in conversations with guys that she frequently had to punctuate with “hello, my eyes are up here”.
A friend of mine went entirely the other way and started wearing vests and shirts with slogans deliberately drawing attention to her endowments (my personal favourite being “(Un)Led(ed) Zeppelin(s)”), though I remember that she used to take a hoodie with her anyway. I guess that was for the point at which she did get sick of the attention. In a weird sort of way I know the feeling: I got very tired of women – and it was always women – asking me what I had on under my kilt, when I used to wear it on a night out.

NRH: And, since I’ve only just noticed it… you’re now the Minister for Kelly LeBrock?

@Launcifer- In a weird sort of way I know the feeling: I got very tired of women – and it was always women – asking me what I had on under my kilt, when I used to wear it on a night out.
What, and you never took the opportunity to offer to show them?

@Launcifer- In a weird sort of way I know the feeling: I got very tired of women – and it was always women – asking me what I had on under my kilt, when I used to wear it on a night out.
What, and you never took the opportunity to offer to show them?

[["Of all the takeoffs on a children's classic for him to slam that way, why pick a good one?"]]
Because I didn’t think it was?
======================
[[it's one of the things I try to avoid dealing with because it rubs my fur the wrong way.]]
Can’t argue with that!
=====================
[[women .. could use their very “feminity” to literally crack and destroy what makes men “masculine” – their dominance, their control, their rationality.]]
Their Precious Bodily Fluids?
=====================
[["One man's meat is another man's person." - Spider Robinson]]
“One man’s Mede is another man’s Persian” (Wolcott, I think)
=====================
[[mostly because of that sense of much more going on than the actual words would seem to say...I found it Carrollian.]]
He’s definitely drawing on Carroll as a source. But from those few pages (150 to 152), I also get a hint of de Lint — not so much style as use of the “urban fantastical, if you know what I mean.
======================
I have decided (after 4 comments written, deleted, rewritten, etc) that anything I say about rape, and more particularly about “raping my childhood” would do more harm than good, so take this as a “read but no comment (kinda sorta after a fashion)” comment.

NRH: No, because there always came a point in the night (beginning at around 1am, IIRC) where people would invariably just start lifting it up to see, or sticking their hands between my legs. And lo, I suddenly realised precisely hot it felt to be objectified*. The really annoying part was that there was a limit to what I felt socially able to say or do about it because, being a man (and therefore owning only a one-track mind) I was doubtless supposed to be enjoying all of the attention, or something.
*Though I’ll admit to liking it when people told me I had nice legs.

So if we cast vampirism as a mental – or indeed a physical illness – Edward’s insistence on controlling the relationship looks less like a bad man trying to control his girlfriend and more like a guy who knows his illness can be set off, knows certain limits just can’t afford to be negotiable, and is trying to be responsible about it. And I think that’s what a lot of fans see: the vampirism isn’t his fault, it’s a serious enough problem that he’s right to worry about its consequences, and his apparently ‘controlling’ behaviour is an attempt to control the disease rather than Bella – and his insistence that he knows how things should be better than she does is not the arrogance of a patriarch but simply the certainty of someone who knows he has much more experience of his illness than she does. In this context, saying certain things she does set him off isn’t ‘blaming the woman’, it’s just a fact.
Wow. Huh.
I like that general idea. Because yeah, it’s really hard to simultaneously say, “everybody’s human and needs to act decently” and “but some people have challenges that make acting properly really, really difficult at times.” Unacknowledged/untreated mental illness is such a huge destroyer. Of course, treatment is still a struggle, but once it can be talked about and dealt with it’s less dangerous and horrible and painful.

Launcifer- No, because there always came a point in the night (beginning at around 1am, IIRC) where people would invariably just start lifting it up to see, or sticking their hands between my legs
OK, now that ain’t cool, and, I guess, the flip-side of the double standard.

Launcifer- No, because there always came a point in the night (beginning at around 1am, IIRC) where people would invariably just start lifting it up to see, or sticking their hands between my legs
OK, now that ain’t cool, and, I guess, the flip-side of the double standard.

I have decided (after 4 comments written, deleted, rewritten, etc) that anything I say about rape, and more particularly about “raping my childhood” would do more harm than good, so take this as a “read but no comment (kinda sorta after a fashion)” comment.

This is why I have made a concerted effort to change my usage to “sodomized my childhood.” Typically consentual, not necessarily unpleasant, but generally uncomfortable, and downright painful if you don’t apply proper lubrication beforehand.

@Ruby: In other words, scientists are not responsible for curtailing persecution complexes.
I totally agree. However, popular science writers are a key component of science education, especially in woefully under-educated America.
Most of the research-reporting articles in SciAm appear to be written by scientists. However, articles they place in the “Society and Policy” category (which contains half of all creationism-related articles) tend to be editorials, overviews, or opinion pieces by staff or guest science writers.
As you’ve pointed out, SciAm’s readership is unlikely to include too many YECs. Nevertheless, searching turns up a lot of results for creationists, creationism, religion, and God.

1. They don’t see the point of women as anything except sex candy; hence an unattractive woman is a worthless human being wantonly polluting their sightlines and using up oxygen to no purpose.
2. They don’t see the point of women as anything except sex candy; hence the act of being a woman is, to them, inherently the act of propositioning them. And lots of people bristle when they’re propositioned by somebody unattractive. They just couldn’t get their heads around the fact that having a uterus does not translate as ‘Fancy a shag?’
Anyone got a take on this?
I think 1. has more merit, because there are fewer steps to go to reach that conclusion. Just simple unrestrained misogyny.
I hear conversations like this *a lot*, but mostly it’s *women talking about other women*: “How dare she be here looking all slutty. She thinks she’s all that but she’s not.”
This conversation is qualitatively different, though. The women in question were not attractive to the men, which seems to be the basis of the remarks. I have indeed heard this same sort of thing from women, but “Why did she go out of the house looking like that?” is not the same sort of remark as “Why is she dressed so slutty?” The first assertion acknowledges the perceived lack of male attraction, while second acknowledges the perceived presence of male attraction. The fact that women say this sort of thing too doesn’t mean that it’s not an inherently misogynistic attitude.

And on the main topic, Self Made Man by Norah Vincent is a fascinating, if not entirely accurate, book.

Jason: Me too… unfortunately being male makes it a requirement.
Am I missing something–why can’t you just wear shorts, man?

@NRH-
I think that kilts should be acceptable attire for men in both business and casual situations, and not just for guys who play the bagpipes.
I would gladly purchase a few of those utilikilts and wear them in the summer and around the house were it not for the fact that in the area that I live, generally if you are wearing a kilt you are expected to be playing bagpipes or at some sort of Scottish festival. If you aren’t, you will invariably get lots of people saying, “hey look! that guy’s wearing a kilt.” I’d be more open to wearing one if it wasn’t treated as such a novelty.

And I think that’s what a lot of fans see: the vampirism isn’t his fault, it’s a serious enough problem that he’s right to worry about its consequences, and his apparently ‘controlling’ behaviour is an attempt to control the disease rather than Bella
I know someone who reads it that way – Edward is decidedly not human, and his reactions are consistent with him being nonhuman. I think she’d disagree that a lot of the fans see it that way – she avoids the fandom because it’s overloaded with people who not only don’t see Edward as nonhuman, but think that it would be OK for a human male to behave like that. She knows that SM is one of them, but chooses to go by what’s in the text and not what the author says about it.

Am I missing something–why can’t you just wear shorts, man?
a) Shorts are still pants… they are just pants that are shorter.
b) Shorts are not acceptable office attire. I don’t even like wearing shoes and socks in the summertime.

Hobbes: As you’ve pointed out, SciAm’s readership is unlikely to include too many YECs. Nevertheless, searching turns up a lot of results for creationists, creationism, religion, and God.
Just scanning the titles of these pieces, my original point stands: Scientific American has a perfect right to criticize, combat, and yes, even mock the lies and pseudo-science of creationism. Indeed, many of the pieces appear to focus on science education. When the creationists stop trying to inject faith into the science classroom, then maybe there won’t be a need for any two-sided war.
And, as NRH points out, the science of the mind and question of why humans have religion, are perfectly valid topics for such a magazine.

Jason clearly needs to visit more kilt-friendly places.
There also clearly need to be more kilt-friendly places.
Can’t we just say “violated my childhood memories” and leave it at that?

When I wear a kilt, I don’t have many people attempting to look or fondle. I frequently get asked what I’m wearing underneath, to which my usual answer is a smile, and “It’s $5 to find out.” I try to make it clear by expression and tone that I don’t expect to be taken up on the offer, and desire to maintain some mystery; though once or twice, my bluff’s almost been called.
On the other hand, on the occasions when I’m costumed in a dress or skirt, folks seem much more willing to go for a look. The chain of logic seems to be, “Look, a guy in a skirt! Well, he’s obviously broad-minded, and won’t mind at all if I make a grab.” The chain is wrong. I’m a pretty relaxed, goofy kind of guy, but I still expect to be asked if someone can see my underwear; and unless you’re a very close friend, the answer’s probably going to be no.
In other words, you can count me on the side of “Provocative dress is not an invitation.”

Ruby: A lot of workplaces don’t like their male workers to wear shorts, certainly over here in the UK.

@Jason- If you aren’t, you will invariably get lots of people saying, “hey look! that guy’s wearing a kilt.” I’d be more open to wearing one if it wasn’t treated as such a novelty.
And people saying “Hey, look, that guy’s wearing a kilt” bothers you because?
Really, you could become a trendsetter.
I think you should go for it.

[[This is why I have made a concerted effort to change my usage to "sodomized my childhood." Typically consentual, not necessarily unpleasant, but generally uncomfortable, and downright painful if you don't apply proper lubrication beforehand.]]
In the show “Glee”, one character says she hasn’t seen anything so inappropriate since “an elementary school show of ‘Hair’”. Which, combined with this comment, made me think of

Sodomy, fellatio//Cunnilingus, pederasty//Father! Why do these words sound so nasty? [*]//Masturbation can be fun//Join the holy orgy, Kama Sutra, every one

[*] 7 or 8-year-olds saying THIS? I don’t think so!!!!

@Jason- If you aren’t, you will invariably get lots of people saying, “hey look! that guy’s wearing a kilt.” I’d be more open to wearing one if it wasn’t treated as such a novelty.
And people saying “Hey, look, that guy’s wearing a kilt” bothers you because?
Really, you could become a trendsetter.
I think you should go for it.

A side-note, but I’d like some opinions. A female friend of mine was talking about some men she’d overheard slagging off some women’s looks. The women weren’t trying to attract them, they were just in the same bar minding their own business – but she said they guys acted offended, as if the women were actively wronging them by being unattractive to them.
Does anyone know what’s up with that? We had two theories:
1. They don’t see the point of women as anything except sex candy; hence an unattractive woman is a worthless human being wantonly polluting their sightlines and using up oxygen to no purpose.
2. They don’t see the point of women as anything except sex candy; hence the act of being a woman is, to them, inherently the act of propositioning them. And lots of people bristle when they’re propositioned by somebody unattractive. They just couldn’t get their heads around the fact that having a uterus does not translate as ‘Fancy a shag?’
Anyone got a take on this?
Posted by: Kit Whitfield
—————————————-
A sailor tells a sea story.
Sailors are bad about this attitude, and it comes from the days when ship crews were always stag (and many still are). Out to sea for months, only in port for the weekend*, and we** are In A Hurry. Any Girl*** who doesn’t look interested is A Waste Of Our Time, and therefore to be derided.
“Single men in barracks don’t grow up into plaster saints” – ‘Tommy’, Rudyard Kipling. Applies to sailors, too.
*Pull in late Thursday, pulling out Monday morning, and one day of duty where you can’t leave the ship. I had a lot of ‘one weekend’ stands when I was single.
**Yes, I was like this, I was young and ignorant.
***Woman between local age of consent and ‘too old’. I know it’s offensive, but required by context. Sorry.

Launcifer: A lot of workplaces don’t like their male workers to wear shorts, certainly over here in the UK.
Oh, that’s fair enough. I thought Jason meant all the time, though I confess I have not been paying the strictest attention to this part of the discussion. I know of a few places that allow both men and women to wear shorts, but they are certainly the minority. Then again, I’ve never worked at a place that allowed only women to wear shorts. In my experience, it’s always been everyone allowed to wear them, or no one.

NRH: And people saying “Hey, look, that guy’s wearing a kilt” bothers you because?
I think it depends quite a lot on whether what follows is something like, “Gee, he looks like/must be a [insert suitably pejorative term for homosexuals here].” I’ve had variations on that one, too, in my time – though thankfully only from the dickheads that seem to make up the general population of a night-time English city. They’re easily enough avoided, where I live.
Tell you what, though, kilts are bloody good in winter, providing you’ve got a decent pair of boots and/or thick socks to keep your lower legs comfortable.

@Anton: Somehow I missed your excellent reply to my questions on an earlier page! I do agree with you that scientific education is important, and that creationists have somehow been making significant political headway in recent years, despite being almost universally reviled by everybody else.
It also just occurred to me that, from the perspective of somebody outside religion in general, it must be hard to distinguish variations in Christianity. (I certainly don’t know much about variations in Islam.) For an atheist science writer, terms like “creationism” and “Christian” and even “religion” may semantically overlap to a great extent, leading to them being used as synonyms when they are not.
There’s also the issue that most people in the United States, atheist or otherwise, have been exposed to religion as exemplified by fundamentalist Christianity. Those who choose to reject that particular interpretation may not even realize that dozens of other major interpretations, held by millions of people, exist. Therefore, when a science writer mentions “God” or “religion”, he’s almost certainly referring to “the YEC deity who created the universe 6,000 years ago”. Those of us who aren’t YECs ought to keep that in mind.
I’m not really sure what the solution is. You’re right that creationist beliefs ought to be countered, but it doesn’t seem reasonable that making snide remarks in a science magazine qualifies as an effective counteraction. Ignoring the problem obviously isn’t helping, but responses brimming with sarcasm turn off even moderate-to-liberal Christians like me. Mainline Christians’ arguments are rejected on the basis of being not-evangelical, while liberal evangelicals are mostly afraid to speak up for political reasons. It is a tricky situation, but I don’t think that SciAm is approaching it the right way.

I keep hoping that modest dress will make a comeback as a fashion statement in the US for similar reasons.

While I respect the intentions of the women you mentioned, to quote Rocky, “That trick never works.” And it doesn’t. Women wearing yet more clothing that sets them apart from men does not encourage men to think of them as smart instead of pretty, particularly not if they are the sort of men who generally think that women can’t be both, and generally aren’t smart.

Headscarves make some of us look like grannies (or, perhaps, freakishly young grannies). I go retro in the summer with a loose skirt and big floppy hat. I’m looking for a good parasol to go way retro.

Go check out Etsy, they generally have a nice supply of them for the Steampunks.

Then again, I’ve never worked at a place that allowed only women to wear shorts. In my experience, it’s always been everyone allowed to wear them, or no one.
In my office, which is kind of midrange when it comes to attire, a woman can wear a skirt and flip flops and that is considered perfectly professional. I however would like I was going to a Jimmy Buffett concert if I attempted to wear shorts and flip flops. I have to wear long pants and shoes and socks.
Also I’ve never worn a skirt or a kilt, so I don’t know for sure, but the idea of not having anything around your individual legs seems more comfortable on a hot day than wearing shorts.

My major problem is that this triumphalism increases the staying power of the fundamentalist religion-or-science false dichotomy
And I don’t think you have a shred of evidence for this claim. If you looked for a relationship between creationism and whatever you’re talking about here, it would likely run the other way assuming that a relationship existed at all.
Furthermore, your comment seems almost like a parody of religious criticism. You say that Scientific American should not print certain opinions — even with contrary views — for fear of offending hypothetical Young-Earth Creationist readers. Won’t someone please think of the children, and shape all adult discourse around their perceived needs?
The bit about scientists believing a dichotomy does seem like a tricky issue. I recently quoted Isaac Newton saying how the newborn field of modern science supported belief in Newton’s God. This deity does not seem “fundamentalist”, but it does affect our experience in a way that science can examine. In fact, we can look at the evidence and call the details of Newton’s theology disproven as a scientific theory. We know that people can keep believing in a form of deism after Darwin inadvertently destroyed the main reason for it. Or people can (say) invent a new ‘theology’ that describes its object as “not being even a possible object of cognition,” and insist on their greater sophistication (Terry Eagleton). But many atheists do not see the point of doing so. I assume you’ve mistaken this for a “fundamentalist religion-or-science false dichotomy”, because (unlike actual fundamentalists) atheists have never once come out and said to me that someone who rejects fundamentalism or biblical literalism must embrace atheism. Atheists frequently point out a discrepancy in method here; to me that seems quite different, assuming that some believer has a reason for this discrepancy.

Undoubtedly, but I would have thought some rapes happen because the criminal is horny. I’m thinking of date rapes, for instance.
This. While the starting point (It’s “not a normal social activity gone a bit off the rails”) is true, going all the way to the conclusion that rape “isn’t about sex” is going too far in the opposite direction. It’s a violent crime different in kind from any other sort of violent crime in a particular way that is linked with sex in a way that isn’t coincidental. It isn’t a violent crime that uses a sex organ as a weapon, because the crime is “about” the weapon in a way that normal violent crimes aren’t (I’ll caveat that with understanding that there *are* some criminals for whom other violent crimes are like this. I think it happens a lot with psychopaths.)

As an undergrad psych major intending to go into social work practice I I was required to do internships. One of the ones I chose was at the local rape crisis center. Based on my experiences there, and the conversations that I had with both victims and long-time professional staff I stand by my statement that rape isn’t ultimately about sex and it’s certainly not caused by an excess of horniness. It’s true that rapists have issues tied to sex. However, the world is full of people who have issues with, and seriously dysfunctional attitudes about, sex. The vast majority of those people will never commit rape. What separates the rapists from the merely screwed up are issues around power and control.
Part of my training at the center was speaking with cops about the legal process. As part of that training the officer I worked with allowed me to read quite a few transcripts of statements made by accused sex offenders (with identifying information removed). Another aspect of my training was to sit in on group therapy sessions for sex offenders. Once I finished my training I did a variety of tasks at the center depending on what was needed. One of the things I did was to go to court with victims in order to provide moral support. Another was to assist with anti-sexual assault education sessions run at the university.
These things gave me the experience of hearing a lot about what rapists have to say for themselves. The young men in the education sessions weren’t sex offenders, so they provided a nice chance for compare and contrast. The thing about the rapists is that I never heard a single one of them say that his actions were the result of being desperate for sex, either generally or with that specific woman. The “regular guys” talked quite a bit about sexual desire and confusion about what women want. The rapists never did.
When rapists justified their actions it was always in terms of how the woman was “asking for it” or that she was a tease and “lead him on”. It didn’t matter if the victim was 16, or 6 or 60—it was always some variant of the same song & dance. There was so much anger, and it wasn’t about being turned on without getting release. It was about the idea that women weren’t 100% compliant with the rapist’s wishes. It was all about “How dare that bitch disrespect or defy me.” It wasn’t about sex, it was about control. Again and again they said things that made it clear that they raped, as opposed to simply beating the woman up, because they knew that would hurt her more. The sexual satisfaction they got was the result of inflicting that “punishment”, not of the sexual act itself.

I think it’s almost as much of a dismissal of rape to say that it’s “just” a violent crime as it is to say that it’s “just” ‘normal behavior gone off the rails’.

I certainly didn’t mean it as a dismissal of rape. That said, my observation is that if we treated rape victims more like victims of other violent crimes, rather than focusing so much attention on the sexual aspect, the trauma would be significantly lessened for a lot of them.
And as a sort of aside, I’ve come to sort of hate the term “date rape”. Distinguishing between a known and an unknown attacker has value in terms of counseling victims, but in terms of how we look at the rapist it’s has a lot less meaning than most people think.

Jason: Also I’ve never worn a skirt or a kilt, so I don’t know for sure, but the idea of not having anything around your individual legs seems more comfortable on a hot day than wearing shorts.
It is, though with kilts you need to bear in mind the fact that good ones are pretty much 100% wool. They can get quite heavy and, sometimes, a little itchy. Don’t even get me started on which sporran is most appropriate for which occasion .

Coming back from a LARP to second/third/whatever the “it doesn’t matter how you dress, it’s not an invitation to be an asshat” sentiment. (Have missed a lot of previous posts, alas.)
Also? If other women want to dress modestly, great and fine. I don’t, mostly, and I’d rather modest clothing not come back into vogue because of that: I have a hard enough time finding stuff I like. I have a decent body, I like showing it off when possible, and I like getting reactions from guys. I figure they’ll value my brain enough if they actually talk to me–that’s pretty damn obvious as soon as I open my mouth–and meanwhile, I do like the attention *in certain forms*.
That doesn’t mean that the guys who make obnoxious comments from cars, or refuse to stop talking to me when I’m clearly not interested, aren’t assclowns, or that anyone who actually tried to grope me or worse wouldn’t be total scum. There are no situations where that behavior is remotely appropriate.
And yes, you’re taking a risk that people will be scum, but you know what? Everyone takes risks all the time. If I get into a car crash, nobody’s going to be talking about how so-and-so-many people die on that highway all the time and I should have known the risks, are they?

Edward Cullen is suffering from a “mental illness” that was invented by Stephanie Meyer for the express purpose of infesting someone with her particular set of kinks and declaring him to be the ideal man.

You say that like it’s a *bad* thing.
I mean, I read a lot of crackfic, and write a bit myself, and that’s pretty much standard for the genre.

It is, though with kilts you need to bear in mind the fact that good ones are pretty much 100% wool.
Except hiking kilts, which are made of high tech microfibers.
Just remember that it is proper etiquette to go last up the mountain in a hiking kilt.

***Woman between local age of consent and ‘too old’. I know it’s offensive, but required by context. Sorry

One of my favorite lines from the Cary Grant film “Operation Petticoat”:
“Women under eighteen are protected by law. Women over sixty are protected by nature. The rest are fair game.”
(The line is offered by the captain of a submarine explaining why it isn’t his place to stop the budding romance between one of his officers and a nurse.)

Just remember that it is proper etiquette to go last up the mountain in a hiking kilt.
Okay, I can totally see the airflow making kilted hiking an attractive option. But given the number of biting bugs at my nearby trails, I think I’d defy tradition and wear good underwear for that specific occasion.

hf We know that people can keep believing in a form of deism after Darwin inadvertently destroyed the main reason for it.
Wow. Darwin inadvertently destroyed my (and millions of other people’s) personal encounters with the Divine? Millennia before he was born and decades after rotting in his grave?
That’s one impressive act of wanton carelessness!

Nice Job Breaking It, Darwin.

I wonder how much of that sort of behaviour is to do with male egos, especially when there’s a group dynamic going on in the background. The person getting shipped into the role of object won’t necessarily notice or even care, but I do think there’s an element of how the group will perceive their actions, rather than the poor bugger being objectified.
Oh – and they could just as well be total armpits, or drunken total armpits.

Izzy: Nice Job Breaking It, Darwin.
Oh, sure, blame the messenger.

In all fairness, I’ve been to known to spend time with friends in public establishments slagging off on the decor in most unkind terms.
If one was accustomed to think of the entire female half of the species as decorative accessories, it perhaps would not even occur to one not to criticize the presentation and upkeep.

Re: Islamic vampire repellents: a khamsa should work pretty well. I think crosses work not necessarily because they’re a symbol of Christianity but because they’re the talisman Christians traditionally use to ward off evil. A Magen David necklace probably wouldn’t work- it’s just a necklace- but a mezzuzah should ward your house (or at least that doorway- I suppose for full vampire security you have to go all frum and have one at every door). Whatever the local evil-repellent is, that’s what you use.
Re: Scientific American- I think the problem was less that they were reporting the existence of theists, and more that they were reporting it as news. “God may or may not exist, but theists do!” Wow, really?
This is why I have made a concerted effort to change my usage to “sodomized my childhood.”
Aren’t you then lending an implicit negative connotation to “sodomize” by inserting into a well known phrase in place of an explicitly negative term like “rape”?
I’m not sure that this is worse than trivializing rape, but making sodomy and rape sound interchangable is definitely not helpful.
Could you just say “Your Mr. Rogers/Barney slashfic kicked my childhood in the crotch” or something?

I’m not sure that this is worse than trivializing rape, but making sodomy and rape sound interchangable is definitely not helpful.

Very true.

Can’t we just say “violated my childhood memories” and leave it at that?

I’m not exactly sure why we need to use any version of this construction. It seems to me to imply that the writer has done something wrong if their work makes me uncomfortable. I think it’s much more accurate to say something like “X was an important part of my childhood and I prefer it in it’s original state. This work based on it harshes my mellow something fierce and I want to pass on seeing it, or anything like it, in the future.”
The issue is mine, not the author’s, and I think the critique should reflect that.
If the issue is that the work is inconsistent with the original in some important way (like it totally breaks the characters) or is simply poorly written then it seems like it should be criticized the way any badly written work is criticized and that discussion of doing violence to someone’s childhood would be better left out of it.

@hapax: You’ve just stopped reading my comments, haven’t you? (Fair enough, but then why respond to them?)

Mr. Rogers/Barney slashfic
Mmm. Rule 34 aside, I don’t think it would work.
Mr Rogers and Barney are from two different eras, and evoke totally different reactions. Besides, Barney has no discernible genitalia, and Mr. Rogers just wouldn’t be Mr. Rogers without his sweater on.
Now, I can see possibilities for a Barney / Bananas-in-Pajamas slashfic (maybe Hurt / Comfort with a spicy twincest vibe)…
[starts whistling "I'm a Rat, I'm a Rat, I'm a clever clever Rat"]

hf: @hapax: You’ve just stopped reading my comments, haven’t you?
Actually, no, since you almost always have interesting things to say. But it’s perfectly likely I misunderstood them. Since the classical definition of “Deism” (to which you linked) didn’t make much sense to me in the context of your comment, I assumed (always dangerous) that you meant a more generic “theism” instead.
Perhaps you’d like to expand on how the theory of natural selection “destroys” Deism? (This would surprise a number of Deist biologists that I am personally acquainted with)

Yeah, uh, hf? The one and only actual Deist of my acquaintance is a biologist. He actually became a deist *because* of Darwin: he says that the existence of natural laws capable of producing such complexity and beauty out of simple, elegant processes is quite enough miracle for one universe. By comparison, the “miracles” described in the two holy books his upbringing presented as legitimate choices (he has a Christian father and a Muslim mother) are quite mundane and clearly the products of limited human imagination.

I read a lot of crackfic, and write a bit myself, and that’s pretty much standard for the genre.
What’s crackfic?
I’m not exactly sure why we need to use any version of this construction. It seems to me to imply that the writer has done something wrong if their work makes me uncomfortable.
Exactly. I’m going to say it again: a book you liked in your childhood is not your childhood. You are not your tastes.
@Lori: interesting to hear your experiences. Have you seen the movie Raw Deal: a question of consent? It’s a very interesting documentary about an alleged rape that took place at a fraternity house. The woman had gone there with a colleague to do a strip dance, then went back later in the evening – she claimed because she needed to pick up her stuff, they claimed because she wanted sex. The next few hours of the night were filmed by frat members, and the curious thing is that about half the people who watch the footage (which doesn’t cover the alleged rape, but shows quite a lot of disagreeable interaction) conclude that she was obviously raped, and the other half conclude she was obviously consenting. The filmmakers say they had a sign taped up in their studio reading ‘Welcome to the argument.’ It’s a very interesting study of different attitudes as well as a striking attempt to be fair, a kind of Rashomon documentary. You can watch some of it here: http://www.rakontur.com/journal/2007/2/6/raw-deal-a-question-of-consent.html
(I watched it and thought it looked like a rape; the woman did seem to be lying about some things but the frats were lying about some stuff too so that doesn’t prove anything one way or the other; she also was drunk and high and tired and not exercising very good judgement, but again that doesn’t make it okay to fuck someone who doesn’t want you to. It looked like nothing so much as a drunken argument in which neither party was prepared to let the issue drop, which ended up with him forcing sex on her as a way of winning. So yes, that did look like a control issue.)

By definition, if one party is drunk or high, it’s rape.

Crackfic… Buck/Phone, for example. Or “What if Dorian Gray was a giant robot?” Or “What if Garfield was an Animagus?” Stuff like that. Strange crossovers, brain-breaking pairings. Some are good, most are not.

On crackfic: Yesterday morning I was watching the Justice League cartoon from the 90s and saw “Legends”, an episode set in an alternate universe where Green Lantern’s childhood comic-book heroes lived, in a perpetual utopia that was like a cross between Pleasantville and the Adam West Batman. It turned out to be an illusion projected on a post-apocalyptic urban wasteland.
I watched 9 yesterday evening.
I am having great difficulty resisting the notion that the two post-apocalyptic urban wastelands are one and the same.

Froborr: In theory, yeah, and in situations like that, it makes sense (as it may from a legal perspective). But I’m uncomfortable using that as a general moral guideline. I’ve had some perfectly nice, perfectly consensual sex in a state that, while not completely on-the-floor blotto, most people would describe as fairly drunk or high. I certainly wouldn’t describe it as rape, and I would do it again given the opportunity.
I think it’s a good idea to be aware that your partner’s judgment is impaired, certainly, and probably to avoid sex with strangers who are really wasted. But alcohol is a social lubricant–as is pot in some circles–and I don’t think it’s a good idea to stigmatize all sex that results from that as nonconsensual.

Redcrow: “What if Dorian Gray was a giant robot?”
Dunno about Ol’ Dorian but, judging by the stuff I’ve seen from the upcoming version, I’m fairly certain that Ben Barnes is one.
Oh – and Garfield is quite obviously a re-incarnation of the Buddha, rather than an Animagus.

@Izzy: Yes, but (and I think we may be saying the same thing in different terms here) the rule really ought to be “Don’t have sex with people whose judgment is impaired.” Like almost any rule, there can be exceptions — but your typical frat boy is not competent to judge when those exceptions may be, and so should be encouraged not to look for exceptions.

Froborr: Yeah, good point. Especially when you allow for exceptions.

I mentioned Isaac Newton’s claim that science could address questions of God. (Of course his theology in other ways don’t quite fit the definition of Deism, so that may have thrown you off.) Deism as a scientific or near-scientific theory lost all credibility when Darwin kicked away the chief bit of evidence. That part seems pretty straightforward.

Froborr: Like almost any rule, there can be exceptions — but your typical frat boy is not competent to judge when those exceptions may be, and so should be encouraged not to look for exceptions.
I’m not certain that I’d be entirely comfortable with leaving this question to a jury of my alleged peers, either, for that matter.

Oh, okay. It never occured to me that you were referring to Deism as scientific theory, because of course it isn’t, and never has been. Not by any understanding of “science” that I’m familiar with.
I mean, as far as that goes, YEC is a much more “scientific” theory. It’s a really crappy one, and easily disproved, but it does make testible predictions, incorporate empirical data, and the like.
Not so much Deism, which is somewhere (depending upon the variant) of the border between a religion and a philosophy.

@Kit: I haven’t seen the film, but it sounds like it depicts a type of situation that happens a lot in college. It does tend to create an argument and end up in a heartbreaking mess. The film sounds like the perfect way to start a conversation about sexual communication.
On this topic I should clarify something about my problem with the term “date rape”. We don’t have a very good way of talking about the messy, often horrible, crap that goes on in some social situations. Mix weird social pressures, confusion over sexual feelings & roles, alcohol & drugs and often limited sexual and dating experience and you can easily get a toxic stew that makes it difficult to tell when you cross the line between a bad evening and a crime. No means no, but what if that’s not quite what she said? Or not quite what he heard?
I have two issues with talking about that toxic stew. First, it’s impossible to generalize so it’s difficult to discuss in the abstract. I came of age during the era of sex codes on college campuses that attempted to codify sexual interactions in order to eliminate miscommunication. It was partially well-intentioned and partially asshat-y and was pretty much a miserable failure.
The second is that discussion about “date rape” always seem to end up focused on the he said/she said cases which creates the impression that that’s what date rape is. IME that’s just not true.
I can’t even remember now the number of young women (both collegae age and older) who came into the crisis center and told some big long story of crossed communication and alcohol and whatever. You’d sit there listening, thinking that it was poor judgment on the part of both people creating a bad experience. Unfortunate, but not a crime. And then the young woman would get to the end and it would be, “And I said no and I was crying and trying to push him away but he held me down. I said I didn’t want to, but he did it any way. It’s my fault, right? Because of all the stuff that happened leading up to that.”
To which the answer is a sensitive, supportive version of, “Not just no, but HELL NO.” When you’re saying no and crying and he keeps going he’s not confused or horny, he’s a rapist. And he’s not some special, less awful sort of rapist than the guy who grabs a woman off the street or breaks into her house to rape her. He’s exactly the same. Rape tends to be a crime of opportunity in one way or another and the guy who finds his chance at drunken frat parties isn’t one bit less of a predator than the buy who finds it in a deserted street or an unlocked window.
A guy who isn’t a rapist stops when he hears any version of “no” and at least checks in with his partner to see exactly what’s going on. If things have gone pretty fair he may be pissed when she calls a halt. He may say unkind, and possibly unfair, things about her being a “tease”, but he stops. If he doesn’t he’s a rapist. I think we’re frequently too reluctant to look at a nice, clean cut guy from a “good” family and call him what he is. We bog down in making a false distinction between “rape rape” and “date rape” in order to avoid that uncomfortable labeling.
We need to break up the term “date rape” and separate the issues of the date part from the issues of the rape part. WRT the dating, I think it’s imperative to talk openly with both men and women about good communication and clarifying what you do & do not want. The need for this is part of the reason that sex-negative culture makes me angry. It stands in the way of saying what needs to be said for the well-being of both men and women.
There are still a frightening number of women who are raised to be seen and not heard and who are unable to state their boundaries clearly. There are also a horrifying number of young men raised with the idea that good girls don’t really like sex all that much and who therefore don’t automatically notice that it’s weird for one’s partner to totally freeze up during sex. We seriously need to do a lot more about that.

By definition, if one party is drunk or high, it’s rape.

This is one of the places where this whole topic gets really messy. It’s a true statement, but it leaves important questions unanswered. For example, how impaired is too impaired to give consent? One beer is almost certainly OK, passed out is definitely not, but there’s a lot of ground between those two poles. In the messy middle ground how much responsibility can you place on one person to judge the impairment of another? What if they’re both impaired?
I think anti-sexual assault education for both men & women needs to include honest discussions about alcohol & drug use. Being drunk or high doesn’t mean a woman deserves to be raped, but it does tend to make it more difficult for her to exercise good judgment and to stand up for herself when necessary. It also makes it more difficult for a man to receive communication accurately. Because of that it’s important to make a realistic assessment of risk, the same why you do for other activities. Both men and women need to know that it’s a bad idea to mix sex with being too out of it to make good decisions.

Amen to everything Lori said, but this:
When you’re saying no and crying and he keeps going he’s not confused or horny, he’s a rapist. And he’s not some special, less awful sort of rapist than the guy who grabs a woman off the street or breaks into her house to rape her. He’s exactly the same.
needs to be embroidered in needlepoint with little ribbons and doves in every Sex Ed class in the world.

The second is that discussion about “date rape” always seem to end up focused on the he said/she said cases which creates the impression that that’s what date rape is. IME that’s just not true.
Wordy McWord.
And talking about “no means no” seems like it’s still too focused on the gatekeeping aspect. Yes means yes. Sex without enthusiastic consent isn’t worth having. And yet what’s hard about that is our culture still penalizes women for liking it too much.
Rape isn’t about sex, because it’s about consent.

Lori: The need for this is part of the reason that sex-negative culture makes me angry. It stands in the way of saying what needs to be said for the well-being of both men and women.
There are still a frightening number of women who are raised to be seen and not heard and who are unable to state their boundaries clearly. There are also a horrifying number of young men raised with the idea that good girls don’t really like sex all that much and who therefore don’t automatically notice that it’s weird for one’s partner to totally freeze up during sex.
Hella. (That’s Northern California for “This.”, which is getting worn out.)
We have here two pernicious lies: “women have no good reason to have sex” and “men have no good reason not to have sex”. The intersection of these is: “A woman’s lack of interest in sex with any given man is completely natural, and is a practical obstacle to overcome, not a decision to be respected.” The short name for that is “rape culture”.
Because of that it’s important to make a realistic assessment of risk, the same why you do for other activities. Both men and women need to know that it’s a bad idea to mix sex with being too out of it to make good decisions.
I’m inclined to cite this as yet another reason to never have sex with anyone until you’ve had a long talk about what exactly you’re comfortable doing, what you’re using for birth control and STD prevention, what you intend to do if that fails, and what all of this means for your relationship–because if you’re sober enough to have that conversation, then your consent means something.
(That, and to not get drunk. I don’t mean “ladies, don’t get drunk, you might get raped and it will be your fault“–I mean “guys, do you really want to wake up in the morning and discover you raped someone?” I admit I don’t understand the appeal, though. Alcohol in completely-smashed doses is not so much “social lubricant” as “mental solvent”.)

Mark Z.: I’m inclined to cite this as yet another reason to never have sex with anyone until you’ve had a long talk about what exactly you’re comfortable doing, what you’re using for birth control and STD prevention, what you intend to do if that fails, and what all of this means for your relationship–because if you’re sober enough to have that conversation, then your consent means something.
Yeah, but my first reaction to that is “Ooof, that’s no way to live!”
Which isn’t fair, since plenty of people do live that way and like it, I suppose, but man would it not ever work for me. I mean, I’ve never been drunk enough to do anything I wouldn’t do sober, given half an excuse, but…well, I do kind of like spontaneous casual sex. (With, of course, precautions. I’m impulsive, not suicidal.) The idea of having to stop beforehand and have The Talk (especially the “what this means for our relationship” bit–ye gods, what a mood-killer!) just…eugh, no.
Mind you, I know everything but what the dude’s comfortable with (and if we’re already friends, I’ll do the “You’re not gonna get weird about this, right?” bit re: relationship) in advance already, have for the past ten years, and don’t really need his opinion on it. I guess if you don’t, the talk’s a good idea, but…brrr!

There’s also the simple fact that, if it’s gotten the stage where sex may well be likely (I won’t say inevitable), answers pending, then I can see a significant chunk (I would say vast majority, but I’m just pulling ideas out of my arse here) of people attempting to divine whatever answers may well get them into bed more quickly, rather than actually telling the truth.
Or am I being cynical with that one?

Rape isn’t about sex, because it’s about consent.

This is the one phrase of feminist discourse I don’t entirely agree with. Rape is about using patriarchal ideas about sex in order to oppress, subjugate, and terrify women. It’s entirely about sex, and using it as an offensive weapon. It’s wrapped up in slut-shaming, sexual guilt, and male privilege. Rape is not identical to similarly physically damaging assaults, and the reason (whether due to cultural forces or human nature or a mixture, I dunno) is because of sex.

@Izzy: I see what you’re saying, but I think there are ways that you can have as much of the conversation as you need to have without totally killing the mood. I’ve had versions of it that were quite fun. (Of course I have an odd sense of humor, which may be a factor.)
This is another thing that I hate about the sex-negative aspects of our culture. It leaves people ill-equipped to manage those kinds of interactions in a relaxed way. Sex is either totally spontaneous or planned in a way that sucks the life out of it, which is a false dichotomy.

I mean “guys, do you really want to wake up in the morning and discover you raped someone?”

IME the light doesn’t usually dawn the morning after, but I’ve known a couple of guys who admitted that they got worried months or years later. I have a fairly good friend who has talked to me about the fact that he looks back on a couple of his drunken outings in college with real worries that there’s some girl out there who thinks of him as “That guy who raped me in college”. He would give a great deal to be able to go back and make enough behavioral changes to eliminate that worry. He’s a good guy and I wish that I could reassure him that he’s worrying for nothing, but I have no way of knowing that. Yet another reason that sexist BS does no favors for any decent human being, male or female.

I can see a significant chunk (I would say vast majority, but I’m just pulling ideas out of my arse here) of people attempting to divine whatever answers may well get them into bed more quickly, rather than actually telling the truth.
Or am I being cynical with that one?

It’s not cynical, it’s realistic. To the extent that something is easy to lie about and has the potential to be a serious issue, don’t base your actions on answers given in the heat of the moment. IOW, never believe that you don’t need to worry about condoms because the person is “clean” or birth control in general because it’s “not that time of the month”. There’s trusting and then there’s dumb.

More agreement with Lori at 5:14.
@hapax: Actually, I was probably wrong when I said Newton’s bit about God in the General Scholium didn’t meet every requirement for deism. Speaking of which, can other people read it here by just closing the box that asks for authorization, or clicking Cancel?

Lori: Oh, very true. I think the key phrase is “as much as you need”–some of us need more of that conversation (and sometimes we need more of it with different people–I’m going to be much more careful about the “what does this do to our relationship” thing with my buddy than with some guy I met at a party, for instance) and some less. I was mostly reacting to the implication that it was a necessary conversation for everyone.
And yeah, people lie, people are wrong, people change their minds. Unless you’ve been involved with someone for a fairly long time, barrier methods are the way to go.

Slightly OT, but still relevant- one of the big things that turned me off of Rush Limbaugh (I actually heard his very first national broadcast, thought he was funny for a while, then I realized the HE REALLY MEANS IT, became ill, and started listening Deep Purple on my jambox at work instead) was that he was constantly whining that “the time-honored act of seduction is now called ‘date rape”.
Um, yeah, going ahead and fucking someone when they’re saying NO and trying to push you away, and maybe even crying is “seduction”.
I just can’t help but wonder if there’s a woman, or women, in his past…

It’s entirely about sex, and using it as an offensive weapon.
Well, I’m mostly with you there. But the fact that it’s being used as a weapon means it’s much more analagous to other types of violent crimes than to anything good or neutral dealing with sex.
Rape is not identical to similarly physically damaging assaults, and the reason (whether due to cultural forces or human nature or a mixture, I dunno) is because of sex.
I kinda think there are types of violation that can carry a similar level of complete disrespect of the victim’s humanity. There are plenty of kinds of non-sexual torture…I think a lot of what determines the nature thereof is culture-specific.
But now we are trigger-central for no good reason, and I’m close to talking out my ass, so I’m backing off.

I had a friend early in college who said he got drunk at parties because he couldn’t relax otherwise. I told him that seemed unhealthy and I couldn’t imagine it. Fast-forward a few years and I needed half a bottle of whisky to get up the courage to talk to my thesis advisor. And it still took several friends telling me it wasn’t normal to burst into tears every time you talk about grad school to decide I wasn’t just lazy. What were we saying on the other thread about self-awareness?
I do think liquor makes a good social lubricant, in that it may make you more likely to enjoy what can be enjoyed, but it isn’t necessary and YMMV.

Lonespark: I do think liquor makes a good social lubricant, in that it may make you more likely to enjoy what can be enjoyed, but it isn’t necessary and YMMV.
I also think it’s somewhat cultural. I got out with my friends and their about as talkative as Tommy Walker for the first hour and then, suddenly, they’re witty, symmpathetic or whatever. Fast forward a couple of hours – and three or four more drinks – and they’re not the sort of people you want crashing on your sofa. I think that, certainly among the English, there’s an element of alcohol smoothing over those sharp edges, at least in moderation, and lowering certain inhibitions until it lowers certain other inhibations and false confidence becomes completely cretinous.
Hell, I can’t even get to sleep at night without a couple of beers, some nights. Getting me to come out of my shell can take an intravenous drip, loaded with phlebotinum.

“an elementary school show of ‘Hair’”.
When I was 6 or 7, I had a small collection of cassette tapes. “Hair” was one of them, “Tommy” was one of the others. I distinctly recall my dad commenting when I was picking them out to take on a trip to my grandparents that maybe I shouldn’t take that one because of some of the words; I said I’d already heard the songs so it was OK. No, I have *no idea* what he was thinking; he didn’t stop me, and I don’t recall my grandparents so much as listening to them. I vaguely recall wondering which words he meant, since all the questionable ones were polysyllabic and not in the set of words I would recognise at all, much less recognise as “bad”.
However, I can *still* sing along perfectly if Hair or Tommy come on the radio. My memory for lyrics just works that way (alas, it’s not so good with anything else).

By definition, if one party is drunk or high, it’s rape.
I’d like to second Izzy’s response here–I’ve had numerous consensual sexual encounters while under the influence that were perfectly awesome. On the other hand, I was also almost raped once when I had passed out. Thankfully I woke up before he had finished undressing me (I had the seemingly preternatural sense of Something Is Not Right Here, I think of it later like the robot screaming “Danger, Will Robinson!”), and he at least had the good sense to be embarrassed about it, though we of course kicked him out afterwards. There’s a big difference between delightfully inebriated, fubar, and unconscious.
That being said, I’d also like to pose a question of my own: what if it’s the rapist who’s drunk, and physically overpowers the victim? We wouldn’t call the victim the rapist in such a scenario (or at least, I would like to think that we wouldn’t; I certainly wouldn’t) just because the actual aggressor was the one under the influence.

That being said, I’d also like to pose a question of my own: what if it’s the rapist who’s drunk, and physically overpowers the victim? We wouldn’t call the victim the rapist in such a scenario (or at least, I would like to think that we wouldn’t; I certainly wouldn’t) just because the actual aggressor was the one under the influence.

The issue with a drunken rapist isn’t that the blame is placed on the sober victim, it’s that being drunk is trotted out as an excuse. “I didn’t know what I was doing–I was too wasted.”
Legally that cuts no ice and I’m not inclined to consider it much of a moral excuse either. YMMV.

Lori: Legally that cuts no ice and I’m not inclined to consider it much of a moral excuse either. YMMV.
Well, it’s a strange old thing, that. I can’t imagine why anyone would assume that the agressor would need to be objectively capable of giving consent in such a situation. It might well muddy the waters when both parties are inebriated – and, even then, I might shade it on the side of the female – but I don’t think drunkeness on the part of the rapist is going to make for anything but the most immediate defence.

The issue with a drunken rapist isn’t that the blame is placed on the sober victim, it’s that being drunk is trotted out as an excuse. “I didn’t know what I was doing–I was too wasted.”
Legally that cuts no ice and I’m not inclined to consider it much of a moral excuse either. YMMV.
That’s my point, really. Froborr had said if one party was drunk or high, it was always rape, but it occurred to me that somebody who’s drunk could in fact rape somebody who’s not.

Reading back I see that Froborr did not say “always”, instead it was “by definition”, so my apologies for that oversight. Still, if that is, in fact, part of the definition of rape, it still raises that question in my mind.

IOW, never believe that you don’t need to worry about condoms because the person is “clean” or birth control in general because it’s “not that time of the month”.
And if an Alan Moore character tells you that he practices a tantric discipline, “so there’s no emission,” laugh in his face.

“It’s entirely about sex, and using it as an offensive weapon.”
Well, I’m mostly with you there. But the fact that it’s being used as a weapon means it’s much more analagous to other types of violent crimes than to anything good or neutral dealing with sex.
This. Rape is about sex in the same way that stabbing is about knives or shooting is about guns.

Slightly OT, but still relevant- one of the big things that turned me off of Rush Limbaugh (I actually heard his very first national broadcast, thought he was funny for a while, then I realized the HE REALLY MEANS IT, became ill, and started listening Deep Purple on my jambox at work instead) was that he was constantly whining that “the time-honored act of seduction is now called ‘date rape”.
Um, yeah, going ahead and fucking someone when they’re saying NO and trying to push you away, and maybe even crying is “seduction”.
I just can’t help but wonder if there’s a woman, or women, in his past…
What is publicly known about his relationship history is that it’s been very rocky, with numerous short-term flings, a history of infidelity, and three marriages and divorces thus far.
It might seem crass to speculate on this, but Limbaugh makes no bones about the fact that he considers the personal lives of public “role models” to be fair game when discussing whether or not they’re *good* role models and/or hypocrites for “lecturing” the rest of us on right and wrong, so it is worth bringing up that this proponent of “family values” does a terrible job of being a stable family man himself — and an intensely fucked-up idea of “family values” (including “seduction = date rape”) is probably a big chunk of why.

I think that kilts should be acceptable attire for men in both business and casual situations, and not just for guys who play the bagpipes.
I have Scottish ancestry, and my last name even has its own tartan. Don’t men who wear kilts regularly suffer from chafing?
They insist that christiantiy Few fallacies lead to as many people going “I’m bad and I’ve done bad”, in my experience, as that one.
While I’ve encountered a few causes like that, they did not apply that concept to others. That’s the flip side of the double standard, where they’re harder on themselves than on others. In both cases, it’s not necessarily that they believe in justice for some but not for others. They seem to believe that everyone gets what they deserve, but that what is deserved is different for themselves than it is for others. That concept of deservedness is really what I’m trying to criticize about the JWF. I’ve vented here before about how some JWFers believe that others deserve to suffer. But when some people believe that they themselves deserve to suffer, I share your sadness at such self-loathing.
*absolutely requires* the rejection of science and biblical literalism, and it’s the *non-RTC* christians whodon’t understand their religion.
Yes, that can be maddening. I stopped posting to one atheist board because of the fundamentalism on both sides. I was criticized from the fundie atheists because of my rejection of the certainty of belief in either direction. I might understand the anger of the fundie atheist side if their extremism was a direct response to persecution as a minority, but fundie Christians and fundie Muslims target many more groups than atheists. (Sometimes the fundie Christians seem to see Eastern religions as no better than atheism, or don’t even acknowledge their existence as alternatives to Christianity.)
To be fair, if you don’t know much about a religion, it’s easy to assume that the religion’s holy book is the equivalent of an instruction manual. Perhaps most believers and most non-believers simply come from different parts of the Myers-Briggs system, one side being more intuitive and the other more sensory, with the absolutists on both sides having the same general personality type in that system. Another part of the problem may be that mainstream Christian theology seems esoteric from a common-knowledge perspective.

The “While I’ve encountered” paragraph was not supposed to be in italics.
And to clarify, “fundie Christians and fundie Muslims target many more groups than atheists” was saying that atheists are not the only targets of those extremists.

What is publicly known about his relationship history is that it’s been very rocky, with numerous short-term flings, a history of infidelity, and three marriages and divorces thus far.
It might seem crass to speculate on this, but Limbaugh makes no bones about the fact that he considers the personal lives of public “role models” to be fair game when discussing whether or not they’re *good* role models and/or hypocrites for “lecturing” the rest of us on right and wrong, so it is worth bringing up that this proponent of “family values” does a terrible job of being a stable family man himself — and an intensely fucked-up idea of “family values” (including “seduction = date rape”) is probably a big chunk of why.

This is the reason that it totally chaps my hide that he is still taken seriously by anyone as a person in a position to make moral statements or pass judgment on others.
I mean really, the man got caught with an illegal prescription for the “little blue pill” coming back from the Dominican Republic, epicenter of the Western Hemisphere sex trade. This is not likely a sign of good things. If one of his numerous enemies had been caught in a similar situation Rush wouldn’t have stopped until he drove the man from public office.

Several things here…
Re: Islamic vampire repellants: I’d hypothesize that the best choice for Muslims might be something with the written name of Allah on it (in Arabic of course). I’ve talked to a lot of Muslims who treat any writing of that name with a very particular sort of respect — never allowing it to come into contact with the ground, for instance. And apparently jewelry with that on it seems to be fairly popular.
Creationism: Creationists seem to want desperately for humanity to have inherent importance and specialness, and they choose to interpret evolution as undermining either of these.
Bingo: that’s exactly it. Unfortunately people will very seldom actually *admit* that’s their motivation, it’s much easier to create a lot of noise and fuss over other issues.
You are either a fundamentalist RTC and hate science and think it’s evil or you are a scientist that doesn’t believe in God and hates religion. There is no room in either side’s view for any gray areas and most effectively ignore or dismiss them.
There are certainly atheists who feel that no one can possibly hold a scientific worldview if they also believe in something (God, for instance) for which there is no scientific proof.
Fortunately, as we’ve seen in this community, not all atheists are like that. I suspect those who are give atheism a bad name in rather the same way as some of the extreme fundamentalists give Christianity a bad name. Hostility is not an admirable trait in anyone.
I keep wanting to say to hostile atheists: “So, show me the scientific studies that prove that science can explain everything….” or “So, show me the scientific studies that prove that humans cannot compartmentalize their minds and believe different kinds of things at the same time…..”
But mostly I just think they’re being obnoxious.

A side-note, but I’d like some opinions. A female friend of mine was talking about some men she’d overheard slagging off some women’s looks. The women weren’t trying to attract them, they were just in the same bar minding their own business – but she said they guys acted offended, as if the women were actively wronging them by being unattractive to them.
I think you hit it right there. “This particular subset of humanity exists to get me off, and if I didn’t want to get off, they wouldn’t exist. Therefore, a member of this subset deliberately existing and yet not making me horny? That’s a deliberate affront.” I doubt they would be able to articulate it as such and some people who think that way might even be shocked to realize that they were doing so. But there it is.
I’ve posted these two stories before, I think. The first is from about five years ago, on a message board set up to discuss the Pennsic Wars, the largest annual gathering of the Society for Creative Anachronism. The SCA supposedly exists to recreate the good parts of the Middle Ages, including chivalry. So this guy (college age, IIRC) is telling a story about the time he stayed with his buddy in one of the public Pennsic campgrounds where small tents are packed close together. The woman in the next tent was apparently a bit new at this, because she didn’t realize that you have to put up some extra fabric if you’re going to change clothes in your tent with a lamp on. Eventually somebody called the constabulary and a female constable let her know why the neighbors were laughing. Out went the light. The reason the poster gave for telling the story? Because he was NEVER camping in one of those packed public campgrounds AGAIN because the woman was NAKED and FAT EW. RUINED HIS PENNSIC EXPERIENCE TOTALLY HOW DARE SHE. With a strong implication that if she had been the type he found hot, he would have been back there next year, same exact spot, hoping she would be too, and that she would have forgotten what she had learned. Truly a flower of chivalry.
Second, from about fifty years ago: My late MIL happened to be on the other side of a door from some high school classmates she had liked and trusted until that moment. They were discussing her sister’s breasts and saying that there must be something wrong with her because big-breasted girls were supposed to have sex with boys who asked them to.
Sadly, it’s nothing new.

With a strong implication that if she had been the type he found hot, he would have been back there next year, same exact spot, hoping she would be too, and that she would have forgotten what she had learned.

I suspect the implication was actually that if the woman had been hot she wouldn’t have “learned” anything because no one would have called to complain.
I can’t even even wrap my head around your MIL’s story. The fact that she didn’t beat them with something heavy and sharp means that she had more self-control than I do.

I haven’t gotten to the end of this yet, so apologies if someone else has already taken this tack and done it better…
Re: vampires and mirrors. Vampires are literally creatures of darkness. Like black holes, they do not reflect light. (They will of course emit light in the infra-red if they are warmer than their surroundings.) So if you truly saw a vampire, you would see a black humanoid shape. It’s pretty good night camouflage, but it has some drawbacks. First, it makes it hard to pass as human. Vampires can use their hypnotic powers to convince an observer that they (the observer, that is) are looking at a normal person. However, it only works if the observer is looking at the vampire. Reflected images of the vampire are not affected. (Maybe a sufficiently powerful, clever, or experienced vampire can pull off the indirect mojo, but generally not.) The more observers, the harder it is for the vampire, so they avoid crowds.
The second problem is overheating. Direct sunlight transfers more energy into a vampire than it would into a human because none of the light is reflected. Black-body radiation will catch up eventually, but only after the vampire has died from heatstroke.
(And yes, I have conveniently left out the use of clothing to alleviate these problems. Maybe vampires are obligate nudists?)

Catching up late:
Kit Whitfield said:

A side-note, but I’d like some opinions. A female friend of mine was talking about some men she’d overheard slagging off some women’s looks. The women weren’t trying to attract them, they were just in the same bar minding their own business – but she said they guys acted offended, as if the women were actively wronging them by being unattractive to them.
Does anyone know what’s up with that? We had two theories:
1. They don’t see the point of women as anything except sex candy; hence an unattractive woman is a worthless human being wantonly polluting their sightlines and using up oxygen to no purpose.
2. They don’t see the point of women as anything except sex candy; hence the act of being a woman is, to them, inherently the act of propositioning them. And lots of people bristle when they’re propositioned by somebody unattractive. They just couldn’t get their heads around the fact that having a uterus does not translate as ‘Fancy a shag?’
Anyone got a take on this?

1 is close, but broaden it to “male-dominated culture believes that women exist to serve men, and part of that means ‘being attractive to the male gaze’”. Feministing had an article a while back on this piece at Spike TV on women who had, in the writer’s opinion, let themselves go. Actual quote: “If you are rich and famous, there is no excuse for being a butterbody. It’s your job to look fit and hot.” The article is only about how he thinks female celebrities exist for his viewing pleasure, but it does reflect a wider social attitude.
Jeff said:

Because I didn’t think it was?

Lori puts my general take fairly well:

I’m not exactly sure why we need to use any version of this construction. It seems to me to imply that the writer has done something wrong if their work makes me uncomfortable… If the issue is that the work is inconsistent with the original in some important way (like it totally breaks the characters) or is simply poorly written then it seems like it should be criticized the way any badly written work is criticized and that discussion of doing violence to someone’s childhood would be better left out of it.

Jeff, whether or not you personally liked American McGee’s Alice, the fact remains that the game was clearly (to anyone who’s actually played it) made with a great deal of knowledge of and affection for the original Alice books. Other adaptations of children’s classics — like the example I linked to — aren’t. No longer being a snotty kid, I’ve grown out of the attitude that “not my thing = bad”; I’ve run across reworkings of classics that weren’t quite to my taste, but so long as the artist understood the original and was making a decent piece of art out of their reworking, I not only didn’t slag on it out of hand, but also refrained from such crass, hysterical, and just plain stupid accusations as “raped my childhood”. To sum up: bad example, worse metaphor, you fail, go to the back of the class. All in all, you’ve made an atrocious show of yourself here, and if you continue on this subject, I shall be forced to borrow Izzy’s flamethrower. Consider yourself warned.

Found on James Nicoll’s LJ
http://nonotyou.tumblr.com/post/168208983/sexual-assault-prevention-tips-guaranteed-to-work
Puts the responsibility on the right person!

YetAnotherKevin,

The second problem is overheating. Direct sunlight transfers more energy into a vampire than it would into a human because none of the light is reflected. Black-body radiation will catch up eventually, but only after the vampire has died from heatstroke.

My only problem with this is that vampires usually don’t seem to have trouble with artificial light or heat, even if it’s pretty bright.
I prefer to give them a UV weakness, due partly to pale skin and partly to the fact that, in order to be superstrong and superfast, they must have tons of some energy-rich and volatile chemical in their body tissues. This makes them highly flammable, and prone to cooking themselves if UV-rich light like sunlight ignites too much of their body’s fuel too quickly.

Aren’t you then lending an implicit negative connotation to “sodomize” by inserting into a well known phrase in place of an explicitly negative term like “rape”?
Sodomy is a negative term. It’s a legal term for illegal sex acts — which are not limited to anal sex, btw — and a religious term for sex acts which are verboten. From its very origins it is negative, bringing to mind hundreds or thousands of people destroyed. People who actually have anal sex or sex with members of their own sex (like me) do not call it sodomy unless they find some humor in using such a negative term.
That said, any word which indicates or implies sex is inappropriate in the above context. And, really, what Lori said.

Yeah, but my first reaction to that is “Ooof, that’s no way to live!”
Which isn’t fair, since plenty of people do live that way and like it, I suppose, but man would it not ever work for me. I mean, I’ve never been drunk enough to do anything I wouldn’t do sober, given half an excuse, but…well, I do kind of like spontaneous casual sex. (With, of course, precautions. I’m impulsive, not suicidal.) The idea of having to stop beforehand and have The Talk (especially the “what this means for our relationship” bit–ye gods, what a mood-killer!) just…eugh, no.

Oh, bah. I’ve got that conversation down to under sixty seconds. “I’m on the pill, but we’re using a condom anyway. I do bondage, impact play, electrical play, domination. I do not do scat, showers of any color, needles, blood, and you can’t touch my feet. I have mild asthma, if I start coughing give me this. My safewords are green, yellow, red, safeword. The only aftercare I need is cuddling. What are you into?” for a scene. Less than that if it’s vanilla sex. It’s never stopped me from having spontaneous sex, and I’ve been known to have that conversation while tipsy, in the middle of foreplay. As long as I can remember it, I’m in fine shape, but generally by the time I’m too drunk to have it, my attention span is so far gone that I’ll get distracted on the way to somewhere more private. Admittedly, I only get drunk once a year, and I do that on purpose, and plan ahead.

Rape tends to be a crime of opportunity in one way or another and the guy who finds his chance at drunken frat parties isn’t one bit less of a predator than the buy who finds it in a deserted street or an unlocked window.
You could argue, I think, that such a distinction is a social injustice. Rape being a crime of opportunities, a drunken college student is simply in the position to find his opportunities in a middle-class setting. Why punish the poor rapist but let the rich rapist go?
We need to break up the term “date rape” and separate the issues of the date part from the issues of the rape part.
What do you think of the term ‘acquaintance rape’?
Rape is about using patriarchal ideas about sex in order to oppress, subjugate, and terrify women.
That doesn’t seem to allow for the fact that men rape men. And I have the impression that women commit sexual assault too, less often but sometimes.
It seems to me that if rape is a crime of power then it’s often going to be done by men to women because that’s the way power entitlement often goes in this society. But it can be used by a man who wants to humiliate another man, too, and so on. It’s a person-on-person power crime, and in a sexually unequal societies a lot of those will be done by sexist men to women – but that doesn’t mean it’s always about sexism. Just often.
I have a fairly good friend who has talked to me about the fact that he looks back on a couple of his drunken outings in college with real worries that there’s some girl out there who thinks of him as “That guy who raped me in college”. He would give a great deal to be able to go back and make enough behavioral changes to eliminate that worry. He’s a good guy and I wish that I could reassure him that he’s worrying for nothing, but I have no way of knowing that. Yet another reason that sexist BS does no favors for any decent human being, male or female.
How does that square with your idea that rape is about power, not sex? Does the guy have power issues, or are you talking about situations where he just wasn’t careful enough to check consent?
The issue with a drunken rapist isn’t that the blame is placed on the sober victim, it’s that being drunk is trotted out as an excuse. “I didn’t know what I was doing–I was too wasted.”
I’m pretty much of the opinion that if that’s how you act when you’re wasted, getting wasted in the first place is analogous to drunk driving. You’re drunk in charge of a dick you don’t use responsibly.

I keep wanting to say to hostile atheists: “So, show me the scientific studies that prove that science can explain everything….”
I’ve never heard of anyone who claims that “science can explain everything,” not even the hostilest of atheists, although there may be a very few of them out there. Much more often I’ve encountered fundamentalist believers who use that phrase to falsely accuse science and non-believers of reductionism, of allegedly trying to negate concepts of love and beauty.
My answer to both types is that knowing that, say, love has a biological basis doesn’t mean we love any less strongly. Even the theory that the moral sense may have an evolutionary origin doesn’t mean we cease valuing right and wrong.
or “So, show me the scientific studies that prove that humans cannot compartmentalize their minds and believe different kinds of things at the same time…..”
I know that humans can compartmentalize – I just see it as sloppy intellectual practice. I’ve been guilty of that lapse in discipline myself, and I’ve noticed that I succumb to the temptation out of self-justification. Achiveving that consistency and discipline is more difficult but also more rewarding, like learning to play a beautiful piano sonata.
it is worth bringing up that this proponent of “family values” does a terrible job of being a stable family man himself
I’m in the minority on that concept – accusing someone of hypocrisy, even when the accusation has some basis, doesn’t automatically invalidate the person’s political positions. I see that too often with many conservatives and some liberals, where they treat any hypocrisy on the other side as a point for their own side.

Even the theory that the moral sense may have an evolutionary origin doesn’t mean we cease valuing right and wrong.
On the other hand, it’s easy enough to argue that, even though moral sense must have been a survival advantage for our ancestors, that doesn’t mean that it remains a survival advantage for every human today.
it is worth bringing up that this proponent of “family values” does a terrible job of being a stable family man himself
There was a big article about this in Christianity Today last month. And thank you, Tonio, for acknowledging that hypocrisy does not invalidate anything. I see that constantly applied to Christians and Christianity. If Christians have ever gone on a Crusade or burned witches or enslaved black people, the whole religion must be terrible.

MadGastronomer: Fair enough. And I can see that being especially important if the assumption is non-vanilla. I just tend to go with “I’ve got condoms.” If dude has his own, he can use those; if he objects, he can walk. If he’s a friend, there’ll be some version of the “…so, we’re still just hanging out, right? This isn’t gonna get weird, okay?” conversation; if he’s some guy I met at a party, he should already know damn well that this isn’t Serious Business, and it’s his lookout if he doesn’t.
So I do have the conversation, I guess, just a dramatically shortened version.

On the other hand, it’s easy enough to argue that, even though moral sense must have been a survival advantage for our ancestors, that doesn’t mean that it remains a survival advantage for every human today.

Really? How? I’m curious. Do psychopaths — defined here as “those who have no moral sense” — survive better today than they did in the past? Are they more likely to reproduce now than in the past? What evidence is there of this?

accusing someone of hypocrisy, even when the accusation has some basis, doesn’t automatically invalidate the person’s political positions
Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t. It depends on the circumstances.
If, for instance, a fundamentalist preacher insists that being gay is a lifestyle choice that anyone can give up with enough faith – and then goes and has sex with other guys – he’s being a hypocrite. But he’s also being evidence against his own argument. If it was possible to stop being gay, you’d think he’d do it; if faith was a factor, you’d think he had enough. He’s living proof that what he’s saying isn’t right.
Similarly, if someone goes on about family values in politics, chances are they’re trying to establish themselves as a warm and trustworthy individual in the public consciousness. They then cheat on their spouse, which is not a trustworthy thing to do – so it proves, at least, that talking a good game about family values doesn’t make you a better person. Either that, or it proves that even people who do believe in family values find them difficult to live by, which calls their definition of ‘family values’ into question as with the preacher. Either it proves their talking point is not as clear-cut as they say it is, or it proves they don’t really believe in it. Either way it proves something.
One hypocrite doesn’t prove a doctrine false. But if a lot of people preaching a doctrine are hypocrites, I think it’s time to start wondering whether the doctrine is any good. You can consider them fallible human beings, but you can also consider them test subjects for their own ideas about how people should live.

On the other hand, it’s easy enough to argue that, even though moral sense must have been a survival advantage for our ancestors, that doesn’t mean that it remains a survival advantage for every human today.

With MadGastronomer: Where’s your evidence?
Besides, even if the evolutionary forces that shaped the moral sense no longer apply, that doesn’t mean indiscriminate murder is *right*. The evolutionary forces that shaped our taste buds no longer apply — sugars and fats were once very important and difficult to come by, so we found them intensely pleasurable. Now that they’re easy to come by, a significant portion of the population is addicted to them. That doesn’t make them any less yummy.
Likewise, even if the evolutionary forces that made screwing over your neighbors willy-nilly seem wrong no longer apply (and I see no reason to think that’s changed), that doesn’t make it any less wrong.
Knowing where a phenomenon comes from does not actually alter the phenomenon.

And thank you, Tonio, for acknowledging that hypocrisy does not invalidate anything. I see that constantly applied to Christians and Christianity. If Christians have ever gone on a Crusade or burned witches or enslaved black people, the whole religion must be terrible.
I don’t usually see that; I do, on the other hand, find it handy as one of the countless rebuttals to “Christianity is always good and no one has ever cited scripture for an evil purpose.”
And what Kit said about hypocrisy; I’ll add anti-abortion activists who take advantage of the services they are trying to eradicate. Also, I think someone mentioned it earlier, but people like Craig and Ensign a) get off on gay sex because it’s forbidden according to them, b) are trying to repress gays because they want to make it harder for themselves to do what they believe is wrong but still want to do. Pick one, I guess.

Wow, very interesting article. 

Does this mean that Atlas Shrugged is actually the most popular vampire novel ever written? 

Interesting ideas. I’m finishing up a novel where the vampires ARE Christian. They are post-millennialist and believe themselves to be the firstfruits of the resurrection of the dead, baptized into death and raised from it by the power of their Risen Lord. The church would be fine, until they decide to actively bring about the Second Coming, by carrying out the Great Commission quite aggressively.

I like the idea of the cross representing sacrifical powerlessness and your spin on the myth. These days, vamps are too often the hot dom boyfriend with the weird diet. (Like werewolves have become the sexy nature boy who has three bad nights a month)

Vampires, before Rice, were a disease metaphor. They die and return to spread their sickness, first to their family and then to their friends. Even Dracula can be read as syphilis, since he is the first of the sexualized vampires. Vampires tend to get goofy or romanticized when they lose the disease aspect. This is why they weren’t big in the 50s (the fears then were nuclear problems), but surged in the 60s (sexual revolution) faded in the 70s to Blacula, and surged mightily in the 80s with AIDS.

I like the idea that the disease is power. First you harm those you love best, then the local area and then the whole world.

This reminds me of the old World of Darkness vampire roleplay game – apart from the obvious religious undertone of trying to explain how and why it started, it had some pretty good themes on the whole vampire myth. Much better than the nowaday “oh yeah, you have all those cool superpowers, and occasionally you drink blood” trend . The idea is that if you got to be one, you, at some point, chose that life. You had a chance, as you lay there dying, to pass on the chance to be one, just… dying. You didn’t. Maybe you didn’t want to die, maybe you thought you had something to live for, but the fact is, you made the selfish choice. Maybe you had the best of reasons – well, now can have an eternity (probably less, you don’t age but you certainly can be killed) to try to stick to them. And every morning, you have a choice of not doing this anymore, not having to harm (and likely kill) people to prolong your own existence. Yet you don’t. Why?

I am reminded in specific of the Bloodlines licensed game based off the old WoD.  ”A certain famous gangrel archeologist” poses to the player character a question as to what vampires were and how they fit into the natural world.  Regardless of the player’s answer, he will claim it makes more sense than the common explanation that they are descended from the first damned humans to walk the land of Nod.  

However, had I been given the option, I would have posed back that such an explanation is not necessarily so unlikely.  After all, their very existence involves things which violate natural law as it is commonly understood, and the old rules do not necessarily apply.  The over-arcing sense of damnation is one I would think that would make a vampire more likely to take up religion, not less.  

It was a good game.  Plus it had Joe Dimagio playing a bruha pirate/biker vampire, and that is always fun.  

Late to the discussion but this pushed the right button in my mind to make a post.

In the 1989 Doctor Who serial “The Curse of Fenric” vampires show up. Or as the Doctor immediately corrected, Hemovores. The serial is a bit of a jumble, with way to many ideas and plot points to be written really well. As such there is some dislike for the short. But I enjoyed it, in particular, one point with the Hemovores made me nod my head and say, “Oh YES!”

Short back story, the Doctor and his companion Ace end up on a remote northern British island in 1940, noted for its viking legends, where the British government has established a facility to decrypt Engima. Also there are evil, more evil that turns regular people into Hemovores, a previously unmentioned “Great Foe” of the doctor, civilians, an Anglican parish, and a group of Soviet infiltrators. Kinda jumbled, yes. The Soviets are there to try to steal British secrets, but when everything goes bad, they ally with the Doctor.

The Hemovores aren’t much more than footsoldiers for the main baddie, but, as the doctor informs us, they also have most of the weaknesses of Vampires, inspite of not being Vampires.

The bit that caught my interest was two-fold. The Anglican priest, having been in WWI, is having a crisis of faith in the face of WWII. When the Hemovores show up, he correctly surmises, his faith will not turn away the Hemovores. So when Doctor and allies are cornered in the church, and need to escape through a tunnel that would lead to the other side of the island, someone needs to stay behind and seal the tunnel, so the Hemovore mob cannot tear though the door and set upon them. The priest voluteers to stay, saying that he is a broken man and it is the least he can do. A soviet captain sends him through the doorway instead, and promises them that they will meet later.

After sealing the tunnel, the Hemovores overcome the church doors, and encircle the captain, prepairing to rush him at once. The captain stands there, steely eyed, and holds up a closed hand. The mob heasitates, taunting him he doesn’t believe in god, so what does he have. He looks back at where his friends just went through, and then brandishes his Soviet Union pin.

Turns out, it works just as well. The Hemovores fall away witheringly and the one who attempts to pounce him crashes as soon as it jumps. The captain gets away.

I have a feeling this was probably controversial in 1989, but I didn’t see it until 22 years later, so I saw it as being, freaking cool. Plus, it does close the plot hole of, “if vampires are real, why didn’t they simply walk all over the communist countries.”