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[originally posted Aug. 2nd, 2009]

I was supposed to answer a question (why girls like vampires and boys don’t) at least a week ago, but the question still sits there, all complex and taunting, like a Rubic’s cube with the stickers put on the wrong way, and then forgotten behind a stove, and melted into a weird indistinguishable lump. Butguess what! I am going to rescue that lump and put the stickers on the right way and then solve it really amazingly quickly, like Spock or that kid in Good Will Hunting or that guy in Beautiful Mind! Look on my works ye mighty and despair: I am about to change your lives forever. Turn off that YouTube video of the cute little bride dancing along to the autotuned voice of a domestic abuser, because I have something related, but better.

Recently, in an internet community I discreetly frequent, this same question was raised. The answer was supplied. And agreed upon. Like, “LOL preach it gurl!” and “IAWTSFM. LJ friends?” Are you ready for this amazing revelation?

Ladies like vampires because human men are bad and selfish in bed.

… All right. Women of the world internet, we have to talk about this. I understand that I may have be biased, since, being pathologically shy, I have (so far) neatly avoided one-night stands and second-date sex. If I had these experiences, maybe I’d “AWTSFM,” too. There are apparently many, many, many men out there who are really, really, really thoughtless. I know that women are subtle and mysterious and must be treated with great care, and that men are like great clay-footed beasts clomping around, accidentally kicking the Hello Kitty vibrator beneath the bed and stuff. But can we really use this as an explanation for EVERYTHING?

Women love vampires because vampires, having the ability to suck blood and live forever, have spent the past two centuries learning how to please the ladies; men, meanwhile, are just fine and dandy with human women, as long as they don’t demand too much chocolate syrup or cry too hard afterwards or put their box of tampons under the sink like they live there or something. So, good! That was easy! Vampires are explained because of a Cathy comic strip and an email forward from your aunt who wears “I’m a Carrie” t-shirts in public.

At first I refused to accept this explanation. I fought against it so hard, I really did. The problem is that I just don’t have a better one. I tried and tried, but all roads led to Transylvania. (Ha!)

For a while I rationalized it like this: it’s because vampires are supernatural, and supernatural beings have a lot of advantages. They have the glamourous loneliness of the outsider, but also magical powers, so even when they’re feeling lonesome and wondering “why me?” and everyone is giggling at them in the school cafeteria, they still know they could start showing off and make everybody shut up but fast.

Werewolves are fine, but there’s the awkward and unavoidable fact that they turn into animals once a month. What do they do while they’re animals? It’s best not think about it too closely. While some lupine traits are hot enough when transferred to humans, it’s hard to think of your lover running around licking under his tail and itching fleas and panting with his tongue out and having a furry tail, for chrissakes. I mean, geez. Werewolves have succeeded in popular fiction, even as sweet functional characters (Professor Lupin!) but the discomfiting brush with bestiality means that most werewolves are either spookshow figures or emasculated sidekicks (Professor Lupin!). They’re rarely the leading men.

Zombies … well … imagine having sex with a zombie. Just imagine it. Now stop. I told you so. Never going to happen.

And ditto for fairies, and pixies, and genies, and ghosts, and ogres. Maybe elves, but come on, what can elves do? They’re about as threatening as a maple leaf. Sure, they’re hyperbolically gorgeous, but it’d be like dating a really handsome yoga instructor who is way too far gone on his brown rice diet and Parabola subscription to give the slightest fuck about you. But vampires! Vampires are as socially-sanctioned as it is possible for an imaginary monster to get. They don’t just look like humans, they look like humans all the time, and they’re almost always sexy as hell, and this is why:

If you get made into a vampire, one hundred bucks says it’s because you were sleeping with a vampire.

That’s right! Having sex is the way to go! It’s not like a werewolf, where they have to become a wild animal and take a Discovery Channel chunk out of your leg, or like a zombie, where they have to open your scalp like a tin of beans and get your brainstem all over their face. Vampires attack you by sucking on your neck, which, as we all learn in eighth grade, is a totally great experience. And if they happen to penetrate you (sorry, I know I sound like your gross uncle trying to talk to you about birds-and-bees over Thanksgiving leftover, but that’s just what it is) … and if they happen to sip up your life-force like a delicious juicebox, well, OK. Vampires are beautiful because other vampires have this whole sorority-system in place where they only choose the most beautiful to become immortal, and then, because they live so long and can only come out at night, they naturally become very cosmopolitan and suave, having lived through three hundred years of nightclubs and coffee shops and bowling alleys, so, OK, I cave, maybe they do know how to please a woman. Fine. I guess I just made the very argument I hated seven paragraphs ago, only I took a much longer time to tell it.

And this is why we love vampires. Because they only come out at night (alternately: have lovely well-mosturized glittery skin), because they’re either very conflicted and sensitive about their monstrous abilities or else totally callous, because they’re basically JUST LIKE HUMAN BEINGS except more attractive and more dangerous. Nothing untoward. Even their metod of destruction is sleek and sensual, like Audrey Hepburn carrying around a little pink pistol in her handbag and kissing you on the jugular before she goes in for the kill. To use some atrocious grad-school seminar language, vampires can “pass”! They are not “othered”! Except when television shows want them to be symbolic others. But who are we kidding, even the most prurient racist/homophobic finger-wag is buried beneath campy, decadent, bloody sex scenes.

And there. I’ve told you everything you already know. Your gratitude is overwhelming.