Quote:
Originally Posted by Moejoe
Stoker didn't have 'sexy' vampires because he wrote his novels in a time of high moral censorship (although a time of very base and carnal activity behind closed doors). It would not have been published if he'd had any kind of overt sexuality portrayed. Of course there's plenty of sexuality in Stoker, most of it is hinted at rather than shown, and all of it stemming from his own lustful proclivities and perhaps madness brought on by his rumoured syphilis infection. I would no more expect sex scenes in a novel of the time than I would to see an absence of them in modern true horror.
Onto the subject of Meyers, a writer who I think is truly awful myself, her novels mirror a strange American obsession with virginity and purity, as evidenced by that woefully ignorant and dangerous trend of 'pledging' to abstain from sex before marriage. Her vampires are non-threatening, non-sexual, but still the object of desire. It's the bad-boy fantasy but without the 'bad'. The relationship without the sex. King said it himself, but he didn't dare to actually reveal the source of this sexless mangling of vampire fiction. His argument was weak because he didn't go far enough to the root and give explanations. Therefore his argument was pointless.
Saying all that, I still think he should have held back on the criticism, as it served absolutely no purpose. So, swathes of teenage girls love the books of a crazy religious noodle who's single-handedly de-fanged the vampire in modern culture, so what? So a whole generation of girls are growing up with a ridiculous idea of what to expect from boys, so what?
it's not like anybody's reading them, right?
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Good grief! You have made me decide to try to read her because of her morals.
