Monday, June 28, 2010

NeckingTrue Blood reinvents vampire sex.

Sleeping with a vampire is basically necrophilia and can even suggest incest (you're sleeping with your "maker"), and since you are dealing with an immortal, the age differences between partners can be positively vast. But the most troublingly taboo aspect of the sex lives of vampires concerns the question of consent. Rape is as dominant a subtext in vampire stories as mindless conformity is in zombie stories. No less an authority than Stephen King has said that the re-enactment of the primal rape scene is part of the vampire's enduring success.

Stephen Moyer, whose Vampire Bill is the romantic center of True Blood, took some criticism last year for suggesting in a magazine interview that one plot twist was built on a rape fantasy, but the allure of forbidden sex has long been a part of the vampire story since Bram Stoker's Dracula.

True Blood is such supremely dirty fun because it doesn't just tap into the dark sexual kinks of the vampire myth. It refines and experiments on them, giving old taboos a fresh spin. For one thing, the traditional vampire is a man preying on women; here, women are the predators just as often. Rape has become something of a vampire cliché. The sick genius of Episode 3, which returns the series strongly

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