Dear Blog: for the next 10 days I will be traversing through Egypt and am so excited/nervous for my trip that my brain can’t really process any super-heavy news today. Instead I leave you with a little discussion of one of my guilty pleasures and its unpleasant statutory-rape undertones. Jenna, Nora, and Jen H. will continue to lead the charge while I’m gone.

And now onward. Look—I’ve become one of those girls, I’m not gonna lie: I’m totally into the vampire thing these days. It’s nothing new…I remember reading this book called The Silver Kiss back when I was in middle school and being thrilled by the violent-and-forbidden-but-oh-so-passionate romance that clearly has captured the minds (and hearts, and OTHER PARTS) of millions of Twilight fans a decade later. These days, I am thoroughly enjoying the camp of True Blood, and am only slightly embarrassed by how excited I am for the next Twilight film (though I can’t say I have any interest in reading the graphic novels or books either are based on), and my reasons are probably not much different from when I was 13—it’s just a lot of fun.

That said, a lot’s been written about the gender and sexual dynamics of the relationships in this new wave of vampire media, and most of it is hard to disagree with: Edward Cullen of Twilight is a weird possessive creep, Sookie Stackhouse of True Blood always needs to be rescued by vampire Bill Compton, and why the hell are we all idealizing the kind of romance that is always just one bite away from becoming murder? I don’t have a lot to add or defend here, but one aspect of these human/vampire romances that has always skeeved me out, and I haven’t seen mentioned as much, is the issue of age. Both the Twilight books and the Vampire Diaries series (soon to be a TV show on the CW) and Buffy the Vampire Slayer before them, focus on teenage girls who fall in love with vampires who are hundreds of years old, but eternally look like young men. This raises lots of questions for me about the biophysics of vampires: do vampires “mature” emotionally even though they never physically age? Does a 17 year-old who is turned into a vampire go through eternal life experiencing the world as a 17 year-old? Doesn’t hundreds of years of life experience—whether it is technically “lived” or not—equate “age” despite the lack of physical aging? Isn’t this whole thing a little gross?

The language used to refer to sex offenders who assault young women/men and children usually focuses on the predator/prey dichotomy: the sexual predator who preys on young girls. In a world with vampires, this dynamic is explicit: vampires are predators, humans are prey. Odd, isn’t it, that the contemporary vampire is so often found “preying” on the young (and female)?

Today I came across this blog post from the Hollywood Reporter about the Vampire Diaries tv show and was glad to see someone bring it up:

Uh…what? Bad explanation, Paul Wesley (who, by the way, is playing the lead vampire and who is, in real life, 27 years-old).

I’m not going to stop enjoying my vampire media (if I stopped watching/reading everything that my brain ruled offensive after a critical analysis there would be nothing left) and I’m sure if I cared enough to try I could actually come up with a couple of arguments as to how the whole genre has some positive social messages. But either way, the old vampire/teenager girl thing definitely leaves a bad taste in my mouth, and I’m wary of its message; forbidden love, however alluring, is sometimes forbidden for a reason; the fact that the 213 year-old vampire loves you so much that he doesn’t want to give in to his natural and uncontrollable urge to drain you of your blood, doesn’t really make him an appropriate choice, does it? Same goes for the 35 year-old who just loves the teenage girl so much that he thinks the two of them should take it to the “next level.” Teenage girls rarely have crushes on the “right” guys, and that’s fine, but let’s not romanticize away the many negative realities of the wrong guys, or pretend like the wrong guys are always acceptable romantic partners (ya know, deep down in their tortured, vampiric souls).