Tag Archives: Noah

Ryan Holmberg on Tsuge and Tatsumi

Posted on by

Ryan Holmberg has left a bunch of interesting comments on Suat’s essay about Tatsumi. I thought I’d highlight some of them here.

Here’s the first.

I realize I am commenting on a two-month old post, but I just now read it.

I agree with the basic crux of this analysis of Tatsumi. I think it is harsh but fair when it comes to metaphor and sexual values. In that era of Tatsumi’s work every oblong is a phallus and every hole a vagina, no doubt, and the misogyny is unmistakable.

Given this – given that Tatsumi’s work is unsubtle – I have to say your review is about as obvious as Tatsumi’s work. I sympathize with the desire to serve up a corrective to the promotional garbage that fills the press, but you are fighting straw men. I am not sure if you are saying much more than what any of us who have had doubts about Tatsumi’s glory have thought at one time or the other.

You were fairly generous about the menstrual flowers in Tsuge’s Red Flowers. Why is it that clichéd sexual euphemisms are okay in a pastoral “literary” genre but not in pulp? Is the problem that the cicadas and babbling brooks are peeled away?

Also, on what basis are Tatsumi’s drawings “crude” and “inept”? For the most part (some exceptions), they seem pretty finished to me, and work perfectly well for what he was trying to do. “Unpolished skills?” He was a 15-year veteran in 1970.

“A failure to move beyond what remains totally acceptable in modern day manga”? You mean manga then? If so, tell me who was doing stories like Tatsumi’s in 1970, aside from Tsuge. Second, Tatsumi was black-listed by Shonen Magazine, supposedly (according to Tatsumi in “Gekiga kurashi”) after their print-run fell after publishing one of his works) – clearly he was not “totally acceptable.”

Also, “Tatsumi was no different from those individuals (the factory mangaka)”? Just on the basis of a lack of character types? I think you also mention pressing deadlines as a reason for how the work looks the way it does. I doubt it. At this point, he was writing for very few weeklies (this changes in the mid 70s, after the period in question). An artist like him with a 15 year career, having produced hundreds of pages a month for many years, do you think writing one 20 page story per month was rush work? At least be generous enough to assume that the artist knew what he was doing and had complete control over the product. He might not have been a poet or a Kojima Goseki-caliber draftsman, but he was also not an amateur.

Again, I sympathize with your basic distaste. But not with the venting.

And here’s a follow up.

The difference in finish between Projectionist and Forked Road is obvious, and as you pointed out it probably has something to do with Tatsumi`s circumstances at the end of the 60s. (Side note: your quote about Tatsumi having a bunch of artists working for him…I think that means artists writing comics for the magazine-anthologies he was publishing, not assistants for his own work…but I will have to check this.) But first of all Projectionist-type crude drawing has a long tradition in kashihon comics in Japan (this is the point where is moving from kashihon to magazines), so I don`t think it can be chalked up to lack of time or skill, and the increase in finish over those two years also has to do with the different standards of the manga monthlies and weeklies, not just a personal aesthetic decision on Tatsumi`s part. That doesnt make the work better or worse, but I think one should, especially when critiquing an artist so harshly, have some consideration for context.

And one more.

Just quickly, on Imamura, I haven’t watched these in years, but the Pornographers maybe, Insect Woman, Ningen johatsu (probably not in English). They are much more humorous than Tatsumi, but there is some overlapping setting and gender views. The impact of Nikkatsu films is also big on all of the Gekiga artists, from the Action stuff to the romantic stuff. To me, Tatsumi belongs in that world.

As for Tatsumi’s busy schedule in the late 60s, when he started doing those dirty-men stories. His prose (versus manga) autobiography “Gekiga kurashi,” published last year, has a bit on this period. It says in short, the mid 60s were a difficult time. Then an editor from a second-tier magazine name Gekiga Young commissioned 2 x 8 pages a month from him, which he claims was hard work given his publishing venture. The editor apparently requested lots of revisions, less speech balloons, etc for a tighter more visual product. I would have to check, but these are probably the short works in Pushman. He also thanks the editor for getting him inspired about making manga again.

Later, he talks about how he had a long standing feeling against using assistants, arguing that one’s work should be one’s own. He says that in 1974 he had to swallow his pride and hire two assistants to complete a commission from Shukan Manga Sunday (a weekly). I will have to do more poking around, but the way things are worded here is that this was a turning point in the way he made comics. Maybe at the height of his popularity in the late 50s he had assistants, but given the economic difficulties of kashihon publishing in the mid 60s, I doubt he had them then.

Do click through the links, as there are additional remarks by Ryan, and comments by Suat and others.

Not a Gentleman

Posted on by

Theologian Stanley Hauerwas, in his book Dispatches From the Front, argues that Trollope’s work offers a challenge to the moral peril of modernity.

It is not hard to document the central place of constancy and forgiveness throughout Trollope’s work. That he saw these themes as central no doubt has much to do with his sense that the England he loved and cherished, the England of the genry and the honest workman, was in danger of being lost under the onslaught of the new commercial culture. Thus, in his Autobiography he says: “A certain class of dishonesty, dishonesty magnificent in its proportions, and climbing into high places, has become at the same time so rampant and so splendid that there seems to be reason for fearing that men and women will be taught to feel that dishonesty, if it can become splendid, will cease to be abominable.” The threat of such people, vividly portrayed in Lopez (The Prime Minister) and in Melmorre (The Way We Live Now), was not that they were unambiguously evil, but that they could so easily be mistaken for gentlemen. Even though Trollope was no doubt concerned with the passing of a certain social class, he was yet more deeply concerned with the accompanying threat to moral order. It is that concern which shapes his entire literary enterprise.

As this makes clear, Hauerwas shares Trollope’s concern about the threat of capitalism and liberalism to the moral order. For Hauerwas, the Enlightenment has abstracted moral principles from community and tradition. Thus, liberalism (in its broad sense, including Democrats, Republicans, libertarians, and more) organizes politics as the pragmatic magaerial effort to balance interest groups. “Freedom” and “equality” are seen as the most important virtues, and truth, honor, and everything else is abandoned in their name. Thus, Hauerwas argues:

I have found it hard to enter the debate about abortion since I do not believe the issue for Christians can be framed in “pro-life” or “pro-choice” terms. Such descriptions are attempts to win the political battle on the most minimum set of agreements — that is, that abortion is primarily about the sanctity of life or freedom of women. As a result, abortion is abstracted from those practices through which our lives are ordered that we might as a community be in a position to welcome children. It is a political necessity to make our moral discourse, and our lives, as thin as possible in the hopes of securing political agreement. As a result, the debate is but a shouting match between two interest groups.

Again, Hauerwas sees Trollope as offering a different vision of society — one based on honor, constancy, and forgiveness rather than lowest common denominator interest group squabbles. Trollope presents a vision of a community in which people strive, not for freedom and equality, but rather to be gentleman and Christians.

I have a fair bit of sympathy for this view. Capitalism is an acid; it dissolves social relations and community. It believes in nothing but desire — the freedom to desire, the equality of all desire, and the need for infinite space in which desire can expand. We’re all autonomous wanting machines, scrabbling for oil and sex and the money to buy both as our hydrocarbons and progeny scuttle across the globe, leaving nothing but extinction and advertising slogans in their wake.

So, if Trollope is the cure, then, hey, I’ll read Trollope.

I picked up The Prime Minister; coincidentally one of the books that Hauerwas discusses. Here’s the passage where the gentlemanly, virtuous Mr. Wharton, scion of the old class and old morality, confronts Ferdinand Lopez, the reckless capitalist adventurer, who wishes to marry Mr. Wharton’s daughter. Wharton is turning over, in his own mind, why he cannot allow his daughter to do so.

this man [that is, Lopez] who was now in [Mr. Wharton’s] presence and whom he continued to scan with the closest observation, was not what he called a gentleman. The foreign blood was proved, and that would suffice. As he looked at Lopez he thought that he detected Jewish signs…

As the book goes along, we learn that Lopez is, in fact, not a gentleman. His whole life is devoted to reckless speculation and the pursuit of money. Like capitalism itself, he has no sense of good and bad — and no sense of social fitness. In his egalitarian amorality, he envies those above him (rather than respecting them) and ruthlessly exploits those below (rather than protecting them.)

Lopez is, in other words, modernity incarnate. And modernity incarnate, for Trollope, is a Jew.

I’m a Jew myself, as it happens. There are Jews who see anti-Semitism everywhere in the media. I have to say, I’m not one of them. Jews are, as far as most Americans are concerned, white. Anti-semitism is pretty thoroughly despised…in part because Jews have so thoroughly assimilated, and in part because the U.S. fought a massive, successful war against anti-Semitism, and, partialy as a result (thanks Hitler!), anti-Semitism continues to be equated with absolute evil.

All of which is to say that Trollope’s anti-Semitism in itself doesn’t bother me so much. I don’t feel like I’m being oppressed. Lopez is an invidious stereotype, but it’s a stereotype that lost. I, for example, married a shiksa, and nobody in the shiksa’s family cared. Lopez hasn’t hurt me and can’t hurt me. In the book, all his plans may have failed and he may have offed himself in the interest of conveniencing the uptight Brits. But, in real life he got to keep the girl and have little baby Lopezes who no one could tell, or even wanted to tell, from the uptight baby Brits. Admittedly, Lopez had to go through the gas chambers first, which sucked…but all’s well that ends well.

What does bother me, though, is that I think there’s a real sense in which Trollope isn’t wrong about Lopez. I mean, clearly, he’s wrong that Jews are evil sneaking submen who don’t deserve to marry shiksas, because, in fact, Jews are awesome, and should marry whoever they want. But I think he’s right that the old moral order which Hauerwas defends, the anti-capitalist, cohesive morality he challenges, is, by its nature, anti-Semitic.

Hauerwas is aware that this is a problem…but he tries to get around it by suggesting in passing that Trollope has us identify with Lopez’s frustrations and by emphasizing that it is Lopez’s conduct that makes him not a gentleman, rather than the happenstance of circumcision.

None of which is very convincing. Mr. Warren identifies Lopez as not being a gentleman because Lopez is a foreigner and a Jew before he knows anything else about him. Indeed, he dislikes Lopez, as he says, precisely because “no one knows anything about him” — and no one knows anything about him because he’s a Jew without lineage or proper family.

And lo and behold, the rest of the novel goes about remorselessly demonstrating that Mr. Warren’s prejudices were correct. It’s true that Lopez does not act like a gentleman…but that conduct is not separable from his ancestry. On the contrary, the ancestry comes first, diagetically and I believe thematically.

Trollope does, as Hauerwas says, show the virtues of constancy, forgiveness, and gentlemanliness…virtues that Lopez and capitalism repudiate. But Trollope also shows that virtues of keeping to one’s own set and keeping away from the greasy foreigners. I can sneer at the Enlightenment and liberalism all I want, but the fact remains that it’s because of Enlightenment liberalism that I was able to marry my wife without a great deal of unpleasantness. Capitalism eats through moral truths and communities — but one of the communal moral truths it eats through is anti-Semitism.

Hauerwas seems to believe that we can get Trollope’s honorable cohesive, pre-capitalist community without that anti-Semitism, and, presumably, without the sexism or the homophobia. It’s an appealing vision…but if he wants to make me believe in it, he needs to do better than just pointing to Trollope. Because, lovely as Trollope is in many ways, I don’t think too many Lopezes are going to want to live in his world.


Nazi caricature of a Jewish banker

Utilitarian Review 4/16/11

Posted on by

News

I’m very sorry to say that Domingos Isabelinho has decided to step down as a columnist here at HU. We’ve been really honored to have him. Besides being one of the most knowledgeable critics around, he has a unique and really irreplaceable perspective on comics and culture. He’ll be sorely missed here. You can see all of his posts here.

The good news is that Domingos will be posting again at his old blog the Crib Sheet. Go check it out.

Utilitarians Everywhere

It’s been a couple of weeks since I did one of these, so there have been a bunch of publications.

A piece at the Chicago Reader about Del McCoury, the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, and embalmed traditions.

A piece at Splice Today about the need for two-fisted pacifism.

At Splice Today a review of Source Code.

Also at Splice a review of Insidious.

And at Comixology I talk about Paul Celan, words and images.

Statement of Purpose

Posted on by

(adapted from The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity by Julia Cameron with Mark Bryan; Media Marketing: How to Get Your Name and Story in Print and on the Air by Peter G. Miller; and from the graduate admissions and promotional materials of writing programs at Brown University, Stanford University, the State University of New York at Buffalo, the University of Houston, the University of Illinois at Chicago, the University of Michigan, and Washington University in St. Louis)

To write is to bring representation and the suggestion of scientific method to the marketing of enlightened self-promotion. It is to be intimately connected to a high-tech ecosystem which overflows organically into a newer, better Graduate Record Examination. That is why, as a writer, I am a talented person. I reparent the artist-child who yearns to be a recognized authority; I pay too much in order to wear weird self-empowering clothing; I think of the universe as a vast electrical sea and of myself quoted in a national magazine. When I — a peripatetic Jungian — go to your cultural mecca to explore the beautiful irreverent shorthand of a profound, profane corporate brochure, the snowflake pattern of my soul will emerge, and, spiritually unblocking, I will become a controversial activist for ethnic and gender collages.

My life has always included strong internal directives. Well-packaged ideas, I call them. Although not always filled with sex and violence, they combine the comfortable nondenominational noncourse educational experiences of Poet Laureate Robert Hass with the sensuous television consciousness of solvent self-affirmer Sharon Olds, and accompany these attempts at conceptual and discursive emotional incest with literary modeling by Kafka, Proust, Woolf, Joyce, Pound, and Stevens. I tell this story not to drop names, but for reasons of ego and commerce. I want to work seriously with a unique community of writers, scholars, and critics in a program which, while current, is not overly specific.

As a kid my dad thought my art was an “unruly multisubjective activity.” That made me feel I was a multidimensional management consultant in pursuit of lush plants, plump pillows, experimental nonlinear interactive space: in other words, of one wonderfully nurturing self-loving something. As I have grown deeper, I have continued to rediscover that my creativity requires a sense of flow and stability different from other’s humility. I believe that the rituals of power and authority which traverse your writing package will fully open to me this sense of abundance — will allow me to perfect my craft and to immerse myself luxuriously in a rewarding publishing and teaching career. In return, I am certain I can contribute to your collective intellectual process by helping your institution maintain its competitive synchronicity.
________

Note: We’ve been talking about artist statements and the evils thereof in comments here. In that vein, I thought I’d reprint the Statement of Purpose I wrote on my MFA applications way back in 2000 or so. I applied to grad school for three years. Writing the statement of purpose the first year almost made me hang myself. So I tried something else the following years. The result was the same (I didn’t get in) but the risk of self-destruction was appreciably lessened. Plus, the Chicago Review printed it, which was nice. I think that this is its online debut, though.

Caroline Small: Theory Is Not About Art

Posted on by

The theory in art thread has once again ballooned to unacceptable lengths, so I’m going to post Caro’s last comment here in an effort to start again from zero. Also it’s a really interesting comment:

Theory is not about art – it’s about language (Derrida’s primordial writing). Theory is always reading. CLOSE reading. Closer than anybody has ever read before (which is why everybody thinks it’s not reading at all.) You have a tendency to see my desire for a challenge to Theory as an opposition between language and not-language, whereas what I’m hoping for is something that is less oppositional and more nuanced. Language through a different, visual frame. A different way of conceptualizing language, that is less “linguistic”, but still recognizably semiotic. What happens when you make the questions too much about something other than that slippery semiotic frame is you move out of epistemology and into ontology.

You commented that’s exactly what the visual image does — but that’s not Theory. Theory axiomatically denies that there is any ontology that is not always already epistemology first. You can make the dialectic move to elide those binaries — but you can also make the dialectic move to synthesize the binary of visual and verbal rather than collapsing it.

So I don’t want an alternate Theory, informed by Theory, of how art works. I want to know whether a rigorous stipulation of the epistemology of art would change the way Theory conceptualizes the epistem-ontology of language. It probably won’t be a strict semiotics, because of the openness of the visual sign — but it can be a strict epistemology. And art tends to think of itself and be thought of as ontological.

I’m thinking of Sean’s point about his “visual reading protocols” and how different they are from prose reading. So what is the linguistics of visual reading? That’s still a very linguistic question — but one that really explodes the reliance of semiotics on the linguistic sign. But it still needs to be formalist semiotics, or it’s not theory. Theory’s formalist semiotics claims that the sign can be both verbal and visual, but the structure is derived from the workings of the verbal signs, because as Bert said, the syntagm of nature isn’t as ordered. That’s the oversimplification that I think comics challenges so powerfully, and you guys both said that contemporary art assumes it…

 

Music for Middle-Brow Snobs: Robotboy

Posted on by

A number of people (okay, two. two people) have expressed regret at the demise of Music for Middle-Brow Snobs. So I thought I’d resurrect it, at least fitfully. Here then is an electronicaish download for those interested.

Download Robotboy here.

And if you’re interested in what you’re getting, the tracklist is below.

1. Robotboy — Robyn
2. Suddenly the Trees Are Giving Way — Ulrich Schnauss
3. My LIttle Beautiful — µ-ziq
4. Carceres Ex Novum — Xeper
5. Night Knuckles — Clark
6. Donkey Rhubarb — Aphex Twin
7. Little Things — Martyn
8. Lasttrak —Plastikman
9. Cast Out Your Demons — Legion of Two
10.The Belldog — Eno-Moebius—Roedelius

The Twilight of Intercourse

Posted on by

This first appeared on Splice Today.
_______________

Romance was her suicidal substitute for action, fantasy her suicidal substitute for a real world, a wide world. And intercourse was her suicidal substitute for freedom.
— Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse, 1987

In the quote above, radical feminist Andrea Dworkin is speaking about Madame Bovary. But she could just as easily be referring to Bella Swan, the heroine of Stephenie Meyer’s preposterously successful tween vampire book and movie series Twilight. In Twilight, Bella does substitute romance for action, abandoning her future plans, her academic interests, her family, her personality,and her life for her vampire lover Edward Cullen. She substitutes fantasy for reality in a manner which is literally suicidal, choosing to die and enter the twilit unageing faery world of the undead rather than grow into the responsibility and autonomy of adulthood. And she substitutes intercourse for freedom, believing that being “bitten” will grant her self-determination and happiness, when, in fact, it will simply kill her.

In short, the millions of tweens trooping in lockstep to the Cineplex to see the latest Twilight Saga installment might as well be trekking over Dworkin’s corpse. It’s a wonder she doesn’t just rise right out of the ground, fangs bared, spitting blood, and personally castrate both Robert Pattison and Taylor Lautner with a rusty cleaver out of pure spite.

I don’t really have much doubt that Dworkin would really and truly have hated Twilight. She hated most things; it was part of her mean-spirited second-wave charm. At the same time…there are aspects of Twilight that resonate in odd harmony with Dworkin’s particular feminist convictions.

The most obvious of these is virginity. Stephenie Meyer is a Mormon, and her novels are obsessed with self-control in general and chastity in particular. The chastity is both literal and metaphorical; Edward won’t sleep with Bela before marriage both because he doesn’t want to damage her immortal soul and because he’s afraid of hurting her physically— he won’t bite her and turn her into a vampire for analogous reasons.

On the one hand, this virginity seems to be more about Edward’s struggle; a typical conservative vision in which female safety is placed in the hands of male renunciation and chivalry. But there’s also a sense in which virginity is not about Edward at all, but is instead Bella’s gift. Edward has a special vampire superpower, and can read minds — but for some reason he can’t read Bella’s. Over the course of the series, Bella proves immune to the mind manipulation powers of various other vampires; she is “safe in her own mind” as the books put it.

This brings to mind Dworkin’s discussion of Joan of Arc:

there was no carnal desire felt [by men] in the presence of [Joan’s] beauty [although that beauty was] female by definition…. This brings with it the sense that it was physically impossible to do it; her body was impregnable…. Joan accomplished an escape from the female condition more miraculous than any military victory: she had complete physical freedom, especially freedom of movement — on the earth, outside a domicile, among men. She had that freedom because men felt no desire for her or believed that “it was not possible to try it.”

The analogy isn’t perfect; Edward wants Bella sexually, and as a vampire he finds her blood especially attractive (“You are exactly my brand of heroin” he says.) Joan mystically shuts down male desire, thus becoming herself masculine; Bella on the other hand inflames desire, becoming all the more stereotypically female. But if Dworkin would no doubt see Twilight as a self-defeating fantasy of objectification, the fact remains that neither Edward nor anyone else can get inside Bella — and this fact eventually allows her, at the climax of the final book in the series, to save her family and change the geopolitical balance of the vampire kingdom. For both Dworkin’s Joan and Meyer’s Bella, virginity is power.

So if Dworkin and Meyer are chattering on about the wonders of virginity, that must mean they hate sex, right? This is certainly the mainstream vision of Dworkin,— her critics often claim that she believed that all heterosexual sex was rape. Though she explicitly denied that, her take on sex is hardly a cheery, rah-rah, Susie Bright one. As she says in Intercourse

With intercourse, the use is already imbued with the excitement, the derangement, of the abuse….Intercourse as an act often expresses the power men have over women. Without being what the society recognizes as rape, it is what the society — when pushed to admit it — recognizes as dominance…..There are efforts to reform the circumstances that surround intercourse….These reforms do not in any way address the question of whether intercourse itself can be an expression of sexual equality.

So intercourse isn’t quite rape…but it is dominance, is inherently unequal, and it is not subject to reform. Intercourse oppresses women.

Again, you can see why people think that Dworkin has a problem with, as she often calls it, fucking. And yet, the truth is almost the opposite. Dworkin isn’t down on sex because she hates it. On the contrary, she hates sex as it is practiced not only because it defiles women, but because it defiles sex itself. When sex is rooted in self-knowledge and love it becomes, she says,

a complex and compassionate passion…. Fucking as communion is larger than an individual personality; it is a radical experience of seeing and knowing, experiencing possibilities within one that has been hidden.

Behind and in between Dworkin’s condemnation of fucking there is this other vision of sex as a sacrament; the idea that intercourse is an expression of the bonds between loved ones and is therefore holy. The introduction of dominance, hatred, hierarchy, and cruelty into sex is for Dworkin a kind of blasphemy; an original sin, if you will. Intercourse for Dworkin is always already corrupted, evil because, in some unknown place and in some unknown way, it was first good.

women have wanted intercourse to be, for women, an experience of equality and passion, sensuality and intimacy. Women have a vision of love that includes men as human too….These visions of a humane sensuality based in equality are in the aspirations of women; and even the nightmare of sexual inferiority does not seem to kill them. They are not searching analyses into the nature of intercourse; instead they are deep humane dreams that repudiate the rapist as the final arbiter of reality. They are an underground resistance to both inferiority and brutality, visions that sustain life and further endurance.

They also do not amount to much in real life with real men.

Dworkin won’t embrace the vision…but she still sees it. Which makes me wonder, if after all, she might not have found something to respond to in Twilight. In the last book of the series, Breaking Dawn, Bella is finally transformed into a newborn vampire, with physical strength that is (for a time) even greater than Edward’s. Suddenly it’s she who has to be careful not to hurt him when they embrace. Before the transformation, she was afraid that the elimination of the differences between her and Edward would spell an end to their passion; he would no longer find her soft or warm, no longer feel the pull of her blood calling him. In other words, she worries that becoming strong will make her unfeminine. But that’s not what happens at all.

He was all new, a different person as our bodies tangled gracefully into one on the sand-pale floor. No caution, no restraint. No fear — especially not that. We could love together — both active participants now. Finally equals.

In her essay in the Atlantic about the Twilight series, Alyssa Rosenberg argues that the vampirized Bella “cuts even the romance buffs out of the equation” as Meyer rambles on and on about how Bella can now see Edward like never before and appreciate him in ways beyond the merely human. “Meyer is telling [her audience] that they are literally incapable of seeing through Bella’s eyes,” Rosenberg notes, as if this were a bug. But, as Dworkin could tell her, it’s a feature. Intercourse with men in this world is inherently unequal, and therefore inherently flawed. There is a dream, though, that things can be different. Or, as another imaginer of other worlds and other loves once put it, “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”

The transformation Bella experiences is not just personal; it’s social. On the surface, Meyer’s fantasy is of a traditional patriarchy. The Cullens are an extended family living under one roof led by a benevolent father. In addition, the book resolutely champions the iconic conservative social issue when Bella refuses an abortion despite the fact that her pregnancy endangers her own life. Though this kind of conservatism is usually seen as denigrating women, Andrea Dworkin had another take. In her 1983 book Right Wing Women, she argued that conservative social arrangements actually offered women some modicum of protection and dignity.

Right-wing women consistently denounce abortion because they see it as inextricably linked to the sexual degradation of women. The sixties did not simply pass them by. They learned from what they saw. They saw the cynical male use of abortion to make women easy fucks…. Right-wing women see in promiscuity, which legal abortion makes easier, the generalizing of force.

Thus, for Meyer, the ultimate expression of Bella’s virginal inviolability is her decision to have her child — a decision whereby she refuses to allow sex to become inconsequential.

But while Meyer is in some sense a proponent of traditional (and Mormon) values, in another sense turning into a vampire involves a rearrangement of familial relationships which can only be described as perverse. The Cullen vampire household is composed of a bunch of married couples who all also see themselves as the children of Carlisle Cullen — so in becoming Edward’s wife, Bella also becomes virtually his sister. Bella’s child, in perfect horror movie tradition, grows at a superfast rate — and is barely out of the womb before she “imprints” on Bella’s best friend and former suitor Jacob. Meyer swears up and down and all around that there’s nothing sexual about this Oedipal imprinting…but even Bella herself finds that hard to believe.

In fact, if the land of vampires is an Eden, then it makes sense that (except for that one about biting the red apple) taboos no longer apply. And this too resonates with Dworkin — particularly with the writing of one of her chief inspirations, the radical feminist Shulamith Firestone. In The Dialectic of Sex, Firestone argued that:

without the incest taboo, adults might return within a few generations to a more natural “polymorphously perverse” sexuality, the concentration on genital sex and orgasmic pleasure giving way to total physical/emotional relationships that included that. Relations with children would include as much genital sex as the child was capable of…. Adult/child and homosexual sex taboos would disappear, as well as nonsexual friendships…. All close relationships would include the physical, our concept of exclusive physical partnerships (monogamy) disappearing from our psychic structure as well as the construct of a Partner Ideal.

Meyer’s vampiric family is, then, in its own way, a kind of prelapsarian feminist utopia, pointing on the one hand to a stable, benevolent society in which all can live safe from the threat of sexual violence, and on the other to a world of libidinal overflow in which staid restrictive rules are smashed in an onrush of egalitarian ecstasy. Vampires, significantly, experience unchanging, never-ending passion — Bella and Edward can fuck monogamously forever without ever tiring or growing bored. And so they will every night for the rest of their eternal lives…though every morning they pause to go to hang out with their family in sort-of-bourgeois domestic bliss.

In Intercourse, Andrea Dworkin actually has some things to say directly about vampires. Talking about Dracula, she writes:

vampirism is — to be pedestrian in the extreme — a metaphor for intercourse: the great appetite for using and being used; the annihilation of orgasm; the submission of the female to the great hunter…. While alive the women are virgins in the long duration of the first fuck…after death, they are carnal, being truly sexed…. The new virginity is emerging, a twentieth-century nightmare: no matter how much we have fucked, no matter with how many, no matter with what intensity or obsession or commitment or conviction (believing that sex is freeom)…we are virgins, innocents, knowing nothing, untouched unless blood has been spilled…this elegant bloodletting of sex a so-called freedom exercised in alienation, cruelty, and despair.

For Dworkin, then, Dracula is the ultimate profanation of both virginity and sex; a reimagining, in fact, of one as the other, and both as death. Instead of virginity leading to autonomy, it becomes just another fetish, to be consumed like all others. Instead of sex being a sacrament of love and connection, it becomes a form of “freedom” from connection, an alienated desire which feeds on itself. Vampirism is a way to make intercourse penetrate virginity, corrupting freedom without allowing for love, leaving only a life in death. It’s sex as consumption.

Stephenie Meyer’s vampires, though, don’t swallow Bella’s virginity. On the contrary, the point about the vampires seems to be that they can have sex and still remain virgins, inviolate and unchanging. After Bella has sex, both really and through the metaphor of being turned into a vampire, her power to stay safe in her own mind expands, until she can shield others from psychic invasion the way she shields herself. And at the very end of the book she gets the best power of all; the ability to let Edward read her thoughts when she wishes. Eternally loving, equally superhuman vampires joined in a monogamous relationship consummated by a perfect meeting of the minds. That’s a kind of intercourse maybe even Andrea Dworkin would have approved of.