When I was young, my grandmother would tell me stories of Yakshis, the female vampires who used to lure men to suck them dry of their blood. Usually the Yakshi was a wronged woman, who wanted revenge. It must be from hearing such stories again and again that I became obsessed with vampires, reading Dracula at around ten, then again around fifteen, etc. The mystery and power associated with each character was sublime to my fertile imagination. By my late teens, my romanticism had made me a fully fledged vampire lover. I empathized so strongly with Louise and despised Lestat from Rice’s ‘Interview with the Vampire’. I wanted to be one of those victims from whom these mighty creatures fed.
But all fantasies must end some day if they are not rooted in reality. There is a time when you realize that Little Red Riding Hood has a very sexual premise, with her cloak symbolizing her menstrual blood and fairy tales like Cinderella and Snow White stereotype women as damsels who are waiting for their charming princes. Though the vampire myth originated quite ordinarily, the class being extended to any supernatural creature which feeds on human blood and flesh, it has transformed into a classic misogynistic structure which exists on several layers of the human psyche.
Let us consider the case of a Yakshi. Always an attractive woman, with long, jet black hair, who whispers seductively. She targets men who are traveling alone. Now, in most of the stories, the Yakshi can be warded off by chanting mantras. Hence, most Brahmins could avoid the attack, since they had better knowledge of those mantras. We could bisect this particular instance. First of all, the implied danger of female sexuality. Even in popular culture, a woman who is beautiful and flaunts it is at times referred to as a Yakshi. The woman is something to be afraid of and if you wrong her (the notion of propertising the womb, kept safe from men with ‘ulterior’ motive), you would most probably end up being her food. Second of all, there is a hint of subjugation of women through faith or religion. The victim has to call for god, recite specific mantras and they act as a barrier which cannot be broken by her.
It might be rather hasty to take a quantum leap from a Yakshi to Dracula or other modern vampire versions, especially the male vampires with the harem of beautiful vampires/victims, all lustful and vying for his attention. The objectification of woman is so rampant in each of such a theme. Consider Dracula, the Count, with his mysterious ways, so powerfully seducing women, with their heaving breasts always painted so picturesquely in every illustration. And as vampire fiction has evolved, the female characters have gotten more and more overtly sexualized and the male characters more and more moody and dark. There is a clear distinction on this level, with women becoming addicted to fear rather than love towards the single male protagonist. Consider even the infuriatingly dumbed down Twilight series. The basic theme is that of the aloof male who wants to feed off the woman he loves and the young woman who is attracted to this dangerous recklessness. In fact I find Sookie in True Blood extremely refreshing, because she is one female character who has steadily refused to fit into the stereotypes set by the vampire genre of voluptuous females who act sex-starved and get pleasure from highly deprecatingly detached males feeding off them.
The truth is that the sexual theme goes further into S&M. A powerful person dominating and inflicting pain on the other. Since the victim is mostly a woman, one has to wonder what kind of imagery is being projected on to the minds of vulnerable young women, who are discovering their sexuality, aided by the pop-vampire fiction that now pervades every turn of mainstream entertainment. How come it is alright to be humiliated and be ‘pain sluts’ without actually consciously transferring the power in sex? The masculinity and femininity (also cannibalistic tendency with allusions to ‘bodily fluids’, coupled with suggestions of the Incubus-like behavior) of a typical society are aggressively amplified in this context leading to distorted concepts of power transfer when this kind of socially acceptable distortion of the aggressive component of the male sexuality is promoted by the media. It is a part of social learning.
Every single aspect of the mainstream media is directed at profit and it is necessary to amplify the desired status-quo which will maximize it. Somehow, we fall short of realizing such tendencies. We tell our daughters fairy tales about Sleeping Beauty and women with long hair and the princes rescuing them from their ill fates. We also fill their heads with horror at being the subversive woman. Then we point them towards ultra-hormonal characters which they can visualize for their happy ending, in a very unnatural way. Where is the choice?
