Vampire Romance - How Reality Bites

Is there a connection between why girls loved the "Twilight" series and why girls date jerks?  Could we learn anything from the Edward and Bella other than girls like guys who suck?

Vampire romance has been around for a while, but "Twilight" really made it popular with the teenage audience.  As a high school teacher, I was thrilled to see so many girls reading something other thane text messages at lunch, but I was very curious - why were women so interested in Vampires?  Being an academic, I did some research, conducted some surveys, and even read "Twilight" for myself. (I hope you all appreciate the sacrifices I made to write this article.)  In the end, I came to some interesting conclusions about what we can learn about women from vampire romance, and what women could learn about love from these fictional flings.

When I asked women of different ages and from different places to describe vampires, there was a long list of traits - older/mature, experienced, strong, well traveled, perpetually young, rich, multi-lingual, suave, etc. but the top three characteristics were:

• Vampires are mysterious and a bit dangerous.
• Vampires are handsome and know how to charm women.
• Vampires can be changed by falling in love with the right woman. 

Over and over again, as women described vampires, they used terms like "kind of dangerous," "a little dangerous," or "just dangerous enough to be exciting."  They rationalized the true nature of vampires, including the fact they were dangerous as if it were some small quirk that just happened to make them sexy - like Russel Crowe's accent.

This provided me with a huge breakthrough on how women think about men.  Think about what vampires really are and what the world would be like if they truly existed.  They are the ultimate hunters - possessing strength and cunning but without mercy or souls.  Strong enough to take life by force, they enjoy employing camouflage and luring victims willingly to their death.  Every father would fear the monsters that hid in plain sight and stole their daughters from the safety of their own communities.    In a world with real vampires, every woman that fell for a vampire thinking that she loved him and he truly loved her and she could change him would show up with a neck piercing and a fatal case of dehydration.  That's the reality of vampires.  Women have rationalized one of the most deadly creatures ever imagined into being "just a bit" dangerous.

What does this mean about real women in the real world with real men?  It means there is almost no limit to the number or severity of character flaws that a woman can rationalize away if a man meets one or more of the following requirements:

• His flaws make him exciting because he is intriguing or a bit dangerous.
• He's a player that is good looking and/or a smooth operator.
• He makes a woman believe that she can change him with their love.

This is a major problem for women.  While the odds of meeting a nice guy are better than the odds of meeting a vegan vampire, they are only slightly better.  The majority of males- especially teenage males - are jerks.  They care nothing for love or commitment or even friendship when it comes to the opposite sex - they just care about the sex.  Like vampires, these men will deceitfully woo a woman until she satisfies his hunger, then he'll dump her like a cold corpse.  They know that if they frame themselves as exciting, dangerous, smooth, or reform-able then women will willingly waltz past all the red flags and straight into their trap.

So how does this change the world?  I don't know.  I just thought it was an interesting insight.