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Page 1 of 4 When I was oh, like sixteen I had a dream about a girl. She was someone I knew, her name was Jo, her locker was next to mine. I thought she was cute but I didn’t really know her. She was new, I remember, a native of San Francisco, quiet, mysterious, mature -- all the things I felt like I wasn’t. She intimidated me in a way that other girls didn’t. Of course, I had a monster crush on her. When she came to me in a dream one night we were in a bedroom, not my own, and there were other women there who I didn’t know. All of them fluttered around me like dark butterflies. Jo, landed at my feet. I don’t remember much but I remember her pulling out my, um, member, looking me in the eye…and baring her fangs. I was terrified certainly but there was also – I shudder to admit this (no, really!) – a warm pulse of …anticipation. I woke up pretty soon after that to the kind of sordid, sticky mess that boys wake up to when they’re sixteen. Now, I wish I could say that this dream and the fact that I still remember it after all these years is a sign of my general perversion and depravity as a human being but the sad fact of the matter is that all the ridiculously obvious interpretations of the “meaning” of this dream simply underscore a much more mundane and depressing truth: that I am hopelessly conventional. In other words this dream was an extension of an aesthetic truism that pulsates throughout the dark side of American popular culture:
Fangs are sexy on girls.
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Why? If movies are the dreams of our collective consciousness what does it tell us that in them if a woman appears as, say, a vampire or a werewolf or an alien from outer space, she is also, generally, smoking hot? What are we trying to tell ourselves? It’s not only that the proverbial she-monster with the nasty overbite looks good but that she purposely uses her attractiveness to ensnare her victims. In a patriarchal society we are scared of women, scared of the spell they cast, the power they hold. In an ostensibly Christian society we are especially frightened of feminine sexuality. This phenomenon has a definite and pervasive side effect: on the communal mind-set: Men derive their power from strength but power in a woman comes from sex. Feminine sexuality is like the Paper to the Rock of men’s strength in a societal scale game of Rock/Paper/Scissors. Gary Hart went from hero to zero when he ran into the presumably irresistible blonde bimbo-ness of Donna Rice. Monica Lewinsky came this close to wrecking Bill Clinton’s presidency and keeping him from becoming the President emeritus of the Democratic party. Christine Keeler almost brought British Parliament to its collective knees back in 1963. God himself had to take a back seat to the heat of Jessica Hahn who then proceeded to burn Jim Bakker’s evangelist empire to the ground in a storm of fire and brimstone and sex. There are entire cultures so terrified of feminine sex appeal that a woman’s body must be covered in public from head to toe. From one corner of the globe to the other (did I just write that? Corner…of a globe? >Sigh.<), from Eve to Lorelei to Malinche, history is strewn with archetypal symbols of the dangers of female carnality. Is it any wonder then that in our societal nightmares/fantasies -- horror movies -- this particular terror should once again raise its lovely head or that time and again this terror is wrestled to an impasse by that other most powerful engine of the human condition, desire, or that so often this desire that we can’t resist, in its nightmare form, might manifest itself…as fangs? Undoubtedly, this has something to do with the puritanical underpinnings of our culture and the residue of thousands of years of social conditioning in regards to sexual roles. Social conditioning that is changing, yes, but slowly and with resistance, frankly, on both sides. A guy with fangs is a monster but a girl with fangs is a fantasy. Fangs on a man are weapons. Fangs on a woman…are accessories. If you’re talking about monster movies, fangs on a male monster are a necessity. Fangs on a female monster…are an opportunity. If you put fangs on a girl the quality of the film (almost) becomes moot. Admittedly, this idea is tested often, say, in Queen of the Damned, for instance. Terrible movie -- but I’ll be damned if Aaliyah doesn’t look good. And so it goes. Put fangs on a woman and we’re hooked – so to speak. The fascination is not in the fact of the fangs themselves but in what they represent. They are symbolic, simply, of power, a microcosmic representation of strength. It makes sense that they are, in the larger scheme of things, subtle, sometimes even delicate. But if the ultimate expression of the most basic interaction between the male id and the female id is penetration…than fangs on a female represent that fundamental paradigm being turned upside down. It is an instance where the woman penetrates the man or at least holds the power of penetration. That so many men find that alluring speaks that part of them that wants to be penetrated, dominated. In a generalization of that same puritanical context, it is the feminine side of men surfacing. That women find it tantalizing as well is either through empathy – sharing the need for the paradigm to shift -- or a desire for deviancy.
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