Asexual Perspective: The Blood is the Life

Lonely, another day / Drowning, please save me / I am struggling / In my own daydream - Palaye Royale

On November 13, 2020, the rock band Palaye Royale released a music video for their song, “Tonight Is the Night I Die.” In the video, the band are vampires who attend a ball where they feed on the unsuspecting female guests. At the end, vampire hunters drag the lead singer outside and stake him while the others escape. The video’s cinematography, gore, and storyline immediately drew me in.

Vampires are my favorite supernatural creatures. And no vampire is more popular than Dracula. Bela Lugosi, Gary Oldman, and Bill Skarsgård (as the Dracula-adjacent Count Orlok), among others, have all portrayed him in various versions. Some terrifying, others more comical, but all with the same lust for blood.

I’ve seen every adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and almost every vampire film or TV show in between. I’m always eager to read a new take on the ancient bloodsucker. In terms of vampire fiction, I’ve read everything from Salem’s Lot (Stephen King) to Interview With the Vampire (Anne Rice), and the Twilight series (Stephenie Meyer).

When I came out as asexual, I looked at my love of vampires in a different light (no pun intended). It didn’t change the way I feel about them. It did, however, give me a good chuckle.

Why? Many consider vampires the most sexual of all night stalkers. The ritualistic blood-taking directly relates to the act of sex. Female virgins tend to bleed the first time they have sex, and since vampires are historically known to prey on virginal women, the connection makes sense.

The allure of vampires lies in their ability to be beautiful, charming, and seductive. Even the more grotesque-looking kind—like Orlok in Robert Egger’s Nosferatu—have an uncanny ability to manipulate those they seek. Watch the scenes with him and Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) again. Girl may be mad disgusted, but she’s also a little entranced. Vampires can tempt even the most modest and conservative woman to expose her, ahem, neck.

Let’s look at Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula. For those new to this film, here’s a brief rundown:

Gary Oldman plays the Count who travels to London after Jonathan Harker (Keanu Reeves) visits him to complete a real estate transaction. Harker’s betrothed, Mina (Winona Ryder) bears a striking resemblance to Dracula’s lost love, who died centuries earlier. After trapping Harker with his three vampire brides, Dracula goes in pursuit of Mina. Though she’s still in love with Harker, Mina cannot fight her strange attraction to Dracula, ultimately letting him bite and turn her into a vampire.

In the film’s climax, Dracula is fatally wounded, and he releases the darkness from Mina, making her human again. There’s way more to the plot, but that’s the gist. If you haven’t seen it, do yourself a favor and watch it. The bad accents aside, it’s a hauntingly beautiful film. Then watch Robert Egger’s Nosferatu.

Dracula, depending on the adaptation, is often portrayed as a charming, albeit ruthless killer. He kills men and transforms women into vampires. Mina is different. Dracula doesn’t want to condemn her to the darkness, but he also doesn’t want to lose her again. This conflict is at the heart of most vampire tales involving romance. Forbidden love creates the perfect dramatic tension, especially when the vampire loves a mortal but doesn’t want to turn her.

Rewatching Coppola’s Dracula now, I relate to Mina’s struggle more than I used to. She embodies purity, innocence, but is also resourceful. Stoker wrote her as such because he needed her to be strong enough to resist Dracula’s advances. Though she is eventually bitten, Mina uses her slow transformation to lead Harker, Van Helsing, and the other men to Dracula so they can kill him.

Scholars and critics call Mina the “ultimate Victorian woman.” Her decisions serve the men around her. She is everything her friend Lucy isn’t: flirtatious, sexualized, and beautiful.

Mina’s most sexualized moment is when she and Van Helsing (Anthony Hopkins) are holed up waiting for the others en route to Dracula’s castle. Mina temporarily succumbs to the vampiric transformation. She exposes more of her chest, her tone of voice changes, and she briefly seduces Van Helsing.

An unintentional asexual character

Let’s look at it another way. What if Mina were asexual?

She’s content having Harker as her partner. She knows marrying him will not give her the most glamorous life, but she doesn’t mind. Like most asexuals, Mina’s closest friend, Lucy, seeks male attention. She is beautiful and sought after. Along comes Dracula, who for the sake of this argument represents society.

Dracula seduces Lucy quickly because she is overtly flirtatious and sexual. She still accepts a marriage proposal and is prepared to be a good wife, but she continues to tease the men she rejected. More so after she turns into a vampire. Mina’s seduction takes longer because she is headstrong and set in her ways. Society’s pressure doesn’t ensnare her as fast.

Asexuals are often told our orientation is not real. And while many aces do enjoy sex, others don’t. Yet we’re told to just do it and we’ll realize what we’re missing.

The right person doesn’t automatically make us sexual beings. A simple bite on the neck won’t make us want sex as much as the next allosexual—someone who experiences sexual attraction—person. It doesn’t work like that.

In his book, Understanding Asexuality, Anthony Bogaert writes,

“Our very sexualized society often places pressure on asexual people to have sex.”

Julie Sondra Decker goes one step further in her book, The Invisible Orientation: An Introduction to Asexuality when she writes,

“The message asexual people get from society is they do not exist and/or that they should get help to change themselves.”

When Dracula meets Mina, he introduces her to a world of passion and sex. His love is more thrilling than Harker’s. The downside is she’d have to give up her values. In other words, society needs to suck our blood and remove the asexuality from it because once we get a taste for sex, we’ll be like everyone else.

But we don’t need charming vampires seducing us to the other side. Like Mina, we are true to ourselves and don’t care if society doesn’t understand us. Would it be nice if they did? Of course.

Misunderstood creatures of the night

Ace liberation is on the rise but slow going. We’re almost like vampires ourselves. Misunderstood creatures, doing what we have to do to survive. Sometimes that means hiding our identities, concealing ourselves in the shadows, or keeping ourselves distant from people who could threaten us.

My asexuality hasn’t made me love vampires any less. In fact, it’s made watching films and TV series about them all the more exciting.

What would happen if a vampire came across an asexual? What if their hypnotic powers didn’t work on us? Would the image be shattered? Would society have to hold a mirror up to itself and finally accept there is more to life than what they believe?

Palaye Royale’s music video paints their vampires in the same realm as Dracula. They’re beautiful, a little pale, hungry, lustful killers. History has proven time and again that being anything outside of “normal” is not acceptable. Conversion therapy, emotional manipulation, and straight-up beatings of people in the LGBTQIA+ community continue to take place today. All to make others in the image society demands they be.

To be brave enough to stand up to a society that, for the most part, doesn’t accept anything different is the strongest kind of bravery. We sometimes let society think it has us in its grasp, only to use its very rhetoric against it.

It isn’t always easy and we’re still in the thick of the fight, but slow progress is better than no progress. Whether we’re Mina, Lucy, or Dracula in certain scenarios, it will take more than a charming face to lure us away from who we truly are.

Author’s Note: While this piece is written from the perspective of an asexual, I am not the only ace voice on the internet. If you're interested in learning more about this complex orientation, I encourage you to seek out more ace voices. You can find a comprehensive (and growing) list of fiction and nonfiction books on my website.

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