Dear Jamie,
One of my lovers is a younger woman who fancies herself a vampire. I honestly thought this would be a fun fling when we met at a kinky party, but despite twenty years between us and vastly different subcultures—she’s a goth barista, and I’m a nerdy lab technician—we have a good thing going. We are mainly friends and both have primary partners, but sometimes we enjoy the benefits that our freedom allows.
My issue is Venn’s goth thing—I think she believes the vampire thing for real. I assumed it was part of role play and a larger imaginative enactment that went beyond the bedroom. I can see the thrill in dressing the part—she’s stunning in black diva gowns and cobweb wraps. I’ve been only too happy to feign my role by receiving lots of biting. Let me be straight: I’m going with the flow here because it’s fun and makes me feel young and freaky.
On a few occasions, Venn brought up the notion of drinking my blood. I tried to play along with the theater but felt silly about it. The thing is, from some weird erotic photography books, I’m not completely sure that she doesn’t believe this. I was looking for a corkscrew one evening and saw some bizarre equipment—tubes and bags and syringes, medical stuff—and now I’ve got it in my head that they are for some ceremonial sex rite. Some of the artsy porn is about blood collecting and drinking.
Is she mentally ill? Do some people who do the vampire narrative believe it and act it full on? Am I in danger? Or is my imagination the one running away with me? – Dirty Harry
Hello Harry! What a thrilling, terrifying place you’ve landed—in your very own Anne Rice novel.
If we don’t have much in the way of specific diagnostic research on the topic, there is still an avalanche of erotic writings, music, cinema, festivals, fiction, and more that takes the vampire fetish and mythology very seriously. There are even vampire dating sites!
It’s not all performative, either—we have stories of “madmen” going back centuries that suggest some folks in thrall of the lore believe it. Certainly many individuals were convinced that blood was a powerful, life giving essence.
Sadists like Elizabeth Báthory were sure that bathing in blood would give her eternal life. Lots of people sip a symbolic cup every week at mass for just that purpose, so it makes sense that perceptions about the essence of life can get tangled and start to blur between reality and myth. For some, that blur is also sexual.
There are numerous mental illnesses, yes, where psychoses or compulsions involve this tangle of life, death, blood, and sex. There are also countless varieties of kink—odaxelagnia (pleasure from biting), haematophilia (pleasure from blood), haematolagnia (pleasure from consuming blood), and necrovampirism (pleasure from drinking the blood of the dead).
I can’t diagnose Venn or even make a good guess. Many folks create a world that they are well aware isn’t “real” in the sense we mean, but they live in it fully. But lots of people with severe mental illness have related delusions too. The equipment you found could be anything—when my cat had kidney disease, I had tubes and bags and syringes for her fluid treatments. On the other hand, there are people who practice vampirism and blood sports as a fetish.
The only way to know for sure is to ask her and find out how far this extends, and what she believes. Then you have to decide where you fit into it and what you’re comfortable with.
Do you have a biting or vampire fetish? How far do you take it?
Tell us what you think