In the Blood: The Consensual Female Sexual Identity in True Blood

The beautiful, young virginal neck exposed for the patriarchal delight and occasional cruelty of the vampire beast. She shrieks and cowers weakly; but no matter how far she runs, she is unable to escape and eventually succumbs to his fangs as he slowly drains her of all life. This is a typical symbol of the vampire phenomenon--the woman who is always overpowered by the sexuality of oppressive forces of masculinity around her. It is as classic an image as the vampire beast himself. As author Milly Williamson discusses in her book The Lure of the Vampire: “…we conjure the vampires that we want or need for the cultural or historical times we find ourselves in” (Williamson 5). The vampire in sense is a cultural reflection of society’s perceptions of sexual identity in an erotic, sexy, and slightly frightening package that shifts from era to era. Indeed, the entire Dracula story began in the Victorian times when female sexual identity was probably considered the most frightening aspect of being a human being, and the vampire represented the harsh repression of masculine sexuality identity (Williamson 5-7). The newest reincarnation of the vampire story is set in the fictional town of Bon Temps where vampires have recently “come out of the coffin” in Alan Ball’s television serial, True Blood, and start mixing it up with the towns’ human residents. True Blood, and its main character, Sookie Stackhouse, take the old lore of the powerless and overtaken virgin of the vampire myth to the strong, independent heroine who is enabled throughout the vampire story to have her own sexual identity independent of any male influence.

It is impossible to analyze the feminist power of the character of Sookie Stackhouse without looking at the rest of the women, vampire and human alike, of Bon Temps first. In the first season of True Blood, it becomes clear that once a woman is made into a vampire that the gender divide and power struggle of the sexes is eliminated. Instead, the importance and power is placed upon age. The vampires know nothing of gay or straight or female or male; they do not live in the binary existence of the modern world. They have advanced past all that (Rickels 57). Once a vampire in the world of True Blood, you can no longer die of natural causes or be raped. As vampires are technically already damned to hell on earth, they may do whatever it is they please. The male and female alike vampires have nearly insatiably sexual appetites and act on them without any retribution for their actions. The female vampires are not held to any sort moral standard.

Interestingly, the human women of Bon Temps do not have it as easy as female vampires and must still drag around the title of ‘female’ in relation to the male power system. Every female human with the exception of Sookie in the early episodes and her Grandmother are very sexually active and, for the most part, go about their sexual liaisons just as the male characters do. It is established in the episodes that take place in the vampire bar Fangtasia, and the majority of the human patrons are female. After vampires have emerged as tax-paying citizens, it becomes common knowledge that the most satisfying sexual partner is the vampire as it was detailed in a Playboy magazine within the context of the show. The women of Bon Temps, being more sexually liberated, go out looking for these encounters and the human males begin to feel threatened. It is the human male’s patriarchal jealousy that is painted as the villain of the show and is not sexuality or the vampires.



From the moment vampire Bill Compton, the 173 year-old veteran of the Civil War, walks into the bar where she works, Sookie finds a companion she has never had before. In the first and second episodes of the first season, it is established that Sookie (aside from her Grandmother, brother, and close friend Tara) has grown up being completely isolated by the rest of world and that the majority of Bon Temps view her, frankly, as a freak. Sookie is telepathic and, as one can imagine, being involuntarily privy to every thought that every person has which makes personal relationships nearly impossible. However, Sookie finds that she is unable to hear Bill’s thoughts making him a welcome retreat from the rest of the world of the every chatting world. Also, for the first time in her life she is able to have an equally balanced relationship with another person. Sookie asks Bill why she can’t hear his thoughts, and he replies saying that it is because he is dead. When things take a rocky turn for the half-human/half-vampire couple and Sookie says that she doesn’t think they should see each other anymore, Bill voices her secret fear: “you’ll never find a human man you can be yourself with.” Thus, the special new connection between vampire and woman is born
As Milly Williamson details, vampires have often been viewed as a knee jerk to reaction to the fear of unrestrained female sexuality, and, further, that the vampire figure has much in common with fairer sex. “The vampire, like the female body is not clean and pure and closed…blood letting fangs also invoke the mythic vagina dentata” (Williamson 12). Both the vampire and the female represent a challenge to human male population. As Jean Lorrah details in his essay Dracula Meets the New Woman, he writes that most scholars who study Stoker’s Dracula believe that the novel even associates the evil nature of womanhood with that of vampires. Williamson also details that it is clear that many female audiences of the twenty-first century very obviously sympathize with the vampire and probably see themselves reflected within the monstrous feminine nature of the vampire and that “women may identify with the vampire rather than the victim” (Williamson 12). Sookie is not repealed by Bill’s outsider status and ‘monster body’; but instead, just as Williamson writes, she feels much in common with him and certainly identifies with him by also being labeled a monster and a freak herself. As Sookie tell Bill why she isn’t afraid of him, “who am I to be squeamish about something I know so little about?” Sookie openly recognizes the connection between the two outsiders.

Instead of the victim/monster relationship, Sookie and Bill even eventually share blood intensively further with the female-to-vampire connection. In episode two, The First Taste Sookie hears the thoughts of known vampire drainers (vampire blood is used as an illegal narcotic in True Blood) that they plan to kill Bill and sell his blood. Sookie rescues Bill and gets brutally beaten by the vampire drainers and left for dead. Bill comes to and is able to kill the vampire drainers, and he then turns his attention to Sookie who begins saying that she is unable to feel her legs. Bill extends his fangs and rips open his arm and tells her to drink his blood. She is frightened, but after he demands: “do you want to live or not?!” She begins to drink reluctantly and then she drinks mass amounts of his blood happily, and her body is quickly healed. In this scene Sookie is given the power of “vampires past” to feed upon blood and not be the passive victim and be rather the more active masculine force. Now the very blood that courses through the vampire ‘beast’, a would-be killer of the classical world, also runs through her veins, and ultimately, saves her life.
In the book Vampire Film by Alain Silver, Silver writes that the archetypical male vampire is “The Byronic figure, seductive, erotic, possessing a hypnotic power that makes its questionable charms irresistible to his victims” (Silver 54), which are all the qualities that Bill the vampire has. The exception is that he is unable to ‘glamour’ or hypnotize Sookie just as she is unable to listen to his thoughts; therefore, he is unable to control her in ways of the classic vampires. Bill won’t even enter Sookie’s home unless he is invited in and can be thrown out in a moments notice. Williamson writes that part of the allure and misogyny of the classic Dracula is that women are unable to resist him and are not given the power to fend off his advances. This is entirely contrary to the relationship between Sookie and Bill.

The vampires of True Blood do feed on residents of Bon Temps, but it is always consensual. Further, the atrocities that are committed in the first season are perpetrated by humans, typically the white male ‘straight’ (doesn’t sleep with vampires) character. In episode one, Strange Love Vampire rights advocate and head of the American Vampire League, Nan Flanagan, appears on the Bill Maher show and states: “we never owned slaves, we never detonated nuclear weapons, since the Japanese perfected synthetic blood that fulfills all our nutritional needs there is no reason for anyone to fear us.” To the vampires credit, while they are technically ‘monsters’, they refrain from murder. Throughout the entire season, women throughout the town are being murdered. The only quality all the victims have in common is that they were known ‘fang bangers’ in that they had consensual sex with vampires. At first, the authorities believe that this clearly points to a vampire as the murderer, but then it becomes obvious that the women are being murdered because of their relations and not by the vampires themselves--rather, it is by a vampire-hating zealot. It is nothing new that True Blood would, in a sense, punish the sexually liberated women; however, the show does not align itself with the honor- killer Rene but instead with Sookie who is nearly murdered for her relationship with Bill. Rene, not the vampires, is viewed as the villain of the season because of his unwillingness to accept other people (if you will) and is very clearly threatened by the sexual activities of the women he is murdering.
Ultimately, one of the most enduring misogynistic overtones of the vampire story is his ability to overtake his female victims against their will. True Blood eliminates this power and gives control back to the woman. “The attack of the vampire is an obvious symbol for rape” (Lorrah 31), the forced advance, the overpowering of the victim, the literal penetration of the victim’s virginal neck and has followed all different reincarnations of the vampire. Not only is the victim unable to defend herself but she is usually unable to remember the attack. Jalal Toufic writes in his book Vampires that vampire attacks are usually recalled through dream states or letters to other characters (Dracula) but never through first person accounts as they are depicted as being traumatic, horrible events. Sookie, however, not only remembers her sexual interludes with Bill, but she also instigates them.


In episode six entitled Cold Ground, after being together the entire season Sookie makes the choice to lose her virginity to Bill. It is important to note the connections that the virginal Sookie has with women of other vampire stories. She is young, a virgin, and impressionable. However, she is not contained by any of her male human counterparts, and she is able to live somewhat of her own life. Her father is dead and her brother is far too consumed with his own problems to be bothered. Sookie is, like all women of the vampire story, ‘defiled’ by a vampire; however, her ability to make this choice makes her an active participant. Bill has no power over her decision to do so, and she runs on her own accord over to his mansion unprovoked by anything in particular. Their relationship is entirely consensual; and during the highly romanticized intercourse scene, Sookie notices that Bill’s fangs are exposed and that he is fighting off his desire to bite her. Then to his surprise and the audience’s, Sookie throws her head to the side, exposes her neck, and says “do it, I want you to”, and he bites her as the episode ends.
The relationship between Bill and Sookie is rich with dynamics that play upon the ancient symbolism of vampires and their relations with human virginal women. However, the female sexuality identity that, usually, has been literally devoured by vampirism in stories of old is used instead to build a relationship between two outsiders. Through her relationship with Bill, Sookie is able to develop a sexual identity of her own. Not accepted by her human world she finds that through the world of vampires and other things supernatural. She is not only able to understand her own misunderstood power but is also able to live a fuller life. A classic, monstrous villain that once used to kill women has metamorphosed into a willing and loving partner that enabled the human female to become sexually independent of the oppressive power of the human male. By understanding our obsession with the undead and what vampires mean to us, we are able to obtain a good insight into our societies’ forbidden desires. True Blood taps into our thirst for the vampire with one major revision. Instead of the erotized, weak and overpowered female body for the pleasure for the male gaze, True Blood empowers the female characters to enjoy their sexuality and give in. Instead of being hypnotized and attacked by sexuality, the women go to vampire bars and unapologetically sleep with them for their own pleasure. As the men in the community cower in the face of change, the women embrace it and beg their vampire lovers to bite them.
There are few creatures that haunt literature, cinema, television and popular culture that are as enigmatic and yet still as seamless as the vampire. Not only do vampires appear throughout different culture’s mythology and folklore, but it would seem that our societal lust for the vampire and his stories just won’t die. American culture is littered with different vampires that continue their enduring run on feeding upon our imaginations--from the frightening, pale-clawed Nosferatu, to Stoker’s Dracula and his many different film forays, to the sexy reincarnation featuring such vampire alums as Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise and to finally a vampire figure that is closely aligned with the female sex. As the vampire continues to evolve it becomes clear that the one element will never change: The audience’s never-ending lust for the power of the vampire bite, and the everlasting appeal of unrestrained sexuality continues to keep the vampire firmly locked in our forbidden, and yet alluring, nightmares.

Works Cited
Lorrah, Jean. "Dracula Meets the New Woman." The Blood Is the Life Vampires in Literature. Albany: Bowling Green State Univ Popular Pr, 1999. 31-42.
Rickels, Laurence A. Vampire lectures. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota P, 1999.
Silver, Alain. Vampire film from Nosferatu to Interview with a vampire. New York: Limelight Editions, 1997.
Toufic, Jalal. Vampires, an uneasy essay on the undead in film. Barrytown, N.Y: Station Hill, Distributed by Talman Co., 1993.
Williamson, Milly. The Lure of the Vampire Gender, Fiction and Fandom from Bram Stoker to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. New York: Wallflower P, 2005.