As most of the books I write are vampire romances and highly erotic at that, let’s talk about vampires and sex.
Vampires in erotic romances is hardly a new idea. Vampires and sex go together like honey and bread and are just as finger-licking good together, too. They ooze with the same golden sensualty that makes your mouth water.
Sensuality is a part of the vampire mythos – from seducing innocent maidens and turning them, a la Dracula, to Anne Rice’s vampire series with its mild hints of MM relationships. Every author since has built upon that heavily sex-imbibed base.
As I have pointed out in “Who Says Vampire Books are Dying?“, vampire romances are in absolutely no danger of disappearing any time soon.
I’ve also theorized that the “average” romance will steadily grow hotter and hotter, as it has for the last ten years, so eventually, what we once considered erotic will be considered quite tame and vanilla, while we embrace more wild, kinky and exotic sexual situations in the hotter erotic stories we read (“Spanking On The Sofa…Are Romances Get Hot All Over?”.
Vampires will be a big part of that hot end of the curve, I suspect. Or…I think they should. Here’s why.
The average vampire has been around for a long time – far longer than the average human. They don’t eat, drink or sleep and their appetite for anything other than blood has disappeared. However, in every fictional universe I’ve read (I can’t think of a single exception) vampires are able to copulate. They can enjoy sex with both humans and other vampires.
If humans, after only a decade or two, can grow weary of endless sex partners, or endless sex with the same partner, how much more jaded is a vampire going to grow over the course of a century or two, when sex is the only biological diversion left to him?
Humans tend to get very creative with their sexual pursuits when boredom has set in. They start experimenting. Sex toys, video tapes, new positions, fantasies, role playing, dress-ups, massage, frequency, setting, anything and everything may be tried. Long term partners will lose weight, change wardrobes, get fit(ter), take up mutual hobbies. At the more extreme end of the sex scale, some couples experiment with swinging, menages and open marriages.
And some long term relationships fail. The wellspring of sexual happiness and satisfaction can sometimes be the only glue that holds some relationships together and when that binding evaporates, there is no sustainable relationship left worth holding on to.
There’s not too many fictional universes where vampires manage to maintain long term romantic relationships. Humans don’t live long enough and relationships with other vampires tend to fall apart because time and history are too caustic: they dissolve relationships rather than cement them.
But for those relationships that do withstand more than a few decades or for any vampire’s sex life at all, how do they cope with the ennui that must set in? Surely, just like humans, the vampires would reach for more and more exotic extremes of sex, once what they currently practice becomes “normal”?
Vampires have endless amounts of time, strength and flexibility to indulge themselves in whatever takes their fancy. They also have compound-interest enhanced bank accounts to support those interests and buy whatever they want, including memberships in exclusive and private clubs.
After a century or two, it’s easy to see that an individual vampire’s sexual tastes and preferences could end up somewhere far different from where she or he originally began. A vampire that began life as vanilla and hetrosexual as it was possible to be–right at the top of the Kinsey scale —might eventually find themselves drifting down to the middle as bisexual indulgences bring new sensations and pleasure. Multiple partners, BDSM, submission and domination would all be explored.
It wouldn’t be simply sex and sexual pleasure that the vampire would be considering along the way. Domestic arrangements would also come under question. The global human male/female marriage would be tested and alternatives experimented with.
In the vampires romance series of mine, Beloved Bloody Time, one of the characters says that vampires are best suited to menage relationships, as over time one or other of the three is free to come and go as they need to without ever abandoning the relationship or leaving anyone alone.
It’s not the only alternative arrangement that vampires might naturally fall into, but its one of the more popular sexual arrangements beyond the standard MF being explored in erotic romance these days.
I think it’s fairly safe to say that any vampire of sufficiently advanced age would long ago have left behind any normal human prejudices, barriers and limitations when it comes to sexual experimentation and practice. While they may look and respond more or less as a human does in order to blend in with society, when opportunities arise to move beyond what a human would consider perhaps even “excessive,” for a vampire the question whether to explore or not doesn’t even arise because they’ve travelled those extreme paths so often it’s well within their comfort zones. Of course they’re going to indulge!
Vampire sexual behaviour, given free reign, would therefore probably be at the very far end of the range of wicked – and that would barely raise their pulse.
No wonder vampires are so popular!