"In Martin V. Riccardo's fascinating book Liquid Dreams of Vampires (1997), he spent six years collecting the dreams and fantasies of men and women who found themselves obsessed by and attracted to vampires. Most of the men and women said they not only were attracted to vampires, they wanted to be one, or they fantasized that they were vampires. Some of them wished for immortality; some expressed a fear of death and aging. Many identified with the vampire as rebel and alien, the lonely outsider. Some expressed a love of the vampire's strength, their lack of ties to the world, their lack of commitment — the sense of power and lack of limitations. Sex was definitely secondary.

"Katherine Ramsland, the biographer of Anne Rice, writes in Piercing the Darkness: Undercover with Vampires in America Today (1998) that when she was young she was fascinated by Dracula. 'I wanted to feel what he felt when he went after his prey. I went to bed each night with my arms crossed over my chest in the hope that I would waken as a vampire. I told people I was 403 years old. Without knowing how to articulate it, I sensed there was some visceral quality in the vampire's experience that would enhance life and make me feel as if I were part of something much larger than myself.'

"Some people in Riccardo's book do talk about love and sensuality, but very few of the fantasies mention sexual intercourse or penetration. The eroticism more often involves biting and sharing blood. And while there are plenty of people who will give you a Freudian analysis of this, how these people are 'fixated in the oral stage,' anyone who has cut their finger as a child and licked it knows there is a certain comfort in connecting with that juice of life.

"In many novels, vampires can't have normal sexual intercourse. In Stoker's time you would not have put a sex scene in a novel, but if you think of the vampire novels by Anne Rice and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, written in the 1970s and 1980s, a time when explicit sex was common in literature, there is no intercourse. Unlike many of the current vampire romance novels, the novels by Rice and Yarbro emphasize — like the fantasies Riccardo obtained in his interviews — a sharing of blood, and a feeling of total ecstatic union, which Riccardo says, 'implies feelings of connection, intimacy, sensuality, and arousal without any direct connection to sexual intercourse.' In other words, he says, the vampire is a sensual rather than a purely sexual creature. . . .

"You could argue that the vampire is clearly speaking up for a more female-centered form of lovemaking and sensuality. But it's not sex as we tend to think of it in popular culture. Riccardo even argues — although this goes way too far — that when we see novels where women are taken by force by vampires, it is done with such elegance and style, they don't think of it as rape.

"But I am going to argue that just as rape is only superficially about sex, and really about power, so, underneath much of the romance and sexuality that we see in vampire fiction and films is a deeper exploration of power and its abuses. And power is something that we all tussle with. And it's something most of us want more of."