ratcreature | random thought while reading more Twilight...

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random thought while reading more Twilight...

So, I started reading the second part -- though I'm not that far along yet -- and I really don't get how this vampire reaction to blood is supposed to work. Apparently even a little blood, like from a paper cut, taxes their control, unless they have lots of practice like Carlisle. Okay, whatever.

But how does that work while they are in a school where half the students will bleed three to five days per month?? Granted, it's not a lot of blood, but more than from a paper cut, so they must smell that. And it's not like they growl a lot at random girls from what I gathered. Is this explained somewhere? Did I miss something? Does menstrual bloood smell icky? What? I don't get it.

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I've never read the books, so I have no idea what the author thinks, but menstrual blood is totally different than what's in your veins. Yeah, it has some blood in it, but it's mostly got all kinds of other stuff. Remember, it used to be the uterine lining that was going to support a baby :D

I very much doubt that a vampire could drink menstrual blood.

I guess their senses might be more finely honed, but it's still blood, even with slimy gunk in it. It's not so much that I think they should want to eat it like fresh blood, but that the smell doesn't bother them at all, when in this vampire version even tiny wounds smell strong enough to make them hungry. Well, at least the abstinent vampires refraining from eating human. It just seems odd that it isn't even mentioned. E.g. if I had a vampire boyfriend reacting this strongly to blood smells I'd ask, just to be on the safe side...

Do you really think it's odd that it's not mentioned in this kind of book?

Yeah. I mean, it is a book aimed a teenage girls from what I gather. And it's not like menstruation wasn't something that's quite present for that age group. I don't expect it to be central or anything, but it's not like it was that taboo as a subject in YA books from what I remember of reading in the "first falling love" genre. Admittedly when I was a teenager I skewed towards reading embarrassingly sappy lesbian romances rather than het ones, but I vaguely recall "girl falls for boy" ones too, and bodies weren't *that* absent in YA?

I haven't read Meyers but I thought this kind of thing was very absent in her books in general.

It seems to be in these books, but I don't think this is due to genre demands. I get not wanting to include lengthy sections dealing with bodily fluids, I can see how that would be jarring (and potentially kind of gross). But considering that the protagonist's vampire boyfriend talks a lot about her smell, I don't think some mention of it changing over the month or a sentence or two dealing with the blood smell aspect to satisfy our curiosity would have been out of place. I can't be the only one who wondered about this while reading.

If Judy Blume had written Twilight, she would have mentioned periods. :)

Heh, true. I suspect if Twilight was that kind of YA book a lot of things would go a bit differently.

I very much doubt that a vampire could drink menstrual blood.

Way to shoot down a beloved BtVS smutfic premise!

I admit to being squicked by menstrual blood in smutfic because it always reminds me of my oversharing biology teacher, who told us how much he used to like to fuck his girlfriend while she was having her period (without a condom since there was no pregnancy risk) before AIDS as he pitied us that so much stuff was now high risk behavior...

On the bright side at least he wasn't creepy about it, not like one of my high school art teachers who always stood too close, talked about whores and shoe fetishes and asked female students (at least pretty ones) what they did with their boyfriends in the shower (which also embarrassed said boyfriends who of course were also in the class). But still, I did not need to know that my biology teacher used to have a thing for menstrual blood.

Late response, but may I say...

EWWWWW!!!! Call me a bad bisexual, but that sounds gross to me. Suddenly, I find myself glad I was never really in BtVS fandom. :D

Hahaha, I was about to share with you the plot point of a BtVS fic I read, but then I realized just in time that you PROBABLY didn't want to know.

::wipes brow:: Oh thank you! Yes, I strongly suspect that I don't want to know.

It's like the person on my flist who feels compelled to post links to the worst Torchwood fic she sees, y'know, the serious Lord King Bad fic with tough guys crying? And then I feel compelled to read it. And then I cry.

I suspect that it's simply because the writer didn't want to deal with the topic, or maybe just didn't think of it. I totally think you're right, though. I grew up in rural Alaska, and I know that bears are drawn to the smell of menstrual blood (as well as the blood on sheets and things that were used in childbirth). Vampires might be more gourmet about blood than your average wilderness predator, but it still should smell like blood to them.

I don't think I've ever seen menstruation addressed in ANY vampire novel I've read, come to think of it! Of course, I don't read too widely in the genre...

I'm not all that familiar with the vampire genre either. If the vampires here had been just able to smell blood really well, even if they liked the smell, I still wouldn't have found it odd that menstruation wasn't mentioned, but the book makes such a big deal out of the vampires' reactions to just a little blood, and emphasizes that not reacting takes a lot of control from them. And when it is stressed like that, as if they were sharks or something with an instinctual reaction, it just seems odd that being around menstruating women is not thought of at all. I mean, we are in the girl's POV and I can't imagine her not at least wondering about that.

Nope, this topic isn't addressed in any book I've ever read on vampires, no mythology, and precious few fanfics, even :P And hey, if Anne Rice won't touch it... really though, I would bet good money that if she did think to put it in, or even if she didn't, the editors would have piched a fit about it, because yes, its a book aimed at teenage girls... and Menstruation is a taboo subject in a lot of the western world. I can't speak for europe, but I know that Judy Bloome is still the height of racy "God, It's Me Margret" books and she was writing in the Sixties.

*shrugs* maybe she just couldn't think of a classy way to cover it. I say its alright that she left it out entirely, because as my own writing teachers have told me, it doesn't matter what you do in your novel, as long as you commit to it, and if she's going to commit to not touching the subject, then I don't have any particular methedological problem with it.

height of racy blah blah blah in the states and canada, should have been in there :P

It has something of an elephant in the living room though, the way she talks about the vampires instinctual reactions to blood smells, and the way Edward smells Bella all the time, yet it's as if menstruation doesn't exist. It's not that I expect a lot of focus on bodily fluids, but it's like-- hm, okay so in fiction you usually don't see characters using the toilet, which is fine, you don't really want to, but if a sequence of events is set-up in a way that there is no possible room or opportunity that a character could have use a toilet over a long time, then you'd notice, because it is just wrong and ridiculous. Even though you don't want to hear about toilet breaks in detail and they are usually absent in fiction, but in this case the circumstances make the absence noticeable. The menstrual blood thing here was kind of like that for me.

Hi, so I'm random. I was thinking about this very topic (in response to this (http://ideas.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/14/women-vampires-and-gay-men/?scp=2&sq=vampires&st=cse)blathering bit of nonsense) and it seems to be an under-addressed issue. I know it is mentioned in passing in one of the Sookie Stackhouse books (a vampire smells it and looks hungry for a second), but that's all I've read. The internet says Rice doesn't talk about it, nothing about Buffy's monthly friend, nada. I'm so not surprised.

BTW, this is post shows up on the third page of a google of "vampire menstruation". You're just that famous.

I suspect it is just one of these genre conventions where everyone ignores something. Only I don't actually read or watch that much vampire fiction, so it is a really glaring omission to me, especially if like Twilight the narrative goes on and on about how any blood smell makes vampires crazy. It's not that I want pages of talk about bodily fluids, but an off-hand mention would have been nice.

this is prolly way too old to reply do, but Anne rice did mention menstrual blood in the one book where lestate ended up in hell and somehow getting the shroud of turin. the girl he had been talking to at the begining of th ebook was menstruating, and he had noticed. closer to the end of the book when he finally got away from lucifer, he pulled down her panties for a quick snack to recover from the escape.

I have a REAllY weird memory for details from books.

Heh. So some vampire fiction does go there.

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random thought while reading more Twilight...

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