I hear people talk a lot about adolescent male sexuality, and now we all know that the reason that a lot of guys didn't want to go to the chalkboard in school was because they had boners in the middle of class. But rarely do I hear people talking or joking about adolescent female sexuality. (Thank God that one of the few benefits of being female meant that being horny didn't prevent us from walking in public).
Alas, adolescent female sexuality was a long labrynth of confusion, excitement and fear. And then came vampires. I'm not talking about Twilight, I'm talking about vampires before vampires were cool. Before Twilight there was Frank Langella, who made being a vampire sexy for the first time, in my opinion. My best friend and I would watch Frank Langella's Dracula, The Lost Boys, Company of Wolves, and reruns of Dark Shadows over and over, soon discovering why our loins would ache during the sexually charged scenes.
For the first part of high school, I was still a tomboy, and just wanted to be outside with either my daddy or big, strong horses. I wasn't quite ready to give into my bodies sexual signals just yet, as my best friend Lisa was. Lisa was a gentle and feminine creature who was obsessed with vampires, and more ready to allow herself to submit to male sexual dominance than I was. She and I were both thirteen when we started hanging out. Our bodies were changing and we were able to confide to each other what was happening, and how we were feeling about boys. And later, Lisa and I both, made darn sure that we got boyfriends that understood our adolescent need for "first submission" and romaticism, fueled by these movies.
My point in writing this though, is that it's timeless, isn't it? Girls take to horses first, then possibly vampires, or some other symbol of male dominance, and then guys is high school. It seems to be a cyclical progression as far as I can see, with the emergence of the teen-focused movie, Twilight. This movie has become so popular that even grown women are panting over it, which makes me chuckle, because I betcha those were the same girls that made fun of me and Lisa for being "vampish" all of those years (we didn't have the word 'goth' back then). Well, I guess a girl's got to get it out of her system at some point. *giggling* It's amazing that what Lisa and I were actually told was quite forbidden in high school, is now all the rage in school's all over the country!