Notes Off-The-Grid: Why fascists get off on the fantasy of the vampire without the costs.
Scribbled at a dive bar on a series of napkins wet with the condensation of well gin martinis.
The ideal of straight male desire under fascism is, in a word, parasitic.
This kind of parasite believes it can take without consequences.
That’s its delusion, its danger—and ultimately its downfall.
This parasite takes without acknowledgment or accountability for what’s been taken. This parasite is ruled, and attempts to rule others, by entitlement to its appetites. It hollows because it feels hollow. It survives through secrecy—even as it erases.
It feeds from the host, usually someone with less power—like a woman or femme, a worker, a younger lover, a racialized body—and imagines itself untouched and untouchable.
In the straight male erotic imaginary that power loves—especially professional hierarchies where codes of ethics and not pulses of appetite should safeguard encounters—the turn-on is compliance masquerading as mutual desire. The straight man who wants to be adored, feared, obeyed, but never seen except on his terms.
That’s the erotic imaginary at the heart of fascism: extraction without responsible relationality.
Fascism eroticizes hierarchy—especially sexual hierarchy—and recruits parasites through an irresistible alibi. It tells them they are kings, not thieves. They don’t need to become true believers or even party members to enable the project of domination, just perform fascist erotics in their private lives.
That’s why fascism often craves the aesthetic of the vampire without the lived costs. Without the haunting by the shadow of one’s own power.
The vampire, if anything, is a cautionary tale for the predictable consequences of believing the myth of one’s entitlement to others. A maker who treats his fledglings as props for his ego gets burned. Sometimes literally. A vampire lover who lies to preserve his status and others’ dependency ends up alone.
The vampire who denies the hard truth of relationality collapses.
What vampire stories teach—again and again—is that to live as a vampire, and not a parasite, means acknowledging one immutable reality: what you touch you change, what you change changes you.
That’s the price.
That’s the pleasure.