The VAST majority of vampire fans (readers of vampire fiction, joiners of Forever Knight fan clubs, etc) are female. Many women are attracted to the figure of the vampire because the vampire represents passion without obligatory consummation; the release of animal desires and sexual fantasies without responsibility/commitment (if the "victim" is being "forced" to fall in love with a mesmerizing, powerful undead figure and feel arousal as he "rapes" the blood from her neck, bringing her to a crashing orgasm, then she doesn't have to say that the fantasy was hers all along. This is common in many Harlequin Romance type bodice-rippers, and in many women's sexual fantasies, not just in vampire fiction. Read _My Secret Garden_ by Nancy Friday.)
If more women than men join fan lists, you will probably be sending your questionnaire to a predominantly female audience.
To attract more possible male responses, try sending this questionnaire out to role players - people who play Ravenloft, Vampire: The Masquerade, etc. No, they won't all be vampires, but I for one role-play because it allows me to be a vampire in public - I get a cheap thrill out of "pretending" to be a vampire. It's very liberating to be myself in public and hide behind the facade of a "game," even when the character I play has more powers than I do and is not biologically the same entity as I am. I imagine other vampires probably experience the same release while role playing, and are attracted to Vampire: The Masquerade for the same reason. And role players are far more likely to be male than female. Demographically, the male gamers outnumber female gamers by about (at last check) seven to one or even ten to one. White Wolf gamers are a little more even, but the women are still outnumbered - there are two to three men for every woman who plays, as a general rule.
Don't ask me about why the statistics for fandom (useful for genre writers to know!) and for gaming (natch) are the way they are. I'm only citing them; I didn't compile them.
>I should have wondered it but, I was also surprised to realize that
>Vampirism is often linked to sexual sadomasochistic practices. The act of
>drinking blood, which is certainly a taboo for most cultures, is then
>turned into a sensual/sexual experience which is not necessarily
>considered as immoral.
It's not THAT surprising.
First of all, most vampire fiction (especially that using a male vampire) has sadomasochistic overtones. Dracula has hypnotic powers that allow him to mesmerize, dominate, and seduce his victims; and he keeps a harem of submissive wives. Anne Rice's vampires are the creation of a mind that also came up with _The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty_, _Exit to Eden_, etc. See my above comment about how many female fans are attracted to the vampire because he (female vampires generally are not so dominant, for some reason, at least not in literature) offers pleasure without responsibility, a safe rape fantasy that rarely involves actual sexual contact.
Secondly, feeding is painful. Whether you bite hard enough to draw blood (I realize that I've jumped into practical aspects of vampirism here; sorry if this was too abrupt) or slice with a sterile razor or whip your donor till s/he bleeds or use a needle to pierce the flesh, you're going to cause pain. Some methods of feeding are more painful than others, but they all hurt. If you are going to eroticize the feeding process, you have to involve a bit of sadomasochism. By definition. Sadomasochism is the giving/receiving of erotic pain; QED.
Finally, speaking as a sadomasochistic switch, I can say from personal experience that SM is vampiric by nature. Bottoms get high from the endorphins produced by the extreme sensation, and often feed from the large amount of attention that they are given (believe me, the centre of attention in a scene is nearly always the bottom); tops feed from the surrender, extreme emotion, and need exhibited by the bottom. It's an amazing thing when the exchange of power ends up energizing both (or all) people involved in a sadomasochistic transaction. Explosive, really (provided everything goes right). While blood isn't always drawn (and is rarely ingested in most cases) there's definitely a vampiric sensibility about the whole thing - it's vampiric on a spiritual and an erotic level, if that makes any sense.
>I also found that spreading of vampirism in the USA has also cultural
>origins. The vampire seems to has become a contemporaneous hero in the
>80's and 90's in the USA. It is present through many US recent books,
>movies, series, shows etc. This phenomenon does not exist in France and I
>am not aware that it exists in Europe (maybe in the UK, what do you think
>Danny ?...).
Interesting observation.
Vampirism seems to be reasonably in vogue in England as much as in America, at least from what I have observed - and the vampiric hero and antihero seem just as common, if not more so (this was the home country of George Gordon, Lord Byron, after all, who was perhaps the first Englishman to blatantly advertise his vampirism and market it to potential buyers of his poetry).