Monster Fuckery Explained
What’s up with monster fucking? Monster Fucker Monday is a visual celebration, but there’s also plenty of monster fucking in smut books, aka erotic romances. Why? Gab Taylor offers an explanation:
So the reason why a lot of straight women love monster romance is that the monsters and the monster romance are less monstrous than real men in real life. It’s kind of like how in Beauty And The Beast, when Gaston is literally more horrible than the beast, who is an actual monster.
Yeah.
So if you’re really confused on why girly pops are reading about blue aliens, orcs, mermaids, dragons who may have more than one appendage… that’s why. Yeah, that’s why. It’s because it’s supposed to be a play on that. The fact that real men who are humans are actually the real monsters in real life. And that you have to go and find a blue alien who will actually love you and take care of you because the actual humans inside of our own species are incapable of doing so.
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Shorter URL for sharing: https://www.erosblog.com/?p=34747
Is anyone confused about why humans, male and female, eroticise the exotic?
She’s entitled to her opinion, but not like you to present misandrist (or misogynist) polemic without commentary. I did click through to see the video, and it wasn’t the rant I expected, but still.
Now where did I put that Dragon dildo my beloved asked Santa for… I’m going to need a bigger roll of paper…
Finagle, it’s not misandrist if it’s true, now is it?
That’s me being snarky. But the gods’ own truth is that I didn’t see her essay as a misandrist polemic. I took it for simple honesty — one woman’s truth, if not the only truth out there.
I didn’t think I needed to “not all men” her by way of preface or clarifying commentary; you all know where I stand. And if you’re paying attention, you also know that men (not all men, but too fucking many, and the bad ones keep refusing to wear signs) are the most dangerous predator in the ecosystem that women inhabit. That’s not misandry, that’s just facts. You can look it up in the violent crime statistics. So I didn’t take any kind of offense at all from what she said. I also didn’t take it personally; if a shoe doesn’t fit me, I don’t try to wear it.
We’re coming up hard on a quarter century of ErosBlogging; at this point there’s not much room for novelty except in finding perspectives about human sexuality that I haven’t published before, and publishing those. So if I publish a notion about why women eroticize monsters (for example) it’s not because I’m “confused” or even because I don’t have a theory of my own. It’s just because I stumbled across this one and thought “hey, haven’t seen this one before, let’s bung it up on the blog!”
Thanks for explaining. I didn’t get her perspective at all, that it might just be her truth. Therefore I didn’t click why you might post it. As I said watching it was less ranty than I expected from the words, which surprised me.
And definitely not accusing you of being confused (I was quoting her).
homo homini lupus est
We’re all capable of great cruelty and great compassion.
No worries! In the moment of my response I forgot that she’d used the “if you’re confused” phrasing too. All good.
I’m definitely onboard with Gab Taylor’s explanation – but it’s not the only explanation. I’ve read a fair number of monster romance novels and novellas by now, after getting curious, and from most, I get the vibe of “wow, let’s play around with what near-human people might be like to have sex with”, regardless of the gender of the couple ( or often more!).
But the female human with male alien ones sometimes have an extra layer of “human males mistreated me, an alien actually treated me humanely.”
We’ve got a long way to go yet as a species to live up to our best ideals.
In a genuine spirit of enquiry, how explicit is this vibe or layer?
I’ve not read any of the modern variants (Twilight shudder), but there has always been a ‘grass is greener’ element to the romance genre. It’s also not always written from experience. Pretty sure a good amount of the romance genre has been written by men under nom de plume. A quick ddg for “romaance novels written by men using a female no de plume” chucked up an interesting article by B.W.Haggart as well as lots of lists on Goodreads.
So I’m curious to what extent the modern genre of monster fuckery differs. Definitely not from an agenda, but curious if writing romance has changed. For historical comparison I offer up War of the Powers by Vardeman and Milán.
Finagle, I do not have an authoritative source for linkage, but whatever the historical case may have been, in modern romance male authors are at least somewhat rare and social media promotion is not optional.
For info, the link I’ve added to the website field is from 2022 and while not bang up to date does make references to what might be more authoritative sources, though it makes some unsupported guesses as well. Worth a read in my opinion.
As for social media promotion, are you implying every social media account accurately reflects the nominal owner? If so, I have a bridge you might be interested in… Bet there’s a few interns ghosting posts for authors under nom de plumes even now.
Anyway, I was more asking about the tenor of the language. I’m curious if Falbert has noticed if there is a shift in tone recently.
One thing doing a bit of digging into this has done has reminded me that Monster Fuckery is nothing new. Is it Bacchus 😄
The biggest shift in tone that I’ve read, over the last decade or so, is the willingness to be a lot more explicit in the sex scenes. Previously, probably due to gatekeeping publishers, I get the feeling that many sexual encounters in print in mass-market books were toned down a lot. Now, there are more than a few books that I have read recently that have three or four pages of pretty explicit description. Or perhaps that’s just what the algorithym is delivering to me?
And my observation is that the novels written by authors with seemingly female names are more likely to be more explicit than those written by authors with male names.
This certainly isn’t a dig at spicy content, just my opinion.
Finagle, I think you might need to soak yourself in modern short-form video-content social media for awhile to understand the point I’m making about social media promotion. I’m talking more TikTok, Reels, Instagram, that sort of thing. People are selling their personality as the author in a way that is hard to outsource, and combining that with appearances at cons, book events, signings … it would not be impossible to hire an actress to do all of that in the name of some cigar-chomping recluse but it would be expensive to maintain over the many years that most of these authors build and maintain their social media followings. You could persuade me that it’s happened a few times but not that it’s a normal or common practice.
Meanwhile, once again I don’t have links for you but I have seen a lot of #booktok women (authors and readers both) expressing that they aren’t very interested at all in reading modern smut/erotic romances (and especially sex scenes) written by men. What they say is that most men neither understand nor respect the genre conventions that have evolved over the last couple of decades, because it requires a deep soak in the genre by reading hundreds of current books, and most men, even the ones who fancy themselves qualified to write in the genre, haven’t done that. I’m not saying how much of this is true or accurate or fair, I’m just repeating things I’ve seen genre-interested women on TikTok say.
That article you linked is interesting, but barely seems to address erotic/smutty romance. See my comment to Falbert below about spice level for more details on the genre distinction I’m making here. It could be very accurate as far as it goes without really grappling with the needs and interests of the subgenre readers I’ve been talking about.
Falbert, the “spice” content of romance is all over the waterfront, from slow-burn mostly-off page stuff with very little explicit sex in the text to full-on smutbooks that are 40% or more raunchy sex scenes. My own reading interests lie in BDSM-themed and other stuff that’s a little bit edgy/kinky (a little bit of shifter stuff with fucked-up pack dynamics, a little bit of kidnapped-by-aliens stuff, a little bit of Omegaverse, some of the the lighter bits of “dark romance” like a few of the less-violent mafia romances, anything where they play with dubcon themes but respect the romance-genre convention of happily ever after) and most of that has a lot more than a handful of pages of explicit on-page sex. I would call this stuff “erotic romance” or just plain “smutty romance” and it’s very much a subcategory of modern romance in general (albeit, it’s a very substantial and popular subcategory). It is the only subcategory that I routinely read in, except when I get sucked into more “tame” romances by my compleatist reading habits when a particularly good author of erotic romance also has tamer titles.