Fucking magnets, how do they work? – Insane Clown Posse, “Miracles”
It’s not always easy being the Honest Courtesan; sometimes in the process of talking about human sexuality, I run into some aspect of my own sexuality which is somewhat embarrassing to admit to. At that point I have to decide whether to walk around the subject, or say “I’d really rather not discuss that”, or just throw caution to the wind and forge ahead out of my comfort zone, trusting that Aphrodite will bless my courage. Often it’s because a reader asks a question which can be answered in part by discussing my own feelings, but in this particular occasion it’s because a reader wrote an article in Psychology Today. The reader is Dr. Robert King, and the article is subtitled “What Monster Porn Might Tell Us About Human Nature”. It’s a critique of John Horgan’s “What ‘Monster Porn’ Says About Science and Sexuality” in Scientific American…an odd venue for it because, as King explains, Horgan “used a blatantly creationist strategy to attack an entire field of science of which he disapproves”, evolutionary psychology. Horgan absurdly claims that because he personally can’t think of a reason for women to be turned on by the idea of sex with monsters, there must not be a scientific explanation, and that this is wonderful because Freud. Or something.
Dr. King, on the other hand, displaying the superior insight one would expect from one who appreciates this blog, has a very good sense of what the biological connection is:
…monster porn is by no means novel…Ancient dildoes going back 20000 years are adorned with pictures of various potent animals. And…just take a look at what the Centaurs are trying to do to the Lapith women on the metopes of the…Parthenon…raucous festivities involving symbolic sex with humans dressed as animals…go back as far as records begin. Not far from where I work there is an annual festival at which the Queen of the May symbolically marries King Puck…an icon of animal potency and fertility. In the UK symbolic animals grab innocent maidens off the streets with impunity during May festivities. What do things like Bigfoot, Cthulhic monsters, magical beings, werewolves, vampires and centaurs have in common? Well, to someone not wedded to a creationist psychology might I venture one or two themes of adaptationist relevance? Power. Potency. Transgressiveness. Loss of control. Outbreeding. The evocation of uncontrollable desire. Dominance. Submission. Rescue. Heroes. Villains. Large penises. Do these sound like themes irrelevant to biology or reproduction? If so, then it’s time to go back to school…it might easily turn out that the prevalence of these fantasies has no adaptive function—they might be by-products of other adaptations. Not everything is an adaptation. Every first year biologist knows this…
Horgan is apparently so content to view sexuality as an unfathomable chthonic mystery that he doesn’t even bother to ask a reasonably-intelligent woman who’s turned on by this sort of thing what she thinks about it. And though I’ll never read Taken by the T-Rex or Moan for Bigfoot, that’s not because I’m disgusted by the subject matter; as it turns out, I myself am a reasonably-intelligent woman who’s turned on by this sort of thing. See these illustrations? I’ve got a bunch of ‘em in my art folders. People who played Dungeons & Dragons with me could tell you about some memorable episodes. And remember my mentioning how the movie Gargoyles inspired one of my favorite make-believe scenarios as a kid? Yeah, that. The thing is, anybody who’s read some of my other columns on my own kinks and paid attention to some of the fantasy iconography I’ve featured (dig the cover of my book at upper right) could’ve guessed as much; it’s no surprise when a woman who is turned on by rape, abduction and bondage scenarios is similarly affected when the abductor is some sort of non-human entity. For the record, dinosaurs and the like do nothing for me; it has to be an intelligent monster, like a demon, an astropelagic alien (again, see my book) or a werewolf. In a spoken sequence on Bat Out of Hell, a male character asks a female, “On a hot summer night, would you offer your throat to the wolf with the red roses?” My friend Philippa used to say that her answer to that was, “Every fucking time.”
When Horgan declares that evolutionary psychology can’t explain monster porn, he indulges in the same narcissism as prohibitionists do when they declare that no woman could choose sex work: “I cannot understand this, therefore it is inexplicable.” But actually, women being turned on by monsters is no odder (vampires, anyone?) than women indulging in transactional sex; however much either or both of them might upset and horrify prudes, they both have their origins in female behavioral scripts going back to the time when the behavior of human men wasn’t much different from that of the monsters in the fantasies.
This is fascinating! Thanks for posting
Not a question, but a comment—if it really were so impossible that women should be turned on by the idea of sex with monsters, then why are there so many recent Kindle books (usually written by women) about female protagonists seduced by vampires or werewolves?
It is amazing that something so mainstream can still be seen as “impossible”. Perhaps they have never heard of Twilight or come across female-written fanfiction with similar themes.
No odder than conception from a holy spirit.
I’m never entirely sure that when outlawing normal sexual behavior, if its a genuine belief or just a means to an end to be able to selectively persecute certain individuals or groups of individuals.
And if the rest is just a feeble attempt at providing a rational excuse.
I wasn’t really that familiar with “Monster Porn” – my “porn” years were 30 years ago and, back then – they consisted mostly of the JC Penny catalog ladies underwear section. I’m not joking about this.
Anyway – so I looked some up not too long ago and … I would say some of it is hot … in a BORRIS kind of way. However – I did run across some examples of monsters coupling with human females and killing them in the act. One had a PILE of dead women and just threw them to the side and said … “Ah, another one died.”
I DO NOT dig that. So, I haven’t read any of these articles critiquing “monster porn” – but if you use the most extreme examples of the art – then one could really go crazy psycho-analyzing that.
Had a girlfriend once who had fantasies about a Vampire raping her. She would dream about this … and they would get so animated that they’d wake me up. I’m not kidding – she literally “soaked” the sheets in an absolutely unbelievable way when she had these dreams.
“they consisted mostly of the JC Penny catalog ladies underwear section. I’m not joking about this.”
Don’t apologize for JC Penny catalog ladies underwear section. That was awesome! I mean … that’s what I’ve heard. From a friend.
I’m active in a forum which has a whole bunch of female members who would totally understand. Just today they were giggling about dinosaur porn.
There is even a company that sells dildos and vibrators shaped as dragon, horse, and dinosaur penises with detail bios of each creature to “encourage” potential purchasers.
My take on monster porn is that it presents a rape fantasy scenario in a way that places it firmly within the bounds of fantasy. There is plenty of other types of dubious consent erotica out there – the stranger in my bedroom, my neighbor f***ed me in my sleep, etc. – that doesn’t interest me at all, probably bc it’s too close to reality (in the sense that it theoretically could actually happen, even if the odds are a trillion to one). But a centaur or something? Not even remotely plausible in reality, thus it is a safe subject for a dominance/loss of control/rape fantasy. And while in general I am with Maggie on the need for an intelligent monster…half the time even those are written so badly in the genre they are worse than a bigfoot with no speech :/
Thanks for this comment—something clicked in my understanding, after I read it. Very interesting!
” The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men, and they bore children to them. Those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown.”
The name of the story in my book to which I refer in the text above is “Nephil”.
I was just thinking of that part of Genesis. And many ancient mythologies had demigods bred from gods and mortals. Then there are succubi and incubi …
If the creationist is having such a hard time explaining monster porn, he’s really going to have a bad time figuring out hentai and the incredibly low rape rates in Japan. BTW and vampiric fangdaddies you come across you can send them my way.
The thing with creationists is that they _need_ their world-view to be true. As it is extremely disconnected from reality, of course anything inconsistent with it _must_ be false. The simple fact of the matter is that there are no creationists accepting facts. There may be some former creationists that do, but as soon as you let the real world in, you cannot be a creationist anymore.
Side note: Fantasies are not a problem as long as people recognize the difference to reality. Most do.
You’ve just written a broad swath of condemning “pap” against mostly harmless people.
I’m not a creationist – I’m a strict evolutionist. I don’t pretend to have all the answers of the questions of the universe (so I don’t rule out the existence of a “creator” of some sort – of what nature that creator(s) is I don’t pretend to know – and I think that is rightly an intellectual position to take. However – I see so many “I BELIEVE IN SCIENCE” folks jutting their arrogant heads in the air as if THEY DO have all the answers. Ya don’t!
When you say that the moment you start accepting facts – you can’t be a creationist – what facts exactly are you talking about? Are you trying to say that all creationists are little marionettes who disavow every fact they come across in the real world? It’s as if … “well you believe in creationism – so that means you’re wrong on everything”. That’s an awfully arrogant position to take.
I would wager – that on some subjects – even some creationists know more than you.
But it’s a beautifully lazy way to debate people – simply say “you aren’t living in the real world – because you believe in creationism … ergo your thoughts on national economics cannot be believed!”
Simply dismisses them right out of hand.
That would be the simple explanation for what I just claimed. A more complex one would be that creationism in basically all its forms is incompatible with the scientific method, and that can be observed.
However, some background explanation is required:
Nobody understanding the scientific method “believes” in Science. It is not a question of believing in it or not. The only thing the scientific method requires in matters of belief is the belief that nature can actually be understood in some of its aspects and that these aspects are accessible to experiments and observations. Of course if you do not believe that, then the scientific method (and all it has been used to find out, often inaccurately called “Science”) goes right out the window. That mental trick has been used in the past to make science and religion compatible, by just claiming that “god is not accessible to reason”, i.e. defining god as extra-scientific. For example, Occam (an otherwise very rational monk) was a subscriber to that approach. And there actually Science tells us absolutely nothing. This explanation could be correct. It could also be completely wrong. It is a matter of personal taste and nobody can prove it either way.
But you make a good point: The people that “believe in Science” are just as misguided as the ones that believe in Creationism. And no, Science is not about having “all the answers”. That is just a smear-campaign done by its opponents. Science is about having a quality grade with all known “answers”! There are no “absolute scientific facts”, although that is often claimed falsely. There are just well-established “explanations” (i.e. ones that would require extraordinary evidence from experiments to make it false and where finding that evidence has been tried really hard and without success), and less well established things. That uncertainty is what makes quite a few people uncomfortable. They then either start to “believe” in science (which is bad) or to go to one of the “alternatives” (which is worse).
Of course (and well understood by all Scientists), calling something a “fact” in science is just shorthand for “well established explanation with a very small residual probability of being wrong”. No need to attack that, shorthand is a fundamental human communication tool.
Creationism is incompatible with a large number of well established scientific explanations, yet the Creationist offer no explanations compatible with the scientific method. That is why as soon as a Creationist becomes interested in actually finding out how thing work and verifying the explanations, he/she is very soon not a Creationist anymore. The “design flaw” in Creationism is that it claims to be “Science”, when it is not.
The philosopher Karl Popper introduced the idea of ‘falsifiability’ of science. Something (a theory, etc) must be capable of being shown to be false. It may not actually be false, but it must be capable of being tested. A statement such as “God is all-knowing” cannot be tested; therefore it cannot have a scientific basis.
Indeed. Or rather, science does not apply to it and hence it cannot make any claims about it. The offensive things about Creationists is that they hijack the mannerisms and language of Science without applying the Scientific Method. People that “believe” in science instead of understanding it are vulnerable to that scam.
Now that you mention Popper, I also just remembered that Science has come up with one absolute truth, namely that there are not absolute truths (besides this one). This is interestingly one of the few solid research results from Philosophy.
Don’t you mean that we cannot establish truths absolutely, except for this one, and negative statements like ‘X is not a complete description of the universe’, and maybe some other things?
No, the result from Philosophy says there are no such truths. The proof is by reductio ad absurdum, as far as I remember.
Of course, if you allow fuzzines and residual risks of being wrong, that changes. But usually these things are regarded as incompatible with the idea of “absolute”.
The main application, incidentally, is to spot people that want to sell you something. For example, if somebody claims “With absolute certainty, there is a god”, you know that they want to sell you this idea as they claim properties they cannot be sure about.
That’s hardly unique to Creationists. Hell, we just had a semi-respectable journalist calling for “Global Warming Deniers” to be jailed. Now THAT’S a bad case of ‘nyaa nyaa nyaa, I don’t want to hear you!’.
Let’s face it; most people will tend to cling to their worldview until blasted out of it with high explosive.
Indeed. Every crackpot is entitled to their opinion. The problem just starts when these people are put on the same level as scientific facts. And in a democracy, that becomes a severe issue as soon as the scientific facts get inconvenient.
One problem the BBC has is the need to “balance” opinions. If there is a report saying that such-and-such is “bad” (or good), then even if this is a view that the overwhelming majority of people would hold, they generally have to find someone who will refute it.
Yes, that is something many reporters believe to be a “best practice”. Unfortunately the idea is broken as some things some people believe are so disconnected from reality that even giving them tiny airspace massively tips the scales in their favor.
However, the “overwhelming majority of the people” is not a sane standard when you look for insight and understanding. Maybe the human race will eventually get there, but not anytime soon.
From Korhomme’s Dept of Useless Information: Thales of Miletus was one of the original seven sages, successfully predicted a solar eclipse, and made a “killing” in olive futures, all in the 6th century BC. Alas, it’s not recorded what, if any, input he had into the dildo business; which is strange, as Miletus was famed for the manufacture of the best dildos in the ancient world.
I know nothing about monster porn. But, I’m impressed with how some people can erect the most amazing edifices based on their own ideologies, and using a form of “logic”or reasoning. If you start from a position of “creationism”, then it must follow that anything which tends to disprove this must be “untrue”; you cannot go to square one and argue from there, you are already several moves down the “logical” progression. And not just with “monster port”, we’ve all seen it with “trafficking”, abstinence programmes of sex education, and why the Swedish model is so wonderful. In other words, if the base from which you start is faulty, or just a bit wobbly, then your conclusions aren’t going to be worth much.
A course in “creativity” or “creative thinking” starts with the mantra: challenge the givens, challenge the assumptions. That is, from what base are these people starting their argument, their thesis? and are they being totally transparent about it?
You might well think that you know that 1 + 1 = 2, and we accept this in everyday life. It took Russell and Whitehead 300 pages of closely reasoned argument to show that it was actually true.
It did? Because at least in modern mathematics, “2” is simply a syntactic abbreviation for “1 + 1” and “1” is one for “0 + 1”. That way all you need is “0” and “successor of x”, conveniently written as “x + 1”. We learned it that way at university.
They started with set theory and did a bunch of other things first and finally got around to defining addition rather late in the game. If they had taken a direct route to 1+1=2 it would have taken them rather less than 362 pages.
Celos: If there was not this thing called”evolution”, what be different in the world? Seriously, what else but what we see in existence but we see could have happened, given the initial conditions? And if a thing has no effect one way or the other, what is it, exactly?
An acorn turns into an oak tree. A cloud of primordial hot gas turns into Peregrine Falcons and Sea Eagles and beautiful women. You would not call the transformation of an acorn into an oak tree “evolution”.but you seem compelled to call the transformation of primordial nature into current nature by that name.
It was all there at the beginning. People vary as to what they do with that information, but there it is.
This appears to be a general counterargument against anything but fundamental physics.
Is there some context here? What post in particular are you replying to?
My best friend and I bonded over Monster Porn, and she was accepted for publication in an anthology of Cthulu erotica. Maybe I should send her this post…
Please do, and send me the link to the anthology. 🙂
A similar feminine fantasy is the older man. In her book “Delinquent Daughters: protecting and policing adolescent female sexuality in the United States, 1885-1920,” author Mary E. Odem reveals that after the age of consent was raised in California, most of the prosecutions for “statutory rape” were initiated by parents against the wishes of their daughters.
Court records describe how teenage girls typically had secret sexual relationships with older men (not teenage boys) over a period of time, going to hotels with the older lovers or inviting them to share their bedroom while the rest of the family slept, before the parents found out about it and called the police.
I’ve never had a boyfriend who was younger than me; the minimum is about 3 years older, and some were as much as a generation older. As a teenager I found the majority of males my own age utterly hopeless, though that sense lessened in my twenties, was reduced to a rule in my thirties and is mostly gone now.
As you get older you may find younger partners more interesting.
Not a chance, as you should realize if you’ve been paying attention to what turns me on.
I think that the monster porn turn-on comes in that forbidden aspect of sex. We all treat sex in our culture like a monster that must be slain (or at least caged,) so I think that to some extent, we fantasize about opening that cage and releasing our instincts.
Reblogged this on Sable Aradia, Priestess & Witch and commented:
Not really sure why I’m reblogging for this blog, other than I support sacred sexuality in all its forums as part of my Wiccan ethos. Whatever turns you on is good by me, an it harm none! (And by that, I mean lasting harm; a little kink can be fun and even good for you, it turns out.) I think we all just like what we like, and as long as everyone can give informed consent and no one is harmed in the long run, have at it! And celebrate it; why shouldn’t we? I think that often as Pagans, we maintain some of our Christian conditioning, that sex is evil and sinful and bad, and good girls don’t have sex and even if they do, they don’t enjoy it. And this is, quite bluntly, bullshit.
First “rape fantasy” and now “monster porn”?!
LOL!!!
Western Civilization never ceases to amuse, confuse and disgust me.
If you think either of those are “Western”, you’re woefully ignorant of female sexuality. But then, your previous comments about how more than a small and unusual minority of women want to pay men for sex already revealed that, so no surprise there. Methinks you should quit before you make a total fool of yourself.
SCORE SCORE MAGGIE McNEILL SCORES!
P.S. I don’t think I’d pay for sex…nope…but I would pay for a romantic date with a man I personally found exciting. I think a good actor with interpersonal skills could do it well. Why don’t women have this service? 🙁
P.P.S. Enough women have dreams/nightmares about being raped or having sex with wolves & werewolves that many psychoanalytical papers have discussed it, going back to papa Freud.
Quote me on this; “ more than a small and unusual minority of women want to pay men for sex”…. for I don’t recall ever writing that, nor could I find such a statement even remotely suggesting that.
“If you think either of those are “Western”, you’re woefully ignorant of female sexuality. ”
Western Universalist thought tends to think “everyone in the world is, or should be, like me.”
You have a huge and difficult task ahead of you trying to prove that the majority of women around the world have rape or monster fantasies. You are on a slippery slope trying to project your particular fantasy life as global “female sexuality”.
Be careful.
If you can’t tell the difference between “women with this fantasy are found in every culture” and “the majority of women have this fantasy”, there is no hope for you.
I don’t think I can say anything better than what’s already been said by others. Or even as good.
[…] McNeill, “Beauty and the Beast”, The Honest Courtesan, […]
Thanks for the shout-out, in case I didnt say so at the time. This piece has led to one published paper and several offers of some interesting collaborations in folk-lore and biology