One of the books I’m determined to finish in 2019 is about monsters, so I’m thinking a lot about them lately.

I love monsters—in both the “general interest” sense of the word love and the more perverted one. I always have, beginning with the tentacle hentai I discovered online as a teenager. That attraction has grown over the years as my sexuality has flourished and darkened, and stuff like the sudden flood of Venom erotic art and stories after the movie’s 2018 release has only increased my interest.

Not only do I love monsters, but I love that monster fucker (along with robot fucker and alien fucker) has become a term that people are proud to call themselves.

People have mused across Twitter and Tumblr—and probably other places I’ve simply yet to see—about the appeal that monster fucking has, particularly for women.

Because it’s women, both straight and queer, who seem to have propelled the popularity of eroticized monsters to its current peak. Sure, tentacle porn created by men has existed at least since the 1800s, when Hokusai painted the famous Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife. But octopuses and strangely disembodied tentacles are one thing—Venom’s sharklike teeth and slimy tongue, and the Xenomorph’s…well, everything is a whole different story.

I’ve seen different theories about why the truly, viciously monstrous appeal to women. Decades of media and social conditioning have romanticized the idea of a woman “fixing” a bad man, and there’s something undeniably attractive about the fantasy of being the exception, the one person whom the emotionless monster falls in love (or lust) with.

For straight women especially, normal human men are often pretty fucking monstrous on their own, just as much a threat to health and happiness as a violent, blood-thirsty creature. Women are used to looking past the ugly, unpleasant, and straight-up scary in search of the redeeming qualities underneath.

All of these are good, compelling theories, but none of them ring quite true to me. I’m not straight; I’m queer and have only ever dated women. Probably ninety percent of real-life straight men are actively repugnant to me, never mind “fixing” them or squinting hard to find the glimmer of good under the piles of trash.

Of course, my orientation doesn’t exempt me from the effects of thirty-odd years of social conditioning, but it does give me reason to examine my subconscious desires extra hard.

And here’s what all my examining has come up with: it has little to do with the monster’s appeal and everything to do with me.

There are monstrous impulses in me. I get off on blood and violence and dark fantasies. Sometimes I’m filled with a rage that burns hot enough to reduce even bones to ash, but I swallow it down. Women have to swallow it down. To be seen as angry or, god forbid, aggressive is to be seen as unnatural. An aberration.

A situation where I’m not the most unnatural thing in the room, where my darkest fantasies can’t compare to the real acts of the monster beside me, where my most violent impulses aren’t judged but accepted, encouraged even—oh, honey, that’s the stuff that monster fucking is made of.

That’s the appeal. For me, at least.

When I say I love monsters, I mean I recognize and love the monstrous parts of myself, and I want them to be recognized, understood, and loved by someone—something—else.

And if the sex is rough and bloody and dirty, hey, even better.