Curiouser and curiouser

By which I mean that how modern monstrous women have been reduced to aesthetic decoration and losing the symbolic weight they held when they dominated myths and tales the past is to our complete and utter modern day detriment.

When I actually stop and think about monster x human romance, how it's representative mainly of heterosexual women's desire, or desire specifically of the male, compared to the obvious lack of monstrous women in modern media or just get a dirth of green-skinned anime waifus or a horned big titty muscle mummy, or some otherwise perfectly ordinary attractive woman with a few scales or fangs glued on. The monster is barely an aesthetic, barely straying from conventional attraction, especially compared to the monstrous male.

But I think that misunderstands what the monstrous woman represents, and why it desperately needs a proper revival.

Because the monstrous female has never been built from the same fears and desires as the monstrous male, but it's important for discussion and it should be given just as much love as the monstrous male.

The monstrous male is an expression of exaggerated masculinity, power, dominance, aggression, control. The monster is the protector, the king, the conqueror, the outcast. The thing powerful enough to terrify you, kill you, or keep you safe. What is attractive about him is often inseparable from what is frightening about him.

But the monstrous woman emerges from a different place.

Look through mythology and folklore and what form does she take? Birds and lions. Snakes and sharks. Seals and spiders. The pure awesome nature of the sea, the howling wind, the biting snowstorm, the dark water.

Beautiful and uncontrollable things. Things that tempt, things that entice, things that draw you closer. Things that consume.

The monstrous woman is the seducer, the mother, the destroyer.

It's a simple fact that her monstrosity is tied not to domination but to desire.

She's the thing singing from the rocks. The thing watching from the water's edge. The thing waiting patiently in the centre of the web. The horror is not that she forces herself upon you, but that she is undeniable, inescapable, the horror of knowing you'll walk towards her willingly.

Because the fear of the monstrous female isnt just death, but the desire that sways and dictates all. Desire for beauty, sex, love. Desire for comfort from mother, lover, friend. Desire for the feminine.

And beneath that, I think, is the crux of that deeper fear that drives so much if the modern anger towards women: that she does not need you.

For the monstrous female, no lover satisfies her because she was never waiting to be completed. No man controls her because she was never interested in being controlled. She desires what she desires, and when she is finished, she devours, she destroys, she disappears without a care.

The monstrous mother is frightening for similar reasons. This creature is femine twisted to the grotesque, the terror of her is that her loyalties exist outside the structures that are supposed to contain her. The terrible mother of myth and folklore uses men, devours them, devotes herself entirely to herself, and even her progeny are more facets of nature rather than something for her to nurture or need. She is frightening because she lacks love, that her desire is unleashed or directed where she chooses, if at all.

And through all of these figures runs the same idea: the desire for women is inescapable.

The need for women is imprinted on the brain, and it angers and terrifies in equal measure. As lovers, mothers, sisters, daughters, friends, human life is built around relationships with women in a way that cannot simply be abandoned or escaped. The fear is that this power women hold is woven into the fabric of life itself.

And that's why I keep wanting more monstrous women in modern media.

Not women written through that weird He-Man Women Haters Club lens, that drip of Tate-style resentment where female monstrosity is just a vehicle for complaining about women.

I want women who are dark and terrible and dangerous. Women who are monstrous in ways that are specifically feminine. Women who are beautiful as the sea is beautiful, and horrifying as the sea is horrifying.

Women whose power comes from being uncontrollable, undeniable, and impossible to escape. Women who don't stop being monsters just because they're also desired.