Inside the Booming Business of Monster Porn
When Cachét was three years old, she was terrified of a glow-in-the-dark rubber skeleton her parents used as a Halloween decoration. So much so that it became a “point of contention” between her and her parents. Then, for reasons she can’t fully explain, Cachét became obsessed with the skeleton. She asked her parents if she could keep it long after the other Halloween stuff came down, sleeping with it like a teddy bear until it fell apart. “ I think that might be where my attraction to weird, scary monster things came in,” says Cachét, now 34. (Cachét asked to use only her first name for privacy.)
Thus began a series of monster crushes. At five, she had eyes for the Crypt Keeper, the decomposing skeleton man from Stephen King’s Creepshow. Then she caught feelings for The Iron Giant and Imhotep from The Mummy (in his zombie form). But her strongest affection was reserved for insects in the yard. “I found grasshoppers very attractive,” she says.
Today, Cachét works as an illustrator. She makes a living doing commissions for personal use, which can cost anywhere from $50 for a sketch to $700 for a full color drawing. Her art often depicts her own fantasies: a woman making love to a cockroach in a seedy motel, a skeleton licking a woman’s neck, a grasshopper performing cunnilingus.
Growing up, Cachét didn’t have a word for her fetish. Now, she understands herself to be a teratophiliac, or more colloquially, a “monster fucker.” And Cachét is one of many. While she likes bugs and skeletons, others prefer demons, elves, ogres, orcs, Na’vi, gnomes, Sasquatch, slime blobs, or Minotaurs.
Since the dawn of the internet, monster fuckers have found each other in forums, bonding over homemade porn and smutty fan fiction. They’ve tended to skew young and geeky, with overlapping interests in videogames, sci-fi, anime, and RPGs. But today, teratophilia—sexual attraction to monsters —is everywhere. Business is booming, driving sales not just for freelance illustrators like Cachét, but in romantasy e-books and Stranger Things dildos. Now, genderqueer furries and BookTok moms have something in common. Is this what endless, personalized internet porn does to us? Are we all going to be monster fuckers soon?
“It is more prevalent than we consider, and I think a lot of people have a little bit of it,” says Phoebe Santillan, a researcher who studied monster attraction through the lens of evolutionary anthropology at California State University, Fullerton.
Our collective human canon is riddled with stories of monster-on-human lovemaking. In Greek mythology, Zeus seduced Leda in the form of a swan. Lamia, a half-snake, half-woman demon seduced young men before devouring them. Yokai, Japanese folkloric creatures, offer many examples: the half-spider temptress Jorōgumo, or the shapeshifting Takaonna who haunts brothels. The Moche culture, active in northern Peru from 100 to 800 AD, made pottery depicting skeleton sex. The 19th-century Japanese printmaker Hokusai is best known for The Great Wave off Kanagawa, that picture which adorns so many dorm room walls and tote bags. His second most famous work, another woodcut, called The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife, depicts a pearl diver being ravaged by two octopi.
“I think human sexuality is very weird in that it is so cerebral and conceptual, which is just not a thing in the rest of the animal kingdom,” says Lindsay Ellis, bestselling author of Axiom’s End, a science fiction novel featuring human-on-alien sex. Several monster fuckers I spoke to cited Ellis’s 2017 video essay “My Monster Boyfriend,” a critique of Guillermo Del Toro’s The Shape of Water, as a good articulation of how they feel. In short, Ellis found that the protagonist gave in to the Amphibian Man too readily, with the film underanalyzing how challenging that would actually be while addressing its themes of disability and immigration justice.
