The truth about minotaur smut (2024)

'In these books, heroes exhibit meticulous tailoring to female desires.'

Now, Meyer’s disciples have worked up a thirst for darker material. The past couple of years have seen an explosion in fantasy “smut”, thanks to TikTok’s “BookTok” community. The bulging-biceped hero of Mills & Boon has been chased away by a horde of improbable new sex symbols, cheered on by “creators” telling their legions of breathless viewers “Guys — this is the spiciest book I’ve ever read!” The content of these books? I’m embarrassed to tell you. Let’s start with an example.

Glory Milking Farm is a wildly popular “sweet and steamy monster romance” from the Cambric Creek erotica series by C.M. Nascosta. The book has been dropping jaws across social media since its release in 2021, and concerns the love story of “typical Millennial” Violet, who decides to take up rather hands-on work at a farm for hunky minotaurs (the premise, something to do with manufacturing erectile dysfunction medication for human men, is interesting to nobody, least of all the author). One “out-of-her-league minotaur”, an immortal sentence in itself, takes a special interest and demands private “milking” sessions. Can Violet handle it?

I don’t know, I’m not going to read it. Nor will I link to Amazon, you perverts. But be assured that this is just one of hundreds of monster-p*rn works pumping life into the publishing industry; we have the Ice Planet Barbarians series about aliens with sex-toy-like appendages, Ensnared (a spider-based p*rno) and endless iterations of The XYZ Bride (orcs, dragons, whatever you fancy). At the heart of each is the very Twilight-y premise of the beastly, sexy killer who just wants you, but with much more actual sex than we ever got from the Cullen clan.

In these books, heroes exhibit meticulous tailoring to female desires. They are loyal, have unquenchable libidos and boast anatomies which are designed to accommodate whatever acrobatic sexual act the heroine craves. Yes, tastes have become more extreme with readers’ ages — but there is a particular innovation to these monsters which says something about what women really want: in a lot of these books, the “men” can’t bloody speak. They can probe you, tear you open, batter you about — but never chastise, patronise or lead you on.

“They can probe you, tear you open, batter you about — but never chastise, patronise or lead you on.”

The risk of slaughter is more essential with non-humans, and helpfully at one remove from the complex politics of the post-MeToo age. This was first and perhaps most notoriously explored in Marian Engel’s 1976 shocker Bear, in which an unfulfilled office worker strikes up a romantic and sexual rapport with an enormous, well, bear. In the end, it nearly kills her with a single stroke of its claw on her back (cute!) — and, having had a taste of the big cuddly bedrock of erotic risk, the protagonist trots back to her old life. These stories are a way for women to confront their desire for self-immolation outside of the oppressive framework of the real world. And, critically, all risk in these novels is purely physical — the emotional side of things is sewn up, guaranteed by what often amounts to a conventional fairytale monogamy arc.

Such monstrous tastes have invigorated female sexuality since long before Angela Carter’s electric — and, for me, world view-shaping — collection of refashioned fairy tales in The Bloody Chamber (1979). In these tales, heroines embark on Kill Bill-like rampages against their oppressors: the protagonist of The Erl King strangles her captor with his own hair, while the mother of the young bride in the titular story races in to gun down the Marquis as he prepares to behead her. The point of Carter’s work went far beyond the tiresome blurb of a “feminist retelling”; her twisted iterations of culturally endemic stories such as Bluebeard and Beauty and the Beast interrogate their masculine hostility; they question what all who were once little girls have been whisperingly warned: avoid the woods; do not trust charm; some wolves will bleed you dry.

Some three decades after this gruesomely sensual evisceration of folk stories, Twilight arrived to put them back in their place; Edward and Bella are merely echoes of what Carter, Marina Warner and Carol Ann Duffy had sought to make ironic. The conventionality of modern romances — monstrous or not — may mark a turning away from the radical refashionings of second wave feminism; I could not blame those raised on a diet of Disney fluff feeling let down by the ostensibly liberated but miserable climate of modern dating.

But though as love stories they may be picket-fence conventional, monster romances are anything but when it comes to the action itself. Scanning through a couple of the big hitters, the content of which I will leave you to discover after your next divorce, it occurs to me how very different sex is in female literotica from the jackhammering sterility of male-marketed p*rn. There is a feminised tenderness to the men/beasts (even when they can but grunt, the grunt is always kind). There is so much emotional intimacy — to the extent that I find this somehow more mortifying than the actual “action”. Even the sex is much more complex: of course, written cues for arousal (swollen this, throbbing that) are almost as formulaic as the various escalating images that make up a video sex scene — but writers try to shake things up physically in a way that puts the variety of men’s p*rn in the shade (a perfunctory accessory such as a hair bow, quickly removed, is usually all that divides one inevitable pounding from another).

And, most distinctly of all, women actually bond over their shared erotic interests. Online forums and TikTok pages are dedicated to book-club-style discussions of characters and plots. Perhaps it is the (undeserved) literary veneer to this stuff that removes the shame of discussing frankly weird fantasies; perhaps it is the closed off nature of these virtual communities, the much-vaunted “safe space”. All that is clear is that you certainly do not find reams of analysis on equivalent male subreddits. For this, we must be grateful.

A proliferation of this material — much of it is self-published or simply posted to fanfic websites — has allowed women to explore extremely niche specialities. A glance at the r/RomanceBooks Reddit forum reveals the vast volume of requests: one reader wants a story that is “literally the movie Megamind as a romance novel”. Another desires “merman/water creature romance that DON’T gain magical human legs and ISN’T set underwater”. One can only imagine an erotic reimagining of a trawler net, limp haddock flipping about. Another daringly requests “spanking between the cheeks”. The less said about that, the better.

What would Angela Carter have to say about all this? In her brilliant 1978 interrogation of p*rnographic archetypes, The Sadeian Woman, she frames p*rn as “a satire on human pretensions” which “keeps sex in its place. That is, under the carpet.” For Carter, it is a way of reaffirming social mores through titillation — consolidating the myths of the supremacy of men and the vanishing emptiness of women. In a charmingly pre-internet way, she divides the sexes into those who buy dirty mags and videos and those who read “love stories for women’s magazines, that softest of all forms of p*rnography” which, she claims, are even less grounded in reality and therefore more noxious. A book about minotaur ejacul*tion may seem a million miles away from the blushing snippets at the back of a Seventies Cosmo, but they share the greatest fantasy of all: that of perfection in relationships, of easy, instant and sustainable passion. As shocking as the action might be, this framework always ensures that, in the end, sex is kept in its place: fenced in by the optimism and security of love. At least dirty mags never lied about that.

One theory of Carters still particularly stands up in the Information Age. She says that whereas violence between men is depicted at liberty in film, “erotic violence committed by men upon women cuts too near the bone”. This anxiety may explain the myriad monsters of modern smut: their beastliness renders the story a kind of pastiche, a way of addressing and enjoying poisonous truths about the physical jeopardy of being a woman without the depressing reality that human men will, sometimes, use their dominance to obliterate us.