‘Monster Pornography’ A Misogynistic Spectacle or Post-Human Challenge to Sexual Morality?
CW // mention of sexual violence.
Monster pornography is a sub-genre of online pornography – which involves animations of (non-human) bodies having sex and which often falls under the broader categorisation of ‘Machinima Porn’. Monster porn usually entails imagery of sexual acts being performed by various mythical (elves, fairies, angels) or monstrous (aliens, cyborgs, zombies, beasts, demons) creatures.
Whilst these videos often reside on smaller online pornography platforms - catering for an arguably ‘niche’ audience - they have garnered substantial attraction on larger online pornography platforms too. For instance, on Pornhub, monster porn involves using characters of which comprise popular video games. Video-game characters such as, Lara Croft, or Lady Dimitrescu, can be found having sex with Monsters in videos amassing anywhere between 40,000 to over 1.6 million views.
Monster porn is produced by a range of content creators too, “amateur fans, commercial studios and crowdfunded non-profit enterprises,” are all responding to demands for ‘monstrous’ displays of sex.
Since monster pornography is animated, content creators often have free-reign with the graphics of their videos and these can be manipulated to be fully accommodative to their audiences erotic desires. This means that content producers respond to cultural demands quicker, or more uniquely, compared to the lengthy production involved in making ‘humanly embodied’ forms of pornographic content.
Animated pornography is granted wider cultural leniency too, there are less ethical or legal regulations and guidelines being placed on its distribution. There are no ‘performers’ to obtain forms of verification or consent from. Instead, monster porn has come to represent a space wherein, post-human sex can be toyed with and in ways that transgress conceptions of ‘humanness’ or sexuality entirely.
Yet, it is precisely for this reason that monster porn raises concern. During a BBC interview with the content creators of monster porn, Joe Madden claimed there to be a gendered component to monster porn and that ‘misogyny’ appears inextricably woven into its production and consumption. Notably, as he captures it, monster porn videos “depict extreme, non-consensual sex that's as dark and disturbing as it comes.”
Indeed, huge phalluses are often depicted stretching, penetrating, or probing the animated bodies of primarily women. These women are often presented as being terrified whilst they succumb to becoming the ‘objects’ of the Monster’s desires.
Here, misogyny begins to emanate not just through the obvious depictions and insinuations of their rape, but through a harrowing flirtation with misogynistic logics already prevailing within wider patriarchal society, wherein many people still truly consider sex as something which ‘happens’ to a woman, not ‘with’ a woman.
A Senior Lecturer at The University of Huddersfield, Rebecca Saunders, argues that this presentation of women being “invariably frightened and powerless in relation to their male [and monstrous] attackers,” has been furthered aided by the way novel sex organs are being presented in a ‘post-human’ manner.
For instance, monsters sexual organs are almost always intended to reinforce both conservative understandings and expressions of gender. They are designed to be conceived as the figureheads for which normative male sexuality can be replicated through animation. However, oftentimes, phalluses appear purposefully enlarged, grotesquely shaped and depicted defying what would be the ‘ordinary’ materiality and physiology of the human body.
For instance, graphics can be manipulated insofar that the phalluses of ‘Monsters’ seemingly enter into one orifice and out of another. In other animations, their phalluses can be shown reaching within what is presented as animated women’s stomachs. In addition, close-ups on women's faces are used to emanate the shock, and pain that animated women are experiencing in conjunction with the ‘force’ of the Monsters’ phallus.
There is an apparent flirtation with necrophilia here too. Since, Saunders notes how “many monster porn clips end with the female animation exploding with semen and collapsing dead in the monster’s claws as its penis continues to mindlessly thrust through her body.”
Similarly, the presentation of bodily fluids aids in the production of a misogynistic fantasy world. Oftentimes blood can be seen oozing from the bodies of animated women who have ‘succumb’ to sex with Monsters. This invariably plays into misogynistic fantasies that seek to conceive sex organs as being ‘strong’ or ‘big’ enough to hurt and therefore exercise some kind of ‘power’ over women.
Coupled with the way blood is reminiscent of patriarchal myths about ‘hymens’ breaking, it should be recognised that blood being depicted dripping from the bodies of animated women, enables spectators to measure their ‘sexual purity’. Blood becomes a means to indicate that animated women have not only become ‘tainted’ by monsters, but they have become the ‘monstrous feminine’ themselves. Thus, monster porn ought to be captured as a digitised formation of purity culture.
The imagery of semen holds a particular function too. Often designed by content creators to be conceived as a ‘pollutant’, the colour of semen is changed by content creators to resemble greens, or dark purples. This is to ensure that body fluids are conceived by spectators as ominous and to evoke a continuous referent towards their monstrosity. This allows spectators to conceive the semen coming out of monsters, as an aggressive fluid that is inherently violative of animated women. A violation that these women ‘cannot want’ but are inevitably forced to endure.
Rebecca Saunders argues that the sinister nature of which semen is presented in monster porn is a purposeful attempt to frame “male sexuality as violent, subjugating and desirous of humiliation [...] and its expulsion onto the female performer’s face is a literal transfer of these grotesque desires onto the woman, who becomes grotesque through her inundation with semen.” In this way, she argues that semen becomes somewhat “a hyperbolic symbol of broader societal ways in which the horror of male sexual violence is shifted away from men and onto their victims.”
However, whilst almost certainly laced with sexual menace, I would argue that monster porn strangely represents an opportunity for feminists to better grapple with their stances on pornography. Feminist discourse regarding pornography has often misunderstood or sought to ignore (through privilege) the social and structural complexities that inhabit the production, distribution and consumption of pornography.
In particular, since the 1970s moral panics have often framed pornography as inherently problematic. Indeed, radical feminists continue to situate themselves as anti-pornography, or sex work more generally. They claim that women within pornography are passive participants, who are coerced by the sex industry. Or that sex work fails to adequately care for women’s sexual, physical or mental wellbeing.
However, they often assert this whilst seeking to maintain their socially privileged positions, or their versions of sexual morality informed through the experience of privilege. For instance, radical feminists often conceive the exploitation of people within the porn industry as isolated – as if exploitation is inherent only to the porn industry itself. Here, they fail to recognise the role of capitalism, the exploitative system it produces and notice that this is what the porn industry operates under.
Similarly, the social privileges of radical feminists have been captured through their failures to properly listen to the lived experiences of sexual, racial and gender minorities of who comprise the sex industry.
Indeed, when radical feminists do take a moment to listen to sex workers or their lived experiences, it seems they only seek to hear from those who have ‘left’ the industry. This is a purposeful attempt to mobilise the experiences of ‘ex-sex workers’ against those still within the industry. It is a logical fallacy that allows them to mobilise sex workers as a universal category in need of ‘saving’ in order to align it with their peculiar, identity reductive and conservative oriented versions of a sexual morality.
Consequentially, those who have left the industry often become acclaimed as the ‘group’ who have the ‘real’ lived experience and frames those still in sex work as being coerced or rendered with little self-autonomy. This is a form of silencing that is inherently dangerous, and unjust.
This silencing of sex workers is frequently used by radical feminists to construct a ‘universal’ truth: that pornography is ‘bad’ and that the sex industry is corrupt. In doing so, not only do Radical feminists live in distorted version of reality that wilfully ignores wide-ranging scholarship, which specifically addresses how porn or sex work has and continues to be socially liberative, economically necessary and politically subversive.
Radical feminists also mobilise enough moral panic to criminalise the sex workers who continue to work within the industry, resulting in seriously damaging economic, social, cultural and political consequences for the gender, sexual and racial minorities they claim to be ensuring to help.
Thus, under the technological logistics of a neo-liberal era, monster porn challenges not just versions of sexual morality that uphold radical feminists desire to maintain their socially privileged positions. It poses a direct challenge to radical feminists who have acclaimed humanly embodied pornography as the leading ‘causation’ for gender violence against women.
Since monster porn utilises the same heteronormative depictions of sex, i.e. it reproduces the same tropes, imagery or language captured within humanly embodied forms of pornography, we may begin to recognise that pornography is not the informant to violence. Instead pornography represents a flirtation with structural and systemic issues that already exist in society. It acts as a lens and space, wherein, socio-political culture is reflected back at us.
Monster porn demonstrates that regardless of whether it is human or animated bodies presented having sex on our screens - socially oppressive mechanisms of power will always seep into every aspect of human or virtual experiences. At least, this is so long as we keep apportioning violence only to porn and not to the wider social political attitudes that underpin various nation states which informs the very language of pornography.
The post-human nature of monster porn marks a changing trajectory and landscape for how pornography might become analysed both empirically and theoretically. It asks us: What constitutes an ethical spectatorship of pornography when it involves animation or post-human caricatures? How will post-human pornography change the avenues for which sexual fantasies are explored? Does post-human porn challenge our current landscapes? Will porn become increasingly post-human? Is there something ‘erotic’ about bodies being presented in a magical, mystical or monstrous manner?
It is these types of questions that could help feminists grapple with over a decades’ old debate: How do we delineate between what is pornographic content filled with sexual menace and what accounts only as sexual fantasy?
Written by Natalie Sherriff
Natalie Sherriff has a MSc in Gender (Sexuality) from the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her undergraduate degree was in International Relations from the University of Exeter. Along side her unhealthy obsession with political podcasts and house-plants, her interests include: current affairs, digital media culture, feminist theory, sexuality and the occult. You can follow her antics on Instagram @nat_a_alie .
