I read this essay out loud at my event Love & Video Games on April 3, 2025. I'm dead serious.

I think that the Greek daughter of the sun, mother of the Minotaur Pasiphaë must have seen the cream Cretan bull the same way I see Nemesis from Resident Evil 3: he just needs someone to hold him. In Nemesis' case, he might also benefit from facial reconstruction surgery to improve his overbite, but I think I could get used to it. 

This is the kind of radical acceptance you practice as a monsterfucker, a term both Urban Dictionary and the freaks on Tumblr use to describe the kind of sick person who wants to know if Pyramid Head is hiding a big or little pyramid under his butcher's apron. Dropping what's left of my hesitation now, I can admit a monsterfucker is a girl like me, whose earliest celebrity crushes included Casper the Friendly Ghost alongside Chad Michael Murray.

I could explain my fascination with supernatural, disfigured, disturbing bachelors to you through the objective power of science — fear and arousal, after all, stimulate similar parts of the human brain. Or, if Freud were alive, he might suggest I've been ruined by my inexplicable childhood fear of scarecrows — symbols of both castration and emasculating crucifixion. Then he'd snort a river of coke. 

But I'm not worried about why I feel that Klaus Kinski's Nosferatu — the one with the rat teeth — is an underrated sex symbol, capable of evoking the same eye-opening magnificence of 1997 Leonardo DiCaprio. OK, maybe not DiCaprio — let's say Pirates of the Caribbean-era Orlando Bloom. I just know that I've always been drawn to monsters like a fly to a rotting apple, their eyes half shut and swollen with infection. 

And the Nemesis, a biological weapon, is especially mutated, because of the evil parasites inside him. So, I regard Nemesis the way I used to think of frat guys when I was wasted in college. Like, "This would be an interesting experiment." 

Part of me also feels like, am I making revolutionary strides for feminism? Literature and mythology are both overwhelmed by stories of conquest: satyrs, gods, and demons that chase women down and fuck them while they're sleeping. The mountain nymph Daphne, for example, transformed into a laurel tree just to escape Apollo's pursuit, only for the sun god to tear off her leaves to use for garlands, as symbols of his triumph.

But if I consent to a monster, then that changes the story, doesn't it? The power of the underworld gets reoriented back to me, a small woman with no muscles. So, casually, while playing video games, I sometimes allow Nemesis to kill me with the tongue-pink tentacle shooting out from his palm, just to see what it feels like. I mean, his hands are so large. In a tantalizing flash of imagination, I think that Jill Valentine's neck could get squashed like a blueberry between them. And Nemesis' biceps are so impressive if you ignore the necrotic skin around them. 

But dying with no one but a creature who definitely smells like a garbage disposal by my side isn't as erotic as I imagine it to be. I admit, there's sadness under the fantasy. It's not like I think my bottomless need for closeness and affection makes me an unsightly beast, necessarily. But since my desire sometimes feels as demanding as a tumor, there have been nights when I've wondered, who could love me but a monster?

But then my human boyfriend holds my hand, and I'm not as concerned about what's hiding under my bed.