HuffPost: Women Would Rather Have Sex with a Fish Than a Man

This article is Bad Analysis on the “not even really worth engagement” level, but I’m spiritually obligated to address this topic – Metanarrative Analysis of A-Woman-Is-Romantically-Drawn-to-the-Monster Stories – whenever it comes up. 

So, in brief:

1.

But that’s exactly what happens in Beauty and the Beast and all the other monster love stories. The woman is drawn to the man’s raw sexual energy and, in loving him, allows him to harness that energy to become someone worthy of her love. She takes the “enormous risk” of loving the beast and the beast becomes a man. It turns out it was a risk worth taking. 

Look, I don’t know whether you’ve ever read Phantom of the Opera, which you yourself cite.  Or Dracula, for that matter.  If you haven’t, you shouldn’t be writing this essay – they’re absolute bedrock foundational entries in the genre.  And if you have, you know perfectly well that falling for the monster’s charms is definitely not always “a risk worth taking.” There is a fundamental dynamic to be explored here, and it ain’t that one. 

(Usually I have to direct this critique at soppy trendy leftist folk, who take it as a given that the Beast is always a cuddly squishy lovable woke-as-you-could-ask-for bae who’s just misunderstood by mean patriarchal Gaston.  But, jeez, your take manages to screw this up in precisely the same way while coming from the other direction.)

2.

The pure masculine vitality that Fallon thinks is pushing women away from men is exactly what the monster’s monstrousness represents — and that is what draws the woman to him, even in his ugliness. 

Again: have you actually read Phantom?  Because Erik is an emaciated opera geek who dreams tremblingly of getting to hold a girl’s hand in the park.  We are not talking about an avatar of machismo here.  And, well, uh, you were the one who brought in Twilight.  There are versions of this story where the Beast’s monstrous attributes can in fact be read as a sort of hyper-manliness, but it’s far from universal – and whether or not that’s the Beast’s shtick, the narrative has pretty much the same kind of power.  You’re really, really missing the point here. 

(Hint: the point involves the monster’s unshakeable devotion being underscored by the fact of his being too broken, too scary, for anyone else to be able to love and accept him the way that you can.) 

3.

The really sad thing is that The Shape of Water, in particular, provides some really interesting insight into the kind of cultural argument that you’re making here.  And it sailed straight over your head. 

See, The Shape of Water is actually different from all those other Beauty and the Beast stories you cite, in an important way.  And, because of that, it’s vastly worse as a Beauty and the Beast retelling – and as a narrative, in the general sense – than any of those other stories.

“Pure masculine vitality” is missing the mark by a lot, but it’s very true that the monster’s allure is always tightly bound up in his being dangerous.  Most of the time this is directly coded as “sexually dangerous” in one way or another – whether that’s Dracula’s exploitative charm, the Beast’s barely-contained animal passion, or Phantom’s edgelordy pedestalizing obsession.  All of this is underscored by the monster having loads and loads of bizarre memorable charismatic personality, so much so that the entire work is suffused with it. 

The Shape of Water doesn’t do that.  The merman is totally powerless for almost the entirety of the story; he proves himself capable of defensive violence right at the very end, but mostly we see him being carted from one captive situation to another, being abused or coddled depending on who his captors are.  There’s no danger to him, at all.  And he’s silent.  Or “silenced,” if you prefer, in the way that damsels-in-distress and plaything-women were in certain films of an older style.  Not just symbolically / diagetically silenced the way that the mute heroine is – he can’t communicate in a way that the audience can understand, he has less verbal power than Koko the gorilla and none of the simian facial resonance, and as a consequence he’s less of a personality than something like King Kong. 

Why?  You’d really want to do a full-bore exegesis on the film to answer that question, but I’m happy to take a tentative stab: it’s partly because del Toro’s “the monsters are the real woobies” themes are getting out of control, and partly because the movie is actually trying to be a woke version of Beauty and the Beast for a woke age.  It makes the high-status audiences feel real icky now when you conflate “this guy is alluring” with “this guy is sexually dangerous,” so instead the merman is presented as a perfect oppressed ally boyfriend: martyred and tortured by a cruel system for reasons that impute no impurity or guilt to him whatsoever, perfectly sensitive and perfectly yielding to female desire, perfectly incapable of screwing up your narrative with any male bullshit. 

(There’s a counterpoint to this with the non-monster dudes.  Normie men often don’t come off super great in Beauty and the Beast stories, it’s true, Gaston is not admirable by any means and Raoul is kind of a putz, but…The Shape of Water takes it to dizzying new heights.  Every single human male character who has any visible interest in women turns out to be horrible and disgusting.  The villain is a remarkable every-bad-thing-about-patriarchy-jammed-into-one-man pastiche – he’s a prudish inquisitor and a sleazy womanizer, he’s a violent loose cannon and a heartless enforcer for the Man, on and on and on.  Non-awful men include the gay neighbor and a scientist whose presentation is totally asexual.   HuffPo is right, at least when it comes to this movie: “straight men are the worst, ditch them and go for a weird monster instead” is a totally viable reading of the message here.)  

And it doesn’t work.  At all.  The relationship is a total flop, and it kind of kills the whole story.  The Shape of Water has excellent cinematography and excellent acting and it deserves all the positive critical attention it got, but it’s inescapably flawed, because at heart it’s supposed to be a Beauty and the Beast romance and no one really gives a shit about Beast. 

For years now, feminist literary critics have been making the point that you can’t have a compelling love story where the woman is a total cypher.  And they’re right about that.  This is the part where people like you are supposed to come in and show why it is that you can’t have a compelling love story where the man is a total cypher either, no matter how ideologically convenient that would be. 

Christ.  Get it together.