Why Are Women Hot for Non-Human Males?

Ever since the trailer for the upcoming Wicker movie came out a few days ago, the internet was overrun by a storm of half-joking, half-serious lusting craze from all the het ladies who are basically yearning after a wicker basket.

The phenomenon is not new. The same thing happened a couple of years ago when the Fallout TV show came out and the character of the ghoul proved to be similarly stimulating to lots of online ladies.

Of course, the delicious irony in all this is that incels and redpilled bros keep whining about women’s too high physical standards and complaining that women don’t want to be with them because they don’t have the perfect physical shape. Meanwhile, women are lusting after a noseless ghoul who is adequately emotionally developed.

So why are women lusting after non-human males? Part of it is the fact that these fictional non-human males are unapologetically focused on women’s pleasure in a way that reality has proved to women is not a realistic expectation from, you know, actual men. Part of it is maybe that all the unfulfilled romantic yearning from women still needs an outlet and falling in love with a man has, again, proved to be not a great idea, historically speaking.

There is also something wonderfully revealing about the physical standards involved here. The internet has spent decades informing women that male attraction is brutally visual, that men are biologically programmed to prefer youth, beauty and an increasingly specific set of measurements. Women, meanwhile, apparently need only establish that the creature has a vaguely masculine silhouette and the capacity for emotional reciprocity.

A fictional male can be bald, scarred, undead, radioactive, covered in fungal growths, made entirely of woven plant material or technically classified as a cryptid, and women will still be like: “Hear me out.”

And this is where the manosphere’s theory of female hypergamy begins to look more than a little silly.

If women were actually operating according to the ruthless sexual marketplace logic that these men describe, the internet would not be full of women thirsting after monsters. We would be conducting genetic audits of Olympic swimmers. We would be fighting over orthopedic surgeons. We would be collectively demanding photographs of men’s tax returns.

Instead, women are looking at a fictional creature with the facial structure of a damaged garden ornament and thinking, Yes. I could fix him. Or, crucially, he could fix me. Yes, please fix me harder :D.

Because what these characters offer is not really physical perfection. It’s fantasy without the usual administrative burden of heterosexual relationships.

The fictional man can be dangerous without being dangerous to you. He can be dominant without requiring you to manage his emotions. He can be mysterious without becoming a man who refuses to communicate. He can be sexually confident without expecting you to perform unpaid enthusiasm for his mediocrity. He can be tortured without making his girlfriend responsible for his healing journey.

Most importantly, he is written by someone who understands the idea of a good story.

Someone has sat down and designed this creature specifically to be compelling. Someone has given him a personality. Someone has decided that he should be interesting, emotionally complex, attentive, loyal, protective or sexually competent. He does not arrive in the relationship as a partially assembled adult human being whose mother apparently forgot to install the dishwasher update.

And there is perhaps an even simpler explanation.

Women like men. Many women genuinely enjoy masculinity, male bodies, male voices, male sexuality and male companionship. What they increasingly seem less enthusiastic about is the package deal that heterosexual culture has traditionally attached to those things.

The problem is not necessarily that women have stopped wanting men. It may be that women are getting increasingly selective about the terms and conditions under which a man gets to be wanted.

Which leaves the modern heterosexual woman in a rather strange position.

She would quite like a man. Unfortunately, the available options are men. So naturally she has moved on to the Ghoul and the patio furniture.

Honestly, I understand. If the choice is between another man who thinks washing the dishes constitutes an act of feminist heroism and a mysterious undead cowboy who is complex but still emotionally available, the undead cowboy has some very compelling arguments.