Lust and the Imaginary; Or, Why We Want to Fuck Sea Monsters

The Mermaids, Ivan Kramskoi, 1871

There is not a single culture in the world where men wandering alone, drunk, under a full moon are safe from the temptations of an untimely death. In Poland, they might heed the siren’s call of the Rusałka, a river bound female thing who holds them under after dancing or singing enticingly. Other Polish mermaids more closely fit the standard idea of a beautiful half woman, half fish object of desire, like The Mermaid of Warsaw who was left helpless after being trapped in a net and eventually saved by local fishermen.

Sailors have lusted after mermaids in many cultures. Sex with mermaids is something we know has occurred, but we are missing the physical details in popular culture. The physicalities of these couplings have mostly been kept out of the Hans Christian Andersen breed of fairy tales. They are water-bound, tragic creatures who cannot be complete partners to their human counterparts. They are subject to their whims during brief affairs that end in tragedy.

Most creatures of the sea, of course, are hardly so helpless. Take The Lure’s Silver and Gold, for example. Discovered by a band having a night out on the beach, the mermaids fail to lure a young man to his death and instead are brought to a nightclub. There, they are gawked at, fondled, offered up.

Copulation is central to the plot of Agnieszka Smoczynska’s The Lure. While entangled with typical mermaid lore (falling in love with mortal men = doomed fate), writer Robert Bolesto adds that without water the mermaids have human-like legs…but are missing a vagina. Or, well, any other holes between them.

Apparently mermaids only shit when you add water.

From the beginning, the pair of mermaids are sexualized and offered up for various male pleasures. When it is determined that intercourse is impossible (or at least less than ideal), they are instead put on display. Their attractions are sensual and visual in equal parts.

While Silver falls in love, she mimics the elicit sexuality she witnesses between bandmates, offering the object of her affection blow jobs. Later she surgically changes her physiognomy to better suit what she assumes are his needs. In this tale, their voices are to be profited off of, but their bodies are what is of interest. He accepts her sexual offerings without checking in with her or asking what she wants. After all, just like women, mermaids are meant to please men.

Gold’s drives are closer to their nature as presented at the beginning of the film: she seduces and kills. She misses her sister and damns the folly of falling in love with humans who only want their sacrifice while offering them nothing in return. More of a sensory delight than the clumsily offered penetrative sex Silver explores with the object of her love, Gold engages in lesbian sex with a government agent who wants to bring her in. They caress, her partner licking the full length of her tail.

Finally we acknowledge that mermaids can feel and enjoy as much as their human partners who demand pleasure from them. While Silver’s sex scenes are sappy and melodramatic, focusing on facial kisses and human parts, Gold’s are deeply physical and directly implement the parts of her that are alien to humans.

Alternatively, Guillermo Del Toro’s The Shape of Water finally answers the question, “What if Mermaids had different fish parts than the tail?” Plus there’s a fishman. We know he is a man because the protagonist mimes a retracted penis revealing itself when describing sex to her work friend. Better people than I can handle this gender essay, but let me sum it up by saying: it’s messy. The character is listed as “Amphibian Man”, which could be an agender usage. But while homosexuality is explored by one character, the audience and commentators on their relationship find the film’s protagonist’s pairing to be heterosexual.

The only part of sex discussed is the Amphibian’s Man’s genitals. Vanessa Taylor and Del Toro have written the script’s dialogue largely in sign language, but this discussion has some improvised hand gestures. We are made to understand that the Man’s crotch opens and what we can assume is a phallus extends.

The protagonist themselves is a kind of sea (or river) creature. Unable to speak, she has injuries in her neck that later reveal themselves to be gills. There is something to her masturbating in the bath, but it’s unclear whether the water makes her comfortable enough to explore her frustrated sexuality, or she is simply a woman living alone.

While the physically more powerful Amphibian Man must accept her advances to some extent, there is something disturbing about sleeping with a being who relies on you entirely for its safety, well-being, and continued right to life. This creature knows nothing about the world. This further illustrates that while we fear sea monsters, and desire them as proto femme fatale figures, similar to a dame in a Noir movie, they need us, and are not the ones in true power.

The Lighthouse employs quite a few power dynamic conversations woven in with the trappings of a deeply sexual, yet unerotic narrative. We are disgusted by the characters, thrilled by them, and curious about them. The movie tosses around dialogue that is impossible to understand, ambiguous scene cuts that remove much of the most dramatic actions, and dripping semen.

The scene for sea monsters is set when the character who is new to lighthouse work discovers a mermaid figurine tucked into his mattress. His interactions with his idea of this mermaid will solidify him as a lonely, heterosexual man, even when evidence is provided in the movie to the contrary. He cannot find solace in the body or personality of the dominant and more elderly lighthouse keeper, because it would redefine truths he has woven about himself.

Later, when Robert Pattinson’s character accuses Willem Dafoe’s lighthouse keeper of planting the mermaid, he’s not just accusing him of tempting him sexually. He’s placing the blame for his isolation-based madness on a singular manifestation of it: his wildly sexual drive to express his pent up frustration.

After seeing the trapped and screaming body of a half woman half fish creature that may or may not be real, he penetrates the mermaid. He chokes her, he dominates an already trapped and writhing creature. Later he penetrates and dominates Dafoe in a scene that is only as erotic as stroking a porcelain figurine’s jauntily proportioned breasts.

While homosexually charged, little in this film is sexually exciting. It is disturbing, with the mermaid representing a desire to exert power over something. In this case, we see the physicalities of sex with the mermaid but it is also a symbol of dominance over something inert while every other part of the plot towers over one of our protagonists.

I started this essay thinking I would weave these movies together into some kind of beautiful thematic basket decorated with a repeating motif, enclosing the eggs of some greater truth. But the truth is sea monsters represent what we fear; we fuck sea monsters because we are scared of finding pleasure in ourselves. We are terrified of touching each other. What will finding that pleasure in another human say about us or our identities? Our internal selves?

The overwhelming truth is that sea monsters are safe. They are uniformly weird: nothing that happens with them can be any weirder or less weird than anything else. They do not make us gay or straight or feel anything beyond the strange sensation of scales and cold and wet.

Most important of all, they are imaginary. They cannot touch us. And they cannot hurt us.