From Films To Literature, Why Women Have Always Loved Monsters

There’s something about the daring that draws the hopeless romantic. The mysterious man who’s as aloof as he’s unsettling perhaps seems like a challenge to those who dare to look for a jewel in the dust.

Is this why women love men who are a little rough around the edges? Or fall for a creature like romantic interest? Jacob Elordi’s Creature has taken over the internet, not because the story is new, but because the instinct is ancient. You can say it’s the yearning or fascination that women have always been drawn to creatures, beasts, and things that shouldn’t be loved.

In simple words, who could understand such a monster better than a woman? Those who have spent lifetimes being appraised, objectified, and misread know what it means to be seen but not understood. Women, too, have been stitched together by expectation, shaped to please and punished when they fail. Across literature and folklore, women have loved monsters not out of delusion, but out of recognition.

To love a monster is to reclaim the right to see gentleness in what the world calls grotesque. From Dracula’s dark charm to The Phantom of the Opera’s tragic devotion, from Beauty and the Beast’s redemptive tenderness to Twilight’s glittering abstinence, women have always found meaning in the monstrous. 

Monsters as Mirrors

To be a woman is to live a half-life between the adored and the abhorred. So when women look at the creature, they don’t see horror; they see a mirror. In Frankenstein, Mary Shelley’s creature is not evil; he’s abandoned. He wants companionship. 

When he asks for a female creature “as grotesque as himself,” a partner made in his image — not out of love, but entitlement. Makes you think even a monster inherits patriarchy. His request is revealing: he doesn’t want a woman who might reject him; he wants one who can’t.

Shelley’s Frankenstein was never just about creation. Victor creates life in his ego sipping milk like Nicole Kidman from Babygirl but refuses to love it. Classic case of father went to fetch milk. He births a being only to recoil from its existence, a gesture that echoes the same patriarchal impulse that glorifies creation but denies care, that worships the idea of life but fears its autonomy. In a way, Victor is every man who wants to play God but not father.

The Creature, abandoned and reviled, learns humanity not through science but through observation. Hidden in the woods, he watches a newly married couple in a cottage, learning tenderness through their gestures, how they speak and live. He reads Paradise Lost and sees himself in Adam, cast out and alone, yearning for an Eve of his own. It is not lust he seeks but a partner  who will not flinch at his face.

The Female Gaze and the Monstrous Beloved

When women fall for monsters, they are reclaiming their gaze. Guillermo del Toro understands this better than most modern directors. In his films, it is the woman, not the man, who recognises humanity in the inhuman. In The Shape of Water, a mute woman loves a creature from the deep. She does not speak, does not dominate, does not diminish her. Their love transcends words because it is built on feelings. In del Toro’s universe, women see the monstrosity of men and the humanity of monsters.

Maybe it's why the gender dynamic is never reversed. Men do not love female monsters. They would rather hunt or dissect them. The siren in Jibaro from Love, Death + Robots enchants a man, only for him to destroy her. When she revives him, he kills her again.

via GIPHY

Men are trained to love beauty, not otherness. Women, on the other hand, have been othered all their lives. For all our centuries of stories about women loving monsters, the inverse remains a rarity. Where are the men who fall for female creatures?

The ones who see beyond tentacles on their bodies or the scary voice? The answer lies in how gendered our relationship to beauty and horror has always been. Women are taught to empathise with ugliness. Men are taught to eliminate it.

They know what it means to be desired for your surface but despised for your depth. A woman can imagine a love untainted by power. She can be desired not as a prize, but as a peer in loneliness.

The Monster as Emotional Safehouse

Elordi’s creature is safe precisely because he’s not human, or rather, not real life man. The creature doesn’t perform masculinity, He’s capable of tenderness because he’s been denied it. He is the one watching life around him which makes him yearn to have something of his own. And perhaps that’s the secret to the monster’s appeal,he doesn’t demand transformation. The world tells women they must be fixed to be loved; the monster says, I see you as you are.

The Horror of Being Seen

But there’s another layer to it, a darker, more defiant one. To love a monster is to flirt with danger. To say: I will find beauty where you told me there is none. It’s a rebellion against aesthetic obedience. Beauty, after all, has long been a moral code. The virtuous are fair, the pure are soft, the evil are ugly. Women have lived and died by this taxonomy. But in loving monsters, they rewrite it. They reject the lie that goodness is symmetrical.

When Belle kisses the Beast, when Sally Hawkins’ Eliza embraces the amphibious women, when women online thirst over Elordi’s dripping, distorted creature is the radical act of empathy in a world that thrives on beauty standards.

So yes, the world is healing. Girls are back to loving monsters. Because monsters, unlike men, don’t demand to be understood before they can be loved. They simply ask to be seen,  and in their eyes, women finally see themselves.

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