The emotional experience of direct and renewed acquaintance with the realities of selective pressure, such as the sudden introduction of sexual jealousy into a seemingly safe relationship, has had for me an almost mystical character, as though what’s reawakened is the prehistory of my whole species, which unwinds from its reptilian recesses, ornamented with the bizarre, gemlike contingencies of thousands of howling animal triumphs and the wailing ghosts of unmutated failures, splitting my consciousness as though from underneath, a whole ocean bursting forth from the sudden shift of tectonic plates; but this alarming thing that emerges, this dark uncoiling dragon capable of incomprehensible violence, seems also dimly recognizable as simply, in some sense, my own self.

It does not strike me as a coincidence that it is quite often the wild and dominating natural action of just these tidal forces which women seem to desire as consumers of the theater that is sometimes called kink. This provokes a feeling of being perceived, qua man, as though across a vast and ugly distance: radically unfamiliar and, as a happy result, perhaps competent in the contemporary eroticism exemplified by “romantasy”—romance books in which female leads liaise with creatures like giants, minotaurs, vampires and werewolves.

I started thinking about these things last Christmas when I saw the movie Nosferatu, which has a vampire lover of sorts. A few days after it was released, a Twitter user got herself into hot water. Despite being a self-proclaimed “monster fucker,” she thought that Count Orlok, the film’s titular telepathic vampire and walking, sailing, bilocating manifestation of plague, was a step too far. The “monster fucker” community reacted quickly, with a wave of replies and quote-tweets: this woman clearly didn’t belong if she couldn’t handle this relatively tame apparition. She wasn’t a real monster fucker.¹Though it might seem niche, “monster fucking” finally broke into the mainstream this year following the October release of Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein. Cf. “Jacob Alordi is Frankenstein’s monster. And he’s kind of hot” (CNN), “We’re All Hot for Frankenstein” (Glamour), “People Are Just the Right Amount of Horny for Frankenstein’s Monster” (Salon).

But Nosferatu isn’t really a film about a monster. Like two other buzzy movies released around the same time, Challengers and Babygirl, it’s a film about two men and a woman. Its structure is Iliadic: an old sexual partner besieges a foreign city to try to get a unique beauty (here named Ellen, a Homeric echo) back from her new beau. In these films, romantic rivalry generates a kind of existential crisis: the soft but crushing force of female sexuality makes men into “challengers”—that is to say, it makes them into monsters. This is what men must be, or must be made to be, in order to match or exceed their rivals; and so heterosexuality itself takes the guise of monster fucking.

The difficulty and darkness of these patterns of behavior conjure perennial questions about romantic rivalry, the felt connections between love and sex on the one hand and war and death on the other, and the contemporary phenomenon of gender polarization, which has created a kind of masculine mystique. Men and their motivations are cast in shadow as an unpredictable, violent “other”—but in novel ways.

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The heroine of Babygirl, Romy, is a girlboss AI-startup founder unsatisfied in her marriage. She pretends to get off atop her passively adoring husband Jacob, then furtively watches rough pornography outside of his hearing range. She is spurred to begin an affair with an intern, Samuel, when she sees him calming a dog on the street; it turns out that she kind of enjoys being treated like a dog herself. On its face, the central interest of the film comes from its presentation of this seeming contradiction in the psychology of powerful women: they may be professionally dominant while being sexually submissive. But this familiar tension is far less interesting than the dynamics of the movie’s male characters.

When the intern finally realizes that he has control in his relationship with his boss, that she will do whatever he commands, he laughs nervously, trying to come up with something. Later, after doing an absurd dance, he asks—rather than orders—her to hold him. When Romy brings up their power dynamic, he replies, correctly, that he is the one with power over her, since, practically speaking, he could reveal their relationship and ruin her career with one phone call or tweet. This professional reversal mirrors their sexual one, in which he, the “dominant” party, appears to have power, but in fact has simply constructed a scenario according to her latent desires. When she discovers that he has undertaken a different, “vanilla” sexual relationship with her assistant, he explains that things are simply different with her, without elaborating. Psychologically opaque and narratively uninteresting, this contrast is also completely true to life.

A recurring theme in the film is the mockery of moralization. It is “anti-woke” in the sense that this mockery includes all sorts of moralization based on “power,” as with the dynamic between Samuel and Romy. The assistant Esme produces a lot of hot air about women supporting women only to threaten Romy with the exposure of her affair in order to get ahead. But the most poignant and topical moralization comes from Jacob, who tells Romy in bed that he can’t do what she wants—can’t be dominant, violent, monstrous—because he doesn’t want to “feel like a villain.” The status of this villainy, how women seem to need it and what they are willing to do to bring it out of men, may be the true topic of Babygirl.

In the scene where Jacob gives that line, Romy, played by Nicole Kidman, holds a pillow over her face. Women’s faces were also covered in an older Kidman movie about the dark sides of male and female sexuality, Eyes Wide Shut. Through a combination of positioning and masking, that film pushed the viewer to identify female characters (including one in a morgue) by their bodies rather than their faces, necessitating some level of objectification—back then a dirty word, now a desideratum—simply to understand the movie’s plot. Here Jacob must instead engage in objectification to understand, and maintain his place in, the plot of his own marriage.

With its generational dynamics, Babygirl dramatizes a shift in feminist thinking. These days, a woman calling a man a “misogynist” rings similarly to a man calling a woman a “dirty little slut”: a term of abuse from those with intense religious commitments, but from most others an indication that they think something fun is about to happen.

When Jacob inevitably discovers the affair, his attempt at violent confrontation leads quickly to a panic attack. (It is the intern who calms him down, too, as he had the dog.) Having found difficulty in adjusting to the sex-positive, slap-me-around sensibilities now au courant, he finds his violent, masculine core, but can only turn it inward. This internal struggle is itself somewhat eroticized; indeed, its appearance signals the husband’s reappearance as a plausibly satisfying (because plausibly monstrous) lover.

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Nosferatu is a remake of an older film, itself a remake of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. As with Babygirl, it’s tempting to see it as a treatment of the complications of female sexuality. As a teenager the lonely Ellen seems to summon or even create—through sheer force of horny loneliness—the demonic vampire count, who invisibly sends her body into paroxysms of pleasure and torture. Some years later, her husband Thomas has to go to work, in doing so notably turning down her request to stay in bed and have more sex. Ellen asks him to stay so she can relate her dream: “It was our wedding, yet not in chapel walls. Above was an impenetrable thundercloud outstretched beyond the hills. The scent of the lilacs was strong in the rain, and when I reached the altar, you weren’t there. Standing before me, all in black, was Death. But I was so happy, so very happy. We exchanged vows, we embraced, and when we turned round, everyone was dead. Father and everyone. The stench of their bodies was horrible. And—but I had never been so happy.”

Count Orlok, Nosferatu, is Death; but who would it be death for Ellen to marry—her bloodsucking lover Orlok or her relatively bloodless husband Thomas? In fact it is Thomas, not Orlok, who threatens the town with death, perhaps because Thomas is, like Samuel and Art, the second lover rather than the first, and thus the one who introduces the terror of sexually rivalrous male violence. Ellen says to him near the end of the film: “You could never please me as he could.” During the wholly untender, animalistic fucking that follows, her face appears to him bloodied and pale, and he steps back, suddenly aware that the one he thought he’d won and possessed does not belong to him at all.

These sorts of intrusive thoughts are part and parcel of the psychology of active sexual rivalry: the constant alarm-bell reminder that a partner has shared an intimacy which is at once the same as and different from the one they share with you. But the scene also echoes Helen’s scolding of Paris in the Iliad, where she mocks him for running from the fight against Menelaus—her first husband, who she thinks surely would have won.

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The intern of Babygirl, Samuel, is of a type sometimes called “therapy-pilled” online. Armed with a deep understanding of things like sadomasochistic contracts, safe words and panic attacks, he expresses and perhaps comprehends virtually nothing about his own experiences or motivations. In some critical reviews this is depicted as a defect in the writing, a sign that the movie is just a straightforward erotic fantasy. But it can be thought of more productively as a reflection on the world created by the discourse of such fantasy.

Perhaps sex can be a kind of exposure therapy for the sort of civilized man who has not transcended but rather repressed a thoroughly engrossing desire for domination. In Frankenstein, Victor, whose mother died when he was seventeen, had never seen his masculinity observed and accepted by a woman, never navigated the streams and islands of alternating command and request nor come face to face with the evolutionary antiquity of his instincts. The unsettling phrase his monster repeats to the doctor, “I will be with you on your wedding night,” seems to communicate that the monster—the embodiment of the doctor’s own monstrousness—will be present most of all when Victor consummates his glaringly platonic relationship. Few things galvanize the inner brute like sexual rivalry, resurrecting at least internally and emotionally the kind of creature who would fight and kill for the right kind of victory.

But of course Frankenstein was written by a woman. Today, most writing and reading are done by women, and a great deal of that is about sex. Lowbrow fiction is good sex and highbrow fiction is bad sex. There’s something perverse in using the consumption of such writing to conclude that most books are now for women, as though watching a lot of porn would make men into cinephiles. But the trend goes beyond erotica. It is deep in gender polarization, which affects everything from TikTok content recommendations to voting patterns to dating practices. Many of my most beautiful female friends are self-styled “femcels.” Well-admired but confoundingly dateless and sexless, they are exposed to virtually no “content” that adequately represents male perceptions and experiences, and are protected by contemporary social etiquette and by men themselves from conversations and interactions that would forcefully get such things across. On a date, one might hear about Taylor Swift concerts and astrological charts; afterward, one might become a character in a story of beastlike sexual control, hearing the rattle of antidepressants on a bedside table.

Perhaps all that has happened is that women of this generation simultaneously believe their elders about what men are and yet have continued to desire men. If men are monsters, if masculinity is a monstrosity, but women keep desiring men, and the more masculine the better, then women must desire monstrosity. This has a certain intuitiveness, and it helps to explain the seeming contradiction in the desires of ambitious self-proclaimed feminists like Romy being aroused by domination. It also helps to explain the virally popular New York Times article from this summer about “heterofatalism,” in which the author Jean Garnett suggests that heterosexuality might be doomed, and that it might be men’s fault. Turned down for sex, she writes: “We all cooed and moaned for the poor wittle fraidy-cat boo-boo, working ourselves into a frenzy of laughter over men’s inability to ‘man up and [expletive] us.’” When one is so convinced that male appetites are insatiable carnivore engines of carnal enmeshment it is only logical to see men’s refusal to fuck them as a loss of masculinity—a failure of men to be men.

Garnett writes that what she wants when she wants a man is “to be organized and oriented by his desire, as though it were a point on the dark horizon, strobing.” Yet at the same time her self-avowed “type” isn’t just “gentle, goofy, self-deprecating, rather deferential, a passionate humanist, a sweet guy, a ‘good guy’” but one who “tends to signal, in various ways, his exemption from the tainted category of ‘men.’” Why seek out deferential gentleness and then complain of “fraidy-cat” dates? Why ask those who hate being men to man up?

By her own telling, Garnett was married and had a child, then opened up her marriage and fell in love with a new partner who wouldn’t commit. Nevertheless, the article is filled with mockery of the male polyamorists she encounters. This sounds like a contradiction until we apply the frame of monstrosity. Maybe the violently desirous man should impose the structure of monogamy rather than negotiating it. Garnett writes, “in some Hobbesian state of nature I might just automatically kneel to the prettiest [penis].” I doubt that there are any coincidences in that sentence, the most potent in the piece. In Hobbes’s political theory, a sovereign monster-king Leviathan creates the very conditions for contracts being maintained, for laws existing at all. The king remains in the state of nature, keeps contact with the raw monstrosity of the world, but imposes order on its chaos—imposes, in Jordan Peterson’s typology, masculinity on its femininity. Garnett isn’t complaining that she has to kneel, but that she has to stand up—that after the lovemaking is over, there’s nothing else to which she can submit. In a way this is truly Hobbesian. The real contract is with whoever enforces the commitments we make, and that contract can only be a submission.

But who actually wants to be the sovereign? In Babygirl both Jacob and Samuel resent the demands of female desire and the roughness their role seems to require of them. They both long to be loved in some real way without being pitted against other men or against ideals of masculinity. Jacob says no to something in bed that makes him feel uncomfortable and ends up with an unfaithful wife. (The film’s final victory, its happy ending, sees him engaging in a sex act that, last we saw, he did not want and tried to turn down.) Samuel plays the part of a sexual dominant but finds more satisfaction in simply being held and in an uncomplicated relationship with a less powerful woman. These kinds of pining fail to excite the contemporary female imagination, and so they flit through the stratosphere of our cultural consciousness, looking like man-shaped clouds to the women watching and pointing below, before they break apart into a vapor which merely dampens the cold white air.

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Of the three movies, Challengers is the most concerned with the experience and effect of jealousy and rivalry—not just with their valence or intensity but with what use they might be. In the past, a gorgeous teen tennis phenom, Tashi, is pursued by the boys’ doubles champions, Art and Patrick. After an occasionally bisexual three-person makeout session, she tells them she’ll date whoever wins the boys’ singles championship the next day. When they ask her what she actually wants, she replies: “I want to watch some good fucking tennis.” Romantic rivalry is put to a clear purpose: to extract the very best from the challengers.

In the present, Tashi is Art’s wife. He has won three of professional tennis’s four slams, but hasn’t won the US Open. They do ad campaigns together. He underperforms badly in Cincinnati, one of the biggest tournaments in the pre-New York swing, so Tashi, who doubles as his hard-ass coach, enters him into a “Challenger” tournament in New Rochelle. What do you know: Patrick has also been entered. It turns out, as we see going back and forth, that Patrick won the boys’ championship way back when—in New York, in fact—and dated Tashi for a while as she and Art were student-athletes at Stanford. Art engineered a rift between them, which also seemed to cause an on-court injury which ended her career. Though Tashi has slept with Patrick once while married to Art, and does so again in New Rochelle (having wriggled out of Art’s one-sided big-spoon embrace), it’s thus not completely clear who the interloper is.

Challengers colors the dynamic of rivalry as homoerotic rather than fully monstrous. The relationship between Art and Patrick has an undercurrent of intimacy through the whole film; in New Rochelle Patrick swipes right on both men and women while in a locker room where his fellow players trash-talk each other nude, their organs swinging lazily like cross-court forehands. Through a clever narrative trick, Art finds out about Patrick and Tashi’s affair while on court, but after a brief pause he actually seems to enjoy himself more, smiling as the two exchange a tense set of volleys which ends with him getting caught in the net as he jumps to smash the ball. Patrick catches him as he falls.

In Challengers Tashi, played by Zendaya, appears more as a force of nature than a human character. But there is something insightful about this as well: women do appear to men almost as aspects of nature, their judgments of attractiveness, evolutionary fitness, and even sexual skill barely less important than the judgment a falling tree branch might make about the robustness of one’s skull or a lightning bolt might make about the conductivity of one’s body. Much has been written about the possibility of a more morally-driven erotic life—for instance by Amia Srinivasan, who has argued for a more robust “political critique of sex” while frequently checking herself to see if she’s “moralizing”—but what’s not mentioned frequently enough is the utter impotence—in all senses—of such moralization. Particularly when it comes from the mouths of men who are called instead to be monsters.

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Certain right-wingers have advanced a kind of thesis about the relationship between moralization and intersexual dynamics. This thesis, represented by what they call the “longhouse,” is that women use moralistic language to control men—that this perhaps is the whole point of morality. Even charged right-wing terms, like “based” or “trad,” are susceptible to this moralization, they suggest. The worst, most blatant offender is probably “real man,” a phrase whose usage makes clear that masculinity is an accomplishment from which many men are excluded and which is generally conferred by women.

This “longhouse” theory is a kind of Nietzschean debunking of morality as serving the interests of a specific group or class—in this case, women. But this sort of undermining is always susceptible to a further move—even the best attempts at overturning the dominant morality are guided by it and serve its interests. You thought you’d escaped, but you just got to another level of the system’s machinations.

I guess that’s my view of getting out of this purported longhouse. For most men, trying to escape into some sort of Übermenschy wilderness isn’t an option—not because women are a dominant class but because it would just turn them into another kind of figure created by women: the monster. Men “going their own way” would be a bit like women continuing to use their fathers’ last names instead of their husbands’. Wherever men go, the road we walk on is always paved in part by female desire.

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In the third season of White Lotus, which premiered not long after the holiday movie season that brought us Babygirl and Nosferatu, a Buddhist security guard, spurred on by the yells of a rich hotelier whose husband has just been murdered and the memory of his colleague and crush scorning his antipathy toward physical conflict, shoots and kills a man—a man we, the audience, rather like. It is the first time the show feels genuinely tragic rather than tragicomic, but the death itself feels less grotesque than the ruination of the pacifist, which we experience almost as a theft of virginity. The guard gets the girl, gets a better job as a bodyguard for the hotelier, and gets a new look: sunglasses and a shirt that shows off his muscles. It is showrunner Mike White’s starkest presentation of an ongoing concern, the use of sex to procure violence, or in another sense the ultimate power women have over men’s power.

A very different kind of film, Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze’s Adaptation, features the thought-provoking line: “You are what you love, not what loves you.” And why shouldn’t we think of men as characterized by the gentleness they seek, and women by the brutality they demand, rather than vice versa? Over thousands upon thousands of generations we have made each other into what we most value. And, to turn the beautiful into the sublime, we have given that value a certain mystique. If a monster hides behind the curtain of that mystique, so much the better, for horror is tied up inextricably with our darkest and most monstrous desires.