Hello hello, my little monsters, and welcome to today’s spooky edition of An Assemblage of Grandiose and Bombastic Grandiloquents. You might be asking yourself, now why is today’s episode a spooky one, isn’t it just a regular Friday? It may be so, cheerey listener, but I ask you to proceed with caution, for today’s word is: teratophilia.
Teratophillia is the sexual attraction to monsters, including fictional and mythical creatures, or ‘monstrous people’. The word comes from the Greek ‘téras’, meaning monster, and ‘philia’, meaning love. Rather than view the condition as a kink, defenders of teratophilia believe it allows people to see beauty outside of societal standards.
The trope of women falling in love with monsters has been around for a long time; examples can be found in ‘The Phantom of the Opera’, ‘Dracula’, ‘Twilight’, and the audience are not repulsed, because they fall in love with the monster too. Here lies the basis for teratophilia, that all creatures with a heart and mind deserve love, and so we might fall in love with them too. In fact, there is hardly a single human culture that finds itself indifferent to monsters; human culture either responds to monsters with fear or feeds on them joyously.
Similarly, ‘teratism’ is the love or worship of the monstrous, though in biology, it refers to ‘a monstrosity, a malformed animal or human, especially in the fetal stage’. Though this may sound harsh coming from the aforementioned ‘teratophillia’, this is how the word has evolved scientifically. Again, the word ‘teratogen’ is another biological word that means ‘a drug or other substance capable of interfering with the development of a fetus, causing birth defects.’ Teratogens include certain drugs, such as thalidomide, infections, such as German measles, and ionizing radiation. A little bit different from falling in love with a werewolf, no?
Isn’t language wonderful?
Written by Taylor Davidson, Read by Zane C Weber
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