“Oh! — I’m into that too?”

It’s a question I’ve been self-posing with greater frequency as Nightcharm delves into deeper substrata of kink. With each topic we broach, I find myself asking “Yow! – is that really a thing?,” followed by a bemused, “Huh…That’s hot.”

Furries? I can kind of get it what with being an animal lover, and my swooning third grade love was Vincent — the subway body-surfing lionman from Beauty & The Beast. Macrophilia? Glancing at my DVD shelf and seeing King Kong, Village of The Giants, The Amazing Colossal Man, Frankenstein Conquered The World, and War of The Gargantuas, I ponder how much I’d like to find a man who is taller and stronger than me — I really don’t like having to be the Alpha Male in the relationship full-time — whom I could give myself over to. Male Lactation? Well, I have always been a sucker for a high-sitting rack on a guy. Kilts? I now own one after writing about their appeal. Thus far, only autoerotic asphyxiation has been lost on me, and I think that’s because I tend to chafe easily.

It’s the overlap between Zoophilia and Furryism that I’m falling into, and looking back, that’s not a recent development. The French Orangina ad involving a hot-ass Cougar Man and his human paramour that’s been making rounds on the Net this past week has me realizing that my sexual fantasyscape is a lot broader than I ever imagined.

I do find Cougar Man just dizzyingly gorgeous, and misanthrope that I am, I’ve often opined that I could love an animal imbued with all the sentience of a human mate minus the weakness and flakiness quite easily. That’s the most perverse thing about being a human animal for me; you can possess all the best adaptations with a potent sex drive to boot, but that still doesn’t mean you won’t end up mateless, no matter how enthusiastically you present.

And that raises my hackles.

Cats — from the common house variety to the prowling jungle beast — have always conjured up a certain magic for me. I can understand why the Egyptians worshiped them as divine; sometimes, when one really looks intently at me, I get the feeling of being a cornered Neolithic hunter gazing into the eyes of the Smilodon as it weighs whether it should claw me to ribbons or just pass me by with an ambivalent traipse.

H.P. Lovecraft — who had a pathological revulsion for seafood — was conversely quite taken with cats, bearing a mystical reverence for them and having the curious habit of waiting patiently for one to abandon his lap rather than disturbing it by shooing it off. His The Cats of Ulthar outlawed the killing of any cat and made it punishable by death, and I’m surprisingly amenable to that becoming a taboo in our own too-cruel mortal coil.

I remember that Cat People — featuring Nastassja Kinski slinking around nude and bloody, panthers getting frisky with human virgins, and a hero who cares for his feline love interest in a zoo when she opts to remain a panther rather than kill him — was the first movie I saw as a kid that affected me on a level beyond mere infantile sexual arousal. People can be so boring and devoid of animalian gravitas, lacking the instinct to simply know how to do the right dance. Judging by Avatar‘s mass appeal, I’d guess more than a few viewers are turned on by the idea of stunning manimals connected to nature, and with a porn parody imminent, my occasional Wild Kingdom leanings are likely not so atypical.

If anything, we’re taught from the time we’re very young that animal-people are fascinating in their weirdness. If fairy tales don’t have great loves transformed into beasts, than the beasts themselves are more human than human.

Even as a kid I read between the lines and figured out that imperiled Little Red Riding Hood had a helluva lot more in store for her at the paws of the wily Big Bad Wolf than simply being devoured, and I always thought that the Beast from Jean Cocteau‘s La Belle et la Bête was far more gorgeous under the curse than he was as a frilly, foppish princeling. Werewolves seem to be gaining as much ground in terms of their ability to make suburban girls and their emotionally stunted Moms go wet between the legs as vampires do, and as gays, we’ve always dispensed with women’s Victorian put-on that they like neutered, civilized men, each of us happy to admit that we want a knuckle-dragging man-ape who’s got no qualms about taking what’s his. If you can get yourself a beast that will fight for your ass and be brought to heel when you need him, then you make it work.

Take a minute and ponder just how much of our sexual trash-speak — “doggy style,” “pussy hound,” “pig bottom,” “bear,” “cub,” “pup,” “pussy power,” “horse-hung,” “bitch in heat,” “sex pig,” and “pig-sex” — references animals doin’ it nasty, and it’s clear most of us would rather be rutting away on The Island of Dr. Moreau than frolicking away in the Garden of Eden. Then take into account the vast array of mythological hybrid figures like minotaurs, satyrs, sphinx, merpeople, centaurs, and even angels who have an eye for human pulchritude and span every culture. This is a theme…

Man’s supposed god-ordained superiority over lesser beings — not to mention his elevation from the baser animal world because he was fashioned in a deity’s image — in western religion has always been a turn-off for me. I frankly do consider myself to be an animal descended from a long line of beings with a foot in both worlds, not the accursed progeny of Antediluvian Barbie and Ken who’s above-it-all with his mastery over the earth. Mythology at large would suggest that not only does humanity dream of something better than we are — we dream of doing it with fauna less hung-up on biology than we are, and however hypnotically persuasive the Song of the Siren may be, the Call of the Wild is even more trenchant.

© 2010, Shawn Baker. All rights reserved. Nightcharm.com