I Want to Fuck a Monster

Javiera Belem, performer and actress, arrives at my house with the idea of staging a fetish performance. “I want to fuck a monster,” she tells me.

Teratophilia: erotic or sexual attraction to monsters, deformed creatures, or non-human beings of monstrous appearance.

She brings with her a text, a story that unfolds on another plane. It is a kind of astral projection taking her to another imaginary city, where her lover awaits. This lover is a gigantic, slimy monster. It has multiple, enormous tentacles that it uses to penetrate, wet, and choke her during sex. After being penetrated in every humanly possible orifice, she desperately begs her ominous lover: “Cum inside me, shoot it all inside.” Following her command, the monster pours a transparent fluid into her, violently flooding her, making her explode. The story ends with her asking herself: “Is this dying? If I'm dead, it was wonderful.”

The story moves me, but I get the feeling that something is missing. The question of the “little death” begins to linger in my mind. Why do I need to “die” of pleasure? Is asphyxiation a chance to escape reality, to die just a little bit? Could that brief moment when veins swell and the body loses its color to become a delicate, red mass replace, for a second, the violence I have seen on the internet?

In the story, it is the monster who suffocates her, and we need to explore, through body and voice, the delicious and painful sexual encounter with it. I take on the role of the monster to rehearse: a scarf around Javiera's neck while she is on all fours. Javiera repeats the text again and again. I squeeze as hard as I can, while we both flow into the erotic movement of the one who chokes and the one who is choked. I am amazed by how erotic it is to have control over her body and her breath. I can feel how the fabric against her skin turns both of us on.

As a way to represent the monster on stage and push the body to its limits, as proposed in the text, Colectivo Tensión joins the performance, bringing their specialty in the practice of kinbaku. Kinbaku is a Japanese erotic rope-binding practice. Its name translates to “tight binding” or “taut binding.” Unlike purely functional immobilization, it consciously works with form, tension, vulnerability, pain, pleasure, and the power dynamic between the person tying and the one being tied.

For the day of the performance, in the context of the FAE party (Chilean Erotic Art Festival), Colectivo Tensión sets up a tangle of spiderwebs and vines dripping with the monster's fluid, allowing the performer to entangle and untangle herself, constantly suspended in midair, held by a harness. The floor is covered in coarse salt. On the salt lies a nineties television set, with static. Because this is not just about pleasure, we bring obstacles to the stage, intrusive images, intrusive thoughts, summaries from the week's scrolling: fascist summits, the children and women of the genocide, bombs, bombs, bombs, horrible men talking to camera. They push into the scene again and again until it becomes unbearable, until the performer begs to die.

Javiera Belem is ready for her erotic journey toward death. They build a rope harness around her that leaves her strangled breasts on full display; her flesh is warped by the pressure of the cord. They hoist her up forcefully. She cries out in pain, saying it is unbearable: the weight on her hips, her bones bearing her entire body weight through the ropes. Holding my camera, I wonder how she will turn that into pleasure. I hit rec. The audience walks in to witness the ritual. That was the missing piece: the pain disappears, and the certainty of being watched gives the performer the exhibitionist spark she needed. She no longer just wants them to see her fuck, she wants them to see her die trying. The text rings out, accompanied by the bound body, the ragged breathing, and the fluid running down the ropes.

That was where the true transformation took place. We wanted the monster to really be able to penetrate her, because she was demanding it with bloodshot eyes, with flesh bruised from resisting so much. The pleasure was interrupted by breaking the fourth wall, whenever the actress managed to connect with reality. But that reality demands to be omitted, ignored, because of how indigestible it is. And for that, pain once more, the demand for death: “Cum inside me, cum inside me.” The climax is accompanied by a transparent fluid that, bathed in the lights of the old warehouse where the act was taking place, could easily be semen, blood, saliva, or all of it combined, flooding the room, our eyes, and our ears.

After the big orgasm, after the little death, the body is slowly unhooked. The light shifts to something cold, the illusion of a morgue: the resting body, breathless now, unflinching before the news of our era, before the radical, overwhelming images of the planetary monster.