Abstract
In 2013, inspired by a combination of the “monster erotica” genre and the 1993 movie Jurassic Park, two women college roommates, Christie Sims and Alara Branwen, self-published the ebook Taken by the T-Rex. Depicting sex between a cavewoman and the titular dinosaur, it spawned a career writing dinosaur erotica which proved more lucrative than those of their white-collar friends. Their success thrived thanks to joke purchases; but even irony-laden reviews of their work contain examples of serious critiques and analysis of the fan-fictive story’s approach to themes of sexual agency, trauma, and comfort. This chapter analyzes Sims and Branwen’s work, as well as situates it within a historical context of more mainstream depictions of romantic and/or sexual tension between (cave)woman and dinosaur. It traces the trope from D. W. Griffith’s 1912 film Man’s Genesis and to its zenith in the 1966 film One Million Years B.C. starring a fur-bikini-clad Raquel Welch, and even into themes of reproduction and cloning in the Jurassic Park (1993–2022) films. Ultimately, these works’ rendering of women as erotic agents alongside those dinosaurs is a transformative act that works to reinterpret feminine sexualities within feminist frameworks of pleasure and exploration.
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Notes
- 1.
Feder, Archaeological Oddities, 186.
- 2.
Schuller, “The Fossil and the Photograph,” 229–61.
- 3.
Mullis, “Thomas Jefferson,” 185–97.
- 4.
Guimont, “Hunting Dinosaurs”; Feder, Archaeological Oddities, 190–96.
- 5.
Zorich, “Ascent,” 10. Man’s Genesis is sometimes inaccurately given as the first appearance of dinosaurs as well as caveman on film. Winsor McCray’s movie Gertie the Dinosaur (1914) was the first animated film to feature a dinosaur, released two months before Brute Force.
- 6.
Griffith, Brute Force.
- 7.
Griffith, Brute Force.
- 8.
Van Engen, “How to Fuck a Kraken,” 131. The scenario in King Kong was itself the prototype of a subgenre of speculation on gorilla/human hybrids; see Ferreira, “Primate Tales,” 223–37.
- 9.
Sciretta, “Stop Complaining.”
- 10.
Singh and Coules, “Palaeoart in Pop Culture.”
- 11.
Williams, “Finally, an explanation”; Williams, “The rise of dinosaur erotica.”
- 12.
O’Connor, “Q&A.”
- 13.
For discussion of the role of science fiction megatexts and their interpretation, see Broderick, “Reading sf as a mega-text.”
- 14.
Russ, “Pornography by Women,” 82–96.
- 15.
Sims and Bronwen, Taken By the T-Rex, Kindle loc. 308.
- 16.
Sims and Bronwen, Taken By the T-Rex, Kindle loc. 315.
- 17.
Sims and Bronwen, Taken By the T-Rex, Kindle loc. 412.
- 18.
Sims and Bronwen, Taken By the T-Rex, Kindle loc. 505.
- 19.
Sims and Bronwen, Dino Park After Dark, Kindle loc. 205.
- 20.
Sims and Bronwen, Dino Park After Dark, Kindle loc. 205.
- 21.
Sims and Bronwen, Dino Park After Dark, Kindle loc. 215.
- 22.
Wherry, “More than a Love Story,” 54, 59–60.
- 23.
Rieppel, Assembling the Dinosaur, 135–36.
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Heffner, K., Guimont, E. (2024). Mesozoic Miscegenation: Erotic Fiction’s Resurrection of Dinosaurs. In: Castle, N., Champion, G. (eds) Animals and Science Fiction . Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41695-8_19
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