Why There Is Suddenly A Thriving Market For Bigfoot Erotica

1 "Mysterious Hairy Creature" Myths Have Been Around Forever

Today we know Bigfoot as the shill for Jack Link's, but the original notion of the big hairy lug is, as so many things, basically a bunch of concepts all bundled up together -- most of them not of the friendly, fuckable persuasion. Instead, ol' 'Foot began as a nasty piece folklore that used to terrorize us and make us afraid of the dark and the woods around us.

Native Americans had their own sets of myths about ghouls in the woods, going back further than anyone knows. Dsonoqua were hairy cannibal women that would kidnap and eat kids. Then there were the Buk'wus, small hairy monsters that similar to pukwudgies, who were basically the violent dickheads of the forest. Then the Europeans who took over the land brought their own sets of myths, including the "wild men of the woods." While most of these wild men were supposed to be shaggy hobos gone native, they became a generic term for anything hairy that one might encounter in the woods, animal or otherwise.

Finally in the 1920s, an agent named J.W. Burns coined "Sasquatch," cobbling together a couple of Salish words, like sokqueatl and soss'qtal, into a catchall term for anything big, hairy, and bear-like running through the forest (possibly after you). Likely because it was fun to say, the term spread, and today we all know Sasquatch as the "official" name of whatever species Bigfoot is supposed to be. But how did we get from there to a national obsession with Bigfoot boners?

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2 A Series Of Hoaxes Brought Bigfoot Into The Modern Era

Back in the days of legit mountain men and lumberjacks (before they got their style cribbed by hipsters), everyone knew that reports of Bigfoot were kinda full of shit. The stories start in earnest in 1811, with an explorer named David Thompson, who reported what the Bigfoot crowd like to say was a first encounter, but which he recognized as the footprints of an old bear.

It makes sense, since bears have oddly human-like feet and the guy was an experienced outdoorsman and not a credulous moron who automatically assumed anything he came across was a new species of ape-man. He further didn't believe the stories because he recognized that while natives told legends about live creatures, no one had ever claimed to see the remains of one -- unlike today, when a cooler filled with a Halloween mask and a bunch of guts commanded a news cycle.

There were a few more encounters in the intervening years, but they were few and far between until we skip ahead a century and a half. Interest sparked up again when Ray L. Wallace "discovered" a set of footprints 1958 in California -- by which I mean he created clumsy wooden stamps, stomped through the woods, and then sent the story to the press. Those footprints were, well, big, so the name "Bigfoot" was used to describe both the creature and the category of Quentin Tarantino's Pornhub searches.

But Bigfoot really went big time with the Patterson-Gimlin film, shot by Bluff Creek (a bit on the nose there), California. You know, the one in which he's caught in the Abbey Road cover pose that has graced every piece of Bigfoot merch since. Of course, that Bigfoot was a guy in a suit (made by the top gorilla suit maker at the time, Philip Morris) named Bob Heironimus. Patterson was a conman cowboy known for check fraud and dine-and-dashing, and his is a wild and woolly tale about a man who ended up scamming the very people he leaned on to help him fake the Bigfoot film in the first place.

Still, the same credulousness that created a huge market for shake weights and penis enhancement pills has kept Bigfoot alive into the present day. And now that Bigfoot has set up camp as a mysterious, intriguing, and possibly dangerous figure in the modern imagination, let's figure out why people wanna fuck him.

Related: The 7 Most Sexually Deviant Creatures In Folklore

3 The Fantasy Of Sex With Magical Creatures Is As Old As The Written Word

Go to Genesis (the book of the Bible, not the bitchin' band), and it practically opens with weird sex. Take the Nephilim; a bunch of angels got cast out of Heaven, slapped some Al Green into their 8-tracks, and then got it on with the ladies of Earth, poppin' out a bunch of half-humans in the Biblical version of the X-Men. It's a tale most people skip over when waving this book around as a beacon of unvarnished truth, but it's in there.

Meanwhile, almost every culture in the world has legends of beings like succubi and incubi -- demon types who have sex with men and women, respectively. The idea of being "hagridden" (literally ridden by a hag or witch or demon) persists to this day, thanks to people seeing "shadow beings" during sleep paralysis. They report the things they see when nightmarishly frozen as getting a little somethin' somethin'. It even changes from culture to culture -- West Asians, for example, report having sex with genies.

Fast-forward to the modern era, and we have myths about aliens committing sexual assault to make hybrids. If your belief system leans more toward ghosts than aliens, you'll probably get molested by one of those instead. Doris Bither, the woman who inspired the classic '80s horror flick The Entity, said she was repeatedly violated by an ... uh, entity ... which followed her as she changed houses and basically wrecked her life for years. As awful as it was for her, others have enjoyed their ghost ghost encounters, to the point that there's a term for it: spectrophilia.

Which brings us back to the main point: By the 1800s, men and women alike were coming forward with tales of being kidnapped and/or sexually assaulted by a Sasquatch. Variations on these supposedly true stories would turn up all over the world, and certain audiences for these harrowing tales suddenly realized they had a new fetish.

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4 Now Bigfoot Erotica Is A Booming Business

In 1977, Judith Frankle and John Cotter wrote a book called Nights With Sasquatch, detailing a woman (coincidentally named Judy) who is taken into captivity and constantly ravished by a Bigfoot. Unfortunately, it's not written as sexily as it sounds, but it's a good starting point for this genre. Four years later came a porno called The Geek, which was apparently 15 minutes of Bigfoot clapping them cheeks.

And when the internet reached maturity in the 2000s, everything that had once been niche became mainstream. You may remember that Bigfoot porn hit the news a couple years back when, in a congressional race for Virginia's 5th District, the Democratic candidate, Leslie "No Jokes About The Last Name, Please" Cockburn accused opponent Denver Riggleman of enjoying Bigfoot porn based on his writings. He denied it, of course, but he also went on to win. Turns out that, politically speaking, possibly popping wood for Bigfoot isn't seen as a dealbreaker.

Authors like Virginia Wade have taken advantage of the affordability and accessibility of eBooks to reach this audience in ways never before possible (she reportedly was making $30,000 a month in sales at one point). And why not? Books and movies about sexy vampires and werewolves took over pop culture not too long ago. And like those stories, Bigfoot erotica seems to walk several lines at once. It's not quite bestiality, because he's often portrayed as a devolved human, but he does toe the edge between sex with a human and sex with an ape. (The ability to climb trees with your feet seems like a good cutoff point.) That is sort of the premise of King Kong, after all.

Bigfoot also falls somewhere on the spectrum of the caveman fantasy. Even more brutal than the Harlequin covers of men in pirate shirts, Bigfoot can be rough in a way that wouldn't otherwise be acceptable, because it isn't a man doing it. It's dangerous, taboo, and exotic -- all elements that certain people have yearned for since masturbation was invented. And really, it's easy to argue that this is better than fetishizing a Fifty Shades-style abusive rich guy because, well, at least there's no risk of actually running into a Bigfoot.

For more, check out 4 Fan Fiction Subgenres So Weird They're Inspiring:

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