Are mermaids sexy?
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It made me think about the double-take I get when I see mermaid pictures. Attractive woman in a clamshell bikini top: ahooga! But slime-coated sea creature: No thank you! I don't usually walk away from mermaid representations thinking, ah, yes, what an enchanting creature, I cannot shake her image from my mind.
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I don't think I'd ever say that a mermaid was ever *more* attractive than a human woman. You really have to love a mermaid to overlook the tail part.
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There's also a very immediate inference about the unavailability of mermaids for penetrative sex. I know that's not the only thing that's involved in being sexy and attractive, but it comes to mind pretty quickly when one is considering a mermaid for their sexiness.
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There is something kind of sad about the myth of mermaids. It feels like they symbolize the utter alienness of women for sailors who spent so much of their time away from women. Like, they've been at sea so long, they just barely have any concept of what women look like or do.
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There's a really good, freaky mermaid in the 2019 film The Lighthouse. It's an absolute monster with sharp teeth and a scary, alien body.
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So, maybe that's sexy? The Other?
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I think there is some conflation of sirens and mermaids, although I guess the original sirens from Greek mythology were more birdlike.
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But if you think of mermaids as enchanting creatures that entice sailors to crash their ships onto the rocky shore, then the womanly half is more like the lure of an angler fish than anything else. An attractive extrusion to entice prey.
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I might be overthinking all this, though. It might be that mermaids and sirens and tritonesses and so on were just a way to sneak some bewbs into your classical art.
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There are a couple of other thoughts here. One is that there's a topological similarity between a mermaid and a woman in a long skirt. Both obscure the bifurcation of the legs, uniting them into a single entity. It's hard to imagine that there wasn't some influence of the image of a woman in a long skirt on the idea of a mermaid.
