‘Women young and old can’t get enough of monster-based erotica. Here’s why this romantasy craze has me worried’

This new female craze for so-called “romantasy” has me seriously worried. Nowadays, women young and old can’t get enough of monster-based erotica. Fairy sex. Elf sex. Vampire sex. Sphinx sex. Goblin sex. Even blinking gargoyle sex. Call it what you will, but here’s the bottom line: women get turned on by reading about being shagged by a dragon. I don’t mind admitting this has come as a shock.

Dragon-shagging fantasies are all the rage. Dragon-shaggers, ahem, bang on about it all the time on BookTok: swapping tips on their favourite mythical creature-based how’s yer father scenarios; recommending niche alien abduction plotlines; discussing breeding kinks; debating the relative prowess of a basilisk versus a minotaur in the sack.

I’m not making this up. These romantasy novels sell by the lorryload. The leading authors are superstars. Olivia Colman’s new film is about her character having insatiable sex with a bloke built from bendy plant fibres by a basket weaver. Monster sex is having a moment.

I canvassed some of my female colleagues about it and they said, yep, raw dragon power is where it’s at, smut-wise.

“What?” I said. “You read about women having sex with a dragon?” “Yep.” “An actual dragon? With scales and wings?” “Yep.” “Breathing fire?” “Most definitely.” “What about satyrs?” “Half-goats? Too right!” “Ogres?” “Absolutely.” “Werewolves?” “Urrigh, no. Don’t be disgusting, Robert.”

Women, eh? I’ll never figure 'em out.

Time was, for a young Englishman the competition was older boys, and then soulful, tanned French lads and stylish Italian kids on scooters. Maybe a raven-haired, twinkly-eyed, silver-tongued Irish charmer came into the mix. They were all bad enough. And yet with patience, and maybe a diet, a gym membership and the passing of the years, ideally combined with chronic dissolution ravaging their youthful good looks, you could outlast those types and get the girl.

But how do you outlast a big scaly bastard with wings? How do you compete against a living statue with a perpetually rock-hard whatsit? Or with two perpetually rock-hard whatsits? That’s not a fair fight.

Back in the day, a nice trip to the pictures and a bag of chips on the bus home could pretty much guarantee a decent fumble. A consensual fumble, I hasten to add. Innocent times. In early adulthood, a keenly priced bottle of Jacob’s Creek and maybe a deep-fried camembert or a tricolore salad did the trick. And once back home, the old rule: if the whole thing (preliminaries included) lasted as long as one side of a normal (not some prog-rock marathon) LP, a man could be pretty pleased with himself.

Now, though, for it to count as good sex, you’ve got to rustle up an elaborate medieval feast and, afterwards, invite a couple of mates into the bedroom as well: the so-called reverse harem, an absolutely ghastly notion (as opposed to a normal harem, which I always thought sounded rather agreeable). And the kicker? At least one of those mates must not be human. It’s a tall order, no? The girl doesn’t just kiss the frog and he turns into a prince any more; the frog hangs around and gets stuck into a threesome.

Boys of my generation got our sex ed from books like The Godfather, The Fog, The Day of the Jackal. And then from the invented, jaded readers’ letters pages of Mayfair and Club International. Girls leant heavily on Jackie Collins and Jilly Cooper. This situation was far from ideal. It’s hard to measure up to Rupert Campbell-Black, for instance, if you’re not an international polo player with a stately home. But at least Rupert was, y’know, human.

What’s a guy to do? Fifty Shades of Grey felt like a real downer. I just didn’t have the inclination, or indeed the space, to construct a Red Room of Pain. I was dejected to discover, from the way that almost unreadably bad book sold, that many women fantasised about sado-masochistic sex. That was 15 years ago, and Christian Grey looks pretty vanilla now. A real gent, if anything, compared with the enormous trolls that the respectable-looking woman on the train to the office secretly lusts after.

Not a “loser on the internet” troll, but a massive, musclebound, Lord of the Rings, “lives under a bridge in Iceland” troll. It’s a long way from Colin Firth in a baggy wet shirt.

Of course, women say, “Men have had their fetishes for ever - nurses and whatever. Now it’s our turn.” Well, yeah, but at least nurses are people, I reply.

I feel I’m left with no choice but to join in. I don’t care for banshees, gorgons or sirens. Valkyries, though …

Valkyries look promising.