In the arts - why do women get the nasty monsters while men don't?

Question:

In the arts - why do women get the nasty monsters while men don't?

Arts, as in literature, film and paintings etc.

The women get paired with the likes of King Kong; with Shrek (OK, I threw in that one for fun!); get kidnapped by the Army of Darkness; get sacrificed to mythical monsters etc.

OK, not all monsters are irksome. Dracula is suave. The Mummy, in his human form, is a hunk.

What about men? They get off easy, don't they? I mean, I wouldn't mind being Captain Kirk when he had his encounters with alien women, all of whom have always been gorgeous (even if their skins were blue or green)!

OK, I know about the 'beauty & the beast' so-called archetype. But if you analyze it, isn't it just one-sided? Let me guess - did God make women so irresistible that even monsters admire them? Poor Man - nobody wants you, unless your name is James T. Kirk! LOL.

P.S. For those who have bothered to read this far - yes, my monstrous outfit is from Halloween - but then, anything made by Yahoo is always respectable, right? LOL.

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker:

This is just a theory, but hear me out. I think that, yes, there is something archetypal going on, but its deeper than beauty and the beast.

When you think about great sculptures, the statues of men are always about specific men; David, Moses, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln. Even the ones that are more abstract, like "The Thinker", are specific, that piece isn't titled "Thought". On the other hand, statues of women are either of goddesses, or, after people stopped worshiping goddesses, abstract concepts, liberty, wisdom, knowledge. A female native American personified the Americas throughout most of the early modern period.

I think in western culture, men tend to personify the concrete, knowable, material parts of the world, whereas women tend to personify the more ethereal, metaphysical, and theoretical parts. So, since women are more cosmically symbolic than men, they need more grandiose, more cosmically threatening monsters to pair with.

But, lets not write off men and monsters, The Odyssey is full of great creatures, most of them female, that threaten the male Odysseus. And the she-demon Lilith plays a large part in Apocryphal Jewish mythology. But by and large, you're right, women do get the good monsters in the movies.