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.