I’m a fan of Dragon Magazine, or at least I was back in the 80s. That’s not to say that the now fully online version doesn’t have its good points, but when it comes to what I remember fondly from my youth, Dragon certainly ranks up there with the greats.

One of the most memorable things about the magazine were the advertisements, almost all for games that I couldn’t readily find in a gaming store. I loved looking at these and dreaming of owning games like Aftermath, Talisman, or my personal favorite Bug-Eyed Monsters: They Want Our Women.

As a child of the late 70s and early 80s I missed the creature feature glory days of the 50s and 60s, so this game was my first real indoctrination to the world of female exploitation by powers beyond the scope of simple men.

This campy style of art was so over the top, so ludicrous, that I was drawn to it like a moth to flame. I’m certain marketing departments knew this as they’d been advising great artists to show such evocative scenes on movie posters and pulp magazines for a half century before I came into the picture.

No matter my desire, both for the game and the women represented, I didn’t acquire Bug-Eyed Monsters: They Want Our Women until 2002, but by that point I’d passed the simple acceptance of the awesomeness of it all and started to question the why…

Why did they want our women? Well, I can only assume because they were hot… I mean looking at the cover of this box, produced by West End Games, got my blood racing in ways most other things couldn’t at the time, and even did a bit when I got to finally play it at the age of 30.

I’m not sure what it is about this particular threat that men find so intriguing, but I’m betting it has come from the school of sacrificing virgins. It seems the subconscious mind of the Y chromosome simply gets off on the threat of female subjugation, or even the deliverance of said act [see Art of Gor].

I have to wonder if this could be some misguided desire to rescue a perspective mate from peril, ala the Prince Charming scenario or is it something darker from our primordial past? That’s certainly best left to psychologists, but I will say that there’s been no shortage of these images over the past fifty to sixty years.

Still I often wonder why something so incredibly opposite to our physiology as a bug-eyed, tentacle-armed, saucer-headed, scaly-skinned, slimy alien would want our women? I mean, it seems that no matter what, women are universally attractive in the Milky Way Galaxy.

Monsters, for their part, sure like women but at least monsters tend to be from this planet. In that argument there might be some lost DNA link between monsters and humans. Perhaps they’re the next evolutionary stage, or a mutant devolutionary throwback that just wants to be understood and accepted by our society. I mean, hey, it works for Marvel’s X-men, right? That said, I share 98.5% of my DNA with a chimp but you don’t see me dreaming about carrying one back to my lair and making half-chimps. We’re talking a pretty big stretch here.

Even if we could explain a monster’s desires, it means nothing when we take it a step further and go for aliens, as West End Games did. Now these creatures aren’t even from Earth! What reason could they possibly have for taking our women? Food? Nah, they’d be too gamey, and besides there are hundreds of protein sources on Earth better than humans. A work force? Well, women work just fine, but if you’re slaving away in some distant asteroid mining antilium-x I’d probably go with stealing men before women, especially the starlets pictured on these posters.

I mean seriously, it should have been called, Bug-Eyed Monsters: They want our sexy women, and you can keep the rest!

Hmmm, how about creating progeny? I doubt it as have you ever seen these freaks? No amount of DNA resequencing is going to make this work, and if the alien species can travel across dozens of light years to Earth, I figure they can deal with infertility issues among their own species back home.

So what is it? The cooking? Ok, granted, my mom is an awesome cook… but my wife… not so much. These things came that far for a complete crap shoot if they’re banking on tying one of these underwear models to a stove and seeing what happens. Besides, even my mom doesn’t know the recipe for glork-flack stew.

I mean, as I go through this list I’m kind of running out of stuff unless horror of horrors there really isn’t any damn good reason they want our women. Maybe, just maybe, they’re all a bunch of intergalactic tools who want to kick sand in the face of human men like a bully on the beach. This certainly makes as much sense as anything above and really the more I think about it the more I like the idea. Why else take only the gorgeous babes? They’re sticking it to us!

It’s the ultimate slap in the face, and actually dooms the population of the planet to decades of rather moderate looking progeny. Just look at Western Europe, after two World Wars where two successive generations of the most fit and attractive men were butchered on battlefields it’s no wonder Americans look so darn good comparatively. All the best breeding stock was chewed up by enemy gunfire.

Ok, so the whole ‘Bug-Eyed Monsters want our women’ might be a rather black-humored cosmic joke, I’ll go with that, but darn it, how do you explain the robots?

Why do robots want our women!? Now this is just frustrating. Cool in a visual sense, I mean look at the shot of Robbie the Robot with the babe in the one piece. It’s epic, but really what’s it all about? The caption says it all ‘what do these machines want with our women?’ To be perfectly honest, I have no freaking idea.

Now the Borg maybe, I mean they assimilate races into their cybernetic collective, but Robbie? Robbie is like the Michelin Man with a fresh coat of black paint and power station head. There’s certainly nothing in his hardware that jumps out with ‘needing’ women.

Are women better mechanics? That can be argued, and as mechanical engineers they hold their own, but why just steal women when any human with a M.I.T. degree would do? My only explanation; a man built Robbie and is using him to collect women for the greatest harem of his nerdy dreams. Thus, Robots don’t want our women, their creators do.

This brings me back to the original point, that men are truly the Bug-Eyed Monsters as they use a wide-eyed bush-baby stare to ogle big boobs and short skirts, and yes, they want ‘our’ women, or your woman, or any woman they can get their hands on and drag away from a domination fantasy role-play.

Is such a fantasy wrong? Probably, but that doesn’t stop men from having it. I mean its Halloween in a couple of days and dressing up as something creepy, adolescent, and socially unacceptable doesn’t end at 10. I drive by at least five fly-by-night Halloween stores a day and the windows are filled with sexy Alice in Wonderland, and Dorothy, and Queen of Hearts, all of which veritably scream to be carried away by something less than human, so we’ve not really moved on from these images have we?

I guess that means that Bug-Eyed Monsters are here to say, and I’m going to be ok with that. Now the real question should be would I throw on some robot armor and carry my half-clothed wife to the bedroom if given a chance? Well… ok, ok, we’ve got to slow this thing down because I’m now seriously thinking about where I can get a Robbie the Robot outfit in L.A…

Until next time, Happy Halloween, and may any of you reading this find your perfect Bug-Eyed Monster or Damsel in Distress because we all deserve to have a little fantasy fun now and then!

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