“What’s This? What’s This?”

The nameless Amphibian Man in Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water just may have been the most inevitable sex symbol of 2017. Played by Doug Jones as a strong, silent type tinged with exogamous fetishism, the Amphibian Man’s costume was designed to emphasize the creature’s wide shoulders and broad chest; his doting puppy dog eyes and soft lips; and, of course, his spectacular butt. Angelo’s fishified body, cold and shriveled, stiff and bloodless, is supposed to be depleted of desire and devoid of the drive to create life. Angelo’s self-diagnosis serves as attempted absolution as he suggests that he is not in control of his “parts.” This concept has complicated histories of sexual violence: “ravishment” was the term in late medieval and early modern England “that described involuntary, but usually pleasurable, sensory, sexual, or religious epiphanies experienced by humans.”.