Let's Talk About Fairies and Sex

If you've read the handful of previous blogs here you might think that this one is going to be a rant about humans sexualizing fairies and turning them into nothing but male-gaze oriented nonsense.
You may be surprised.
Yes, humans have turned fairies into the stuff of pin-up posters and softcore porn, sometimes in deeply offensive ways, and modern fiction has reduced the fey folk, too often, into love interests that could play the role of Prince Charming. But the hard truth, which many people reading this may not like, is that many fairies (not all) have always been deeply sexual beings and it was only the last hundred or so years that infantilized and desexualized them.
Prior to the Victorians and their festive re-writing of fairy folklore into sanitized children's stories fairies were understood to be highly sexual beings that might seduce - and often ultimately kill or kidnap - the unwary. Chaucer mentions the old belief of elves lurking in wilder places waiting for women to father children on, and in Irish belief there is a spirit called the Gean Canach that is found in the wilder places and which seduces lone women and steals their life force. The Anglo-Saxon aelfe - all originally male by the way - were fond of trysting with human women and were equated to incubi. In Iceland there were people historically who had 'alf' as part of their name to reflect what was believed to be partially fairy parentage. The Leannán sidhe found in several different Celtic language speaking countries would take human lovers, sometimes to the humans' ultimate doom. Keats' "La Belle Dame sans Merci" is a poem about a fairy woman who seduces and ultimately passively destroys human men. King Arthur's knight Lanval is the human lover of a fairy lady, eventually repudiated by her for breaking a taboo before she returns to save him and bring him with her to Fairy. And of course stories of humans stolen away into Fairyland to provide children for the fairy folk abound. There are tales - even songs - about a kelpie taking a human wife and producing a child with her - usually until she finds out his true nature and flees.
If we are going with the Scottish courts then we could say that a seelie fairy might take a human lover for the entertainment while an unseelie one wouldn't involve as much sentiment.
The older view of fairies definitely didn't see them as idealized partners or even as beings generally capable of love as humans understand it, but rather as beings existing outside the human social norms that could and would use sex as both a weapon and a means to an end. In some rare cases love may have been involved - certainly some of the kelpie tales hint at such - but generally sex is more of a game, entertainment, or even a way to feed off a partners' life force. So while its been distorted in modern understandings the idea of fairies as sexual beings and as sex partners is as old as the stories of fairies themselves.

Just remember that previous post about agency and power. And give some thought to who is truly in control in these situations. Because unless you are a ceremonial magician conjuring a fairy lover through a complex ritual and binding them to your will, the odds are the one in control isn't you.