[davem]

Originally Posted by drigel

I keep coming back to this thought. From what Ive been exposed to, it seems the traditional view on sexuality is one sided. The faeries being the aggressor as it were. Their human victims either being duped, or forced into the relationship. Is this right? Or do I need to dig up more material?

As I understand it, it could work both ways - there's an analysis of Kirk's Secret Commonwealth here:. Especially

There were also more sinister aspects to human/fairy interactions.
Most people have heard of changelings, where a human baby is taken away
from its parents and a defective fairy child left in its place. But the
Subterraneans did not balk at taking adults away too. They particularly
liked women who'd just given birth. They were kidnapped to serve as wet
nurses to fairy babies. Interestingly, the fairies would leave exact
doubles of their captives behind. Kirk discusses these doppelgangers,
who he calls "co-walkers," in some detail. Like changeling infants,
co-walkers tend to weaken, become incoherent, and eventually die.
They're not human or fairy, but a sort of biological robot created by
fairy magic to distract mortals away from the truth about the abduction
of their loved ones. UFO lore is full of co-walker types. Many of the
classic "men in black" episodes feature clumsy, muddle-mouthed visitors
who don't quite seem in sync with the mundane world. MIBs, like
co-walkers, perform some task, then depart -- though they don't usually
die in front of puzzled witnesses.

Kirk gives this account of one woman's abduction (I have modernized
his spelling):

"Among other instances of undoubted verity, proving in these the being
of such aerial people, or species of creatures not vulgarly known, I
add the subsequent relations, some whereof I have from my acquaintance
with the actors and patients and the rest from the eyewitnesses to the
matter of fact. The first whereof shall be of the woman taken out of
her child-bed, and having a lingering image of her substituted body in
her room, which resemblance decayed, died, and was buried. But the
person stolen returning to her husband after two years space, he being
convinced by many undeniable tokens that she was his former wife,
admitted her home and had diverse children by her. Among other reports
she gave her husband, this was one: that she perceived little what they
[the fairies] did in the spacious house she lodged in, until she
anointed one of her eyes with a certain unction that was by her; which
they perceiving to have acquainted her with their actions, they fained
her blind of that eye with a puff of their breath. She found the place
full of light, without any fountain or lamp from whence it did spring."

Kirk goes on to say the returned woman was undoubtedly the same one
everyone thought had died, and that her husband, having remarried since
her "death," was obliged to divorce his second wife to remarry his
first.

& an article on Selkies gives:

The male members among the selkie-folk were renowned for their many encounters with human females - married and unmarried.

A selkie man in human form was a handsome creature with almost magical seductive powers over mortal women. These selkie men had no qualms in casting off their sealskins, stashing them carefully, before heading inland to seek illicit intercourse with an 'unsatisfied woman'.

Should such a mortal woman wish to make contact with a selkie man, there was a specific rite that she had to follow. At the high tide, the woman should make her way to the shore where she had to shed seven tears into the sea.

The selkie man would then come ashore and after removing his magical sealskin, would seek out 'unlawful love' among the women of the island.

In the words of the Orkney folklorist Walter Traill Dennison, these selkie males:

"..often made havoc among thoughtless girls, and sometimes intruded into the sanctity of married life."
If a girl went missing while out on the ebb or at sea, it was inevitably said that her selkie lover had taken her to his watery domain - assuming, of course, she had not attracted the eye of a Finman.

But if the males of the selkie race were irresistable to the island women, selkie women were no less alluring to the eyes of earth-born men.

The most common theme in selkie-folklore is one in which a cunning young Orcadian man acquires, either by trickery or theft, a selkie girl's sealskin.

This prevented her from returning to her home in the sea and the beautiful seal-maiden was usually forced to marry their 'captors' and sire children.

These tales generally end sadly, however, with the selkie wife's children finding and returning her sealskin so that she might return to the sea. In some accounts her children go with her while others have them remaining with their mortal father.

Six of one, half dozen of the other, so to speak.