Bad publicity, confused gender.

(This post originally appeared in May 2008 but was lost when the server was hacked in 2015. This is a recovered version.)

Well, it had to happen. Here’s the blurb for a film in which a Yeti is the horror interest. Probably a male monster.

Contrast this to Herge’s poignantly misunderstood beast . In Tintin in Tibet, the yeti is shy, lonely, and female.

For sheer strangeness, what about ‘Sex Secrets of the Yeti’ (google it yerself!) – which so far as I could determine puts forth (ahem) a male monster.

Insofar as I’ve been able to make sense of various threads within the yeti mythology across the Himalayas, they can be either male (as in the Dumji plays discussed by Ortner (1989:202)) or female (as in the stories I’ve heard from Bhutan) but they’re certainly not man-eaters.