This is the third part of “Solving Riddles; or, Following in Medusa’s Footsteps.“ Originally part of an undivided volume—specifically Volume Two of my Sex Positivity (2023) book series—this promo post now belongs to a large-but-redundant book sample called “Brace for Impact“ (2024); i.e., that went on to become its own completed module in Volume Two: the Poetry Module, aka Volume Two, part one. The module was primarily inspired by Harmony Corrupted and divides into over thirteen posts, whose collective chapters/subchapters compile one half of the larger total volume; i.e., Volume Two has three modules—one bigger module for part one (re: the Poetry Module), and two slightly smaller modules (the Monster Modules) for part two—for which the volume halves are roughly equal in size (subject to change).
Update: Volume Two, part one (the Poetry Module) is out (5/1/2024)! I wrote a preface for the module along with its debut announcement. Give that a look; then, go to my book’s 1-page promo to download the latest version of the full module (which will contain additions/corrections these posts will not have)!
Click here to see “Brace for Impact’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.
Permissions: Any publicly available images are exhibited for purposes of education, transformation and critique, thus fall under Fair Use; private nude material and collabs with models are specifically shared with permission from the original model(s). For more details about artist permissions, refer to the book disclaimer (linked above).
“Following in Medusa’s Footsteps”: Conflict, Mothers-in Conflict, and Liberation
Samus is more than a classical Perseus; she’s Athena. In the Medusa myth, Athena is an androgynous figure, both masculine and feminine; she forges a shield, but gives it to Perseus. In Metroid, there is no Perseus, no male hero armed to the teeth. Only Samus. Samus kills Mother Brain, but also intimates her by stealing her power. I see this cycle as hereditary in a Bakhtinian sense: told through the castle, Zebes. It’s written all over the place, including Samus’ pilfered gear (source).
—Persephone van der Waard, “War Vaginas: Phallic Women, Vaginal Spaces and Archaic Mothers in Metroid” (2021)
Picking up from where “Teaching and Coaching” left off…
This third-and-final subdivision to “Medusa’s Footsteps” concludes the “Teaching” chapter by examining conflict relative to the monstrous-feminine: per conflict as an essential, definitive feature of language, mothers in relation to that (mothers-in-conflict), and ultimately their liberation as monstrous educators we should value and defend. Under attack, monster mothers (the Medusa or otherwise) seek liberation through themselves as monstrous-feminine, thus alien and fetishized across a variety of simulacra capital reduces to a singular (and dogmatically lucrative) type:
(artist: Urbanator)
In regards to general conflict, the human condition is rife with it as something to live with; e.g., trauma, guilt, alienation, desire, etc, as carried around with us. Crippled under capital, we must fight as heroes do in order to influence maternal outcomes as not being automatically punitive: for the oppressed, which ironically under capital, are workers not the state. The elite discourage revealing this, which means that all teachers, detectives, heroes, and monsters (or artifacts of these instances) become part of the same dialectical-material struggle; i.e., for workers or the state. Beauty and strength sit in the eye of the beholder (re: I like monster mommies as cathartic devices and profound levers of speculative thought) but their dialectical-material function is not subjective. Mommies or not, Team Caterpillar or Team Wasp—all are completely fine provided they don’t betray worker interests in service to the state; i.e., what Marx would call class traitors, meaning cops. Enjoy Wonder Woman and her strong thighs and lasso of truth (exquisite “torture”), but also critique her ideal form as containing pernicious aspects the Gothic will reveal with glee—in short, how its material conditions are used to change how we think, create, and act regarding animalistic mothers as part of a bigger struggle fascinated with “antique” derelicts (re: “Borrowed Robes” or “War Vaginas” [the epitaph] and my love for Amazons as protectors, teachers and nurturers that I want to be and fuck; i.e, since I first saw Alien when I was nine and played Super Metroid when I was eight): I’m always playing and thinking about/with monster mommies.
(artist: Frank Cho)
It’s true that (from Volume Zero): “Returning and reflecting upon old points after assembling them is a powerful way to understand larger structures and patterns (especially if they’re designed to conceal themselves through subterfuge, valor and force). It’s what holistic study (the foundation of this book) is all about” (source). And I’ve done this with Amazons and Metroid a great many times (see: the glossary’s definition of “Metroidvania as closed space” and “Metroidvania” to track this process, yourselves). The likes of comic books (above) constitute just one facet of popular media as colonized by weird canonical nerds and liberated by weird iconoclastic nerds; i.e., comics inform us, but also other forms of popular media that are alive and active, carrying idealized forms (and their profane counterparts) across novels, movies and games (video or otherwise) just as easily and often. Back and forth, heroes-as-monsters present Amazonomachia as educational in poetic forms—an endless, dialectical-material process whose pedagogic conflict serves workers and the state at the same time in opposition to each other.
As such, we must think just as critically about our relationship to these things “as one” and ourselves “as one”; i.e., to think about Gothic poetry repeatedly and how it affects and shapes our ability to think, feel, and empathize through understanding others not with identical lived experiences, but shared unalienable rights: in stories that speak to shared struggles where everyone’s experience is unique/weird, and which empathy is feeling for those whose experiences are different from, thus alien to, our own (re: Volume One’s “Healing from Rape” chapter): a pedagogy of the oppressed where mothers are loved, not killed for their weirdness. Achieving a collective understanding in spite of these alienating factors, especially through creative action and imagination, is the prime Communist directive of the Humanities, medieval expression and Gothic poetics; i.e., monsters as critical lenses, but also roles through which their various senses (expanded, inclusive, animalistic, and crude; e.g., the sense of humor as medieval, thus carnal, thus abject/toilet) open up and expand our minds, offering up things to experience and see differently to achieve new vital perspective relative to our positions in capital. Such options help workers see it for what it is and to fight back any way we can. I envision the Gothic as our home, insofar as it quests for the Numinous through us working as detectives and advocates for all peoples affected by capital and the past (thus future) it tries to regulate through imagination; i.e., the Wisdom of the Ancients. The Judgement of Antiquity becomes, per my arguments, something to camp and replace the gentrifying twin trees with (again, the Base and Superstructure) through flexible, maternal poiesis. Medusa.
(artist: Jan van den Hoecke)
“People are not trees.” No, but they are informed by them as often personified in memetic refrains that speak to wider myths as useful[1] to critical thought; i.e., by identifying wider harms acknowledged and apologized for by canonical scenarios proving ipso facto that “rape is everywhere,” insofar as it affects nature-as-food, meaning “monstrous-feminine, thus abject”; e.g., Zeus rapes women, who escape him by turning into trees. To that, maybe transformation isn’t just a means to escape at all, but fight back, Medusa-style, and refuse to be told what to do; i.e., “turn into a tree I can rape” versus trees that fight back who can move to defend themselves; e.g., dryads and forest nymphs: to not be kept by taking borrowed robes and using them as a revolutionary means of education-through-disguise, through cryptonymy (no matter how harmless, badass or cool we seem). Expression is defined within limits, then, and there’s only so many dots and theories I can provide while teaching you to assemble and connect them as you decide; i.e., in a given current form to speak to larger battles taking place during class/culture war as one in the same. So try as I might, I can’t mention them all here (the struggle to do so is what matters), but they will come up throughout the book.
As they do, look for patterns in movies, songs, poetry and porn, et al, that you can endlessly repeat and vary to help yourself and other workers find liberation by reifying a collective jilt, delight (success being the best revenge). Quote, play and create things that, from complex-to-simple (successful praxis, a pedagogy of the oppressed, synthesis, and the basics: anger/gossip, monsters and camp), leads reliably to catharsis—in short, what makes our hair (and other things) stand on end, in jouissance, to stand up and pay attention, captivated, to ravish us like John Donne’s “three-person’d God” or fill us like his infamous “Flea”; to “park its Big Mac truck right in this little garage” (size difference for the win; but we’re not all size queens[2])! Like Medusa, or the caterpillar and the wasp, the monstrous-feminine can be said and expressed in a billion different ways all speaking to the same thing. A lover saying “Yes, baby! More!” is not an actual baby but a teacher who can be loved with a profound emotional, physical and/or sexual connection that mirrors such familial hyperbole (re: Cuwu); reality yields funny paradoxes that aren’t impossible, but perceived: the angel in class who listens to Enya with her students, and who—per Foucault—goes home and fucks big time in the bedroom. Per us, “art is love made public[3]” to break these barriers down a little (or a lot). We’re taking our rights back, one incremental fuck at a time (e.g., Sabrina used to be a Playboy bunny and struck out for the territories seeking bigger opportunities—definitely a size queen!):
(artist: Sabrina Nicole)
In short, the Gothic is the study of experience that leads to transformative proletarian knowledge through popular media; i.e., as part of who we are in conflict. In turn, our Galatea is something to sculpt and embody as forever ongoing and unfinished, en medias res. All heroes are monsters, and all monsters are idealized, but also highly idiosyncratic characteristics of the human condition as at war with capital and itself regarding nature as something to destroy or defend. Existence within capital raises difficult questions about a system that is designed to control us, to which we must fight against its natural-material constraints to become our true selves by synthesizing the two, processed through critical thought to achieve liberation: to be unafraid to say “I love you” in monstrous ways. To take it all. Every. Last. Inch (which is easier to do if you’ve had a hysterectomy—meaning your vagina won’t have a cervix, just the elastic tissue that remains).
Mothers aren’t defined by biology (or any other essentialized factor). This brings us to mothers, mid-conflict. To that, the rebellious maternal is a reunion that happens by routinely challenging capital’s illusions during iconoclasm: to bend reality to our will and needs by breaking Capitalist Realism as patriarchal by design. It is synonymous with “true sight,” class consciousness and worker action, including deceiving our captors in good faith via combative metaphors (animals, sex and war) that, when combined, collectively help all parties “break on through”; i.e., onto a better, more humane world by rescuing motherly personas from abject bondage, hence tutelage regarding actual or figurative forms of motherhood (which Zeuhl ironically helped with by recommending Stuart Mills’ “What Is Acid Communism?” [2019] to me as a rebuttal, which led to my original December 2022 manuscript [then shorter than this chapter by itself is—roughly 50,000 vs 85,000 words] ballooning into nearly a million words, four volumes and lots of future success and happiness for me. That’s your legacy, Zeuhl; I didn’t need you and found people who actually give a shit. Fuck you, with [tentative] love).
Conversely, Cartesian thought is synonymous with blindness, with bad faith, with deception, division and enslavement to keep all workers in Plato’s cave, to keep things operating behind the curtain much as they always have for hundreds and thousands of years; i.e., when cities emerged and started to order existence in ways useful to the powerful:
The ancient poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged and numerous senses could perceive. And particularly they studied the Genius of each city and country, placing it under its mental deity. Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of and enslaved the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects. Thus began Priesthood. Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales. And at length they pronounced that the Gods had ordered such things. Thus men forgot that all deities reside in the human breast (source: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 1790).
In other words, Capitalism was already ordering nature into something it could dominate, which Blake saw as finite and fallible, thus challenged through poetry as a Hellish physical process—a Satanic means of rebellion:
The ancient tradition that the world will be consumed in fire at the end of six thousand years is true, as I have heard from Hell. For the cherub with his flaming sword is hereby commanded to leave his guard at [the] tree of life, and when he does, the whole creation will be consumed and appear infinite and holy, whereas it now appears finite and corrupt. This will come to pass by an improvement of sensual enjoyment. But first the notion that man had a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged; this I shall do by printing in the infernal method by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid. If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern (ibid.).
These visions, seemingly drug-induced and quite mad, speak honestly through poetic confusion to the critical, virulent power of the Gothic, of thinking openly about sacred and profane things in relation, like Blake’s proverbial marriage but also Milton’s combative argument, Paradise Lost (for which Blake saw Milton of the devil’s party without realizing it; re: Jamal Nafi’): it opens our minds to have society progress in harmony with nature, language, history and ourselves as monstrous-feminine freaks of nature enslaved through Cartesian menticide.
(artist: Bubble Wolf)
The ticket to unfucking the mind is, paradoxically enough, “fucking” it. Just as everyone likes playing with sex, death and monsters (ace or otherwise), everyone[4] likes the Hell portions of stories like Dante’s Divine Comedy (1321), Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1392), Milton’s epic and Blake’s Songs of Experience (e.g., “The Tyger” vs “The Lamb,” 1789). This “infection” cannot happen without derangement and paradox; i.e., without grasping the whole of it, however impossible that may seem. There will be pain and disappointment, as all struggles and growth involve. But the cost will be worth it—liberation of, and reunion with, our lost Galatean power! More than that, complex evolution takes trial and error over time. But regardless, it still remains our basic human right as supplied within nature and later in relation to the state seeking to enslave us; i.e., by abusing the dialectic of shelter and the alien to benefit the few at the cost of the many as potentially abject. It’s a big deal, a matter of life and death, a virus whose cheap knockoffs of the Gothic (which is ironic, I’ll give them that)—and incessant febrility of constant moral panic and crisis—collectively lead to actual dead people and brains, not Richard Matteson’s zombie-vampire Commies:
(exhibit 33b2c2b: Monsters aren’t just theatrical preferences to speak poetically about things; they readily lend a punchy shorthand to collocative issues [mouthfuls, gushers]. Since at least the Black Death, zombies concern social strife tied to unrest caused by natural disasters and manmade interference [Capitalism in its earliest forms]. Fast-forward to the present and the same factors continue to play out from generation to generation, under capital; e.g., since I was eight—since high school, when I played hooky with Uncle Dave to see Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead [2004] and play Metroid: Zero Mission [2004] for the first time; i.e., a potential cadet during early-2000s, post-9/11 moral panic, Samus’ “zero mission” being the state’s “project zero” to infect the nation’s youth with the androgynous spirit [and sport] of death: patient zero, a targeted host and peer pressure to kill the enemy at home and abroad with—a moral panic that elides different xenophobia into a perverse, wretched psychosexuality. The confusion of pleasure and pain, where the bounty hunter delights at killing “Mother Brain” for the state until the end of time. Stripped down to a baby-blue birthday suit—and scared of the same old ghost of the counterfeit, mid-homecoming—Samus’ blood ritual is meta and diegetic: punching her own dark reflection inside all the usual neoliberal hauntologies. “Kill the pig! Spill its blood!” Her blood.
[artist, top-right: Jack C. Gregory]
Instead of George Romero’s critical bite, then, such apocalypses manifest like Zack Snyder‘s Dawn of the Dead “gettin’ down with the sickness”—not Matteson [or Cronenberg’s] “new flesh” at all, but an exchange of the Communist “could be” for a dated fear of the fast and terrifying infector threatening a conservative house and home [Snyder’s film being grimly homophobic, having the gay man slice up the hot blonde with the chainsaw]: “Here it comes, Mommy. Get ready to die!” In consequence, the infection becomes an infarction [dying tissue, often from blood clots in the heart, brain and other organs] as we’re supplied a death knell of perceptive satire/pastiche and Medusa, insidiously replaced with Jameson’s “statue with blind eyeballs”: a return to childhood as hopelessly damaged and yearning for fatal violence to kill the monsters under one’s bed as projected onto all the useful groups; i.e., the givers and receivers of state force and division—a generation bred on DBZ music videos and other AMV/neoliberal exports “falling victim to a radical new virus.” The kids definitely aren’t alright:
In true anisotropic fashion, the zombie war is a Children’s Crusade set to catchy music, one whose enfants terribles mirror the state as threatened by “degeneracy” [a dogwhistle attached to Capitalism’s usual cycles of rise and collapse] and workers threatened by the state’s weaponized children. The state’s Pied Piper leads to kids killing kids, adults killing kids and vice versa. And like all civil wars, you love those on both sides and don’t want to see anyone get hurt. For example, I love Adult Gohan—if only because he is valiant, tragically protecting a tween Twunks from harm—but his swan song doubles for a fascist call-to-arms we need to be mindful of. We need to while working through our own problems, onstage, because those useful to the state—the capably dogmatic with mommy issues blindly worshipping heroes—become headhunter operatives to hog the venue with; i.e., in times of perceived crisis, chasing down their own bugbears and war brides [rulebreakers and rewards to report and reap] when Capitalism decays towards a fascist state; i.e., like Jadis did with me: a “new flesh” for them—a fat pig on par with Barker’s cenobites or Priest [below] slurping disgustingly on my stolen lifeforce—to toy and play with like an unwilling plaything. Their harmful, unironic approach to BDSM was “cool” in their eyes; my sex-positive, ludo-Gothic BDSM was not. I could never be cool to them; I was only ever and always a victim for them to crush under their boot, eating me alive. That’s how the state-in-small operates: a sexual predator playing the victim, up to no good.
[source]
I get the appeal to transform, thus escape abuse in badass ways [or equally understand getting “stepped on” by doms who help us process trauma as living in and around our bodies]. There’s nothing wrong with such morbid chapels, provided it doesn’t lead to more abuse—that the congregation isn’t compelled to harmful worship, dogma, canon. Sex positivity can be entirely lovely in that respect. But Jadis “made it lame” by sacrificing me for no other reason than it made them feel powerful, a head of their own private church—of forced confession, of suffering-under-duress carried out by a tried-and-true taskmaster. Through such dire and coerced transformations, the fascist past [and its Hugo-Boss regalia, per Sontag’s 1974 “Fascinating Fascism“] becomes something to unironically revive during the liminal hauntology of war. It regresses to traditional divisions of violence against the other—a teenage [tom]boy’s weaponizing of illegal fireworks [and other makeshift explosives] alongside power tools, daddy’s shotgun, and mom’s medicine cabinet [“Pills here!”]. This necrosis becomes something to debride, but from one’s own sense of self and home as sick.
This requires inspiration, to which music, muses and games work best, I think—a cradle-like plane to urgently play inside and reclaim from the usual monopolizers; i.e., to, as Daft Punk put it, “Lose Yourself to Dance!” [2013] inside the chapel, to go a little crazy and kick it out. Many people can’t, having been made to see such shambling hybridity as repulsive, even—no, especially—in Gothic circles [academics are some of the biggest snobs and sexually repressed weirdos on Earth]. Gotta get past that, my dudes, or at least let us speak for ourselves [who wants an aging dinosaur like Fredric fucking Jameson telling them the Gothic is boring and exhausted? Puh-lease]. Otherwise the fascists win. The battle for the youth as for workers or the state dates back to Coleridge and Lewis, pushing forward from the Ike Generation savagely lampooned by Jim Sharman’s Rocky Horror [1975] to our present moment: J.K. Rowling marshalling TERFs to police weird culture to suit state aims, yet-another-case of fash-vs-antifash. Well, “Nazi pigs, fuck off!” This is our dangerous disco, discourse, and dance of the dead—our succulent patchwork to flaunt and twist ecstatically a) in spite of state prudes criticizing us, noses held high, too “grown up” to act as rebellious children themselves; and b) in defiance of state hunters infiltrating our ranks, both parties undercover, out on the sweaty dance floor.
Out there and in here, we wrestle and rest on the same arena’s murky enclosure, guerillas winning the war of attrition one calculated [and indulgent] shake of the booty at a time; i.e., by using what guerillas generally are reduced to, reclaimed by us and held together by duct tape [Millennium-Falcon-style]: not weapons, but lies [e.g., Edward Norton’s 2009 Leaves of Grass: a classically-educated identical twin thinking his pothead brother was murdered with a crossbow (“They’re… inexplicably popular where I come from”) when, point-in-fact, it was all a ruse to get said nerd out of his ivory tower… and to help his dealer brother out of a territorial jam] contributing to the proletariat’s enduring inventive ability to [counter] terrorize, thus raise Cain for workers. This includes our bodies and gender trouble as something to make with a smile; i.e. we exist despite offended calls for silence from the audience, rejoindering with our bodies, our identities: “Fuck the nuclear family model! Fuck settler colonialism and genocide! Fuck America as emblematic of these things! Onto to something better!” And take it from me: Nothing seals the deal—peels the panties [or banana]—better than the forbidden illustration [thus promise, sacred contract] of mutual consent amid intersectional solidarity [except with Nazi bitches, but only Nazis go to bed with Nazis]. “Stare and tremble!” indeed!
[model and artist: Quinnvincible and Persephone van der Waard]
And like a cake to decorate, we lay it on thicc—networking by spreading the delicious sugar [and cheeks] around as much as we can, and using such wonderful and tasty phrases that freely play with language despite veiled threats issued and directed at us to: “go back inside [to the shadow]” or “get back”; i.e., as a complicated extension of our GNC selves. Out of the closet, we become more than a moderate message of marketable hope to middle-class Americans; we become actively combative, our andro/gynodiverse [trans, enby and intersex] bodies providing the necessary push towards liberation by throwing old levers to cultivate new praxial stances—i.e., through revolutionary cryptonymy [masks] whose theatrical “flashing” exposes those aligned with power by using our power as outing their true motives. Eve’s Aegis—his big, crunchy “apple’s” pleasures of the flesh—becomes a scrumptious, sacrilegious means of temptation and heft to buckle the knees of any Nazi dumbass [extending to moderates who, when scratched, bleed like any fash]. Suitably tailored, we synonymize sex and gender parody with rebellion, updating 1960s anti-[state]-war “free love” with an expanded, all-inclusive post-millennial body lingo and [if needed] academic arsenal: class war and culture war prosecuted for workers, nature and Medusa.)
The lengths that Matteson goes to bring illuminating infection to a Cartesian suburbia should be a hint, one that speaks to the daily struggles of sex work across space and time. Jeopardized by state operations biased in favor of profit—as well as tokenized retribution that is anything but impartial—our colorful poetry and flexible campy rebellion is our greatest strength: one that is invisible in the absence of material conditions. So we must materialize it with dignity and grace under fire, which are something they can never take from us—not by force, lies, or manipulation at large (as the status quo trains workers to do since birth). We may not be able to pick our roles as “sullied” in the eyes of the state, but we can pick the place, uniform, dosage, and flow of power regarding us as the perpetual center of attention. Their eyes are always on us, but we can decide what to permit, what to spike—to toy with our enemies and relay double messages to our friends: signs, tells, hints, games. All as if to ask, “Well, what are you waiting for?”
(artist: Quinnvincible)
All the while, it becomes flirtatious, coy and fleeting per access supplied by us as something to contract, per contract, through de facto channels of communication. It’s not as simple as showing skin or “bumping uglies,” but managing attention, funds, and other resources in confidence with trusted friends while keeping our foes in check: outing and placing them with our “wagons” (and other corporal-to-cosmetic projections) rocking the larger boat outside the bedroom (vis-à-vis Foucault). Power aggregates. Viewed by the moderate and reactionary watchdog as preying on us for the state, there is always an acute and chronic risk of harm for sex workers; but the final stage of genocide is silence, so we must keep people talking (“the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about”).
Gothic entertainment, then, becomes an ironic, at times bizarre means of speaking to awful things—of expressing rape through “rape” as dramatic/comedic theatre, but also the unequal conditions for what normally leads to rape when society grows increasingly sick by design; i.e., exposure; e.g., bare skin, female genitals, a feminine affect in male bodies, and a masculine one in female bodies, intersex potential, etc. We don’t want to “rank” rape, here but strive to prevent it in all its forms. All become a praxial sum to synthesize towards catharsis for all, which occurs by fostering intersectional solidarity to hit the issue at its core: challenging power from the bottom to the top with things that leave a void when they’re gone. This includes our monstrous-feminine bodies, conditions, and boundaries, but also our booties to squeeze, eyes to catch, and yes, holes to fill: “Get busy living or get busy dying.”
(artist: Quinnvincible)
Per Creed, Medusa fights victimhood using what she’s got as fetishized by the state; per me, we stick to our strengths insofar as these encompass our bodies, labor and creative endeavors. Likewise, our fuel has many names: grace, grit, poise, and moxie, etc. We perform, but won’t stand on ceremony when a spread pussy will speak just as well. All the same, we’re happy to give an orator the floor or a doctor room to treat, using whatever the “medicine,” in a given theatre’s (operative, or otherwise) stage and number of performers, patients, pudendum, and so on. This fleshy alliance includes sex workers with a secure living arrangement, and survival sex workers down on their luck, dependent on the former’s help (with people’s exact position not always being clear based on the images they [and their body parts, below] produce). The haves and have-nots, it’s a group effort in that respect, too, and one whose solidarity remains determined; i.e., to overcome harmful boundaries, which include stereotypes: the stigma of the whore, baby-crazy mother and transient sex demon as “asking for it,” but also a class division precluding consciousness and cooperation between uneven parties rescuing Medusa while she represents different struggles among an oppressed polity. It’s an appeal to our humanity and a business maneuver that aims for societal improvement through the expression of vulnerability (which love is). To bare it all, to show off the goods.
(artist: Mugiwara)
Capitalism reduces people to sex objects useful to profit; i.e., not just like pieces of meat in that regard, but processed meat. Rendered into Jell-O like sludge, we exist as pink slime whose process of manufacture must be reclaimed by us for our own sake: valuing our own jiggly parts’ worth as an extension of our monstrous humanity. This starts with creativity as a social act and covenant between workers against the state. Humanity is monstrous, thus without limits. In game language, Capitalism frames the human condition as a profit margin to maximize—a zero-sum (win-lose) game where the elite win at the expense of monsters (workers). For workers, monstrous liberation is a positive-sum game—a win-win that actively accounts for the needs of all parties involved: sex, or things better than (or comparable to) sex, in exchange as needed. Working in concert, we can negotiate a tenable balance of what we both want regarding our needs as generally unequal but complementary—to snuggle, fuck, snugglefuck to music, with the lights on or off; do it doggy or masturbate for each other, edging to bigger and better climaxes; to go for a walk holding hands, or cook a tasty meal, etc (to never have sex again)—and likewise allow ourselves outlets when one party isn’t available (to “rub one out” to porn).
From top to bottom, Capitalism translates to a system of predatory paywalls that reduce survival to a constant, endless need: to slave over basic necessities like food, shelter and comfort routinely gatekept by opportunistic fat cats. In the same top-to-bottom fashion, this ranges from industry barons to landlords and local pimps (token or not) all being part of the same problem; i.e., generally by contributing to a series of disabling factors (trifectas and monopolies) that socially and materially (through settler-colonial, heteronormative dogma and tollways) cripple the individual (and the group) by needing “A for B,” “B for A” and so on. To offset this vicious cycle, workers must busy themselves with self-liberation as a group ordeal; i.e., as occurring between work and play as something to inventively combine among ourselves—to even the odds as a social engagement that speaks through bodies, money and labor as persuasive (“money talks, sex sells”), but also enriching. It becomes a careful game of investing energies, of management regarding debt, disease and disuse as normally crippling by design. It’s a causal, symbiotic relationship between workers creating the means to help one another and voice our oppression as one over space and time: as people who have done this before, having worked a day in their life but also played just as much, on and on.
From all our yesterdays to the last syllable of recorded time, the Gothic-Communist goal is the same: to offer but not rush, nor push what is refused (the sweetest butter tastes bitter when burned; the subbiest pup will bite the hand that feeds when said hand forces a collar round their neck, etc)—all to “meet our maker” not as a Wizard of Oz or prescribed divine authority, but ourselves and our dark poetry as the authors of our fate. Such routine, fancible invention might seem like pure magic, but in truth is as natural, artless (effortless) and easy for the initiated as the magician pulling a rabbit out of their hat. We must do the same with whatever needs producing at a given moment. To tease, “I heard you like magic? I got a wand and a rabbit!” to make our audience, who—suitably tantalized (and in on the joke, completely silly and dead serious)—grin and respond, “Now you’re speakin’ my language!” We like something and into us it goes, exiting again in some shape or form (fluid or otherwise). In turn, “great magic” can be done with cheap parlor tricks—by those who like the simpler magics (with my character, the witch queen Ileana Sanda, canonically favoring such illusory and compelling gimmicks over more forceful and literal spells):
(artist: Chapelle Roan)
Human history is mostly communication. Most of that is a nudge and a wink, a look to know and join in with—to flirt with boundaries during artistic, love-made-public displays that exhibit galleries buffering those who don’t want to see (or hear) such “sex” in public. Ideally control is allowed for both parties without enslaving the invigilator to censors, with exhibitionists playing with their identities, sexualities, and gender roles/performances less as literal and more as figurative but hinting at the latter the way policed media always does: because sex is policed, women are policed, the monstrous-feminine as sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll (originally an African American euphemism for sex, repressed by white culture commodifying black culture as settler colonists always do). But as Volume Zero put it (an extended quote, because this is important):
it’s fine if [an] exposed vagina in art/porn isn’t someone’s cup of tea, but videogames—especially those in the Internet Age—are a public space, a forum/galley to some extent. This means the rules of such places also apply to videogames (and other mediums); i.e., they’re an exhibit that isn’t curated to cater to a single group’s vision. If someone is sex-repulsed, that’s a valid consideration, but it should always be raised in ways that aren’t sex-negative. To that, sex-positive galleries shouldn’t have to compromise their sex-positive, xenophilic vision to meet a smaller group’s needs if the exhibit is about showcasing naked monster bodies in a sex-positive way. Putting the vagina in the closet when male genitalia are plastered all over everything is a modesty argument, often used by moderate individuals conflating their own sex repulsion as transcendental; they feel vulnerable when they see someone else’s vagina, but are probably acclimated to the cock as everywhere or the breasts as a commonly adjustable feature of avatar cosmetics. To include one but not the other is arbitrary and harmful, especially when the precedent of the game invokes sexual and gender expression to begin with. To exclude a particular morphological identity from the game is segregation, which generally will have a cis bias; players should be able to represent themselves however they want: Big Titty Goth GFs or Big Booty Goth GF with a girl-cock! So I ask people who would want to prevent that, “Why do you care if that’s in-[text]?”
[…] Yes, sex-repulsed people being triggered by exposed genitals is understandable; but their feelings about their own genitals doesn’t extend to other players within a shared world any more than it does in real life (the relationship, here, is half-real). This isn’t John Lajoie’s “Show Me You Genitals” […] the vicious historical-material cycle of tragedy and farce oscillating in public discourse at large); gender expression through the human body isn’t even automatically sexual. So no, people having the option to express themselves in a nudist sense with their [various] avatars isn’t you being forced to also “play doctor” or look upon someone who wants to have sex with you.
Put differently and in regards to Sex Positivity as a whole, it’s not up to the invigilator to manage their gallery to meet regressive, sex-negative standards; if the [text]-in-question provides inclusive options that represent a change in the paradigm shift troubling to creepy reactionaries fantasizing power abuse […] or even ace people, frankly that’s their problem (the option towards being ace, or at least not having genitals in videogames, is certainly nothing new); it’s not being done to offend others and even ace people need—and I promise this is coming from a place of love, my ace comrades—to manage their expectations while realizing that monster identities, especially genderqueer ones often are sexual and conveyed through nudism. Love it or hate it, them’s the breaks (although this book is largely about sex-positive Gothic expression, this doesn’t preclude asexuality at all. We will thoroughly explore ace options in Gothic media, too). Nudity and monsters have always been political, but this has to occur on our time, not that of moderates (versus overt reactionaries) telling us how to do our activism for us; we’re not doing this for just ourselves, but fighting for a better world for all—a post-scarcity world where nudity isn’t automatically a sexual act, sin doesn’t exist, and people can be more open about their sexuality and gender without feeling vulnerable, fake, criminal and/or exposed in fear of reactionaries killing them and aloof, smug moderates turning a blind eye or prioritizing their own victim complexes. This requires imagining that world ahead of time, which requires having thoughts that will be considered sinful and anathema by the elite and their proponents (source).
As such, the GNC need for iconoclastic exhibits will always trump ace people’s comfort levels when being near but not directly inside something they’d rather not think about at all. Silence is genocide during moral panic—a death sentence we’d rather not have the indifferent-to-hostile issue the warrant of, just because we play at “measuring coffins” onstage. The thing at stake is our sexual agency and gender, something that aggressively ace and sex-negative people need to tolerate without pushing for our sisterly silence. Wrinkle your noses if you want, but we’re not trying to rub your faces in it. All the same, try to understand the underlying message if you please—to imagine yourselves getting it after the moral panic (and its uncanny nostalgia, below) have temporarily subsided and we’re gone; i.e., from being genocided and the state compelling you to have their children, then sacrificing you for the child’s life, even when the fetus isn’t viable: in short, when your rights are in the toilet and the crucible to mending them is scuttled. “They’re coming to get you, Barbara!”
The basic idea is called mirror syndrome and it’s generally mimed through popular media. For example, the countdown mechanism in Alien is a self-destruct metaphor occurring inside a larger dying organism (a life craft) as tied to our own fragile life cycle. In turn, Scott’s seafaring-in-space gag is a similar lunar ploy to Matteson’s own zombie schtick: compartment syndrome, or the release of toxins into the bloodstream. Scott would have been seventeen when I Am Legend released, but bred on such stories as older than both men, and indeed Capitalism: a horror vein whose sex, death, murder or rape scenes have been a common main attraction, center stage since Beowulf and capitalized on by enterprising storytellers keying in on audience fears: “In space, no one can hear you scream.”
Such chill-inducing taglines (and their deathly delirium) are feigned and extensive, but tied to real problems pushed “far away” using go-to promotion schemes at home in the Gothic. Per Hogle, the medieval theatre’s ghost of the counterfeit and narrative cryptonymy came “back” to 1979 British and American theatres (on the cusp of Thatcherism, what Ian Curtis would go on to call “disorder” in Unknown Pleasures [1979] and Derek Jarman would speak on through The Last of England, eight years later), delivering a catch-and-release mechanism who ghost ship/castle floats in the vast expanse of “outer space” as the latest haunted-house/zombie (the Nostromo/xenomorph) metaphor for the Imperial Core; i.e., as a threatening perspective for Capitalism having made homely places threatening but also forcing workers to go into inhospitable environments at home and abroad for profit (re: allusions to Conrad with the borrowed slave-vessel names for the ships in the movie). Per Scott’s astronoetic critique, it’s “crew expendable,” but experienced (for GNC people) from the POV of blue-collar space truckers wearing Hawaiian t-shirts: “Something’s definitely wrong.”
This alarm-bell approach isn’t unique to Alien or Scott, but vibes synchronistically with other artists then and now. For example, The Offspring hit upon the same senescence in 1998: “When we were young, the future was so bright […] Now the neighborhood’s cracked and torn […] How can one little street swallow so many lives?”; re: “The Kids Aren’t Alright” from their Americana album reflecting a dark shadow on Pax Americana (and by extension, Britannica) at large—the place where worker childhood dreams go to die, the graveyard and ghost of empire. No one ever said Gothic material critiques were anything but sobering. You can hear the same entropy through Ian Curtis and the boys:
The cover to Unknown Pleasures is solid black, its surface stamped with a mysterious chart: the sequence to a dying star. But you might not know that looking at it. Instead, you might see the symbol and wonder what it is; it might pique your interest, even, but does so with veiled hostility—not from concealment, but through frank opaqueness. It’s there for you to see, but yields little except mild discomfort and burning curiosity.
This curiosity definitely kills the cat. The album sounds like the end of an explosion, the silence afterward heavy and bleak. The energy it contains is dissipated, a bodiless vigor surrounded by darkness visible. Breaking glass stabs the silence, the shattering of which cuts like a knife and closes like a wound. Ian Curtis croons like a gloomier, less raucous cousin to Jim Morrison. Control is never lost, because there’s none to be had; in this endless void, any kind of scream would only ring hollow.
[…]
Cohesive and hypnotic, this album weaves a dark, chilly spell, one that lends just enough warmth to keep you alive. Thrown open, its doors submerge the listener in thickened air, heady and difficult. But amid this smoky gloam lurks a menacing power, addictive and destructive—a pathos that yields pleasures found only in the darkest corners of the universe. There are moments of giddy madness, but just as many that allow you to reflect on your slow, inevitable disintegration. What follows a supernova? A black hole, of course (source: Persephone van der Waard’s “A Hell without Mirrors, Only Darkness,” 2019; which she wrote shortly after Zeuhl left her for their future husband).
It’s all rather gloomy but nevertheless remains the place to make our stand and let our feelings be known. Often we’re preaching rapid-fire to the choir—a little goblin-like creature “that gestates inside a living host and has concentrated acid for blood” (“no ordinary fetus,” as David put it)—but that’s the point: to see our evil twin and rattle on paradoxically (a merger of pleasure and pain as pleasurable adjacent to harmful pain) to our gremlin-y lovers to sing together in Sisyphean defiance of the gods: to cum neurodivergently (and gay as fuck) together with those we love until we’re dunzo; i.e., trauma-bonding (sex) and psychosexual catharsis, the feeling of us actually being food where we live—e.g., fictional band Cherry Bomb’s “Hunger City” (1986): “daddy’s pride and joy / slithers down the drain instead, fast food for the mutants!”—and to find other lost souls to take comfort, however brief, in that perilous fact as something to endure and find joy together in, anyways: as fucking weirdos fucking together despite feeling fucked by our surroundings. You know you’re lucky when you’ve found someone who’s just as weird as you are, likes all the same weird shit that you do/takes pleasure in seeing you geek out at weird hybrids of trashy garbage and high culture combined; e.g., Alien by itself, or Alien and Howard the Duck alluded together in my weird-ass book, listening to Annihilator’s Alice in Hell (1989) while I hang with Bay and Beat, chopping and screwing things together… and leaving my gloomth-filled, corpse-like cathedral for people to comb over and walk around inside—to play within and with like an (excuse the Tim-Burton necrophilic phrase) rotting sex doll (“What’s this! What’s this!” Haha). I’ve gone and mentioned necrophilia and Howard the Duck in the same sentence; my life’s work is now complete, but legend has it, I’m still writing (if you walk around inside, years from now and hold your breath, you can still hear the clacking of my keyboard, Jack-Torrance-style; e.g., King Diamond’s “Twilight Symphony” [1988] or Michiru Yamane’s “Dance of Pales” [1997]. “Welcome home,” as they say—all singing together and me among them). And with that, I think I just wrote my favorite paragraph in the whole book!
Certainly, the cliché is known to us all—that “death is where we feel most alive.” Canon’s commodification of the Gothic is akin to what Bay describes as “lobster-fication”; i.e., taking a pauper’s dish like lobster, black pudding or lamb shanks, and gentrifying it. Per the Gothic as something to reclaim, we wacky fags feel most alive when we put “death” in quotes, slapping things campily together through ludo-Gothic BDSM to find psychosexual enrichment. Is it predatory for the Straights (or us) to “cash” in on that? Such moral probes/high ground aren’t as cut-and-dry as you might think. For Alien, given the film’s rocky production—and much of the money disappearing into corporate vaults when Fox famously refused to pay out, citing a lack of profit (Charles’ Schreger’s “The ‘Alien’ Papers: Can a $100-Million Film Lose Money?” 1980)—I’d say that Scott and company existed in a space where money-making and statement-making can both take place to a shared degree. It’s good old-fashioned liminal expression, not unlike Shakespeare’s theatre house being the barber shop for GNC bleeding hearts across space and time: the violent pornography of sex, death, and capital reifying over and over again.
Furthermore, the phenomenological differences—however alien they might seem per case—actually mirror a shared parallel struggle. We can influence it to help each other decide what is often too big for one person to conceivably choose regarding matters of the heart, of development: to want what we can’t have, but could if the state’s powers were reduced. Neoliberals swap possible dreams for false hope. So we must make our dreams (whatever they are) come true at their expense—to, with our partners-in-crime (during sex or something equally fun)—delightedly howl like gay bubbly comedian werewolves, “We’re doing it, babe! We’re doing the nasty!” to our legions of adoring fans’ frantic cheers mixed with slow nods of solemn approval; i.e., not the incompatible/unavailable crush that we hopelessly cling to, but a compatible likeness of them that is a) able to keep up, and b) still their own person (and not a shambling copy to fill the gap with): someone better than those who treat us poorly who is still cogent enough to appreciate us the same way around.
To that, we’re the face of a given production and the theatre operators behind-the scenes. Our treatment comes from a cavalcade of willing wackjobs howling at the moon, all to challenge the hubris of those who posture dogmatically as heaven-sent. We speak sense through “lunacy” to challenge dogma, clearing the field with brilliant puppetry—ourselves. Watch and learn, but remember, we’re professional weirdos operating under informed consent. It’s our trade secret, then, one that—when administered—must solve complex systemic problems by having precisely the kind of fun that doesn’t treat workers as “zombie-like” problems to “solve” through force (or force them to be someone they’re not, likenesses aside); i.e., the cis-het numbskull repeatedly barking up the wrong tree, trying any way he can to coax said “animal” down instead of respecting its rejection (subtle or overt) and its boundaries (ace or otherwise).
The praxial idea with any healthy (stable) relationship is to learn what one needs and find it with whomever can supply it both ways; we do it while looking out together for all monsters. Drenched in pathos, these alien-fetish personas must also be met in concert, the habitual focus of a given example being movement towards a shared goal, a (non-nuclear) village of mothers, sisters and allies likewise meeting each other halfway through different signposts. To be frank, our focus isn’t pregnancy* or a white wedding to broadcast the amatonormative ceremony trotted out in broad daylight; it’s a cemetery gradient of those who generally can’t afford such luxuries (children, healthcare and families are expensive, under Capitalism)—indeed, are swept under such Hallmark posturing as “of the middle class” at the expense of everyone else (the ghost of the counterfeit and process of abjection): those at home with genocide as commercialized, never affecting them on a systemic level. White Anglo-Americans and their allies!
*With my staunchly pro-life mother hovering to adamantly and proudly declare regarding abortions, miscarriages and stillbirths, “Even the Antichrist deserves a chance!” Hell’s midwife, a delivery woman for any and all demon babies jumping ataxically from host to host—with my demented mother loving King Diamond’s “Abigail” (1987); mind you, this feverish bias only extends to human/selectively humane babies and “cute” animals: kittens, puppies, piglets, foals, etc.
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A paradigm shift requires a change of perspective (ruffling feathers, Said-style), but also a structuring of optics, of triggering factors, of outcomes that feel doomed, but which a part of us never sees coming. Families are always rising and falling in America. We can prevent that, but have to change the system by seeing its grave danger (mirror syndrome) for what it is; i.e., by who it views and treats as monstrous-feminine, the wild and the feisty but also the innocent. No one deserves dehumanization for doing sex work, many of whom are merely trying to survive, but also many others doing de facto social work through elevated positions of sex work as stylish, well-produced. All are important, rooting for a common cause, courting prosperity through informed workers raising their collective intelligence and awareness—to increase worker safety and research solutions, but also shell out and afford changes through redistributions of wealth.
We’ve talked about illustrating mutual consent and paying sex workers, then. But there’s something else to consider and entertain more than we already have (the service top in me begs repetition, here): the social element, to which class and culture war through sex work are definitely an enterprise of.
In regards to sex workers and marginalized peoples at large, but especially GNC people, we’re separated by vast gulfs of space and (at times) emotional distance and distress. But the beauty of the Internet, though bittersweet, remains connection; if one hurts, we all do. And we all supply force fields to bar enemies from entry with and venues to exchange what is needed among ourselves: mutual aid. This isn’t for posterity or performance art, but simply to get by as we work; but, as this book demonstrates, remains something to exhibit in artistic forms that serve a dual purpose. Prevention trumps treatment by a mile, and some risks are ventured by those who can afford to take them; i.e., to do sex work to speak to civil rights, and stand up for those who cannot devote themselves to these policy-changing dialogs beyond surviving from moment-to-moment[5]. We need them to feel welcome (thus safe) enough to be present to receive aid (with genocides made to keep state victims “in the wind,” exiled and adrift).
(artist: Mugiwara)
This book’s definitive statement always returns to holistic expression, one regarding workers vs the state; it’s something we add to as much as we can, shameless entertainers smoothly putting on a show (making a slick “entrance” to communicate as people do [and which Capitalism has aliened workers from, save in harmfully fetishized forms]: through motion, sound, scent, taste and touch, but also music, dancing and other rhythmic forms of instructional fun as a) sexual and asexual [many sex workers are ace but still enjoy sex work] and b) whose various ways of feeling good happen together while balancing interpersonal needs—maintenance, motion and lubrication). These functions and forms all translate fairly well because that’s how people generally tend to work on any register/configuration, full circle.
Onstage and off, we forms cracks on apathetic fronts (and executors) where people are hemorrhaging help. Of that, there is no doubt. We’re the support group, the lecturer of those who don’t just fail and trouble our friends, but actively harm them; i.e., by keeping things the same, yet also fishing for the virtue of theatrical charity. We combat this through the power of suggestion and charm (of which we have plenty to spare), but also strictness and terror to petrify the things that sabotage our partnership: the blood flow of a giant called Capitalism. We can save our spite and venom for that son of a bitch, giving those we shelter and assist all our goodness, humility and love (our compromises). Using hard, consistent stances that never yield, budge or otherwise give an inch from threat of force (which the state always defaults to), we’ll take back from the former all we can to enrich the later. From a cookie to a glass of milk (our double entendres always allowing for innuendo, of course), we’ll start slow, then race together towards a glorious, sticky finish (our finest, self-serving hour). But we can’t afford to be innocent, either—to be willfully naïve about the reality that all work is sexualized and alien, thus demanding patronage from privileged peoples to move forward to happier days. So spread the love, pay it forward! You’d be lonely and miserable without us (as “MGTOW” and TERFs [incels and nice guys/girls] generally are—deeply cynical people, hopelessly afraid of everything while somehow still expecting the state not to betray them in a given cycle).
Call that an agenda, if you want—our enemies don’t deserve honest discussion and respect as equals if they won’t treat us in kind. They clearly have the power but choose not to. Except, human rights aren’t up for debate, and those who act like it aren’t to be trusted; they merit our steel, our rage, our fury the likes of which Medusa would be proud. I might be a poly slut who wants to fuck all my friends (what Cuwu once called “a little horndog”), but the same doesn’t really apply to my enemies. Yes, I’m full of nothing but love, but all the same, words have the power to cut deep. Rest assured, I have plenty of choice ones to spare for the ghosts of capital, including Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan’s neoliberalism surviving in current-day forms. To that, a cutie’s pen (or aspects to them a pen might describe) is mightier than the sword, if only because labor is a collectively creative act, not a singular destructive one; and labor is something the elite can never fully control. We must expose this reality every chance we get: through bodies as propaganda, as a joint exercise of creative expression fighting for our rights and that of nature, of Medusa’s (squishy melons). People deserve to know how they’re being abused, and communicating is a skill that draws on many talents simultaneously.
(artist: Mugiwara)
The above section is, in my opinion, the finest thing I have ever written. As such, I’ve dedicated it to my friends Quinn, Mugi and all the rest. I love you all very much and hope my work can continue to make a difference in your lives! —Perse
In turn, capital will be exposed as a prison, its sick home an unironic torture dungeon filled with patriarchal jailors and tokenized fiends. To transition away from that to post-scarcity requires reflection on the present world with pre-capitalist nostalgia in updated, non-fatal forms: Medusa as friendly to the Cause. It requires seeing the false harmful qualities in idealized things, to tell them we don’t want their “protection” but to be left alone; i.e., as a collective monstrous-feminine working against state predation, inviting all workers to grow and develop in harmony with nature: not unironically alien and fetishized, but part of the same complex interaction made ironic. Thanks to Enlightenment thinking’s modern interference, our traumatic past becomes involved. But through Gothic reflection and reinvention, it lets us become the thing that never quite existed: a xenomorphic, biomechanical assisted by recent technology and pre-capitalist forms whose combined thinking achieves post-scarcity through natural resources and morphological freedom of expression. It is not posthuman, insofar as our basic human rights are attained and humanity reclaimed from a thoroughly Western idea sickened by Enlightenment thinking and Cartesian domination; it’s merely the conclusion of the riddle(r) reclaimed by us—to make our own monstrous-feminine arrangements of something akin to a caterpillar and wasp that leads to future metamorphoses as healthy regards of what emerges from the chrysalid.
We don’t need a paternal “protector” at all, then, but merely to be left alone by colonizers acting in bad faith through shared poetic devices. But convincing their enforcers to cease their attack (thereby surrendering their hold and their power on Medusa) requires humanizing us through the very things the state lies to us with. It requires steady demands, but also the will to fight back inside the realms of imagination and reality as intertwined; i.e., through courage and wit, cunning and perspective, the ability to blend in and play with illusions natural and material. “It takes a wizard to beat a wizard,” but we are all of us wizards, kings, queens, gods and devils with the power to unite inside capital: to escape it by transforming it, thus ourselves, into a better world over time. It is, like Ovid’s Metamorphoses (c. 8 CE), a magical make-believe to bring the impossible “could be” into existence: from an egg, a caterpillar, and from there a beautiful butterfly? Or is it a wasp inside the caterpillar to emerge from the same container a sleek sexy “destroyer”? Does it represent our revolutionary potential to win, as the Punic invader does, through splendid-mendax deception, or as a double of that exposing Troy as false and we, like Medusa, wrongfully accused? Does it portend to our own unmaking through inaction by capital devouring us from within, or we turning the tables to avoid such a fate when Medusa eats us? Why not both? Poetry is a battlefield.
(source)
Such a riddle (of steel[6] or otherwise) must be answered in duality amid class war through culture as an active process of thinking and existing through language as an organic living unit. Flow determines function, and form follows function, be that a wasp or butterfly as part of the same poetic struggle to become our best maternal selves as stewards of nature; i.e., using the language of the Gothic to speak to capital’s universal alienation and fetishization, its grim patriarchal (Cartesian) harvest.
In turn, all of “Teaching” is food for thought, regarding things to return to, deconstruct and rebuild as signposts towards a goalpost: Gothic castles (and castle-like Destroyers) leading to the Communist Numinous (the proletarian monstrous-feminine) amid a war of titanic forces, gargantuan but vague; i.e., felt through paternal disturbance, Capitalism being Communism’s mortal enemy and the true Great Destroyer labeling its foil as “devil-in-disguise.” Both are, but only one wants to enslave and destroy workers, Medusa, and the planet as a sustainable habitat: capital. We have a right to exist; to dye our hair, take HRT or pierce our nipples and worship Satan; to be recognized as squishy and delicious; to groan or fart as we pee (or pee in someone’s butt—not my kink but you never know who likes what). All constitute intimacy, which the state doesn’t care about (seeing ours as “passing for” their own coached doubles and so-called “winners”).
Again, it’s just “crew expendable.” Why? Because “fuck you,” that’s why! They want to own us and cheapen our lives for reasons purely of greed entertained by the lamest vultures on Earth (real “divorced dad energy”). So we must fuck them (and their monopolies) by freeing the monstrous-feminine to become our true selves with, whatever form that may be (simultaneously resisting the urge to “punch the Nazi” [a personal scapegoat] versus publicly excoriating billionaires, the closest thing to a personified systemic issue [apart from heads of state or the church, monarchs, etc]: we don’t owe either an ounce of politeness and should absolutely give them hell online, but our pressure attack should fixate on those with the potential to do the great amount of systemic harm. This means removing billionaires, those with formal power, from said power to prevent systemic abuse; it’s the hardest to achieve and takes the most work. Outing personal abusers is just that, a personal choice). Liberation is a journey to survive in deathly forms, wherein we escape, fight censorship, and endure embarrassing double standards (enshittification[7])—to fight the good fight, forever.
In the interim, the fight is a war and not all survive. To that, my friend Ginger likened being queer to being like a squad: of ace fighter pilots that go out each day. But not all return in the evening to those in hiding. Some lose their nerve, cut and run; others still sell out; many die. If one GNC person is raped, killed or otherwise betrayed—and our allies and fellow oppressed people as well—then we all feel it, a pandemonium banished to the darkness to varying degrees (which Dante called “circles”). Our liberty is non-negotiable, so we must make the world around us unafraid through appeals to escape from the cage that’s built for them, too (the classic princess paradox: danger in fantasy but “there’s no place like home”; except home can change, can yield fresh possibilities and first-movers by ladies seeking love with those they’re told not to, outside of marriage). This isn’t new. Medusa was killed during Amazon panic; Harvey Milk, during gay panic. Indeed, a genocide is, and has been, happening just about everywhere except if you’re a white cis-het European person (the colonizer class/group) who toes the line. For them, this requires redemption; for us, rescue and revolution.
But we must unite and never let them forget we are human. For the long haul, till the angels sing. Except kindness is taught by being enough to love a priori, to sing that love together against our destroyers; i.e., donations, platforms, charity and service/voluntary empathy as second-nature inspired by Communist mothers, not Cartesian dildos. Care goes both ways but focuses on big fish to fry while helping minnows. Communism is our white whale to rescue from Ahab. And if we cannot do that, we can at least help it be remembered with dignity. With the sun on our face surrounded by the big blue sky. When we go home. That lives on, that’s what matters: like a Valkyrie, a protector to look over those we love to tell them they are not alone. The eulogy is a benediction, a salvation, an anthem, an apologia the Gothic sings electrically using Communist hands, bodies, voices, imaginations. A place where the brave live forever (or as The Scorpions say in “The Best Is Yet to Come” (2014): “How can we grow old, when the soundtrack to our life is rock and roll?” The best is yet to come!): Medusa’s graveyard, two snakes facing each other!
(artist: Renato Casaro)
This isn’t a state of grace through default martyrdom, but prevention of genocide, murder and rape—unchecked fetishization and alienation—as routine universal consequences of capital plugging along. It’s waged by caretakers against sickness. Except caretakers need rest, too. A break. Sometimes, it’s retirement. Sometimes it’s a change of pace, of scenery and/or of form—a life change, or per Alien, a lifeform change.
Mothers, it turns out, are a perfect encapsulation of this. From the start of our lesson, Sylvain’s riddle speaks to the cyclical, maternal nature of history as hijacked by capital and leading routinely to the destruction of capital and the natural world by the former in the decay while harvesting the latter as monstrous-feminine: “Killing is easy. Saving someone is hard work.” So reflect again on the riddle with that in mind: “A thousand years ago, Gandahar was destroyed and all its people killed; a thousand years ago, Gandahar was saved, and what can’t be avoided will be.” It constitutes a riddle that takes place over space and time through stories, of which there is no true outside. Vis-à-vis Derrida, there is only inside and the healing or devastation that take place there: relative to binaries as things to install and uphold, or to tear down and replace with a more flexible, gradient approach to language as lived.
Another way to view state shift, then, is Mother Nature seriously pissed off. It is the classic death knell of oppressive structures, except the oppressive nature of capital abusing the natural world is so great that the subsequent “rubber band effect” will cause said “band” to snap[8]. The Gothic loves such riddles, staring down the gaze of Medusa in a repeat venture—from the ancient Promethean myth to Mary Shelley’s Modern Prometheus (1818) to Scott’s Alien, Cameron’s Aliens (and its refrains, the shooter and the Metroidvania), Prometheus (2012) and Alien: Covenant (2017), my master’s thesis “Lost in Necropolis” (2018) and eventual book series-in-progress Sex Positivity (2023-present) and Fede Alvarez’ Alien: Romulus (TBA; 20th Century Fox’s “Alien: Romulus | Teaser Trailer,” 2024). We’re living in Gothic times, grasping at an ancient riddle (a problem exacerbated by capital as a recent affair) to isolate through the puzzle of “Antiquity” as forever lost and found, isolated inside it:
(artist: Persephone van der Waard)
Through medieval duality and monomorphism, such stories—and their endless, looping Marxist/GNC potential—speak collectively to the monster mother in and around all of us. As such, their tangents routinely show that “death,” far from a chaotic stranger to us in real life, becomes material, something we can use when challenging the state/profit motive through counterterror (whistleblowers): to lose ourselves inside and infringe playfully on our boundaries, making new ones by muckraking and playing with the goop, the hysteria, the bicycle face (all critiques of capital, from Shelley to Scott to me, using Gothic language); i.e., the saints and imposters as a widening comfort zone established through calculated risk, of calculating it, of calculus. Per this Galatean vein, maternal conflict and triage express insofar as the state will try—by gaming the system they rigged to pad the numbers, and promise infinite growth through illusions thereof (the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow)—to greedily fleece the same pacified people they push towards such harmful ideations (suicide or otherwise). We must challenge that on all registers. I shall do so as the ancient rhetors and poets did, but unlike Socrates, shall recruit writing into my Renaissance-girl approach: not the Platonic insistence of memory death, but a life after death yielding Communist fantasies that reify systemic change through hearts and minds. Medusa shedding her skin.
Writing might be the death of memory (re: Socrates in Phaedrus, c. 347-399 BC) but the Gothic thrives on/writes with disintegration in mind. This infuses the medical and the morbid to the traditional domain of caregivers (women) as essential dogma; i.e., to uproot in monomorphic expression that yields a means of non-binary and intersex forms that fight back against the state by reclaiming monstrous language as combative—Amazonomachia. Like all media, it can toe the line, or veer off into old possibilities certain copies have forgotten. Rememory occurs through media and us oscillating within work at cross purposes, manifesting in a variety of aliens; e.g., stress manifesting in the body as told through psychosexual hyperbole onstage. Such theatre gives the audience a scare/fright to speak deliciously to actual things while playing with fact and fiction, the truth somewhere in between them, inside-outside and correct-incorrect (the Gothic loves hyphens). These speak to criminogenic conditions, axes of oppression, crime and punishment, etc; i.e., scapegoats/relative punishment and its collective/selective double standards; e.g., white pearl clutching when a token threat snaps, versus when a white man does it—to uphold a system through punitive justice instead of preventative justice; cries for help through suicide ideation (or martyrdom), drug abuse, getting into fights, and so on.
(artist: Sabrina Nicole)
To that, mothers are essential, potent, greater than Patriarchal Capitalism, Francis Bacon, and all the rest. From porn to art (they are each other), maids to mothers great and small, from Amazons to Medusa, demons or whores, to the Sapphics to Edna St. Vincent Millay—I love all my mommies; i.e., as a family I found elsewhere, or saw in a naughty painting or portrait, their pussies wild outlets and their (other) prisons butterflies and light, a home I am happy to lose myself inside.
As a trans woman forever invested in the wellbeing of others, my muses (alive, dead, or in between) inspire me; pregnant, I spread monsters (“book babies,” mighty idiots) in all directions that challenge the status quo, defibrillating the collective inside the home, putting it there in place of the state and its cancer. Both are imposters that work back and forth, in and out, like sex, but per the Renaissance, is also asexual and poetic as the medieval generally is; i.e., mixed metaphors, but also theories within metaphors, with us, copies of us, a bit from Column A and Column B (more Marx puns). Like Medusa, like the xenomorph, like the caterpillar and the wasp as a bigger cycle the state can’t kill—it’s ironclad, bulletproof, our acid for blood something to teach, to pass along as a wonderful defense mechanism. “It’s like a man, it’s big!” But Medusa’s not a man; they’re monstrous-feminine!
These, in turn, translate through compound metaphors (comparisons of unlike things over time): poetics, of course, but often as combat theatre and kayfabe being “ancient” poetics revived; i.e., speaking to labor action against labor theft and genocide, etc, in ironic forms shared in duality. Like the caterpillar and the wasp, then, cancer is a part of the natural world and cannot be destroyed, but life is equally stubborn; the state can be shrunk and sent to a status of remission and stasis, lapsing into perpetual dormancy while Medusa (and Communism) rise beautifully from sleep, cancer-free: “Look and see her, how she sparkles. It’s the last unicorn!” Keeping with our ancient riddle, this motherly beast can be a butterfly or a wasp, but feel free to teach with your own poetic devices. But also, respect the power of Galatea defying Pygmalion. To the mommies of the world teaching us, then: Each of you is a priceless treasure who shows the sexiness of consent—as you are, in defiance of capital. In life, you make a difference that echoes in eternity.
(artist: Sabrina Nicole)
Straight allies can do this, too; i.e., Scott’s hauntological penchant for astronoetic, queer-tinged matelotage (“hey, sailor!”) speaking to poetic standards commenting on present realities: capital, ships and industry as perilous, but also lifeboats and chances to take. We want to improve ours through death/rape theatre as monstrous, hideously beautiful and maternal, hilarious; through stress manifest in physical forms that we must face not with fear but informed confidence: “Come to Mommy!” Just as we can’t die in these stories, Medusa can’t be killed when capital guns for us; so we, gunning for capital at the same crossroads with/as the devil-in-disguise, should keep her eternal memory alive in us to survive after we are cold and dead.
Ideas are bulletproof, so we should let one crawl from our body that isn’t cancerous. Rather, our little homunculi share and spread our goals in life; i.e. to seek compassion and quality of life (and document those who don’t) through teaching as a transgenerational act: setting a better example, a feral one that loves all of it—the holistic process; i.e., to hold off and build up one’s hunger for a tasty meal, be that a leaf or a grub. Then, when it’s time, our throwbacks shall lead our partner(s) by the hand, snugglefuck and have a good cry (to rival Jane and Tarzan) and cum, getting it all out; to play with those when and where it is safe to varying degrees, licking our platters clean and “tagging” each other (with cum) as owned by no one but ourselves. Every. Last. Drop.
(artist: Bokuman)
As such, we sit on the cusp of disaster and have one of two basic choices: evolve inside capital and survive by transforming it from within through an oppressed tutelage, or consign ourselves to its boundaries, thus go down with the ship (many things can be combined, but the state-as-Faustian and rebels are diametrically at odds). The way out is together through intersectional solidarity as alien fetishes united against capital; i.e., according to how it divides and controls us, controls Medusa. By enjoying what’s forbidden to us by capital, we can expand what’s possible through empathy as something to imagine, create and leave behind as an actionable offense; i.e., a seminal affair that upends traditional familial norms in favor of post-scarcity ones informed by past peoples gone but not forgotten. In short, we’re putting the pussy on the chainwax (“starting a thing!”) as Sylvain does, hence are able against all odds to make that fatal choice: not to rape the womb of nature as Francis Bacon argued, but make love to it in harmony (as a caterpillar, butterfly or wasp—pick your poison) while stealing fire from the gods. Orgasm! Victory! Great success! All occur in and out of the classroom and bedroom as a liminal space to find truth in all its forms useful to us. The vital part to teaching is, like sex, communion: that we do together and while listening to and respecting each other’s needs and boundaries (“More, more!” being just as valid as “No, stop!” Green light, red light).
Like nature, then, the Gothic is full of startling transformations and tremendous, motherly conclusions/translations, and all quests begin with riddles similar to the one I’ve proposed as a Great Chain of Being—the caterpillar and the wasp, the maiden and the xenomorph, the mother and the child, the master and the apprentice. Medusa. My Promethean Quest (for Numinous mommies) did; so does yours, whatever mommy you’re looking for. The caterpillar and the wasp bookend this volume. Solving said puzzle means solving existence as a balance of pleasure and pain to avoid systemic harm, through the strangers we “uncover” (create), but also the weird friends we make along the way. This includes inside the classroom and the bedroom. Learning and fucking needn’t be separate, and both are fun, as is solving puzzles while relieving stress. Yet, while it’s lots of fun and we don’t wanna stop—the Humanities endless search for knowledge as limited but imagination encircling the world—like sex, pacing ourselves is good.
We’ll briefly explore this on my old blog next, in “Prep, part two: Medicine“! Here, we’ll proceed to “Castles in the Flesh“!
Footnotes
[1] Re: Mark Madoff’s “The Useful Myth of Gothic Ancestry” (1979): “The idea of gothic ancestry endured because it was useful” (source). This utility applies to workers and the state.
[2] “How big are you looking for, exactly? Something the size of a jumbo jet?” Thank you, Samurai Cop (1991).
[3] From Sense8 (2015), what Hernando declares to his class when he’s outed quite nakedly as gay.
[4] Except for moderate prudes like Jameson, but more on him later in the volume.
[5] My friend, Mugi, is a survival sex worker and a plural personality caring for his daughter. The realities of care are higher when the street looms overhead, but also the need to shield one’s identity from harmful parties waiting to prey on unhoused victims. Most sex workers use aliases, but those in a housing crisis are especially vulnerable, thus need our help most of all. If you can help Mugi, his webpage has multiple donation options. Any bit goes a long way.
[6] I.e., the riddle of steel from Conan the Barbarian (1981): “Steel isn’t strong, boy! Flesh is stronger! What is steel compared to the hand that wields it?”
[7] Coined by Cory Doctorow’s “Pluralistic: TikTok’s Enshittification” (2023):
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two sided market,” where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them (source).
Sex workers are a common casualty of this, and travel nomadically to make a living. Selective punishment means that sex workers who exist as “cash cows” (excuse the term) are allowed to exist where normally they would not; i.e., pimped out by de facto jailors; e.g., Elon Musk, as he uses his tremendous resources… to spitefully attack trans people after his wife divorced him and slept with Chelsea Manning, but also corral and intimidate labor into living under his thumb. The banality of evil really isn’t “cool”; it’s just a bunch of sad, pathetic and cruel old men alienated from nature abusing a system they were born into—e.g., with Musk inheriting his means, motives and opportunities from his allegedly emerald-mine-owning dad:
In an interview with The Sun UK, Errol Musk revealed that Elon Musk went on a four-day visit to his emerald mine in South Africa when he was just a teenager. According to him, they went to the mine in the Lake Tanganyika region “to pick up a cargo of emeralds and fly them back to their native South Africa.” As per his statement: “I visited the mine once, Elon came with me. It was lousy. There was nothing to eat except stamp mielies [ground dried corn]. Elon never ate anything for four days in a row.” Back in January, Elon Musk had tweeted that he’d offer one million dogecoin, worth $93,000 at the time, to anyone who can prove that this emerald mine actually existed. In a previous The US Sun report, Errol Musk had revealed that he can prove the mine’s existence. He further added, “Elon knows it’s true. All the kids know about it. My daughter has three or four emerald pendants. Elon saw them (the emeralds) at our house. He knew I was selling them” (source: Priya Singh’s “Father Details 4-Day Visit to Emerald Mine with Billionaire Son, 2023).
The point isn’t that the mine is real, but that the rumors of it orbit around someone who has far surpassed his father’s ability to do harm; e.g., Musk enabling Nazis on Twitter (one hand washing the other), weaponizing tech bros against labor through gentrified products made at racist factories, and presenting himself as a god to worship despite inventing nothing. He’s a real Wizard of Oz.
Censorship and segregation really is no defense for sex workers. Those on larger platforms are able to make ends meet, albeit as the exception that proves the rule; i.e., they often have to push their practices to cater to the status quo; e.g., trans misogyny is a thing and effects other sex workers through marginalized in-fighting: me, being dogpiled by cis and queer AFAB sex workers (source: Persephone van der Waard’s “Setting the Record Straight, Transmisia Experience: 5/26/2022”). This isn’t always the case. Some, like Nina Hartley (as we shall see) become activists; but she was also an industry pro who survived swimming with sharks long enough to have the luxury of a platform, thus a voice. My whole book revolves around giving sex workers a voice who don’t have that kind of privilege.
[8] The breaking of societal and material bonds, but also the childish desires to kill our problems through Malthusian solutions; i.e., a snap reflected in smaller forms like suicide and genocide; e.g., Aaron Bushnell killing themselves to speak to a systemic problem out of desperation, and Thanos during fascism solving an imaginary problem with godhood because he cannot imagine a better world than the one outside Capitalism. Yet while heroic fantasies and calls for correction emerge during crisis, the state (thus workers) are always in crisis, meaning such theatre is fine so long as it serves workers, not the state (constants and variables).