This promo post—the fourth part of “The Medieval; or, Monsters, Magic and Myth“—belongs to a larger book sample and module called “Brace for Impact” (2024), the latter a) inspired by Harmony Corrupted and b) having been designed to promote my upcoming monster volume—aka Volume Two of my Sex Positivity (2023) book series. The module divides into over thirteen posts, whose total chapters/subchapters compile a taste of the larger volume (which has three modules total, to give you an idea).
Click here to read about the entire Sex Positivity book project.
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).
“Monsters, Magic and Myth”: Knocking on Heaven’s Door; or, Prepare for Entry!
“What knockers!”
—Fredrick Frankenstein, Young Frankenstein (1974)
(artist: Jeff Waters)
Picking up up from where “The Eyeball Zone” left off…
Ok, we’re finally here, but before we enter the palace, let’s reiterate (this page) and go over some Marxist signposts and liberatory sex work exhibits.
As the previous subchapters established, the Gothic has always been campy as fuck—”rapacious” as a genderqueer (often ace/nudist) means of confronting and subverting actual trauma (the ghost of the counterfeit) by reversing the process of abjection: through the poetic, often-paradoxical language of war tied to monsters, magic and myth as “bad theatre”; e.g., Chris Farley’s meat wagon skit from Tommy Boy (1995); i.e., as everyday activities often set to music gleaned through rhythmic, synchronistic intuition during cliché ceremonial fetishes and broad Gothic conventions (“Giddyap, faster!” having Phyllis riding Aristotle [the incel giga-nerd] like an ass). The Gothic, as such, transcends mediums to speak across them in everyday relationships that help put out fires while not starting new ones (a complex spectrum of social-sexual exchanges, whose material factors and aesthetic elements of unequal power and trauma hyphenate to address systemic abuse). From campfire stories to novels to cinema to videogames, ludo-Gothic BDSM is a veritable “city of paradoxes,” one whose fomenting sediments we can shape into new, more sex-positive (and less profit-driven) likenesses from what Jeff Waters[1] might call the “Fun Palace” (1990).
As such, Capitalism blinds us through cheap likenesses; to see through its Realism, we must play and make our own preceptive forms that (as we shall see) use Gothic paradox and oxymoron, mid-historical-material debate, to dialectically-materially confuse (thus critique) the senses, then assemble them magically again in selectively absorptive healthy boundaries that tear down old harmful ones (and other medieval tricks we’ll all explain once we’re inside the palace proper). Like Radcliffe’s Black Veil, it becomes something to pull aside; like Matthew Lewis, it becomes something to campily fuck until we’re breathless (a veritable “meat wagon” to piledrive until you’re deaf, dumb and blind; the Gothic is not for the faint-of-heart—its rough-and-tumble sexual aesthetic riding hard and putting away wet):
(artist: Harmony Corrupted)
Per Radcliffe, it’s also the greedy old man behind the mask; per us, Lewis and the Gothic’s love for crude, iconoclastic puns, it’s a mask we can wear while wearing… not much, really! We’re not gonna let “him” (the old man) get away with it, but the way forward is through Medusa as someone to embody as a psychosexual educator (which extends to ace critiques of unironic psychosexual violence; e.g., “I’m here and you can’t touch me, incels!”). It might seem random, but it all fits together pretty well, trust me (I’m writing this as I listen to Annihilator and think about how Harmony’s fat pillow pussy [seriously, just look at those plump, puffy lips] blew my mind a few hours ago; i.e., hitting my stride [as sex generally encourages]. But this is my third book and umpteenth exhibit/excursion into the shadow zone’s realms of metal, BDSM and taboo hedonism [and doubles that invite troubling comparisons, but also abject language that is inevitable under capital[2]]—of sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll as an aesthetic to enlarge the mind [and other things] with): to kick ass (with ass) and chew bubblegum, and we’re all outta bubblegum (chewing Capitalism up and spitting it out, crying “Avaunt!” as we do)!
The paradox of “thinking with your dick” (or cunt) through the aesthetic of fear, theatrical degradation/disintegration and “doom” (as contained inside the castle-like body-as-fun-palace) is that it hits just right, hurts so good as an acquired taste (re: native-speaker intuition); i.e., learning to like the pussy’s little bit of pleasurable pain from a hard dick chaffing a tad and stretching the willing-but stubbornly tight entrance open during consensual, fun, monstrous sex (Zeuhl’s would be extra tight and dry until I eased, millimeter-by-millimeter, all the way in and then, sploosh! It would suddenly gush with a sudden eruption of pussy juices).
As stated, this poetic thought process/ontology is generally operatic, rhythmic and musical—a collective, flute-powered nympho dance held through the Gothic mode as the gateway to forbidden wisdom: a better world that happens by facing our fears in sustainable ways that speak to people through how they operate and what they consume as monstrous, musical, drug-like and medieval (ace people fuck, too, or at the very least read about stories that contain “murderous” sex and “rape” in some shape or form; beware those who don’t—they’ve drunk capital’s Kool-Aid, high on dogma as a capitalist virginal screed and modesty screen: TERFs [and other incels] killer virgins springing from the Man Box to enact “prison-sex” violence onto other workers).
(artist: Joseph Tomanek)
To that, Gothic reinvention and reclamatory learning occur amid total creative and labor control over our bodies, sexualities, genders and performances, such a liberatory venue/playground giving us (the proverbial good doctors, mad scientists and bad girls, etc) the final say during sinful, iconoclastic rebirth—a dark Renaissance unafraid to say the “quiet part” as loud as possible (one-upping a cumming banshee, a singing fat lady shrieking with pleasure about her own death and transgenerational salvation amid time-as-a-circle—its hefty cryptonymies speaking truth to power according those for or against the state): knowledge found in “desolation” and activities far more conducive to sex-positive learning than unironic penance and mortification of the flesh (unironic, scorched-earth torture dressed up as “righteous”):
Centuries of war and waste
Have dealt a mortal blow
Mother earth begins to rot
Humanity on death row
Life does slowly cease to be
Death seems so surreal
As earth becomes a vacant lot
There’s nothing left to heal (Annihilator’s “Imperiled Eyes,” 1990).
If a whole album (or series of albums, a career) can skillfully[3] speak to that awful reality—of Medusa’s revenge as reclaimed during calculated risk to save workers from state shift—then it merely joins in across a larger Gothic dialog as holistically expressed: with our bodies, sexualities, genders, relationships and labor in sexual-to-asexual ways reclaiming the language of war in castle-like bodies: “Yeah, baby! Take my ‘castle’ if you can! She’s thirsty for cum!”
(model and artist: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)
Or as Cuwu once said to me, “Want to hit it from the back, little man?” It’s a Numinous peach of doom, a forbidden freaky fruit that—once tasted—you’ll want more and more of (making the mattress squeak and the walls [of your partner’s pussy and the room[4] around you] shake).
In turn, Gothic-Communist cultivation involves a wide variety of forces challenging capital as a process internalized by workers; i.e., professions yield different paths, and armies provide specialists and general-purpose versatility where both can be useful to serve workers in ways canon classically does not; i.e., Heinlein’s Competent Man trope (originally from his 1973 novel, Time Enough for Love) as something to acknowledge as imperialist, then subvert accordingly for workers and nature’s collective benefit:
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
“Insects,” “invasion,” “orders”—the language of settler colonialism is clear and present not just in Heinlein’s work, but those who followed him in franchised neoliberal refrains (re: Tolkien and Cameron’s refrains in cinema and videogames) colonizing and capitalizing on the Gothic (and the monomythic fantasy and science fiction genres stemming from it) to serve profit. This gentrification all but require us to be competent in opposition to the material and social factors that push dogmatic, Cartesian versions of such ideas out into the world (ultimately to privatize, thus enslave, sexualize and alienize workers with).
In regards to my work and that of my comrades, I’m a holistic cutie whose Renaissance-girl approach yields a complex solution to a complex problem: a book series built on negotiated art exhibits whose context illustrates mutual consent as labor action and sex-positive propaganda; i.e., something accomplished exclusively and demonstrably through the intimacy of muses and artists illustrating mutual consent, mid-struggle and in concert.
Like Jeff Waters, then, I am the director of my brainchild’s labor of love, thus familiar with all aspects of its production. Of course, this familiarity with labor goes well beyond artwork and simply into work at large; e.g., housework, aka “woman’s work” as labor that, like all forms thereof, is infinitely valuable (thus infinitely exploitable) and requires that we reclaim all of these things through our daily lives synthesizing good worker habits, thus good praxis as our pedagogy of the oppressed: all those things conducive to imparting good social-sexual habits (thus education) reclaimed from pre-existing colonial forms. But I could not do it without the likes of my friends. It’s a group effort, and two heads (and bodies) working together aren’t simply better than one in terms of intersectional worker solidarity as self-evident; they’re required when it comes to certain kinds of work that can’t be performed and invigilated solo:
(exhibit 34a1b1: Model and artist: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard. Yes, there’s a lot you can do with modern smartphones, selfie sticks, lighting and mirrors. But the simple fact remains, certain types of sex work can only be done together with cooperating and mutually consenting parties; i.e., sex-positive forms of mutual action [which can still involve mirrors, above]. Assuming that mutual consent is already established as part of an exhibit’s underlying context, you can only spank someone else’s booty if two [or more] people are present to perform the action, can only film an actual couple’s sex scene with a present-and-willing-couple. This includes the penetration, the foreplay and the climax/creampie [below], but also the dialog in between, the interactions between a couple, the aforementioned subtext of consent I can invigilate and express while my friends and I camp [thus subvert] canonical media’s fear and dogma, but also the profit motive as linked to Cartesian [settler-colonial, heteronormative] propaganda.
To this, capital treats labor and its sexual and gendered expression through the narrow function of exploitation and theft, vis-à-vis the dialectic of the alien—not to communicate the rights of people, then, but to establish people as products first and foremost [especially female workers, or anything seen as feminine, thus monstrous-feminine]. Workers are owned, their rights diminished or virtually non-existent under a system that treats corporations as more human than human. By extension, capital frames things as “content,” insofar as you have a goal to make as much content as possible, appealing to the profit motive according to a universal clientele [white, cis-het men] and their tokenized gradients; i.e., to adhere to the widest possible audience catered to by the state, whose money flows through the platform-in-question to move various products that adhere to and uphold the status quo—from Vitruvian bodies to dimorphized clothing [diminutive female underwear or pocketless garments] to the division of sexual labor treated either as directly pornographic products or artwork under capital. All are “for sale” in ways that keep money moving through nature, and generally in ways conducive to censorship, control and ultimately genocide.
[model and artist: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard]
By comparison, Communism hyphenates sex and art, but must challenge all of these factors through what we create inside our own systems of thought. It can all sound rather drab [or hilarious, insofar as Marxist theory generally does adjacent to sexuality and queer camp]—fighting the good fight against a largely invisible structure that is felt through commerce and economics inside the Imperial Core, first and foremost. But I can assure you, there’s plenty of room for romance, playtime and “action” amid our own poetic expression. Simply put, we’re not slaves to the grind, and can multitask with the best of ’em; e.g., my fucking of Cuwu’s tight pussy was good praxis, insofar as it was mutually consensual, but likewise produced for content we could express ourselves with, and which continues to inform this book’s revolutionary ideas.
Expressed in binary form, Capitalism is patriarchal, imperial and criminogenic; under Cartesian thought, capital harvests nature as monstrous-feminine to serve profit, which is theft of labor’s universal value during police violence, setter colonialism, AI and tech bro shenanigans [“Why create when you can steal stuff from artists and sex workers for free?”] and so on. Communism is monstrous-feminine, and must reclaim what capital tries to privatize/monopolize by seizing labor’s infinite value as something to weaponize against capital through subversive media, work, relationships, Gothic poetics, et al. This happens through Sex Positivity as the camping of canon by virtue of there being capital/the state versus anything else that refuses to compromise with the state. There’s sex positivity and sex coercion, liberation and enslavement, genocide and salvation, rape and consent, and so on. And all can be invigilated through exhibits like these that amount to both services and acts of group and self-expression; i.e., to survive under capital while doing activism as a means of mixing business and pleasure, but also direct demands and allegory through the things that people enjoy that likewise store value and comment on taboo, policed subject matter [thus workers].)
[model and artist: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard]
The worker-to-media relationship, then, isn’t just nomadic in-place—a wonderous athetos/Gothic-castle circus on part with Deep Purple’s “Space Truckin’” (1972) or Montrose’s “Space Station No.5” (1973)—or indicative solely of our rights spoken through Gothic poetics, mid-interpersonal relations inside a larger spectrum of intersectional exchange; it’s symbiotic, “Pan” needing the “nymphs” to dance to his music (the muses) and they needing his music to dance. Ideally they should be able to perform in isolation, but the practice is practically meaningless without a performance to share with, and experience among, the world. A cake needs sponge to squish, but also frosting (and other decorations) to give it flavor. For us, this serves workers through mutual action, not the elite through profit. Taken to an extreme, profit will always cheapen/lessen the quality of things—e.g., videogames, food and people, etc—and capital is built exclusively around profit; i.e., per Jason Moore and Raj Patel, Capitalism puts nature to work as cheaply as possible by making it as cheap as possible, thus life. Per me, liberation of work as sexualized (and universally alien) occurs by camping the twin trees of capital, thereby clawing profit (and labor value) back from the elite, along with power and class consciousness (awareness), emotional/Gothic intelligence, and so on during sex-positive iconoclastic art.
Contrary to what sad pathetic nerds like Fredric Jameson would insist, then, monsters aren’t “boring and exhausted,” but priceless[5] and die-hard, populist ways of reducing the risk of unironic rape and war in all their forms; i.e., by developing Gothic Communism! Rape (re: “the taking of power to harm someone, somewhere or something”) is ubiquitous under Capitalism through unironic forms maintaining Capitalist Realism, hence heteronormativity in warlike, poetic language caught between boundaries, but also castles, castle-like bodies, and “rape’s” concentric “mise-en-abyme” existing in quotes: during ludo-Gothic BDSM questioning normally through “unnatural/unknown pleasures” preventing catastrophic events by playing with the dolls (re: Waters) as alive-unalive, correct-incorrect, inside-outside (and other such hyphenations the Gothic loves to invigilate while profaning the sacred as “almost holy”); i.e., as something to endlessly revive in the present space and time (and something for capital to commodify and paywall in blank, canonical forms); e.g., Heinrich Lossow riffing on old dated clichés while having Friar Tuck making his Big Thighed Goth GF “fly” (“I’m an airplane, weeee! Faster, motherfucker! Don’t fucking stop…”): sin is relative to those who would contain healthy activities (fucking) inside oppressive systems (churches, capital, the state) whose oppression and liberation must take place inside of themselves. There’s no outside of the text, kids; and besides, why think outside the box when you can be inside one (if you follow me)?
(artist: Heinrich Lossow)
As we shall see, such an imaginary past’s liminal expression/doubles are a black mirror and oft-orgasmic (re: jouissance) release valve—a “deathly*” escape from repression (and the holier-than-thou) something touched on by metalheads, freaks, and creative misfits playing with undead, xenophilic taboos; i.e., from Matthew Lewis to Jeff Waters camping the canon backwards and forwards to achieve activism on all fronts (a chorus of the damned [there being endless orchards of flowers blooming in Gothic fields, all of them lovey in their own special ways] all speaking to all rights in seductive forms; i.e., the ghost of the counterfeit as something to revive and interact within to achieve new knowledge that yes, is a bitter bill to swallow [war and rape in all their forms tied to capital as a menticidal system stuck on repeat to drum up profit], but one coated in the sweetest of sugars; e.g., queer and environmental rights per Lewis [re: Colin Broadmoor’s “Camping the Canon: Matthew Lewis, Milton, & The Monk,” 2021] and Jeff Water’s “Stonewalled,” 1990). So, if you can recognize the myths and magic that generally accompany them, too, then all the better! You’re gonna need ’em if you wanna tell this from that and successfully add to the Cause!
*I.e., ahegao essentially is a “death face,” aka an “O face” where one ostensibly loses control (thanks to Harmony Corrupted for the idea, making me cum super hard again). Creed describes the Medusa as having such a face, post-unironic-decapitation: “The writhing snakes, with their fanged gaping mouths, and the Medusa’s own enormous teeth and lolling tongue were on full view. Athena’s aim was simply to strike terror into the hearts of men as well as reminding them of their symbolic debt to the imaginary castrating mother.” While the unironic, dated version of this used by Creed amounts to endless female rage at sobering patriarchal violence—i.e., to terrify insecure and rapacious men through undead revenge—my applications of camp during ludo-Gothic BDSM see the notion of monstrous-feminine turning the idea on its head (so to speak): the campy (thus ironic) performance of intense social-sexual gratification. Often this happens with an assistant making the “performer” give in to a calculated risk, putting on a show where things are at least half-real. It’s less phoning things in, then, and more to bring down the house from a wild, crazy orgasm that has the likeness of Medusa cumming defiantly at settler-colonial forces—all to frustrate them. As such, “decapitation” translates to any kind of rape play that can be exhibited, and whose formidable powers of projection “castrate” insofar as they humanize the Medusa as any feminine force perceived as monstrous that exhibits an uncanny ability—a) to not only subvert torture and resist harm, but b) take power away from the state dominator by showing the Medusa as human(e) and the state enforcer as not. “Can’t touch this.” It’s not just the refusal to be a victim, but also not an abuser while being sex-positive. The state’s repulsion, humiliation, anger and frustration is the Medusa’s aim, smiling at their would-be killers’ loss of control in seeing the Medusa quite unharmed and satisfied in ways only a good cum can do.
Got it? Ok, you little fucks. Outta the car! It’s time to learn… inside the fun palace (which, plot twist, is slang for “madhouse”; you’re the inmates and I’m the nurse)!
Ok, I lied again; I wrote a postscript that concerns the monstrous feminine; i.e., as something to relate to the above point about ahegao in a broader context: regarding the monstrous-feminine in relation to everything discussed so far vis-à-vis the broad strokes of Volumes One and Zero. Onto “Heaven in a Wild Flower“!
(artist: Peter Corriston and Dave Heffernon)
Footnotes
[1] A real Renaissance man, Waters’ expressed all aspects of the production inside and outside of itself (akin to Walpole’s Strawberry Hill evoked inside Otranto and vice versa):
The album has a song titled “Alison Hell” which is based on the true story of a little girl who had the fear of the dark so to speak, the fear of seeing a bogeyman-type monster at night. This eventually made her go insane as her parents ignored her cries. The album cover depicts exactly that. The artwork is brilliant and comprehensive, making the average fan curious about what the music on the album is about, specially taking into consideration the fact that this was Annihilator’s debut effort and Jeff Waters being responsible for the cover art in addition to writing all the lyrics, playing guitar and mixing the album by himself (source: Aniruddh “Andrew” Bansal’s “Top 25 Metal Album Covers of All Time”).
[2] E.g., Taking dick during anal felt alien to me, so much so that my only point of reference for it was—in true abject fashion—taking a shit. But this obviously isn’t the same as taking a shit, thus doesn’t fall into that particular kink field. It’s merely an abject form of language tied to bodily functions to describe a reversal regarding a part of the body that normally under capital is “exit only.”
[3] I.e., virtuosity, regardless of type; e.g., Water’s guitar or Radcliffe’s quill as skillfully held to at times speak out, and others, to “cash in” (ol’ Radcliffe sold out big time, and eventually Waters did, too): to find tropes you can repeat for profit, not critical power first and foremost.
[4] The self-destruct metaphor in Alien also being a crude erotic one: the heroine-in-small being inside a cumming giant currently “dying”; i.e., the house, the monstrous-feminine, getting off during “hysteria”: exclaiming and cumming as loudly as possible—the proverbial “big finish” that, for AFAB bodies, can take a while to achieve in order to get out of one’s system (along with the trauma it sits adjacent to during psychosexual expression’s historical-material markers: the ghost of the counterfeit).
[5] Per the difficult, anisotropic nature of the Gothic, its recycled myths have a particular dual function that very much can be used to assist in Communist development; i.e., by exposing the usual state heroes as cowards and humanizing the people, places and things they dehumanize or otherwise treat inhumanely; e.g., Ripley sucks (Cameron’s version), the xenomorph rules, and military optimism/Capitalist Realism need to end, along with their rape-like, unironic function under capital (which debates through brute force and in bad faith: a presumed air of infallibility and superiority that necessitates genocide per the Divine Right of Kings segueing to the Protestant ethic and profit more broadly in the 20th century onwards).