This post is part of “Searching for Secrets,” a second book sample series originally inspired by the one I did with Harmony Corrupted: “Brace for Impact“ (2024). That series was meant to promote and provide Volume Two, part one’s individual pieces for easy public viewing (it has since become a full, published book module: the Poetry Module). “Searching for Secrets” shall do the same, but with Volume Two’s assorted chapters and its twin modules, the Undead and Demons. As usual, this promo series (and all its posts) are written, illustrated and invigilated by me as part of my larger Sex Positivity (2023) book series.
Volume Two, part one (the Poetry Module) is out now (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 the original blog posts will not have)!
Click here to see “Searching for Secrets'” 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 at the bottom of the page.
Picking up from where “Digging Our Own Graves” left off…
Splendide Mendax: the Rise and Fall of “Rome” as Built-in(to Us)
Our struggle—to hug the Medusa as something to teach, to reclaim our bodies (our asses) as Aegis-like and disguise-worthy—sits inside a dangerous hall of mirrors. The state isn’t just a war machine, you see, but a war factory (of factories) whose own spinning room of kaleidoscopic reflections stretches in all directions, remediates during fractal recursion into/onto all media: a dividing of the natural-material world into linguo-material false binaries and boundaries the state’s servants can acquire, internalize from childhood, and raise then police into the future. To critique power as an illusion, you must go where its illusions—its masks, disguises and performers—collectively inhabit and interact in curious, veiled hostility (source).
—Persephone van der Waard, Sex Positivity, Volume Two, part one (2024)
“You have your sword, I have my tricks,” said Odysseus to Achilles. The latter dies during the fall of Troy from his Achilles Heel as acquired at birth. This subchapter considers nature vs nurture relative to Gothic poetics, insofar as this can be used to code humans to war against/rape nature; i.e., how for humans under Capitalism, nurture is currently tied to giant linguo-material structures called “capital” that weaponize the imaginary past’s splendid lies against workers and nature: Capitalist Realism dipping the hero into the river Styx. They do this to “gift” him (or her) with the aura of invulnerability but don’t bank on its being haunted by narcissistic echoes of other Roman fools having fallen on the same proverbial sword; e.g., the Skeksis are unicorn hunters on a drug war, addicted to what they are alienated from in rarefied form: cocaine, essence, as the blood of the Earth; i.e., Foucault’s biopower reduced to something the usual capitalist vampires render nature into before injecting greedily into their own veins. In turn, all their splendide mendax/elaborate strategies of misdirection—all their art and science, their Base and Superstructure—collectively aid in this ghoulish refueling process, including heroes as monsters, as elaborate lies that can serve or challenge profit; i.e., hinging on how workers utilize them in response.
The problem to face, then, is Capitalism; i.e., capital doing what capital always does: move money through nature as alien, abject—something to harvest and regress backwards and towards on a black-and-white chessboard of the same-old hauntological chateau guarded by the same-old hauntological watchdogs. Cartesian thought commodifies the monstrous-feminine into predatory herbo/himbo groups, turning such poetic devices into action-figure collectibles that can be bought and sold, but also played with, inhabited; i.e., during an intended gameplay’s dogmatic, copagandistic instruction: rape nature by policing it in tokenized forms of predator and prey. There’s also those who play the part the doll is based on, and the capitalists who run the show behind the curtain. Consumer, creator, capitalist—all are part of the same canonical war machine harvesting nature-as-monstrous-feminine, as alien, fetish, psychosexual slave valued for the usual imperial “goods” divided along heteronormative lines in a settler-colonial binary as “dressed up”; i.e., in the usual centrist gimmicks: sex and force as things to capitalize on and privatize for all the usual benefactors (capitalists) to the detriment of all the usual victims (cops and victims).
(artist: Emery EXP)
To that, “mommy” might be absolutely stacked (as Medusa generally is) and wet, making that pull-out game weak; she remains forced by capital to serve the usual gooners as a paradoxical waifu (the Amazonian war boss) playing strip-tease. Resistance—per Foucault (and me: ludo-Gothic BDSM)—occurs in the same place, the same stage to perform on; i.e., with one’s body as a playful, linguo-material extension of one’s labor value and struggle to reclaim it through iconoclastic Gothic poetics made material, obvious, tangible: Milton’s “darkness visible.” This is all fine and good, provided the performer doesn’t tokenize and colonize others in turn. Many do, some do not (we’ll look at both in just a moment), but who we are as people factors in through our bodies as part of ontological statements workers make all the time. We’re not always aware of it, even. “Damn girl! You shit with that ass?” my ex’s ex once asked me, regarding my dumper. Amazons, by extension, are cover-image material; i.e., the marquee to imitate through such body parts where exceptional.
In musical terms, this is called a cover. In comics, it’s a cover model, blown up for maximum, repetitive effect; i.e., profit, for capitalists, and critical power for Communists—the Aegis, the money maker, the fucking POW! blocks from Mario 2 (1988). It’s what more cynical grifters might label “an agenda,” but simply is reality as something to perform, thus to achieve something other than menticide, submission, enslavement, et al. Capital’s like a bad relationship, then. Fucking and fighting like a tornado is fun for a bit, but it gets old even when it is our choice. Equality and stability are so much better (e.g., Crash Hard’s “BeamNG Drive – Cars vs Stairs #11,” 2023), except Capitalism doesn’t give a toss about those! It’s a shark; as we’ll see with those who emulate it, they become sharks, too: glass-eyed killer dolls built like tanks. Jadis was one, Autumn was another (as we’ll see); some people have the equipment, but are kinder than either of those ghouls (as I’ll assume Kay is, below). Original Sin’s a persecution mechanic in that respect, but also a liberatory form of ironic BDSM, and people are walking canvases; i.e., it’s not the truck-like dumper that’s the problem, but what you do with it as a socio-political statement tied to your labor as often overshadowed by the body itself as fetishized. It’s not always overt/obvious, then; sometimes, a butt is just a butt, no matter how substantial/fine, but conversely there’s context to any photograph:
(artist: Kay)
When tokenization occurs, though, the problem historically snowballs. The more the state takes to try and cheat death, the more addicted they become, the more alienated, the more rotten—them, of course, but also the alien they dress up and rape, time and time again. Eventually Medusa wins (state shift). And those who play both sides/are high on their own legends of self-righteous do-goodery will pay the price like everyone else; i.e., billionaire Marxism and centrifying variants of the white Indian/savior narrative that erase Indigenous (and other marginalized struggles) by painting themselves as the universal victim, the Amazon of which there is only them; e.g., Star Wars (and its assorted counterfeits) furthering Red Scare by doing a common middle-class trick under American Liberalism: equality of convenience per men like Mark Hamill stuck in this centrist performance that defends the state by playing the white-knight variant of the false rebel.
Fascist or not, a cop is a cop; Mark Hamill isn’t just Don Quixote tilting at windmills, then, but a cop (as knights classically were) who thinks he’s a Marxist space wizard “keeping the peace” (what MLK called “negative peace” as the absence of tension versus “positive justice”); i.e., as white moderates (and their token agents) always do—not just him, but people acting like him in equal bad faith/measure; e.g., Ron Pearlman, Natalie Portman, and Madonna (source: Lauren Sarner’s “Celebrities Leading Support for Israel in the War Against Hamas,” 2023). Like the Nazi outfit, the white moderate becomes something they think they can “take off.” Except it’s not, because people don’t forget; Commies have minds like elephants, and you’ve left behind a mountain of evidence. You make hay during genocide; we take your folly as straw to spin gold out of—our liberation!
(source tweet: Spiderwarz, March 27th, 2024)
Achilles isn’t just doomed once, you see. It becomes a fatal hand-me-down, a counterfeit nostalgia where the warrior’s death is canonical code to embody through the young man or tomboy’s rite of passage becoming the very toys they play with in service to the state; i.e., of flowing power towards the state during the dialectic of the alien, harvesting nature-as-monstrous-feminine during Cartesian edicts. Under capital, these constantly sexualize, fetishize, and alienate everything during canonical essentialism’s us-versus-them. It is a historical-material byproduct that we, as Gothic Communists, must argue against with our own doubles of—e.g., costumes, masks, and other revolutionary cryptonyms; i.e., by using ludo-Gothic BDSM’s ergodic motion (castle-narrative) during the liminal hauntology of war (the appearance of the grim harvest, beckoning the usual victims towards the usual Call to Adventure as a copaganda exercise): oppositional praxis synthesized to achieve systemic catharsis when challenging the profit motive on all registers and modes of expression.
Our examination goes well beyond videogames and their cartographic refrains (re: Tolkien’s treasure map or Cameron’s urban warfare/shooter) to holistically apply this to all media as something to collectively and individually foster in an iconoclastic, sex-positive direction. Achilles’ cycle of rape and revenge (the murder-suicide) for profit can be broken, but we have to kill a lot of darlings to do so; i.e., break a lot of toys to engender emergent gameplay that develops Gothic Communism in a ludo-Gothic BDSM sense: camping canon, aka “making it gay/political” by announcing our own existence as ironic towards the profit motive unironically killing us through its toy-like dogma.
As luck would have it, the Gothic has done this since the days of Matthew Lewis—embodying rebellion as something that others less campy (and brave) would gentrify to line their own pockets with and fortify state arguments (re: Radcliffe). As such, Castlevania (1986) might seem like dead dogma, now, but the possibility always remains for such heroes to become ironic once more; e.g., from Nintendo’s beef-lord Belmonts to JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure (1987) as its own campy launchpad of future genderqueer icons. Our best revenge is to become voices they cannot silence, toys they cannot break left behind inside the same proverbial toy chest. To ask questions like “Where does Sir Thomas’ wealth come from?” and expose the state, regardless of the answer! Whereas fascists use straw man arguments as dog whistles to eventually become straw dogs, our game of chicken with the elite becomes an Aegis that traps them in amber.
History is an endless toy chest, and there’s only so many combinations and dialectical-material opposites before you start to get repetition and overlap. My book is an iconoclastic toy chest. First, we’ll have several sections I’d like to reexamine based on what we outlined: the idea of history as toy-like through action figures (the herbo and himbo) as both a) a clever means of replicating and interrogating the imaginary past as empowering through Promethean “disempowerment” (re: Aguirre), but also b) the monstrous-feminine as a ludo-Gothic BDSM historical device that operates in relation to ourselves and its various effects on us and our social-sex lives. After that, we’ll dive straight into the modules to look at the imaginary past: as something to historically learn from now and reapply differently in the future during proletarian praxis (which Volume Three will focus on).
Before we do, though, there’s toys to be played with! First, onto gay himbos and herbos!
“Cruisin’ for a Bruisin’!”: From Herbos to Himbos, part one (feat. Dragon Ball Z and Big Trouble in Little China; Wonder Woman)
“That’s like… super gay!”
—Even, Superbad (2007)
(artist: Silverjow)
Camping war is to make war gay in ways that challenge profit. To that, capital is criminogenic through action-figure echoes of Achilles that have gay potential for or against the state; i.e., Pride as an LGBA conclusion within Rainbow Capitalism that tries to colonize our flags again as previously reclaimed from the usual D&D nerds and metal cohorts, etc (e.g., Dio and Tolkien). I want to explore this in a form of the monstrous-feminine we haven’t looked at as much in the book, but certainly is one this bitch (me) grew up with: beef lords, himbos. We’ll look primarily at relics from my childhood we, as Gothic Communists, want to rescue from their canonical selves. Part one will, look at Akira Toriyama’s DBZ and contemporaries like John Carpenter from the neoliberal ’80s using stories like Big Trouble in Little China as showcasing the magical man-wizard dueling for recruitment purposes; then, to be holistic, we’ll of course look at Wonder Woman as the herbo equivalent. Part two, will account for double standards and copycats—e.g., Ayla from Chrono Trigger (1995) and Savage Land Rogue, among others—under Pax Americana; i.e., as something that canonically apes these blindly masculine, hetero-to-homonormative lugs, but which we can also camp and reclaim regardless of biological sex (Claire Max), but must still watch out for token police agents (Autumn Ivy)!
As we shall see, the herbo/himbo go hand-in-hand, and generally suffer the same tokenized war-bride problems all monstrous-feminine do—albeit on opposite ends of a heteronormative colonial binary. They become eyed by prospecting muscle to serve like King Kong does: in chains (the service varying per type, but always involving abuses of sex and force against marginalized groups).
To that, capital operates within war-as-a-business as predicated on the homosocial, psychosexually erotic domain of male soldiers that threatens to wildly veer off into very-gay territories (female or otherwise). In fact, as Volume Two, part one explored, the language of sex and force through war theatre is something to camp and canonize back and forth:
one look at the weirdness of war-bred child soldiers says it all: baby-brain numbskulls thirsty after “waifus” and howling at the vengeful moon (witnessed inside odd localizations of Japanese media; e.g., “Invitation of a Crazed Moon” from Portrait of Ruin [2006] cryptomimetically touching on total catastrophe as a Western invention embraced by eco-fascist Japanese fandoms [the return of the Shogunate] and tackled by infamous auteurs writing “A Cruel Angel’s Thesis” [1995] tied to a bigger production. From Castlevania to Neo-Genesis Evangelion, then, the Japanese consensus is kick-ass emulations of American rock ‘n roll as thoroughly campy [less so with Mega Man, but I digress]: “Neo-Gothic Bible rock.” Yes, they’re straight-up bops, but the liminality remains indefinitely fascinating inside a capitalist world order).
In other words, love is a battlefield, but also a stage in between reality and fiction; as should hopefully be obvious at this stage, combining sex, nudism and the language of war per ludo-Gothic BDSM (sex as art) is an endlessly productive-and-liminal operation, especially when funneled through the fetishes and clichés of the Gothic—its “Ancient” Romances (stories of high imagination) and real life (the novel: “truth is stranger than fiction”) yielding something special and new (“imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” but “familiarity breeds contempt”) when used in a consciously satirical, campy way. The Gothic, as we think of its earliest origins, was always campy and about queer sex in a partially ace way (re: Walpole and Lewis)—something whose dialectical-material push-pull survives well into Rocky Horror, Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2009) and beyond (source).
By extension, all language is dualistic, mid-opposition; i.e., workers vs the state (and its proponents).
Per the himbo or herbo, it’s like a teddy bear as more outwardly uncanny than such things might normally seem; i.e., ostensibly more capable to harm (as the hyperbolic muscles might suggest) and haunted by trauma, but nevertheless can present a special bargain that per such negotiated regressions between two or more people, becomes a clever means of pushing together towards catharsis and interrogation of one’s childhood as imperfect, monster-fucker-style; i.e., towards openly ridiculous, psychosexual, nostalgic warrior fantasies. Like Toriyama’s Ginyu force (below), a given outing should always get incrementally close to the violence without crossing over into unironic harm. In short, they’re absurd, but also easy to step into in ways that feel legitimately comforting: one’s childhood as silly and serious, campy! In gay bedroom parlance, they’re also “catchers”; i.e., the one’s that, when faced by Goku as the most violent of all, get absolutely trounced by Toriyama’s designated hitter punching gay Nazis.
(artist: Akira Toriyama)
As such, keep this thesis statement in mind as we go ahead (“green light,” babes): the profit motive is fascist, and always decays from more moderate or reasoned forms inside the Cartesian (settler-colonial, heteronormative) paradigm towards an “older” form; i.e., hauntologically evoking a time before the Black Death and “hiccups” of state shift that forced the elite of yore to make concessions (wages, which they try and steal back through profit). These translate in modern forms of pacification that, above all else, serve as so-called “empowerment” fantasies that—through the medieval trope of the dueling knight or wizard (usually a semi-naked hybrid; i.e., the fascist hauntology of the so-called “barbarian”) regresses to an imaginary fascist past that normally leads to regular rape of so many different kinds, but for us can easily be put into quotes: “rape” by the beef lord as something that is always ambiguously gay and which we can stress the gay qualities of in iconoclastic forms (often colorful, fruity and fabulous, but haunted by fascism—above) that ape the gayest qualities of such muscular male warriors; i.e., to camp and spread the cheeks of, partaking of sodomy as a ludo-Gothic device! Taste the rainbow!
And if you’re allergic to “rainbows” (assholes by another name), think of it simply as a “sausage fest” (many queer AMAB dislike anal sex[1]); i.e., the dick-measuring contest as an implied “sword fight” where the audience (the de facto judges) imagine the specimens involved “crossing swords”:
(artist: Sgt Crisis’ “Big Break: a Literal Dick Contest,” 2021)
Total power corrupts totally and those with the most power hoard resources through capital as privatization: the ability to generate profit through the dialectic of the alien harvesting nature as alien, sexual, and fetish through a paywalled privilege to view. It’s predatory but malnourishing for all sides. The elite in particular are “skinny fat,” having both the most and the least; i.e., are the most alien of all, the most decayed when trying to cheat death by weaponizing the Philosopher’s Stone as an Enlightenment corruption of Renaissance thought (re: the Skeksis darkening the Crystal of Truth). They use it to create cocaine-like essence for themselves, inside a dogmatic chain that fosters hunters they can reliably call upon and respond with against those who don’t answer to capital. Anyone who assists in this process—i.e., by whitewashing it or conceding with capital in any shape or form—is ultimately fascist, meaning they will decay or demask eventually to expose what they have been doing all along: running interference for the state while posturing as good (re: Hamill and company).
No one is immune from said decay as relaid through the structure that converts people into drugs the other cannot live without; i.e., becoming slaves to their own grift/grind. This is predicated on the same addictions—a summoning-through-sacrifice that all at once demands an obvious dupe and makes all others dupes despite what they might insist: the wild hunt as recuperated by fascists and neoliberals into something whose folly can be seen in The Dark Crystal to Mandy to Metroid to Ghostbusters and other such-variations of the muscled-to-brainy man/woman as a Cartesian relic. Embodiments of either virtue, when canonically invoked, work as two sides of male culture with tokenized elements; i.e., the egghead, the Amazon, the himbo or herbo, the muscular wizard/brainiac as a sword-and-sorcery type of gatekeeper pushed through a neoliberal lens. Through all the usual ways, “war” becomes personified through an imaginary Antiquity that is thoroughly Olympian, but classically heteronormative (with diminishing circles of other normativities), biologically essentialized and anchoring sex-to-gender to serve the profit motive’s Male Gaze/creation of sexual difference, etc. Such Amazons—including their bodies—are always dressed “for men.” Except, like with beef lords/muscle wizards at large, there is always a campy and very gay potential that haunts the straight prescriptions at work!
First, we’ll look at the action figure as male per Toriyama and his contemporaries like John Carpenter, then consider the fighting trim (that was a terrible pun) of curvy crusaders that take figure drawing to a pugilistic, kayfabe extreme. This can be art on the page (left), but also the human bodies that leap “off the page” and appear in the flesh as actually made of the stuff (re: Autumn and Claire).
(artists: Devmgf modified by Elee0228)
To that, such wonders of creation can bring untold joy to all, but once corrupted to serve the state, become a drug war that cannibalizes everyone to endlessly try a resurrection myth from old arts; i.e., copies of “Osiris” a rotten, insane giant that will inevitably die (echoes of Frankenstein). In the end, Medusa always wins. So we must reclaim the Crystal, the ritual, as a “sacrifice” in quotes we can perform to answer to a higher power and calling than the bourgeoisie. As Jadis taught me, I didn’t just see what I wanted to see, but glimpsed what could be/would have been on the surface of someone cracked, broken by echoes of Pygmalion—a gay Amazon aping her colonizers (any power fantasy having the potential to be unironic, in this respect—Faustian and Promethean in ways that not only disempower but also harm). We must heal the Crystal, end the hunt, mend what is broken by synthesizing praxis to push power mid-poiesis towards Communism; i.e., until it becomes second-nature on a grand scale: to become so robust that it never regresses again! Gozer is home and stays home!
(artist: Persephone van der Waard)
I love herbos (re: Revana, left), and we’ll talk about Wonder Woman/similar characters (and female embodiments of them through Autumn Ivy and Claire Max) in a second. But first, let’s consider this through the toy-like Amazonomachia of a male-centric canon: of Akira Toriyama’s Z fighters and John Carpenter’s dueling wizards as having a monstrous-feminine character with a penis, not a vagina.
Personally I prefer pie instead of strudel (to borrow a tired gag from Dwayne Johnson), but holistic praxis demands at least sampling the “salami” when playing “hide the salami,” ourselves. In truth, I’ve had many such specimens forced down my throat as an adult, but also a kid, and a part of me remembers and relishes the taste despite my preference for AFAB Amazons (which gay “Spartans” are effectively the AMAB variant; i.e., able to be fascist [e.g., 300, 2006] or gay [re: Jojo] on a liminal gradient of likenesses, of likenesses). I remember the music, the men, their muscles, and their battles as echoed across so many media types; and I recall copies of famous canonical works that, so often, lacked any irony at all. It became holy to me, which I eventually learned the Gothic will make “almost holy” to achieve as much irony as it possibly can.
As such, I had to escape something that, on some level, I still enjoy: the heel upstaging the babyface as something Vegeta (especially early Vegeta) did so well; i.e., he was a psychotic brat, but given understandable motives that spoke to my own childhood trauma. Goku, on the other hand, is so fucking boring! He’s strong and goody-goody because—like Superman—the script needs him to be. I don’t want to reduce him to just that, as there are elements to him that are quite campy. But all the same, at his worst he really is the white knight letting the black knight go to the detriment of millions. In this respect, he can’t afford to be so naïve, but does so precisely because it fits into a centrist scheme he can pass along to his son; i.e., Red Scare minus the overt Cold War language (exhibit 34b3b2a2a1, next page). Like Superman, he begs to be camped:
Think of camping the magical warrior himbo less as a reversal of Genesis, and a parody of it, a la Matthew Lewis unmaking the so-called Dark Adam, Ambrosio. Like Lewis, we’re using such a likeness to push power towards workers, not the state, one that includes female, intersex and GNC variants (the “Conan with a pussy” argument). This exists on the same stage as passed down from him to us; i.e., in the same kayfabe-style masks, costumes, stage music/names, and sets, etc. Capital haunts and occupies them, and so do we. Unlike them, we use all of these things to push towards equality and post-scarcity. But this is far easier said than done. We can’t just camp canon as a content, but as a game whose playful theatrics are a subversive hermeneutic that yields future iconoclasms that, combined, push towards Gothic Communism, not centrism. Take, DBZ’ best duel (for this argument): our boy wizard dueling the end-of-the-world as very gay and inhuman the way only a mad-science experiment can be!
(exhibit 34b3b2a2a1b1: In the show, we see the usual homosocial arguments against Communism per a Japanese imitation of American Liberalism/kayfabe. Cell is the vice character who both represents the Nazi and the Communist [the unnatural product of mad science that threatens state collapse towards naked genocide on the home front, but also state shift towards a perfect organism/polity haunted by state trauma]. As such, the duel is ultimately a proxy war—of Goku [the American] fighting Cell [the Nazi, the Communist] through his brainwashed son: Gohan, the gentle nerd pushed towards a confrontation he doesn’t believe in—all to prove his worth as a “real man,” a rite of passage forced onto him as the monomyth always is. This time, Hell comes to Earth, and he must push it back with the help of his dead father egging him on.
Again, Gohan cannot do it alone. His father stands over his shoulder like Hamlet’s father’s ghost, waiting for the former heel, Vegeta, to turn babyface and kick Cell square in the dragon balls; distracted, Cell turns his back on Gohan, who backstabs the “backing stabbing Jew” to get his revenge [a cycle parodied by Radcliffe of all people, presenting Count Montoni and his ilk as a den of self-stinging vipers]. Gohan unleashes the demon, going “beast mode” to remember all the people Cell’s hurt; i.e., emotional manipulation. Goku could have prevented all of those deaths, but chose not to because he wants to indoctrinate his son. The myth—of patrilineal descent vs a monstrous-feminine menace—is what matters.
Such centrist peddling is pandering to future fascists [which is what moderates functionally are] through chicken hawk bullshit; i.e., Amazonomachia delivered by the likes of those without strength or presence of arms, but have all the abilities of the wormy silver tongue profiting off the war of mythological competent men and women, of might-makes-right heroes punching down against future zombies of a rising labor force sick to death with/of exploitation. Fascism, remember, isn’t just the state in decay, but the state defending itself in displaced, externalized arguments; i.e., while synthesizing the monstrous-feminine as thetical and antithetical to its own existence. The state needs nature to sacrifice and weaponize and that nature is always, to some degree, monstrous-feminine. It doesn’t take a genius to play along [re: Goku] with such unequal power exchange, just a willing and useful idiot.
To this, Goku—and by extension Toriyama and those who parody him[2]—is tremendously successful, leading to reactive violence by a member of the colonizer group: a special youth secretly belonging to the warrior race of Aryans projected into the show’s mythos—the blonde-haired, blue-eyed Saiyans, per Nietzsche’s Übermensch, defending capital from would-be envious parties.
In short, Gohan rapes Cell as the perceived alien, fetish, psychosexual demon clown—a green-and-purple zombie, Hulk-like punching bag that Gohan imitates in ways the state through Goku et al want him to. It’s dogma, pushing the next generation to achieve their “greatest hour” in service to the state through a kayfabe battle of wills that save the world as we know it from state shift, from Communism; i.e., something perceived as the end of the world versus what it could be more nakedly expressed as, and something dealt with through a centrist balancing act of porcupines mating as such animals always do: very carefully in spite of the barbs and warrior theatrics.
My point, here, is there’s a method to the madness that serves the state as undead: a copy of the Olympics glorifying a new power built on empire, which is what capital is. Cell appears, prophesized as a vengeful act that brings Imperialism home to empire through a foreign plot as inside-outside, needing to be rooted out during the Cell Games [our zombie Olympics promising the usual reward of military conquest: glory and gold]. A false flag occurs, and through a series of prescriptive, dogmatic propaganda battles, leads to the big climax at the end of the Colosseum that unfertilizes the egg-like planet as could-have-been-Communist, if not for Gohan cock-blocking Cell’s Communist potential; i.e., by framing him as the Nazi to punch. It’s Red-Scare-in-disguise, but also a thoroughly unironic version of Matthew Lewis’ The Monk told in kayfabe theatre. Young, dumb and full-of-cum. Punch the clown, get fool’s gold. This is very dumb and has been parodied to death:
“I am perfect! I cannot be defeated!” Cell boasts, reducing class war to a mirror-image inversion of itself; i.e., as a xenomorph that—like Radcliffe’s black castle—can be conjured up and defeated with American force. In turn, this can be camped in ways that, while fun—e.g., Mega 64’s “The Cell Saga in 5 Minutes” [above, 2019]—need to do more than just play it for laughs. However funny these guys are, we gotta do them one better: camp the Nazi to reverse the flow of power, not camp the punching of the Nazi simply to make content! Furthermore, this begs introspection through origins of seeming arbitrary cryptomimesis. Mega 64 did what Team Four Star did according to what Toriyama did in response to what John Carpenter did in his own arcade: the two old sages dueling while surrounded by younger strapping men dueling for the honor of women everywhere; i.e., to be married to a good husband, not a bad one [the usual incrementalism, I confess]! Carpenter’s duel is kayfabe through two wizard “gamers”: one good, one bad, the heel pitching a fit, post-dogfall [a tie]. It’s surprisingly apt of rage-quit-style tantrums, nowadays, abiding by the usual mechanisms and positions of power: “You never could beat me, Egg Shen!” It’s a duel, mid-trouble-in-paradise.
An “arcadia” is “a place of simple pleasures and quiet,” which translates to Christo-fascist regressions—of the videoludic space as something to colonize by players who police the various territories of performance, paradox and play for the state again. Milton camped Eden; Tolkien canonized it through Middle-earth as a cartographic refrain that translated well to videogames from table-top versions of the same monomyths; per Cameron, this became a military optimism whose shooter’s refrain translated to profit across venues, from the box office to the arcade hall and into American family households; for videogames like Nintendo, such products became a slice of heaven to brand, then reward good little workers who uphold the status quo through the profit motive: as something to endorse and extend through videogames as the continuation of neoliberal dogma out of older media forms [cinema] into newer ones [videogames].
As I said in Volume Two, part one:
Neoliberalism and home entertainment didn’t really exist until the early 70s (with Atari’s 1972 release for Pong happening on the cusp of the 1973 Oil Crash, and Tolkien—the author of the fantasy cartographic refrain, as I call it—died in 1973, while the subsequence tabletop games of the 1970s would go onto to influence the game developers of the next decade, and the next, and the next…). Regarding videogames as a neoliberal form of dogma, from the early ’80s to the end of the Cold War and beyond, you went from public entertainment devices (arcades) that had a bunch of mostly young male clients cycling through them like a pimped-out sex worker… to the 1983 Atari Crash and subsequent 1985 smash-hit success of Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros. encouraging the widespread sale of videogames in the Gothic’s usual haunt: among the middle class. Except this time, the elite wanted in through ways that didn’t exist during the Neo-Gothic revival: televisions as personal property that could funnel in their burgeoning ideology through the disguise of (expensive and highly recursive) games.
From the early days of Space Invaders (1978), Pac-Man (1980) or Donkey Kong (1981) to Mario, then (about seven years—twelve, if you start from 1973 when the elite began their first experiments with neoliberalism in South America), the usual place of neoliberal business and indoctrination transitioned from single arcade machines to larger amounts of money (from quarters to hundreds of dollars) per customer in each household (where there is more money to be had, and seasonally at that); i.e., a Stepford Wife, purchased for paychecks, not pocket change, and ready to implement the business model into the first generation of what would become the New World Order under neoliberal Capitalism: a world of us-versus-them enforced by neoliberal, monomythic copaganda’s harmful simulations of Amazonomachia to maintain the status quo at a socio-material level; re: the shadows of a new republic’s man-cave walls.
In turn, the American middle class (so called “gamer culture”) would gatekeep and safeguard the elite through videogames being an acclimating device to neo-feudal territories to defend in reality (outside of the game world[s] themselves) as capital starts to decay like usual. Meanwhile, the companies making these games have progressively privatized and digitized them to such a degree as to make it easier to pick the pockets of said middle class, leaving them brainwashed, broke and looking for someone to blame—all while being routinely desensitized to us-versus-them violence against a flexible scapegoat refrain; i.e., extending from some combination of open to closed space across numerous themes and genres: from “Mazes to Labyrinths,” “Out of Novels and into Cinema and Metroidvania“! Any counterattack should go beyond something to reference from older works into new ones. Mine are considerable, populous and consistently sex-positive, reclaiming the likes of Castlevania and Metroid to say something iconoclastic with them (versus merely compiling them as Parish largely does; i.e., he spends a lot more time compiling all the games that simply exist instead of making thesis statements that apply to multiple games. Sorcha, by comparison, has thesis arguments that are broader but limits them considerably by specializing in one monster and media type. There are pros and cons to either approach, but especially cons insofar as intersectional solidarity goes. You can’t afford to be critically vacuous or narrow to achieve conscious unity among workers. All forms and arguments must be accounted for) [source].)
Canon “fills us in” (so to speak) with codes that repeat for profit as self-destructive; i.e., to workers, but also capital as the ultimate fortress with the ultimate lit fuse: “Take what you can when you can!” When Shakespeare’s Macbeth famously called life “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,” he was offering up a disguised critique of Achilles and the “Roman fool,” but also a displaced capitalist refrain (unto an imaginary “Scotland”) that was already beginning to develop through Christopher Columbus formulating the settler-colonial model in small; i.e., one that England, in the 1600s (re: Livia Gershon’s “Britain’s Blueprint for Colonialism: Made in Ireland,” 2022), would put to practice, followed by the American colonial elite and their descendants.
By the time Shakespeare was dead as a doornail, mercantile Capitalism was connected to the Cartesian Revolution as something that gradually evolved into total war through the nation-state of the 1700s and 1800s, followed by fascist imitations of American Manifest Destiny in the 1900s (re: Bad Empanada’s “How the USA Inspired the Nazis – From Manifest Destiny to Lebensraum,” 2022) followed by soft-power copaganda after the American elite chose to drop the nuclear bombs on Japan (re: GDF’s “No, We Didn’t Need to Nuke Japan,” 2023). Forget “filling us up,” this is capital “running a train” on our asses! That takes time, work, and careful repetition.
(artist: Drew Struzan)
To this, stories like DBZ and Big Trouble and Little China—but also their assorted himbo offshoots—exemplify a post-nuclear age, one whose statuesque/splendide-mendax neoliberal refrains (videogames) sure love big explosions, but also nuclear-grade himbos and herbos. Insofar as the unironic monomyth presently haunts all media forms, all feel and administer the curse of profit through exploitation—of nature-as-monstrous-feminine through unequal, oft-tokenized power fantasies that many people seek (the white Indian, for example). This quest for power imbalance—whatever dominant or submissive form you could think of as something to perform, just to feel in control again—happens under capital as a historically-materially unequal system. In turn, the unequal power fantasies that occur manifest by virtue of abuse as something to survive and administer in ways that aren’t always sex-positive; i.e., by all the usual Amazons and knights, the herbo and himbo meat wizards playing rebel but functioning as cop and dishing out damage the likes of a dying Death Star spread out liberally over its usual targets: the colonial territories and their theatrical, romanticized offshoots. It’s a (video)ludic contract, the ping-pong oscillation aptly suggested by 1972’s Pong felt moving among updated neoliberal forms promising the same bogus gold at the end of the proverbial rainbow: “One Ring to rule them all!” From speedrunning videogames, to intended gameplay forms, to anime weebs and otaku then and now, the form and interaction with state power is determined by where power flows; i.e., as canonical or iconoclastic, thus sex-positive/liberatory or sex-coercive/carceral ipso facto, by virtue of what future interpretations (and cryptomimetic exchanges) result. On and on it goes, like the One Ring passed from one patsy to the next.
Per Sarkeesian, canonical texts can be enjoyed, but critiqued in ways that, per Fischer, expose Capitalist Realism; per me, this happens through ludo-Gothic BDSM: what we create and leave behind based on older imperfect texts being used to give us a leg-up against weird canonical nerds (and the elite) now—i.e., as fascism waiting not to happen, but already having happened and waiting to strike from behind gentler, “benevolent” veneers/gobstopper masks. For every outwardly hostile fuck, you have masked dickheads like Karl Jobst, Caleb Hart, and Ian Kochinski, etc, who think they can outrun their bigoted past and pass themselves off as “good wizards”; in turn, for every an-Com Medusa like me, you have “progressive”/white moderates like Natalie Wynn who, frankly, are only a jump, hop and a skip away from being exactly like Mark Hamill. This is in appearance, mind you; functionally all of these fuckers are the same! From lowly stooge to all-powerful billionaire, they’re entitled fucks invoking smidges of privilege/charity theatrics to make the lie of capital/American Liberalism work. Conservatism 101; neoconservatism 101. As we’ll see, this applies to Amazons as yet-another-tightrope to walk!
With that being said, let’s examine the himbo’s flip-side: herbos.
(source)
The monomyth and Heracles are as old as Western civilization, as are their female counterparts for or against the state; e.g., Wonder Woman as walking the bondage-to-cop tightrope in ways that skirt the boundaries of canon and camp, of such a character as ever fitting successfully into a heteronormative scheme despite wearing the American colors. As Jesse Kinos-Goodin writes in “From a Sex Cult to the UN” (2017):
There are a lot of mixed feelings around Wonder Woman, mainly due to this feminist figure/male sexual fantasy dichotomy that has followed the character since her inception in 1941. This complexity has a lot to do with the character’s creator, psychologist William Marston, a self-described feminist who also lived in a polyamorous relationship with at least two women, his wife Elizabeth Holloway and Olive Byrne, who both bore children by him. Byrne was a direct inspiration for Wonder Woman’s physical appearance. Another woman, Marjorie W. Huntley, was also in a romantic relationship with the Marstons, and even helped with the inking and lettering of the Wonder Woman comics in the 1940s (source).
Like all Amazons, Wonder Woman is pinned between her dutiful place in a man’s world, the symbol of rebellion likewise defined through her body and gender identity/performance as “like a (straight) man’s” or not. The same problem extends to queer men and any other monstrous-feminine, of course, and frankly to any soldier period (e.g., Jubei from Ninja Scroll [1993] as upholding a dogmatic function or an iconoclastic one): to serve the state or serve workers (refer to Volume One for more on that character).
Wonder Woman works within an Amazonian pastiche that camps Superman’s iconography in ways that Marston imagined would replace men as the rulers of the world, but also remained haunted by Pax Americana and the myth of the good war. It’s the so-called Superman or Captain America problem[3], which as we’ll see with Wonder Woman and similar post-WW2 offshoots like Ayla and Savage Land Rogue, has a female equivalent to the usual male forms of violence against nature as monstrous-feminine: punch, stab and shoot, but also gag and tie up while shielding yourself from rebellious damage. Wonder Woman enacts multiples of these; i.e., wields a sword, a lasso, and her good-ol’-fashioned fists. Violence is sex for her in ways that yield that the same-old double standards against woman-as-monstrous-feminine: the weirdest boner a rape fantasy that’s oddly pleasurable, aka death by Snu-Snu; i.e., “She can ‘rape’ me anytime!'”
(artist: Dandonfuga)
To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with rape fantasies provided they’re sex-positive. Except, those written to serve the profit motive are sex-coercive on principle. Such characters can be penned by immigrants or rebels, but they have generally been bought out (e.g., the original authors for Batman, Superman, or Ghost Rider) or otherwise revived to be recuperated by the state in a neoconservative, “peace through strength” way that valorizes the state; e.g., Gal Gadot serving in the IDF (the Israeli Defense Force) and playing Wonder Woman as a good-ol’-fashioned “punch the Nazi” romp that regresses to older problems that exclude marginalized groups to then brutalize them at home and abroad: white savior syndrome, aka white people/boomer disease. It affects Mad Max even at its most progressive, but also Star Wars and superheroes/the monomyth at large.
Any superhero risks becoming a weapon for the state; i.e., something that sells sex and force and can be sold to children; e.g., sex and force as often overlapping and having animalistic forms: the caveman or cavegirl in animal furs, the primal herbo/himbo who will bonk you—over the head with a club! The same baton-like quality translates to a Greek hauntology that lends itself well to American pinup Imperialism eroticizing the sword while simultaneously making it chaste, “non-lethal” fisticuffs. Like punk, feminism decays; e.g., from Mary Wollstonecraft’s “hyena in a petticoat” to American, hawkish feminists championing Capitalism as something whose hegemony wasn’t as globally established in Mary Shelley’s day. Wonder Woman is a defender of Omelas—a civilized cavewoman/noble savage descended from when “‘the West’ was great.” Similar neoconservative echoes beget through the likes of Master Chief, Doomguy and Samus Aran (who all echoed Ellen Ripley as a female Rambo galvanized by James Cameron huffing on Heinlein’s hog in stories like Aliens, but also the screenplay he wrote for Rambo: First Blood part two, 1985):
(artist: LeanFoo)
I can’t lie; my iconoclastic work has always centered around Amazons[4]/monstrous-feminine of a particular female kind: the kind I’ve wanted to be and fuck as informed by such statues placed all around me since birth. As such, I’ve written about superheroes (male and female) post-grad starting with Neoliberalism in Yesterday’s Heroes as a discontinued book (the only chapter being “The Promethean Quest and James Cameron’s Military Optimism in Metroid,” 2021) that eventually became Sex Positivity in earnest: critiquing the monomyth and monstrous-feminine as my PhD’s primary focus.
Of course, male monstrous-feminine are really not so different from female monstrous-feminine, suffering from various double standards through intersecting axes of privilege and oppression: of service in chains to an Atlas-grade body whose muscles are turned into state dogma and weapons. But my own interests remain very much someone wedded sexually and asexually to these bonafide mommy doms being something I had to learn to divide from biological sex when making my own gender trouble. “With such a confederacy against her—with a knowledge so intimate of his goodness—with a conviction of his fond attachment to herself, which at last, though long after it was observable to everybody else—burst on her—what could she do?” writes Jane Austen[5] regarding Marianne Dashwood as forced when all’s said and done to marry Colonel Brandon.
Simply put, there’s always been an element of calculated risk and BDSM to the Amazon—doubly so under Pax Americana and Britannica. What’s a girl to do? Does she submit, or disobey her ostensible overlords and their psychosexual marital schemes?
All of this doubles and redoubles in pastiche that is, to some degree, blind or perceptive regarding these meta wars taking place. Like any woman/monstrous-feminine, Wonder Woman has always been the virgin and the whore, the slut and the maiden we can reclaim from older forms in recent conversations. She becomes something to canonize and camp, but also write editorials about, about, about. Humanization cannot occur without confronting the objectification that monstrous-feminine play at; i.e., through calculated risk as a liminal sphere that butts up against unironic forms that view sex work as “universal enslavement”; e.g., James Cameron’s second wave feminism bleeding into not just his own maternal, sexless Amazons (of which he married and divorced Linda Hamilton[6]) but also his Pygmalion’s opinions on other Amazons and how they should appear according to him:
(source: Noah Berlatsky’s “James Cameron’s Comments on Wonder Woman Completely Ignore Her History of Sex Appeal,” 2017)
Escape from state chains is generally an ironic performance while reclaiming them in performances that highlight state abuse. Except, this takes nuance and Cameron’s a boomer who suffers the same problem as Akira Toriyama, George Lucas, John Carpenter or George Miller regarding the Amazon; i.e., as something to commodify similar to the Indigenous person: marketing “struggle” as war allegory that commonly cleans out all but the white folk versus a given imaginary Railroad company (with The Terminator having one black side character) or forces an Indigenous group to be the shooting gallery target (Aliens) or be led by a former-cop white boy (Avatar). Cameron has white people disease real, real bad! There’s plenty to critique about Wonder Woman but he can’t get past the first hurdle!
Seriously, we’ve barely scratched the surface of just my own corpus. I’ve written about Amazons and BDSM a lot; e.g., from Volume Zero (for more, use Crtl+F):
There’s also assimilation fantasy vs legitimate rebellion through Amazonomachia/Amazon pastiche as symbolic of class struggle through subjugated/subversive doubles: the war mask, uniform, weapon and weapon-like, athletic (or at least capable/”built”) body as performances that, far from canceling each other out per the centrist axiom, continue in opposition for or against the state as something to wrestle out from under its iron thumb. Because the state historically personifies itself through hauntological bodies that express war, lies, death and rape in unironically fetishized forms that simultaneously perform all of the above, these variants exist to victimize the ironic monstrous-feminine during oppositional praxis. Simply put, a state fetish is a coercive device, one that frames iconoclasm not simply as “incorrect,” but jailed then abused for its sex-positive, thus anticapitalist heresy during “prison sex”/Man Box rituals. Said rituals are often performed by assimilated members of a given minority (source).
and from Volume One:
Some heroes are villainous; all are monstrous. Superheroes, like animals, are trapped between two worlds: the foreign and the domestic, the wild and the tame, but also the ancient and uncolonized versus civilization as a colonial ordeal. To that, their animal considerations stem from the ancient world as something to revive in the present under Capitalism, then hide these secret identities under acceptable-albeit-conspicuous personas; to that, superheroes—like the naked wrestlers of Antiquity—supply the performer with animal qualities during kayfabe theatre as a popular-if-disposable commodity [straw dogs] that includes wearing masks and other performative devices: their statuesque bodies. Some of these animals are so-called “good animals”; others are feared and stigmatized for their inhuman strength, speed or reflexes; e.g., Spiderman (source).
Male or not, why are these buff, wizard swordspeople’s kayfabe/staged wrestling duels (and their pedagogies of the oppressor) so popular/able to buoy the careers of so many sell-outs and blind satirists?
Why, indeed! Beyond my older books, we can look backward from Mega 64 and Team Four Star to DBZ to Big Trouble in Little China to see a shared patriarchal, military-optimist pattern exchanged across oceans, from East to West under a post-WW2 neoliberal hegemon: from cinema, heavy metal, cartoons and videogames (with Toriyama in particular expressed in movies, comics and adaptations of his manga/anime, but also videogames where he became art director like Dragon Warrior [1987] and Chrono Trigger) all communicating the unironic monomyth; i.e., as something to revive the blind legacy of and have faith towards in defense of capital through itself: an endless exchange of content, making more content, leading to profit, uncritical consumption, creation, external genocide, ever onwards. Per the Shadow of Pygmalion, it’s something to regurgitate as blank pastiche—the myth of the good war as obvious, a priori. Except it’s really not; it’s simply enforced.
As Gothic Communists, we very much need to inhabit the same mode as something to make perceptive inside of itself, exported to all registers and media forms; i.e., as a parallel trend that challenges capital’s profit motive and fetishes/clichés of sex and force, of dueling Herculean wizards and damsels to be rescued, demons to rape, etc, through easy-to-digest interpretations: media whose pro-Communist trend avoids the pitfalls of capital and leads workers away from such a praxial quagmire towards development using Gothic poetics; i.e., camping the canon to formulate a pedagogy of the oppressed: “making things political, gay” or whatever else the usual defenders of capital will accuse us of doing. We must be what they fear most—not merely a joke they will turn into a videogame boss to punch, but something they can never kill. Indeed, they cannot—must instead try to enslave the monstrous-feminine as needed for them to profit. This is where our revolutionary cryptonymy’s masks, costumes, bare bodies and virtuosity comes into play. Some people (e.g., Hannah-Freya Blake) bake literal cakes and write books about it[7]; others, like Nacoco Music, jam out with their clams out. So long as it reliably yields to a challenging of the profit motive while subsisting within capital, then go to town, queens!
(artist: Nacoco Music)
In turn, Gothic Communism will face capital’s proponents as such and make them lose all will to fight—by humanizing Medusa and exposing capital for what it is: a killing field to acclimate the usual benefactors (and tokens) of capital to defend its Imperial Core/monomythic profit motive ad infinitum. We must introduce an element of nausea towards that, making them prefer what we offer up, instead: our “cake” as something to eat and learn from through mutual consent as illustrated. This happens not once, but over and over and over…
Amazons, like all superheroes, are like time capsules that get up and move around, but also represent a chance to roleplay and experiment with symbols of power that mean different things depending on whose using or consuming them. Canon frames them as a line to toe (with limited wiggle room); iconoclasm allows for possible worlds known to potboilers the likes of Phillip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1962): the Nazi as a time traveler connected to possible futures, not unlike Cameron’s alternate timelines haunted by spectres of state violence that, for the Global South (and non-white people), are a regular occurrence. There is also the spectre of Marx, albeit as something routinely bullied by the spectre of “Rome” reifying through offshoots of either Numinous.
In a similar fashion, then, the likes of Superman or Wonder Woman (and a million other statues to play with like dolls or wear like costumes/masks) become a fantasy we can chose to wear or have forced on us—like the Nazi uniform as skin-tight all on its own, a cartoon of superhuman torture and rape not unlike evil versions of our male and female monstrous-feminine; i.e., our himbos and herbos as guilty pleasures, wish fulfillment, pleasure principles and stress relief, but also domination fantasies of the Pax Americana sort: copied by Nazi Germany’s own palingenesis, not the other way around (the American establishment pioneered settler-colonialism as the Nazis tried it: the war of motion as a gas-powered bio-mechanical spearhead thrust into the heart of the Bolshevist nucleus).
Such roleplay and fantasy is canonically prescribed by nation-states. This travels on the human body as encased in a tomb-like uniform draped in the flag as limited to various color schemes (often white, black, and primary colors) evolved out of medieval war standards and heraldic schemes into modern day knights; i.e., as larger-than-life political statements doubled by superheroes. Both remain emblematic of each other in a copaganda campaign haunted by its own past, of past, of past; i.e., the goody-goody as always ready to turn heel, his or her various codifiers challenged by the presence of the fascist ghost on “nobler” semblances (fetish gear having a “mil spec” quality to it evolving out of WW2 to the 1970s onward, into comic books and other pulp fictions): PKD’s potboilers adopted nowadays to speak to the same fascist loop Pax Americana always yields. We’re trapped in a never-ending cycle that blends the usual BDSM mil spec together on the usual bodies:
Observe, then, a nebulous, back-and-forth quality to the imagery of the surface; i.e., the body points to the genitals as implied, and vice versa, as clothed or naked to varying degrees and context. It’s Frankensteinian, with built bodies that—through a Gothic, monstrous-feminine lens—yield postcolonial critiques amid paradoxes with undead potential.
To that, big muscles equal strength and virtue as subjective, but classically are gendered in ways that uphold differently now in a dialogic of the superhero as a given kind of alien; i.e., a traveling castle-like body whose fortress is very poetic, but also built on preference for different codes of regression and subversion; e.g., “buns of steel,” washboard abs, and Wonder Woman’s physique perpetually frozen in the 1940s starlet, wearing the American-flag corset; i.e., “Old Glory” maintaining that hourglass figure (and optional ’40s hairdo) for the Man (or then-closeted lesbian) to guiltily enjoy (craving the whore-like quality that such an Amazon portends relative to a model virgin-esque housewife).
Such an aesthetic is the usual military pinup sort: the sex cop fighting the good fight for the usual presidents and all their horny men. Though functionally “undead,” Wonder Woman doesn’t look like a traditional zombie or Creature, then; she looks outwardly comely—soft, but hard as steel. Like all American™ superheroes, she remains haunted by the spectre of fascism as having double standards that complicate the proceedings: the Amazon as anathema to Nazi Germany but also, just as often, fascist parts of America that try to cram Wonder Woman into the wedding dress her character would have fought tooth-and-nail against. It’s a bodice whose comic-book-style violence “cauterizes” the wounds of any victim of colonial force, similar to Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber (the 1977 original did not disguise the blood of the disarmed bar thug, I admit; but that movie was more rebellious than its kid-friendly sequels would become: cops and victims, the latter trapped between dueling Jedi and Sith).
Wonder Woman is something of a “gentle” dom, then. She draws no blood, but whose BDSM chassis is—like the Terminator’s—”fully armored, very tough,” covered in the usual disguises that a) not only liken her to past heroes, but b) make her appear human and welcoming to the next generation of soldiers for the state! “Grown for the cyborgs,” she’ll tie you up and fuck your brains out!
(Kotaku’s “Make Wonder Woman Buffer! | MultiVersus,” 2023)
At least, that’s the canonical promise, right? The bodice and briefs are something of a compromise—to please “the boys” of a bygone Americana drooling over a fascist, oxidized Statue of Liberty given a fresh coat of paint. Like the ageless vampire, though, it becomes unable to change—just frozen in time, feeding off the Oedipal fantasy as a roleplay that can transfer power and information in either direction depending on how one performs it. “Mods” like the one above recuperate the “thicc Amazon” to serve a Male Gaze, but can also appeal to girls (and GNC people) who want to feel strong as an aesthetic that isn’t strictly canonical; like makeup or clothing, props or jewelry, they can serve different performances that identify around struggle or police violence (which DARVO obscures). In turn, the sword can be “just for show” (a prop weapon) that symbolizes state force, or a reversal of the same cryptonym doubling as revolutionary praxis profaning the American flag: a theft of legitimacy regarding the sword as a theatrical device (re: Weber).
As usual, consent and context illustrate the difference, but this takes dialectical-material scrutiny as not normally taught through canonical stories. But said stores don’t monopolize Wonder Woman any more than Marston did. It can be fun to camp the Nazi-in-disguise (the American hauntological cop), but also fuck someone you know could crush your puny head between her thighs (a closeness to power) but won’t because you’re just that special (aw, shucks)! I don’t even like Wonder Woman’s look, per se, but the concept is not without its appeal (fucking what I want to be, but also what I want to change: taming a symbol of American Imperialism[8] to become a Commie Amazon camping Old Glory): fucking an alien who’s crossing boundaries and fornicating with the enemy to find common ground by misbehaving. What’s not to love about that?
(artist: Zirael Rem)
All of this is rather dated and fresh—a superhero hauntology that extends from color to size to elasticity to genitals (sticks and holes). All synonymize per sex and force through the body language of war as a literal/figurative uniform—back and forth in that respect, but also as a regression towards/progression away from fascist violence as forever out-of-focus (similar to Far Cry‘s 2004 Valerie Constantine, second image, aping so many older femme fatales): the rape castle (or some-such resort for bloodshed made into a herbo/himbo power trip) and its bondage, murder and disempowerment perpetually informed by preference as acquired/congenital; i.e., accident of birth and nature/nurture; e.g., Marvel’s ’90s male pinup series being published featuring two high-profile gay characters Northstar and Hector subverting a straight male readership’s expectations (over time, comics becoming more expensive and bigoted):
(artist: Jan Duursema)
Despite being a Gothic expert of Metroidvania and Amazons, I like herbos and vaginas, and tend to be far pickier with male bodies than female ones, enjoying femme male cuties (e.g., femboys) of a very narrow sort (the opposite of my father) and all manner of female monstrous-feminine. I have an ace attachment to male himbos (many people do) but a sexual, imitative one to female herbos. In turn, it’s certainly guided my research, but I still try to be holistic and make thesis arguments that are intersectionality productive and encouraging of solidarity against capital and tokenism. Enjoy these settler-colonial sex/rape fantasies, but only so you can critique them and their real-world counterparts:
In other words, any power fantasy can be reversed (switched, in BDSM parlance). Capitalism, to that, often swaps genders but does so while tokenizing the fetish topping the male/tokenized audience, mid-Orientalism. We need to do better than that, exploring the same old tombs being raided to interrogate them and the avatar alike as fascinatingly fascist: to interrogate the ghost of the counterfeit where it and its usual rape fantasies can be found, albeit in ways that rescue BDSM from its dated American origins, post-WW2. It’s a good idea to do so, if only because we might surprise ourselves when fashioning ludo-Gothic BDSM beyond De Sade, Sontag or Creed, but also the CIA; e.g., what I learned while writing this piece—that I actually like the idea of Wonder Woman as a sex-positive icon; i.e., one whose many sex-coercive functions I can pick up on through roleplay as praxial. Simply put, it caters to my favorite BDSM theatrical role (the mommy dom) and body part (the booty) while leading me down some fun new rabbit holes. What’s that, Heather Hogan, “Wonder Woman’s Star-Spangled Butt Has Always Been a Canvas for Feminist Hope and Male Misogyny” (2020)? Say more, queen!
How’d that bank robber feel when she slid along the floor in front of a group of hostages and pinged away all his bullets with her golden cuffs? Can’t say, but I know what her ass looked like right after. How did she feel when she was fighting a grizzled Bruce Wayne about assembling a league of superheroes? Not sure, but I know how her ass looked when she was arguing with him. How’d her strut compare to Batman’s, fully suited up? Don’t know, but I sure did see her ass while Batman was skulking away from the camera. In fact, nearly every time Diana of Themyscira, daughter of Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons and Zeus, the mightiest of the Gods of Olympus, entered a scene, she did so ass first, and the camera lingered and leered as it brought the men in the frame into focus.
Snyder and Whedon are not, of course, the first men to use Wonder Woman’s body—and especially her butt—as a blank page onto which they could project their feelings about Wonder Woman, specifically, and women, generally. Wonder Woman was conceived as an avatar. Tired of the “blood-curdling masculinity” of Golden Age Comics and endless real life wars waged by leaders of the Western world, William Moulton Marston designed Wonder Woman, in 1941, as his feminine standard bearer who would usher in matriarchal rule in the United States. He believed men needed to submit to women’s “loving authority,” in all ways, including sexually, which is why Wonder Woman’s weapon of choice is a Golden Lasso that she used during Marston’s days to tie up her enemies and friends almost constantly. […] Marston told anyone who would listen that his Wonder Woman represented all women, who could use the “charm, allure, oomph, and attraction” of their bodies to make men submit to them. Marston was a huge fan of bondage, and while his Wonder Woman embodied a lot of still progressive feminist ideals, there’s really no way to look at his comics without acknowledging that they are, in part, real-life bondage evangelism (source).
(ibid.)
Except, Hogan, there’s nothing wrong with preaching BDSM provided you can steer away from its cliché, harmful past! More than that, such dated forms don’t change the fact that ancient-to-medieval poetics, especially warrior poetics, believed that power was stored in different parts of the body that had a weapon-like function: the penis (the sword) or the vagina (the net), to be sure, or the head/mind (the crown), but also the ass as a warrior’s seat of power. And they would coalesce into other organs (the eyes, heart, etc) as connected to martial extensions of power like the sword or lasso as classically gendered: “phallic” and “vaginal.” Amatonormativity prescribes marrying off the rebel-as-war-bride; i.e., there always being something weapon-like about the monstrous-feminine, “nature” extending from female biology to gender performances that both challenge and operate under patriarchal force into capital building on said force; i.e., as something for us to subvert, thus challenge, the nuclear family structure as laden with war brides and their booties crammed into an American war chest far more recent than Ancient Athens, but regressing towards such a hauntology (“Athens” in quotes) to prescribe future war and rape fantasies with.
Seriously, there’s so much stuff to play around with, and Marston really broke the mold; i.e., in ways that yielded a productive power fantasy that could travel outside the bedroom (Foucault would approve) yet still yield subversive forms of play that would endlessly and productively subvert dogmatic thinking through a familiar face with a foreign function: speculative thought chosen in ways that go beyond mere “evangelicalism” into informed choices centered around sex-positivity as transgenerational roleplay—e.g., Sandy Norton and I, my own work informed by their 1994 polemic of Perkin (source: “The Imperialism of Theory: A Response to J. Russell Perkin”).
(artist: unknown)
Ironic or not, there always exist some stand-by arguments to default to. Even just among straight white people, a strong woman is so much more interesting than a strong man because she actually has to overcome adversity as the monstrous sex object men seek to take, objectify and dominate in harmful variations of Amazonomachia—a rich cultural heritage dating back thousands of years. For me, this is both a passing of the torch and opportunity to self-reflect—to learn from the past to synthesize good praxis in the present; i.e., in ways where I suddenly want to include Wonder Woman more than I did in the past. A status, sex and authority symbol, but also a bottom-heavy warrior and statuesque, classic feminist icon that yields myriad GNC potential to challenge modern-day impostors weaponizing the same aesthetic? In short, ol’ Diana grew on me. This extends to superheroes (male, female, or otherwise) as something to camp in dated, nigh-Freudian ways.
For example, while Kevin Smith points out (with Stan Lee’s help[9]) that sex organs are so often the topic of conversation, they generally are eclipsed by the body as statuesque/plastic: hard as stone or as soft and pliable as rubber, and often hugged in form-fitting briefs (echoes of Eugene Sandow’s imaginary antiquity and various strongwomen from the same period in time; e.g., Sandwina[10] as a circus attraction for much the same reasons [raw, brutal strength] married to female double standards trying to get by in a male-dominated America).
In turn, any hero is a monster (as I write), but any hero that deviates from the white, cis-het, Christian male is monstrous-feminine; i.e., as something for the war machine to enslave and assimilate per the Amazon as male or female (excluding intersex, of course) in service to the war machine and profit as its hauntologies/cryptonymies currently exist: the thing from another time, the secret identity that shows by hiding itself in plain sight; i.e., an iconic disguise doubling as a political statement marrying sex and force in oft-naked, androgynous forms: the open-secret identity and alter ego.
Himbos and herbos, like their gentler damsel-esque sacrifices, often reduce to centrist caricatures orbiting around home-defense/assimilation-fantasy action through sex and force tied to war personified; but as Lee, Marston or Smith demonstrate, there’s plenty of room for medieval (sometimes crude) nuance that, while historically limited to men, clearly has extended canonically and iconoclastically to performers regardless of sex and gender. In short, there’s certainly a heteronormative standard, and a gradient of normalizations and deviations that respectively work for or against said standard; but they all use the same basic ideas and tropes, fetishes and clichés. Not even something as wacky as Doom Patrol (1989) really “reinvents” the wheel (not to be confused with Gregg Araki’s excellent-if-sobering twink-murder-odyssey, The Doom Generation, above 1995—Zeuhl loved their twink murder); it just camps it[11].
(source: Creepy)
Through the body language of the statuesque power dynamic, sex is frequently a joke that—whether on purpose or not—seldom measures up and historically-materially translates to statues and statuesque bodies as standing for different things and being camped by nature and those with nature versus anything against either of those things. Except the state cannot corrupt if it doesn’t exist, but this is a long, slow process—one that camps the monstrous-feminine regardless of its biological sex (with big showy genitals, as Flashgitz shows us, classically not even being the point); i.e., the classic problem of gender parody in Amazonomachia regarding female bodies: is the Amazon “acting like a man?” or not? I tend to think of this in terms of class and culture warfare. “Acting like a man” is classically a Man Box idea, and Amazons like Ellen Ripley or Samus Aran classically punch down against Communists represented as space aliens… while still being otherworldly themselves. This arguably started with Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya (1806) and Victoria de Loredani, but it certainly didn’t stop there!
Power symbols become things to symbolize, to hunt, to claim as trophies (which, like sex toys, we can make “dark” in ways that camp their unironic function, but likewise showcase a Destroyer with a light, Liberalist guise). We do so in safe spaces of unequal exchange, acknowledging symbolic freight through the usual places to barter but also work through our biases, phobias, and kinks, inside and out: to push against sin, dogmatic boundaries, to learn not because one is told (through discipline and punish), but because one plays as learning for oneself; i.e., in a safe space that imitates the usual disempowering feelings of state abuse: all the language of the “Imperium” put into quotes.
This being said, American superheroes like Wonder Woman are frequently cops of a white-knight sort; i.e., acting besieged while sticking to trademark heroism as branded: to look and perform as crystalized, thus are much more about imitation with mild variation than anything radically different than the good-vs-evil, us-versus-them formula: aping the “Roman,” Vitruvian statuesque through imperial verisimilitude. It’s bonafide praxial inertia, but similar to the Gothic’s zombies or demons, there’s still room to work and play with these things to achieve proletarian results; i.e., the usual, psychomachic “corruption fantasy” (mirror syndrome, aka “the dark side”) as yet-another-thing to interrogate/play with.
For the rest of the subchapter—part two, as I’ve divided it—we’ll look at fictional examples with Weaponlord (1995), Chrono Trigger‘s Ayla and Savage Land Rogue, followed by real-life performers who can play the witch cop or the rebel as a matter of praxis: Autumn Ivy and Claire Max. To that, let’s look at some more fictional examples other than Wonder Woman; i.e., those that bring the imaginary past forward as a habit that houses a wild persona trying to survive in a world historically very unfriendly to it.
(artist: Norasuko)
Onto “From Herbos to Himbos, part two“!
Footnotes
[1] From Bobby Box’s “These Gay Man Identify as Bottoms but Hate Anal Sex” (2020):
Can you really be a bottom if you don’t enjoy receptive anal intercourse?
When I initially requested to speak with bottoms on this topic, I wasn’t expecting many bites (this kind of information is sensitive!). But I couldn’t have been more wrong. A few hours after posting my request, messages poured in.
“I find anal sex more painful than enjoyable,” Chris, 23, says. “I know it’s only supposed to hurt for a bit, but even when it starts to feel good it’s still not satisfying. I find myself thinking: Okay, hurry up and finish so this can end.“
Though he doesn’t enjoy receiving anal sex, Chris still identifies as a bottom because he’s submissive, prefers giving oral sex rather than receiving, likes feeling protected, and his sexual fantasies often—if not always—depict him as the receptive partner. “It’s that stereotypical big burly guy doing what he wants to [do to] me and taking control,” he explains.
Chris blames this fantasy on the porn industry, which, in his opinion, romanticizes the ease of receptive anal intercourse. “The bottoms always look like they’re having the time of their lives and everything just slips in with no struggle at all,” he says. “The fantasy appeals to me more than the reality [emphasis, me].”
The same idea applies to rape, which sodomy codifies to under Cartesian schemes: butt-rape nature. Make it hurt. It’s a powerful dogmatic tool that crystalizes dominance and submission as patriarchal, but also an aphrodisiac that, under unironic Pavlovian conditions, reduces to synonymizing sex and harm as things to trigger actual harm: a dog whistle. We can subvert this by putting “rape” in quotes, but the ghost of the counterfeit is always there (as is the reality—and I’m speaking from experience, here—anal sex almost always hurts a little).
[2] From “Dragon Ball Z Abridged: Episode 60 – Part 1″ (2019), Team Four Star redubs the anime to say pretty much the same thing as Toriyama:
Gohan, grow up! You act like you are the only one suffering. But I believe Trunks has some stories for you, and I can assume they all end with, ‘And then he died, too.’ And before you start whining about your father, again—and I get it—take a moment to consider that my father made me to be a soulless killing machine to kill your father [oh, the irony]. And that doesn’t come close to the complete tragedy of fatherhood that is Vegeta. […] You think you’re better than everyone else, but there you stand, the good man doing nothing. And while evil triumphs, and your rigid pacifism crumbles into blood-stained dust, the only victory afforded to you is that you stuck true to your guns! You are a coward, to your last whimper! Of fear and love, I fear not that I will die but all that I’ve come to love—the birds, and the things that are not birds—will perish with me. So please, Gohan: stop holding back! (timestamp: 18:13).
It’s so manipulative in favor of the unironic monomyth/status quo at large—a cruel hazing ritual that essentializes good and evil not just within the current story, but all of them across space and time. Cell (a stand-in for Capitalism-in-decay and Communism-in-development) is simply “evil,” and “good” is nature as catalogued and dominated by the byproduct of a cartoon scientist; i.e., the Creature minus Shelley’s pathos or irony as made into a military recruiting device that makes him a liar in the spirit of the original Victor Frankenstein.
Toriyama’s refrain apes older refrains that, per future duplicates, reliably yield Goldilocks Imperialism; i.e., taming nature while repeatedly shooting oneself in the (self-righteous) foot. As such, Android 16 (and those voicing him, time and time again) is persuading Gohan (and by extension all those “like” him and his antiwar tendencies) to “put up or shut up”; i.e., not hold back against the Nazi-Communist monstrous-feminine to “save the world.” It’s a circular argument that reliably leads to profit through genocide by erasing the state’s role in things; i.e., a bourgeois call to violence/false flag turned into yet-another palingenetic/strongman nation creation myth delivered by the canonical posthuman in service of the profit motive: as a voice for the state instead of rebellion (on par with Bungie’s own talking head in Myth: the Fallen Lords versus Scott’s beheaded Ash the android celebrating David’s creation, the xenomorph, post hoc).
Clearly Team Four Star recognize the theme of Frankenstein in DBZ—tragedy of fatherhood through the Gothic (fantasy-meets-science-fiction) making of monsters per the Promethean myth: as an endless, Gothic dialog* to weaponize the usual middle-class nerds to fight for the state in yet-another-cycle-of-violence celebrating and capitalizing on the monomyth. In other words, Team Four Star lost their ironic comedic edge the more they sold out; i.e., blank parody par excellence, used to worship Toriyama and push merchandise tied to his brand through their own. It’s transactional and dogmatic. So, way to go, guys! You suck!
*One I have written about before, and which we’ll talk about more, later in the volume (exhibit 39c2): “Dragon Ball Super: Broly (2019) – Is it Gothic?” (2019).
[3] Captain America initially created the myth of the good war, writes R. Joseph Parrott in “Captain America: Changing [the] Conscience of a Nation” (2015):
In March 1941, the United States remained neutral while World War II raged in Europe and Asia, but the country was inching toward war. Newspapers announced policies to support the Allies like the Lend-Lease Act, even as isolationist sentiment earned space in opinion pages. Yet next to the adult fare at the newsstands was something far less ambiguous: a four-color spectacle featuring a red, white, and blue clad figure holding a shield in one hand and using the other to punch Adolf Hitler square in the jaw.
[…After Korea, Stan] Lee rejected the simplistic, perfect heroes that typified previous comics in favor of fantastical soap operas grounded in very human emotions, where heroes bickered and faced personal crises, punctuated by kinetic fights choreographed by Kirby. […] From his origins in World War II, Captain America waded into national debates with sometimes blunt force. Since the 1960s, his stories have reflected complex ideas about patriotism, recognizing national flaws while clinging stubbornly to an inherent, even exceptional belief in the United States (source).
And there it is—an attempt to balance the argument with give-and-take amid a universal tendency to capitalize on American exceptionalism. Stan Lee wasn’t above it, and nowadays anyone who unironically brandishes the red-white-and-blue is, on some level, relying on its immediate symbolism as something to a) immediately recognize as a brand, and try to whitewash (versus Troma films indicating its perfidiousness through the neoliberal presence of toxic waste).
The idea of the superhero is canonically to revive someone sexy and statuesque, but also quaintly ace to literally stand and fight for the image of war as good in defense of the nation-state model—an idea that Howard Zinn (a bomber pilot in WW2) would lament regarding Saving Private Ryan (1998):
I watched Private Ryan‘s extraordinarily photographed battle scenes, and I was thoroughly taken in. But when the movie was over, I realized that it was exactly that—I had been taken in. And I disliked the film intensely. I was angry at it because I did not want the suffering of men in war to be used—yes, exploited—in such a way as to revive what should be buried along with all those bodies in Arlington Cemetery: the glory of military heroism.
All that bloodshed, all that pain, all those torn limbs and exposed intestines will not deter a brave people from going to war. They just need to believe that the cause is just. They need to be told: It is a war to end all wars (Woodrow Wilson), or we need to stop Communism (Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon), or aggression must not go unpunished (Bush), or international terrorists have declared war on us (Clinton).
In Saving Private Ryan, there is never any doubt that the cause is just. This is the good war. There is no need to say the words explicitly. The heartrending crosses in Arlington National Cemetery get the message across, loud and clear. And a benign General Marshall, front and back of the movie, quotes Abraham Lincoln’s words of solace to a mother who has lost five sons in the Civil War. The audience is left with no choice but to conclude that this one—while it causes sorrow to a million mothers—is in a good cause.
Yes, getting rid of fascism was a good cause. But does that unquestionably make it a good war? The war corrupted us, did it not? The hate it engendered was not confined to Nazis. /We put Japanese families in concentration camps.
We killed huge numbers of innocent people—the word “atrocity” fits—in our bombings of Dresden, Hamburg, Tokyo, and finally Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
And when the war ended, we and our Allies began preparing for another war, this time with nuclear weapons, which, if used, would make Hitler’s Holocaust look puny.
We can argue endlessly over whether there was an alternative in the short run, whether fascism could have been resisted without fifty million dead. But the long-term effect of World War II on our thinking was pernicious and deep. It made war—so thoroughly discredited by the senseless slaughter of World War I—noble once again. It enabled political leaders—whatever miserable adventure they would take us into, whatever mayhem they would wreak on other people (two million dead in Korea, at least that many in Southeast Asia, hundreds of thousands in Iraq) and on our own—to invoke World War II as a model (source: “Private Ryan Saves War,” 1998).
In similar fashion, superheroes classically make war criticism blind and sexy—i.e., in ways that engender the policing of such venues: gargoyles that spring to life and attack labor as historically sex-positive, thus anti-war and anti-Nazi, which Capitalism is not. Such defenders of the state are always monsters and martyrs for the state, some (especially female and other token varieties) being more expendable than others, but also prone to regress to fascist forms (re: second wave feminism, TERFs).
[4] E.g., “What an Amazon Is, Standing in Athena’s Shadow” (2017).
[5] From Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (1811).
[6] Noah Berlatsky writes,
Wonder Woman is a feminist icon. She’s also a sex symbol. She’s a wish-fulfillment power fantasy and a sexual fantasy, which is part of why she’s had such lasting appeal to fans all over the gender spectrum. But her sex appeal has been a consistent cause of consternation for critics, fans, and casual passersby since her earliest days as a comic-book character.
Director James Cameron is the latest commenter to claim there’s a contradiction there, that feminism and sexiness are somehow at odds. In a furor-raising recent interview at the Guardian, he said that in Patty Jenkins’ new Wonder Woman film, the character is “just an objectified icon, and it’s just male Hollywood doing the same old thing!” He claimed it was a “step backwards” from his own Terminator franchise, starring Linda Hamilton, who he described as “not a beauty icon” [ouch]. That’s an odd thing to say. Hamilton’s Sarah Connor is a wonderful, powerful character, but she certainly didn’t challenge Hollywood standards of attractiveness.
Marston meant for his Wonder Woman to be sexually appealing to men and women. / Cameron’s evaluation of his own work is questionable. But he at least has a glimmer of a point about Wonder Woman. It’s just an old point that’s been made over and over for decades, largely by people with no sense of the character’s history. William Marston, her creator, believed that female sexual oomph could lead both men and women to matriarchal utopia. His version of Wonder Woman was meant to be sexually provocative, educational, and appealing to men and women alike. Marston lived with two bisexual women in a polyamorous relationship, so he was always very aware of Wonder Woman’s potential lesbian audience. He was also aware of how female sexuality could be empowering, not just objectifying.
Per my arguments, paradox is a performance regarding power as a theatrical, playful means; i.e., to interrogate itself and generational trauma through ludo-Gothic BDSM. Sex appeal is very much a part of this, as is rape play in asexual (artistic) forms.
[7] Re: Cake Craft (2024).
[8] As an an-Com, I don’t really think we should focus on rescuing American symbolism from its own hypocrisy, but there is something fun about the fantasy—not unlike fucking the cop, but more exotic, otherworldly. Furthermore, the fantasy of “changing the conqueror,” while seldom practical, is often fun! And because it’s imperial, we’re not slumming but fraternizing with the enemy as something to subvert and send over to our side—the symbol as well as the people(s) involved! The way to Communism, I’ve discovered, is often through sex and BDSM.
[9] From Mallrats (1995): “He seems to have an obsession with superhero sex organs…” / “He’ll grow out of it!”
[10] A famous strongwoman from the late 1800s I have written about before. From Volume One:
Collared by the state, the “queen bitch” is a war boss who ultimately fetishizes the state’s will, including its historical-material effects: the ubiquitous celebration and female personification of statuesque war, death, lies and rape in a fascinating but ultimately “lesser” form: a lady cop, gladiator and/or reaper in tokenized spaces.
[source]
This appropriation took time, starting with a literal circus persona that fixated on the strongwoman as a dated curios tied to an imaginary past not ruled by men; e.g., late- 1800s strongwoman Katie Brumbach.
Similar to rockstars, pornstars and various other “stage bunnies” of the 20th/21st centuries, she had a stage name: Sandwina, but also “Lady Hercules.” People tend to forget that heroes are monsters. Hercules was a monster that Sandwina combined with the woman as a classical monster type: the monstrous-feminine by virtue of having manly strength and female attributes. Her naturally strong female body dwarfed the men around her [thus threatening the heteronormative order and literally personifying the suffragette movement]. As such, people like Sandwina were regarded in their time as oddities but also potential threats; or, as Betsy Golden Kellem writes in “The ‘Trapeze Disrobing Act'” (2022):
for a long time, unusually strong women were regarded as aberrant curiosities, described with wonder in the same breath as bearded ladies and living skeletons.” They were literally circus acts—magnetic ones that, Kellem continues, “not only destabilized the white-male basis of physical culture, it challenged popular ideas about female ability, all while showing a discomfiting amount of skin and startling muscle mass (source).
Meanwhile, the likes of Eugen Sandow [future icon of the Mr. Olympia organization] would represent an “imaginary antiquity” that suspiciously came with the statuesque, rippling muscles of a patriarchal hauntological past—a historically sexist tradition carried forward by “Pygmalions” like Conan author, Robert E. Howard, and famous Conan illustrator, Frank Frazetta.
[11] From Noah Berlatsky’s “Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol: The Craziest Superhero Story Ever Told” (2014):
The journey from disjunction to order is only emphasized by the fact that the heroes are themselves often outsiders in some way. Superman is an immigrant; Batman has a traumatic childhood backstory; the X-Men are policed and persecuted mutants. Yet despite the fact that they are underdogs, the heroes nonetheless fight for the mainstream authorities. Thus superheroes are often fantasies of assimilation—a dream of outsiders being accepted by, or turning into, insiders. […] The Doom Patrol was initially invented in the early ’60s, around the same time as Marvel’s X-Men, which it resembled in a number of ways: It was a group of people seen by “normal” society as freaks, outcasts, and weirdos, led by a wheelchair-bound genius (the Chief, for the Doom Patrol). Morrison, a British writer just beginning his long and much-praised career in American superhero titles, took the basic concept and pushed it to places where mainstream comics had rarely ventured. The new members of the Doom Patrol who he introduced were not white guys marked, through various fantastic mechanisms, as marginal or persecuted. Rather, the members of the Doom Patrol were marginal in their world for much the same reason that they’d be marginal in ours (source).
Camp can be more liberatory and inclusive, per Morrison, but as Zack Snyder’s 2009 Watchmen adaptation shows us, routinely drops into fascist pitfalls per future adaptations that gravitate towards violence and sex of a particular vigilante kind: Nazi (stochastic terrorism).