Originally part of an undivided volume—specifically Volume Two of my Sex Positivity (2023) book series—this blog post now belongs to a promotion called “Brace for Impact“ (2024); i.e., that went on to become its own completed module in Volume Two: the Poetry Module, aka Volume Two, part one. The Poetry Module was primarily inspired by Harmony Corrupted.
Click here to see “Brace for Impact’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.
Further Reading: Volume Two actually divides into three modules/sub-volumes, each with its own promotion and release. “Brace for Impact” is the first (re: Volume Two, part one), but there are also promotions for Volume Two, part two’s twin Monster Modules, The Undead and Demons: “Searching for Secrets” and “Deal with the Devil“!
Update, 5/1/2024: Volume Two, part one (the Poetry Module) is out! 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 PDF (which will contain additions/corrections these posts will not have)!
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 ally shared with permission from the original model(s). For more details about artist permissions, refer to the book disclaimer (linked above).
Concerning Buggy Images: Sometimes the images on my site don’t always load and you get a little white-and-green placeholder symbol, instead. Sometimes I use a plugin for loading multiple images in one spot, called Envira Gallery, and not all of the images will load (resulting in blank white squares you can still right-click on). I‘ve optimized most of the images on my site, so I think it’s a server issue? Not sure. You should still be able to access the unloaded image by clicking on the placeholder/right-clicking on the white square (sometimes you have to delete the “?ssl=1” bit at the end of the url). Barring that, completed volumes will always contain all of the images, whose PDFs you can always download on my 1-page promo.
“Teaching (the Caterpillar and the Wasp),” part one: Angry Mothers; or, Learning from Our Monstrous-Feminine Past
“How can they cut the power, man? They’re animals!” —Hudson, Aliens (1986)
Picking up from where “My Quest Began with a Riddle” left off…
Part one of “Teaching” aims to establish the monstrous-feminine past as something to learn from in the people we meet and media we consume: us versus them as a liminal sphere with mixed messages, metaphors, monsters, mothers, etc. “Who is this Medusa lady and why is she pissed off?” To answer it, we’ll use me as the mother teaching you about the monstrous-feminine from where I encountered, thus learned about it—from Alien, and similar stories explored between myself and my past’s working and romantic relationships to people: cuties messily making monstrous memories and artwork together that ultimately settled into a four-volume book (which snowballed as more people wanted in).
The number of volumes should indicate the complicated, highly meta nature of our relationship. As such, we’ll explore the “caterpillar and the wasp” refrain a bit more fully on page 161. For the moment, I just want you to consider that enemies exist in relation to how they’re taught using different predator-prey metaphors—a caterpillar and a wasp, but really any symbiotic relationship you could identify in nature. This includes animals and monsters, which generally operate as personifications (often with animal characteristics) to get a larger point across: the xenomorph as an expression of said “past” that we can take on ourselves.
(source: Derek Vanlint’s “Alien and Its Photographic Challenges,” 2017)
In Alien, the monster—a combination of undead, demonic and anthropomorphic qualities—was primarily inspired by a symbiotic relationship with nature-as-abject: that of a wasp mother (the monstrous-feminine) that would punch through the bark with its stinger/ovipositor to inject its infantile prey and by extension its host with an egg that would ultimately kill the host—parasitoidism. This is just animals being animals, who kill for shelter, territory and food as part of a habitat they belong to, first and foremost. Humans also do this, but likewise operate through the solving of puzzles-in-abstract; i.e., they consciously think about things, including trauma, in ways that other animals (let alone plants and fungi) can’t. For non-human animals, fight or flight is more basic. For humans, our brains are more complex so “friend or foe” is more complex, as are our psychosexual responses to trauma as inherited, imagined and/or lived; also for us, animals are both a) descriptions of animal qualities in humans, and b) more complicated puzzles to solve, thus think about the world with, through increasingly complex-critical means.
Again, this often involves monster mothers as castle-like; i.e., in a dialectical-material sense, where workers are your friends and the state is the enemy and both use the same kinds of puzzle-like metaphors, often with animals, to express friend or foe in a dialectic of the alien useful to workers and the state in opposition (e.g., The Poisonwood Bible [1998] by Barbara Kingsolver, a story about a forbidden relationship between a white minister’s daughter and a local native in settler-colonial Africa. Books, like all popular media, concern such forces): adversarial castles/mothers squaring off in humanoid forms that blur the lines between body and home, friend and foe, as waged between mankind and nature-as-food, as-alien, as-monstrous-feminine. It becomes operatic, channeling Helen Reddy’s “I am woman, hear me roar!” and the Commodores’ “She mighty-mighty” through a formidable display of weight to throw around, black garb and spike-like implements, etc: “mother” as teacher, including “deathly” ones speaking to hard truths we can swallow more easily during calculated risk. In BDSM, this is called “size difference”—a Numinous whose divine enormity is generally preceded by fleshy parades that often feel weaponized, “ready for battle”; i.e., war machines and sex machines that promote great risk, punishment and reward (awesome power) in complicated ways; e.g., booties, cocks, fat, muscle, etc. It becomes, like Tolkien envisioned, a potent source of temptation insofar as Galadriel’s hypothetical taking of the One Ring unleashed her potential to be a Dark Queen dominating Middle-earth, uncloaked! Big mommy energy.
(artist: Harmony Corrupted)
Like Marx, we would assign this bellicose character to class and culture war. However, this human-animal relationship is a time-honored tradition, and one that starts simple, but like all puzzles grows with the student into adulthood and maturity as they learn to think. Bullies, through canon, become conditioned to think reactionarily for the state; workers, through iconoclasm, to think emancipatorily for themselves—surviving the state by liberating themselves from it; and all use the same language starting from simple to complex.
In turn, understanding is generally predicated on the ability to explain complex things in simple ways, as one might to a child. So animals and monsters work in that fashion, too—starting as simple puzzles alluding to bigger hypermassive problems that students become more engaged with (always in the abstract due to their size); i.e., as the puzzles grow more advanced, but also oscillate back and forth as needed inside different media forms: books, movies, videogames, etc, as opportunities to learn for or against the state regarding all ages for all ages. Poetic manifestation and interpretation routinely “grow up,” becoming giddily sexual:
(exhibit 33b2c1a1b: Artist: Selvaggia Babe. The way to parody academia is through heroic sex; e.g., Quistis from Final Fantasy VIII [1998] gobbling male essence up with all her mouths. This notion of wisdom and sexual heroism isn’t as quaint as you might think. For one, Academus was an Attic hero, whose garden was selected for Plato’s lectures and where the word “academia” hails from [with platos meaning “broad[1]“]:
The Academia was originally a public garden or grove in the suburbs of Athens, about six stadia from the city, named from Academus, who left it to the citizens for gymnastics. It was surrounded with a wall by Hipparchus, adorned with statues, temples, and sepulchres of illustrious men; planted with olive and plane trees, and watered by the Cephisus. The olive-trees, according to Athenian fables, were reared from layers taken from the sacred olive in the Erechtheum, and afforded the oil given as a prize to victors at the Panathenean festival. The Academy suffered severely during the siege of Athens by Sylla, many trees being cut down to supply timber for machines of war. Few retreats could be more favorable to philosophy and the Muses. Within this enclosure Plato possessed, as part of his patrimony, a small garden, in which he opened a school for the reception of those inclined to attend his instructions. Hence arose the “Academic sect,” and hence the term Academy has descended to our times (source: Mathieu Deflem).
[artist: real xxiii]
More in line with Gothic thought [and the above collage], though, the university [and academia at large] is a place of secondary forbidden education; i.e., a renovated place of higher learning that—just as often through medieval power structures surviving into the present—yields its own ghost of the counterfeit to abject: the fetishizing dysfunction of teachers sleeping with their students—the modest nun-like nerd as someone to deflower while discovering forbidden pleasures together. Echoes of Original Sin and Matthew Lewis aside, this remains a highly popular fantasy that can just as easily be reclaimed by iconoclastic workers; i.e., releasing stress and tearing down canonical boundaries normally obsessed with controlling sex through essentialized conventional means: the fetishes and clichés of porn deliberately confused per Gothic liminal expression [vampires and other hungry undead metaphors]. Hauntology pits heroes against ordinary and otherworldly dangers often sharing the shame [there’s a Freudian slip] uniforms and positions of status and control, release and disobedience—the nun, the whore, the knight, the damsel.)
Gothic-Communist development requires thinking about teaching and other things we’re generally not encouraged by the state to do unless we’re assigned a discrete profession within it—teachers. But it’s possible to do more than one thing at once and indeed, mothers often must; i.e., teaching valuable, life-long lessons to their figurative and actual children while being treated like animals and monsters by the state. To that, I often think of myself as a teacher-first, academic-second, but still have to routinely put these things into perspective when trying to explain them in relation to one another. Lessons have plans, meaning they’re prepared in advance and developed over time according to your audience (research, which is work). My audience is adults and workers more broadly so I have planned my lessons to keep them in mind.
For starters, I feel like I shouldn’t have to define teaching and what that is, but fascists are literally anti-intellectual and moderates are just fascists waiting to happen, so here’s a quick rundown: Teaching gets you to learn by engaging with the world, including media, by asking questions. Asking questions demonstrates an attempt to understand something by interrogating it or something related to it. This ideally should start when people are young by involving things that interest them. Discouraging questions and replacing them with singular reactionary interpretations is called dogma, which is generally predicated on fear as something to communicate through socio-material conditions. Instead of the proposition of friends, you have the enforcement of enemies—aliens, “stranger danger” and the “other” amounting to us versus them; i.e., prescribed by the state as the enemy to workers, making us fearful and mistrusting of nature: by using monsters as poetic language to discourage critical thought, thus societal bonds, through bad education, bad puzzles and bad teachers that lead to bad students, to bullies.
We don’t want that, because community is built on trust through an ability to recognize friend from foe under difficult conditions. We want people to question their surroundings from a young age, thus think in ways that further their development for the better of them, other workers and the world. This demonstrates an ability to observe and learn, which is important regarding relationships with other people and learning their boundaries, their needs and wants while communicating your own; it also encourages people to imagine ways of improving their world to help themselves and others. This starts in early childhood and progresses well into adulthood, but for reactionary people will always be arrested because they are always dogmatic, thus isolated and scared of just about anything different than them (re: Crawford’s invention of terrorism). They will be unable to imagine anything outside of Capitalism, and monsters (for them) always personify us versus them. This is largely because Communism is extracurricular. It’s not taught in schools and is basically outlawed. You’ll have to, at the very least, ask questions to find it, including about and with monsters.
Furthermore, if a child is precocious, you’ll want to encourage them so they keep asking questions, thus learning through repeat questions (often the same classic refrain, “why?”) that likewise correspond to how they check in on friends, loved ones, lovers; i.e., to let them see that you care, even if you seem fine but might not be. This is vital, lest the problems burrow horribly to the surface and painfully convert the living to the undead (“Kain seemed fine…”); i.e., in statuesque forms likened to “Antiquity” as also[2] statuesque through perceptive sculptors chasing poignant messages with the statue: the muse that is not material (a person) coming to life and placing itself in the artist’s cathedral as a fellow exhibit made by two. A given cathedral is wrought from and with many muses working for a better future during our Song of Infinity (more on this device in the medieval prep section, “Monsters, Magic and Myth”). No one person can take all the credit, our labor value trumping money value through a “laboratory” of mad science playing out in sequence; i.e., from one vacant galley made full of Gothic wonders into another and another until the fat lady sings.
My book, then, is but one example, though I hesitate to call it “mine.” While I might technically be the author (thus art director) of this particular chain of comely oddities, I really hate to take “the lion’s share” of glory proffered. Art is work, sex is work, sex is art, and all come from older forms (e.g., Medusa, Alien); and if you’ve ever tried to direct a shoot, or be directed in a shoot, you’ll quickly realize just how much work goes into such productions: costumes, makeup, lighting, scripts, acting and physical stamina (a big one, when it comes to sex). I learned that from Zeuhl, a photography nerd and music snob (their alias should be a clue) who helped me make my first sex tape (with them) and do my first nude shoot together (them, filming me). They also showed me how to date online and helped me set up my website after leaving me for their future husband.
It became not just something to survive the heartbreak and abuse of, but to understand that I was lucky for what came to pass; i.e., that I eventually learned to see through their awful illusions and find people who treated me better because of what I learned from my exes. Their treatment of me became something to evolve regarding—to adapt. It made me a better partner, writer and art director. But I had to kill my darlings, to bury my idealized versions of what I wanted them to be and look for that in future cuties. But what I loved about my exes still lives on in my book, and what I feared about them is something I can face without fear. They can’t hurt me anymore.
In turn, I took all they exposed me to and applied it with the same degree of interest Zeuhl showed postpunk, Manchester and twinks; Jadis, to insects, female domination, and Tool musical videos; and Cuwu, to worker rights, weed, and Pagan pageantry—i.e., I had a series of adventures and happy accidents, all leading circuitously to the present moment, of which I feel the happiest I’ve ever been: my book as counterterrorist apologia made with people I utterly love and adore loving me just hard.
Mastery takes time and sacrifice, which means you can’t have a Promethean Quest (and badass cathedral associated with it) without making some enemies/strange bedfellows to dig up at a later date. This disinterment also includes former friends—those who weren’t ready for the sort of commitment a better future requires:
(exhibit 33b2c1a2: Artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard. Some wasps look soft and femme, but can “sting” sweetly or deeply—i.e., in ways that cause genuine delight and severe emotional harm. Cuwu was one such person—soft and genderfluid, needy and vain, they sucked me dry and ultimately hurt me. But I still have fond memories of them [most of which are videos and photographs[3]; I’d learned my lesson from not taking nearly enough with Zeuhl in Manchester]. It left me hurt, reflecting on my mom’s motto: “No pussy’s worth it.” But I’m glad I had the chance to learn, because some pussy is. You just gotta find cuties who won’t mistreat you, confusing the boundaries between pleasure and harm. Cuwu did that because they had been badly hurt—a histrionic with borderline personality disorder who sought power and control to empower themselves by victimizing others; all my exes did. Eventually I learned how to meet people who treated me well minus the predatory harm [exhibit 33b2c1b]: camping canon with this book to prevent future disasters intimated in past Medusas I couldn’t help.)
I’ve often been accused by trans misogynists of devising this book as a wicked scheme: to “just” get laid. First off, while I love getting laid, surely there are far easier ways to have sex than writing a four-volume book series based on ten-plus years of research! Such persons seriously miss the point, then; i.e., my revisiting of old strategies of reflection to bond with new cuties I can teach important lessons (and they me) while we relate back and forth (which making art and having sex both consist of and combine). The point in doing so is to build on something that liberates all parties, targeting the Superstructure with Gothic poetics mastered by a community of awakened workers building in perpetuity (always out of breath with more to say). This requires trust in good faith, not deception (which my critics seemed to have projected onto me regarding their own humanistic shortcomings): the valuing of that which Capitalism normally cheapens in pursuit of profit.
To this, a director is precisely fuck-all without a muse to blow up, and a model often needs a platform to work their magic. As such, Sex Positivity was and always will be a group effort, its total collective statement on/with artwork and sex work entirely impossible if not for all my muses, models, partners (currently friendly or antagonistic) and friends (sexual or platonic) working in concert. Nor is ours the first. Like the patchwork group of (mostly cis-het male) art nerds who made Alien, celebrating the monstrous-feminine in Gothic panache, my cuties and I don’t own each other while raising temples to our own dark gods. Instead, we’ve worked together to contribute to a diverse, inclusive labor of love that we can all feel proud of; i.e., a dark progeny begot from enthusiastic, heartfelt teamwork. It’s an orgiastic journey to document and leave behind, a procession of memories to learn from (as Alien very much is). Or as Scott himself put it: “It takes an army of dedicated people to make a feature film—and on Alien we had a marvelous army” (source: American Cinematographer’s “The Filming of Alien,” 2017). So did I.
(ibid.)
Per the Humanities, such marbled dialog is not set-in-stone, then, but sculpted in our own caring gestures cheering others up and looking out for them; e.g., wagging “tails” manifesting as a simple “How are you doing?” (capital makes us forget to breathe, thus ask, thus think—waves of terror—so we must regain a prompt ability to think on the fly less as “total recall” and more as being quick on the draw). The more they learn, the more they can change the world provided they learn things that allow them to. In turn, this requires someone who will seek answers out, not take things at face value, including with things that interest them. They’ll enjoy them, but call them out if they’re pernicious, and invent curious solutions to hornswoggle/trick the state and its proponents (e.g., my older brother’s Mr. Kazakhstan; i.e., the useful myth of Gothic ancestry).
Just look at Gamergate to see the effect of canonical tutelage on worker minds; i.e., players as puzzle-solvers who, stuck in fear and dogma, become unable to solve even the most rudimentary of social puzzles (spoiled rotten). Puzzles don’t just teach us to think, but help us relax and relieve stress, but per dialectical materialism is also dualistic; e.g., a soldier or soldier-like (for the state) worker’s R&R and scapegoat to kill versus a proletarian worker’s R&R and dragon to slay. For the state proponent, they remain as children, their minds closed off to further development save as better soldiers, better killers for the state; and we, as class warriors, learn through entertainment and relaxation as going hand-in-hand while repurposing dogma to suit our needs; e.g., me recognizing videogames as neoliberal refrains imparting the monomyth to acclimate future children to future wars for the state, thus furthering Capitalist Realism (space cadets, scouts, and cops, etc, of any gender the state needs to tokenize).
My countering of that focuses on a simple principle: children are far easier to teach than adults (the latter requiring learning incentives like sex [and other such treats] to motivate them). Children start as hungry and absorb things like a sponge; the state takes advantage of that to make soldiers that maintain its strength and position: “Give me a boy until he is seven and I will show you the man.” For Gamergate types, everything is a stranger and wrong except whatever fits with their narrow, fragile worldview, and they respond predictably to that in ways the state can control; i.e., through us-versus-them violence, made into a holiday (a cycle): the ghost of the counterfeit to summon and abject.
As such, gamers (the metonym for conservativism’s lost boys) hate Anita Sarkeesian because she encourages critical-thinking skills in regards to entertainment, which for weird canonical nerds is anathema. They liken cognitive estrangement/dissonance to a biased confirmation that they must be right; i.e., she is an enemy who is wrong—an animalistic monster not to be trusted, but attacked and killed because it apparently threatens Man like death personified (meaning “a threat”; e.g., Michael Myers in Halloween [1978] as a threatening Shape that h(a)unts you: “In Samuels’ writing fate is immovable like a mountain. It stands where man passes away. Fate never changes”). By extension, all women are the enemy. Nature is the enemy. Monsters that evoke these motherly characteristics (the topos of the power of women making Aristotle out to be an ass) are the enemy. Teachers (the intelligencia) are the enemy. In turn, cis-het men become isolated, lonely and desperate; they take by force what capital routinely denies them, knowing they’ll play along to move money through nature. Forget “double-secret probation”; this time, it’s war!
Conversely, I was a precocious child, always asking questions with my twin brother (we once asked a service tech at my grandfather’s work showing off a heart-and-lung machine filled with cow’s blood: “How did they get the blood out of the cow?” “Did it hurt the cow?” “Where’s the cow now?” The technician was speechless). Over time, my brother stopped asking questions and escaped into videogames, started a family and upheld the nuclear family model. I, on the other hand, became a wandering spinster and academic, studying videogames and monsters until counting myself among their number by coming out of the closet and writing this book series; i.e., using my expanded vernacular and general education/experiences through a show of solidarity informed by my childhood; e.g., by my grandfather and I, as a little girl, walking in the fields and I stopping to see the flowers as a child does. “Aren’t the flowers beautiful?” I asked him; to which my grandfather looked around him and saw them as I did.
“Why yes they are!” he remarked, touched by my childish observation having reopened his eyes to a thing forgotten regarding that which was in right in front of, and all around, him—nature. “Lest ye become as little children, you shall never enter the kingdom of God!” Except per Rudolph Otto, this isn’t a Christian kingdom, but one expressed through placeholders that is quested for by Gothicists (and other such poets) looking on awesome things: “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” Awesome things lead to awesome thoughts, to awesome problems, to awesome solutions. Memory becomes a lesson to trust passed down as “Antiquity”—a challenge that rings bells of devastation not rung in some time: a lost lesson, a rememory we return to as a colossal wreck surrounded by sand (ashes to ashes, dust to dust—what Hamlet called a “quintessence”).
To that, I still have to teach my ideas to people or it’s all for naught. While accessibility and replicability is a common theme of my book (abjuring academic superiority and cognitive estrangement), a desire to teach lies inside my biggest volume: about monsters, with monsters, as motherly and animalistic. I want to teach not just because academia did me dirty but also because I learned to teach correctly through the women in my life as there for me; i.e., in ways that made me feel welcome, loved, and safe. This is another duality insofar as the state treats all women like animals and monsters, forcing them to be mothers who teach their children to be better inside the system caging both; chattelized, they often fight enslavement through their children as the future that outlives the patriarch controlling them “to be a man” like him, a coach from Hell: “Our babies will not be warlords!”
In Western myth, women are the classical guides for men through Hell (with Virgil being a classic exception). Not all of them were proverbial good witches, but likewise, through Hawthorne I learned that moral distinctions (value judgements) like “good and bad” are far less useful critically than dialectical materialism expressing the using of such qualifiers onto monsters as complex societal roles; morality is automatic insofar as actions do what is moral relative to human, animal and environmental rights protecting them from the state, from echoes of tyranny. The best teachers prepare us for the world, including our own growing sexualities in relation to those who protect us as being people we will want to be close to, including sexually—the generally accepted role of the teacher and the parent versus the Gothic’s enjoyment of the paradox, the student desiring the teacher as (through the ghost of the counterfeit) donating to incest, thus rape. This can happen through paradoxes of ironic bodily reactions; i.e., the body reacting to rape with physical pleasure divided from the mind (the tickle or laughter paradox—of tickling or laughing feeling good until they don’t, or if they are unwanted—but also of complaint, of “methinks the lady doth protest too much” during #MeToo, legal bias and sexual harassment; e.g., Amy Black Stone et al’s “Legal Consciousness and Responses to Sexual Harassment,” 2009).
In other words, context matters; contending with capital means playing with these paradoxes and their context through signifiers thereof that manifest in daily life and media as half-real, echoing across imagination, therefore time and space. Precocious children want to “grow up” quickly and jump into sex as a learning device; we often only have access to canonical instances of porn that, unlike worker-friendly forms, prepare us for a rude awakening when we discover that women/the monstrous-feminine aren’t without weapons. While they gatekeep (cockblock) and teach us about sex through boundaries as likewise informed by media, they can reject unwanted connections and harm to teach vital lessons; i.e., that they are not sex objects to own and abuse, first and foremost, but people we must acknowledge and treat with respect while managing our own bruised egos (and pent-up frustrations). Like a teacher in class but a lover in bed, such fuckable, motherly personas will be waiting when we’re both ready to play:
(artist: Sabrina Nicole)
The idea of such maternal BDSM and kink is to mother a pedagogic connection that isn’t harmful—a “first time” that is cute, thus special. It probably won’t be earth-shattering (unless you both know what you’re doing and understand what you both want and like) but it can be in the future if chances to experiment are allowed—to repeatedly take each other out “for rides.” This will happen if you trust each other and look for a likeness of mothers in those you befriend and yes, fuck—not to encourage incest, but calculated risk that prevents incest and other abuses common to the state falling apart under its routine collapses; e.g., I have a mommy kink, but engage through such personas to heal from power abuse (rape) that I have survived at the hands of many abusers, be they more readily classifiable as male or female (and arguably intersex, in Zeuhl’s case).
In turn, there’s so many monsters (mommies or otherwise) to examine, so many ways to think about/with them as memory aids and psychosexual teaching devices; i.e., that speak to underlying dialectical-material forces at work, thus myriad conclusions to draw/fun to be had through what’s uncovered and in turn played with (children should play with dead things). Holistic intersectionality demands solving Capitalism through poetry and monsters, but also critical thinking as something that involves fluency in both; i.e., with people who don’t always agree (often on protocol but also deeper issues like morality and other such cultural values) and who must find common ground in shared interests. It raises questions; i.e., desires to quest for answers that rise from media as dualistic, thus puzzling. And like all quests, fluency starts with a riddle.
In the interests of playing with poetry as an invaluable contribution to solving Capitalism, I’ve devised this riddle in a particular shape inside the mind: the caterpillar and the wasp (which, if you haven’t figured out already, is a metaphor for Ripley and the xenomorph as monstrous mothers). Except we’re thinking of these devices as abstractions of things (the monstrous-feminine), which just as often abstract other things (mothers, nature, BDSM and kink, etc). Their socio-material engagement works back and forth, providing delivery systems for trauma and catharsis on a systemic level: the Archaic Mother as a big-ass (full-of-eggs) man-eater.
(artist: Bay and a female mantis)
Contrary to Cartesian dualism, though, this actually describes a very human way of approaching the world and learning about it. As such, we’ll jump around a fair bit, but try to return to the original placeholder forms (our titular caterpillar and wasp) every so often, if only to keep things anchored and consistent. Regardless, try to remember that Gothic theatre roles like the Great Destroyer and sacrificial lamb each occupy the human body—not simply a blank canvas, but a “murderous” art studio (akin to Scott’s psychosexual, 1970s arthouse splatter revived and parodied; e.g., with Jeremy Saulnier’s 2007 Murder Party and Macon Blair’s own contributions[4]) whose prolific gradient of expression—painted in all manner of unspeakable pigments and fluids—is anisotropic amid dialectical-material dispute; it all shares the same shadow zone, one that talks about multiple things at the same time, but stresses different qualities as needed to make a given point. To that, a human body can represent “power” as closeness to trauma, further symbolized by animals and theatre on and offstage; i.e., as something to impart by acknowledging its complicated, linguo-material existence; e.g., the counterterrorist ability to buck systemic abuse normalized by the brutal ordering of nature as moralized to serve Cartesian interests: something as ridiculous as “All Wasps Are Bad” (capital demands profit, which demands genocide, which demands wars of extermination, which demands a misunderstanding of what nature is in relation to human fear and dogma). Humans must be humanized; other animals, treated humanely.
Those touched by trauma pursue “trauma” as something to control through calculated risk; the Gothic invites this through paradox, pushing the hero (the protagonist) towards Hell as an edge of destruction that wholly transforms them. Capital harms us and conceals its harm through cryptonyms that announce the structure it cannot fully hide. In pursuit of Communism as our Numinous, then, our Gothic quest begins with a caterpillar bookending itself. It starts with an egg and a leaf and from there the egg hatches and the caterpillar start its life. In one branch, it grows up, enters its chrysalis, and emerges a butterfly. In another, or at the same time insofar as time is a circle, it emerges a wasp. What represents Capitalism and what represents Communism? Capitalism is a cancer and Communism is the cure, but cancer-as-capital is both a natural thing and unnatural insofar as Capitalism is and isn’t an animal, because it is alive but also too big to be expressed as such. But such poetic abstractions (metaphors) are common in popular stories because popular stories are what work insofar as oral culture is far older than written culture but expressed within it; e.g., Medusa as expressed through likenesses (the xenomorph) that speak to the human condition as in flux through dialectical-material exchanges: commodities vs activism. The process as alien becomes something to reunite and play with as much as the body encapsulating it. Pursue it from all angles and positions:
(artist: Lera PI)
Swept up in that is an innate (congenital, internal) and taught (external, societal) desire to help others and fend for ourselves; i.e., to value and appreciate the defenseless, caring for/treating them so they trust, feel safe and will spend time with us: protection and comfort. It’s not supernatural but it is alienated from us and fetishized by capital, which in turn speaks to those of us who identify with monsters (often in familial language that speaks to our psychosexual desires for protection and comfort) by virtue of this alien-fetish effect—the monster’s motherly affect bouncing back onto us as marginalized collectively among differences; e.g., me as trans, intersecting with people of color and women, religious minorities, disabled persons and Indigenous people as needing to unify together through these maternal sentiments: to fight collectively against the state as a patriarchal settler colony that has already won, collaring Medusa. It’s like Star Wars, except the Death Star is still operational(!). Salvation for one group demands salvation for all, lest said Star become an Omelas.
Like Star Wars, people tune in for drama because it speaks different things to them in personified forms (all heroes are monsters). Ideals and taboos. You don’t just have a character die randomly[5] because then the story stops before anything has been said. People learn through popular entertainment because it’s popular in oral and written forms. This includes the Gothic juxtaposing contrasting and oft-personifying elements (and multiple interacting and interrelated, interesting factors) through theatrical paradox to express the whole through disturbance according to ideals and crimes through “what stinks” (where the bodies are buried); i.e., using what captivates and holds people’s attention: puzzles and games, but also fear and dogma, struggle and victory.
To that, is the puzzling case of the caterpillar and wasp a simple mimetic game, something idealized that “stinks,” mere poetry or dogma meant to elicit a fear response? Can fear be used to keep us alive through devices that help us think critically about our surroundings as eating us? The short answer is, all of the above, in duality! The riddle is one of motherhood (the wasp’s maternal predation of its specialized host, the caterpillar) as enslaved to abject forms that can always be conjured up and crushed under heel. Doing so speaks to something I outlined in Volume One:
Rape and war are two sides of the same coin; Gothic Communism seeks to prevent both (and Capitalist Realism) through worker intelligence as something to raise well beyond canonical, Cartesian standards. Trauma writing/artwork, then, are vastly important insofar as they grant workers an awesomely potent means to speak out against the state and its normally myopic dialogs on rape, war and death: Gothic poetics as a counterterrorist device, by which to regain control over portrayals of our own trauma, thus lives; i.e., by reclaiming the ability to perform and play with these things imagined for ourselves, seeing possible worlds beyond Capitalist Realism’s endless rape and war. Women (and all monstrous-feminine “non-men”) are food whose harvesting serves a Cartesian profit motive.
To that, it’s actually quite common for heroic canon to include trauma, but not to process it in any meaningful, healthy sense; i.e., of actually stopping its criminogenesis by recognizing and subverting these coercive material conditions and linguo-material factors in reclaimed language and iconoclastic, Gothic theatricalities. […] The most effective (and final) form of genocide is silence; the best way to combat its execution is to speak out in ways that highlight our trauma in recognizable forms. […] Capitalist Realism as a Cartesian enterprise. Under Cartesian thought, nature is female food tied to profit in ways that alienate workers and the natural world in classically Gothic ways that lead to police states and grim harvests, but also harvests at large regardless of their outward appearance; i.e., the monstrous-feminine through settler-colonial models that continue to plague workers and nature as victims of capital (source).
To that, what could be more vivid (and indicative of the monstrous-feminine) than infanticide, paralysis and cannibalism? It certainly strikes a chord, and speaks to things normally left unspoken in Western media save as ghosts of the counterfeit: the fed-up mother feeding on her baby to pass a rebellious double along inside the hollowed-out shell—a Trojan.
Except, abject theatre seems to be unsatisfactory insofar as it’s “just gross.” Indeed, it would seem far easier to ditch all of this gnarly mayhem, stick to theory and “speak plain” (there’s a paradox) minus the gross bugs and infanticidal gestures. But doing so would ignore how people learn, thus make us terrible teachers, hence Gothicists (the Gothic doesn’t speak plain, and wouldn’t to save its life); it would ignore the repressed matriarchal fury—of a) not wanting to be a mother forced to give birth to soldiers for the capitalist, patriarchal hive, and b) wanting to look and feel human as something that can be as outwardly comely as a butterfly or as hideously beautiful as a wasp being two sides of the same magic: “Set me free! We are sisters, you and I!” The puzzle to liberation—to “cleaning house” once and for all—lies in both as scholarship and cool-as-shit. Unicorns and harpies? Fucking. Metal.
(exhibit 33b2c1b: Unicorns fuck to metal. The chase of the Numinous is a reoccurring theme in this book, but especially this volume. It’s the proverbial elephant in the room: the womb of nature—not just a church but a cathedral in a vast string of “might in small.” This grappling duality reflects in phallic women and Archaic Mothers; i.e., doubles of a light and dark side through all the usual Gothic binaries sliding on a warring gradient; e.g., Hippolyta and Medusa, but also the harpy and the unicorn: as monstrous-feminine similar to the wasp and caterpillar as predator and prey through stigma animals amid a commercialized pastoral, the strong and the weak [which for the fascist is both, but also for the Communist]. Per the Gothic, these dueling foils mobilize the formerly arrested, fusing nuclear division [the family unit and its labor] while haunting the counterfeit’s dark funerary heritage as something to investigate; re: Radcliffe and us, to get to the bottom of an ongoing curse we [unlike Radcliffe] will actually do something about. We won’t banish Marx’ spectres; we’ll revive them in “prisons” that set workers [and Mother Nature] free from the abjection process [a concept we’ll continue exploring throughout this volume].
Powerful men [or those in the same Man Box] aren’t just intimidated by powerful, sexy women, but the monstrous-feminine at large. Those forced to identify as “women/femme” under heteronormative schemes, then, inherit the burden of care, the need to be creative as a teaching/enrichment device [apart from enterprising auteurs, cis-het men are terrible cooks, dancers, photographers, child rearers, artists, instructors, etc; and even those who excel are self-centered and destructively competitive]: pulling thorns out of wounded lions’ paws. Except, mothers of the future are forced by the state/status quo to care for the murderously infantile as given everything except what they need to socially and emotionally thrive. It becomes “gimme or die,” a demand made by those living in a capitalistic bubble that leads them to think they’re entitled to everything—to own what they don’t understand [e.g., girls pee out of their butts].
Our flowery subversion of the usual pride-based theatrics includes confirmed bachelors of any preference; i.e., I love my grandfather but would much rather write about the monstrous-feminine [especially monster mommies and Amazons] for-fucking-ever than spend one second apologizing for patriarchal forces [from Volume Zero]:
We will invariably discuss cis-het, male proponents (exhibit 63b) of the status quo throughout the book, but our transformative interest really lies more so in TERFs and other heteronormative cross-sections within tokenized canon; i.e., the class traitor’s assimilation fantasy that maintains the colonial binary by emulating white supremacy and toxic masculinity through internalized bigotry and self-hatred as a discipline-and-punish panopticon, one that perpetuates the status quo of dominating the monstrous-feminine—i.e., the rebellious slave or barbarian, effeminate meathead or thinking/feeling soldier, worker, athlete or statue essentially being property-come-alive and thinking for itself—through the rape culture of “prison sex”: acting like a man as something to perpetually watch over everyone else within and remind them of it. Not only are the terms “prison sex” and “Man Box” synonymous in this book; they’re performed by token minorities, including women but really anything that “isn’t a white, cis-het, Christian man” wanting to assimilate, thus occupy the guard tower. All functionally become a double minority relative to the power of their voice for the status quo, but also against the status quo in proletarian discourse [source].
Gondor, the Emerald City, Omelas—the Patriarchy is “Goldilocks Imperialism,” historically-materially whatever fails living up to a promised better future during theatrical conflict. Aragorn is a heartless sham, the Wizard of Oz a perfidious humbug.
[left: a saucy conversation between Bay and I]
The likes of Tolkien [and his imitators] might seem like tough acts to follow, historical materialism regressing to times of revenge, sexual division and high adventure at the fascist beginning and end of time [“Rome” by any other name]. Such calculated risks might be tempting to enjoy without critique; e.g., Witch Hazel’s “Ride On” [2024] yet-another-power-fantasy with clear-cut ground rules, its friends and foes easily defined, its roles, revenges and rescues restoring a centrist balance of power. As such, it’s our monstrous-feminine “past” against a Man’s world, the latter envisioned as such by perilous fraudsters laying claim to everything from Cleopatra to the Pouch of Douglas. Our bedroom code and its curious preferential allowances, whatever form they take—whatever tension and release their salubrious locomotion provides and lubricates—helps gear workers towards development; i.e., of what Capitalism deems “impossible.” Fuck them; this is our cake, our cathedral to taste and share with those who are invited—that, like Gloria Gaynor’s spectacular refrain, operatically belt “I will survive!” while saving all our lovin’ for someone who’s lovin’ us. Like the unicorn, our fur[r]y is dainty and cute; it remains inarguably terrifying to the privileged as cowardly through domestication—e.g., like this tiny bird furiously attacking this ‘fraidy cat [Daily Dose of Internet’s “Random Tire Flies Off Car, 2024; timestamp: 2:46]: “That rabbit’s dynamite!”
Moreover, class/culture war is fought and won with love and nature as subversively maternal and sororietal—to reclaim from a heteronormative, tokenized mind prison of nuclear-familial bad instruction and poisonous love [re: TERFs]. Female or not, so many people are completely afraid to love at all. Many often love deeply once and then, unrequited or otherwise denied happiness, fall into a deadly celibate trap: of thinking that it can’t get better. Speaking from experience, I’m a certified nymphomaniac, but didn’t date successfully until I was 29[6a]. After that, I had a series of exes who harmed me until 2022, except I started seeing my past as like all relationships: an opportunity to grow and learn from.
As such, my luck started to change because I was calibrating my search parameters, each abuser a setback that taught me what to look and watch out for [the proverbial green and red flags]. In other words, creativity became my superpower because I could take whatever an abuser threw at me and make it something beautiful; I eventually started to find “mommies” who didn’t hurt me while making me feel good [unlike with Cuwu, exhibit 33b2c1a2] and that’s when the real magic started to happen—i.e., when this book sprang to life.
To that, unicorns are visible to those who search and trust; generally mistaken for ordinary things, they are both ordinary and extraordinary as something to learn from. Zeuhl loved to swallow cum [and make eye contact, mid-gulp]—was an invigilator who had the tightest, most perfect pussy imaginable [with lots of fuzz and sliced ham, but tight as hell]; Cuwu’s bedroom door had a literal unicorn on it; and Jadis was a chonky entomologist, dark mommy and orc chiefess who lured me in, deliberately groomed me for harm [if failing is fucking then I’ve “failed” a lot—many lifetimes’ worth because I’ve lived a lot]. Their friendlier ghosts are the figurative “mothers” we leave home to find; i.e., to make “home” among those who actually nurture and protect us, teaching us how through roleplay and sex, through Gothic teasing and thrills [“the gift that keeps on giving”]. Dating for love as casual or serious, roomies or strangers, SOs or FWBs, we may not ever get to fuck in-person, but we can learn and bond long-distance just fine [the classic “love-by-letter” approach, but extending to images and video on the Internet; i.e., Trans-X’s “Living on Video” (1983) or Taco’s vampy “Puttin’ on the Ritz” (2024) but overtly pornographic]: I love my job because the people I work with [through interdependence, not codependence] are all awesome mommies and daddies I can proudly show off without regret!
[models, from left to right: Ms. Reefer, Blxxd Bunny, and Quinnvincible]
How could I have any when working with such angels, and while having survived the complete-and-utter torture that preceded them? Jadis was my Great Destroyer. They took with impunity. They scattered my wits, drained my sanity and stole my will to live [source: Persephone van der Waard’s “Setting the Record Straight; My Ex’s Abuse of Me: February 17th, 2022”]. By comparison, these cuties—stellar and glowing—utterly restored it, gave me something to live for—something warm and serene, but joyous, thunderstriking and awesome: helping my friends avoid similar fates; i.e., an angelic and devilish bliss comparable to what Matthew Lewis described following the riot and fall of Ambrosio in The Monk:
The remaining years of Raymond and Agnes, of Lorenzo and Virginia, were happy as can be those allotted to Mortals, born to be the prey of grief, and sport of disappointment. The exquisite sorrows with which they had been afflicted, made them think lightly of every succeeding woe. They had felt the sharpest darts in misfortune’s quiver; Those which remained appeared blunt in comparison. Having weathered Fate’s heaviest Storms, they looked calmly upon its terrors: or if ever they felt Affliction’s casual gales, they seemed to them gentle as Zephyrs which breathe over summer-seas [source].
To that, I’ll let you in on a little secret: The greatest irony of Jadis harming me [something we’ll go into more detail about during the undead module] is they accidentally gifted me with the appreciation of calculated risk. Scoured with invisible knives, I don’t view my scars as a “weakness” at all; I relish the feeling of proximity to the ghost of total power—of knowing that motherfucker took me to the edge but didn’t take everything from me: I escaped them and lived to do my greatest work in spite of their treachery! Like the halls of a cathedral, my lived torments and joys color this castled work, ornamenting its various passages with the power of a full life. I’ve known such terror that makes the various joys I experience now all the more sweet and delicious. I am visited by ghosts of my rapturous design, the empress of my fate, the queen of a universe shared with seraphs the likes of which I can hardly describe; “no coward soul is mine.”
[artist: Persephone van der Waard]
Am I privileged enough [white, male, American/middle-class] to not be immediately killed by those with the stomach for it, trapped on the wrong side of the imperial fence or the law? Yes. But let it be known all the same that all of our abusers—however powerful they might seem—can’t completely own us, nor take the best things “during the divorce”; i.e., they don’t monopolize “what works” when combined adventurously by us [which we may do as we want—to have fun and learn with those we have “eyes for”]: my creative stealing of their power through my own work, eliding sex and warlike metaphors to liberate the monstrous-feminine by illustrating mutual consent with sincere revolutionaries. The Imperium divides along sex and force; birth and creativity are a classically feminine act, whereas traditional masculinity operates through rape dressed up as “birth” [re: Zeus and Metis]. Sex Positivity is our subversive playground, primarily funded by me but occupied and performed inside by a great many artists; i.e., those with access to forbidden, medieval, alienated things [their bodies and genders] and utterly determined to catch[6b] your attention, but also get you to think about sex worker liberation once your tails start to wag: “Don’t be afraid to play ‘dangerously’ [to slay] in order to learn how to love better!” No horseshit, it’s bonafide scholarship in our case, but also slutty and freaky as fuck. There’s praise, release words, collars and puppy play abound!
As such, a given pair offers the usual “fencing” quality mid-argument, albeit often within a theatrical BDSM cosmetic whose dialogic stance is literally worn: black leather symbolic of the alien, the profane, the lance-like penis as something to ride on a helper body—a dominant assistant that supplies the Destroyer component/stance as a physical component. But per Gothic oscillation, the role can waffle between submissive and dominant, the merger of white and black reflecting a given paradox; e.g., of evil, the gentle mommy dom appearing dark and deadly but being harmless, or the trans penis as penetrative but obedient towards the sub or dom as someone to top.
As such, the Gothic loves monsters, Hell, sex, violence, oxymorons; but contrary to modern capitalist thought, good villains [vice characters] hold an audiences’ attention long enough to get them to think while eating popcorn entertainment [bread and circus, with a healthy dash of fake blood and cum]. Gender swaps/trouble and role reversals—the revelatory [and descriptive] possibilities of iconoclastic roleplay [and its visual expression] are virtually limitless, their appreciative irony liberating such wild motherly things from prescriptive canonical bondage; the original, however harmful or seemingly immutable, can mutate into something fresh across generations, but also in the current one—e.g., from Super Mario Bros. 3 [1988] to Akihabara Electric Circus [1988]. When you hear the cry of Medusa, it’s a sigh of relief as much as a wail of the damned—a dark mommy getting’ her breeder’s freak on, begging ahegao for that baby batter!
In turn, we as workers have the right to express ourselves however we wish to say whatever is required to liberate us; e.g., the monstrous-feminine reified by “ancient” fertility throwbacks from Pagan harvest/resurrection rituals: Easter and egg-laying rabbits. The state, by comparison, has no rights insofar as it interferes with our right to exist and thrive. It must be throttled, irreverently choked to the point of total irrelevance by the jailed set free—often to the point of cartoonishly staged, parodic access; i.e., as borrowed from childhood favorites that already “get the idea”; e.g., pinching its snoot with a pair of chopsticks set to Beethoven’s 9th[7], shouting “OVERDOSE!” holding a dubious cure in both hands[8], or taking Hugo Snyder’s threat “I’m going to crush your head until slimy ooze comes out of your eyeballs[9]!” a bit too literally. Be it with fake blood and/or placental slime, it’s all been done before, so do whatever works.)
Liberation-amid-torture might seem like a fever dream, except historical materialism presents history as a dialectical-material cycle described by Marx[10]; i.e., like a bad dream where evil doubles would seem to haunt us for pure torment save for the riddle they provide meant to save us from the same sorry fate: one predicated on bourgeois socio-material conditions (the canonical Base and Superstructure), but also shapes how we think through popular stories; i.e., in arguments through doubles (from Volume Zero):
Doubles invite comparison to encourage unique, troubling perspectives that “shake things up” and break through bourgeois illusions. To that, the paradox of performing power compounds through the visitor(s) from other worlds, planets, times as fabricated, but also doubled in a praxial sense; i.e., Satan builds pandemonium and hell follows within him, but he looks and acts uncannily like those he’s rebelling against. While warring against the status quo, the monsters from either side (which come from/occupy the same shadow zone, whose nebulous, psychosexual “forces of darkness” we shall unpack during the thesis proper) start to resemble and not resemble each other. Sure, they look a lot alike, but dialectically-materially are actually polar opposites (source).
The problem to solve isn’t a monstrous identity and abject appearance, but Capitalism as a structure these things rage against. Medusa has good reason to be mad: Capitalism deliberately kettles her and canonizes her angst, making such conditions unequal, thus harmful; Communism is a polity whose intersections need solidarity to survive by making said conditions (and the views that spring from them) equal, balanced, and healthy. Therefore, to solve monstrous-feminine riddles of motherhood/nature-as-abject is to think critically about them; i.e., by using, like Odysseus, what we have on hand: our bodies and minds grappling with nature as something to learn from, no matter how fearsome and unmotherly she seems.
I’ve given you examples from my own life, but want to consider liberating mothers and the monstrous-feminine more broadly (mimesis) across a variety of media forms. We’ll back these (Gothick dumpers) up next, in the opening to “Solving Riddles; or, Following in Medusa’s Footsteps“!
(artist: Lera PI)
Footnotes
[1] “‘Plato’ seems to have started as a nickname (for platos, or ‘broad’), perhaps first given to him by his wrestling teacher for his physique, or for the breadth of his style, or even the breadth of his forehead” (source: Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy). True to form, “virtue” and power are conveyed through strength as classically gendered—”big equals strength” having many applications; e.g., a big ass, orgasm, cock, smile, intellect. The classical world would have relegated women to the ignominious position of male property. But hauntological forms allow us to present female/GNC schoolmasters who subvert male institutions of power to liminal degrees.
[2] Is the silence of the breathless pieta an overwhelmed/unresponsive alarm to true distress, a jest, or a worrisome trifle? I’d say it’s somewhere in between. Diagnoses like those must happen on the fly and can be stressful, but are important for the health of all peoples involved. They revive through the wardrobe—the costume, the prop, the makeup, etc—as a canvas on which to breathe fresh warnings and excitement, relief and ultimately restoration; e.g., a variety of rainbow shades as limitless as there exist colors of lipstick*, as flavors of food (sweet, savory or bitter, etc), and mixing those through a confusion of the senses whose magical assembly sets us free (more terms to explain in “Monsters, Magic and Myth”).
*And all those qualities that women (or those forced to identify as women) canonical porn organizes into types: redheads, brunettes, blondes; big, medium and small tits, hips, buttocks, etc. Like parts to a car. To be bought, traded, exchanged, turned in for a newer model—abused and neglected like all property ultimately is. We use a lot of metaphors in this volume, but people are not functionally slaves because that is wrong. Imperialism is wrong. It’s going to kill everyone on the planet and make most of our lives suck ass until then. End of story.
[3] Regarding the middle photo, here’s a bit of medieval architectural nerdiness: vintage cathedrals would have been built facing the dawn to represent the rising of Christ’s soul to Heaven. To that, Cuwu facing the dawn is like a cathedral in more ways than one; i.e., her front, or heavenly façade, is awash in sunlight, and her hellish, shapely backside is covered in growing shadows. In the Gothic sense, she intimates my own stabs at Strawberry Hill, my own personal “Lilith” who haunts Sex Positivity’s hallowed gloomth, but mostly without images to give her shape.
[4] As I wrote in “Murder Party (2007): Review” (2018):
Jeremy Saulnier and Macon Blair—I stumbled upon Blue Ruin several years back, and immediately fell in love with both men; they operate in tandem, much of what they deliver working through a constant, healthy partnership. For example, the stark conclusion, of the suicidal revenge plot, is realized by a shrunken, speechless Blair (a directorial talent in his own right: I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore [2017] is one of my favorite films). I was hypnotized, and driven to watch more (source).
From Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus to Scott’s Alien to Saulnier and Blair and ever onwards, the Gothic’s carnage is a sexy blood smear our own bodies, rooms and intersections of these carry into the future. Follow the pussy slime, the “snail trail,” the white rabbit!
[5] Heroes are like videogame characters; they don’t take actual permanent damage and can express themselves in immediate, impactful language everyone understands: sex and violence (the language of the Imperium).
[6a] I didn’t drive and had to take the bus to college, going back after nearly a decade-long hiatus. I met a future ex on the bus, Constance, who was going to a nearby college. To be charitable, it was a short relationship, and one that involved their mother not wanting us to spend time together because I was a broke bitch; they were worried I’d get their daughter pregnant. Unable to provide for Constance, she eventually stopped talking to me altogether. But about seven years after the fact, I reached out apropos of nothing and we caught up; Constance said she still remembered me, and that I had treated her very well and inspired her to do the same with her own future partners. I was reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1605) when we dated, and I often described her as my fairy queen. And seven years later, I mentioned that to Constance; she replied: “You’ll always be my fairy queen.” We did plan to meet up after their relationship went “on the rocks,” but I had to get tested first. By the time I got my healthcare set up, Constance and her fiancé had patched things up and we had to cancel the trip; but we did have a couple of fun days where we were fantasizing and talking about old times together—to fuck like it was new to us.
The moral, here, is you can meet people in person or online; what matters is that you enjoy it and take away something vital that you and others can collectively learn from and pass on.
Not harmful lures or traps, but a means of setting you free in sexual-to-asexual forms (many workers are ace, but ace variation is immense—something we’ll explore much more in Volume Three); not as an imposition of torturous conversion or unironic peer pressure (for you ace types), but an invitation to try new things, to seize the day! Is there a price? Of course, but this payment helps sex workers and customers combat material scarcity and apathy provided customers and creators work together to ease suffering in all its forms: lessening harmful anguish, loss, agony and torment in exchange for campy theatrical forms (excruciating delight), sincere encouragement; “perilous” excitement, chills, awe and frisson (“skin orgasms”); and genuine, distinctly dizzying erotic pleasure—to help those in need fill empty reservoirs with fresh reserves, not oasis-grade fabrications administered by practiced frauds/repeat offenders.
Holistic creativity isn’t mere distraction, then, but a medicinal and material redistribution of means, knowledge, care, love, etc, into proletarian depots; it becomes something to put on and take off the table per negotiation. But it also demands active fieldwork and social work, one whose gradual adjustments slowly shirk the sidelines, scanning wider and wider for opportunities (thus achievements) of friendship, love, education—of, once unstunted, ready to jump at fresh chances to experience new fun relationships (stepping stones) while being prepared and respectful towards rejection. Such growth may not be normal under capitalist standards, but Communist pressure alters what the “low bar” is, starting with human rights and going from there as the bare minimum. We become not just a division of sex workers and regulars, but a circle of friends, a support group of comrades issuing complaints, self-defending by attacking and accusing proponents of an abusive and predatory system—to reach for something better by fighting back in ways that humanize all methods, including sex. It’s not a crutch or a Band-Aid, at all, but a device to eliminate such requirements through mutual reciprocity—of giving and receiving whatever we all need to thrive in a post-scarcity world while progressing towards it; i.e., a total fix versus a quick one (which isn’t a fix at all).
[7] From Surf Ninjas (1993).
[8] From Re-Animator (1989).
[9] From 3 Ninjas (1992).
[10] Re: “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” (1852).