This is the second part of “Solving Riddles; or, Following in Medusa’s Footsteps.” Originally part of an undivided volume—specifically Volume Two of my Sex Positivity (2023) book series—this promo post now belongs to a large-but-redundant sample series called “Brace for Impact“ (2024); i.e., that went on to become its own completed module in Volume Two: the Poetry Module, aka Volume Two, part one. The module was primarily inspired by Harmony Corrupted and divides into over thirteen posts, whose collective chapters/subchapters compile one half of the larger total volume; i.e., Volume Two has three modules—one bigger module for part one (re: the Poetry Module), and two slightly smaller modules (the Monster Modules) for part two—for which the volume halves are roughly equal in size (subject to change).
Update, 5/4/2024: I’m starting a similar book sample series for Volume Two, part two: “Searching for Secrets“ (2024)!
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 full module (which will contain additions/corrections these posts will not have)!
Click here to see “Brace for Impact’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.
Permissions: Any publicly available images are exhibited for purposes of education, transformation and critique, thus fall under Fair Use; private nude material and collabs with models are specifically ally shared with permission from the original model(s). For more details about artist permissions, refer to the book disclaimer (linked above).
“Following in Medusa’s Footsteps”: Teaching between Media and our Bodies, and a Bit of Coaching
To escape the closeted freakshow status of nature-as-abject, we can employ monstrous language that allows for sex-positive forms of essence, knowledge and power exchange through ludo-Gothic BDSM; e.g., not just the Amazon or knight, damsel or demon, but the vampire (queer person), gross person (fat/muscular) or person of color, etc, as combined with a whole army of Gothic status symbols and arrangements of power and control. As profound ontological statements concerned with Cartesian abuse, these make up a collective ludo-Gothic paradox/educational act; i.e., rooted in Gothic play and psychosexual performance, thus adjacent to phallic harm as normally produced by the state and which we to overthrow through cryptonymic rebellion: to look the part, but no longer play it by refusing to obey the elite’s evil commands; e.g., as Anubis does to Emperor Tulpa: “Ronins, I am one of you!” (source).
—Persephone van der Waard, Sex Positivity, Volume One (2024)
Picking up from where “Meeting Medusa” left off…
This second subdivision to “Teaching” part two proceeds from meeting Medusa in our daily lives, considering the monstrous-feminine as instructed according to two additional factors: the liminal relationship between our minds and multimedia, and as something to coach while keeping that in mind.
Teaching is learning and both require being in tune/touch with—following along, paying attention to—nature in ways that help us think critically about important things (our rights), which all appear in popular media as the Gothic connects and encompasses. The Gothic mode draws attention to things that carry value, including heroes as idealized and taboo subjects, inviting critical comparison between the two: as secret identities and alter egos that are, themselves, open secrets to ongoing and unaddressed societal problems; i.e., the monstrous-feminine, regardless of where it appears in media; e.g., comic books speaking to a repressed desire to transform and become “strong enough” (through critical thought about such things) to actually “do work”—like animals that, when invoked in a wonderous, freakshow fashion, help ourselves through others (e.g., the xenomorph, of course; Stan Lee’s 1963’s The Amazing Spider-man; and female Amazons, next page, as having animal qualities: Batgirl/woman): a thing that cannot die, but stubbornly survives in ways that “flip the bird” to Cartesian forces, seemingly shouting “Suck my girl cock, Descartes!” as they do.
(source)
Media is symbiotic. What’s important to remember here is that all operate in connection to each other as interconnected beings that, like a game of tug-o’-war, relate to the experiences of either party in either direction within capital (thus disorder and panic as made to panic and frighten us). This kayfabe is ultimately meta and forever at play insofar as it interrogates society-as-Puritanical through mimetic copies of itself that are more modest or less:
(source: a fan edit to Bruce Timm’s original page)
As such, the Gothic is cryptomimetic, meaning its cryptonymy (often masks and costumes—a theme we’ll explore in this chapter and others) uses mimesis through popular forms of disguise-like media (that emerge in times of scarcity out of natural/oral forms into material/written ones locking horns; e.g., spandex less a disguise and more a censorship of the statuesque nude whose imaginary antiquity is restricted to modest lifesavers under American Puritanism: echoes of the Comic Code Authority as the comic book equivalent of the infamous Hayes Code in cinema). This includes the Internet Age and automation (which includes things like Pinterest recommending me things as I write, helping me weaponize the Algorithm against the state—suckers). My approach to thinking critically about the Gothic is to focus on it as a mode of being and thinking concerned with, and composed primarily of, popular media in many different forms (source: Persephone van der Waard’s “Sex, Metal, and Videogames,” 2021); i.e., to be sex-positive is to think critically about commonplace things that store or reify value according to a mode that studies their reactions back and forth; e.g., memes[1] as a repeating image generally used to communicate through humor about society at large: through aggregates but also sequences that disagree and clash (my mother and I as she helps me write this book, helping it grow and evolve despite our mutual differences. “Mothers of the world, unite!”).
This includes us in relation to it as artists, but also detectives and advocates using our critical-thinking skills to contribute to a pedagogy of the oppressed: regarding complicated things like muses, monsters and mothers that normally are bought-and-paid for within capital (“voting with our wallets”) but for us are thought about independent of that voting mechanism; i.e., to advocate for, and investigate issues of, people, places and things underrepresented by established courts and jurisdictions (lawyers are usually threats made by wealthy people—attack librarians). We must critique those, and by extension capital, by thinking about them in ways that burst bubbles; i.e., that include everything normally left out in popular media as a matter of profit and maintaining the status quo (cops and victims, damsels and demons, us versus them); e.g., as lawyers, jokers and educators like Legal Eagle does, handsomely encompassing all three while mixing humor[2], stylish clothes and education (teachers are parental and sexy in ways that invite, at times, less-than-platonic admiration):
Like them, the praxial-synthetic idea is to loosen up but not be too loose regarding teaching and monstrous-feminine motherhood; i.e., to be as creatures of habit whose good habits are consciously informed and tempered during synthesis to prevent harm caused by bad habits; e.g., ludo-Gothic BDSM and parental kinks (daddy and mommy doms) versus actual incest (and other such harm) through performances that aren’t the same thing. The idea is to be ready and flexible, thus prepared, for whatever capital throws at us, including our friends (and other disruptive methods that frustrate our efforts to challenge capital using sex-positive monsters; re: elaborate strategies of misdirection): “Something doesn’t fit, but why?” In turn, the Gothic demands you “solve for X” regarding generational problems (“that moment in high school where they told us algebra would save our lives”); it becomes not just a question to ask in repetition, but an exercise to repeat, a mantra, a detail to condition while asking questions that remind us of ongoing hidden threats (cryptonyms): “My breathing is off, but why?” (we’ll explore the medical side of “remember to breathe” in the next prep section).
Our focus, here, are mothers-as-monstrous—something to paradoxically rescue from its “own” bad rap using slutty language reclaimed for subversive, liberatory reasons; i.e., Medusa’s a slut, but doesn’t deserve to be harmed for it. In short, being a slut without harm is her right. Achieving such recognition in society at large is what liberating monster moms is all about.
(source: Jake Rosenthal’s “The Pioneer Plaque: Science as a Universal Language,” 2016)
To that, monstrous-feminine subversion and education go hand-in-hand, but more than two hands because ours is a group effort (and involves andro/gynodiverse monsters that never heard the word “Vitruvian,” or saw the Pioneer Plaque [1972] and its whitewashed, Cartesian view of the world from a colonizer’s eyes: the panoptic astronoetic eye colonizing anything different for profit, a) resulting in a eugenics-grade* homogeneity that enslaves all of nature’s “emergent” beings by white European descendants from the same Imperial Core literally jettisoning its likeness into outer space; and b) echoed by older pioneers, gold rushes, and arms races behind which military optimism always conceals a military function to 20th-century science fiction stories): of children wise beyond their years and game wily sages speaking in riddles but seeing the world as precocious children do—playfully and by adding to something that must also grow and change, leaving all of it behind in a puzzling trail (the narrative of the crypt) that shows we’re not so different from animals; i.e., that we both feel fear and can be manipulated to attack when angry and scared. To find out who’s who and get to the bottom of things, we’ll have to return to animals and nature armed with our wits (entering Hell and breathing it in, not holding one’s breath). This occurs through the power of the Humanities (to think by creating in many forms and vice versa) married to the Gothic and monsters; I am a monster mother and Renaissance girl, but you can be too! “We all float down here!”
*Which, Harmony Corrupted points out, occurs “aside from being instrumentalized by corporations to keep us self-conscious and hooked to consumerism under the guise of self-improvement”—the usual self-evident (ipso facto) cryptonymy of settler-colonial fabrications barricading the mind.
(artist: Demi Levato)
“We’ll get you, and your little dog too!” As such predator-prey stories and interactions demonstrate, it’s all about the blend, the balance; i.e., in service to workers (not the state; re: centrists and the balance of order through conflict that quells chaos-as-labor) treated as witches, threats. The praxial idea is to use what we have (our bodies, labor and material resources) to speak through monsters (mothers or otherwise) as things to live with in open secret, but confront in non-lethal/non-harmful ways that humanize their nostalgic past as equally non-fatal when revived in the present: the madwoman in the attic (the Medusa as much as Antoinette Causeway) as dehumanized, even non-human, but still deserving of human rights and humane treatment despite their limited power and/or faculties. To prevent her death and ours, the power is in our hands to overcome the sins of the father to acquire our mobile objective/ambrosia; i.e., to imbibe it like medicine and habitually dissolve it into us before we explode (re: Dr. Leo Marvin’s “death therapy”).
This proposed solution requires riddles to wrestle with, thereby using a concurrent means of monitoring and assessing our vitals: to teach in methods that last (in bed and elsewhere) according to memory as something virtually without limit; e.g., the rhetors, but also imagination, creativity and passion through monsters as world-famous globetrotters; i.e., akin to insects like the wasp and caterpillar as covering the planet: a cultured presence, and one aware of culture’s power to (re)shape the face of the Earth—through the battles lost and won on all fields real, imaginary and in between. “We can’t trust the insect,” Seth Brundle insisted; and yet, insect politics, Amazonomachy (“monster war”) and forlorn hopes become a vital means of performance and play on smaller doubles reared from history as partially fabricated, wrought from whole cloth:
(artist: François-Louis-Joseph Watteau)
Close-minded people will mistake our ghoulish enthusiasm, excitement and willingness to engage with rape and war simulacra for being “upset,” or “simping[3]” for Medusa; i.e., “female weakness” as Oedipal. While this aims to invalidate, it’s also partly correct. Our enjoyment of monster mommies overlaps with trauma as something to confront in popular theatrical places; i.e., the ghost of the counterfeit and process of abjection; e.g., the Pyramids of Giza and Orientalism, a routinely traveled gravesite alive with a curse of fatal knowledge tied to an imaginary past forever received (from Shelley to Napoleon to Lovecraft to Mercyful Fate). Furthermore, would you put your trust in someone who loves monsters (and mothers—mommy issues) or hates them? Love knows no bounds, especially regarding monsters by those who live them in a sex-positive way. You could say the same about actual cruelty but why would we want to make the world more cruel (animal cruelty or cruelty towards human groups treated like maternal animals, which sex workers often are)?
In all forms, Hell is a place to play with inside according to what people (traditionally the middle class) like but can be occupied and reclaimed by all homies. Often, it happens through various classes of mix-up, including etymological ones—Gaza (“strong city”) versus Giza (“the place of the pyramids” and “cut stone”)—and murder/rape fantasies: the “curse of the Pharaohs” being the spectre of settler colonialism feared by a fascinated middle class, and who the oppressed weaponize against capital (counterterror’s murder fantasies given an outlet) since Napoleon and the Battle of the Pyramids. Propaganda battles aside, Napoleon was a master of propaganda regarding public opinion, but ultimately had to leave Egypt; the same postcolonial principle is used by those seeking truth when spiraling into Hell as a Gothic classroom (to prevent spiraling and suicide ideation in real life). It becomes something to admit into us; i.e., by refusing harmful realities we substitute with our own mysterious mothers. That is, inside a world where nothing is owned by anyone except workers owning their labor and their rights, nothing can be stolen; except Capitalism tries to own everything thus steal it from around them, most notably labor by dimorphically sexualizing and alienating it! Mothers as monsters, teachers, caregivers, lovers, etc.
The iconoclastic idea is to mix and match, provided the speculative thinking and playfulness that emerge demonstrably lead to better things. To that, consider how parents are a bit like doctors, in that both save lives by not doing harm as something to teach, but also to play at (“doctor” or “parent”; re: BDSM and kink, often in animalized forms). So do monsters like the Creature when expressed in parental forms serving a medicinal function that cures larger issues (alienation from nature-as-fetish). Per the Gothic, this regards institutions like hospitals, but also antiquated forms of maternal instruction that often combine: animal poetry and house calls (“doctor’s orders”); i.e., the home as where we are, thus making moving unnecessary when saving the lives of others. People who feel sick often push others away to protect them. Keeping with the doctor analogy, suicide victims often do; keeping with the animal metaphor, such behavior apes a dying cat, leading predators away from loved ones. And yet, it also demonstrates crisis through mixed metaphors: those like Medusa and mothers—in pain, nearing death, as crying out for help through code (as humans and animals do in different ways that overlap): suicide as praxis, vis-à-vis Aaron Bushnell’s martyrdom (re: “An Ode to a Martyr“).
As such, a collective assistance towards all life is as much about technique and talent as natural and supplied through work, but also the mindset of those wielding these devices and who they want to help by mixing this with that; e.g., pleasure and “harm”; i.e., aiding others through desperately reckless self-surgery that is exploratory and palliative (calculated risk) but also assisted suicide of the self as a perceived problem, a burden on the home, the group. Their tragic martyrdom—the exiting as an actual, cataclysmic event—can be prevented through theatrical stories indebted to ongoing dialectical-material struggles: “to be or not to be” made “to be” by showing Medusa there’s nowhere you’d rather be—by their side as someone to help, thus healing the home by finding empathy among the insectoid wretched and vulnerable: as made strangest only by capital shrinking compassion with canon, and camp seeking to expand the humanity (and humane treatment) of Medusa through what they create (e.g., music, like Jethro Tull’s “Aqualung” [1971]: “Feeling like a dead duck…”): monsters, mothers, heroes, and animals. Through the hero as monstrous-feminine, motherly and animalistic, we’re left with helpful puzzles like the caterpillar and wasp as abstractions of an imaginary past to learn from; in turn, these become something that stays on, a maternal allegory living in and around us when “Frankenstein has to go.” No matter how hard we cry for them not to leave—to call for them to save us and then hold tight as the dark, titanic winds rip them from our weakened grip (“dying in our arms”)—we can rest easy knowing nothing is truly ever gone.
This remains true in idealized forms we can raise as graveyards to what isn’t but could be in the future; e.g., Autumn Ivy disappointing me (from Volume One):
The problem here, isn’t selling sex, but that Autumn’s approach became prescriptive and self-important; i.e., a weird canonical nerd smiling their Hollywood smile, getting fake tits to emphasize their female attributes within the Amazon persona, and treating false modesty like a lucrative virtue exclusive to them and their brand: the bogus and incredibly harmful argument that partially-clothed bodies and implied nudity are somehow “worth more” than fully naked ones are. It wasn’t explicitly stated, but nevertheless showed in how Autumn treated me over time: they were always the victim, and I could never be one (source).
I.e., my reflexive attraction to mommy doms like Autumn versus Autumn being an unapologetic transmisogynist who policed my work: through their false modesty of “no ham sandwich” while punching down at me as someone actually fighting for all sex workers: as an AMAB artist, writer and trans-woman sex worker myself.
To err is human, and even if we mistake a subjugated Hippolyta for one that doesn’t bow to Theseus, hope remains. Despite heroes being doomed to disappoint, meeting and questioning them and their monopolies stays vital because in them we can see a thing that inspired me: Medusa as perfect.
Glimpsing her idealized form, I became determined to resurrect a maternal protector of my own; i.e., informed by past ideas given to me as a little girl; e.g., Alien, but also Fred Dekker’s benevolent Creature: a paternal guardian[4] I envisioned (through monster bias) being a tall and strong Amazon—one who wouldn’t flinch when facing true adversity, capably protecting the little girl in all of us. “Goodbye” becomes “Until we meet again, in this life or the next!” as something to envision or hope for based on past failures we can parade, revised into better examples: what we loved about those who hurt us. It becomes beautiful in death as ecstatic and precious, like lightning in a bottle—a deathly reflection that, like the caterpillar and the wasp, intimates total death and salvation through transformation on the same heroic body the mirror shows us: a pussy to put on the chainwax (to camp canon with)! A better mommy.
(model and artist: Autumn Ivy and Persephone van der Waard)
In turn, history is married and written on monsters and imagination as half-real, which cannot be owned, thus stolen. Engagement is endless, but occurs from cradle to grave, interacting Numinously with those mighty and beautiful who have gone the way of all flesh. Such life after death is profound, and becomes something to capture all on its own. To do so here and elsewhere in the book, I have borrowed trauma and value from the past as it exists in the present (monsters, mothers and popular media) to put into myself and, in turn, write my motherly heart out on these pages: monsters as food for thought, for courage, for love eternal as something to give like a gift, not take by force (“You have heart; I’ll take that too!”). It is grown inside us from external forces, then eaten out of ourselves and what we create and give back (through “little deaths”) towards others who, enriched, may better the world with: according to a prandial idea of enriching ourselves. We become something to eat and pass onto the next generation “cannibalizing us”; i.e., to—as Bay taught me—regain our power and knowledge as a sign of mutual respect and love between workers bonded to nature against capital, which in turn will make us stronger than we ever thought possible/would otherwise be had the heart of the corpse been malnourished (as immiserated bodies generally are). We become not just mothers, but warriors of an Indigenous character.
In relation to the caterpillar and the wasp, their dualistic roles—of consumption amid life and death as part of a disguised cycle—hints at a speech Adam Savage originally gave to the Harvard Humanist Society in 2010:
[…] There may be no purpose, but it’s always good to have a mission. And I know of one fine allegory for an excellent mission should you choose to charge yourself with one: Carlos Castaneda‘s series of books about his training with a Yaqui Indian mystic named Don Juan. There’s a lot of controversy about these books being represented as nonfiction. But if you dispense with that representation, and instead take their stories as allegories, they’re quite lovely.
At the end of The Eagle’s Gift, Don Juan reveals to his student that there’s no point to existence. That we’re given our brief 70-100 years of consciousness by something the mystics call “The Eagle,” named for its cold, killer demeanor. And when we die, the eagle gobbles our consciousness right back up again.
He explains that the mystics, to give thanks to the eagle for the brief bout of consciousness they’re granted, attempt to widen their consciousness as much as possible. This provides a particularly delicious meal for the eagle when it gobbles one up at the end of one’s life.
And that, to me, is a fine mission (source).
Except, Savage loves Scott’s Humanities work in the Alien franchise, and whose own “caterpillar and the wasp” we’ve touched upon; i.e., echoes the idea that motherly food isn’t just “for the Eagle,” but other workers as a collective whole that challenges the state as a giant animal, kaiju-style. The state is the caterpillar and the wasp, and so are we. What matters is how we speculate through animalistic “violence” to achieve liberation while keeping these theatrical paradoxes in mind.
The fire of the gods, then, sits among workers and is given back to them from us by virtue of familial absorption; i.e., between us and those we see as family (us) where sex and protection overlap: monsters as coaches, role models, parents, in life and death everlasting. It becomes a source of renewed pride and love to share between voyeurs and exhibitionists according to our mutual established boundaries (exhibit 33b2c); i.e., our bodies’ morphological variations—our zweihänder and our mommy milkers, but also big booties, small booties, itty-bitty titties, thunder thighs and stilts, soup cans and vices (the owner[s] usually set[s] the tone for the level of self-disparagement, unless they have a humiliation kink that is understood by all parties)—all as a source of pride unto Medusa, but also our gasping feral appetites merged with our “extra” senses: humor as something that comes magically alive during such performances.
The silly weirdos[5] are the best in bed, I’ve found, and the ones who laugh, roll their eyes, and shakily breathe, “I love you!” as I fuck their stupid brains out; e.g., glasses are “windshields” to protect the eyes from flying jizz—no laughing matter and yet oddly funny all the same as we lose control and push for ecstasy together! In doing so, we’ll have spurned capital to know what love is, thus can pass it on as a maternal refrain: to always learn and encourage when searching for by our monstrous-feminine example.
To that, look at our passion, our warmth, our fluids and messy aftermath, our silly O faces (“You should see your face!” a means of spreading cheer and delight through Gothic sex)—then go out and make your own by living as we have! Discovery is a process that searches for the “right fit,” which is different for everyone. Some people like bossy and some like gentle; e.g., I like gentle mommy doms[6] with a strict aesthetic, but like to top them as they command me from the bottom (and give praise while demanding worship through cum tributes). Some people want romance, snuggles, or gestures of (often public) displays of affection. Some people wanna just go home and fuck; i.e., to take their coffee with sugar or take it black, but it’s given based on preference. No shame in either provided everyone’s on board, that everyone trusts everyone, that no harm is done and that all rights are upheld.
In other words, when “slaying” pussy yourselves, don’t enact the caterpillar and wasp’s predator-and-prey relationship too literally (causing actual harm, beheading Medusa); find out what you like (what fits) and go from there. Fence and touch your “opponents” (whatever the shape) to bond, thus unite, against the true foe of all workers (Capitalism). “Seize the day” (fuck) until you’re blue in the face, remembering as you do that however incendiary and inflammatory something seems, all’s fair in love and war provided sex positivity is upheld! This goes for all monsters, mommies and daddies alike; e.g., Bay is AFAB, but also a daddy who I can call “mommy” if I want (earned trust and respect).
(exhibit 33b2c2a: A corpse on a bed, or a cutie with soup brain? Though sick and vulnerable, Bay taught me the value of life by treasuring it while we’re alive [not throwing it away as Cartesian warriors so often do].
Apart from things to show off in private galleries open to the public, and to flash those in power as a means of provoking them, and that doing so is a right we have in defense of our other rights, there’s also another function: to show off not just the bodies and the sex as intimate [which it is], self-serving and amusing [which it is], and uniquely beautiful per case [which it is; e.g. the amount of cum and distance a tight little pussy makes a big dick shoot—messy and far], but the relationship between those bodies to express its contract in visual forms. This includes the spoken and unspoken aspects [hard and soft boundaries] of the people involved, whose sex-positive subtext becomes part of the exhibit teaching people regardless of the artist’s diminished capacity [their absence, however that appears]: their art speaks for them and for us as belonging to the same larger group. All is shown in boundaries that navigate power as a place to go and interrogate among ourselves: capturing our relationships and their power as something to exchange and perform through the dynamics of each working in unison; i.e., whose frank, honest invigilation invites not just the same behaviors in the painting but also the presentation of the painting as something to do elsewhere—a monstrous-feminine Renaissance revived and achieved through teamwork.
Of course, not everyone has to partake and the game isn’t “fair” [asymmetrical warfare]. But the fact remains: censorship denies people the right to express themselves in safe spaces featuring sex positivity and sex coercion as forever-at-odds; i.e., in ironic and unironic forms. Sex-positive art can’t harm you, but its censorship can; censorship is tantamount to genocide, meaning it reduces logically to violence against those things [mothers] the state controls through weaponized masculine force; i.e., since the days of the Caesars, of city-states, of pretty much anything after hunter-gatherer societies: win against the enemy-as-different [alien] to achieve glory through endless military conquest. Capitalism is a system of thought that prioritizes the individual in service to the elite, meaning that to speak out through open, monstrous, sex-positive expression [as we are] is paramount to preventing it [which we owe to ourselves, “just because”; i.e., there’s no logical argument for or against genocide, it’s simply incorrect relative to our rights being essentially in conflict with state predation]. Canon and camp, sex positivity and sex coercion—these are literally functional opposites, as are the coaches and artisans promoting them and all their forms that follow function as a flow of power towards or away from the state. Permission can be granted implicitly in pre-established relationships that are already secure; those smaller relationships interface and relate to bigger ones and even bigger ones that, in medieval language, often work as animalistic shorthand [also known as art; re: our aforementioned caterpillar and wasp]. And if you disagree, I’d like to respond, “Welcome to real life! I’m Persephone from Earth; what planet are you from?”
The fact remains, we all come from a “sample of one,” and the usual Cartesian divisions [and their historical-material patterns] can be reconciled with and rectified while surviving as people do; i.e., who must kill for food, build shelter and acquire/devise enrichment as part of a natural world they’re stewards[7] of [nature and animals can do all of these things, but they can’t consent]. Those aren’t mutually exclusive unless you’ve been coded to treat nature as alien/monstrous-feminine and rape it endlessly for profit, for victory, for the state. Our victory is “Rome’s” fractal recursion successfully transformed—castle by castle, cathedral by art exhibit, blowjob to smiling portrait—into an anarcho-Communist utopia made here on Earth through Gothic poetics. The more the merrier, of course, but also the more language to use; i.e., producing a more flexible attack and redundant security system [often expressed as a matter of optics and presentation].)
Monstrous-feminine puzzles like the caterpillar and wasp might seem to oversimplify things while steadily and stubbornly stating the obvious (and sounding like someone who’s never boned before, but the best sex should always feel new, exciting and fresh); it’s also a profound, regenerative testament to our fading existences as profound—i.e., through prophetic revelation and dark delight felt through the living who survive us: “Her tits were there.” Her tits, man. In computer science, this is called “redundancy”; i.e., the more of a given message, the more failures it can endure before total system failure. For us, the message of Medusa is memory as the very stamp of worker life—of what Capitalism through settler colonialism craves to snuff out, to exterminate: people, their lives and culture, their dreams and nightmares, their sex and monsters, their poetic renditions through the likes of our animalistic bug duo. All extinct, all gone, and for what? So Elon Musk can feel cool on Twitter? To tell us what goes where; i.e., dicks-in-pussies-only regardless if the pussy owner consents? The idea is to go home with whomever we want—for John Denver’s proverbial “Mountain Mama” (of any gender or location) to take us home and have whatever part go into whatever part because all parties agree.
(artist: Sabrina Nicole)
In short, we live by Sex Positivity in order to speak with our bodies and their labor through sex/gender expression as medieval towards a post-scarcity world; i.e., “be stupid and gay together” to whatever degree of intimacy we’re all comfortable with (some people hate kissing and some fucking—ace variation) while making the world a better place one step at a time between great warring beasts on either side of us, and expressed in animalistic language beyond the caterpillar-wasp example I gave; e.g., Mae Martin’s Sap (2023). Martin’s argument presents succor-in-shelter as besieged from both sides (outside and from within) as an apt metaphor to our lived realties, inside which we become free to play with; i.e., reality as something to make our own delightful “sap” with: using everything we can to build something colossal on the mandala’s freedom of expression. This happens within boundaries broken and bent, but also socio-material constraints and fading inhibitions: giving way to matriarchal expressions that challenge the status quo. Doing so through Medusa is not to state the obvious—that a dark motherly cutie is as lovely as the day is long—but to make the world like their beauty and image through repetitious appreciation: that which develops better habits among different people and the things they leave behind as, diverse and intersectional, marrying collectively to empathy and pleasure; i.e., our walking synonyms and paradoxes, the gradients of infinity and their outcomes, our dark sides and light confused delightfully as the Gothic does, etc; to crow endlessly love-drunk on obvious things, to want to devote a book to each and every one. So pro-tip, lovelies: If you put yourself out there and are sex-positive, don’t be surprised when unicorns (of any value, color or gender) stroll up looking for some sugar (speaking from experience here—with this book, and college; I went to get an education and find love. I got [and continue to get] both)!
The idea, in the interim, is to coach (which I shall do a little longer before we conclude the “Teaching” element of our prep with a heroic refrain focused on conflict and mothers): motivating is wrought with clichés and homegrown advice regarding dragons to “slay”; e.g., “remember to breathe” pertaining to those who routinely feel small hiding from capitalistic forces (me as someone suffocating myself in ways not completely foreign to my mother’s, but also different to her constrictive habit[at] and survival mechanisms); i.e., in relation to death and similar titanic forces—to be kept waiting by a mistress who never lets us go outside, and to which its paradisiacal “beyond” is paraded in fantastical homecomings before death; e.g., by me, a queer orator and speechwriter/giver who has written for funerals and weddings (echoing Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina [1878]: “happy families are all alike, unhappy families are unhappy in their own way”). Our expertise speaks to the power our enemies do not have over us relayed in speculative verse selectively applied per moment of a given “turn at the helm”; e.g., “my will is as strong as yours and my kingdom as great; you have no power over me” being a phrase my mother taught me to banish evil men with; i.e., Tolkien’s black arrow received “from my mother and she from of old; if ever you came from the forges of the true Queen under the Mountain, go now and speed well!” Such gender swaps (of one of my favorite Tolkien foils) finance rebellion as active between people and fiction, sticking the bullseye by prodding us to respond (with Cupid’s thick shaft) against those rich in gold but poor in spirit; ready, take aim, loose!
To this, Gothic-Communist equilibrium is maintained in monstrous-feminine continuum. As such, a consumptive and interpretative activity like reading about monsters is merely one of many ways to pass knowledge among people who partially disagree about Medusa (often heatedly at that; i.e., to take the verb “haggling” from Twain, whose titular Huckleberry Finn dragged a sawblade over a dead forest animal to fake his own death with): its pedagogic limits stretched taut as a bowstring and honed as sharp as an arrowhead through friendly contest—e.g., my mother, a linguist and lover of “literature” (rhetorical quotes, but defined by class, culture and bias) convinced that readers read by opening a book, turning the pages and looking at its words; me, a ludo-Gothicist, who sees the value of ergodic motion (attained by non-trivial effort) to interpret and use the words inside to appreciate them beyond one’s idiosyncratic interests, entering a shared generational struggle: liberating mothers. Despite our differences, then, the bricks of this castle were a mother-daughter effort (that’s your immortality, Mother).
In turn, “death” (expressed with the Gothic likeness of natural forms, mid-poiesis) becomes something to face and delight in, celebrated through scholarship that is encouraged from older mothers to their literal or figurative daughters; e.g., for whom my mother gave me a room of one’s own to practice, perfect, and produce my own echoes thereof. Except qualities of those in small have, over time, reached the same place of maturity learning from my matronly stances. I’m 37 and, while not exactly “old as fuck,” see in my muses (not teens but younger than me) echoes of my former self. We can be there together—alive on the edge (close to the sun) in so many forms of “free care” (through myths and monsters, in the flesh and in spirit); i.e., nation-sized but locally distributed helpers serving workers, that hold the information of our future in our hearts, bodies and minds. In devilish confidence, we hustle up as proletarian rainmakers who take on capital and live to tell the tale; i.e., by showing them who we are through the false pretenses of impostors that define us in paradox: monsters, warts and all, including jealousy and desire, love and respect, frustration and fulfillment, caterpillars and wasps.
Like Medusa, accidents and flaws define us (and monsters) through function, speaking to something so big, so profoundly massive that it might not fit (which is what size queens are for, taking it like a champ) and yet also “too small” to notice but for the appreciators of small things (truffle pigs). Goldilocks or not, all shapes and sizes have value. Failure and success, then, happen to the best of us. The mark of any good coach is persistence—to throw mud until something sticks; i.e., the mad scientist inviting a spark of inspiration inside the host until learning catches on, galvanizes: to see people not as dollar signs or free labor (sex or otherwise) but humans to respect, thus reflect that in nature as something to treat humanely.
In other worlds, every con has a mark to fleece, someone they clock from a mile away. Capital is a cabal of conmen. It’s not even about money as piles of gold, but capital as it functions—as positions and status. It’s about power and control through unequal arrangements thereof that serve the elite by moving money through nature. No amount of false hope or kind of magic pill will change the compulsions or behavioral/mood disorders (e.g., eating) and side effects of such diseases (e.g., withdrawal from alcoholism) pinned on Medusa; i.e., stemming from the state’s underlying material conditions (disguised through biological essentialism—a lack of consent, thus informed consent regarding AFAB persons forced into roles of biological motherhood, thus experience postpartum depression and all the other symptoms of pregnancy before, during and after).
To rescue Medusa, we have to change how power is distributed, which starts with how it is performed and viewed; re: ludo-Gothic BDSM when critiquing and responding creatively to theatre and other popular forms of media as vital to praxial synthesis in order to develop Gothic Communism. Anything else won’t work, meaning it’s always too little, too late; e.g., like singing “You are My Lucky Star[8]” (1935) on board the Narcissus, death there to greet us and take us home, one way or another. Catastrophic failure is incumbent on capital making our home, nature, inhospitable: Medusa as abjectly furious, feral thus unable to recognize us, expectant for a maw of death crammed more food—the battered housewife’s murderous womb (Shakespeare vis-à-vis Creed) but also queer and black revenge, and all other state victims occupying the same angry shell as monstrous-feminine, of nature; success is incumbent on preventing that by… putting the pussy on the chainwax (“starting a thing”)!
For us, this means “living with Mother” by abjuring the nuclear family unit (which orphans children as soon as they hit eighteen—by those with means, opportunity and motive; i.e., the elite). Patriarchal bloodlines start with the Superstructure, thus with entertainment inside the Imperial Core preying on the Global South; iconoclastic Gothic entertainment, by comparison, is “maximum care, minimum profit” through sex-positive icons, fashion, monsters as glamorous, arm candy and genderqueer[9] plus-ones; i.e., “the works,” provided the prestige it brings from the halls of power meaningfully challenges canon. Revolutionaries must be visible and doing good work, wearing their serpentine hearts on their sleeves; i.e., must do so precisely because dogma and blood libel, but also compelled marriage and motherhood (waifus/war brides) are bred into us—are force-fed to us by those making our home sick in order to rape and murder it, over and over (thus us): “I am the destroyer of everyone, / And the fall will be plentiful…” (TR/ST’s “Destroyer,” 2017).
(artist: Omar Dogan)
This maternal iconoclasm starts and ends with our diet as alienizing. In a Gothic sense, the gap to bridge invokes nature and monsters as like Medusa; i.e., humanize them from the dialectic of the alien, addressing greed and human rights regarding all opposing forces on a poetic level (again, with the likes of something vivid and classic, like our caterpillar-wasp refrain). Capital enslaves cuties to dominate the world as monstrous-feminine. To these same hotties, Communism shows kindness to a maternal group of monsters that, when combined, make a better world with each turn of the globe: with what each provides towards the whole; i.e., our money as something to pay workers with and put where our mouths are. “Just eat it,” Weird Al sings. Right in your cakehole, bunghole, any hole.
In all seriousness, everyone deserves love and thanks, to be told “I love you” like it’s our last night on Earth. Faced with crisis, we become motivational speakers, cheerleaders “boosting” through complementary sex, words and monsters, etc; i.e., lifting Excalibur by putting our backs into it, thinking outside the box to address problems inside the box—thinking with our box, meaning our junk, but also our mind (what my paternal grandfather called “you kop“)! Have faith in its ability to routinely thwart power as guerrillas have historically done for millennia (re: Roberts Asprey’s paradox of terror)—by surviving when empire wanted “to smash them out of existence, to be free of their cursed memory forever!” So whether it’s literally just that, or expressed playfully on safer ground—i.e., movies; e.g., Skeletor telling He-Man (whatever the gender) to “kneel before your master!” or Garth from Wayne’s World 2 (1990) saying “Do not eat the red liquorice!”—our murmurs of dissent must rise to a clamor whose storm, like Medusa, freezes the elite in place.
It’s quite an experience to live in fear (“That is what it is to be a slave!”). So we must be able to say in response, “No, never!” to imperial forces. So enough talk! Let this be our final battle, one—like Dracula’s 1997 soliloquy—to quote throughout the ages!
The road to mutual respect lies in how we treat the wretched; i.e., like building a cathedral (a theme we’ll return to often in this volume) that occurs as required, being in sync amid forces that aim to throw us off (those in power who, accustomed to things as they are, see our equalizing as a threat, something personal to resent, mid-scandal, no matter the cost). “Eye on the horizon, not the prize”; but also, sometimes the other way around, regarding contact with supplemental elements that compound, expand, and break the levy apart. One way or another, something’s gotta give (from state shift to more localized and personal breakups). So we have to look for warning signs even when things “seem fine,” when we’re dealing with people and/or ideals that seem “invincible”: capital, mothers, Medusa, etc. It’s not to push for a “hard reset,” but encourage radical change using speculative methods that recruit monsters (often maternal ones like the wasp) to evolve capital and workers in relationship to it; i.e., before we’re dead in the water thanks to climate change. Manufactured crisis leads to collapse by design, but Capitalism’s push for infinite growth cannot change the cold hard truth: the hubris of “cannot fail” by virtue of “built-to-fail” must reconcile with stressors leading to a final outcome only workers can prevent, not capital and the actual end of the world as manmade; i.e., by the state as something to speak out against in motivational forms like the Medusa.
As such, we speak truth to power and give actionable hope to workers through motherly monsters: a holistic method as something to teach and pass on, which I call Gothic Communism. It’s wherever the magicians go: “Behind the sky. On the other side of the rain[10]“; i.e., over the rainbow, with trash or garbage that—like Baum’s magical Scarecrow—springs to life (our “pieta”) and begins to dance for the delight of all… Until they don’t (from death or because our hour is up and they need more payment) and all we’re left with is the still, lifeless form: of the dark mother as an old friend, one whose powerful ancient memory wiggles snake-like, ever onwards!
Oh, duckies, how I could show off my own knowledge and delight—to endlessly prattle on and on like Schmendrick gushing about his make-believe Robin Hood! But we’ll see “him” again (true magic), so let’s cut short the pep talk (a brief gag to tourniquet the flow) and press on! “The woods are lovely, dark and deep[11]!”
As perpetual caretakers to ourselves and the world, I’ve shown how we shoulder the brunt of the blame as harbingers of Medusa in one of two forms—enabling our doom or salvation. I want to devote the rest of “Teaching” to my favorite sex-positive teaching device—monstrous mothers—as preceded by conflict during liminal expression. First, conflict; then, mothers-in-conflict and finally just mothers (the monstrous-feminine), liberated.
Onto “Conflict and Liberation“!
Footnotes
[1] Humor enhances lessons, as do theatre and abstraction to solve problems through violence and monsters (e.g., the Ronin Warriors “solving fascism” by chopping it up, which we can question in different ways).
[2] See: “malicious erections” (from Washington State Legislature, 1881): “An injunction may be granted to restrain the malicious erection, by any owner or lessee of land, of any structure intended to spite, injure or annoy an adjoining proprietor. And where any owner or lessee of land has maliciously erected such a structure with such intent, a mandatory injunction will lie to compel its abatement and removal” (source). Sexy!
[3] For men who use the term unironically, “simping” is coddling within a double standard. Men can fuck up, even get drunk. They just can’t show weakness or vulnerability (and if they do, they must challenge and eliminate it through force) as coached into them by older men of the house: “No losers in this family! Win, win, win!” Very American, thus settler-colonial.
[4] Other examples include pets (Where the Red Fern Grows, 1961), monstrous children (Super Metroid, 1994), and manmade creations (Terminator 2, 1991).
[5] I.e., the sort touched by trauma who play dead/possum, “rape” play and somno, sleeping on Hell to work dark wonders, playing Hell on our dreams. The castle’s a girl; the girl’s a freak: “A rare, fatal vision, a Gothic dream to haunt the chapel with; a dark freaky church where no one gets hurt and there’s lots of sex, it’s the Neo-Gothic in a nutshell: visions of a better world when threatened by the ghost of capital, keeping the aesthetic of torture but not the context! It’s exquisite ‘torture,’ with a darky mommy queen!” (re: the review I wrote of a video Harmony Corrupted sent me—more on this in the medieval prep section). It’s a closeness with “death” to raise the blood pressure for just a second, an orgasm to give into and lose control, a little death that feels massive; i.e., a regaining of control through the medieval aesthetic of power and death, a building of fatal glory with non-fatal results or nostalgia that exposes, like the Oracle, the dark horrors of capital, of the home as alien: the family annihilator as genuine and guaranteed by good little soldiers who rape their mothers, shoot their fathers, and turn settler-colonial violence in on their own families through the home as fallen. Our “death” fantasies avoid that by confronting doubles of it that raise empathy from the dead, of the dead, for the dead, to the death. As usual, the enemy is Capitalism, which we combat through Neo-Gothic paradox: live burial and secular challengings of canonical, holy dogma; e.g., cum tributes. This isn’t purely psychological, but psychosexual and dialectical-material.
[6] Kinks generally overlap and vary per person. As discussed in Volume Zero, domming and subbing are separate from topping and being a bottom. Dom and sub are distributions of power as “more/less,” with the dom ostensibly having “more,” but the sub having the most in a mutually consenting scenario; and top and bottom generally mean to give and receive sexual pleasure (not always). And these overlap and exist with additional qualifiers amid negotiated boundaries.
For example, I’m 37 and ask the cuties I top to “gentle mommy dom” me while I fuck them; i.e., with praise, as they tell me how to use my dick and that I’m a good little girl. Despite my relatively advanced physical age (compared to my partners), I’m performatively regressing in a scenario where I’m dominated from the bottom by a gentle mommy dom, often by a dom who’s physically younger than me but acting older in a gentle way (with Harmony being 26, issuing praise, and acting nurturing and feral as I breed them in an online social-sexual exchange). It’s a highly tailored combination of sex, gender identity and performance amid flexible pre-established BDSM roles that can likewise change, mid-session; i.e., in a playful way based on feel, but also animal elements and spoken communication: safe words, commands, “breeding,” etc.
To this, BDSM, kink and Gothic poetics are actually three distinct things, each being modular and idiosyncratic—a constant exercise of establishing and maintaining trust, boundaries and power amid hard/soft rules; i.e., as articulated between two people’s social-sexual contract as ludo-Gothic, psychosexual. It helps confront and interrogate trauma, relieve stress and practice communication. For me, such BDSM (unequal power exchange) is sexual (kink) and roleplay dependent, except the obvious Gothic elements inform the sex/gender performance; i.e., as likewise adhering to my daily gender identity but sometimes diverging from it (regression). There’s a lot to keep track of and learn per case and I find it to not only be very engaging but also good social-sexual practice. The skills applied are useful during roleplay and bedroom stuff, but also regarding power exchange and relationships more broadly under any poetic scenario, anywhere it occurs (an obvious game or interaction, regardless if it’s an overt transaction or not); i.e., any “caterpillar” or “wasp.”
[7] Thus have access to technology including medicine as collectively able to a) end worker problems and b) maintain balance and harmony with nature until the sun burns out… except such things are tied to capital and industry as made to destabilize, enslave and exploit workers and the natural world; i.e., by withholding technology on purpose.
[8] Weaver was a Broadway actress who improvised the line in her theatrical debut:
Written by Arthur Freed and Nacio Herb Brown in 1935 for the MGM film, Broadway Melody of 1936, the song “You Are My Lucky Star” was released months before the film’s premiere to draw attention to the film’s production and stir up anticipation for the film’s premiere. […] It was made famous again with the release of the 1952 film, Singin’ In the Rain – this time as a duet between the movie’s stars, Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds – and is probably the most well-known version. For the 1979 science fiction horror film, Alien, actress Sigourney Weaver had the idea for her character, Lieutenant Ripley, to be shakily consoling herself with the classic song’s lyrics when facing the alien head on during the film’s climax – a more literal take on the song and an intentionally stark contrast to its glittering Hollywood origins (source: Busy Beaver Button Museum).
[9] Medusa as glamorous, like Ursula from The Little Mermaid (re: Jack Coleman, 2022). Superheroes, drag royalty and gender trouble (we’ll explore gender performance much, much more in Volume Three), elaborate strategies of misdirection (divide and conquer) and Gothic theatre (the sex trafficker banditti abducting not just maidens, but any and all small, helpless and sexually vulnerable*—those fragile little folks who can’t consent, thus blameless in a larger scheme that goes straight to the top: “all roads lead to Rome”). This is not impaired judgment, but a redundant operation of concealment in the open; i.e., cryptonymy disguising entertainment, back-to-back, as allegory among adversity drilled within franchises that are branded but aren’t people (though there is overlap; e.g., uniforms). They teach the brave to ask for help and the scared (our little fighters) to be brave, to look for care in others part of the same oppressed group: workers at large (this means all of them, not just white Imperial-Core teens playing detectives to achieve equality of convenience to “make Daddy proud”; i.e., “Radcliffe Syndrome”; e.g., Vecna’s “type” to torture and kill slowly and deliciously—white girls—while killing token non-female victims instantly and spitting them out like garbage).
*Child abuse, animal abuse, spouse abuse, guilt by the owned from the owner as classically the property’s master in all respects—father, husband, teacher, judge, head of state, etc. Medusa becomes something to brand, own, convert—to bind, torture, and kill. Except it’s ultimately bad for men, too, because they become unable to care for themselves, thus dependent on the very thing they’re alienated from as both mother/daughter and fearsome; i.e., unable to fend for themselves inside the household as woman’s domain; e.g., cooking (“Where’s my dinner?”), cleaning and laundry, compelled sex where they can’t please their partner (and often develop Virgin/Whore Syndrome) or look after their kids. In short, they become useless save as a breadwinner, thus a nervous wreck if the tides of the market don’t favor them at all times.
“Happy wife, happy life,” except times of economic hardship have men acting like infantile stoics who hide their feelings and their resentment of their position until they snap, all while being denied healthy therapeutic outlets and chained to their end of the nuclear family model. Some men run away (“go out for a pack of cigarettes”); some men neglect, beat or rape their wives and/or kids; many turn to drink; and an alarming number kill themselves and their partners by murder-suicide when the woman threatens to leave with the kids. They are his property and he invokes the “ancient rite of Athens,” Egeus-style, except he adds “Roman fool” into the mix (to save face). It’s idiotic inside the home as alien and broken, but fascists recruit vulnerable men everywhere; i.e., from stochastic death cults that, per Capitalist Realism, see the world as ending if they “can’t get a girl.” In these cases, lonely hopeless men can’t threaten to kill themselves if a girl leaves because they can’t get near one to put her in that position (thanks to early forms of feminism educating white cis-het women to know better, first and foremost). Instead, these chudwads become incels who hate and covet women (or feminine GNC people) from a distance: chasers of the Medusa.
Pro-tip to cis-het dudes: My guys, relationships are built on trust and mutual exchange. So listen to a girl and find out what she wants and likes instead of defaulting to male-coded behaviors; i.e., great deeds; e.g., Prince Lear and Lady Amalthea. So-called “manly men” aren’t really pussy magnets, but weird dudes who attract other weird dudes who “glaze” them (the latest Zoomer slang for “brownnose,” a dick-rider). So be sex-positive in good faith instead of openly or secretly creepy and the people you’re into will show interest; i.e., because you’ve stopped giving off Norman Bates vibes, thus aren’t the routine threat (cis-het misogynists) they’ve learned to avoid. From there, learn how to see the monstrous-feminine as human; i.e., people to compliment for the purposes of friendship and love, not a selfish goal. This requires actually being interested in them, as well as paying attention to, and asking questions about them. The more you do that, the closer you’ll become; and if she’s into you and feels safe, trust me, you’ll know because she’ll tell you (usually letting you into her bedroom and giving you bedroom eyes—if it’s not obvious, always ask if something is okay and wait for a clear answer). And if she doesn’t want to sleep with you but still thinks you’re good people, she probably knows a few sluts who are looking for some fun (casual or others); i.e., Austen’s matchmaker Emma, but X-rated.
Treat girls (and those force-coded as “girls”) like humans; your sex and social life will thank you!
[10] From Suzanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (2004).
[11] From Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” (source, 1923).