This blog post is part of “Searching for Secrets,” a second promotion originally inspired by the one I did with Harmony Corrupted: “Brace for Impact” (2024). That promotion was meant to promote and provide Volume Two, part one’s individual pieces for easy public viewing (it has since become a full, published book module: the Poetry Module). “Searching for Secrets” shall do the same, but with Volume Two, part two’s opening/thesis section and one of its two Monster Modules, the Undead (the other module, Demons, also having a promotion: “Deal with the Devil“). As usual, this promotion was written, illustrated and invigilated by me as part of my larger Sex Positivity (2023) book series.

Update, 8/7/2024: Originally this piece was written for “Searching for Secrets.” On 6/14/2024, I moved the written material to the PDF manuscript of the Poetry Module (v1.2 onwards); today, I updated each promo page’s table of contents to reflect said change, too, meaning these transplanted posts are featured in the “Brace for Impact” table of contents.

Click here to see “Searching for Secrets” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

Volume Two, part two (the Undead Module) is out now (9/6/2024)! Go to my book’s 1-page promo to download the latest version of the PDF (which will contain additions/corrections the original blog 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 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.

Note: This subchapter discusses rape as something to critique through Gothic media. It contains no images of actual sexual abuse, but does include problematic Gothic media as something to critic in our usual approach (from the book/series disclaimer):

While explicitly criminal sexual acts, taboos and obscenities are discussed herein, no explicit illustrations thereof are shown, nor anything criminal; i.e., no snuff porn, child porn or revenge porn. It does examine things generally thought of as porn that are unironically violent. Examples of uncensored, erotic artwork and sex work are present, albeit inside exhibits that critique the obscene potential (from a legal standpoint) of their sexual content: “ultimate sexual acts, normal or perverted, actual or simulated, masturbation, excretory functions, lewd exhibition of the genitals, or sado-masochistic sexual abuse” (source: Justice.gov). For instance, there is an illustrated example of uncensored semen—a “breeding kink” exhibit with zombie unicorns and werewolves (exhibit 87a)—that I’ve included to illustrate a particular point, but its purposes are ultimately educational in nature.

The point of this book isn’t to be obscene for its own sake, but to educate the broader public (including teenagers*) about sex-positive artwork and labor historically treated as obscene by the state. For the material herein to be legally considered obscene it would have to simultaneously qualify in three distinct ways (aka the “Miller” test):

• • appeal to prurient interests (i.e., an erotic, lascivious, abnormal, unhealthy, degrading, shameful, or morbid interest in nudity, sex, or excretion)
  • attempt to depict or describe sexual conduct in a patently offensive way (i.e., ultimate sexual acts, normal or perverted, actual or simulated, masturbation, excretory functions, lewd exhibition of the genitals, or sado-masochistic sexual abuse)
  • lack serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value

Taken as a whole, this book discusses debatably prurient material in an academic manner, depicting and describing sexual conduct in a non-offensive way for the express purpose of education vis-à-vis literary-artistic-political enrichment.

Into the Toy Chest: Gothic History as Toy-like Amongst Ourselves (Opening)

BDSM in popular media [canon] isn’t made to educate, but to shock naïve people looking for a thrill. It’s about as accurate as sex is during porn, tending to romanticize the therapeutic psychosexual elements divorced from performative context; i.e., merely showing them as they appear at first glance: recreations of traditional disempowerment, whose paralysis and vulnerable exposure hauntingly evoke real scenes of abuse; e.g., hair pulling and physical attacks, kidnappings with bindings and gags, rapes, drownings and murders—often by knife [canon synonymizes sex with violation, including abject reproduction: the murderous cock and womb of the father and mother but also their hideous “brood”]. The neophyte’s idea of what BDSM is often tries to mimic the trust-building exercise without understanding why it exists in a sex-positive [often trashy/pulpy] sense and why someone might try to perform it to achieve psychosexual catharsis that is often embroiled within self-destructive pathologies [the “call of the void”] seeking unironic harm; the novice counterfeit also tends to look like the expert performance at first glance. The difference lies not in the aesthetics but the skill level and intent, which can be hard to detect. Nevertheless, the fact remains that BDSM, when sex-positive, is built around community and trust as something to establish over time. It’s rehearsed over and over in a highly controlled environment [informed boundaries/consent, safewords] to prevent harm, hence the motto: “Hurt, not harm.”

Yet, there’s also the paradox of professional sex work, which capitalizes off hard kinks to turn a buck. There’s frankly nothing wrong with this, provided there’s a communal understanding encouraged by the paratext (source).

—Persephone van der Waard, Volume Zero (2023)

[artist: Cara Day]

Picking up from where “Herbos to Himbos, part two” left off…

In my usual style, this chapter was written backwards, making “Into the Toy Chest” the first-written, placed-last element thereof—one that considers playing with the toy-like past in two parts: among the parasocial nuts-and-bolts, and among friends as co-contributors to an ongoing poetic statement for or against the state. In turn, it considers the Gothic as toy-like insofar as it’s gleaned and understood through rape play (aka consent-non-consent) as executed between these two poles.

• “Into the Toy Chest, part zero: A Note about Rape/Rape Play” (included in this post): Outlines rape and the Destroyer persona as something to camp during rape play per our definition of it previously introduced during “Psychosexual Martyrdom” (2024).
• “Into the Toy Chest, part one: the Nuts and Bolts of Rape Play” (included in this post): Covers the nuts and bolts of Gothic history as toy-like through its parasocial, rape-play exchanges.
• “Into the Toy Chest, part two: My Experiences“: Observes the nuts and bolts of rape fantasies when reflecting on my interpersonal exchanges.

Into the Toy Chest, part zero: A Note about Rape/Rape Play; or, Facing the Great Destroyer

I liken [Jadis’ abuse] to Majora’s Mask. In that game, the villain, Majora, curses the moon to fly into a [double of Hyrule called Termina]. While the player can return the moon to its original position using a magic song, the residents of Hyrule are still trapped inside a cruel time loop. Faced with their impending doom, they stew in their own fear. The world around them slowly falls apart—not just once, but over and over and over again. It degrades their sense of reality until nothing but madness remains. Majora uses this madness to control the [doubled] Hyrulians through fear, distorting their very perception of reality. This mind-prison is what Link ultimately escapes. The paradox, here, is the method: He doesn’t escape by playing the song and stopping the moon. He escapes by exposing the tyrant controlling the “moon” to begin with (source).

—Persephone van der Waard, “Setting the Record Straight; My Ex’s Abuse of Me: February 17th, 2022”

Trigger-warning! This subchapter discusses ironic and unironic rape fantasies extensively! This isn’t to condone unironic violence through Gothic poetics, but prevent it through sex-positive education, entertainment, transformation and critique; i.e., the term “rape,” in this case, has been broadened to mean “taking away power to cause harm,” which ludo-Gothic BDSM camps in cathartic, Gothic-Communist forms of Gothic poetics. —Perse

Since this subchapter discusses rape, I want to define it as something broadened beyond its narrow definition, “penetrative sex meant to cause harm by removing consent from the equation.” To that, there is a broad, generalized definition I devised in “Psychosexual Martyrdom” (2024), which will come in useful where we examine unironic forms of rape, but also “rape” as something put into quotes; i.e., during consent-non-consent as a vital means of camp during ludo-Gothic BDSM:

martyrs are generally raped by the state, which we have to convey mid-performance without actually getting raped if we can help it (“rape” meaning [for our purposes] “to disempower someone or somewhere—a person, culture, or place—in order to harm them,” generally through fetishizing and alienizing acts or circumstances/socio-material conditions that target the mind, body and/or spirit) [emphasis, me]: finding power while disempowered (the plight of the monstrous-feminine).

Rape can be of the mind, spirit, body and/or culture—the land or things tied to it during genocide, etc; it can be individual and/or on a mass scale, either type committed by a Great Destroyer (a Gothic trope of abuse of the worse, unimaginable sort, rarefying as a person, onstage) of some kind or another as abstracting unspeakable abuse. It’s a translation, which I now want to interrogate with the chapters ahead. So we must give examples that are anything but ironic before adding the irony afterward as a theatrical means of medicine; i.e., rape play challenging profit through the usual Gothic articulations in service to workers and nature at large.

Simply put, to be raped is to be deprived of agency facing something you cannot defeat through force alone (rape victims are often brutalized for trying to fight back)—capital and its enforcers, pointedly raping nature and things of nature-as-monstrous-feminine by harvesting them during us-versus-them arguments according to Cartesian thought; terror is a vital part of the counterterrorist reversal humanizing Medusa during activism as a psychosexual act of martyrdom. There is always damage, even if you survive, but there is a theatrical element that lets you show your scars; i.e., during consent-non-consent as an artistic, psychosexual form of protest through ludo-Gothic BDSM: having been on the receiving end of state abuse as something to demonstrate and play with for educational, activist purposes—generally with a fair degree of revolutionary cryptonymy (showing and hiding ourselves and our trauma).

By comparison the state uses masks, music (and other things) as a coercive, complicit means of cryptonymically threatening us with great illusions. These rape our minds without irony in service to profit. Such proponents are generally people in our own lives who don the mask/persona of the Great Destroyer to frighten us into submission; i.e., by threatening us with total annihilation as a force of unreality that feels shapeless and overwhelming yet humanoid. This is no laughing matter, nor is subverting it during rape play, both of which the rest of this volume (and Volume Three after that) will explore at length.

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

To prepare you, I want to extrapolate rape as I experienced it; i.e., as we shall use it as by previously citing “Psychosexual Martyrdom.” I want to expand on that quote a little; it’s a tough read, but it should prove vital in the grim chapters ahead: power is an illusion, but it is tied to forces that can drive you mad through echoes of your own doom assisted by social and material inequality weaponized by state forces!

Note: Originally posted on my old blog, I went onto include “Psychosexual Martyrdom” in this volume (which is available, as all of my books are, on my website). —Perse

Here is the sample, written after the murders of Nex Benedict and Aaron Bushell, which I had written about previously:

“Psychosexual” means “of sexuality and the mind,” generally trauma; I further liken it to conflict—i.e., conflicting mind and sex, or “battle sex” through rape fantasy, theatre and play. So while Capitalism alienates and sexualizes everything in service to profit and all monsters are psychosexual to some degree, the chaos of iconoclastic monsters ultimately challenge the profit motive and its heteronormative, binarized theatrical language/performative roles (of sex and gender) as a delivery mechanism for orderly state abuse (canon vs camp); i.e., by anisotropically reversing Gothic poetic’s flow of power (often through deception, concealment and revelation—cryptonymy) to humanize workers in spite of Cartesian hegemony (and its grim harvests) and Capitalist Realism; e.g., terrorists and counterterrorists, but also heroes and villains (from my thesis volume): “All heroes are monsters, thus liminal expressions that are sexualized and gendered” (source). Challenging state monopolies by reversing the dialectical-material function of said labels (and their oft-pornographic poetics) is exactly what we must do in order to succeed. Monsters as (often queer) code, a messy shadow zone full of darkness visible. It’s where the magic (and the sex) happen.

All the while, surrender and segregation are no defense because the state requires criminals to exist inside harmful, highly unequal distributions of power (“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will” —Frederick Douglass). Instead, we must short-circuit the exchange of violence by humanizing ourselves as ordinarily being the givers and receivers of state harm made into something whose sex positivity—the giving and receiving of pleasure and pleasurable pain; i.e., sadists and masochists during sex-positive demon BDSM—of which the establishment cannot challenge: “The givers and receivers of a state-sanctioned conflict reveal both to be human, one losing its ability to receive punishment and the other to give it. Both must happen simultaneously and en masse for settler-colonialism to stop” (“Bushnell’s Requiem“). The state mustn’t colonize us through fascism, thus decaying into fractured forms of itself (and Capitalism) through medieval regressive defenses of capital; it must be developed before then, from moment to living moment, as gleaned from monstrous hauntology into something that stalls genocide altogether. Though violence and force are required to challenge the state, liberation comes not from sheer feat of arms, but rather from subversive and transgressive reclamation of monstrous symbols: a pedagogy of the oppressed that makes us human while presenting us as monsters abused by the state. It’s a tricky balance, mainly because violence as something to perform and receive are not the same thing despite often appearing identical; i.e., martyrs are generally raped by the state, which we have to convey mid-performance without actually getting raped if we can help it (“rape” meaning [for our purposes] “to disempower someone or somewhere—a person, culture, or place—in order to harm them,” generally through fetishizing and alienizing acts or circumstances/socio-material conditions that target the mind, body and/or spirit) [again, my emphasis]: finding power while disempowered (the plight of the monstrous-feminine).

Again, it’s tricky because mid-development, we will be criminalized regardless of what we do; but if criminals become human, then the state’s power crumbles, not ours. The paradox stems from the manner in which those cast as monsters are designed to threaten the state at all times—either by making demands that go outside their scope of influence, but also because our mere existence must threaten the state and its actors; i.e, because the state demands the arrangement as useful to them. To survive this clear-and-obvious clusterfuck, we must become precious, saintly and unkillable as monsters are, but also loved.

(artist: Lera PI)

I confess, this is not easy reading and sadly is only a taste of things to come. But, the rest of the chapter shall give you a means not only of healing from rape, but subverting its unironic Destroyer through rape-like theatre that puts “rape” in quotes. Sometimes this is less gentle than you might think, but often it occupies that “black Egyptian” hauntological sweet spot; i.e., trapped between reality and madness, danger and disco as liminal in another respect: exploitation and liberation felt in the same theatrical space, fucking to metal and combining operatic pleasure and non-harmful pain to evoke harm but not execute it!

Instead, “rape” becomes an aesthetic with a dark motherly persona emblematic of rape as something to heal from through bad echoes of itself. Thanks to capital, these can never be historically-materially divorced from actual injury and death, but per psychosexual theatre always sits adjacent to harm as something to learn from during calculated risk; i.e., as dark, stylish, and raw. This isn’t the case in the photo below—with UrEvilMommy and her partner always using condoms (from a shoot already featured in Volume Zero)—but therein lies the rub: little clues that tease such performances as “on the fence,” straddling that Goldilocks zone that hurts so good; i.e., like a witch’s broom mounted, mid-flight! “Fuck me like you mean it, you bastard! Like an animal! Give me your power to make Hell on Earth something sex-positive for now until the sun burns out!” It’s a taunt, even at times a bit of a goofy one; e.g., Arnold Schwarzenegger’s supremely hilarious Predator (1987) bit: “Come on… Come on! Do it! Do it! Come on. Come on! Kill me! I’m here! Kill me! I’m here! Kill me! Come on! Kill me! I’m here! Come on! Do it now! Kill me!” (source). He’s a bad sub, but it’s still a submissive gesture!

This is a cryptomimetic byproduct, one teased at centuries ago by Marx. As he put it,

The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language (source: “The Eighteenth Brumaire,” 1852).

Now camp Marx. Put that pussy on the chainwax! It’s not a means of pacification—to make us laugh, cry and/or cum to hold us back—but a means of waking up our dormant empathy as a kind of “darkness visible”; i.e., a sleeper that, once collectively awake, breaks Capitalist Realism once and for all!

(artist: UrEvilMommy)

Into the Toy Chest, part one: the Nuts and Bolts of Rape Play

The reader identifies (broadly and loosely) with the predicament as a totality: the ritualized conflict that takes place among the major figures of a Gothic fiction (within the significant boundaries of that “enclosed space”) represents in externalized form the conflict any single woman might experience. The reader will project her feelings into several characters, each one of whom will carry some element of her divided “self.” A woman pictures herself as trapped between the demands of two sorts of men—a “chaste” lover and a “demon” lover—each of whom is really a reflection of one portion of her own longing. Her rite of passage takes the form of (1) proclaiming her right to preside as mistress over the Gothic structure and (2) deciding which man (which form of “love”) may penetrate its recesses! (source).

—Cynthia Wolff, “The Radcliffean Gothic Model” (1979)

(artist: Robert A. Multari)

Part one considers the nuts and bolts of rape play through ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., and rape/death fantasies rescued from Radcliffe’s skilled-and-yet-unskilled status (from my thesis volume); e.g., the knife dick:

“Sade had to make up his theater of punishment and delight from scratch, improvising the décor and costumes and blasphemous rites” (re: “Fascinating Fascism“). Needless to say that nearly two centuries later, Sontag’s opinion of BDSM is limited to a harmful canonical version of Sadomasochism that frankly is way off the mark in terms of what sex positivity’s entire gamut entails: “Sadomasochism has always [emphasis, me] been the furthest reach of the sexual experience: when sex becomes most purely sexual, that is, severed from personhood, from relationships, from love” (ibid.). She completely ignores the matter of degree and negotiation, and the fact that sex isn’t even automatically included in BDSM:

So what about the intersection of kink and sex? When is this appropriate and what are the guidelines?

It’s a tricky topic. I remember telling a friend who is pretty vanilla but curious how kink scenes are distinct activities. She said, “So, wait, there’s no sex?” And I remember struggling to answer this. For me, most kink scenes are separate from sexual encounters, even if sex may follow a scene. This is very partner dependent, but for me, a kink scene requires aftercare before there is sex. And so far this was almost always the case for me – negotiation, scene, aftercare, possibility of sex [source: Victor’s “Intersection of Kink and Sex,” 2019].

In other words, if Sontag was “vanilla,” then Radcliffe was barely even ice cream [whose naughty operatic fantasies are unironically violent and sit on the ledge of threatened morality—what Ash, in Alien, would call “delusions,” exhibit 51a]. But their combined inexperience paradoxically stems from dark fantasies invented from the open secret of sex abuse turned into urban legends (source).

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

As we dive into the history side of monsters as psychosexual poetic devices, then, I want you to recall my description of Harmony Corrupted:

the proverbial flipside [“horror”] annihilating the viewer through the self-same castled-buttocks, hefty flesh and raunchy feast for the senses: fatal food belying wild hunger behind the veil of lost innocence, paradise lost (the poisoned apple), the feral lycanthrope’s mask-like visage and costumed body alluding to a secret self, an animal side ritualistically evoked not by a literal magic potion, but the power of sex-positive ritual and psychosexual sexual healing. […] she looks good, mid-“death,” but whose surface crackles with untold power and colossal weight, thrown around with the scope and scale of vacant planets. A very freaky girl, in other words, she confronts what she fears as something to reclaim: her own body and gender as something to play with through Gothic mechanisms of power exchange and forbidden knowledge (source).

To this, Harmony’s brand vibes with mine. She becomes something to dress or undress by virtue of mutual consent; i.e., as something established and executed between us and invigilated by me after the fact by someone who wanted to be invigilated and routinely gave me feedback, mid-invigilation. It was less a tornado or force of nature (as women are so often compared to) spiriting me away to a magic other world, and more something close by and spritely—like a slutty fairy with a record shop, but cutely nerdy and quietly wacky like Senan Byrne’s “Helium Balloons” skit (2016) taking me somewhere over the rainbow but somehow down to earth:

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

In short, Harmony participated and played with me, the result being something weird, toy-like and fun: Gothic Slutty Barbie™ minus Mattel’s corporate tampering! It’s a bit kooky and comes with all the usual hanky-panky shenanigans, but also funny and sweet, meaning relatable/delightful BTS stories springing forth (next page); i.e., while that cute little tongue pops out of that ostensibly “dead” mouth, its owner choked by invisible hands round her throat (fetishes and clichés equate to “necrophilia” placed into quotes—the corpse bride/mommy dom in corpse paint). The desire to say “it ain’t easy being green” while simultaneously saying “bright green!” to BDSM rape play is one hell of a tightrope, but a fun one if you know what you’re doing and have a good playmate. You feel that tension and want to rip each other’s clothes off and get all up in there. Into her “toy chest,” indeed!

More to the point, entry into someone’s “forbidden zone” is established through trust and boundary-building exercises that play (and lay) on the poetic devices Volume Two, part one outlined:

Our views are shaped by those we meet and fall in love with in sequence and upon reflection, who we see as human by virtue of common ground and interests amid differences—a pedagogy of the oppressed relaid in Gothic poetics as recursive, concentric, anisotropic, and ergodic (endlessly tiered and self-contained, determined by flow and non-trivial effort); it’s about tearing down harmful boundaries and installing healthy ones through different points of view like teaching, medicine and the medieval, but also selective absorption, a confusion of the senses and magical assembly to add to our Song of Infinity (all specialized poetic devices the medieval prep section will explore further). In our hands, ludo-Gothic BDSM is a potent means of establishing and negotiating boundaries—to perform and play with power (and trauma) where it exists, in the shadow zone.

Friends are made through communicating boundaries and being open with those we connect with while living in situations that require us to use code to portray our human condition but also oppression and rebellion. In short, we identify as monsters who love and see each other as human in spite of those who, one way or another, side with the colonizer group (source).

Harmony is literally the poster girl for this idea—the wellspring for which our ideas flowed through me invigilating her as we related to each other, mid-poiesis! I want to include her because she’s valuable, friendly and fun—is a wonderful friend, student, playmate, and comrade! I feel very safe working with her and value our friendship beyond words; i.e., as something to pass along to the next generation: to learn from us in oral, written, and visual forms they can digest and create fresh recipes with. Pay attention, kids; this is how it’s done!

It’s a work-in-process, one made in real time that allows for all the fun weirdness that intimacy equates to. For example, Harmony posed awhile back for this cover shot (which eventually became the cover of Volume Two, part one). She was wearing black lipstick that, in a later sex tape she made for me with her SO, actually wasn’t “smear proof” as advertised! It kept getting all over his big fat cock during oral. So Harmony had to use a burgundy red called “Bauhaus,” instead… which caused the algorithm to send her “#bauhausisracist.” We had a laugh about that, both of us enjoying killing our darlings mid-discourse, per our overlapping Gothic voyeurism and exhibitionism; i.e., as an opportunity to expose harmful bad actors playing the rebel (an ” apocalypse” in zombie terms). This, in turn, reminded me of my past spent in Manchester, England, and Zeuhl (speaking of bad actors) showing me “Bella Lugosi’s Dead” (1982). I said, “I’m more of a postpunk girl,” to which Harmony replied, “Yeah same here! Post punk, EBM and ethereal is my stuff!” We exchanged some music, back and forth, but she also said she’d make me a playlist.

Then, we had a play session and it was very relaxing and fun—like sex in a graveyard, but from the comfort and warmth of our own homes! It’s ultimately not a privilege, but a basic human right! It’s all there in our cryptomimetic gloomth, our castle-narrative funneling along the Gothic chronotope as a meta dialog between cuties: delicious, sexy echopraxis! “Put your mysterium tremendum in my uncanny valley!” It disintegrates, reassembling amid vitality as decaying into fresh life! Just look at those cute little boobies, that tight little pussy waiting to be stuffed (the context of mutual consent being as much Harmony taking the images for me, but also me selecting them and her approving my selections in real time):

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

In other words, women classically are made to fear themselves projected onto abject counterparts, but also to campily interrogate or embody that in different toy-like ways: torturous mutilation, death and rape fantasies to play with differently than cis-het boys (or TERFs) would. The latter approach the memento mori as thrashed on like training dummies during overtly phallic emulations of war and mortal combat; i.e., Man Box, when irony is truant; e.g., Kentucky Ballistics’ “Medieval Weapons vs The Modern Warrior” (next page, 2024). Women are expected to rely on men for projection, but must likewise grit and bear it when white knights turn out to be black (whose decay is expected by the narrative as a historical-material one—ACAB extending to canonical knights and castles).

However vengeful, women are expected grant softer and more literally sexual analogs for “rape” in quotes (or not): poison, resentment, and treachery as the universal recipient for penetration, not guns and bullets given back in kind. They can do other things, but these become Amazonian as a form of monstrous-feminine, which the state will try to monopolize as toy-like under the elite’s thrall: Golding’s conch, except it shoots bullets to keep the peace.

To subvert that, we must toy with all of the above as something to take away from TERFs as bad actors, players, educators during Demon BDSM (and all token agents). Expressed through our bodies and roleplay (re: Harmony and I, having fun) as monstrous-feminine, there is often a neo-medieval flavor that recovers from trauma acted out versus contributing to it in classically male forms (to steer us clear of state harm and bad education, in other words): knives, bullets and clubs (stab, shoot, punch); i.e., melee and projectile violence that kills someone’s enemies, meaning the state’s by proxy. Every execution needs a cop, thus a victim; but dated, second wave forms like Dead Calm often (as stated, earlier) deliberately pit the resident white cutie against a demon lover (white or black) like Radcliffe’s sort, over two centuries backward. It’s regressive, but also exclusionary as a kind of decay reserved for “special women”; i.e., for good girls (married to white men, or at least white-functioning men): childishly fighting over the same gun as a police tool in settler-colonial territories (the rapist, in Zane’s case, scrapping with the British naval officer’s wife. She can throw down, doing so as the secret warrior princess [with auburn, curly hair] who doubtless has her own bigotries effaced by making the rapist white).

These are broad claims. I’d like to spend the rest of part one articulating the nuts-and bolts of this poetic, toy-like violence—in essence, to give room to critique the unironic forms of its theatrical iterations, extending pervasively into the Gothic and sex work, including guns and cars tied to heroic action (echoes of Neoliberalism in Yesterday’s Heroes and my monomythic critiques at large). Then, we’ll move into part two: my life as a poetic, iconoclastic, interpersonal response to all of these parasocial things! It’s gonna go quick, and we’ll cover a lot of ground over a very short period—just enough to get my points across…

First and foremost, let’s consider sex and force as dimorphized in toy-like ways (with history being such toys coming to life). Because of the heteronormative, false-dimorphic nature of capital, such toy-like violence divides into male violence as something to give and receive in service to the profit motive; i.e., attacking nature-as-monstrous-feminine, extending the dialectic of the alien into violent, Cartesian displays whose shows of force are lethal and regressive: whack, stab, and shoot Medusa! Rape her zombie cunt; i.e., own your enemy through deadly psychosexual force, aka “extreme prejudice.” It’s everywhere, so we must learn to laugh at (thus critique) such things through play that extends to how others do so as well, but differently as a matter of dialectical-material praxis: opposing force!

(exhibit 34b3b2a2a2a: Artist: Kentucky Ballistics. The Gothic explores psychosexual violence as something to play with in non-harmful forms, except the duality of language implements BDSM as something that can always be good or bad relative to state dogma; i.e., as something to enforce [or otherwise encourage] through terror and force, meaning police violence as de facto and stochastic—as much meted out by vigilantes as by official agents within the same half-real theatre. For sexist men [from Volume Two, part one]:

humans aren’t cruel by nature; they’re taught to be cruel to serve profit during settler colonialism at home and abroad. Accustomed to the Man Box, boys grow into young men, then adults who maintain a cruel streak fueled by us versus them; they fall prey to guilty pleasure, wishful thinking and the pleasure principle as Pavlovian. They’re always chasing that fix and cannot conceive of anything outside of it: a murderous flow state whose headspace is conducive to violence against the enemy as alien. In turn, the enemy is “out there,” so that is where men go—to war and for marriage (military exogamy and war brides); i.e., war booty to drag back to the ancestral home as restored from a mysterious decay through far-off bloodshed [source].

In short, capital is criminogenic relative to nuclear-familial dogma leading to domestic abuse that synonymizes sex and force to harmful extremes during theatrical rites of passage: lethal force carried out with actual killing tools [or improvised ones] breaking one’s “toys” [a big problem when people are treated like toys, but also bodies to count[1]] as us-versus-them analogs; i.e., so-called “male violence” per an unironic “Male Gothic” speaking to the implements of psychosexual medieval theatre used by heteronormative [or token] agents serving profit by hammering anything that sticks out [above]: sexual violence as punitive play/retribution.

[source: The Slow Mo Guys’ “75mph Bird to the Face with Adam Savage,” 2024]  

It’s a silly thing to do, of course, and often a very funny one ipso facto. On a domestic level, this historically-materially turns to lethal force by the male/tokenized side against the female/monstrous-feminine side as indicative of the larger structural exploitation built into itself; i.e., harvesting nature as monstrous-feminine, code for “rape and kill.” The “problem” is always there, always something to turn into “merch” given the right tool as being worshipped for doing so. This dimorphism ties to capital and its usual heteronormative tropes/false binaries expanded wider and wider in an ever-growing market roping workers into the Battle of the Sexes. As Snake Eater [2004] shows us, this kind of gun customization and worship [which extends to cars and bodies] wasn’t available at a public level in the 1960s; it also shows Snake [the future Big Boss] nerding out over the future of the world in his hands… all while ignoring the female Russian spy seducing him as much with the gun as her own “ballistics” [very phallic]. Communism one, Solid Snake zero! To quote the man himself:

“The feeding ramp is polished to a mirror sheen. The slide’s been reinforced. And the interlock with the frame is tightened for added precision. The sight system is original, too. The thumb safety is extended to make it easier on the finger. A long-type trigger with non-slip grooves. A ring hammer… The base of the trigger guard’s been filed down for a higher grip. And not only that, nearly every part of this gun has been expertly crafted and customized. Where’d you get something like this?” [source].

There’s a lot going on—a kind of story-within-a-story whose espionage and counter-espionage will become especially relevant in part two. We’re all monsters and heroes on the same stage, wearing the same masks, driving the same heroic vehicles, sporting all manner of weapons and strange powers. But for all this pornographic liminality and potential for rebellion in service to workers, sex work is guarded in the classic sense: by harem soldiers; i.e., the submissive wifely girl by the battle-hardened warrior nuns pledging service to the state [re: The Monk]! Just as you can’t just peel off your clothes and simply say you’re safe, you can’t just hand a bitch a gun and be like, “Go shoot the enemy!” Context matters, as does instruction as anisotropic through Gothic poetics; i.e., as forever at work vis-à-vis class warriors and traitors sending power in one of two directions:

 

[artist, top-right: Gala Ann; top-left: Nonneim; bottom: Blur Squid] 

American culture is Pax Americana, aka “peace through strength,” which not only builds on top of genocide, but aims to turn the world into a car lot and gun shop expressed through people-like avatars of such things[2]. It’s not whether these things are needed, but that they dogmatically turn into porn that operates along the usual nuclear model to the detriment of all workers and nature, mid-harvest. Through Capitalist Realism, guns and cars become an essential way of life; i.e., killing the planet by virtue of war and rape as a business, one where gun/car culture represents privatization as Marx envisioned it: factories [which Henry Ford defended and upheld per his own fascist ties]. To quote the man himself:

Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it – when it exists for us as capital, or when it is directly possessed, eaten, drunk, worn, inhabited, etc., – in short, when it is used by us. Although private property itself again conceives all these direct realizations of possession only as means of life, and the life which they serve as means is the life of private property – labour and conversion into capital (source: “Private Property and Communism,” 1844).

Per my arguments, this usage translates historically-materially into rape minus quotes. For our own sake, then, we must challenge that with our own camp, our own ludo-Gothic BDSM. As my short essay “Making Marx Gay” [2024] demonstrates, this means camping Marx as well! Anything they put into the world becomes something they cannot exclusively own; i.e., we can camp it.)

Sex and force are two sides of the Imperium; i.e., ubiquitously sponsored and disseminated by state proponents in mock-up, “faraway” displacements making settler colonialism seem “ancient” (the ghost of the counterfeit), ready to abject time and time again. As such, the female/tokenized side of the settler-colonial project’s binarized thinking is terror as called by Asprey, “the kissing cousin of force.” Under canonical essentialism, force executes terror as a flipside the state tries to monopolize against its enemies; i.e., both being given and received to harvest nature as alien/monstrous-feminine.

(artist: Hanage Missile)

In this praxial vacuum, consent is the first casualty thereof, sex and force meted out by those with no reverses for nuance or kindness, save towards a singular pet perhaps (usually an animal or a bride); e.g., Samus saving the animals while blowing up Zebes, eventually decaying into a shadow she will abject to whitewash empire while decaying herself (re: the euthanasia effect).

Faced with heteronormative vanguards, those essentialized as “women” according to their biology are forced to sell these products as canonically essential from a likewise geographical and morphological degree; i.e., sexualized by capital like women are at all points/perspectives, becoming an extension of them as eroticized inside the same police dialogic: of enslavement and profit, gun and car porn sitting on the image of the surface as something to seek revenge with—through tokenized police violence during the usual decay of punk, feminist and genderqueer culture.

Metroidvania or not, videogames—like their older palimpsests—are rife with this spirit of decay. It sits inside them and travels across all manner of performative interpretations (e.g., cosplayers, speedrunners, critics, etc). As such, they decay and become the fascist knife dick to rape nature (and those of nature) with; i.e., the Cartesian lie of “thinking beings” vs “extended beings.” The former are actually lobotomized to kill the usual colonized parties as darkness, outside, incorrect, etc: little mouths eating for the big mouth of the state, siphoning power always and forever towards the state nucleus and its Skeksis-grade oligarchy in half-real forms.

For example, just look at these two ghouls, Mark Hamill sucking the state’s dick; they’re both pieces of shit—bad actors merging fantasy and reality as bouncing back and forth through backroom deals; i.e., through the useful myth of Gothic ancestry—but the register of their hypocrisy converges between two men on two different stages: of war as something to—per Lucas—whitewash as “faraway” during billionaire Marxism (which really is just Capitalism, thus not Marxist). Yet, relegated to the alien halls of American power, the nature of this shared politic remains “theatrical” for both men. Good or bad, power is simply a relationship between actors serving workers or the state. These two assclowns are serving the state, thus the profit motive, as genocidal by design:

(source: Becca Wood’s “Mark Hamill asks President Joe Biden if he can call him ‘Joe’-bi-Wan Kenobi,” 2024)

Regarding the tokenized side of such betrayals, Amazons appear as knights do, but the function of the armor is usually inverted, stripped down to the skin as something to drape across a car’s hood, ornament-style. Moreover, the same underlying syndromes still exist—e.g., virgin/whore, mirror and compartment, etc—meaning that somewhere, some girl isn’t just being reduced to a militant sex object, but a dutiful wallflower actually getting shot by some family annihilator treating his wife and children exclusively as his: his car to ride and crash—to punish when they’ve “been bad” (running away to have extramarital sex).

Under this patriarchal installment, the man is generally the giver of violence towards disobedient property as—per neoliberal Capitalism—made inside a given area and haunted by a ghost of the counterfeit that must be routinely abjected at home as alien. This haunting extends to guns, cars, and the toy-like force tied to them and their manufacture as indebted to the usual trifectas and monopolies; i.e., regardless of where on the male/female dichotomy one lands. It’s toy-like, but harmful, so we must play with it as a Shakespearean might: on the stage as half-real! Unlike Hamill and Biden, who are accustomed to power and privilege, we’ll have to work and act all the harder to make our message heard!

(artist: Steven Stahlberg)

Capital is ultimately a Cartesian (settler-colonial, heteronormative) delivery system that biologically essentializes dimorphized sex and violence. The problem with American gun/car culture—and Gothic hyphenations of these (and other morphological forms of male violence; e.g., knives and car sex, above)—is they aren’t just treated with respect, but worshiped as canonically mutilative: the white woman escaping into unironic rape fantasies that lionize American and its usual Man Box benefactors; i.e., those emblematic of the profit motive as abject and romanticized per the Western, noir or Metroidvania, etc (Joe Biden, with his stupid aviators, thinks he’s a cowboy-style badass; i.e., the emperor has no clothes). Blame Radcliffe for that one, white women pacifying Imperialism while paradoxically exposing it. Nevertheless, the Gothic canonically offers up a measure of one’s manhood, meaning “knife dick” toys to play with that define women (specifically white cis-het women and various token examples) by how they are tortured by men. In turn, they shape and maintain how the women triangulate for these men when ranking rape vis-à-vis various minorities they gatekeep.

Skewered, class traitors attack potential dissidents through cultural appropriation: victimization as a witch-cop veil for TERF-style assaults dressed up as “survival.” Radicalization towards the state is effectively random, but with odds bettered by dogma (socio-material conditions loading the dice), it’s a gamble the state with happily take time and time again; i.e., to roll on repeat in service to profit. It’s all a game to them, a harmful one.

Guns and other weapons remain central, insofar as they are the expected result of any such rhetoric; car culture gets the vigilante to and fro (and at times weaponizes to run down protestors and bystanders alike), and it all bleeds together like a bad Saturday morning cartoon: the heroine, her car and her weapon, her outfit all on-brand as “fash.” Except no matter how much respect you give them, fascism serves only one purpose: to kill for the state defending itself mid-decay (which cars generally deliver to sites of such Holocaust-by-bullet violence; i.e., as something that must be built to provide: garages, parking lots, highways, etc). They aren’t simply expensive toys, then, but killing devices made to threaten others with: a vampiric mad dog.

By extension, those who wield (or receive) them become arbiters of state force much like a medieval knight would on their armored steed; those on the wrong side of the law become desperados, terrorists, outlaws, etc, including sex workers regularly policed by medievalized regression (which is what fascism is). White or black, the state’s proponents are something to be feared, including by white women (the classic Gothic readership) enforcing this fortress-grade xenophobia through their own compelled dysfunction. Emblematic of the nuclear model’s “teenage rebellion,” they grow threatened by imaginary scapegoats projected onto real-world groups; i.e., harmful stereotypes tied to profit; e.g., the lie of trans women merely being “men in women’s dresses,” and “all black men raping white women,” etc—mostly myths built around reactive violence, but lucrative ones popularized during moral panic as capital decays (versus targeting fascism and the elite, which we must do).

On the other hand, the state will routinely target a person forced to identify around their female biology as monstrous-feminine: a thing to protect in bad faith, but also to slay through the male/token body doubling the state’s carried weapons—their executioner and victim. It’s so very easy for the cartoon Communist to become fascist in centrist yarns: mad Medusa insane with psychosexual fury as something to sexualize in defense of capital. She becomes as toy-like as a gun, a car-like machine girl who can be scapegoated by capital, but also deputized by its decaying agencies: to assist in a return to greatness. Such give and take is always made to further consolidate state power as never really surrendering anything.

(artist: Sykosan)

Forms follow function, then, insofar as power normally flows towards the state as arbitrated by state control over Gothic poetics. People are not machines, but can be made machine-like; i.e., through bio-power-style insect politics relative to the gun/car culture around them as dogmatizing guns, cars, and girls (all expensive commodities) during us versus them. Cars and guns create far more problems than they solve, and women threatened by perceived dangers help the elite stay in power (versus asymmetrical warfare weaponizing stolen ordinance for a postcolonial aim): by redirecting privileged worker anger towards those with less privilege coded as “threats” in dogmatic bad faith.

State power decays towards fascism, but genocide under “peaceful” conditions is equally present-if-mendacious pareidolia; i.e., a menticidal, gut-punch lie to tell whenever the white castle darkens: “There is no genocide!” To that, there seriously needs to be a lot less guns, cars, and weaponized bodies in the world (the warship, left, haunted by the ghost ship in a fourth-dimension sense); i.e., being worshiped on altars due to the Military Industrial Complex and copaganda selling war toys to kids that mirror the killing doubles kids are expected to grow into: waves of terror and force.

Instead, there needs to be more people being treated as human while playing with toy-like iterations of these things; i.e., what’s known in Biblical language as “hammering swords into ploughshares,” and generally associated with the end of the world. Per Capitalist Realism, America laying down its arms—thereby converting them permanently into tools of peace—is entirely unthinkable to capital because guns/cars and female/monstrous-feminine enslavement (and the Protestant work ethic attached to them in the nuclear family model on all registers) is holy insofar as capitalistic hegemony is sacred. In short, it’s the same-old fragile, trigger-happy dogma.

(artist: The Art of Vero)

As such, women become turned into cargo—”built,” that is, like a nice car/gun (or some such weapon) would be—but also operating as a model usually does under patriarchal influence; i.e., to swap in and out insofar as a given woman (especially a non-white woman, let alone a GNC monstrous-feminine) will historically-materially codify along the lines of such entities’ power installments. Per the canonical Gothic, this means without any agency save what they’re reduced to within material culture indicating nature’s subjugation to serve profit; i.e., guns and cars, but also the girls tied to them as the measure of a man’s success by virtue of implied conquest: their “parts” owned and assembled by him as capital reduces to through its daily operations, moving money and materials through nature in war-like, rapacious ways.

As such, women (especially Indigenous women/women of color) become the beautiful shadow—the ghost-like unicorn tied to efficient profit that, per enshittification, exploits and infantilizes them as a ripe harvest to divvy up and exploit, but not before presenting in public spaces like Halloween candy fetishizing the ghost of the counterfeit. Such beauties are classically naked-and-clothed all at once, viewed from the front and the back as something to “hit,” and mistreat through impostor accounts leaking the original material; i.e., as fruit from another planet, the Global South. All remain as something to carve up but whose carving haunts the criminalized romance such bodies are forced to align with; i.e., guns, drugs, sex and fast cars/women tied to the usual siphoning of resources from colonized lands at home and abroad. Capital loses control over wild things, precisely so it can seize control again and move money through nature. It’s a con.

Volume One examined Nya Blu in this respect:

[artist, right: Nya Blu]

We all have skulls inside us. According to the Gothic tradition inside the Imperial Core, inheritance anxiety historically-materially communicates internalized trauma as suggested within workers but expressed according to their surface-level appearance in the material world; i.e., who, regardless of their origins, will be judged and consumed based how they appear relative to a cultural understanding of the imaginary past as something to constantly look at, vis-à-vis Segewick’s “Imagery of the Surface” [1980]. Nya, for example, is covered in tattoos that speak to Cartesian trauma and the Gothic as something to wear on her skin, reassembled there after having been created many times before. She’s a walking fortress, utterly stacked but rife with surface tension. She performs the paradox that Charlotte Brontë’s Anne Causeway could not, the latter woman entirely doomed inside the attic for no one to see [except in dream-like reveries]. The paradox is a doubled form of emancipation that occurs through confrontation; i.e., a savvy and brave wielding of the very things used to coop her up in the white man’s home, but also his colonizer’s heart and mind and those of an imperial readership then and now seeing her “of nature” and nature as psychosexual food [source].

The same idea applies to Nya as “comparable”; i.e., to other models being mistreated by capital as toying with their rights: something to weaponize, labor-wise, against the colonized group on various registers and at different locations. All maintain some aspect of this colonial character even in domestic spheres.

(artist: Lexi Love)

To that, Lexi Love is yet-another-resurrection of the whore side of the virgin/whore binary—stupid hot and dummy thicc, but a dark Madonna who’s ultimately “off limits” save in cheap, replicate copies: photos, videos, and other merch-style offshoots of the original. All constitute a parasocial, predatory means of rarefying nature as something to conquer by men—to “come and get” like pigs to the trough (a comment on the men bred on Lexi’s likeness, not the lady herself as a person); i.e., nature as food (re: Volume One), cultivated and feasted on, over and over through the favor of the gods pimping out nature not just as female, but monstrous-feminine; e.g., the lady of the lake, Aphrodite, Medusa, etc.

Prostitution is the world’s oldest profession. I would extend this to nature deifying under capital (and its predecessors); i.e., into something men can chase and claim through force, not consent. Said forces decay inside an arrangement that worsens by virtue of optics; the exploitation is universal, moderate or not. So while fatness is something altogether healthy (and desirable) under natural circumstances, capital treats it merely as something to milk and abuse for profit. The so-called “temple” becomes haunted by the historical-material abuse of a people that—if not Lexi, herself—nevertheless look like Lexi. She becomes unfairly privileged in a system where relatively few people get to enjoy such “success”: a princess, a sex symbol, an icon. She might seem mute, then, but there’s power in her silent smile and shapely body the elite can never monopolize:

(artist: Lexi Love)

Both ladies are industry pros, to be sure, which the state ultimately treats as expensive merchandise of a non-white variety to flaunt and exploit like a mountain of cocaine. Pushed into the streets of American cities, they featured within sites of imperial consumption deep inside the settler colony’s mother territories: to be feasted on by sex-starved white people slumming through harmful “jungle-fever fantasies,” then discarded by virtue of their raunchiest material being all over Google at the touch of a key (out of respect for Lexi and Nya, those images are not shown here; these images are from fan accounts that, as far as I can tell, are legit). In terms of spices, materiel, and “booty” as delivered through force, these girls are queenly pursuits (the ass that launched 1,000 ships) haunted by drug wars treating their flesh as the ultimate high:

 

(exhibit 34b3b2a2a2a1: Artist, top: Lexi Love; bottom: Nya Blu. It’s possible to appreciate these women as sexy and exotic while also acknowledging their human status as exploited. They might technically be clothed; their bodies still swell against all manner of skimpy-but-tight garments. The women aren’t inevitably stripped of just these, either, but of market value by various persons flooding said market with something to drive people wild with: stolen labor per a larger settler-colonial addiction that mistreats the models [who are probably well-paid, but whose image or likeness becomes branded or owned by the companies who hire them]. Such leaks are tremendously unfair to Lexi and Nya, who are framed as either “teenage” [note the braces] or “dark maternal jungle bunny”; i.e., as yet-another-form-of-nature-being-harvested-as-monstrous-feminine: a castle-like body to besiege, bought-and-paid for per a settler-colonial scheme whose shelf life is radioactive. Yet the show must go on, reducing them—however lovely they might appear—to sex objects inside a highly racist industry[3a] exploiting them for their labor [and non-white bodies] chased by white cis-het men as the universal clientele.

 Volume One likened this cycle as a liminal hauntology inside capital; i.e., raping Medusa per the castle as dislocated, viewed on the horizon:

Such a castle’s nightmarish presence denotes potential mayhem tied to one’s habitat; i.e., through the liminal hauntology of war colonizing nature and those tied to nature. When such a castle appears, it is time to be afraid; the colonial harvest is at hand. Yet, precisely because the state does not hold a monopoly over violence, terror and morphological expression, a demon or castle needn’t spell our end; it can represent our sole means of attack, reclaiming said poetics’ endless inventiveness to turn colonizer fears back into their hopelessly scared brains with counterterror [source].

[artist: Nya Blu]

So whatever power women like Nya or Lexi have—and duplicates of them who survive in the same predatory business, including others of a less-than-celebrity status—it collectively lives in the shadows of a wider exploitation hinted at by the long shadows these ladies cast. They embody the harvest as something to reclaim inside of its American hauntologies—on the surface of the skin, behind phone screens, as statuesque castle-like bodies in a traveling mise-en-abyme. They are legend, but in ways that potentially yield Richard Matteson’s fearsome undead made into a liberatory device: Medusa, thick and full, threatening to break free, getting down to business.)

All the while, white women look at them in horror and disgust, but also confused empathy as someone who is policed differently relative to the same shared characteristics: “woman is other” something we must extend to all oppressed groups treated as monstrous-feminine, not just thicc white or black cis-het women! The same critical lens we applied to Peele works here, then: Anytime someone tries to make you cum as a clever distraction from state criticism—especially while serving the profit motive—they’re enacting state apologia. We need to think through sex/rape play in ways that prevent genocide for all peoples, including sex workers exploiting others through themselves as selling out

Note: This isn’t a comment on Soon2BSalty! She’s awesome and my working experience with her was perfectly fine [and made a nice piece of art]! Go support her work! —Perse

(artist: Soon2BSalty)

Per my work as done with all my friends’ help[3], we’re exploring the opposite side of Capitalist Realism’s harmful, myopic/panoptic refrains well beyond Ellen Moers’ dated “Female Gothic”; i.e., to re-envision Matthew Lewis’ “Male Gothic” as a toy-like monstrous-feminine whose 21st century camp provides ironic rape play. Such irony expands “sodomy” and witchcraft to all forms of queerness/monstrous-feminine under attack by bloodthirsty straight dudes and token agents; i.e., serving profit as a settler-colonial structure pimping nature out: what TERFs call “men in dresses” regarding trans women and “foolish girls duped by a global conspiracy” regarding trans men (with enbies and ace people facing their own discrimination). So while people generally like a dash of splatter with their theatrically rough sex (e.g., Romeo and Juliet‘s graveyard duel: “Tempt not a dangerous man!”), we want to expand the view of the oppressed beyond white cis-het women/tokenized sex workers; i.e., as historically triangulating against/policing other oppressed peoples to receive the state’s equality of convenience, post-betrayal.

As such, we’ll conclude part one of the subchapter with a few more points on the nuts and bolts of interpersonal Gothic poetics; following that, part two will consider the toy-like pedagogy of Gothic poetics per my own experiences with various cuties—my exes, but also my current partners as real people, not parasocial exchanges.

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

We all have the power to work together for or against the state. Revolutionary cryptonymy dabbles in power as something to—like the state—temporarily surrender before taking it back. And to be completely honest, losing control/sharing power is fun under sex-positive scenarios. Except the Destroyer can’t be sex-positive unless it demonstrably challenges the cycling of profit, thus the state’s unironic war and rape of nature-as-monstrous-feminine. This arbitrates as a matter of Gothic counterculture, civil rights and social justice decided by workers, not the state (and its pulverized, accommodated intellectuals).

(artist: Blxxd Bunny)

As an iconoclastic device, then, ludo-Gothic BDSM plays with rape through ace-leaning nudism and unequal power exchange between artists and muses, doms and subs. All work together to a) comment on systemic harm through calculated risk, and b) to cooperate through our crossed wires’ survival mechanisms warped by trauma—in short, so we can function as people and have (relatively) healthy relationships, sexual or otherwise: we’re not toys for you to abuse or use to abuse others with like you might your favorite gun, car or sex object. This applies to me and Harmony Corrupted as FWBs as we negotiated, but also my friendship with Blxxd Bunny as a predominantly ace sex worker I can proudly feature time and time again! On top of that, I can invigilate/write about both cuties separately and/or together (over the next few pages) despite them having never met!

Some cuties cast big shadows. Like Harmony Corrupted, Bunny corrupts icons simply by existing in ways ironic to capitalistic dogma (which is inflexible, rigid, unable to change). Each cutie amounts, in praxial-poetic terms, to size difference challenging history as a giant composite thing their own contributions threaten with a dialectical-material opposite; i.e., in the same historical-material loop of pilfering stuff for different ends; re: “And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service.”

Except doubles serve workers or the state. Camp Marx, remember? Debate his ghost to weaponize such spirits to our cause as an ever-evolving one! During a given counterfeit’s decay, its gigantic dogma remains; e.g., Lady Justice. We can double that, take power back for ourselves; i.e., from Ozymandias, who loses power mid-entropy and takes it in again, but for a moment does not have it securely in his grip (the Shadow of Pygmalion).

Even so, the flow and spread of power can seem hideously uneven—like a black hole’s sucking in planets and spitting out single atoms from Hawking’s radiation—but the state only appears so powerful. The paradox of hyperreality is decay invades itself during Capitalist Realism, giving us room to work, thus the ability to install our own doubles to reclaim the desert of empire behind their decaying maps and galleries. The icons are always in motion, framed in different ways to achieve different ends:

(source: Bryan Rolli’s “Rush to Release Photo Outtakes from Moving Pictures Shoot,” 2021)

Fret not, lovelies, what Rush called Moving Pictures is hardly a new concept. Indeed, ambiguously gay men like Walpole and Lewis recognized through aesthetics regarding power (and aliens) as forever alive; i.e., by virtue of us haunted by the unstable, volatile past swimming all around us—to frame but also assemble like a giant or castle (or a giant, Voltron-style bunny mech) to thump capital’s ass with. It becomes a war whose mise-en-abyme is concentric, embroiled in chaos but able to move and challenge things that seem “immovable” (from Volume Zero):

The mise-en-abyme [“place in abyss”] is classically portrayed as heraldry—the coat of arms, as per Bakhtin’s “dynastic primacy and hereditary rites” of the Gothic chronotope—emblazoned on the knights’ shields, banners and killing implements belonging to the same “walking castles”: castle-narrative becomes something not just to walk around inside one castle, but between castles, outside of castles, inside the giant knight as a castle-in-a-castle; straight castles and gay castles, etc (source).

Any body-like castle or castle-like body we can do, too—our own Trojan Bunnies: “Stare and tremble!” But these can be arranged inside of an exhibit of pastiche, of praxis remediating for workers next to older examples that copied themselves to serve capital: it showcases the constant reassembly during oppositional synthesis.

(exhibit 34b3b2a2a2a1b1: Left side: source, top-left; bottom. Right side: artist, bottom-left: Frank Frazetta; bottom-right: Jean-Léon Gérôme’s “Bonaparte Before the Sphinx”; middle-left and top-right: Blxxd Bunny. Model and artist, middle-right: Blxxd Bunny and Persephone van der Waard. Power is a splendid lie, but also a reassembly of old assemblies mostly hidden until now [the right side of this collage-of-collages being concealed until later in this volume]. Make it a deck full of trap cards tailor-made/jury-rigged to fuck with capital’s own statues; it’s not like they can monopolize any of this!)

Per the infernal concentric pattern, we dance in the ruins, learning to recognize not just the signs, but how they dialectically-materially clash, reform/redouble, and fit together. In turn, people are drawn to our decay and revival as a giant, sex-positive force that escapes the illusion inside of itself: our castle-narrative, our ludo-Gothic BDSM an opposing force denigrating capital and celebrating liberation by virtue of power as something no structure can hold onto forever! Indeed, capital cannot, because it decays by design; and while moderates try to conceal the decay of fascism, they only have their own radioactivity eat them from the inside, out. Like the caterpillar and the wasp, eventually the green statue becomes like a chrysalis; i.e., something to nefandously emerge from differently that hungrily changes the function of power and capital into Communism leaving exploitation behind: our butterfly (or wasp) having eaten theirs—mid-poiesis, mid-refrain—to change the flow of power along all the usual tracks: the Archaic Mother and her huge, throbbing ovipositor making for some strange, hungry babies (with Starry Eyes, below, being [in true paradoxical fashion] being two things at once: a lovely Gothic commentary on psychosexual transformation [of the Sapphic sort] and damning indictment of the Hollywood class system). We’re left with things that—however seemingly “killed and dead” they might seem—don’t stay dead, indeed cannot die no matter how much abuse capital throws at them! Once deconstructed, Medusa can simply reconstruct, endlessly reborn! “That all you got?” You can’t kill the metal, bitches! Medusa cannot die (neither can the state, which always threatens to return, but either can be atrophied to irrelevance)!

(source: Cult Projections’ “Q&A with Alexandra Essoe, Star of Starry Eyes,” 2015)

When this happens, it’s no longer the state taking resources for itself. The material and social conditions shift in ways that redistribute and rearrange the Base and Superstructure, mid-resistance: into a camped, horizontal, chaotically flexible iteration of itself. It’s a double, in other words, a Venus twin with an opposite function to capital’s monopolies and trifectas, achieving post-scarcity through pre-capitalist nostalgia, but also the Four Gs, Six Rs, mode of expression, Gothic-Communist Hermeneutic Quadfecta, three doubles of oppositional praxis (from Volume Zero) and basics of oppositional synthesis/the oppositional synthetic groupings (from Volume One); i.e., as something to practically reduce to anger/gossip, monsters and camp as a matter of good habits that bounce all along this manifesto tree as something to camp the twin trees of capital with: using our creative successes to outlast our short lives! What we do in life echoes in eternity!

(exhibit 34b3b2a2a2a1b2: Artist, top-left and bottom-right: Blxxd Bunny; bottom-left and top-right: Harmony Corrupted. Like a “pharaoh’s pyramid,” effigies of Medusa are wrought in disintegration, becoming Russian-doll golems that assemble and disassemble in the abyssal refrain. But decay totally rules! In the desert of the real, we don’t have to pull an Anakin and complain, “I don’t like sand. It’s coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere. Not like here. Here everything is soft and smooth!” We can have our cake and eat it, too—our bodies serving as giants-in-small, smooth pillars of rock ‘n roll, effigies to Medusa that illustrate mutual consent by engaging poetically with the past to produce Communism in the present; i.e., as something we can add to from moment to moment. Simply put, our bodies are built for war—class and culture war through sex work liberating ourselves through iconoclastic art, side by side! It’s a booty phalanx, hard and soft, united as one against the state monopolizing us. Nothing will terrify them more than our own advertised might: intersectional solidarity through sex and force made sex-positive, not imperial! It becomes second-nature, strikes all by itself; i.e., as language evolving and building on itself as part of something larger trapped-in-small, encased in sweet amber.)

That’s just the tip, loves. We’ll broach all of that during Volume Three (and provide copies of the manifesto tree for you to reference). Until then, just remember that power is a paradox largely concerned with perception; to that, icons and canon are ridiculously fragile, and can be changed easily enough by an intersectionally organized collective. During special moments of routine crisis we can install cracks in their perceived “invincibility.” We can break them. Nothing is permanent; there’s always the opportunity to change, but especially when capital decays. Capital is always decaying and said decay increases the more they try to take (which they do by design). They will not last, and in the vital moment as a series of steps, we can unify to replace their gargoyles with our own, camping their ghosts with ours: from Caesar to Marx, we camp them all.

Put in simpler (and shorter) language: Ace people rock, and Bunny’s the fucking bomb, y’all! And while they currently don’t do custom content, the material that we produced together is some of my all-time favorites. So, similar to all of the cuties I work with, please go show Bunny some love! They work hard to deliver a killer product each and every time, but do so as an excellent comrade worthy of your patronage and respect! Their smile (and booty) are infectious, irresistible:

(artist: Blxxd Bunny)

In short, we’re comrades in a shared struggle, one whose Gothic-Communist spiral intertwines with Gothic canon during oppositional praxis; i.e., a double helix that complicates along a sex-to-ace gradient during Gothic poetics at large (from Volume Zero):

(exhibit 1a1a1c3: D&D “homebrew” is a way of escaping the palimpsestuous racial profiling of Tolkien’s High Fantastical gentrification enacted by Wizards of the Coast trying to enforce the racial [thus class and gender] binary—e.g., “mind flayers” always being lawful evil, or Drow always being chaotic evil/”pure evil” inside the state of exception [exhibit 41b] to fill the gap made by the humanized [yet still fetishized] “good” orcs [exhibit 37e]: the exceptional “not bad for an orc” pariah. Tolkien made orcs to be beaten and bitten by swords with fancy-sounding names illustrating the function as simultaneously dressed up and denuded [from The Hobbit]:

He took out his sword again, and again it flashed in the dark by itself. It burned with a rage that made it gleam if goblins were about; now it was bright as blue flame for delight in the killing of the great lord of the cave. It made no trouble whatever of cutting through the goblin-chains and setting all the prisoners free as quickly as possible. This sword’s name was Glamdring the Foe-hammer, if you remember. The goblins just called it Beater, and hated it worse than Biter if possible. Orcrist, too, had been saved; for Gandalf had brought it along as well […]

At this point Gandalf fell behind, and Thorin with him. They turned a sharp corner. “About turn!” he shouted. “Draw your sword Thorin!”

There was nothing else to be done; and the goblins did not like it. They came scurrying round the corner in full cry, and found Goblin-cleaver and Foe-hammer shining cold and bright right in their astonished eyes. The ones in front dropped their torches and gave one yell before they were killed. The ones behind yelled still more, and leaped back knocking over those that were running after them. “Biter and Beater!” they shrieked; and soon they were all in confusion…” [source]. 

This function can be reversed, but must occur within the mode of expression; e.g., sexy orc roleplay in Skyrim mods, exhibit 84b; i.e., inside material conditions to avoid praxial invisibility. You have to be able to give it shape inside camp and communicate it to others afterward.)

To this, oppositional praxis during Gothic Communism is less like the discrete, nine-squared D&D Alignment Chart (above) and more like a Venn Diagram of the same components doubled and super-imposed over each other. Hence, why revolutionary acronyms like ACAB (“All Cops Are Bad”) are handy but also why you still have to distinguish between who’s genuine/good-faith and who isn’t/bad-faith during oppositional praxis; i.e., through dialectical-material scrutiny as performed by gay space wizards through whatever “poison” you pick and serve up (source).

As part of the helix, there exist a lot of tightropes to walk. For starters, sex workers love to look good regardless of sexual pleasure (though the two often overlap). Released from the bondage of the mind, the rape castle’s unironic function disappears but the aesthetics of captivity, rape and murder remain; i.e., something to fuck to, fool around with and feel the high of proximity to power without actual danger being a risk. We can heal together while respecting each other in ways others from our own separate histories did not, but who still taught us a thing or two to “better the instruction” in an ironically sex-positive sense. In turn, we can take that and use it when working with new cuties who aren’t total dickwads!

For instance, when Jadis marked me for trauma, I lived to produce my greatest work (from Volume Two, part one):

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! (source).

Sometimes this was in clothes, at my desk. But as you have seen, sometimes it requires going mask-off, but also clothes-off with (and balls-deep inside) my friends; i.e., to show you my trauma as something I can express in ways that feel and impart healthy psychosexual lessons.

(artists: Persephone van der Waard and Cuwu)

Indeed, I very much had to, as Jadis—always one to take, take, take by force[4] (“You have heart! I’ll take that too!”)—took my Gothic wardrobe during our separation (the snazzy clothing purchased with her dead father’s fortune to manipulate me with). I eventually had to get my own collar again, purchased by me and chosen by my own “owner,” Bay, as one of many future friends to play with while wearing it:

(exhibit 34b3b2a2b1: Artist: Persephone van der Waard. Like rings as gifts to give and take away, collars wield great potency as emblematic of “rape” worn around our necks. Jadis took my old collar [left] with them; Bay picked my new collar [right]. The former was a master at hurting others through gifts; the latter, at healing others despite their own trauma. In short, Bay didn’t become a stone-cold cunt like Jadis did; i.e., the latter aping a bad likeness of her godawful mother as something to elicit pity and fear from me, but also compelled submission and confessions. Like, fuck that noise! I’m a little puppy-raven who wants a good owner, meaning someone who treats me—in the Gothic-Communist manner—as an equal, not a slave. But per my own trauma and open nature, I had to learn that one the hard way—i.e., by people who knew a great deal about harming and deceiving others in order to control them, but fuck-all about being open and honest in sex-positive ways. We gotta camp Nietzsche, too, then; i.e., gazing into abysses to fight sex-coercive monsters by becoming sex-positive monsters: “I’m totally gazing into your ‘abyss’ right meow!” / “That’s right, baby! Now come on inside! Mommy’s waiting!”)

Regarding the Gothic past as half-real, but also something to toy with in new imaginary forms performed in our everyday lives, I need to warn/encourage you: lived trauma can bleed into shared trauma as a site for new predation; or said “predation” can be put in quotes by someone who also knows what it’s like to suffer who doesn’t want to harm others to help themselves feel better! This coin-toss outcome is essentially pure chance on a shared aesthetic, meaning you gotta look past the image to spot the flags [red or green] hidden through subtext. You gotta know yourself, which you can’t fully without taking some risks with others. The best toys can hurt you in the wrong hands; in the right hands, you can feel like you’ve died and gone to heaven (or hell; re: Milton’s “the mind is its own place”).

While love, monsters and sex all rule, you can really get your heart broke all the same. In short, you gotta “risk it for the biscuit,” but don’t let down your guard; dream big, but don’t lose sight of you humanity or your playmate’s! Once you have confidence and some experiences under your belt, meeting cuties will get easier, as will falling in (and out of love): unicorns thicker than a bowl of oatmeal—colorful, exotic, tasty and all around you if you have eyes that see. Like weirdness, confidence can attract. Consent is sexy! Monsters are sexy! So go for those who are actually bold enough to bare themselves in public (as sex workers generally must do); i.e., a sight for sore eyes standing out from all the usual eyesores (systemic inequality and discrimination), making a stand to speak with their body and gender as part of who they are. Doing so encourages Galatean sorority through tailored “plumage”: to look related less through traditional hereditary-heraldic variables and more through a found family. Birds of a feather flock (and fuck) together!

(source: FilmsByJosh’s “Black Tape Project,” 2024)

Unlike birds, people are socially and sexually flexible—can change their external appearance through art as a subjective, human experience. People, then, are like tattoos: personalized, expressive, wrought through pain as endemic to the healing process; healing hurts. But some people have tattoos and other bold (sometimes crude, graphic) qualities that announce their trauma and recovery on their sleeves; i.e., as part of who they are that exits out into world in good faith. Like a Gothic portrait, the idea with these signals is to vibe in ways that guard and express, yielding good psychosexual habits and campy paradoxes (e.g., cute little bats, adorable princes of darkness), not unironic medieval violence and bigotries (a troubling comparison whose dark reflection becomes a doubt or worst fear to oscillate in front of, but also remind us who we’re not by virtue of excising it).

As such, bad faith is always possible with masks. This means the double operation of cryptonymy should always be considered, insofar as a proverbial open book is still a “book,” meaning the cover contains something that isn’t the same on the inside as the out, or can pass itself off as something it’s not. In short, there can be a predatory or adversarial character to a survivor who has just as much potential to be cruel versus kind. Superficiality aside, there is a preferential component that remains subjective (skin-deep and in the eye of the beholder); i.e., the body as a canvas according to its parts as preferred; e.g., boobs are ok, in my opinion, but the booty is where it’s at! Or you can try combinations: thicc, bendy and expressive. Like Harmony and I, it becomes something that’s out, proud, and seen in public despite scornful eyes; i.e., beauty as a target to click and devastate, versus appreciating for its courage, its taut, bombshell moxie.

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

To that, I’m a sucker for mommy doms because I’ve learned it through trial and error (which is what dating initially is unless you have a book like this to refer to). As such, I’ve discovered that I love Amazons, mommy doms and knightly girls: a girl-crazy trans woman chasing after different dark mommies, and who loves the complexity of getting topped from below—to be nurtured by someone I can really pound and call funny names[5], and who enjoys receiving tributes while mechanically disadvantaged but privileged within a liminal position; i.e., one whose negotiated mutual consent makes them equally powerful to myself in a shared space where power is largely a ludo-Gothic illusion. Compliments are paid—not in pounds of flesh, but appreciation through sex-positive “peril” as forbidden, but nutritious and enriched by Gothic maturity as a Communist quality evolved past the dated barbarism of Capitalism; i.e., versus canonical forms of cake-like or peachy food that rot the brain through harmful, sex-coercive lessons: things that encourage Man Box antics from dudes (or token women like Jadis) and a lack of emotional/Gothic intelligence and class/cultural awareness.

Does this all sound like crazy talk from the madwoman in the attic? Poppycock! Remember that power is a paradox—one to play and perform with as a potent means of interrogating and negotiating power and resistance in the same shadow zone’s complicated sphere. I’ve written about this a lot, and want to give you an extended quote I feel is germane. Skip ahead a few pages (“Am I a joke to you?”) if you’ve already read it.

As Volume Zero writes:

The idea is to liberate ourselves with fairly negotiated, thus cathartic, dungeon fantasies that camp canon through counterterrorist theatre to whatever degree feels correct to us [emphasis, me]; e.g., me in a haunted castle, wandering through the dark, menacing halls while wearing a sexy dress (and nothing under it, my bare body molested by the breeze and the fabric): a hopelessly vulnerable Gothic heroine feeling pretty and desired, hungrily and desperately interrogating the musical, cobwebbed gloomth while scarcely having anything between me and certain “doom.” As usual, the Gothic paradox allows for intense, oxymoronic dualities to coexist at the same time in the same space (e.g., “sad cum” or “gloomth” or similar and confused degrees of “verklempt” during the castle’s psychosexual, emotional “storm”). Simply put, I want to feel naked and exposed, thus paradoxically most alive in ways that I have negotiated through the contract between me and the media I’m working with (wherein the Metroidvania castle, as far as I’m concerned, is the perfect dom); i.e., while being “hunted” and covered in rebellious “kick me” symbols and clothing that advertises my true self260 as naked, colorful and dark, as if to tease the viewer in the shadows to try something (and also showing my ass to my academic dominators: “I fart in your general direction!”). As the kids say, that’s a mood.

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

Why stick out? you ask? One, because we must in order to survive. Two, because our deals with the devil simply acknowledge our true selves, which the state wants us to reject […]. But also, it feels good to be Athena’s Aegis; i.e., challenging heteronormative power in ways that demonstrate how fragile said illusion (and its gatekeepers) are. State bullies are entitled nerds completely used to getting everything they want, who desire what I will never give them (a form of agency I’ve worked hard for); and completely afraid of nearly everything and will freak out at fairly silly things they have no business getting so worked up about: at people like me, burning down their imaginary churches and those churches’ ideas of compelled order about Capitalism and its gobstopper illusions (those highly unnatural and imprisoning systems of thought that are slowly killing us as a species). Frankly the idea of me being terrifying seems absurd, but as a burning proponent of rebellion constitutes something that still, on some level, represents an incendiary threat that many advertise as the “end times”: Communism… but Gothic and gay! To which I cheerfully put up the goat horns and say in response, “Hail, Satan!” It’s like saying “Ni!” to old ladies.

Our performative and internalized devilry becomes something to join—a communion or pact whose assimilation classically amounts to a devilish bargain; yet Gothic Communism is a group effort, one whose sex-positive class/culture warrior is among a fellowship or pandemonium of equally sex-positive ne’er-do-wells instead of one or more class/race traitors for the elite and their age-old Faustian bargains. We reach towards you, croon “Join us!” and become something to run away with; i.e., corrupting the minds of the youth (women and children) by calling out seductively to them, offering forbidden knowledge/fruit as a chance to go wild/go native by coming out of the closet in opposition to state forces (who will chase us, only to be turned away at the door—”no fascists allowed!”): the truth of things in its totality and not just a white person’s perspective as an outsider to genuine atrocities; e.g., a Lovecraft novella, an overplayed Iron Maiden or Slayer song or the problematic castle of a Radcliffean novel (though these can all be enjoyed mid-rebellion).

As Robert Asprey notes, terror and native wit/creativity are the historical tools of the counterterrorist, often being all they immediately have at their disposal; under Capitalism in the Internet Age, labor becomes a huge bargaining chip that Gothic Communism marries to terror during class war as a theatrical, operatic proposition (solidarity and labor action expressed as much through improvised Gothic poetics [improv] as improvised weapons): a means of bringing the oppressed and alienated closer to together in an informed, Satanic act of outer-space empathy and love in the face of state forces. The spotlight isn’t something to hog or monopolize strictly by white nerds but expand and share in a drive towards post-scarcity (through a horizontally-arranged system that isn’t rigged in favor of those who control it because no one person or select group will be in control, in that sense; that’s what anarchism ultimately is).

Doing so becomes second-nature, a way of existing that doesn’t require drugs or sex (though they can certainly be involved if one wants them to); it requires community and love in opposition to capital’s usual bad-faith actors, fear and dogma […]

In turn, these principles manifest efficiently in music, art and culture not as “lesser forms of media” but as an open, quick and honest way that people express themselves regarding the truth of things (which the usual benefactors of Capitalism will cover up by acting like the Enlightenment and Pax Americana is either somehow good for everyone, or neutered forms of futurism that can be envisioned by white men who speak for everyone else; e.g., Asimov or Jameson). It’s hard, at first, to “put on the glasses.” Eventually you don’t need them at all—communicating effortlessly with others who see the way you do because it’s become a part of your culture, the Superstructure. That becomes a powerful bond—in part because it’s saturated through an entire polity versus simply being restricted to a single-dose product.

As such, terror through labor action is my weapon, but specifically counterterror by pointing out rather nakedly the stupid things the state fears […] The paradox continues insofar as I learned what, how and why through a harmful, abusive emulation of rape fantasy while living with Jadis, which I then turned into cathartic forms having at least partially learned (by accident) the method from my humiliation endured inside an academic setting. […]

Entirely by accident, then, I discovered through bad play (enacted against me by a bad actor/player) that good play amounts to Gothic poetics as a potent means of regaining control through reclaimed implements of terror (the manacle, castle, rapist, slur or baton, etc) but also being that which terrifies the state and its proponents to no end: a refusal to conform or obey (which forces the state’s hand, relying on the veneer of not being the tyrants they’ve spent decades projecting onto Nazis, nominal Communists, and other theatrical scapegoats). Haunted by the ghosts of my youth, I could dance with them and make versions of themselves that could never harm me. I would be in control in ways I never felt before, feeling a presence of “danger” that triggered my prey mechanisms just enough to make the exercise therapeutic; i.e., while showing myself off as a trust-building exercise behind a buffer that stood between me and the world. The whole performance/thought experiment nursed my wounds and made me feel safe without pushing me into the arms of future abusers; instead, I could transform myself and my environment using my education as a negotiation device, the theatre and its effect enhanced by years of academic and lived experience. Suddenly my years of costly and time-extensive Gothic education felt profoundly useful—not just to me, but something I could give back to the workers of the world; i.e., those who had already given me much to think about in relation to their own work as part of a movement I could join through Gothic poetics:

(artist: ikerellatab)

Despite their poetic nature, performance and play are an absolutely potent means of expressing thus negotiating power through the Gothic mode (its castles, monsters and rape scenarios); a polity of proletarian poets can negotiate future interrogations of unequal power within the Gothic imagination as connected to our material conditions: one shapes and maintains the other and vice versa. As such, my own contributions to the Gothic are very much about making it sexual again, but also sex-positive in ways that Radcliffe (and her own venerated castle’s praxial inertia) were not; i.e., tearing her (and her Faustian contracts, castles and various harmful BDSM scenarios) “a new college-debt-sized asshole” while, in the same breath, addressing my deeply personal, trans woman’s fears of my own penis (e.g., Zeuhl) but also trying anal and other things in a monstrous context (e.g., Cuwu’s choking and rape play and Jadis’ “put your mysterium tremendum in my uncanny valley!”). In short, my playing with new things—activities, roleplays and identity scenarios—had transformative potential relative to my sexuality and gender as highly idiosyncratic.

We’re all idiosyncratic in ways Capitalism wants you to forget, so try anal, “chains and torture,” and the Numinous as something to reassemble yourself in some shape or form during liminal expression; the paradox of being free while still “in chains” is a sex-positive kind of theater that is incredibly intense, but harmless (and it’s more fun as a group activity—we are a social species). As the conveyor of these complicated fantasies, my book is a castle with castles inside of itself—built for the reader to wander around inside while asking questions about: to play with, making mistakes that will undoubtedly hurt, but not harm them, and which they can take and apply to their own social-sex lives. We can use this to camp not just Radcliffe as the end-all-be-all of the castled stage, but also Tolkien’s former interrogations of power presented in poetic language (source).

As we shall see, the same liberatory praxis applies to any canonical darling to kill for development’s sake while playing with history mid-poiesis, inside our own BDSM “torture” dungeons. We want to rule in Hell, not serve in Heaven, lovelies.

As such, the chief goal of Gothic Communism isn’t just to tear down old the harmful legacies of old dead people (through that is important); there’s a Cartesian element to Gothic canon that we need to consciously attack, liberating as we do sex work (and nature-as-alien) through our own misfit toys. This is a poetic device, which Volume Two is mostly concerned with; as Volume Two, part one argues:

In short, we want to hug the alien, therefore contribute to a pedagogy of the oppressed by synthesizing praxis, invoking the dialectic of the alien to confront and interrogate trauma (and power) as something to perform and play with; i.e., ludo-Gothic BDSM as a potent means of embodying likenesses among differences, its dark theatricalities ushering intersectional solidarity in by humanizing monsters as de facto (extracurricular) teaching devices: to be more creative and poetic as a means of attaining praxial catharsis, collectively illustrating mutual consent thereby raising emotional/Gothic intelligence and class/cultural awareness, mid-struggle. Catharsis amounts to reversing the flow of power away from the state (and its powerful illusions) through our daily interrogations (source).

Except this applies differently per oppressed group in a shared pedagogy’s similarities amid difference; e.g., cis women experience oppression differently than trans people do, but nevertheless are still regulated by state forces that trigger them in rape-fantasy realms meant to help them spread their broken wings and soar (not without some element of grandeur and camp: “I’m a peacock! You gotta let me fly!”).

(exhibit 34b3b2a2b2: Artist: Harmony Corrupted. “Rape” becomes something to put into quotes versus the profit motive as something that commonly presents nature as monstrous-feminine; i.e., a womb-like castle to invade and, per Francis Bacon, torture nature’s secrets out of in service to capital as it now exists. This speaks to the lives of women [and other marginalized groups] who—faced with state force—are given two choices: tokenize or fight! They play with the Dark-Souls boss gag through their own social-sex lives as campy and instructional: “PUSSY SLAIN.” It becomes fun, putting “murder” and “rape” in quotes, but letting someone feel monstrous and sexy at the same time; i.e., as a sex-positive challenge to TERFs, SWERFs, fascists, et al. Class war and Gothic counterculture are fun partly because those accustomed to sexual violence and gender essentialization can find people they trust a) not to harm them, and b) let them be their own weird selves inside a room of one’s own. Fucking is fun as an oft-ahegao means of doing so! Not just once, but again and again [“Can you put it back in?” Harmony likes to shyly ask her partner]. Rooms need paint, after all!)

For instance, Harmony—when fenced inside a Walpolean “rape castle”—is a cis-het woman, thus has cis-het female trauma. She might feel the impostor relative to her womb, booty or breasts, etc, as female-coded. However, the same ideas extend to the monstrous-feminine (and its various torture dungeons) as a thoroughly GNC proposition (with other intersecting marginalized components); e.g., as Harmony and I collectively demonstrate during ludo-Gothic BDSM as a group effort that goes beyond us, and which I shall now unpack before jumping into Volume Two, part two’s Monster Modules. In short, we’re the monsters, playing with “rape” as a kind of fantasy theatre trapped both inside itself and as part of a larger concentric meta text; e.g., from Northanger Abbey (1817) to Scream (1996) to Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin (2022).

Let’s unpack all of that next, in part two! Onto “Into the Toy Chest, part two—My Experiences“!

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Footnotes

[1] In war, especially American wars, “victory” is arbitrated by kill count; the same idea is perpetrated by weird canonical nerds stuck in the Man Box regarding sexual conquests: a “body count,” which generally only “counts” if it’s PIV sex. In truth, numbers are far less important than the quality and character of a given relationship, not the sex; i.e., my in-person body count is eight—where I achieved PIV sex, but furthermore where the majority of those [six] were people I was friends with, and which the sex was a chance to learn more about them versus the end-all, be-all of our relations.

[2] From guns to cars to explosives—e.g., crash dummies, the dwarvish satchel charges from Myth, to MythBusters (2003)—all simulate war, rape and death through calculated risk; i.e., as something to have an element of control over through a mixture of analog bodies and implements of actual harm. It’s a game, a form of redirection that ultimately feels playful and cathartic; i.e., the closer you approach sex-positive forms, which capital will try to fake in service to profit, not workers or nature.

Indeed, it’s often zany in Loony-Toons-style ways classically befitting of young boys; e.g., my little brother hijacking one of the jets in Battlefield 2 (2005) and flying so high that the physics grew “dangerously confused,” causing the plane to spiral out of control and spin impossibly fast (with my brother ejecting to leave the confused co-pilot sitting alone in the whirling and disintegrating plane); or, when he hacked the game’s physics in Daggerfall (1995), effectively turning his character first into a rocket car (zipping along the ground similar to Doomguy’s own lack of friction) and then an airplane/missile that launched off the imperial castle steps, flying forward at impossible speeds to smash gloriously into the ground like a meteor.

It’s akin to playtesting life through abrupt and obscene simulations that, like a videogame, verge on the absurd, the warlike, the outrageously violent. But, as myself playing Myth on an old (new, at the time) iMac, or my brother playing Need for Speed 2 (1997) on the PSOne and trying to “tip buses” (think cows, but with vehicles) in a particular level, it turns complete accidents and horrendous, abject failures by any other name/on any other day into an Evel-Knievel-type spectacle: something to sell tickets to and rate 10/10 for the thrill of it; i.e., on stolen land, but also into illusions of digital replicas of said stolen land during Capitalist Realism. The profit motive generates such entropy as chasing after efficient profit that translates back into real life out of various simulations that decay into the real world connected to the hyperreal simulation: rubbernecking with a death race feel that verges on parody speaking to the reality of car violence; e.g., Carmageddon (above, 1997) merging popular heavy metal—Fear Factory’s Demanufacture (1995)—with out-of-control car racing similar to Mortal Kombat the movie (1995) did with pit fighting/manufactured counterculture (e.g., KMFDM’s 1997 “Megalomaniac“) or Road Rash (1996) did Soundgarden’s Bad Motor Finger (1991). It’s like a caricature, a sick joke, a bad portrait with a time signature and hauntological idiosyncrasy gliding along the same Gothic mode. At times, it can feel a bit manufactured, especially from a white, middle-class perspective acting rebellious even when there’s no systemic oppression taking place (which is what fascism historically is: white oppressors playing the victim); i.e., a controlled form of opposition that’s even a bit silly and random (as silly and random as my brother naming one of his bases in the original DOS version of X-Com: UFO Defense [1994] “trans fat,” after glancing at the black-and-white Nutritional Facts label on the back of the Cheetos bag he was eating from: “Trans Fat was invaded by aliens! No!”). Can you tell the difference?

(source: Fandom)

[3a] Which extends to camping superhero stories with varying degrees of success regarding assimilative double standards; e.g., Key and Peele’s “This Superhero Squad Has a Discrimination Problem,” 2020). It’s easy to swat low-hanging fruit but still compromise on harder moral stances; e.g., Jordan Peele disappointingly taking Israel’s side in support of Joe Biden’s role in American’s age-old genocidal antics: “Peele put his name to the letter which praised Biden for his ‘unshakable moral conviction, leadership, and support for the Jewish people,’ and urged the U.S. government ‘to not rest until all hostages are released'” (source: Shannon Power’s “Jordan Peele Faces Backlash,” 2023); i.e., Afrocentrism-meets-plain-old-American-exceptionalism-and-centrist-dogma! Gross. More to the point, anytime someone tries to make you laugh as a clever distraction from state criticism, they’re enacting state apologia. We need to think through laughter in ways that prevent genocide for all peoples, not just black Americans, Peele!

[3] If you want to be included, refer to Persephone van der Waard’s “Looking for Models, Sex Positivity 5/13/2024.”

[4] They were a bully and took pleasure in stealing from others.

[5] To be silly in bed, but also elsewhere; i.e., like Bob Wily to Dr. Leo Marvin on Good Morning, America, in What About Bob? (1991): “You can call me boob“; e.g., me telling Bay, ” I love you, my pepperoni pizza with double cheese and stuffed crust.” To which Bay lets me “eat their pizza,” anytime.