This blog post is part of “Deal with the Devil,” a third promotion originally inspired by the first and second ones I did with Harmony Corrupted: “Brace for Impact” and “Searching for Secrets” (2024). The first 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). “Deal with the Devil” shall do the same, but with Volume Two, part two’s opening/thesis section and one of its two Monster Modules, Demons (the “Searching for Secrets” promotion covered the Undead Module, which is now live). As usual, this promotion was written, illustrated and invigilated by me as part of my larger Sex Positivity (2023) book series.
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Cops and Victims, part two: Our Sweet Revenge; or, Being Ourselves While Reclaiming Anal Rape, mid-Amazonomachia (feat. Nyx and Amy Ginger Hart)
“Crom, I have never prayed to you before. I have no tongue for it. No one, not even you, will remember if we were good men or bad. Why we fought, or why we died. All that matters is that two stood against many. That’s what’s important! Valor pleases you, Crom… so grant me one request. Grant me revenge! And if you don’t listen, then the HELL with you!”
—Conan, Conan the Barbarian
Picking up where “Reclaiming Amazons; or, Cops and Victims (opening and part one: the Riddle of Steel)” left off…
Demons show us our deepest, darkest desires, which mirror our present, dialectical-material realities. Amazons, as we have explored, are the stuff of American pulp—a Nazi or a TERF’s wet dream/cheap power fantasy about getting even (a lie, considering their revenge against never stops)—but they’re also a timeless medieval (of knights and barbarians, but also Amazons and similar demonically crafted beings[1]) we reclaim to have our own revenge: through the language of the imaginary past as half-real, shared across space and time, on-and-offstage between workers for or against the state.
This desire—to crush one’s enemies and rape the vulnerable—is inverted, insofar as the state wishes to trample us routinely underfoot (and move money through nature), whereas we reclaim such devices of rape and revenge (which Amazons are) to stymie profit and dismantle the state once and for all; re: during the aesthetics of power and death during ludo-Gothic BDSM’s rape play. Our actions aren’t those made with total impunity and heartless retribution like token state enforcers, but classify as “criminal” and automatically violent in their eyes because the state demands such things in order to exist: unironic rape, unironic Amazons pursuant to rape in conqueror-fantasy language vis-à-vis cops and victims (the strange appetites of those who gentrify and decay under capital, but also survive its abuse to abuse others or attract abusers).
Part one explored our confronting of the imaginary past as having a tokenized, fascist character (re: TERFs, Angela Carter and Creed, etc). Part two considers the whore’s revenge as ultimately the subversion of Amazon’s prior subjugation, doing so through the language of warriors and rape during the whore’s paradox: to camp rape while suffering from its historical effects. “Rape” feels oddly good, either when putting others “to the sword” or vice versa (re: the so-called “Riddle of Steel”). Reflecting on earlier arguments, we’ll consider this with Amazons (a classic terrorist) and anal sex (a classic terror weapon), reverting the anisotropic quality of such terrorism to serve a proletarian purpose: the whore’s revenge granted by standing bravely against our enemies! To reclaim their stories of rape against us, hence all things associated with those tools of abuse.
Weapons of Terror; or, Anal Amazons: Reclaiming Anal Sex, mid-Amazonomachia
(artist: Aria Rain)
First, what is anal? Anal speaks as much to rape and vulnerability as it does to proximity with unequal power and forbidden pleasure: exposed dumpers. While the state loves to threaten damsels with impregnation, it also deems them “worthy” of it. While sodomizing maidens isn’t unheard of, doing so goes against the profit motive/patrilineal descent. Damsels are maidens, first and foremost—sodomy something of an afterthought/sinful prophylactic reserved for victims worthy of that treatment: whores, thus sex demons (a stigma, let it be said, that is often assigned to older married women; i.e., those who have already borne children/marry up and are resentful towards the status quo, but who canonically punch down: the wicked stepmother a kind of witch-y impostor/devil-in-disguise).
Amazons, by comparison, are whores from the offset, hence sodomized to better stress their demonic status and token value (and deny the victim any chance at generational revenge: to train their children to avenge state devastation). Even so, the state also views, thus treats Amazons “like men”: as capable of revenge beyond gossip and poison; re: phallic women, or bitches, threatening lesser men (“little bitches”) with castration, captivity and ignominious penetration! Forced anal, then, speaks to the capture of Amazons “tamed” and tokenized by humiliating and painful taboo sex ranked as “worst” by the rapist; i.e., vae victus in receiving state revenge, said revenge (the cop) aping the colonized in bad faith: to fuck, thus dominate like the animals Cartesian rule prescribes (a process less about biological accuracy [animals can’t rape/sodomize each other] and more to dehumanize those “of nature” slated for social-psychosexual punishment by police forces: abusing chattel slaves/property who can’t consent). And yet, colonial abuse ties historically-materially to bodily sites of psychosexual harm, which rebellious recipients might subvert; i.e., to submit in ways they—like any oppressed people part of the land—can reclaim through theatrical distress/rape revenge; re: rape play extending to “playing dead,” meaning to camp one’s rape by subverting colonizer vaudeville inside itself: mid-witch-hunt, witches policing witches, sex policing sex.
To it, Amazon booties can threaten rape, insofar as “death by Snu-Snu” can mean pretty much whatever you want it to; i.e., to give but also to receive its war chest. “Amazon” can likewise mean “anal” as a classic terror weapon to use against conquered foes (re: “prison sex” mentality within rape culture[2] having warrior elements), which subversive forms can reclaim as a postcolonial device—not the clapping of one’s cheeks under genuine duress by token Amazons (thus token bitches whose shitty behavior lessens the whole in the eyes of the oppressed/viewing public), but a site of forbidden pleasure during ludo-Gothic BDSM thwarting profit per the whore’s revenge: the place whence girls shit, but also where bolder (and braver) dicks go inside to vengefully defy heteronormative reproductive orders (the decay of the nuclear family unit[3])!
To conclude, anal is both a classic act of rape, and a canonical, complicitly cryptonymic accusation (and mark) of shame; i.e., of forced submission trapped in duality during liminal expression. Like Medusa, herself, iconoclasts (and their Great Pumpkins, below) cryptonymically reverse abjection, camping imperial consumption (sex and force) to weaken Capitalist Realism, year-round; i.e., not just on the appointed, state-supplied day of “Halloween” (controlled opposition), but freeing the harvested (the ghost of the counterfeit/spectres of Marx) to fight back, thus reverse abjection (state sovereignty upheld through force) on our Aegis: throwing the energies of rape and revenge back in the colonizer’s face! “Any weapon can become a weapon of terror” (re: Asprey) and anal is a weapon for which everyone has the ability (and the asshole) to camp state doubles, using bad worker puns and wholesome worker fun: the Gothic maturity of a rebellious bodily autonomy Hippolyta would be proud of—reversing terror/counterterror with our butts. Let ‘er rip!
(artist: Kitty Boy Jake)
That’s anal in a nutshell. Let’s quickly outline some additional forces at work (two pages), then broach my thesis argument.
First, subjugation is something to subvert in dominant/submissive language. It doesn’t apply exclusively to Amazons, but any “of nature-as-monstrous-feminine” per the whore’s paradox having revenge during Amazonomachia‘s broader definition, “monster battle,” attached to “psychosexuality” expressed (which I do) as “battle sex”; i.e., having revenge through “rape” theatrics while haunted by actual rape, thus help prevent the latter in the future by throttling profit: humanizing the harvest by using anal sex’ position as “very uncomfortable place,” itself alluding to the demonization of colonized lands and peoples. Anything said herein applies to out-and-out Amazons or Medusa, but also offshoots, like orcs and goblins, witches and vampires, etc—in short, anything monstrous-feminine associated with sodomy that has a bone to pick with capital targeting our bums (with the xenomorph originally being Dan O’Bannon’s crude metaphor for irritable bowel syndrome).
Unironic submission occurs because colonial forces aim to not merely to destroy their enemies, but humiliate them during anal as a pacifying terror device; i.e., anything that might be perceived as empathetic “slack” for the harvest and rebellion is sodomized by the colonizer to antagonize nature-as-monstrous-feminine all over again; re: Capitalism raping nature along the usual gyn-ecological arguments, but also blood libel and sodomy-style extermination rhetoric: as their own modular persecution networks that—in capital’s later days—crossed with some degree of interchangeability to assist in profit raping nature through literal-to-figurative sodomy. This means anything monstrous-feminine (female or not) having an asshole, thus being subject to anal rape as an ongoing threat, mid-witch-hunt, hence opportunity to abject and commodify such things.
For straight men, rape—but especially anal rape—is something to joke about, insofar as receiving it usually doesn’t concern them (outside cases of child and carceral abuse). By comparison, anyone deemed “monstrous-feminine” under Cartesian rule[4] is already demonic in state eyes, thus subject to anal as a terror device (either to give to them, or accuse them of doing during moral panics); subversive parties must reclaim both actor and action, anal and Amazon, as demons would: dark campy sex offering forbidden sight through problematic love that, when humanizing the harvest (the crop, not the cop), reveals capital and its tenure’s ongoing flaws; re: treating nature as something to fetishize, carve and harvest by police force.
Camping those means camping the material being abused, anal overshadowed by its own pro-state weaponization; i.e., rape play with exotic, xenophilic elements—the beauty and brawn of savage girth, whose “Oriental” (non-European/non-American) warriors emerge seemingly ex nihilo, suddenly endemic to Capitalist Realism. Such vaudeville banks on unironic carceral forms of anal sex and Amazons trapping the mind inside itself, endlessly punching down at forms that actually push for genuine liberation through anal sex (the whore’s revenge, versus the pimp’s): rape play and roleplay speaking to “conquering” as a spoof that challenges profit using the same devices.
(artist: Mona Wolt)
Simply put, demons double “unspeakable” (cryptonymic) desires for power and knowledge; i.e., relaid in dialectical-material forms of psychosexual pleasure through various intersections of class, culture and race, but also pain (exquisite “torture,” aka passion/martyrdom). As such, Amazons promise empowering transformation through the paradox of receiving anal sex during calculated risk; i.e., the giver turned into a protector of this or that, the latter receiving anal as a vaso vagal device, and which under mutual consent enjoys as much control over you as the other way around: the dom serves the sub, but the sub needs someone “dark” (thus fearsome) to serve them through the whore’s paradox—of the sub issuing commands of domination for a dom (or switch) to objectively follow when they transform on command; i.e., trying anal sex for its fearful reputation, meaning a dominating act associated with harmful Great Destruction, but also pleasurable pain (and forbidden pleasure) serving the sub during rough sex; e.g., like a genie in a bottle, “Your wish is my command!”
Lived trauma invites Numinous dialogs; Capitalist Realism abjects rape onto pornographic language, which can be camped through the Gothic’s lateral directness: destroyer fantasies, chasing the palliative Numinous. Anal, reclaimed as such, becomes a paradoxical sign of trust, wherein the harming of recipients can occur when caution isn’t exercised (the whole point of discipline, in ludo-Gothic BDSM, is harm avoidance/rape prevention, mid-passion): to walk the line regarding things that, once they’ve touched you, never leave. You don’t “get over” rape; you learn to live with it. A gift and a curse, predation fosters anti-predation sentiment; if you are raped, it becomes something to live with through fantasies of itself you can control and thrive within.
The entire practice commonly hints at genuine abuse through its own Ozymandian aesthetic—live burial, chasing down old secrets (re: Medusa’s rape) buried/unburied during faux-Orientalism; i.e., camping rape vis-à-vis the ghost of the counterfeit: the Amazon’s dark anal zone of wicked, barbaric delight (doubling state forgeries)! It’s a conqueror’s fantasy—pushed onto state victims and reclaimed by them in the same half-real, tomb-like brothel space: the plundering of alien war “booty” overshadowed by eugenics, hence actual, still-existing racism/race science and its statuesque practitioners’ vague-yet-constructed ideas of an imaginary past made great through multiple bigotries; i.e., followers of Eugene Sandow into Olympian, drug-fueled echoes of American-sponsored eco-fascism (which the Olympics are); e.g., Mike Israetel’s “Is Intelligence Really Different Among the Races?” (2023): to live in fear of nature as criminal/terrorist, period—as monstrous-feminine, hence non-white, non-Christian, queer and/or female, etc. It’s a false flag but a profitable one, provided you have the belly to police it/play the victim in bad faith. In turn, systemic rape gaslights its victims while tokenizing them, the sickness excised by assimilations thereof, turning hypochondriac (the paradox of modern sickness and health, bodybuilders making cryptofascist arguments while being gluttons and entitled [middle-to-upper-class, usually white/male] drug addicts: a disease stemming from their pathologizing of nature).
Amazons or otherwise, the Gothic is certainly no stranger to rape fantasies or telling truth with lies. This includes sodomy (“the love that dare not speak its name”) as hyphenated “love language,” relaid in historical violence ahistorically displaced unto fabrications of unironic rape revenge. If we are to heal from rape by capital unto nature (cops policing those “of nature” to devour them for the state), we must confront it in campy forms. So enjoy anal and even fantasize about rape through ironic forms; just don’t endorse its unironic abuse by state actors aping the colonizer/chasing the dragon (re: ghosts of Caesar and his statuesque effigies’ historically unattainable physique) to dick-measure with!
In turn, our bodies and their art may become weapons of genuine resistance (which the state will always treat as violent, regardless if it actually is); i.e., of protecting ourselves and our homes from those who would seek to own and exploit us, reclaiming what they try and take from us (our darkness visible) to use against us—by demonizing sex work (which all work is, under Capitalism) in sex-coercive forms! We’re not doing ourselves any favors by keeping quiet, in that respect. Play with “rape”; play with Amazons, meaning those strong enough to liberate all workers from state tyranny! Sweet nutritious pain; clap my cheeks, Amazon mommy! Revenge, for us, is simply to exist in visible, humanizing forms of demonic expression. There’s certainly an exploratory element to this, but also an addictive, drug-like facet with liberatory energies: demon BDSM, including anal sex, as criminalized, thus policed into acceptable forms of trespass by state forces.
The Gothic is largely poetic; in poetic language, “sodomy” yields a forbidden gateway to other worlds—one engaged with through a variety of non-PIV sex, BDSM and kink. This includes those reputedly practiced by Amazons (meaning those compared to Amazons) as vengeful aliens (re: the settler argument, prohibiting liberation for fear of revenge); i.e., so-called “savages” or “mud people” having a broad, xenophobic function despite its offshore colonial origins: degenerates of any location, color or creed—the enemy within to abject once more (to displace and exterminate, often by tokenized means). And while sodomy yields a crossover element speaking to/with demonized things, it’s not inherently destructive or negative; instead, it can help us regain control—over our trauma through fetishized caricatures speaking to our idiosyncratic alienation without ranking rape or discriminating against others. To heal from rape (and reverse abjection), we must exist sex-positively in the shadow of police forces; we do this (and avoid discrimination) by finding similarity amid difference using taboo language (which sodomy is); re: the pedagogy of the oppressed speaking diplomatically to those accused of rape and those having survived it (an idea we’ll revisit when looking at demon mommies). We solidarize intersectionally against capital and its effects making society sick through false notions of power (the grim harvest).
(artist: Aria Rain)
So while said trauma forever stays a part of us, it likewise doesn’t define or control us in totality. Instead, we become desirable for it, albeit in sex-positive ways to trade in; i.e., can use it to synthesize good social-sexual habits that likewise extend to society at large; e.g., Aria Rain is an amputee using her disability through sex work to raise awareness: towards humanizing the disabled, illustrated by the company she keeps treating her well also being humanized. It becomes something to pay forwards, good instruction versus bad, good Amazons versus bad; re: starting “from ignorance, but also positions closer to nature that have become increasingly alien and closed-off” (a statement I originally applied to queerness and blood libel, in “Understanding Vampires,” but applies equally to Amazons as demonic entities).
Is anal during ludo-Gothic BDSM a Rubicon of sorts? Sure; you’ll start seeing the world differently while still inside it (re: Plato’s cave). But why let that stop us from living our best lives while helping others in the bargain? In turn, this encompasses our daily lives; i.e., in ways that affect ourselves and inform our struggles against larger predatory structures, namely capital (and its qualities, monopolies, and trifectas) looking to frame us as barbarians to conquer anew.
I want to consolidate some important issues regarding this, which we can likewise apply to Amazons (and anything monstrous-feminine, in that respect). Consider this portion an “anal Amazon thesis,” of sorts (indented for emphasis):
First, capital sexualizes everything to rape nature in modular terror language, including Amazons and anal; i.e., the world under Capitalism arranges heteronormatively in service to capital, whose Cartesian/settler-colonial structure rapes nature through said language; e.g., Amazons being used classically to control women by Ancient Athenians, not free them; re (from a few pages back): “The state controls sex and gender in monstrous-feminine language because these are where power (and trauma) are found […] their ideas of power revolve around ideas of state revenge also dressed up: the pimp dominating nature-as-monstrous-feminine, doubling and dominating it through tokenized double standards; e.g., anal sex [and Amazons].” The state only tolerates the problematic love of Amazons and anal when their challenge (to the ancient canonical laws) is nominal; i.e., provided their counterfeits serve profit in canonical terror language that furthers abjection. As something to combine, but also canonize in different performances, anal is a place and parlance of trauma to give and receive through tokenized enforcers dressed up as warriors—Amazons being a half-real theatrical device forever trapped between genuine rebellion and false, targeting vulnerable body parts in vulnerable areas (e.g., the bathroom). Things like Amazons and anal, then, become canonically binarized to best give or receive state force (mainly police violence) pursuant to profit. To challenge profit and Capitalist Realism on and offstage, workers must camp state terror inside of itself—anisotropically with Amazons and anal to reverse terror/counterterror with subversive irony during liminal expression.
To see on which side of the fence people fall, you need only look to how they treat others through controlled devices; i.e., police violence; e.g., sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll, but also the monstrous language of violence, terror and morphological expression per the Gothic mode: giving and receiving sodomy as a broader mechanism that includes Amazons and anal sex; re: subjugation is something to subvert in dominant/submissive language, which anal sex (and Amazons) very much are. Demons aren’t satisfied with vanilla sex; they play with “darker” forms to weaponize them as a form of transformative exchange: an eye-opening experience/revelation, insofar as anal isn’t purely abject, but something to reverse and embrace during the dialectic of the alien (re: hugging the alien, thus Medusa, with Amazons).
Said umbrella includes the basic idea of forbidden sex and hard kinks adjacent more ordinary forms, the appearance of fantastical things like Amazons that indicate policing as given and received through anal (and its double standards); e.g., redheads becoming scarce (from a cultural standpoint, not a genetic one) because they’re exotic, hunted to extinction under capital’s exterminator rhetoric: forbidden fruit weaponized part-and-parcel with capital’s usual harvesting of nature behind foreign or condemned zones’ arbitrary boundaries; i.e., alienated and sexualized by police agents enjoying state protection as they sodomize nature by going into said zones; re: us versus them, enacting cops-and-victims revenge arguments. This forced alienation of native groups, in turn, bleeds into any kind of archetype or associate behavior you could think of (not just Amazons): exploiting and exfoliating the land and its occupants, one on the menu and the other holding a knife and fork.
(artist: Persia Lourdes)
This works historically through terror and its devices assigned to abject territories by those with a monopoly on violence, terror and monsters, hence Amazons and anal. Simply put, if someone’s a cop, they’ll police sex, including monster sex’ fetishes, kinks and BDSM; i.e., hard kinks become a disproportionate response against nature as something to impugn by straight avengers (re: the state is straight). To that, anal vis-à-vis subjugated Amazonomachia isn’t a canonical tool for pleasure, but unironic domination that extends poetically to larger structures of oppression abjecting land back through anal: Amazons and “death by Snu-Snu” speaking to bog-standard sodomy fears (as a “disease” to “catch”) and warrior-style revenge against colonizer bodies by militant colonized ones (only in colonizer peoples’ own heads, mind you[5]). Guilt by association, then, becomes something to reclaim alongside shame and hatred towards abjected things; i.e., to take Amazons and anal back by camping them is to take the land (and labor) back from these performative elements and their associate structures/enforcers.
To that, we reclaim ourselves as much animals in relation to nature as the state raping nature, thus adopt its survival mechanisms: Medusa’s mirror-like gaze and fearsome appearance conjoined with softer things. In evolutionary terms, this is merely strength overcoming natural pressures, which capital is an unnatural (manmade) extension thereof. In turn, the subversive aesthetic of garbage speaks to things normally treated as such, fighting back against patriarchal addicts: subversive Amazons and anal rerouting the usual flow/ordering of power on the Aegis.
Bear with me. Such arguments often (and not without some justice) sound a little funny on their face, but highlight larger forces at work; i.e., hyperobjects and their symptoms, such as Capitalism vs Communism; e.g., squiggly lines are less violent than straight lines on a map because straight lines are unnatural, therefore laid out historically by nation-states through force instead of by land markers, like rivers or mountains. The same idea applies to actions that pertain to sex by native groups (or those treated as native)—those to do reproductive acts different or, God forbid, to do them for reasons other than reproducing at all!
So-called “rape epidemics” and sodomy go hand-in-hand under ethnocentrism, hence moral territory (and actors) versus immoral ones; i.e., deserving and underserving victims of state force; re: cops and victims, orcs and humans, etc. Hatred goes part-in-parcel with menticide breeding bad apples to spoil the entire crop; i.e., fruit from the poisoned tree, treating the colonized as “thicc” forbidden fruit to both objectify by the colonizer and deny themselves while chasing it down: e.g., PAWGs and PHAT black girls. These are generational issues measured most commonly in how they fight over time in relation to larger structures and dogma: an industry farming honeydew and milk of paradise.
(artist: Persia Lourdes)
For example, if someone is unusually afraid of anal, they’re probably afraid of a great many other things associated with anal, thus more likely to attack those things using anal in bad faith; re: anything “of nature,” including Amazons as barbaric givers and receivers of it for or against the state; e.g., witches—redheads or trans women, for instance (above and next page)—that might arbitrarily be called “Amazon” simply for their appearance being different, exotic, alien. Yet the truth is, hard kinks are hard for a reason, meaning they’re acquired tastes (most of them I don’t exhibit in this book because I don’t prefer them, but do prefer rape play with Amazons and knights; i.e., demons, like all monsters, are enacted through preference as something to discover). And while experimentation often yields interesting results, its primary goal is to acclimate users to a priceless idea: of trying new things that, while stigmatized, are hardly unnatural or even that over the top!
A common application for ludo-Gothic BDSM is transformation, meaning towards a transhumanist outcome (more on posthumanism during Frankenstein); i.e., “upgrading” ourselves by setting aside normal activities and swapping them for abnormal ones. Doing so is less extreme unto itself (most of the time, anyways), and more a spice to, well, spice things up! Such is anal sex. It’s not “bad,” just different. So are Amazons and their own appearance during rape play a campy alternative to their unironic, tokenized variants—not to conquer for the state in subjugated forms, but to appear strong and fearsome to avoid state predation by subverting subjugation (similar to Medusa). This often has a magnetic effect, during calculated risk; i.e., they attract interested parties in good and bad faith.
For us, postcolonial considerations may be raised when dealing with capital’s universal benefactors abusing such devices; re: capital is heteronormative, setter-colonial, and Cartesian, meaning its anisotropic views about sex and force extend unto half-real spheres exploring the rape of nature through revenge: as a kind of demonic exchange reversing the terrorist/counterterrorist dynamic; i.e., by illustrating mutual consent with “rape,” occurring through demonic expression as part of daily life.
As something to indulge in or deny ourselves, we consume forbidden fruit and learn from the experience less perfectly synonymous with rape and more to camp it in order to safely control its powerful effects; re: forbidden sight, our darkness visible taking any shape or measurement, per exchange. In short, anal is the drug and Amazons (or things compared to Amazons; e.g., trans women, below) are associated with it as the automatic dealers/doers, thereof; we’re the forbidden fruit (as much as anything “dark” is): to subjugate or subvert using what we got, offering you a delicious taste of a better, freer world; re (earlier in the module):
(artist: Eva Android)
Under Capitalist Realism, something is “dark” if it ostensibly moves anything of value (re: power and knowledge) away from the status quo. Generally this darkness is associated with the vengeful imaginary past based on buried historical atrocities, the latter paradoxically twisted by the former to keep control right where it is (among the elite). Anything that challenges this paradigm is canonically framed as dark, evil, profligate; i.e., nature as vengeful whore, which capital takes revenge on through DARVO-style police violence/obscurantism, witch hunts, tokenism and moral panic; e.g., Medusa and her Aegis’ forbidden sight (source: “From Composites and the Occult to Totems and the Natural World”).
followed by
power, darkness and knowledge—often as conspicuous, ritualized acts of creation/poetry and (re)invention through magic/mad science—go hand-in-hand during unequal, forbidden exchange, radical transformation and dark desire/wish fulfillment; i.e., someone will trade what they have for what they don’t in order to transform or otherwise fulfill a given wish: with a demon that has the requisite item(s), build and/or abilities (e.g., sensations; re: Medusa’s Aegis/forbidden sight). / Demons are the classic, mighty and at-times-untrustworthy granters of dark wishes/desires, be those fame, fortune, sex, or revenge (which transformation facilitates, on either side of an exchange) [ibid.]
and
demons having a third quality apart from exchange and transformation—desire, whose forbidden, wishful thinking/fulfillment occurs under a Western hegemon that alienates, fetishizes and scapegoats nature by design, whoring it out and raping it for profit. As you can imagine, this structure and its grim prostitution translate easily enough to revenge by one side against the other—of man/the nuclear model vs nature-as-whore and vice versa; i.e., commonly expressed as Amazonomachia in ancient to “ancient” heteronormative wrestling dialogs (and similar theatricalities), but also the Medusa and many other monstrous-feminine GNC forms. Revenge is an exchange that pertains to power and knowledge concerning workers whored out under state rule, our revenge being the development of Gothic Communism with ludo-Gothic BDSM to end said rule (thus rape) [source: “A Rape Reprise”]
and
according to what power and knowledge we exchange to and [for, the] whore’s revenge is to break the profit motive by making a world for which it (and rape) are no longer possible using these methods; i.e., by using the same demonic and slutty language capital does, but at cross purposes: to hug the alien—not demonize it to receive state violence—thereby (ex)changing how the world is seen to begin with (ibid.).
Which brings us to anal and Amazons; i.e., traditional, warlike, tools of tokenized state revenge; re: raping Medusa’s corpse/tomb to repress rebellious sentiment during state decay (and uphold Capitalist Realism). To have our revenge (and break Capitalist Realism), we fags subvert these devices to stymie profit with; i.e., as normally achieved by abusing anal and Amazons being objects of dark desire, thus wish fulfillment: to live deliciously and in defiance of state orders purging us, generally turning those “prison sex” mentalities (and their Man Box) inside-out using weird nerd culture—monster sex and its assorted battles!
This generally means while bare and exposed, called “furious” even if we’re just naked and vibing (often, though, a fair amount of rage is present): dead and loving it, fucking each other’s brains out, or adored for our muse-like body’s public nudism/asexual prowess exploring (through unknown pleasures) the ways in which sex is normally controlled by the state (through force). Fighting for the right to eat, shit, fuck and die with our dignity intact, our revenge is to humanize ourselves while being remembered for our demonized status. We conjure up (and camp) said status with clay and other dark materials, reversing “rape” by putting it in quotes; re: camping its canonical forms in paradoxical language/medieval puns: “Oh, yeah! Plunder my forbidden ‘tomb!'” Our revenge equals survival as something to perform, exchanging data through new healthy trades that help us conceptualize our own rape as something to avoid by summoning copies of itself that are costly and cheap (“there is a price, barbarian”); anal is often a rebellious statement, boldly ripping the control of sex (and force) from state agents—one commonly made in primal, anthropomorphic “breeding” language transported to the modern world (which Amazons and Medusa certainly hint at, but which we’ll examine more with furries, later):
(artist: Foxovh)
It bears repeating that doing so is classically framed as “petty” by pro-state narratives; e.g., to look pretty if only to gain the upper hand in a world that values good looks. In truth, we’re merely trying to exist, which requires breaking profit as the thing that normally destroys us because we’re different; defying such notions, we become whatever we want—our body plasticity and gender euphoria existing despite capital trying to exterminate us, and contributing towards its ultimate demise by taking away its ability to privatize us (and our bodies, genders, labor and sexualities, etc): objects they cannot privatize, and sleek death machines to render their greatest treasure, profit, wholly moot by breaking Capitalist Realism with it. Such is our ultimate revenge—not to exist, but thrive in a post-scarcity world.
Like any illicit substance during a drug war/epidemic, moral panickers clutch their pearls, and the reactionary behaviors between them serve the same purpose vis-à-vis anal and Amazons: control for the state over workers and nature by normalizing one particular way to do things that is “correct,” while outlawing everything else (or legalizing them behind paywalls; re: Sales of Indulgence under a Protestant ethic); e.g., missionary PIV sex vs anal doggy (the latter being what Amazons have, thus Commie, Satanist space aliens). These become things to feel anxious about, hence loaded with great expectations on how we’re supposed to behave. In turn, Capitalist Realism informs Amazonomachia with neoliberal dogma (anime, videogames, movies, etc): copaganda designed to make people terminally afraid of, hence allergic and paradoxically addicted to, some very basic things onstage and off; re: Gothic push-pull during the abjection process counterfeiting the ghost of genocide, the middle class fearful of/fascinated towards abjected things like anal and Amazons being treated like forbidden fruit.
Except outlawing things, per the cryptonymy process and its double operation (to show and hide), doesn’t eliminate outlawed things from society at large. Instead, they grow increasingly dark and visible, those abjecting them suddenly seeing them everywhere; i.e., as a matter of illicit, drug-like consumption: a moral quandary insofar as our existence is something they are conditioned to eat and deny like junk food. Guilt, curiosity and dread (venial vin, often thought crimes) ensue to uphold the norm, which is persecution; i.e., towards the out-group by the in-group afraid of them yet also wanting to try what might “kill” them if they “eat” them. We become synonymous with sin and temptation as things to try and reject, for fear that prolonged exposure might enact the whore’s revenge, not the pimp’s; the pimp grows afraid of their own supply.
Such oscillation is rather addictive, but also comical. Cis-het vanilla types, for example, usually walk into situations like these thinking out loud, “But what if I like having my asshole fingered?” Would that really be so bad, my dude? Furthermore, when done correctly, anal (giving and receiving) is merely something to try[6]. It’s not a disorder but a divergence[7] from normative approaches to sex (and relating to others through sex), thus Capitalist Realism equating said boundary’s violences as unironically apocalyptic: anal as inherently transgressive through such eyes projecting their inheritor’s guilt onto the whore, the latter a homewrecker because she tempts people with forbidden love like anal (which the state conflates with rape). But also, it’s a butthole whose owner has reclaimed it from state terror dialogs—existing in a rebellious but happy position the same way someone might reclaim the bedroom or bathroom associated with it (and its signature “surprise butt sex” [shock and awe] vulnerability): the revenge of success, decentralizing power’s spread in creamy ghosts of itself!
(artist: Aria Rain)
“Nothing ventured, nothing gained” leaps to mind, but suddenly faced with that tempting proposition—of changing into something outside of what capital deems useful—will downright terrify most men (and anyone in the Man Box). Suddenly demon BDSM becomes a gateway to harder and harder kinks, which naysayers either reject entirely (calling such activities “giving in” or “weakness”), or which to project their own desire to dominates others onto; e.g., anal = rape because it “feminizes” the recipient; i.e., it makes them a recipient of police violence per nature-as-monstrous-feminine as something not just to rape, but rape in prison-like (uncomfortable) ways by Cartesian forces[8] allergic towards liberation arguments like land back made through anal. They resent anything that points out their hypocrisies through these allergies; i.e., that they’re bad-faith, the state incompatible with life and consent through its militants jockeying of the same-old paradigms; e.g., that they’re more likely to kidnap women and children and harm them than Indigenous peoples are, thus must constantly act self-righteous to keep up appearances (and rob people blind behind the fog of war). Kinks become like rumors to squash, but also guilty pleasures: to enjoy behind the choir screens, but also weapons of rape to use unironically against their enemies. “Who’s the savage, modern man!”
By extension, the colonizer assumption becomes those who do things that are gross (to them) must secretly crave anything that isn’t the norm; i.e., isn’t PIV missionary sex with a white picket fence; re: Amazons, anal and the power fantasies they express denoting unironic violence committed by the rebel against an “innocent” colonial body. Such things are forbidden by the state, colonizing them as guilty pleasures: to let one side to unto the other as punished for crimes that could happen. The genocide becomes endlessly pre-emptive; i.e., any fear of a controlled substance instilled to police it through pre-emptive revenge.
For those who fear the forbidden, such things exist outside their realm of experience; camping them, these become viewpoints unto themselves, those who enjoy them doing so because of their medicinal, therefore campy and transformative, potential. Pain is often a part of this, as are ways of doing things differently to achieve similar results. An orgasm is an orgasm—largely in the mind! So is the idea of fair treatment. Our revenge is reversing abjection to undo all the awful, alienizing things listed above; re: taking anal back from our colonizers, thus our land, brokering for peace using Amazonian theatre (and its excessive, over-the-top theatrics) as a popular and humorous conduit: threat display (the kind to make you spit out your morning coffee). Death by Snu-Snu, indeed! Anal becomes the whore’s revenge; re: Medusa clapping back, subverting the Amazon by dancing with the ghost of the counterfeit: as something to include, not abject, when going native (when in “Rome”)!
Such counterterror humor often has a “gallows” flavor to it; i.e., speaking to the pain of forced anal (or some such metaphor of colonial abuse) inflicted over a long period of time. Pain is a data that demons specialize in; re: “hurt, not harm” providing love taps—slaps, whip cracks, and pegging, etc—that speak to our abuse echoed across bad copies we can reclaim. To see something exotic and different as human, but haunted as alien under police heels—re: the pedagogy of the oppressed—is to heal from rape by finding similarity amid difference in the shadow of police forces. What they dehumanize, we rehumanize (the harvest) to expose the state as inhumane! Profit is the rape of nature as “inferior” to modernity’s timeless enforcers; we camp doubles of those, but also embrace ourselves (and our multiculture across like-minded allies with their own struggles, left) as “native,” monstrous-feminine: inheritors of a possible better world that Capitalism, in the interim, has done nothing but abuse!
(artist: Minetgot21)
“Native” is both a history and a status—the latter comparable to “dark,” in settler arguments and their Gothic offshoots; Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism encourages all oppressed peoples—those treated as monstrous-feminine by the state—to join hands in collective revenge: intersectional solidarity against our foes aping us in bad faith. Faced with such mirrors, the idea isn’t tokenization by viewing ourselves (and our allies) as enemies within, but to subvert the expectation of subjugation-through-assimilation, thus become stewards of each other as part of the natural world we can rebuild at capital’s expense. Our struggles might seem different, but in truth share the same basic goal: liberation, its dismantling of state models comprising our best revenge.
In turn, the same umbral-yet-liberatory potential that Amazons and their sodomy yield likewise goes for non-Christians, GNC persons, people of color and/or Indigenous groups combating various modular-to-intersecting abject immigrant myths/xenophobia; e.g., rape epidemics (“think of the [white] women and children”); i.e., presenting in the buff (or skimpy clothes like the bikini, below) while also being heard through these statements’ combined pedagogy of the oppressed: “We’re here and we’re queer!” Intersectional solidarity punching up towards universal, postcolonial liberation (while navigating various double standards/uneven privilege and oppression) is key in reversing abjection/challenging profit as a whole. Find what works and run with it; light a fire under your ass and go to town! Let them see you living your best life: a mistress of one’s own fate.
(artist: Minetgot21)
Indeed, such holistic, feral creativity is vital to breaking Capitalist Realism, becoming mothers (and fathers) to a post-scarcity world while inside its hauntologies. This happens by having pride in one’s culture, heritage and creativity as attached to other cultures; i.e., as Amazons are, speaking to white women as “ancient,” unruly and chaotic, similar to their non-white cousins raped inside the same territorial police states, thus prisons: “terror-tories.” Assimilation is folly because the zones of fear always expand and contract indefinitely per state revenge; i.e., delivering disproportionate violence that, unto itself, yields the very desperation and convenience that lead people to betray themselves. Being informed by the colonial past but not set in colonial stone, things don’t reduce merely to class, culture and race under struggle, but hybridize and intersect across all persecution networks, lest the elite divide-and-conquer us all over again: “The axe forgets, the tree remembers.” We’re a forest, babes; they cut down one of us, they’ll do it to all of us in due time. Lest people tokenize, gentrify and decay under state concessions, liberation is a universal affair! No exceptions! Basic human rights must become universal or Omelas’ genocides will continue, unabated.
That’s all our main points (and thought experiments) about Amazons, which means the rest of part two is, as usual, a bit more conversational/extraneous/tangential (a forest of tangents); i.e., rehashing previous points—recombining them holistically to reconsider how such things are forever at odds, warring among the same aesthetic for or against capital and its Realism; re: Amazonomachia something of a civil war between subjugated and subversive elements, abstracting them in easy-to-understand forms (re: sex and force) during ludo-Gothic BDSM: by interacting and playing with them; i.e., Nyx and Amy Ginger Hart (who we’ll examine towards the end). We’ll also integrate and inspect some historical elements to Amazons and the ancient world.
In Dispute, Afterthoughts: Subjugation vs Subversion (cont., feat. Nyx and Amy Ginger Hart)
Behind every fantasy is a reality waiting to be heard. Bearing that in mind, me and my mother’s mutual feelings—of wanting empowerment through frightening-yet-sexy monsters like the Amazon—are perfectly legitimate/ethical provided they don’t tokenize/submit to state abuse (and its various confusions about BDSM, fetishes and kink).
As such, we shouldn’t discount the value of Amazonian devices; i.e., as “mere fun and games,” hence treat them as “lesser” when trying to break the cycle. While fun and games are required to relieve stress and camp canon, garbage is useful because it’s garbage; i.e., is clay-like, hence something to transmute demonically into something else because it is both wholly invaluable and entirely cheap. But regardless of its stamina, veracity or exact constitution, the state practice works well enough for them: to divide and conquer those made to fear and fetishize whoever the state requires by abusing the power of mythmaking that Amazons convey so well. Take what they recuperate and use it to hit them where it hurts; make your opposition unruly and desirable in ways that—through the aesthetics of power and death, but also the product placement of monstrous-feminine revenge (the sleek, biomechanical avenger on her “steed,” left)—bend others towards liberation through darkness visible on the Aegis!
(artist: Martina Oliveira)
Under capital, sex and force sells as products, including Amazons. Their arguments—about rape and revenge—are demonic, persuading poetically through unequal power’s transformative potential and fulfilling of dark desires (regarding sex and force with sex and force); re: the right to exist, thus have anal sex, but also practice BDSM to challenge profit/systemic rape, achieving catharsis while fencing dialectically-materially with tokenized variants. The fact remains, rape survivors are more vulnerable under state duress, and historically betray (along class, culture and race lines) to stop it from happening again; i.e., more vulnerable parties are more desperate, thus more prone to betray under convenience to escape criminogenic conditions (said conditions being promises of violence that may or may not occur—the Faustian exchange, unto itself, also being criminogenic). It’s an old TERF/SWERF trick, one the state knows all too well. Scratch one, the other bleeds, both victims of privilege and oppression who dominate other workers by becoming cops. Both seek revenge through costumes they’ll monopolize “for themselves” and “themselves” alone: state bruisers acting as if they kneel before no one, playing the white Indian in bad faith.
(artist: Aisendraw)
Bullshit; nothing is regulated more than sex through force, subjugated Amazons stuck smack-dab in the middle of that clusterfuck. Asprey writes in War in the Shadows how
Terror is the kissing cousin of force and, real or implied, is never far removed from the pages of history. To define (and condemn) terror from a peculiar social, economic, political, and emotional plane is to display a self-righteous attitude that, totally unrealistic, is doomed to be disappointed by harsh facts (source).
As such, TERFs are fascists and fascists, however “ancient,” “mighty” and “rebellious” they seem, always bend the knee to capital; i.e., through false acts of rebellion facilitating police action—official or stochastic (vigilante)—preemptively against labor as a criminal whole to fight against; re; Parenti: the paradox of one’s “defiant” actions being they constitute deference, actually defending capital by killing capital’s enemies. The enemy is within, but that enemy is them: playing dress-up in bad faith to better enact state terror (thus violence) with relative impunity.
Neoliberalism endorses personal responsibility in its cryptofascism—a “phallic” Amazonian tack to defend the free market, while seeking the kinds of revenge known previously to medieval women’s Gothic voices; i.e., regardless of territory or occupant; e.g., Lady Macbeth’s rising venom when forced to harbor King Duncan under her battlements:
Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
Of direst cruelty! make thick my blood;
Stop up the access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose (source).
Medusa, through Hippolyta, rattles in echoes that can be copied in bad faith.
Again, while the state tries to monopolize Amazons—and while these sentiments and actual monopolies are impossible—the historical-material consequence of striving for them is anything but. Faced with the unknown as brought about by planned economic collapse (and loaded with cryptonymic threats of rape), the middle class triggers, suddenly crying out, “We can’t go back to the street, the brothel—won’t (or can’t) squeeze into a corset again!” But that’s precisely what they do when they posture as strong inside the Man Box; i.e., putting on a fur or metal bikini and posing as a buff underwear model with fake tits; e.g., Autumn Ivy doing just that while aggressively insisting they aren’t a money-grubbing sex worker, and policing those who might say otherwise:
(artist: Autumn Ivy)
There’s nothing wrong with underwear models, money-grubbing or fake tits; there’s everything wrong with fake solidarity from token SWERFs, gentrifying sex work while punching down in bad faith (with Autumn also being a TERF for punching down against me, a trans woman). For Autumn (and anyone who acts like them), it’s a brand (e.g., the tweet for the left image reading “gym girls that cosplay”)—the actual politics largely unimportant save when posturing as strong in ways that white gentrified AFAB people historically do: as token feminists, punching down against easy targets. They’re loud, but only when their own equality of convenience is threatened. In turn, images like the one above become something that cannot easily be parsed without dialectical-material scrutiny (the above image merely the phallic aesthetic of the Amazon, its author’s politics largely neoconservative/unspoken beyond “strong women are sexy”).
State alienation knows no bounds. Wedding personal responsibility to austerity politics, neoliberalism loves to threaten middle-class security as “under attack” (during alien invasions) before “creating jobs” to police labor with; e.g., branding the bodice as a “breastplate” and the thong as a “codpiece” (or ham sandwich holder—the vagina dentata) to conceal its carceral, police-like function (versus a function that liberates all peoples). All equate to labor and wage theft, disguised as false power in oft-fantastical language criminalizing sex work through monetary value; i.e., the Amazon as a formerly conquered group, but also a job opportunity (the carrot and stick) chained to the brothel: a bouncer who can never leave. Doing so decays the Amazon as a sex-positive feminist symbol; i.e., replacing it with a traitorous double recruited from the prison population to brutalize their own (the state later rescinding these privileges, per the euthanasia effect). Whores policing whores in the brothel-as-prison, they do so while posturing as exclusive, special victims; i.e., undeserving of state force, while administering said force towards deserving victims in exchange for state pay. Autumn (and those like them) aren’t strong for standing up to the elite; they’re a cop, thus the elite’s bully kept on a leash, acting strong (and having their cake and eating it, too, as their alt account demonstrates).
Female or not, the state must always create new monstrous-feminine enemies to uphold Capitalist Realism with (and cops to enforce it); i.e., offshoots of the Medusa scaring and exciting its middle-class gatekeepers with a ghost of the counterfeit to further the abjection process (to be on guard/the lookout for criminal degenerate elements). This includes domestic cops and victims, but also from Elsewhere—from the wild reaches beyond empire, while making civilians want for heroes that bridge the gap at home: cowboys and Indians, orcs and humans, us versus them. Per eco-fascism and its moderation by state good guys (re: American exceptionalism calling such things “stable,” so-called “peace and prosperity” code for worker/owner division, infinite growth, and efficient profit), competition, conflict and scarcity are relaid through tokenized monsters combining this with that, under Pax Americana power fantasies; e.g., Amazons and orcs with sex, and sex other forbidden goods, like rape: someone to capture you and presumably never let go! It’s a drug and the first one’s free (“There is a price, barbarian!”)!
(artist: Master DCJ)
Such feast-or-famine combative theatrics are universally applicable, and regression isn’t automatically bad (re: regressing during roleplay to address trauma). That being said, state decay cycles under capital, fostering a routine unknown to endorse and enforce regressively conservative politics made from whole cloth (re: fascism defends capital during neo-medieval regression with paganized, eco-fascist elements). In turn, Orientalism is the dialog between the colonizer and colonized, speaking between them in warrior-like ways; i.e., among those with a capacity for physical violence pushed into cartoonish forms about monster captivity and rape (above and below). They become sources of power to tap into—rape epidemics that seek to reclaim these devices to humanize the Beast and acknowledge the furious and whore-like elements of the Beauty character in the same breath: their hellish co-existence during rape, capture and murder fantasies (we’ll unpack this even more with demon mommies). It’s an opera, a danger disco whose Numinous, forbidden love speaks to nature not simply as alien under capital, but desirable for it (sex out of wedlock isn’t just fun, but good praxis).
(artist: Soli)
Rape play involves passion when putting “rape” in quotes. Per Laura Ng and Edward Said, the inheritors of empire seek protection from the home as suddenly foreign to them per a fear of said unknown; i.e., when their rights and personal property are threatened by the elite pulling the strings (the call coming from inside the house): during the Gothic’s liminal hauntology of war turning the home into an unheimlich, traveling barbaric castle (thus conductive to those savage realities of empire that inheritors of the Imperial Core turn a blind eye to); re: “There is always a sense of a lurking danger from which the viewers need protection” (source), generally through feelings of alienation and attraction.
All can be supplied by rebels or cops, but their appearance is largely the same; i.e., in such spaces “invaded” by a foreign, imperial menace—that of a savage conqueror “of nature” doubling as a homely nurturer that, all the while, comes off as nakedly imposing and desirable, foreign and familiar while evoking the Medusa to hug and embrace during calculated risk; re: the dialectics of shelter and the alien—their threats of capture, bondage, domination, torture, rape, death, etc, playing out during courtly love. A black castle appears; the Amazon defeats it to canonically whitewash home, then is bridled/pimped out as a whore (while being somewhat whore-like until then, too).
In terms of the “invasion,” itself, home is invaded by the ghosts of empire projected onto an abject scapegoat mirroring state abuse in “ancient alien” forms (re: the black pyramid and its evil rulers). A wild enemy appears, calling for token Amazons (and similar agents) to crack down in bad faith. These trends extend historically-materially into the retro-future’s castle-narrative (chronotopes) and cryptonymies; re, Hogle and Bakhtin: a restless labyrinth merged with the environs of a castle space, saturated through-and-through with time in the narrow sense of the word; i.e., that of the historical past, fixated on dynastic primacy and hereditary rights enforced by police agents, pivoting and wheeling to maintain their own middle-management, desk murderer’s white-knuckle hold on a given population: the animation of a legendary police violence mirroring ironic, campy forms (and their gender parody’s subsequent gender trouble).
In turn, this ghost of the counterfeit is policed to further the abjection process, having revenge against nature through clay-like renditions of the status quo as “Gothic,” a found document. Statutes are documentation, in that respect—psychosexual golems bringing the dead back to life, wish-fulfilling a variety of guilty pleasures/forbidden desires. “I love ‘clay’ so fucking much!”
(artist: Sergey Galanter)
Clay is the data storage device of the ancient world, but also—still to some extent—the modern one. Demons, including Amazons, come from said world, fashioned from clay to denote “ancient,” repressed revenge; i.e., as something to reclaim under state dominion; re: from state gargoyles policing state territories and coded with state data, thus instructions regarding the giving and receiving of police violence as revenge against oppressed peoples fighting back. It’s again effectively eco-fascism, white Indians treating native peoples like a virus while badly imitating them. This can be reversed, the proletarian whore both “for real” and artificial while pushing for post-scarcity as starting in imaginary realms; i.e., “given flesh” through clay and other demonic devices.
To demonize something is either to make it alien or speak to one’s alienation while reclaiming it. As monstrous-feminine beings, Amazons—good or bad—incur this process in a dialectical-material sense similar to knights (e.g., Cameron’s terminators); i.e., cops and victims, us versus them, etc, pilfered from Antiquity in service of the West or to undermine it, mid-Amazonomachia.
Through demonic expression—of monsters battling monsters (one-on-one or through teams)—you’re only limited by your creativity and imagination; i.e., which capital curtails to serve profit by raping nature: profiting off manmade disasters. Challenging that, anything becomes possible, be it match to make or stance to adopt, per Satanic self-determination; re, Milton: “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.” All pro-state forms (of demons) deliberately serve profit while asleep at the wheel; all pro-labor forms actively fight capital to subvert, resist and dismantle it (to be of the devil’s party and know it), hence abjure greed and achieve liberation, sex positivity and post-scarcity—often by showing audiences a troubling view of their own world: of “another” world, another time, one whose age of wonder and cusp of disaster speaks of god-like beings who walk the earth among us mortals!
In a post-scarcity sense, such a world has never quite existed, but the lack of systemic cruelty before capital can be revived in hauntological forms felt in the shadows of cloaked, present-day abuses. This happens per the Aegis seized from the state to embody our struggles; i.e., in opposition to state forms, our best revenge being to humanize and deify the proletariat as sacred: a Great Destroyer the state actually fears—what it can’t fully pimp/rape, thus control in service to profit! “You’ll never own this ass!”
(artist: Dandonfuga)
This dialectic of ownership and control over nature-as-alien/monstrous-feminine brings us to something I want to briefly explore, here: ancient history and aesthetics superimposed over modern forms of the Amazon as a profoundly hauntological being.
Despite a curious translation for amazos meaning “one breast” and indicating body mutilation, we also have the armored, resisting quality of the classical female form protecting the body from mutilation while wholly unclothed; i.e., controlling sex through force, hyphenating both in masculine body displays loaded with feminine contradictions, theatrical hauntologies, and GNC gradients that have only intensified in recent years (under Amazon tokenization).
For one, recent female embodiments speak through/of the tell-tale nudity of ancient warriors, but specifically male bodies mythologized for having invincible flesh (e.g., Achilles) that Amazons were historically denied; i.e., as the victims of male conquest (the Amazonomachia) by infringing on patriarchal territories. Yet, Gothic Communism is half-real, recultivating the imaginary past that performers (and their bodies) might speak to historical-material issues like female domination: as giver or receiver of current state abuse! To that, the monstrous-feminine isn’t biologically male or female, and its mythologies allow for a sea of contrast more or less alien to the nascent West (sexuality and gender identity emerging in the 1700s; re: Foucault).
Considering public nudism, the monstrous-feminine invokes a curious paradox when presenting nude before the gods: strength through exposure. Under current forms, this presents an opportunity as much to ogle ancient male-exclusive ideas of masculine strength onto women’s bodies as it does to masturbate to the female body on display. The two are not mutually exclusive, but female warriors remain haunted by a die-hard notion of imaginary motherhood attached to state models about sexual reproduction and, by extension, nudity (vaginal or phallic) having evolved over time: male power fantasies for various reasons, but also female/queer pilot adopting said fantasies for ironic (or unironic) reasons.
(artist: Alex Ross)
This Amazonian paradox began with older patriarchal forms that were, themselves, rather plastic. For example, Sarah Bond writes in “A Brief History of Olympic Nudity from Ancient Greece to ESPN” (2016) how the 5th century BCE historian Thucydides saw “athletic nudity [as] a show of civility [emphasis, me] in the face of the barbarism displayed by the Persian enemies to the East of Greece. Ancient Persians traditionally thought it against decorum to appear in the buff, and thus Greek nudity was an affront to their social mores. It was a symbol of Greekness at that time first associated with Spartans and then with many other Greek city-states. It was said that even Spartan women worked out in the nude” (source).
In short, ancient warriors advertised their superior lineage through their naked bodies; i.e., as a kind of dogma/copaganda—one that could be replicated (for workers or the state) through cryptomimesis (the echo of trauma, but also, I would argue, symbols of power). Bond further writes,
Athletes were often ideal bodies that served as the muses for artists, just as Michelangelo would later use such Greek athletic sculpture to inspire his statue of David. To Thucydides and many other later writers and artists, the athletic body was a symbol of Greek civilization, superiority and, most importantly, control. These were bodies honed and shaped by extreme discipline. Greeks prided themselves in competing with each other in self-control—called in Greek “σωφροσύνη“—and Sparta in particular was famous for this virtue.
If nudity really was a way of projecting and advertising Spartan discipline, just think about what all those enhanced six-packs in 300 were supposed to represent. No one articulates the meaning of the ancient nude athletic body better than historian Donald Kyle, who notes in his book Sport and Spectacle in the Ancient World, “The human body-male or female, fit or flabby, clothed or naked-is the ultimate symbol…In Archaic Greece, disrobing fully to become naked for sport became an assertive communication of maleness, ethnicity, status, freedom, privilege, and physical virtue.” Even then, the athletic body was a powerful advertising canvas and nudity was itself a costume (ibid.).
“Costume” is a good way to put it. Basically reversing Segewick’s imagery of the surface vis-à-vis nudity on the surface of clothes, and more showcasing clothing through nudity (the surface of skin) as a virtue of masculine strength and beauty that Amazons are certainly known for (albeit as a matter of performative irony regarding their feminine side and status being monstrous because they aren’t biologically[9] men)—so-called “bare strength” is an heirloom of the ancient world; i.e., bodies stripped bare, less to perform better and more to advertise them and those they represent (the state and the state’s dimorphic gender values) on the field: to be viewed, hence witnessed, as intimating works of art/poetry in motion. This would happen while suitably giving a courtier’s deference and hubristic display to Olympus—namely Zeus and his divinity as something to bask in and hopefully win his (infamously capricious) favor:
Athletes competed naked as a tribute to the Greek God Zeus. They wanted to show Zeus their physical power and muscular physique. Showing off their bodies also helped intimidate other competitors. /Since Greek heroes were often depicted nude in artwork and sculptures, this inspired athletes to train harder and win their event. Athletes wanted to be compared to “true” [quotes, me] heroes like Hercules and Achilles.
[…] In Greek legends death was a terrible experience. They believed when you died it was all over and you spent the rest of eternity in endless torment. This is why Hercules was so revered. He was a mortal man who won immortality because of his athletic accomplishments. / Lunt believes that many people competed in the Olympics hoping they’d be able to achieve some portion of immortality. By consistently winning athletes would have statues sculpted and songs written about their achievements, which meant their legacy would live on through the ages (source: “Five Things You Didn’t Know About the Ancient Olympics,” 2016).
Male or female, masculine and/or feminine, there’s an apocryphal element to Greek heroes—one that plays out, onstage, in a half-real sense (tying heroism as much to games and performance, such naked violence sitting between legend and real life). It also bears repeating that Greek heroes are notoriously tragic, chasing the gods only to fall short (with Hercules going mad and killing his family before trying to commit suicide[10], and Achilles famously falling victim to poison).
The belief (and a very patriarchal one, at that) was immortality being achieved through legendary feats of physical strength that people could witness at a given venue known for recreating them (athleticism, but also military conquest told in masculine art; i.e., the “human cockfighting” of gladiatorial kayfabe). The classic problem with Amazons, then, is they and their costumes (their naked bodies) were basically doing what men did minus a male overlord, which society at the time would have warned against; Amazons were monsters, meaning threats to male power structures because they promoted an equality that was fundamentally antithetical to how the Ancient Greeks—particularly the Athenians—normally viewed men and women: as inherently (according to them) unequal, thus ultimately defeated in propaganda battles ordaining such things (which classical Amazonomachia did, carrying its foregone conclusions into Renaissance art and ultimately present-day forms; re: hoakley’s “Amazons at War,” 2023). Men were dogmatized as “superior” and treated all women, not just Amazons, as threats/sites of conquest to put down by force—to rape, synonymizing sex with force.
While city-states are not homogenous, even Spartan[11] women would have been beholden to this ordering of things; yes, they could be do certain things other city-states, like Athens, might be stricter about (nudity in public), but still remained beholden to that most sacred of womanly duties a state would need to survive: motherhood. A quality reflected in Cameron’s Amazons, literal millennia down the road, this effectively made Spartan women glorified breeding vats for the city-state: to produce children, including boys, for the Spartan Agoge: “Their lives were not their own, but belonged to the state,” explains Unknown5, who is quick to point out the Spartan state was a war machine dependent on slave labor and brutal military programs, but also secret police[12] (“How Sparta Manufactured Super-Soldiers – The Spartan Agoge,” 2023).
And yet, if men were victims of the state for falling in battle, women were recruited to assist in sexual reproduction valorized over something closer to a whore or second-class citizen: dying during childbirth. But they would have still stood for the values of the state, making them glorified cheerleaders with additional responsibilities yet still controlled for their sexuality by something that had (and continues to have) power over them in newer evolved markets continuing to control sex and force, and by extension, women’s bodies of all different kinds. Nothing is controlled more than sex, force an instrument to dominate nature by vengefully pimping it. Nudity and prostitution became increasingly common in forms that, while they can be sex-positive and dictated by workers themselves, historically would have (and still continue to be) controlled by state forces towering over them:
(artist: Prism Serene)
In short, the nation-states of today inherited the flaws of their city-state predecessors (the ones that survived, which Sparta did not), but also their modus operandi for advertising through bodies; i.e., whose owners at times worshipped warrior women, but also feared and reviled them as things to pimp (thus rape). In short, Amazons were policed and fetishized, but also martyred in service to male hegemony as an ongoing hauntological theme; i.e., the topos of the power of women, creation of sexual difference, and Male Gaze, etc, speaking to classic problems of female appropriation and assimilation: regarding women historically disfigured and maimed by patriarchal forces, turning them into cops.
(artist: Franz von Stuck)
Yet, there is a current issue through such bodies seeming to recruit warrior women in a very Spartan-esque “equality”: the state haunting liberatory forms, the latter also seeking the right not simply to undress and show off, but challenge canonical doubles with self-same exposure (a kind of warrior tribadism); i.e., to avoid forced motherhood and military service! Subjugated Amazons commonly express as paradoxically virginal, immaculate by Cameron’s neoconservative, cop-like forms; i.e., scrappy but off-limits, giving them a modesty element that is paradoxically cheeky and “of nature.” Ripley doesn’t birth Newt, but rescues her from dark, Communist- and queer-coded savages.
In short, the Amazons of today canonically function as “Goldilocks whores,” policing bad nature through good under Pax Americana, and which we can redress/undress as needed. Toying with various BDSM themes, such as Marston’s bondage kink, it becomes an act of worship—revering the exposed flesh as “mighty” through ironic appearance and subversive context: “She’s a brick house,” one caught between genuine rebellion and actual betrayal. Once a rebel, then a cop, and struggling to reclaim such things away from their traitorous qualities on the same combative surfaces, the Amazon’s surface tension is heightened paradoxically through exposure; i.e., to her as both combatant and bride in patriarchal eyes, one whose dialectical-material function isn’t immediately obvious: a cop or simply a warrior maiden/demon lover that speaks to liberation as a constant uphill battle. Throughout history as something to reinvent while looking backwards into the future, the Amazon’s powers remain constantly stolen and abused by nation-states (and neoliberal corporations) appropriating modern-day feminism vis-à-vis an “ancient,” naked-warrior aesthetic. Yet, such is where power lies, waiting for her to take it all back with.
Moving past the former historical side of things, let’s conclude this section by considering power’s application through Amazonian dualism—specifically in our hands through Amazons as a form of art and political expression.
Power is useful; demons embody all kinds, the Amazon in particular speaking to her exposed body as a sexual weapon—one of rape and revenge that promotes athleticism through the flesh and vaso vagal through the weaponry she carries. These collectively threaten before, during and after social-sexual activities (often warfare). In turn, inequality through exchange is classically determined through artists and muses, one being knowledge (about nature) and the other power (from/over nature). Per Galatea, but also Faust and Prometheus, each side has something to offer the other in statuesque ways: a slice of Antiquity as retro-future.
Keeping with ludo-Gothic BDSM, the poetic dialog of Amazons should be intense, but palliatively subversive; i.e., to deliver eustress, or positive stress, in Numinous passions that speak theatrically to our lived trauma while replicating good feelings, mid-paradox: those relaid in “torturous” body language, unequal exchange, and the dark transformative potential of various social-psychosexual performances. Provided it’s what they want, the fucked party should reach back to grip the bedframe while getting railed, or otherwise offer the dom their body and agency during calculated risk (re: consent is hot, but especially under conditions that put it to the test, below). Such surrender is temporary and committed through service, the dom serving the sub in ways the sub needs (and which the dom enjoys).
Furthermore, demon BDSM (with Amazons or not) isn’t purely of sex and pain, so much as it involves asexual interrogations of trauma that often (though not always) include sex and pain in demonic language. The point of such theatre is to “surrender”; i.e., under a performing destroyer’s “captivity” and “violence” as equally performative, thus in quotes. It’s not real so much as half-real, thus cannot harm the recipient(s) despite controlling them in ways they choose to submit to; it merely restrains them, giving them the chance to negotiate boundaries of unequal power happening under controlled circumstances arranged by everyone in advance (re: informed consent).
In turn, these devices (e.g., bed restraints, below) aren’t abusive unless being used to abuse, which camp doesn’t do. Even so, campy forms of exquisite “torture” very much remain haunted by actual, generational trauma; i.e., “rape” being a fantasy to live with and overcome through play that helps stabilize our inner victim, one threatened by daily remainders of what they survived: the Amazon as both protector and destroyer in good faith and bad, for workers or the state; e.g., with me loving the Amazon aesthetic despite having been abused by those practicing it in the past. It’s not just medicinal, for revolutionaries, but cathartic, orgasmic and good praxis, when done correctly!
(source)
Keeping this in mind, the gods and their avatars (dualistic manifestations of unequal power and knowledge, transformation, and dark desires of rape and revenge unto nature-as-monstrous-feminine) are as much things to make ourselves as they are to return to in demonic forms made by others—with alienation’s problematic lineage under capital reclaimed in statuesque doubles speaking to our bodies and identities echoed darkly across the Amazon (and other demons); i.e., statues to sculpt and behold as one does a god from “ancient” times—both silly like this ’90s Street Fighter spoof or serious like Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights, the imaginary past conjured to their makers’ service: “a form moulded with at least one element of grandeur—power” (source: Nava Atlas’ “Charlotte Brontë’s Preface to Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë,” 2014).
(artist: Zhaar)
This bestiary very much includes Amazons; i.e., as historically whored-out, female avatars of war that have become increasingly entropic (dualistic, liminal, GNC, BDSM-themed, and hauntological, etc) under neoliberal Capitalism as something to be for or against. Our copies double the state’s and vice versa, their respective arguments borrowing a great many things from a shared source; i.e., from the cryptonymy process and its restless vanishing point; e.g., dark “phallic” mommy doms like Lady Dimitrescu, left, both coming from and occupying the same half-real shadow zone used by cops and victims, alike. Both are “dark” in appearance, threatening order as it currently exists (under crisis and its fearsome, decaying circumstances), but only one functionally serving workers, animals and nature by doing so; i.e., there is always a shadow under capital and that shadow is always a deserving/undeserving victim in duality.
As we’ve discussed, cops abuse DARVO and obscurantism to accomplish state revenge (thus profit) against nature; i.e., as monstrous-feminine with monstrous-feminine; re: having “good” nature rape “bad,” the Amazon versus the Medusa but also other “bad” Amazons during Tolkien’s refrain and later Cameron’s. Victims of their unironic violence and bad-faith masquerades seek to anisotropically stymie profit (and break Capitalist Realism) with while using the same linguo-material performances per liminal expression: rape play where Amazons aren’t simply bona fide liberators, but token police reflecting inside/upon the same guerilla, monstrous-feminine, armor-like-yet-undressed (virgin/whore) shells and surfaces! Revolution is ergodic/non-trivial in this respect; embracing and adjusting under this total, diseased reality means acknowledging the Amazon’s shared praxial, ontological confusion during the cryptonymy process: on the Black Veil personified, tracing its concentric veneers’ mise-en-abyme (castles-in-the flesh) to escape the labyrinth while, to some degree, inside its power as something to occupy and relate to, person/place, resident/residence, etc.
Like Victor’s Creature, Amazons are demons, meaning things that—once made—testify as much to ongoing abuse in dysfunctional relations with (and receiving deceptions/cryptonymy from) powerful forces; i.e., forces concerned with controlling power for themselves as pro-state or pro-worker (anarchist). This applies to both sides of a given exchange and goes both ways, among various marginalized groups; e.g., white women like Radcliffe commonly making Neo-Gothic hulks that speak as much to their husband’s legally unequal status as they do citations of imperial abjection, but also reclaim either in fictional forms: “Fuck me like you mean it!”
Speaking to the whore’s paradox (re: the best sex[13] having a bit of struggle, vaso vagal, eustress—so-called “struggle snuggles,” cuddlefucks, what-have you), forbidden knowledge and power are often about sex and force as “dark” because it achieves catharsis in a pre-existing state of confusion that workers inherit/are born into (one where order and equality are a lie that serves state continuation by menticiding vulnerable parties through psychosexual dogma; re: gargoyles). Great castigation conveys the data through how we camp its effects with other people we view as “statuesque”; i.e., Amazonian dominators that, under our command, expiate our naughty-naughty sins by pounding our asses just how we like—all while living with/embracing trauma during the dialectic of shelter/the alien:
(artist: Marlon Trelie)
But again, Gothic Communism is holistic. To be considered sex-positive at all, such things cannot harm others—meaning in the scene or elsewhere—across space and time, through poetry and politics using Amazons during oppositional praxis. It’s not entirely about their gender but the demon-lover threat they represent towards certain privileged groups under men’s “protection,” classically white women.
Much of the next few pages comes from Volume Zero. Though not female, for example, Radcliffe’s banditti were demon lovers, and very much threatened (white, straight, middle-class) women with rape; i.e., whether deliberate or not, she commodified a white, straight, politically moderate woman’s idea of rape, all while excluding most other oppressed voices during the abjection process (all relegated to the ghost of the counterfeit she charged her novels with). Among TERFs, current Amazon poetics can yield a similar misogynistic flavor (cis or trans) that Radcliffe did unto cis women exclusively using mythical, male forest demons. Both are bad, but our focus, here, is the darkness of Amazons made to serve the state similar to how Radcliffe’s own rape fantasies did (causing unimaginable harm in the process).
By subverting Amazons as demon lovers during courtly love, we can use this ourselves to harness, thus convey dark power and knowledge; i.e., as things to behold in proximity to its deathly intimations, promoting repressed characteristics of ourselves and how we and our potential (to transform during unequal, forbidden exchange) are treated by state and liberatory forces in opposition: the struggle to snuggle, to be bold—to rub elbows with godly forces tied to land, labor and occupant normally enslaved by bourgeois servants who look like us, mid-rebellion.
As things to control workers with, sex and force “war” as they normally do, the Aegis taking various taboo aspects of daily life and reflecting them back at workers in poetic, shadowy forms and methods; i.e., the psychomachy as Amazonomachia, yielding internal and external disputes for problematic contrast, thus comparison; e.g., fucking but also dialectical-material struggles about fucking (the marriage bed or wedlock) personified through Amazons (monsters to fuck) being something to embody and take into ourselves as much to get out of our systems; re: to be strong in ways that prevent future harm for all workers, animals and nature as monstrous-feminine caused by state predation.
Amazons are warrior women that reflect “dark desire” being historically ironic; i.e., normally triangulating for the state for fear of rape projecting onto the colonized-as-demonic, and us anisotropically pushing back through Amazonian camp. This alienized-vs-alienizer dialog commonly has a gendered, animalistic (re: predator/prey) element as well, the Amazon’s classical abilities to conform (or not conform) used by state forces recuperating rebellious actors and actions like Amazons (who are basically big animal warrior women) to suit their own needs. They do so with confidence, always assuming we don’t have the guts to reclaim and such things to suit us, not them. It’s not technically “hard” to prove them wrong (at a glance), but the battle is very much an uphill one; i.e., to internalize these devices at a cultural level so that developing sex-positivity (thus Gothic Communism) becomes second-nature: liberating sex workers (thus all workers) through iconoclast art, recultivating the Wisdom of the Ancients (the Superstructure) in the process.
(artist: AkiraeviI)
A “terrorist” goes both ways, then, as does any ability to move power through such dichotomies; i.e., as things to reverse; re: workers being terrorist and counterterrorist in anisotropic duality. This duality reverses polarity through the same points, all depending on who’s labeling and perceiving who, but also who’s describing a given position as “Amazon” (or something similar to Amazon, like orcs or witches); e.g., state victims are always “terrorist” (thus illegitimate) in the eyes of the state and its rights, but always “counterterrorist” (thus legitimate) in the eyes of themselves and their rights. The same aesthetic of power and rebellion, rape and revenge, can be recuperated by state actors enacting false rebellion vis-à-vis the obfuscation of Amazons and Amazonomachia through DARVO arguments. Through praxial inertia, they tie the function of Amazons into knots (above), their white Indian/undercover cop cloaked in double standards colonizing nature (and symbols of resistance tied to nature) as a monstrous-feminine force to harvest for the state. Doing so happens, again, per the usual neoconservative, predator/prey triangulations; i.e., tokenizing a desire for protection from abject beings under state conditions: nature equals big, scary whore, so find something of nature—an Amazonian whore domesticated by state agents—to keep criminal (non-white, queer) nature in check, thus protect the state’s nuclear model (often expressed as non-Amazonian women and children; re: Cameron’s Amazons and their victims/wards).
From a competitive standpoint, home is an alien mountain to climb; i.e., king of the hill with only one victor after trammeling the whore (which Gothic Communism seeks to reclaim using the same binding devices and weapon-like threats of force [thus rape] that cops use). In turn, canonical home defense (the besieged home-in-decay as “Western”) is always (neo)conservative, overlooking Pax Americana‘s genocidal function by seeking its revenge; re: peace through strength, repressing state skeletons-in-the-closet by dressing them up as bugbear scapegoats.
This includes the Amazon as something to banish, afterwards—a sow to fatten and butcher while acting like a pig (a cop). Such “hogtying” happens while conveniently titillating the Male Gaze outside the bedroom (for anyone in the Man Box, not just men); re: the canceled future of childhood regression, whereupon capital decays and Imperialism comes home to empire in medieval language: summon darkness (often as evil dollhouse, but also monstrous-feminine dolls inside said house); retire the Amazon similar to the male knight or nameless gunslinger (except she’s also a whore) by banishing or bridling her after the liminal hauntology of war (the haunted house or Gothic castle’s operatic danger disco) retreats. Rinse and repeat; rape nature abroad by evoking genocide at home.
Doing so panders to Capitalist Realism per the ghost of the counterfeit, pimping demon lovers in parental language overlapping on the same monstrous bodies; i.e., whose abjection Amazons express par excellence—manlier and more “daddy-like” than many men, but still treated as non-men/automatic mothers by the state using them like men; re: to rape nature with nature by defending the state. As a system that rapes nature time and time again, the state is always good in its own eyes; under times of expansion and crisis, it allows tokenism to assimilate one lucky member of an alien group, making them good merely to violate all others from said group (and other groups). Galatea tokenizes under Pygmalion’s shadow to enforce his will: that of the skeleton tyrant/Capitalocene.
(artist: Kafun)
The entire enterprise descends into alarm fatigue, a process where someone becomes the cop simply to postpone, not prevent their own abuse by state forces; i.e., big fish eat little fish, so kiss up and punch down, rape encompassing an act of creative control about itself; e.g., Jadis—apart from raping me—also policed my artwork, telling me what bodies were acceptable to draw (as Amazons) and which weren’t (and pulling my funding to attack me with)! Such persons are craven to a fault, selling out at the drop of a hat; i.e., at the threat of collapse, or facing things coded as “collapse” which they employ[14] against state enemies: the perceived enemy at the gates of “Rome” also being the enemy within her dark fortress; e.g., “That not my wife” (from Body Snatchers, 1978) being a phrase Jadis freely laughed at and used unironically against me: not someone who’d put up with their bullshit indefinitely (though I did for nearly three years, the last six months mostly being me planning to leave and calling them out as my abuser).
True to form, Jadis wasn’t above whoring themselves out for the state, either—not if it let them assert strength over me (a trans woman) as the (according to them) weaker party! They were always right, and I was always wrong—a holster for their frustrations, and where they could shove their terrible gaze into me (to “look daggers,” as the saying goes), a colossal twat ensnaring me with boobytraps:
(model and photographer: Jadis and Persephone van der Waard[15])
Onstage and off, such things regress to pre-agrarian, hunter/gatherer levels of postapocalypse, state “guerrilla monopolies” (on asymmetrical warfare as a performative device) resulting canonically in Quixotic, Pavlovian/menticidal, and “white knight, black knight” syndrome (refer to Volume Zero and One for further examinations of these ideas): the hyphenating of pre-existing gender notions of strength (the stacked, “non-white” body type) with ironic roles canonically swapping to uphold the status quo, forced onto classic dominatrixes by the state (another reward to promise to state sissies). She’s a lethal weapon from head to toe, darkness visible yielding and concealing various cryptonymic facets!
Yet, monster-fucking goes both ways. This uwu/owo (fear/fascination) schtick applies to people lusting after Amazons, knights and similar warriors’ ghost of the counterfeit as much as it does when embodying them (chercher la femme vs gender dysphoria and body dysmorphia); re: Tennyson’s Lady of Shallot craving Sir Lancelot from afar—boldly and voyeurism eying the great warrior with her magic mirror’s telescopic gaze:
A bow-shot from her bower-eaves,
He rode between the barley-sheaves,
The sun came dazzling thro’ the leaves,
And flam’d upon the brazen greaves
Of bold Sir Lancelot.
A red-cross knight for ever kneel’d
To a lady in his shield,
That sparkled on the yellow field,
Beside remote Shalott (source).
In short, middle-class people historically get “thirsty” and desire protection from imaginary threats in black/white language; e.g., black/white knights, but also novels haunted by them; re: Catherine Morland and friend—in Jane Austen’s 1803/1817[16] Northanger Abbey—crying “positively dreadful!” while reading so-called “black” (Gothic) novels by the dozen (see: Volume Zero).
They also desire to be strong in ways that mirror their Amazonian protectors unequal distributions and proposals; re:
For me, this becomes another form of consent, one informed by sexual desire. I choose to interact with Samus and the castle because they teach, but also excite me. I want to fuck what I want to be: sexy. For me, that means a powerful woman like Samus [a colony brat raised by giant bird aliens].
Yes, Metroid spaces and heroines are “traumatic,” and echo trauma (re: child abuse) and “trauma” (re: watching Alien) from my childhood. They remain sexy because Samus chooses to protect me inside the space, the carrot to the castle’s stick. To quote Spike Spiegel, “I love the kind of woman who can kick my ass.” The Metroidvania castle lets me adopt a traditionally “female” stance: fear of physical abuse. Intimations of trauma are inevitable; framing them within boundaries of play grants me an element of control, according to a partner I can trust. I trust the Metroidvania to “imprison” me. Inside the castle, I control Samus, an avatar whose powerful persona chases my boogeymen, tyrants, away (source: Persephone van der Waard’s “Why I Submit,” 2021).
As such, Amazons are like the bull in the China shop—blunt and graceful, pursuer and object of pursuit. Thusly reclaiming these paradoxical fixtures of rape and resistance from bad actors/state hegemony during liminal expression’s mise-en-abyme, we become not only torn between two worlds (either as or regarding Amazons), but between Amazons as alien advertisements for timeless battles working for/against the state; i.e., these castles-in-the-flesh (castle-like bodies and vice versa) “going native” to fight—from mind to monster—over and across the same billboard bodies’ demonic sex and force: towering and morphologically buttressed, but also under siege in both directions.
Except, whereas cops present themselves as “shepherds” guarding nature in bad faith (often as white Indians/token vigilantes; re: Savage Land Rogue[17]), we promote stewardship over nature as true anti-rape arbiters; i.e., something to take back from the state—both sides employing the castled language of sex and force, rape and revenge to make victim arguments in good or bad faith; e.g., the lived reality of monstrous-feminine female bodies controlled by patriarchal ones, the Amazon classically feared by rapists for her visibly daunting appearance, and which rapists will teach Amazons—per the Pygmalion fantasy—to rape for them (appearing on and off state land to police its wider colonial territories)!
Amazons are demons, not maidens, thus intimidating to cops when cops cannot control them; i.e., as pimps poaching the most vulnerable targets they possibly can, and constantly dreaming up BDSM clichés that let the male jailor “submit” to stronger-appearing (often female) subordinates in whorish, female-coded outfits when it suits them. They pimp the conquered as controlled opposition/pin-up dominatrix (often as whitewashed “jungle fever”); i.e., projecting their rock ‘n roll sex fantasies (and insecurities; re: death by Snu-Snu) onto a classic enemy of the state, but also a paradox: weak/strong per masculine/feminine as monstrous-feminine, forcing the colonized to mother them/whore for the Man—to look tough for said men, but submit to their masters raping them as whores and literally fighting their battles. It becomes an embarrassing privilege in the same old hierarchy. Women’s work enters the Man Box, “acting like a man” to collect for the Faustian pimp as never actually giving anything up when swapping roles (“liberation” staying in the bedroom, trad wives exiting that space wearing Halloween costumes disguising June in pearls, but also her cop status). Instead, rape becomes something to rank inside a costume game.
Abjection projects state violence onto its past-and-present victims becoming future cops and victims. To it, older dynasties were rooted in misogyny as something to recruit from its own victim pools (restricted to local groups cops could realistically dominate through said time’s state logistics; e.g. Sparta), capital expanding said pools to assimilate earlier out-groups; i.e., centuries after Imperialism expanded from feudalism into settler colonialism, some of the world’s oldest scapegoats (women) became early examples of token cops furthering abjection per state concessions: to fight a rising consciousness to state abuses (merging with other forms of tokenism/decaying activism [white indentured servants, people of color and Indigenous peoples] to punch down against labor as a whole); re: gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss putting “rebellion” in quotes; e.g., kidnapped Hippolyta forced to wed Theseus and obey him, a husband and pimp one-in-the-same, the whore a savage made tame on the Wild West of frontier Capitalism. Over a relatively short period, subjugated feminism suddenly became the concealed weapon during the cryptonymy process—the warrior Venus an alien ace up the elite’s sleeve: to go where men weren’t allowed.
State/pimp revenge, then, became a matter of funding such sell-outs succeeding the myth as something to make anew and rebirth[18] the state by infiltrating its own prisons. In turn, all state monopolies, trifectas and qualities of capital include and inform tokenism as something to swap out various persecution networks among the greater lattice—Amazons merely being a famous example that has decayed into witches hunting witches for the state (white women gatekeeping other women and oppressed groups); i.e., for profit inside state territories, dead metaphors patrolling the same old graveyard’s half-real danger discos. They become invasive, predatory cuckoos.
(artist: Sveta Shubina)
Unlike workers fighting for positive freedom, thus control over themselves, state domination boils down to unironic chattelization/humiliation of its alienized prey and total control for itself, like always. Through this terrible device, older abject creatures of darkness and Hell, the wild outdoors and Numinous, etc—once polar opposites to goodly state bodies—have since redoubled among those bodies as state cops serving profit, thus genocide; i.e., to assimilate, the state recolonizing old territories using new traitors wearing the same native uniforms/standing in monumentally for the usual colonizer agents, reversing roles only to uphold what is normal: female harvesters grasping the reaper’s sickle, wearing the collar or bridle to segregate/silence their own (and other) people(s) without performative irony. They become stewards not of nature, but Omelas; i.e., expendable patriotic executioners and jingoistic hypocrites sheltered by the state till it yokes them (re: the euthanasia effect): the trick without the treat, the danger without the disco, relegating “resistance” and transparency to once a year (e.g., Halloween, or Pride).
Under capital, state revenge becomes something to exact no matter what, dividing and conquering Medusa (nature, the whore) as they always do—through triangulatory violence, double standards, brides and bribes; re: the middle class furthering the abjection process (and its grim harvest) through the ghost of the counterfeit. Subjugating Amazons to, in turn, subjugate others using said Amazons, token whores police non-token whores for the Man (aping his straightness, whiteness, and/or Christianity, etc). To have our revenge, we whores have to fight back any way we can, extending Amazonian subversion into and out of the half-real realms of fantasy (and its dark reflections on history) while fighting for universal liberation now. Revolution, for us, is year-round and holistic (so is Halloween and queer acceptance, for that matter). All for one, and one for all!
Before we move onto “Trial by Fire” and demon mommies, let’s quickly conclude with several collaborations, in this respect: Nyx and Amy Ginger Hart.
Whether of class, culture and/or race, cops are traitors through-and-through. Witch cops don’t just apologize for oppression, you see, but fight to maintain and accelerate it within weird nerd culture (often under duress; e.g., trans people threatened with homelessness, people of color with imprisonment, etc); they strike deals and infiltrate colonial territories for their same-old masters, standing in as scarecrows and gargoyles (the latter commonly animalistic statues guarding sacred grounds from evil forces, the former ceremonial watchers controlling pests in agrarian sectors): to exterminate their fellow native/rebellious brethren who refuse to sell out. We must challenge these traitors with our own likenesses thwarting theirs; i.e., Amazons (and similar beings) expressed through labor action’s revolutionary cryptonymy in age-old markets of war and the flesh; re (from Volume Zero):
[where] rituals of power expression and exchange that embody hunters and hunted, predators and prey that play out through the ongoing battles and wars of culture, of the mind, of sexuality and praxis as traumatized: marked for trauma or by trauma that parallel our green and purple doubles onscreen (source).
In taking those elements on and offscreen, we bring the battle to the half-real streets of public imagination! Gender parody becomes iconoclastic, playfully camping canon.
(model and artist: Nyx and Persephone van der Waard)
Apart from being a walking weapon of war and survival that often has sold out, the Amazon’s herbo, hyperbolic/giant/super-sized and protective-yet-bare muscles/sex appeal (and dark, Medusa-grade “furious” form—Nyx, above) still remain legitimate, call-and-response threat displays against state copaganda! Nyx, for example, is a nurturing force of nature, in that respect—treating the land as sacred and all its peoples, animals, and environments under state duress. It’s why I chose to paint her and why I see her as one of my muses. Yes, I crave and worship her for being downright delicious, but do so as much for her kindness and love; i.e., for things she values for their labor and natural value, which capital only destroys for their monetary value (for profit, thus rape).
In short, I want people to know Nyx has value as a cutie and a comrade because she treats me (and nature) as she does: a stacked queen who loves to show off, yet is kind to smaller and more vulnerable things! Despite living in West Virginia (a place devastated by decades of coal-mining), Nyx knows the value of all living things, and places said things (and their labor/natural value) above corporate greed. She absolutely rules:
(artist: Nyx)
Toxic and titillating to state sissies, such hulking green eggs and ham are the state’s bête noire (nature as gyn-ecological; re: Patel and Moore) and our gender trouble’s raison d’être when opposing them during ludo-Gothic BDSM—a feast for the eyes that says, “look, don’t touch” to their ideological enemies, hence in ways antithetical to profit when reclaimed by proletarian agents (who are happy to say “touch,” as Nyx is, during playtime with comrades); re: we whores exerting control over ourselves as “of nature” during calculated risk. This includes how we present as/perform during liminal expression, thus express power in addictive and fun demonic ways; i.e., onstage and off, the Amazon classically a power fantasy about killing our colonizers[19] versus joining them while disguising ourselves as quite literally bridled.
I’ve said repeatedly in the past that Amazons, while demonic, cannot change shape. This is only half-true. They’re big muscle girls, yes; they’re also military units/targets, which means they have uniforms (often of disguise, next page), which they can swap in and out of, during guerilla warfare. Often modernized in cloak-and-dagger stories like the noir femme fatale or Western shootout, Amazons have the capacity to infiltrate the state while looking like something the state would use (e.g., as a bride whose gown contains a female-but-deadly assassin); i.e., “when in Rome” to burn Rome down, the process a gradual one: through marriage as another aspect of the nuclear model to upend while camping it.
In fact, said disco and its hauntological “danger” are rather like the witch hunt, in that respect: often unmoored from a given space and time (re: Federici), cryptonymically in disguises that announce the plot to those who know (spies work in code, showing and hiding through the cryptonymy process)! In turn, the warrior girl is half exposed then fully exposed, but able to fight back when the ruse runs its course (as the fake bride does, below). Get ’em, girl!
(source: Choi Dong-hoon’s Assassination, 2015)
Like the Gothic at large, Amazons are fake in a variety of ways we can exploit to our benefit; i.e., the whore’s paradox requires gaining control while seemingly surrendering it (the Amazon both a maiden and demon originally written by Athenian propagandists to subdue women), but ultimately affording oppressed workers greater agency over their own lives: by dismantling the state as it tries to pimp us. It does so through Amazonian doubles that are never fully closed off, opening the doors for rehumanization (of the harvest) per the whore’s refrain applying to people, product and place. By turning the land into a brothel that operates against nature, nature utilizes the same devices to open up shop in said territories; i.e., against land owners and rich people settler-colonizing places to privatize, ethnically cleanse[20] and demonize through Amazon dialogs. Cops act like your friends, but actually exist to protect private property over people; their job is to rape, then play the victim.
To it, everyone likes the whore, and by making it a warrior monster to cage, the state is generally pointing to its own half-cloaked abuses—ones workers will see happening to themselves, during the pedagogy of the oppressed! The brothel is never fully the elite’s to own, nor is anything else “of nature” the state tries to criminalize; e.g., sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll.
As such, its traitors’ loyalty (and lingo) is always for sale, hidden by the cryptonymies at work/on display and reclaimed by us; i.e., exposing those who act in bad faith during the cryptonymy process, slipping the false Amazon’s mask when she sees what we show her (on the Aegis) and consequently shits her pants; e.g., TERFs acting liked oppressed Amazons, but keeping the costume to attack trans people with. Exposing bad intent is useful and what I designed revolutionary cryptonymy to accomplish through the dualistic, monstrous-feminine language of Amazons. In doing so, we have our revenge—on the Aegis by undoing state control over such things, thus reinstalling the potential for mutual consent during the whore’s paradox: a savior who appears like a destroyer (meaning a stronger person who looks like they can rape you) but is anything but an actual abuser!
(artist: Amy Ginger Hart)
Update: Amy Ginger Hart has decided to go back on our deal, despite me fulfilling my end of it. To summarize, I was writing about Amazons and anal, and saw that Amy checked both boxes (so to speak). So I asked if she’d like to be featured in exchange for some promotion. In response, Amy agreed to retweet the drawing when it was finished. When the drawing was complete and I asked Amy to honor her word and her agreement, however, she responded by blocking me (refer to “Amy Ginger Hart Exploitation Incident, 11/11/2024” for the full details). I’ve decided to leave this section, unchanged, as it illustrates how subjugated Amazons can fool comrades acting in good faith; i.e., how subjugated Amazons often seem good on the surface while actually using the aesthetic in bad faith. To that, Amy shoots pretty photos and certainly looks cute (all photos herein used from her public Twitter account), but is actually, as Foucault might have put it, “a phony twat.” What she abuses (through obscurantism), we reclaim. —Perse
Such are subversive Amazons, which Amy Ginger Hart (our second collaborator) also aligns with; i.e, of nature as part of the same warrior tableaux (above), and one to embody/embellish for workers performing strength in ways that mix-and-match modern-to-ancient forms of the Amazon, during ludo-Gothic BDSM! Women are classically small and passive, under capital, and Amy values her tight holes but also her strong muscles as classically monstrous-feminine; i.e., masculine and feminine, exciting gender trouble for the status quo and gender delight for Amy and her fans! She embodies nature as something to fight for/alongside with various allies during calculated risk:
(artist: Amy Ginger Hart)
Until development, exploitation and liberation sit on the same stage. Gothic Communism is the practice of spies and monsters towards development, we whores activating demonically during ludo-Gothic BDSM to cryptonymically dispel various (mono)myths about women and other monstrous-feminine; e.g., that women can’t shoot/fight back, are always subservient to men and never want revenge against them/are merely sex objects to please men (all of these intersecting with other myths in the fight for liberation; e.g., girls don’t like being choked, above). In turn, spies imitate those they wish to destroy or change into something better. So does Amy showcase herself as Amazonian—a warrior for sex positivity who operates in the buff/out in open for all to see, and one that harmful practitioners of the aesthetic have, since Ancient Athens, stolen from healthier mythical simulacra (the copy of that which patriarchal forces unironically fear).
Women, then, are generally trapped between positions of ownership and being owned, such Amazonian brothel espionage walking the line between bride and whore, diplomat and spy/assassin. This includes models and muses, whose bodies since Antiquity have inspired (male, female or intersex) to illustrate notions of power as much between masculine and feminine, versus simply a feminine that male artists could realistically dominate: Amy’s formidable physique, but also their love of anal sex (a classic terror weapon) being something they love to have—a forbidden zone’s territory and traveler explored by brave souls humanizing both as harvested normally by capital.
(model and artist: Amy Ginger Hart and Persephone van der Waard)
Through darkness and desire, but also vibes, mood, and monstrous thrills, we regain control of responses the state will abuse (re: the vaso vagal response and various psychosexual mechanisms)! Amazons, whether they want to be or not, are sex demons, thus whores in this respect; and whores—again, being vice characters—communicate paradoxically through pain, stigma, bias, the taboo, barbarism, animalistic rape/torture fantasies, and so on. Literally a crush of sorts (the Gothic loves its neo-medieval puns, combined sex and war), they become avatars to vicariously portray/express, hence grip and control desires the state would normally never allow us to speak: in the “just games” allegory of action stories, kayfabe, and Gothic theatre at large, where Amazons are queen.
Furthermore, for those who prefer the masculine approach (as Amazons generally do—upon their classically female bodies), who doesn’t want to be desirable as sexy and strong (excepting subs and fem-presenting workers, who resist compelled masculinity in favor of controlling it through mutual consent)? Thick thighs save lives! Sex is better during metal; i.e., it hits harder when you’re excited by theatrical implements of “danger” overshadowed by state forces haunting and infiltrating our pedagogy (and place) of the oppressed! Resistance is a party filled with good actors and bad fighting over (and with) the same Amazon aesthetic: “Don’t you know I want to be with you tonight?” (Trans-X’ “I Want to Be with You Tonight,” 1995).
Beyond Amazons, there’s power in all monsters, specifically their reassembly, recontextualization and release; i.e., challenging the state’s unironic prostitution/weaponization of anything monstrous-feminine (female/feminine parties being reduced to sex objects defined by their sexuality/sex organs, queer people by sodomy and people of color by non-white criminalization/their skin, etc). We can reclaim them while still being prostitutes, ourselves. And keeping with the whore’s paradox per Amazons, the whore’s revenge doesn’t have a singular meaning or application; e.g., anal sex, but also oral:
(artist: Amy Ginger Hart)
The fact remains that if monsters like the Amazon didn’t have subversive power and cathartic utility through psychosexual camp, we wouldn’t bother! We camp canon because we must; i.e., from city to nation, the state historically summons the Amazon as a monster whore of nature to rile up moral panic with—as coded into dogmatic fear (scapegoat) responses towards sex controlled through unironic force! By comparison, rebellious workers camp all of that to achieve genuine, at-times-postpunk rebellious effects: disco in disguise, seeking similarity amid difference! Let’s dance!
These are not naturally mysterious concepts, but have become unnaturally mysterious[21] by those who don’t want people to utilize Amazon aesthetics for labor action on a grand scale; i.e., to follow She-Hulk as one might “Liberty Leads the People” (a painting about the French Revolution) versus a lady who lays down with the law as its submissive and breedable war bride/whore-with-a-badge (which She-Hulk—a lawyer and tokenized crimefighter—sadly is), or lays down the law for the law (with vigilantes raping people to defend private property in the interest of continued privatization)! Amazons can be cops or victims, but victims can fight back against cops and their various effects; i.e., there’s a gentrifying element that extends to superhero lairs (often cities; e.g., Gotham): turning rebel saloons into cop saloons, brothels-by-another-name gatekeeping such things per the usual assimilative double standards punching down; re: joy divisions. Cops can congregate, redlining and dividing up their prey through military urbanism. Within this hierarchy of values, women are pimped on either side of the Thin Blue line: muscle, but female muscle.
The fact remains, class, culture and race war concern betrayal as something to avoid along the various persecution networks we’ve discussed; i.e., attritional exchanges imploring sympathy for the devil on either side by various onlookers. Such supervised, spectated revenge ties Gothically to demons since at least Frankenstein; i.e., a concentric, frame-narrative story about nature demonized, thus criminal in the eyes of the state pimping it. Victor less feared the Creature’s hulking physique and more its ability to reproduce, envisioning a doomsday when labor-as-robotic fought back across generations to reclaim the Earth out of revenge (re: the technological singularity—a concept we’ll briefly explore, in “Making Demons”).
Though more transhuman than post, Amazons embody such fears per the whore’s revenge. In turn, such us/them and cop/criminal binaries are false insofar as the state promotes them, but which it uses strength to defend the status quo from vengeful whores of nature by presenting cops as false friends; i.e., including in tokenized forms; re: the Amazon as someone to beat and subjugate into a cop. We reclaim all of this during ludo-Gothic BDSM, promoting the very things we seek to challenge and subvert; i.e., by enjoying their empowering elements, per Sarkeesian’s adage, and refusing to endorse their harmful functions and features while punching up against undercover cops (trying as all cops do, to control every aspect of our lives).
(artist: Araneesama)
Liberation is a market; i.e., one whose varied and nebulous creative exchanges pass between many abused parties. Primarily nature whored out by capital pimping it as monstrous-feminine, rape isn’t something to “rank,” and cops can’t fully monopolize Amazonian theatrics any more than workers; i.e., our own capacities for giving and receiving violence being stigmatized by the state, but sympathized with by workers for their campy positions under state rule. Like all vice characters, standbys have become the norm. So, yes, there’s the classic towering huntress with her sword, club or quiver of arrows as unbroken, unbowed. In the buff, she cannot be tamed, cleansed, or bought! Her primal, athletic and flexible (above) cavewoman’s body serves herself and workers, not the state! But her camping of the state is haunted by the very abuse she makes fun of, thus reclaims through courtly love experienced by demons great and small: during anal or other Numinous forms of psychosexual, medieval-style “torture” interrogating trauma!
(artist: Sasha Khmel)
During ludo-Gothic BDSM, evocations of “Ozymandias” and Prometheus should leap to mind in “ancient,” posthuman copies—their clay-as-rogue-technology reinventing older Satanic traditions: something wild, strong and of nature, teaching us what we have lost and regain through golemesque poetics/close encounters; i.e., how power redistributes through creative expression to affect participants differently during an ongoing and oscillating pedagogy of the oppressed; re: similarity amid difference.
Amazons are demons. With any demon ever made, there is a being of nature attached to it a) policed by itself (or some traitorous double), or b) liberating itself from police abuse overseeing such construction in service to profit (thus rape). Not everyone enjoys this kind of thing to start with, but the state wants us too afraid to play with others as though they want to play with us, too. Fighting back is forbidden unless the state sanctions, thus profits from its recuperations/preservations of heteronormative thus Cartesian and settler-colonial stances. We challenge all of them on our own GNC (thus alien) surfaces, uniting in ways that Amazons have struggled to do since reclaiming themselves from state authors out of Antiquity.
To it, pandemonium takes many forms and combinations. Under capital, nature is monstrous-feminine, thus alien in ways that Amazons speak well to: our mutual-if-uneven alienation by the state, and the forbidden sight that punches holes, Amazon-style, into Capitalism Realism’s various embodiments of rape and revenge. Once their subversive potential wakes up and unites, Amazons (and other demons) can rise up to remind the elite—those unable to imagine a world where they can’t harm others and would rather die than give up what they think they own—that it was never theirs to begin with! Hope isn’t given by those who hold us hostage; we make it ourselves by actually fighting back—together. “I am woman, hear me roar!”
(artist: Amy Ginger Hart)
So concludes this two-part section on Amazons, rape and revenge (and Medusa before that). From here, we’ll look monsters comparable to Amazons, albeit on a spectrum!
Again, all demons play with rape through unequal, forbidden exchange, and whose subsequent power fantasies (mainly of dark desire) take many forms of “phallic,” alien, weaponized sex. These, in turn, encompass magical friends to make/construct that provide an adversarial, oft-painful component to help us change beyond societal norms. By feeding the whore’s paradox into others—e.g., the paradox of terror speaking to virgins/whores and vice versa during the whore’s revenge—workers suddenly become free to explore things like sex (and sexual taboos) that society pushes into fantastical, hellish realms: the asshole of existence. We reclaim these to go beyond what is allowed, genuine rebellious camp being far harder to prevent than canon would have you think; i.e., nature-as-monstrous-feminine having its whore’s revenge to exist in ways that speak theatrically to the violence normally committed against us by police forces: on the casting couch as its own cartographic refrain!
(artist: Amy Ginger Hart)
In terms of canon vs camp, function is context, which doesn’t always track immediately with form; i.e., it plays with and subverts it; e.g., Amy can stretch out on said couch in a campy scenario that resembles its unironic variety’s demonic exchange: power and knowledge not things that can ever be fully controlled by one side alone. Transformation happens through the whore’s paradox turning things on their heads through play for oneself (with one’s body, orientation, and gender identity or performance through clothing, makeup, props and sets)—a desire to have fun with things that are normally abusive. That’s how any monster works during ludo-Gothic BDSM!
(artist: Evul)
Let’s unpack that next, going beyond earthly realms (which Amazons occupy and wage war inside) and into hellish territories about monster (thus forbidden) love with admittedly Amazonian qualities! Amazons classically capture their mates; continuing with the blood libel/sodomy class of monsters, we’ll proceed unto Lady Hellbender and other demon mommies own operatic, ballroom sex-as-weaponry to reclaim postcolonially from state forces (similar to our anal Amazon thesis)! Onto the beefcake mothers of sin and hellfire[22]!
Onto “A Paucity of Time“!
Footnotes
[1] Made from clay to be strong—to rape and avenge or avenge a rape, but also “rape” during ludo-Gothic BDSM, thus achieve praxial catharsis while developing Gothic Communism.
[2] “Prison sex” being a term I devised to speak to a hierarchy of power and subsequent values towards the giving of rape, versus “rape culture” being a term I’ve heard used to describe rape apologetics on a mass, cultural level; i.e., apologizing for rapists and blaming their victims, under the profit motive; e.g., R. Kelly avoiding punishment for decades despite the mountain of evidence left in his wake (Dreading’s ” The Disturbing Case of R. Kelly,” 2024).
[3] Commonly expressed through Orientalism, sodomy and blood libel; e.g., King Piccolo’s parthenogenic offspring, Piccolo Junior (a qualifier he later abandons), swearing he’ll have his revenge (for his senior’s death) after he is reborn; i.e., from a giant egg that grows quickly into adult form: echoes of mad science, incest, reptilian vampires, Pagan infanticide, and the backstabbing Jew, etc.
[4] I.e., abused by men of reason having secularized Divine Right through the Protestant ethic, enjoying its exceptions and double standards as white straight European men always do (for them and theirs, their understanding of nature becomes artificial, ordained by God-given forces yet dressed up as “science.”
[5] While fantasy races commonly symbolize settler-colonial arguments, there’s a duality to them that requires them to be racist through usage, hence context; e.g., green skin speaks to colors of stigma that not only historically predate systemic racism, they speak to alienation of all kinds; re: blood libel being a medieval practice that survives into the present to afflict different groups for different reasons. The fact remains that rape fantasies aren’t always based on actual cultures through these fantasies, but imaginary ones informed by different stigmas, biases and fears known to ours. To it, Jadis and I used to do rape fantasies—with me being their twink war bride and them playing an orc chiefess saying to me (as I fucked them), “I’m keeping this one!” Doing so wasn’t so much to punch down, but play with “Gothic” destroyer language we divorced from systemic racism. It was fun!
[6] Such abjection is something to dispel through experiment. For example, I used to be scared of anal. When I tried it, I realized that God wasn’t going to strike me down, nor Satan (the canonical version) drag me kicking and screaming off to Hell. Yes, I didn’t like it with Zeuhl (who lost their virginity to anal sex), but I also didn’t like them entirely as a person; when I tried it with Cuwu, I liked them a lot more (and was more comfortable with myself as trans), thus found myself enjoying anal a lot more, too. In doing so, I suddenly saw all the people who not only were afraid of anal, but things associated with anal; e.g., whores and gay people. It was a very eye-opening experience.
[7] These in turn, are loaded with various slippery-slope fallacies and false equivalencies we can dispel; e.g., anal doesn’t always lead to felching (through it can), and felching isn’t equivalent to “getting your red wings.” I’ve done one but not the other but viewed through the abjection process, such activities would be conflated and viewed as harmful.
[8] To it, if there is escalation, it’s generally because those escalating violence have been conditioned to behave as such; i.e., by seeing enemies all around them to attack, thus whores “of nature” to pimp; e.g., Amazons sodomize men out of revenge (the idea—of an avenging degenerate—being a fascist argument; re: the backstabbing Jew), so Amazons must die “the way they’d do it to us!” It’s a strawman, one the state loves to abuse during DARVO—to shame and ridicule sluts, and things treated like sluts by the state tokenizing Amazons (anything not white, cis-het, male, European and Christian). Nature becomes a brothel, the land something to hold onto and choke out through force versus actually give back to Indigenous groups during “land back” arguments (which become just as unimaginable to Cartesian dominators as anal sex is).
As such, everything must be white, a black planet something fear because the revenge of those reclaiming the land surely must want to seek harm against the colonizers they’re ousting. Again, this is projection. While there’s something to be said for getting even, the fact remains that places like Haiti and its successful slave revolt against the French, were repelling a group of people from their land that had spent their entire time there exterminating the local population for profit. Settler colonialism is a system, in this respect—one that repeats over and over across the world, space and time, in between fact and fiction, novel and romance, normal and abject. People who are weird about sex and gender—but also BDSM, fetishes and kink as monstrous extensions of these things—are likewise weird about Imperialism, ethnocentrism, and Pax Americana, etc. Things like anal and land back might seem unrelated, but only to the uninitiated!
In turn, history repeats itself in ways that play out through relationships between people and the land that harbors them (where they live, thus have sex). As Jewish Voices for Peace writes:
This July 4th, we contemplate parallels between the colonization of Turtle Island (“North America”) and Palestine:
Genocide. Land theft. Ethnic cleansing. Environmental destruction. Forced displacement of people from their homes, and sequestration into isolated areas with (artificially) scarce resources. Criminalization and surveillance. Colonial control over lives, and denial of self-determination and sovereignty. Erasure of native history and culture. Ideologies (Manifest Destiny, Zionism) of entitlement to, and justification for, these atrocities.
While there are parallels between the colonization of Palestine and of Turtle Island, there are also major distinctions. It’s inappropriate to discuss the colonization of Turtle Island as a monolith, since the various peoples here endured it in different ways and at different points in time. (To learn more about the specific history of the Indigenous people whose land you’re on, go to native-land.ca.)
Supporting Palestinians’ right to return and right to self-determination in their homeland goes hand in hand with supporting Indigenous people’s demand for #LandBack — for restoration of Indigenous sovereignty and stewardship, and respect for their deep connection to and knowledge of their lands.
As @ndncollective writes, although Palestinians and people indigenous to Turtle Island “come from different nations and geographies, the struggles against settler colonialism are the same… because settler colonists share playbooks,” and “Zionism, white supremacy, and imperialism… act as one to oppress and eliminate us.” And both groups of native people are working toward a similar vision of liberation. In @ndncollective‘s words: “Just as we fight and organize to reclaim land on Turtle Island, our Palestinian relatives fight and organize to return the land and for the land to return to the people” (source Instagram post: July 4th, 2024).
Solidarity against such oppression is the only way forwards.
[9] That ancient (and awful) rubric, still used by patriarchal defenders to this day (re: TERFs).
[10] According to Euripides (source: Perseus.tufts.edu).
[11] Joshua Mark writes,
Spartan women had more rights and enjoyed greater autonomy than women in any other Greek city-state of the Classical Period (5th-4th centuries BCE). Women could inherit property, own land, make business transactions, and were better educated than women in ancient Greece in general. Unlike Athens, where women were considered second-class citizens, Spartan women were said to rule their men (source).
He goes on to state how Sparta lost a 371 BCE battle with Thebes, at Leuctra, after centuries of military supremacy. Following this defeat, the state weakened and collapsed, leading future male thinkers to not only create the Amazons, but blame Spartan women, to boot:
What Aristotle and other conventionally minded non-Spartan men feared subconsciously and perhaps sometimes consciously was feminine power. One expression of that Greek male fear was the invention of the mythical race of Amazons, but at least the Amazons had the decency to live apart from men, whereas the Spartan women apparently exercised their power from within the heart of the community. In the grip of such fear, the male sources often distorted the facts they had access to, usually only at second-hand at best, about Spartan women (cited by Mark; original source: Paul Cartledge’s The Spartans: The World of the Warrior-Heroes of Ancient Greece, 2004).
In short, the glorifying of male military might was done at the expense of the women who, in the case of the Spartans, not only bore their husbands’ children but used their own expanded rights to empower Sparta beyond what it could have been otherwise.
[12] Called the Crypteia, on which Paul Cartledge writes in Spartan Reflections (2001), “either principally sought out and killed helots across Laconia and Messenia as part of a policy of terrorizing and intimidating the enslaved population, or they principally did a form of military training, or they principally endured hardships as an initiation ordeal, or the Crypteia served a combination of all these purposes, possibly varying over time.” In short, they enforced the will of the state as a police body upheld through force—a ruthless tactic adopted by modern-day fascist resurrections regressing imaginarily backwards; i.e., paramilitary units with a vigilante flavor defending capital and its hauntological gender values (which initially fetishize, then euthanize Amazonian doubles).
[13] For survivors of trauma who aren’t sex-repulsed because of their trauma.
[14] Ironically while acting “barbarian” themselves (as TERFs/SWERFs so often do); i.e., as facets of fascist feminism—playing dress up as a complicit disguise purely to hide/show their role (as state enforcers) during the cryptonymy process forwarding abjection.
[15] Originally featured in the Undead Module, “Escaping Jadis” (2024).
[16] Written/published posthumously. In part, such stories panned as terrorist literature, something not befitting an unmarried, but still white, straight, middle-class woman to write about.
[17] Amazons, tokenized, illustrate an ongoing problem of assimilation; i.e., that expresses not just in a variety of superhero bodies, but spatio-temporal fantasy worlds that house them. Rogue doesn’t just appear in “our time,” then, but other worlds where she can put her talents to work (stealing power from those she touches); re (from Volume Two, part one):
As Ayla and Savage Land Rogue demonstrate, Amazon habitats are far older than videogames, but have evolved into them out of older Pax Americana fantasies exported elsewhere (from America to Japan and back again); i.e., a revival of the “white jungle” populated with “big game”: a vacation-type resort for the usual anxious pearl-clutchers looking for Jane and Tarzan; i.e., to punch down at towards the dogmatic threat of a Black Planet: to ease their own inheritance anxieties and fear of a non-white revenge for empire as inherently genocidal, tokenizing colonial subjects like the Amazon to police its own group, mid-Holocaust (source: “‘Death by Snu-Snu’: From Herbos to Himbos, part two,” 2024).
In doing so, she becomes a crimefighter vehicle for pro-state fantasies that we must take back, regardless of where or how such things manifest! Kowai or kawaii, tits and ass in or out—a cop is a cop, a rebel a rebel vis-à-vis how they move power in one direction or the other!
(artist: Mike DeBalfo)
[18] Re: The state is incompatible with life and consent—can only rearm its workers to assist in mythmaking that maintains this pattern; i.e., to essentialize the state and end history beyond Capitalist Realism, the past not something to learn from save to enforce state dogma and police violence. Our own gender trouble upsets this paradigm, doing so inside itself vis-à-vis Amazons and other monstrous-feminine stories and characters (classically with animal masks being an ancient form of theatre); i.e., to divorce biology from gender and sex, and gender and sex from each other to end canonical essentialism, pushing towards horizontal arrangements of power, knowledge and history.
[19] Again, versus imitating or otherwise getting in bed with them; e.g., Theodor Herzl (the father of the modern Israeli state): “The anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies. / We want to emigrate as respected people” (from Herzl’s Diaries; e.g., cited by Joeseph Massad’s “Zionism, Anti-Semitism and Colonialism,” 2012). This historically comes at a cost: killing your own in favor of a colonizer identity that alienates your from your own group, but never lets you fully assimilate. It becomes a fortress mentality tied to a satellite proxy state the powers that be (namely America) will exploit in a functionally “white” sense; i.e., racial supremacy as a geopolitic project with uneven, modular application (as fascism always is; re: Eco).
[20] With Samus Aran and similar cop-style, monomyth heroines becoming retro-future exterminators cleaning homes of vermin infestations, per state DARVO arguments); re: in the “Scooby Doo,” Radcliffean approach (more on this, later, when we reexamine Ellen Ripley vs Giger’s xenomorph).
[21] As trade secrets—namely prostitution surrounding sexual reproduction policed through force—as more secretive than simply “punch, stab or shoot” enemy forces; e.g., Mallrats (1995) and Brody’s obsession with superhero sex organs: “It’s a secret of the pros!” Smith treats the idea strictly as a joke (“He’ll grow out of it”), but such devices yield liberatory potential when camped; i.e., a classic way to disempower cops is to mock them, and a classic way to mock anyone is through their junk.
[22] Oxymorons aside, desire commonly expresses through higher temperatures; i.e., to be hot. Demons of a Numinous inclination raise that to ostensibly self-destructive, incendiary degrees: the anal sulfur and witchy hellfire of a stacked pandemonium married to other motherly types, like Amazons.