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.
Click here to see “Deal with the Devil’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.
Volume Two, part two (the Undead Module) is out now (9/6/2024)! Go to my book’s 1-page promo to download the latest version of the PDF (which will contain additions/corrections the original blog posts will not have)!
Permissions: Any publicly available images are exhibited for purposes of education, transformation and critique, thus fall under Fair Use; private nude material and collabs with models are specifically shared with permission from the original model(s). For more details about artist permissions, refer to the book disclaimer (linked above).
Concerning Buggy Images: Sometimes the images on my site don’t always load and you get a little white-and-green placeholder symbol, instead. Sometimes I use a plugin for loading multiple images in one spot, called Envira Gallery, and not all of the images will load (resulting in blank white squares you can still right-click on). I‘ve optimized most of the images on my site, so I think it’s a server issue? Not sure. You should still be able to access the unloaded image by clicking on the placeholder/right-clicking on the white square (sometimes you have to delete the “?ssl=1” bit at the end of the url). Barring that, completed volumes will always contain all of the images, whose PDFs you can always download on my 1-page promo.
A Paucity of Time: Addressing the Rest of the Demon Module’s Relative Brevity
“I want more life, fucker!”
—Roy Batty, Blade Runner (1982)
Picking up where “Reclaiming Amazons, part two: Reclaiming Anal“ left off…
My original plans for the Demon Module have oscillated constantly between longer and more complicated versus relatively short, verging on inadequate. I say “oscillating” because I acknowledged earlier how there would always be a survey element to various aspects of it; re: “As such, the infinite poetic variety and limitless creative potential of demons and nature requires me to adopt a more survey-style approach for the entire module” (source: “Of Darkness and the Forbidden”); i.e., demons have infinite forms; e.g., those of nature being something we can only gloss over in the module’s remaining pages. Gothic Communism is holistic, and happens among different people taking a shared corpus of ideas and applying them differently towards a common goal: universal understanding and liberation. There’s always a different way to say the same basic things—a different time and place, space and persona, term and theory to occupy and adopt. In turn, these things frame and compound, building on themselves (often through size difference, left) to challenge state scapegoat mechanisms with: to summon and abstract as we require!
(artists: Ray Sugarbutt, Shiri Allwood, and JazzzBerrry12)
To it, all sections from here on out, unless explicitly stated, will adopt a symposium approach, thus conversational style. This means I won’t have time to reiterate arguments and reinforce these pages by steelmanning them; i.e., I cannot take everything I’ve said already about monsters (not just demons) and say them again; re (from Volume Zero): “to include or string everything into a grand necklace/dichotomy that I then trot out each and every time a given topic comes up” (source). Instead, I can only abbreviate big things and repeat small things, trusting my readers to take and reassemble my ideas henceforth, making new creative successes pursuant to revolution during oppositional praxis; re (also from Volume Zero):
This book is full of stars, so make your own shapes in the sky using the tools and keywords I supply. As long as the journey and outcome are sex-positive within a broad ergodic sphere, the exact routes you take to get there don’t really matter. So chart your own sequences. To that, revolution needs to be more than holistic; it needs to be internalized in its practitioners by exposing them to radical ideas and praxis as soon as possible, thus at as young an age as can be allowed (rest assured that fascists and centrists are doing the same thing) [ibid.].
I.e., using the Gothic to synthesize sex positivity (thus liberation) with; re (from Volume One):
Above all else, the cultivating of emotional/Gothic intelligence and class/cultural awareness remains paramount—to help workers and society liberate itself (and nature) from Capitalism, thus assist in the renewed development of Gothic Communism through sex-positive (art)work. As things to cultivate, emotional and Gothic intelligence are synonymous with social-sexual activism begot from our own diving into the imaginary past. So please, swim around and play—with language, yourselves, and figurative and literal BDSM games that renegotiate labor and unequal power exchange in sex-positive ways. Mix, match, and blend; inject or insert (so to speak). Whatever it takes to do the job in some shape or form; i.e., to recultivate the Wisdom of the Ancients, thus achieve a Gothic-Communist outcome (source).
(artist: Kitty Bit Games)
Trust me when I say that I’ve wrestled at length, back and forth, with deciding to write less about demonic sex and force than I want. There’s always more to say and revolution is less a single statement plugging up knowledge gaps (in the academic style) and more like the beating of drums, over and over, through slogans and solidarity overall. But up to this point, I’ve already written a variety of thesis arguments about demons, whores, and Amazons that concern the widespread raping of nature by the state. Those will have to do. Perhaps it’s best to avoid cramming a single book too full of different thesis statements (even concentric ones), but I feel these arguments are productive (and modular) enough concerning the whole of demonology that I should be able to say more with less. I will have to; the results of the recent election necessitate my releasing of this module (and the Praxis Volume) ahead of schedule—i.e., while I still can, even if they’re somewhat abridged or otherwise incomplete (a quality that, already felt here, will become even more apparent in “Call of the Wild’s” abbreviated writings on nature at large).
In other words, there may be a time in the near future when my kind (trans people) are considered completely illegal. I plan to release the entirety of Sex Positivity before that happens, showing my own demonic passion for Gothic Communism for others to carry into the future: that we have the power to change things through our actions, not voting (the latter mostly a middle-class game of follow the leader that endorses bourgeois decisions meant to pacify workers with).
Actions take many forms, and go beyond “pure” demonic expression at large. For instance, when I wrote the Undead Module, said module concerned socio-political action through our trauma, and means of feeding in relation to trauma, as undead; i.e., through strange appetites acquired under capital as constantly raping nature, which we subvert through reclamatory Gothic poetics synthesizing good praxis—to cultivate good social-psychosexual habits that prevent profit, thus rape by camping it through its usual poetic markers. Made with our bodies, labor and relationships, our power becomes something to “flash” on the Aegis—ourselves, persecuted like the undead so often are: by other undead forces but showing the world what power remains in spite of those trying to closet us. We expose our abuse but also that which survives abuse to thrive in light of it; i.e., functioning as undead in ways that often appear vivacious and fully alive, without obvious trauma or visible scars:
(artist: Persephone van der Waard)
With demons (and by extension the entire Demon Module), we exist in ways that, like the whore, are paradoxically forbidden-yet-ubiquitous onstage and off—entirely policed, but something the state cannot police in its entirety save through bad-faith revenge arguments monopolizing such things: portraying us as unironic monstrous-feminine demons; i.e., “of nature,” which the state must first antagonize, then destroy to keep existing as the state does: unequally as a matter of revenge against nature, extirpating it like vermin.
Our revenge, as demonic whores of nature, is to exist in spite of that, liberating ourselves with the same devices under persecution, but also outright extermination mania. That occurs through the various relationships we establish together to break Capitalist Realism with; re: by humanizing the harvest and liberating nature from state bondage, suspicion and persecution by showing the world we’re human despite our reprobate, monstrous-feminine status; i.e., as demons do—through a powerful, campy desire for revenge selecting the language of demonization for total liberation (through iconoclastic art) instead of state punishment-as-usual: “Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?” (source).
The rest of this section (fifteen pages) shall unpack a few broader concepts the Demon Module shall tackle through holistic study and informed mutual action, despite said paucity of time.
(models and artist: Maybel and Jackie, and Persephone van der Waard)
For one, the best revenge is success, which for revolutionaries amounts to survival, solidarity and speaking out to achieve universal liberation with; i.e., in ways that denude our killers and give us our dignity amid tremendous adversity during the cryptonymy process: the cryptomimetic echo of trauma, but also darkness, knowledge and power in reimagined “past” places replete with theatrical devices as old as demons; e.g., animal masks, ancient burial rites, and the repressed anger of slaves leaking from a given “tomb’s” seditious fakeries (e.g., Ancient Egypt, above).
So often, demons speak with the voices of the dead—those long-dead, but also those treated as “dead” within the state of exception outlawing their existence; i.e., by fetishizing it as demonic to fulfill state wishes with—impossible, save under Promethean circumstance and Faustian duress, chopping off Medusa’s head. The best way to prevent that is to show our killers the head is human yet threatened by devices that, unto themselves, can be reclaimed during the dialectic; i.e., reversing abjection (us versus them) through an expanded circle of empathy weaponizing demonic language for workers, animals and the environment—with our bodies, faces, sexual acts and all-around public nudism; re: “art is love made public,” negotiated by different groups within shared exhibits illustrating mutual consent as demons so often do—while openly queer and naked:
(artists: Maybel and Jackie)
A perceived land of the gods (who classically enjoy forbidden things to consume or perform, be that ambrosia or reindeer games), our artful forgeries’ ghosts (and their aesthetic of power and death) point vengefully to a palliative-Numinous outcome; i.e., a revenge less of the pharaohs, and more of their servants haunting the same chronotopic venues to threaten the whore’s dark revenge—a subversive, genderqueer desire to change the world through demonic transaction, vis-à-vis the Wisdom of the Ancients weaponized for worker counterterror (and benefit) through Gothic counterfeit; re: camping the canon to recultivate the Superstructure.
Laden with reclaimed instruments of bigotry and alienation, we become armored when nude (and vice versa; re: Sedgewick), a mask and mirror that—in our capable, inventive hands—grants forbidden sight through historically-materially ironic, seemingly impossible vision; re: Nick Bottom’s dream from another of Shakespeare’s plays, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1600):
Methought I was—there is no man can tell what. Methought I was, and methought I had—but man is but a patched fool if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was (source).
Rather than strictly frighten or overwhelm, this medieval confusion of the senses shows others our happiness, organs, trades, bonds, and yes, struggles through a combined, intersectionally solidarized pedagogy of the oppressed—one healing from rape with “rape” by finding similarity amid difference; i.e., a disparate polity darkened as much by police shadows as by our own intersectional necromancy’s ludo-Gothic BDSM, and one we pointedly resurrect through Gothic poetics and active, informed labor exchange. We become human while demonized—something to show off in all its rugged splendor when reclaiming poetry-as-labor from state actors:
(artists: Maybel and Jackie)
“Hurt, not harm.” Apart from their glaring eyes and naked, succubean bodies, demons communicate with pleasure and non-harmful pain performed adjacent to actual trauma haunting the same stages; i.e., reminding viewers that liberation (and calculated risk) share the same half-real space with unironic exploitation during liminal expression—death theatre having a fair amount of sex and guilt, but also delight. Said joy happens while breaking through canonical boundaries and out of the closet into the open—our jouissance expressed using memento mori symbolism to speak to death as haunted by rape, but also by healing from rape in graveyard language; e.g., ahegao both “death face,” “rape face” and something in between either that camps what is often, otherwise, impossible to talk about.
In turn, these become pleasurable for several reasons: one, doing so both physically, emotionally and/or spiritually feels good, unto itself; and two, because suddenly having a voice where no voice previously existed—to discuss what feels bad with paradoxically “bad” language—also feels good. By pointing to bad things with “bad” copies during calculated risk, workers afford themselves counterfeits whose larger “ghost,” vis-à-vis Hogel, highlights an intensely pleasurable reaction not simply unique to such Numinous juxtaposition, but renowned for it! Non-harmful pain, like non-painful pleasure, becomes a data mechanism to speak to difficult generational injury with, granting much-needed relief about things that are often repressed through state force and disguise; i.e., longstanding harm that, owing to its state-sponsored qualities, otherwise might hide in plain sight. The Gothic, then, becomes a warning device in rebellious hands; i.e., to supply the public with different paradoxical combinations that draw attention to themselves and, per the cryptonymy process, cloak their rebellious operations as needed: as monstrous code, specifically ludo-Gothic BDSM presenting violent action and thought (however actual or justified those claims actually are) as “mere play.”
These aren’t forbidden at all, then, but which state forces allow during popular media’s Gothic dialogs; i.e., by the simple fact that they require some kind of Medusa (monstrous-feminine scapegoat) to impugn, thus execute through monopolized sex and force, but also violence, terror and morphological expression inside a given territory. For us, it’s a Trojan Horse already inside Troy (or Rome)—a splendid lie whose grey area cannot easily be censored; i.e., it gives bigots room to misinterpret what, for us, contains a deeper message to spoil the elite’s propaganda with revolutionary cryptonymy during the whore’s paradox; re (from earlier): “Often by rape survivors, such people classically find power/agency through theatrical reenactments of unequal, unfair or otherwise rapacious treatment and conditions […] The paradox is simple: demons are maidens and maidens are demons, but both are virgins and whores, and each finds power (and knowledge) according to how the state forbids access, yet access happens anyways” (source: “A Rape Reprise”).
As something to transform, history is incredibly imaginary and plastic, the myth of Gothic ancestry useful for many competing groups (re: Madoff) but especially rebels needing to lick their wounds; i.e., with calculated risk, itself serving as a kind of “hair of the dog”/sheep’s clothing in equal measure. Per the whore’s paradox, dialogs of abuse become healing and playful during Gothic theatre’s “found document” pastiche and ludo-Gothic BDSM, but also vengeful for those very same reasons; i.e., “rape,” in quotes, is no longer strictly a weapon of terror employed by the state to incapacitate us with amid joy divisions, but joy and exquisite “torture” something to reunite with to castrate state terror campaigns with palliative doubles; e.g., by counteracting a great many superstitions about public nudism, queerness and sex (re: that God will smite you for having anal sex), while likewise exposing a great many holier-than-thou people who enjoy guilty pleasures while attacking others for embodying those concepts outside the nuclear model: dissecting the ancient canonical laws while reversing abjection as something to, itself, exhibit by having fun. “Fun,” for us, becomes any act that, by reversing abjection, helps dismantle state structures with. The more we exist and subvert things, the less stable their worldview becomes. Capitalist Realism begins to fracture, the elite trying to re-ingest it to regenerate itself. But decay is also a time when state power is weak, thus prone to revolution through controlled variables like demonic sex.
(artists: Maybel and Jackie)
Keeping with demons, sex often appears (and sounds) violent, even murderous, and loads itself with medieval puns; e.g., “batter my ‘fortress’ with your giant ‘ram’!” or Mortal Kombat‘s infamous “FINISH HER!” and “FATALITY!” but also Dark Souls‘ immortal victory font: “BUSSY DESTROYED!” Except, what might seem ambiguous in theory becomes rather obvious in practice; e.g., Maybel and Jackie aren’t harming each other at all (above), but point in fact, are having a great deal of fun, subverting harm—all while letting the world see its entrance and entering of forbidden things (assholes) with forbidden things (trans genitals) that, under capital, are very much for sale but which our exhibit shows a different usage for porn than pure, pro-state exploitation; i.e., by using the ace side of sex work to—through the ace elements of Gothic poetics (exploring psychosexual trauma, onstage)—skillfully interrogate police abuse onstage and off: by putting it in quotes, but also by showcasing the ace function of sexuality expressed as pornographic art, seeking to decriminalize itself in demonic forms attaching “Hell” to this or that. That’s how subversion in Gothic fundamentally works.
(artist: Angel Witch)
For example, when I showed photos of Angel Witch (a model I’ve worked with/drawn before) to my cover model, Harmony Corrupted, the other responded: “I love that dildo on them, it’s so cute! They look absolutely dreamy and fantastic!” In turn, sexual objects often haunted by sexual violence (of a medieval sort; e.g., knights, castles and torture going in and out of itself, on and on, during mise-en-abyme) gain the curious ability to look cute; and if dildos and assholes can look cute, “murder” and “rape” can look cute, but retain their usual taboo power on the Aegis and its carnival refrain: “‘Come and see the amazing ball-whacker guy!’ Can you survive their ‘castles’ of doom?” Hell ass, dark castle of ass, etc, as a Gothic space of camp, not genuine hate, we provide/are left with a monstrous-feminine site of fantasy that, often enough under capital, starts and ends with female bodies (queer bodies or not, Crow being non-binary but female, Angel Witch being cis-het): something to summon and rock out to/get down with during rhythmic ceremonial rituals (sites and bodies) well suited for such activities. Hell rocks!
(artist: Crow)
In other words, it’s a party concealing itself from state litigation as a matter of disco-in-disguise, but also devilry to normally burn at the stake; i.e., speaking to police abuse during a hellish party atmosphere. It’s very postpunk, but goes beyond the posturing of those older Mancunians like New Order under Thatcher’s reign. Regardless of function or intent, some posturing and fakery is always required during oppositional praxis; behind the mask lurks the revolutionary’s desire to change the world—one all too clear to see on the naked surface of their playful bodies: “It’s ‘just’ porn/Gothic!” Bodies of Hell, then, are often conspicuous—branded with “Hell” as a symbol, but easily dismissed as dumb entertainment that wasn’t trying to actually turn the status quo upside-down (trouble in Paradise).
To it, those in good and bad faith appear visually identical, as do their monstrous symbols, metaphors (mixed or not) and costumes/poetic dress up during liminal expression. Except those more skilled in cryptonymy—i.e., as a consequence of simply needing to survive—rely on a level of skill regarding dialectical-material scrutiny the enemy doesn’t have: to camouflage themselves with police and scapegoat symbols, but also to engage in rebellion with using said symbols during oppositional synthesis, onstage and off. It’s a complicated idea, but after four books I kind of expect you to get it. For more examples, though, consider “An Uphill Battle” (from Volume One) and “Into the Toy Chest, part two”; re (from the Poetry Module, describing cryptonymy my own life):
none of my exes used their trauma to think with in sex-positive ways, but glide from point A to point B on autopilot: toying with their food as something to abuse, mid-play. Sex is one of those things that works well on instinct, but it’s better when it’s actively engaged with because trust is incumbent on good communication, not blind cruising. They were all sex experts, insofar as Zeuhl had sexual health training (and an extensive GNC education, especially with twinks), Jadis was an active masochist with years of acquired know-how (and a sadistic mean streak), and Cuwu likewise knew the ins and outs of such things as relayed between a younger generation’s acclimation to internet culture, but also the machinery of the state as something to impersonate, like chameleons.
Within that culture’s mise-en-abyme/framed narrative, the Amazon (and similar monstrous-feminine) survive as tools used by different people pinned between the state and its usual disparate, harmful conditions. They become something that, like all toys, you can recognize in people, and play with; i.e., mid-historical-materialism, while capital constantly corrupts, rewrites, and transforms over time—in short when it decays and regenerates. This travels from Ancient Athens, to Marston’s Wonder Woman putting “Athens” in quotes, to whatever it becomes when we manifest these articles ourselves; i.e., working to find social-sexual freedom amid oscillating threatres of opposition, deception, games-in-games rendering us or others the dupe, but also having the power to liberate us amid low-to-high stakes.
Within those stakes, monstrous-feminine players are more skilled by virtue of necessity—overcoming systemic adversity through treachery and cunning but also nuance and grace; i.e., a system of exchange on par with giving rings, in The Merchant of Venice, which extends to other kinds of games that serve a similar purpose; e.g., Luc Besson’s 2019 excellent rehash of La Femme Nikita, the svelte sexpot beating the boys at their own game in ways they aren’t accustomed to playing themselves, by virtue of them being men: blunt instruments to her scalpel’s acting and play as a means of surviving men, first and foremost (source).
In short, it behooves us to be skillful, “skill” something that, through sex work (or work sexualized under capital, which is everything but especially any kind of work performed by/assigned to women or people treated as women by the state; i.e., according to their biology and/or identity as monstrous-feminine) merging porn and art as activism-in-disguise:
(artist: Angel Witch and Blxxd Bunny)
Such vivid-yet-underestimated markers of alienation and us-versus-them violence are incredibly useful to workers for several reasons. For one, nothing is more controlled than sex and the desires and poetry surrounding it, which the state requires to prolong itself and rape nature with using police violence (and tokenized rebellion). Except the state can’t make sex entirely illegal, nor language, sarcasm, and thought crimes, and point in fact, desperately needs monsters acting rebellious; i.e., to justify its own sexual violence against nature as monstrous-feminine: through the performance of sin, which it can then control as a language and vector of its own tyranny punching down.
Furthermore, Gothic prohibition (and police/military violence at large; e.g., bombs) historically don’t work. Such things, divorced from their immediate sexual prescription and dogma, afford theatrical commentaries that become performative with a rebellious function, during ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., granting a layer of cryptonymic detachment and engagement that lets us play with such things without the immediacy that sexual connection often entails (many of the models I work with are asexual to some extent; e.g., Blxxd Bunny—who enjoys pain and sexual expression more than overtly sexual sensations—is a bit of an ace “size queen,” above). In disguise, we can reverse the terrorist/counterterrorist role, banking on the historical fact that fascism and Imperialism (thus Capitalism) have short lifespans and cannot monopolize weapons of violence and terror like rape through demon BDSM. We can use the same exact things to weaken their stronghold! And there’s nothing they can do about it; colonizers always need someone to fight.
We camp canon because we must. Queer people (and other minorities) live under unstable, harmful conditions, the state criminalizing nature in bad faith to police and maintain private property (re: ACAB, ASAB). So while fascism colonizes media to infiltrate the usual voices of the oppressed, and which the latter must be decolonized by us in the same spaces (subverting the Protestant ethic), we’re not trying to assimilate thus become cops that relegate such subjects purely to realms of privatization/controlled opposition; we want to express private matters in public ways that make the world safe from capital and police violence: by highlighting the chaos of our daily lives through the demonic, sexual language of survival during crisis. It’s a kind of saber-rattling—a threat display that says, “welcome to our world,” but also, “fuck around, find out.”
(artist: Persephone van der Waard)
Police monopolize, thus abuse, “boundaries for me, not for thee.” Except empires, while formidable, are not all-powerful; they need workers (and copaganda laden with fireworks) to defend them from labor at large as something to steal from. Fascism is capital in decay defending itself and state rights from worker, animal and environmental rights. This means that nothing scares empire and fascism more than a vulnerable party fighting back in ways they can’t control; i.e., by demanding boundaries while acclimated to status-quo bullshit, and calling out state obscurantism and DARVO (which the Gothic, and its lack of concrete boundaries, excels at): exposing the universal fear and hypocrisy that state actors enjoy while using its mechanisms to punch down (whose ridicule only takes a good scandal, per the black penitent trope[1], to hoist our enemies on their own stupid, fragile petards; e.g., pointing out that Destiny—a full-blown Zionist and pedophile who loves calling his political enemies “terrorist” to discredit and attack them—apparently blew Nick Fuentes [a bonafide Nazi who hates women and chases catboys] and then filmed it, only to have the tape leak).
Gender trouble is a large part of it, of course (which the monstrous-feminine is, even in cis-het examples like straight Amazons; e.g., Ayla, from Chrono Trigger, above, and a million other examples of the virgin/whore herbo and harlot), but so is “trouble,” period; e.g., women with guns and confidence in their animalistic, feral bodies while not kissing up and punching down (a witch hunt needs token witches to work, gentrifying and decaying activism): warriors who undermine the status quo and shrink the state of exception for universal liberation!
(artist: Peach Jars)
Viewed onstage, darkness visible is anything that promises universal liberation through Gothic maturity. It becomes something to concentrate and channel, taken offstage during liminal expression to then spread around: rape as something to play with. This includes titillating (and historically ironic) mixtures; i.e., of things normally raped weaponizing tools of rape to their advantage; re: women and guns (above), but also blowing off steam (a sexual outlet, when individual worker needs and desires clash) while simultaneously passing vital ludic codeswitching (and Gothic, BDSM familiarity with such mysterious devices) onto the next generation of workers; e.g., panties—often connected to violence as symbols of sexual vulnerability and conquest (during courtly love, below)—let us play with rape, thus act it out; i.e., by raping the whore as an embodiment of nature that fucks back by acting out her rape, but also monstrous-feminine sex to demonically have the whore’s revenge: as mutually consensual, but whose mixed metaphors (of which the Gothic predominantly is) remain utterly haunted by those who wish her genuine, irreversible harm!
“Safety” is paradoxically expressed as danger and desire, but also “blind,” in Gothic; re: darkness visible. The panties are up, then down; suddenly Medusa is curiously letting you inside, speaking through the performative language of psychosexual violence—to whisper through gouged-out eyes and severed necks’ denoting forbidden sight[2] through a confusion of the senses, but also the paradoxical excitement of lowered panties and foreign objects shoved deep inside her most “delicate” of regions; i.e., during magical assembly and selective absorption‘s Song of Infinity speaking to our profound surviving of rape, and coming to an important realization: that rape, under mutual consent, is impossible, but threats of “it” during calculated risk are not just possible, they’re demanded! “Rape” is so often how Medusa asks for hugs (with Harmony loving the image of the blood shooting from her eye sockets; her response when seeing it: “LMAO that’s amazing!”). Hurt, not harm; no harm, no foul!
(artist: Harmony Corrupted)
It’s not that consent is terribly difficult to communicate, then, but that its visual ambiguity and subsequent parsing requires intuition that is not commonly taught by canonical norms (afraid of troubling comparison, which doubles are, and which the state uses to shift the blame onto scapegoats other than themselves). To see us uncloaked and doubling our demise (and bad-faith counterfeits of said demise) during liminal expression, then, is to look upon a post-scarcity world shrouded in the plastic, inky language of the imaginary past loaded with rape as something to camp (usually through bad sex puns). Its hellish, anisotropic dualism begs, “Look at us, living our best life in spite of those hunting us; i.e., our stubborn thriving and, indeed, our flexible ability to speak to their betrayals under state control—our humanity something to seize by virtue of the sorry fact that those in (or with) power seek constantly to harm us for profit’s sake”:
(artists: Bay Ryan and Beat)
Cumming is a passionate, “torturous” matter of arrival towards profound feelings that, couched in violence, bigotry and phobia, feel amazing and bypass state barriers (thus unironic usage) during psychosexual martyrdom as a form of art, not literal suicide.
To be clear, the two are often adjacent; re (from “Psychosexual Martyrdom”):
Capitalism is heteronormative, exploiting workers in sexually dimorphic ways that lead to state decay through Capitalist Realism: the world as parasitized behind the illusion, killing host and parasitoid alike. All the while, said nerds project their terrorism onto others, calling their actions “counterterror” to disguise settler colonialism (and its stochastic terrorism) while chasing their victims down. It’s a monopoly whose process must be humanized by learning from the monstrous past as psychosexually martyred, stalling Capitalism and helping it develop into Gothic Communism; i.e., by subverting its heteronormative, kill-on-sight illusions with genderqueer ludo-Gothic BDSM iterations that thwart Capitalist Realism and achieve active intersectional solidary from various marginalized groups working in concert (source).
In turn, “Capitalism has no use for people who see each other as human; it wants us dehumanizing ourselves so capital can function as normal, moving money through nature at the cost of human life” (Persephone van der Waard’s “Remember the Fallen: An Ode to Nex Benedict,” 2024).
Except, what for the elite is merely an unironic tool of domination and humiliation (often used in bad faith), we reclaim the Gothic orgasmically to camp canon with through the greatest of ironies; i.e., to do things that constitute as swears, but also employ forbidden things in operatic spaces playing with rape, death and sin, but also divinity as a campy device hauntologically unrestricted by historical time and place; e.g., curses like “holy fuck/shit” and “Oh my god!” (which Bay cried as Beat fucked him, below) but also half-real arguments that employ demonic poetry as social-psychosexual action (often by merging sexuality with the language of death, war, and food, etc): beating our meat in depraved, “almost holy” acts of Gothic reinvention, revolution’s rock ‘n roll taking land back, but also language and labor in connection to it (re: Amazons and anal sex). Instead of the fascist nadir of genuine dignity and standards, we reclaim our humanity through campy terror language as the poetic passage of space and time, scandal and sentiment. Like Hell, the Gothic is something to reify and move through as we do; i.e., as de facto, extracurricular teaching devices camping state doubles.
(artists: Bay Ryan and Beat)
In other words, our doing so profanes currently sacred, but ultimately harmful systems using a devil-in-disguise that’s about as subtle as a Trojan Horse, tramp stamp (e.g., Hawthorne’s infamous Scarlet Letter) or Gothic novel (originally cited as terrorist literature; re: Crawford, Groom), but historically remains just as effective; i.e., with “harmful energies” that cultivate the Superstructure through the Wisdom of the Ancients as, itself, quite plastic.
It bears repeating that the devil is something to conjure and summon by self-appointed “holy” groups to maintain state control. Summoning sin personifies punishment; i.e., from a position of naturalized weakness to then exploit the whore’s involvement in, even if their role is involuntary, beyond or otherwise outside their control: the fetish and scapegoat to see through and surveil during the cryptonymy process. The maiden/sex demon are things to canonically embrace and abject; i.e., per the same whore’s paradox and revenge, itself something to reclaim from state mechanisms tokenizing and sacrificing the usual suspects. By framing/concentrating them as sex objects, but also sex weapons through the arbitration (assignment) of criminal sex and force, religion already pornographizes such things as guilty pleasure. Using doubles during liminal expression (under an unequal, hierarchical ordering of existence that monopolies things like pity and blame to serve the usual benefactors), the Gothic merely highlights this double standard; e.g., naughty nuns encompassing hauntologically medieval arguments of appetite and abstinence (signified by black and red, the colors of Schism; re: Protestantism vs Catholicism), one where formerly extended (sex) objects—subsisting under a rising Cartesian discourse pimping nature—have always, but more gradually in an iconoclastic sense, constituted a great many things under a latter-day perspective men cannot fully dictate or perceive: camping the canon.
(artist: Paul Laurenzi)
Women, as nuns, are classically saved and fallen, for example; their bodies are charged, in this respect, as a matter of automatic persecution and ownership by men fearful of educated women (e.g., source tweet, Dr Ally Louks: December 10th, 2024), but also anisotropic reversal by those same women (or those treated as women). Threatened with systemic power shift, men (or those inside the Man Box) view loss of power as “rape,” which they respond to by inflicting on their usual victims, mid-DARVO[3a]. In turn, agency and disempowerment inhabit the same canvas and monstrous-feminine bodies tempting men a priori, thus giving the status quo an excuse to resist with prejudice: to blame and rape nature all over again, reforming her as a matter of futile conversion; i.e., while treating it as impossible, but also hopelessly reprobate, degenerate and profane in sacred divisions of man vs nature. Her rape becomes foregone, then, as does her retaliation—one organized religion will try to reimburse and triangulate against more marginalized subjects under state rule. Nuns, in classic Neo-Gothic, are cops and victims. So does capital tank peoples’ vitals—their intelligence and awareness, mid-struggle—to a nadir of praxial inertia.
The fact remains, we Commie-fag sex workers are already creatures of violence, terror and sin; said language can be used to cryptonymically expose state hypocrisy without too much trouble—i.e., by living in/as sin, we achieve multiple desires, expressing ourselves as “of nature,” but also “from Hell” as a coded brand: reversing abjection to show ourselves as human and happy despite state dogma alienating and fetishizing us for being (as they see it) alien, horny and reprobate. Our doing so makes state proponents crap (or jizz) in their pants, thus out themselves as bad-faith behind concentric veneers (re: Matthew Lewis and his crossdressing Matilda tempting Ambrosio)—bad actors testifying to their abusing of us before we’re in reach. So do we, like Lucifer bounding into Paradise, break into Heaven (sold to workers as “Hell” during the Protestant ethic). It’s not like these devices (or their subjugated/subversive functions) have gone anywhere; profaning the sacred breaks Capitalism Realism by outing those menticided to uphold it—through singular (thus violent) interpretations of canonical norms, which our holistic application overwhelms and exposes easily enough!
In short, using the same language cops do, we can expose them more easily during the cryptonymy process, yet mark and identify ourselves as friends to the Cause when all sides are in disguise to some extent: friendly people to gravitate towards, in good-faith, while warding off genuine abuse camping the same destructive language’s markers of prison violence; i.e., during an apocalypse/witch hunt/moral panic assigning them without irony to administer hate crimes dressed up as “law and order” inside a prison full of witches (the state, incompatible with consent, needs rape to function, but also disguise); e.g., Radcliffe’s nunnery from The Italian full of uniforms that advertise state power but disguises to use by those against the institution trying to escape its concentric, prison-like halls with (for more examples of this idea, refer to “The World Is a Vampire” from the Undead Module). Inside such rooms, state actors feign oppression—acting legitimate while doubting our credibility (thus humanity) as something to root out, inside the prison-like disco; we, under scrutiny in the same masked ball, can playfully insist, “It’s a ‘fake,’ my dude!” And if that excuse doesn’t work—if such gay taunts are attacked in earnest regardless of the venue or circumstance—then it’s time to lock arms and, standing side by side, storm the wire of the camps!
Silence is genocide; the existence of GNC people (and other minorities outside of normalized, token spheres) equates to a kind of speaking out the state can only conceptualize as a threat: to profit, thus its own existence, which it will defend by aping us. The state is only a prison (inside a prison, inside a prison), and police are only the enemies of workers (and rebels, monsters) who they dress up as in bad faith; i.e., posturing as false friends. They know it’s a prison, but think themselves exempt; we know better, using the Gothic notion of home-as-prison (an ambivalent, ambiguous, oscillating crisis of faith, in the theatrical sense) to free our minds, then our bodies with: imagination first, then material conditions, the two ultimately working hand-in-hand to develop Gothic Communism and dismantle the state while paradoxically inside it. Liberation happens within, the wasp eating the caterpillar to emerge something different.
In Plato’s cave, this happens primarily with shadows; on the Aegis, with mirrors. Cryptonymy lets us survive, solidarize and speak out through buffers of pretend/not-pretend crime and punishment during liminal expression—a half-real mirror game whose dualistic markers of monstrous violence (to give and receive) infiltrate different sectors’ overlapping persecution networks: through buffers and reasonable doubt, accrued during costume games amid moral panic as an ongoing operation under capital. Our return to home as fallen is soothing through the ability to address crisis during calculated risk, psychosexual poetry and palliative-Numinous affect. Porn is some of the most potent art, in this respect; i.e., as it speaks to (and with) what the state will try to control more than anything else: sex with force, the latter dressed up as protection.
All monsters are, to some degree, imaginary thus fake, but likewise hinting at buried realities through their fakeness; the Gothic, as a dualistic means of calculated risk, is rooted in fakery to further or reverse abjection through the cryptonymy process—i.e., a fake made of clay or an authentic article made of clay are still, both of them, made of clay (re: the Gothic through camp, puts everything in quotes). As such, function trumps form as a hauntological matter of assigned legitimacy versus actual activism regardless of appearance.
Gothic Communism takes said clay, then, and uses it to liberate workers from state golems and gargoyles, the owners of a church increasingly menticided by/alienated from its own counterfeit sense of “past”; re: the ghost of the counterfeit ours to weaponize against our jailors, mid-chronotope. The more they lie, the more room we have to work with, terrifying what they and their forgeries try to abject using the same borderline-to-outright pornographic poetic devices: the sacrifice and executioner housed in the same special place, the maiden/whore to conjure up achingly during Gothic’s liminal rape play and murder fantasy! “Oh, heavens! Just what have I gotten myself into!” Hot goss, indeed, girls talk—about that big Gothic “castle[3b]” to go to for a good time!
(artist: Owusyr)
Except whereas the middle class since Radcliffe might conjure up a castle or demon lover to assuage their bigoted fears (cold feet or shoulders, often with an alter ego—the secret identity man-of-mystery or Amazonian menace to warm things up/cool things down charming the panties off the [classically white, straight, female] audience during calculated risk), we do so to announce and combat systemic oppression: killing our darlings on the Aegis, but also calling them out for their entitlement, hence grab a tantrum-throwing slaver by the balls (re: cops—those whose profession is to torture and extort people more vulnerable than themselves in defense of private property).
So do we anisotropically defend ourselves from state fabrications; i.e., by making our own and fashioning an alternate, at-times-frank/streetwise but also exciting/swashbuckling voice to history through demons (e.g., Borges). We make room for reasonable doubt/craft an alibi tied to our identity and performance going hand-in-hand. The Gothic becomes a place to conveniently be naughty and put our ideas to practice that, in turn, aren’t fully removed from our habitat, thus bailiwick. So with sugar and spice, but also piss, vinegar and worse things (shit, blood, etc), we can win some degree of arbitration regarding sex and force, but also our basic human rights swept up in these things. There’s power in fiction, but especially when it’s mixed up with sex and force through demonic expression as pulpy and clay-like. Yet another thing to speak to power with, onstage and off, we don’t just bypass boundaries; we blur them, too, by relating to (and learning from) the half-real past as ever in flux: through iconoclastic art liberating sex work!
Cryptonymy goes both ways, of course, but in making gender trouble (and again, trouble full stop), we’re freer than state proponents; aping our dragons, witches, zombies and demons, the latter is always trapped in crisis, closeted while reporting us to the authorities. The fact remains that some amount of violence is always required to liberate, even in theatrical forms the state cannot tolerate beyond its own perfidious misuse (of stigma, bigotry and phobia). The elite cannot own, thus monopolize sex and force, hence demons. Ergo, we camp harmful sex and force with ironic, non-harmful variants that worship ourselves, and give suitable gooey offerings (e.g., Beat giving Bay a nice big load, below) to frighten the elite with: wasted seed/non-reproductive sex (despite the creampie, Bay doesn’t have a uterus)! Our devilish pandemonium, these bodies and banners’ dark wishes push collectively using ludo-Gothic BDSM towards a world where profit (thus rape, capital, cops and billionaires) are well-and-truly a thing of the past!
(artists: Bay Ryan and Beat)
Deifying ourselves, we become something to aspire to, an example to lead by when developing Gothic Communism as fairly novel (re: to put the pussy on the chainwax): transformed into as demons do, trading in shadows to achieve reparation and release from police brutality with humor and consensual control (e.g., cock cages). With darkness, desires and dreams, we unleash upon a world that—per Capitalism—has become increasingly afraid of our presence: that trans people have always existed, and always will despite those chasing us. We transform not merely to hide from our attackers, but reveal that which they seek to conquer and destroy inside/outside themselves: us.
As such, we solidarize to reverse what they abject and divide, showing them their own straightness and whiteness (of the state’s settler argument, including tokenized variants); i.e., as the real sickness punching spectres of Marx across space and time, but also in between the past and the present in hauntological dialogs: revolution happens inside capital, the state using language it can abuse but never fully prevent those it harms from anisotropically reversing.
This concludes the broader points of holistic study and informed action the remainder of the Demon Module shall try to impart. In my usual approach, then, I’ll be cross-examining demons with the undead/animals, but will—for the rest of the module—be unpacking different aspects of demonic history and its poetic application we’ve yet to examine. First, we’ll establish the rest of the blood libel class (monsters of persecution and revenge); i.e., among demons mommies and faeries, in “I’ll See You in Hell,” followed by the rest of “Idle Hands” considering the desire/revenge portion of demons as monstrous-feminine whores (such desires often being sex liberated from state force, but still haunted by it). After that, we’ll summarize making and summoning demons vis-à-vis unequal, forbidden exchange to end “Forbidden Sight” with. The next chapter, “Call of the Wild,” shall focus entirely on radical transformation—especially concerning anthropomorphic demons of nature like chimeras, furries and lycanthropes, but also their holistic temples, masks, and props, their lips that grip (and other formidable extensions, below) all begging to be touched and played with: a sensual void calling you home, a mirror on which your own lovely monsters (and their bountiful harvests, also below) await! Ravish ironically!
(artist: Annabel Morningstar)
This possible better world—one where all peoples, animals and environments are free from state oppression and illusions—will always coexist with our dreams and bodies speaking together about such a special day. Its forbidden sight, Numinous quest, and special prescription express in and upon those struggling to survive, using what they got to humanize themselves and theirs normally being exploited through the same monstrous-feminine aesthetic; i.e., stewards of nature reclaiming sex and force from the state (and its historical-material language of profit raping us); e.g., as Bay does while being disabled and through survival sex work, an avatar of liberation and kindness the likes of which channels a sweet feral goodness.
Blood libel conveys a classic problem of horror movies: the monster lives at the end; when in Rome, we speak to those who fear us through the ghost of the counterfeit as something to hug. Survival is victory and silence is death, Bay the little puppy god that lives in my heart, a force to be reckoned with that makes our enemies think twice. One that all revolutionaries should aspire to, his spectacular levers and buttons—once joyously thrown and pushed (next page)—move the Earth on its axis away from capital harvesting us simply for being different than the ruling class. May a day yet come when people like myself, Maybel, Jackie, Beat, and Bay (and Annabel, Sinead, Romantic Rose, and others, next section) are, all of us sex demons, gradually freed from state rule, police violence, and token betrayals! Infinite labor, infinite value; demons, infinite form to explore and express our revenge: they only have what power we give them! Able to play with power ourselves, it becomes what we hold onto and administer as stewards of nature from nature, learning from the imaginary past to create a better world—a Hell on Earth!
Hell, expressed as such, isn’t so bad, is it? But it seems safe, harmless, non-threatening? Bay’s a sweetie’s sweetie, but they can absolutely fight back: “Thou called’est me a dog before thou had a cause / But since I am a dog, beware my fangs[3c]!” In place of pity burns a heart than can never be conquered (outside of ironic playtime), will never surrender to state pigs!
Onto faeries and demon mommies! “Drink deep, or taste not, the plasma spring. Y’see what I’m sayin’?”
(artist: Bay Ryan)
Onto “‘I’ll See You in Hell’: Dark Faeries and Demon Mommies,” opening and part one (dark faeries)“!
Footnotes
[1] Outing those classically sheltered by state structures, said structures normally letting them retreat elsewhere to harm others; e.g., Father Schedoni from Radcliffe’s The Italian. Exposed for his sins, Schedoni literally dies of shame. Nazis act holier-than-thou, but in truth are the most guilty of all.
[2] That of blind and/or decapitated prophets and demonic xenoglossia: speaking through corpses.
[3a] Re, Louk’s tweet (the original attacker’s response to her PhD’s publication):
You are the dumbest fucking bitch I have ever seen on the internet and the perfect example of literally everything wrong with modern society. Imagine thinking you deserve taxpayer money for writing that useless piece of shit thesis nobody will ever read. Vegan, feminist and queer, your dues to society are many and me and the boys will RAPE them out of you (ibid.).
Educated women, regardless if they’re for universal liberation or not, are witches to burn at the stake by good little soldiers—a threat that historically makes many women (already victims of rape) tokenize; e.g., TERFs; i.e., during fascism scapegoating modernity to attack modernity’s usual victims (and token agents). It’s a recruitment tactic—one to divide-and-conquer labor/gentrify and decay feminism by marginalizing educators into “prison sex” modes of thought, and all while getting others within these same, semi-privileged circles to kiss up and punch down, mid-witch-hunt.
Some things never change because the elite (and their moderate-to-reactionary defenders) endorse such pogroms, dogwhistling and virtue-signaling to varying degrees. And the reality of straight white people is, sadly enough, selective; i.e., such alienation is something that happens to different people under different degrees of preferential mistreatment—with Louks certainly antagonized for her work in academia, but less aggressively than, say, a black trans woman of color (re: “Hot Allostatic Load“). The point isn’t to rape rank, here, but acknowledge relative privilege during oppositional praxis. Such abuse is alien until it is not, but for some it’s less alien and closer to home to varying degrees of open hostility and micro-aggression, from moment to living moment; i.e., witch hunts, like any prison, persecute unevenly to keep workers divided, and America was and has always been a settler colony/police state.
Louks, for instance, pointedly “drew the line” after she was attacked as awfully as she was, but we must do so before attacks happen; i.e., while actively and aggressively fighting for universal liberation (which PhD authors don’t always have time to do; i.e., research is time-consuming, emotionally demanding and expensive). And I get it—rape accusations are dangerous for those inhabiting environments that are historically unkind to those they victimize; i.e., academia and women, the former abusing and tokenizing the latter to carry such abuse forwards; e.g., Simone Beauvoir raping her students (re: Martin)—but being “woke” is all about being ready for abuse and preventing it for all peoples on a systemic level by developing Communism (which academia historically doesn’t do; re: it paywalls its research): while living in Gothic times. Furthermore, you can’t just report rape to the police (which Louks suggests) because police/the courts don’t prevent crime; they uphold the patriarchal bigoted systems (and divisions of thought) that make rape possible to begin with (and cops commit more domestic abuse than anyone else). The state is white, straight and rapacious; so we must treat it as such whether the mask is on or off.
(source tweet, Dr Ally Louks: December 10th, 2024)
To be absolutely clear, I’m not saying Louks is tokenized; but it’s not unreasonable to suggest that others in light of her treatment could be motivated to tokenize in an environment that encourages abuse by turning a blind eye (re: academia has become an increasingly neoliberal institution over time). In Louk’s case, she was bullied so quickly (on a platform bought by the world’s richest man to platform Nazis) and so fiercely that she left Twitter for greener pastures. In short, an educated woman simply announced her intellectual work, and capital’s fascist lapdogs fetishized her for it; re: as they would a nun being—beyond someone classically with access to written material—a sex object for men to use and abuse with impunity. Fascism is the normalizing of rape in public, regressing to an anti-intellectual state of paranoia and persecution mania, mid-moral-panic.
[3b] Known in architectural legal jargon as a “malicious erection” (a structure erected maliciously—usually as an eyesore, or to vindictively block a neighboring party’s vision) but what I call “the liminal hauntology of war”; re: the arrival of a harmful condition/crisis of state, which the hauntology (usually a castle) symbolically announces: genocide, thus police brutality and ultimately rape as symptoms of capital’s endemic boom-or-bust cycle. The castle symbolizes the raping of workers by the state devouring them, its appearance simply a matter of routine; i.e., when Capitalism Realism wanes and apocalypse suddenly rears its ugly head (the Gothic metaphor between state violence and state bodies generally being a morphological one). The Gothic tells its stories with buildings and people relating back and forth across space and time (commonly framed as haunted houses/castles; re: chronotopes).
[3c] From The Merchant of Venice (c. 1598).