This blog post is part of “The Total Codex,” a fourth promotion originally inspired by the three I did in 2024 with Harmony Corrupted and Romantic Rose: “Brace for Impact,” “Searching for Secrets” and “Deal with the Devil.” 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). “The Total Codex” shall do the same, but with Volume Zero/the thesis volume (versus “Make It Real” promoting Volume One/the manifesto, which I will release after “The Total Context” completes). 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 “The Total Codex’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.
Volume Zero is already written/was released on October 2023! 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.
The Roots of Camp: Reclaiming Demon BDSM and Radcliffe’s Tricky Tools
“You geniuses fell for the old net over the door trick! You suck!”
—Boner, “Johnny Whoopass, episode one” (a bigoted, shameless and now defunct He-Man parody from 2004)
Picking up where “Pieces of the ‘Camp Map’” left off…
Camp is an effective means of challenging canonical, thus systemic, norms because it has its roots in them (often through true crime/murder mysteries, which I just tore a new asshole). For example, the damsel (or subordinate detective, above) as an automatic, unthinking submissive is something we can subvert to communicate our own trauma while also having fun, mid-rebellion; e.g., Roxanne from Megamind (2010), bored stiff of the “bad guy” because he’s all bark, no bite. What’s more, he’s campy in the true sense—i.e., “seriousness that fails” and he hasn’t a clue!
Note: This section was written after “Our Ludic Masters” and “Why I Submit” (2021); i.e., in 2023, when I had already envisioned the Gothic and BDSM through Metroidvania, and here would start to combine BDSM practices and terminology with ludology as a matter of campy an-Com psychosexual performance, on and offstage; i.e., when I reached out to Jeremy Parish in 2019 but also Scott Sharkey. After interviewing both and getting permission to quote them both in my book series, Sharkey in particular responded after, in 2021, about the idea of BDSM in games; i.e., from a ludology standpoint; re: in response to “Our Ludic Masters,” which I ran by him at the time:
For anyone who’s curious, here’s the full conversation between Sharkey and I, from 2019 to 2021 (the full conversation between Parish and I is already available through my 2025 Metroidvania Corpus):
Essentially this book segment embodies the preface to what ludo-Gothic BDSM would evolve into—from the remainder of this volume and into the rest of the series (re: “Concerning Rape Play“). So anytime I say “BDSM” or “sex-positive BDSM,” I’m essentially referring to ludo-Gothic BDSM, a priori. —Perse, 3/23/2025.
It’s a quick, cis-gendered example. The Gothic mode more broadly tackles rape fears through calculated risk; i.e., as a profound means of potential camp. Genderqueer camp of the “twink-in-peril” (re: Gregg Araki and Dennis Cooper’s “twink exploitation” work), for example, is an equally legitimate form of the cathartic rape fantasy model that ties into consent-non-consent during rape play more broadly—with consent-non-consent being on the harder end of what ludo-Gothic BDSM, as a spectrum, encompasses. Per my coinage (and subsequent arguments), ludo-Gothic BDSM introduces a game-like element of emergent play into traditional BDSM; i.e., married to Gothic poetics and roleplay scenarios (e.g., kidnap, live burial, rape, murder and monsters, etc). By extension, consent-non-consent, or RACK, is essentially a “hard” form of informed consent that puts more trust into the hands of the dominant/dominatrix than usual; re:
consent-non-consent
Negotiated social-sexual scenarios through informed consent, consent-non-consent where one party surrenders total control over to the other party trusting that party to not betray said agreement or trust; aka “RACK” (Risk-Aware Consensual Kink) in relation to risky BDSM; i.e., bodily harm; e.g., public beatings, rape scenarios, whippings, knife play and blood-letting.
i.e., wherein the dom is the person ostensibly with “more” power during the BDSM ritual and the submissive/sub is the person with “less.” As we shall see, looks can be deceiving.
At the very start of the book, we listed the very basic ideas of Gothic psychosexuality and live burial tied to kink, fetishization and BDSM; here are some related performative definitions for what I said I would exhibit that we are now going unpack after I list/define them (as these terms can be harmful if misunderstood, I don’t want to abridge them; most are fairly short):
dom(inator/-inatrix)
A BDSM actor who performs a dominant role—traditionally masculine (especially in Gothic canon: Mr. Rochester, Edward Cullen, Christian Grey and all the million monster variants of these kinds of characters) thus ostensibly having more power. However, in honored realms of mutual consent, they actually have less power than the sub, who only has to say no/red light, etc (for a good example of sub power, watch the 2014 Gothic-erotic thriller, The Duke of Burgundy); the sub controls the action by giving the dom permission according to negotiated boundaries.
sub(missive)
A BDSM actor who performs a submissive role—traditionally feminine (especially in Gothic canon: Jane Eyre, Bella Swan, Anastasia Steele and all the million monster variants of these kinds of characters) thus ostensibly having less power. However, in sex-positive scenarios, the sub calls the shots from moment-to-moment (except in consent-non-consent, where they only agreed to everything up front and sign everything over ahead of time—a useful tactic for certain rape fantasies and regression scenarios).
“strict/gentle”
A BDSM flavor or style generally affixed to the dom in terms of their delivery. A “strict” dominatrix, for example, will administer discipline much more authoritatively than a “gentle” variant will; i.e., she will deny succor as a theatrical device to supply through the ritual, whereas the gentle dominatrix will be far more nurturing and supportive from the offset.
topping/a top vs bottoming/a bottom
These terms generally refer to dominant/submissive sexual activity in which someone “tops”; i.e., “rides”/is rode. However, they can refer to BDSM/social-sexual arrangements with various, historically-materially ironic configurations; e.g., “power bottoms” or “topping from the bottom” (which can be literal, in terms of the execution of physical sex, but also have BDSM implications/monster personages, too).
regression
In terms of mental health, regression is a form of dissociation, often tied to trauma or healing from trauma. Common in rituals of appreciative peril, which include Big/little roles daddy/mommy doms and boy/girl subs, etc. However, regression is also something that sex-coercive predation keys off of through regressive politics; i.e., to regress socio-politically towards a conservative medieval when Capitalism enters decay.
rape fantasies
Fantasies tied to sexual/power abuse (rape isn’t about sex at all; it’s about coercive power control and abuse). This kind of performative peril can be appreciative/appropriative, thus bourgeois/canonical or proletarian/iconoclastic. Common in Gothic narratives, which tend to project trauma, rape and power abuse onto displaced, dissociative scenarios: man vs nature, Jack-London-style; the lady vs the rapist or the slave vs the master in numerous articulations (racialized, but also in BDSM-monster frameworks), etc.
aftercare
Rituals supplied after BDSM (or frankly just rough sex/emotional bonding moments and other social-sexual exchanges) that help the affected party recover better than they would if left unattended (“rode hard and put away wet” as it were).
There’s also some Gothic scenarios and theatrical/operatic devices that we need to unpack before we proceed to entertain camping them using the above power/gender roles and BDSM devices; i.e., ironic, negotiated variants of Radcliffe’s tricky theatrical tools: her classically xenophobic/xenophilic and dubiously “consensual” Black Veil (hiding the threat badly), demon lover (the xenophobic/xenophilic threat of unironic mutilation and rape), and exquisite “torture” (rape play):
(source: “The Rise of the Gothic Novel” by Stephen Carver)
the Black Veil
Radcliffe’s famous “cloaking device” from The Mysteries of Udolpho, delayed until the end of the book (over 500 pages) to reveal behind a great terrible thing that made our heroine swoon; i.e., her immodest desire to look upon something that threatens her virtue and fragile mind. It remains a common device used in horror media today—e.g., as I note in “Gothic themes in The Vanishing / Spoorloos (1988),” the Black Veil is present all throughout that film.
demon lover
Cynthia Wolff writes on Radcliffe’s process in “The Radcliffean Gothic Model” (1979):
Let us say that when an individual reads a fully realized piece of fiction, he (or she) will “identify” primarily with one character, probably the principal character, and that this character will bear the principal weight of the reader’s projected feelings. Naturally, an intelligent reader will balance this identification; to some extent there will be identification with each major character—even, perhaps, with a narrative voice. But these will be distributed appropriately throughout the fiction. Now a Gothic novel presents us with a different kind of situation. It is but a partially realized piece of fiction: it is formulaic (a moderately sophisticated reader already knows more or less exactly what to expect in its plot); it has little or no sense of particularized “place,” and it offers a heroine with whom only a very few would wish to identify[1]. Its fascination lies in the predictable interaction between the heroine and the other main characters. The reader identifies (broadly and loosely) with the predicament as a totality: the ritualized conflict that takes place among the major figures of a Gothic fiction (within the significant boundaries of that “enclosed space”) represents in externalized form the conflict any single woman might experience. The reader will project her feelings into several characters, each one of whom will carry some element of her divided “self.” A woman pictures herself as trapped between the demands of two sorts of men—a “chaste” lover and a “demon” lover—each of whom is really a reflection of one portion of her own longing. Her rite of passage takes the form of (1) proclaiming her right to preside as mistress over the Gothic structure and (2) deciding which man (which form of “love”) may penetrate its recesses! (source).
exquisite “torture”
Exquisite “torture” is a Radcliffe staple, and classically pits the imperiled heroine inside a complicated, but generally unironic rape fantasy within the Gothic castle. Somewhere in the castle is a demon lover who is both more exciting than the boring-ass hero, and someone who speaks to the heroine’s inheritance anxiety and/or lived trauma inside the chronotope. The fantasy on the page is a form of controlled risk, but Radcliffe’s forms are “proto-vanilla” in that they emerged at the very beginnings of feminism/female discourse and whose imaginary safe spaces are actually didactically unsafe. According to Wolff,
Two hundred years ago Ann Radcliffe introduced Gothic conventions into the mainstream of English fiction. For the first time the process of feminine sexual initiation found respectable, secular expression. Yet the terms of this expression were ultimately limiting. It is important to recognize and acknowledge the heritage of Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic tradition; it is even more important now to move on and invent other, less mutilating conventions for the rendering of feminine sexual desire (ibid.).
the explained supernatural
The sensation of a seemingly profound or Numinous in Radcliffe’s stories, often linked to fear of unironic rape and death, but also boring material disputes that involve these things. The threat—like her mischievous pirates—are dressed up as ghosts or monsters to fool the detective so they can rob the state (and maybe the heroine) of their goods (the heroine and her modesty being “priceless treasure” in the eyes of themselves having internalized these bigotries, but also the men “protecting” them).
All of these definitions are useful to camping canon (as canon is heteronormative, thus coercively sexual in terms of unequal power exchange and the Gothic, performative language of war), so learn them well; even someone who is not acclimated to the theory can do it (e.g., my twin brother’s “Death Boner[2]” supervillain joke [source, now removed: u/hvanderw, Reddit]: “Oh, no! It’s Death Boner!” [said in your best old-timey radio announcer voice] as a surreal camping of the death knight’s rapacious/moribund function; i.e., the death erection as “Freudian erectile dysfunction” tied to the hero archetype as “phallic”: adventure and domination [think the “gamer bro” sort] tied to success by “winning” against an advertised foe, but also the damsel as something to “own” when the battle’s over and the happy ending becomes something to collect through sex as its own miniature battlefield—i.e., raping the womb of nature).
We’ll delve into specialized, negotiated ways to camp canon during the “camp map” proper—with me focusing on critiquing Tolkien and Cameron’s refrains with my own preference as a bad bitch/Gothic specialist, while also camping Radcliffe’s powerful tools: the closed, ergodic space of the Metroidvania as a Gothic castle whose “ludo-Gothic BDSM” arrangement explores repressed desires (emergent thoughts, guilty pleasures) and fears regarding the grander meta-text “palliative Numinous”: the world in which we live as doubled by the castle (of the castle, of the castle…). In fact, the really frustrating thing about Radcliffe’s work is she was honestly very skilled at her craft (I absolutely love The Italian for that reason), but her craft was still incredibly basic from a class critique standpoint; i.e., state apologia first, state critique if someone else does the work[3]. At the very least, she could have used the above tools to write something more sex-positive than she did—e.g., in the vein of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) or her famous daughter’s incredibly impressive Frankenstein (there was no shortage of revolutionary ideas at the time). Instead, Radcliffe wrote overlong and convoluted murder mysteries for her husband, whose canonical castles (ACAB) revived practically identically centuries later (e.g., Scooby Doo). Radcliffe’s own were “good of kind” but that only seems to confirm to me that she’d dug her heels in; i.e., pandering to a voracious middle-class readership that would eat her operatic, heteronormative ideas up when she wrote them, internalize these castles, then help to revive them in the future as “zombie Radcliffe” (somehow dumber than Radcliffe’s stories were—again, Scooby Doo). To that, we’ll also camp Radcliffe and her castles more throughout the entire book, taking what’s useful (or fun—again, Scooby Doo) and leaving the rest through our own interrogations of the Gothic mode and its regular displayers of unequal power exchange—in short, our own contracts of informed power exchange and resistance that we draw up in intelligent Gothic language.
For now, though, the basic idea is to highlight the psychopraxial struggle of it all: the chase of the bait by the hunter as something that exists in canonical norms in and out of media, on- and offstage within the performance of workers; i.e., as informed by the elite’s Superstructure, their propaganda working as bad entertainment that serves to instruct through fear and dogma towards an imaginary threat relayed through actual criminogenic conditions. In other words, the problem is real, but the scapegoat generally is the state-compelled victim of the structure, not the cause: the underclass as punished by workers above them, including white women who write propaganda or internalize it, then act it out on every possible register. As such, canonical Gothic poetics amount to unironic rape culture whose “prison sex” mentalities enfold vis-à-vis Man Box through good play vs bad play as codified and taught, but also cultivated and policed by canonical proponents gatekeeping everything. To borrow from Tolkien, they shout, “I will do the stinging!” and set to work stabbing the out-group to death while paradoxically wearing the same aesthetics (cryptofascist billboards/graffiti). Meanwhile, canonical trauma and its problematic phrasing compound inside the structure’s historical materialism—i.e., an echo chamber where past victims become “chasers” punishing “traps/bait,” serving the status quo as dutiful (thus merciless and fierce) watchdogs, war dogs, straw dogs:
(artist: Peter Paul Rubens)
rape culture
The tacit-to-aggressive apologizing for rape in society at large. Learned power abuses taught by state-corporate propaganda and power relations through “Pavlovian/Pygmalion” conditioning that breaks the recipient’s mind, bending them towards automatic, violent behaviors towards state targets during moral panics. This response can be men mistreating women, but also women mistreating each other or their fellow exploited workers (who can mistreat each other); i.e., TERFs abusing trans people and ethnic minorities. When executed and learned on a societal level, these sex-coercive practices become codified as “bad play” in canonical BDSM narratives, which recycle in and out of popular media (re: the Shadow of Pygmalion/Cycle of Kings).
“prison sex” mentality (covered earlier)
good play vs bad play
Forms of power exchange during oppositional praxis; i.e., sex-positive BDSM and other social-sexual practices and code built on mutual/informed consent vs sex coercion and harmful BDSM/rape culture. Bad play is the emulation of white, cis-het men as the unironic performers of coercive sex, bondage, murder and rape (e.g., TERFs dominating members of their own group).
(artist: Anrig)
Conditioned by the state, the standardized/token enforcer’s combined bad instruction and execution historically-materially produce a variety of colonizing binaries, one of the most classic being the virgin/whore dynamic, which in Gothic fiction is the damsel/demon. In the past, the hypermasculine enforcer was strictly the domain of men. But in the Internet Age, the demon archetype is as much the woman “acting like a man” by raping/reaping the theatrical submissive as a perceived whore deserving of punishment or being “claimed” by the stronger party. Being from the 1970s, Wolff describes this in woefully cis-het terms (which we’ll return to in Volume Two; e.g., “Non-Magical Damsels and Detectives“)
Many men have a tendency to divide “love” into two components: an affectionate (and asexual) element; and a passionate (sexual) element. Furthermore, since the areas of affectionate and sexual love are fraught with complex emotions of guilt and anger, many men manage these difficult and (to their way of thinking) dangerous feelings by projecting them onto the women about them. Thus, through this process of projection, men may perceive the world as a place inhabited by two kinds of women: “good” women whom they idealize and who have no sensual desires (and for whom, of course, the men themselves feel no sexual longings); and “bad” women who are sexual by nature (and with whom it is permissible—perhaps even expected—to have sexual relations). This imaginative construct has come to be called the “Virgin/Whore” syndrome (source).
but these harmful misconceptions (and their subsequent “bad play”) have not only not gone anywhere; they’ve pathologized in ways that grant some women/token minorities the ability to tokenize, hence become the demonic-undead enforcer to quell/cull the state-issued submissive dressed up in the same language: “my lamb and martyr you look so precious[4]” enacted by an abused party towards “weaker” abused groups in the larger underclass (a prison within a prison). Abused themselves, the TERF “as the true woman” becomes the Greater Destroyer to rape, kill and dismember the perceived “other” as the “false women”; i.e., the token cop policing the state’s chosen victims inside the state of exception, the latter unwillingly sacrificed by the former to serve the profit motive. It’s Marx and bad demonic BDSM in action.
As Radcliffe is the lynchpin of “Female Gothic” (and thus takes most of the credit for her famous School of Terror and its clichés and fetishes), much of the above exploitation’s blame absolutely falls to her as having codified the model through the choices she made; i.e., her idea of sexual and gender expression, but especially rape fantasy. If anything, Radcliffe’s painfully obvious inexperience—as a dutiful white, cis-het British woman writing unironic rape fantasies for her white, cis-het British husband—has furthered many harmful xenophobic/xenophilic stereotypes regarding the demon-BDSM theatre of the masculine and feminine as things to perform in Gothic meta-play during oppositional praxis as sex-positive and sex-coercive to varying degrees of irony and straightness. While there’s a million-and-one examples that emerge on either side of the praxial equation (refer to exhibit 1a1a1h in the “camp map” for some of them), the fact remains that we, as Gothic Communists, must resupply the Gothic imagination with less mutilative/rapacious forms of feminine and masculine expression for it to emerge in society at large; i.e., sex-positive xenophobia/xenophilia that aren’t harmful and don’t serve the profit motive (which is incumbent on harm and bigotry [crisis] to drive the market by abusing the process of abjection). This includes informing other workers who aren’t strictly a party to our schemes, making their own incremental variations of the Gothic roleplay that are closer in function to Radcliffe’s bunk.
(source: Alex Greenberger’s “25 Famed Artworks That Have Been Vandalized,” 2022)
I’m not interested in stringing up and beating a dead person, but I do want to barbecue Radcliffe’s sacred cow/melt down her golden idol to counteract the social-sexual harm her shameless catering to the profit motive has caused. To this, let’s outline the basic procedure as performed by weird canonical/iconoclastic nerds in their daily lives (with parallels and responses that inform fictional variants under Capitalism): how do workers play with each other during the Gothic’s codified belief systems and their coded instructions as things to arbitrate; i.e., to reinforce or reclaim through weird/cool rituals that are imitated at cross purposes during class/culture war.
Any sex-positive ritual happens through informed consumption of psychosexual appreciative peril, but also invited voyeurism/exhibitionist (asexual) nudism as things to perform during demon BDSM/consent-non-consent as something to do, watch and show to each other and the world (with camp having an-oft Gothic flavor—i.e., the Gothic “heroine”/damsel archetype as ironic, thus cathartic rape play that camps the canonical rape scenario: “‘Help, help,’ I’m being ‘raped!'”). Sexual activity isn’t always involved, but when it does happen, it is generally called “topping” (giving) or “being the bottom” (receiving). This is not the same as being dominant or submissive; a dom can top or be the bottom, as can the sub. What determines their position is the agreement between them of whatever boundaries and roles they agree upon, which afford each a different kind of power during social-(a)sexual activities of various ritualized kinds. The dom has the power to do what the sub says, and the sub can say “yes, careful/maybe, and no” (the traffic light system is a good analog: green, yellow, and red).
This is where things get nuanced, thus complicated. For starters, oppositional praxis employs animal aesthetics that elide power with canonical norms and resistance to those norms in sex-positive forms: demonic BDSM and kink as power exchange rituals infused with the aesthetics of power and death (the undead/demons) through animalized stigmas that, themselves, can also be camped. Second, mutual consent makes it impossible for the dom to violate the sub‘s boundaries or otherwise harm them, but “hurt, not harm” is still an exercise in building and maintaining trust, which is fallible. While service through the ritual is generally issued through commands, the sub ostensibly doing what the dominant wants is frequently subverted by the dom servicing the submissive as a being to worship and avoid harming at all costs. Not only can the pressure to perform be incredibly intense, but the fixed, set roles of power and its utility become confused and playful. Speaking from experience, the sub’s understated desires, bratty refusals and inaction can leave the dom feeling “stuck” in a position where they want to serve but also feel frustrated by someone who is physically much smaller than them, tied up, or otherwise able to hypnotize them with a look, an unsaid word, not moving at all (itself often being a survival mechanism they cultivated to survive[5] their own abusers)—i.e., like Dracula, a “corpse” hypnotizing a subject of the living side of the equation:
He lay like a filthy leech, exhausted with his repletion. I shuddered as I bent over to touch him, and every sense in me revolted at the contact; but I had to search, or I was lost. The coming night might see my own body a banquet in a similar way to those horrid three. I felt all over the body, but no sign could I find of the key. Then I stopped and looked at the Count. There was a mocking smile on the bloated face which seemed to drive me mad. This was the being I was helping to transfer to London, where, perhaps, for centuries to come he might, amongst its teeming millions, satiate his lust for blood, and create a new and ever-widening circle of semi-demons to batten on the helpless. The very thought drove me mad. A terrible desire came upon me to rid the world of such a monster. There was no lethal weapon at hand, but I seized a shovel which the workmen had been using to fill the cases, and lifting it high, struck, with the edge downward, at the hateful face. But as I did so the head turned, and the eyes fell full upon me, with all their blaze of basilisk horror. The sight seemed to paralyse me, and the shovel turned in my hand and glanced from the face, merely making a deep gash above the forehead. The shovel fell from my hand across the box, and as I pulled it away the flange of the blade caught the edge of the lid which fell over again, and hid the horrid thing from my sight. The last glimpse I had was of the bloated face, blood-stained and fixed with a grin of malice which would have held its own in the nethermost hell (source: Bram Stoker’s Dracula, 1897).
Unlike Dracula, this function can be transformed using the same aesthetics. The normally objectified undead/demonic monstrous-feminine (demanded by the abusive lover to lay as naked and vulnerable as a sacrifice and as motionless and as quiet as a corpse that they have total control over) can harness of the power of the hellish gaze (and appearance) to freeze would-be attackers in their place; i.e., caught in a confused position of adoration, fear rapture that teaches sex positivity through the Gothic mode as a social-sexual, descriptively sexual[6] process:
(exhibit 1a1a1e2: Artist: Kay. To look “ravishing” is to have a look that begs in different directions: “ravish me!” versus “you can’t, and I am ravishing you!” It’s “look, not touch” married to the aesthetics of dominance, power and death, sin and vice, etc, that are all combined within a liminal expression of something between a discretely fearsome dominant or vulnerable submissive [called the switch] comfortably existing on the shared within Segewick’s “the character in the veil [or] imagery of the surface in the Gothic novel.” Instead of the novel, this clearly applies to any medium, whose imagery of the surface is like a mirror or portrait to behold: in fear-fascination, but also barely-concealed horniness, passion and conflicting desire; i.e., the effortless violation of assorted boundaries that the Gothic is known for. In sex-positive expression and its various domains, this is power, this is strength: “You have no power over me!” and therein lies the theatrical device: the reversal—of the visually mighty by the classically weak as having far more power than is canonically prescribed; i.e., “topping from the bottom.” As such, the theatre is instructional to the making of the historical-material rapist into a harmless plaything wrapped around the traditional victim’s little finger [known in sexist circles “as being pussy-whipped[7a]“].)
To apply game theory to basic theatricality in any medium, but also in our daily lives, the ritual—whether in sex-positive and sex-coercive forms—is the “magic circle” and the performance somewhere between the roleplay and the rules; it can yield emergent or intended gameplay based on the players’ understanding of how the game should be played, which is made up according to canonical ideas of power battling iconoclastic ideas of power. I want to focus on sex positivity as something to instruct, so I will instruct you based on how I was taught (indented for clarity):
Under healthy circumstances, power fantasies/calculated risks can invoke a kind of psychomachic dialog or roleplay in one’s one head, but also one’s own partner that can invoke guilty pleasure as part of an escalating fantasy scheme: to orgasm. Sometimes, the usual, “old-faithful” tricks “don’t cut it” during sex, which leads to the Gothic as a potent aphrodisiac often discovered by accident (the golden apples, or ambrosia, as Promethean; i.e., stolen from the gods). We’re told by God to not eat from the Tree of Knowledge, but sometimes—just sometimes—we do anyways and discover that we like the taste of forbidden fruit. In Gothic-Communist terms, the fruit has been alienated from us, requiring us to corrupt Capitalism’s twin trees: the Base and Superstructure. This happens through the ways in which we synthesize proletarian praxis in our own daily social-sex lives: “I tried this; I liked it” (for example, I discovered entirely by accident/playing around with Gothic things at random[7b] that I very much liked feeling disempowered according to a palliative Numinous in videogames, albeit of a particular kind: the Metroidvania as a ludo-Gothic BDSM narrative that reflected my preference for being dominated by “dark mommies” of a particular kind: the videogame castle. We’ll expound on this during the “camp map”).
The bedroom is one such place. There, the fantasy is like Satan; it transforms like a sex demon to invoke power as taken away from/supplied unequally to you or your partner(s) or vice versa. Whatever works, as long as it’s sex-positive (contrary to moral panics/admonishments in Neo-Gothic novels, BDSM isn’t a “gateway drug”; it simply reveals what we like or know about such devices, or how we feel or respond to them/project[8a] onto them). In the chase of that particular dragon, you can try different fantasies that might draw inspiration from traditional battle theatre: “take me, I’m yours”; i.e., the chased, monstrous-feminine object of desire—when corned by the monstrous-masculine[8b]—theatrically squeaks “I’m small and delicate; please ‘ravish’ me” as an almost magical invocation to cum that triggers based on one’s recognition of the other party as “close,” but also according to the ancient theatrical notion of catastrophe
In drama, particularly the tragedies of classical antiquity, the catastrophe is the final resolution in a poem or narrative plot, which unravels the intrigue and brings the piece to a close. In comedies, this may be a marriage between main characters; in tragedies, it may be the death of one or more main characters. It is the final part of a play, following the protasis, epitasis, and catastasis (source: Wikipedia).
aka the narrative arc (below) as “rising action, tension, climax, resolution, epilogue” married to sex, power exchange and both parties’ acquired mental grammar of an internalized aesthetic being externalized again; i.e., built on older and older precursors (but also hauntological ones; re: spectres of Caesar and Marx):
The “climax” is tricky because it varies depending on the mode of the performance: physical, emotional and/or sexual. A pain-based climax, also called the vasovagal response (or “pain orgasm”), can make someone “dead to the world,” so a sadist really has to recognize the signs when the masochist literally loses control. But at the same time, the masochist can communicate up to the tipping point, so it is always a team effort. As for sex, it isn’t always involved in roleplay but if it is, someone who is “close” (regarding the orgasm) can let the other party know, but often you can “just tell” when someone’s inside you and you’re so close to them you practically operate as one (which opens the door to fun little discipline exercises: orgasm initiation [telling someone to cum] but also orgasm denial, also called “edging” as a sometimes-physical painful excursion known as “blue balls/blue clit[9]“). There can be an almost drug-like ecstasy to this intimacy, but also guilt at invoking rape fantasy (and other kinks/fetishes) in pursuit of the orgasm as something to tease, hence potentially frustrate[10]. It becomes a tightrope to walk, wherein you have to be in control enough not to harm your partner but prepare to hurt them a little if the sex gets appropriately rough and you nail their cervix (generally by accident) or fuck their pussy or asshole sore.
Usually, the adrenaline and excitement can make it a little hard to notice on either side of that equation. And sometimes you try different things because you’re bored, but also used to what’s normal, are physically stronger (from the repeated exertions of sex as a physical exercise) and both “broken in” and wanting to “push the envelope” a little. Ideally the love is mutual and the receiving side (which can switch sometimes) wants the giver to come, thus might take a little more “punishment” by them than usual. The recipient becomes the service bottom, and the same idea applies to the service top; i.e., serving each other through fulfillment of what both sides want and need to feel good physically, emotionally and/or sexually.
This includes during the sex or kink, but also afterwards during aftercare. Exquisite “torture” and demon lovers (of the Radcliffean sort) operate within the paradox of innuendo and playful forms, but it remains fallible insofar as comfort zones and boundaries are concerned. Both can suddenly change depending on one’s headspace—their mood and mindset, or because the wind blows; which is classically linked to men’s erections and women’s “fickleness,” but in practice affects different people differently depending on how they’re “wired”—i.e., the comorbidity of congenital factors and conditioning that leads to various predator or prey behaviors. Some people give as good as they get; i.e., “fuck back” or “top from below.” Some people look strong or tough, but are more obedient in the bedroom/general situations of private intimacy—i.e., big softies/gentle giants or pillow princesses. It’s classically (canonically) coded as the angle and devil, but in reality you can have the aesthetic of the angle or witch through a gentle/strict dom that matches their ability to dish out “punishment” according to a sub whose own aesthetics can be whatever both parties agree upon, and who can take far more than the dom is able to handle (which is why aftercare[11] exists, in case the dom is asked to do perhaps a touch more than they’re used to/comfortable with).
Cuwu, for example, liked to be choked, and knew the proper technique (surgical fingers over the veins and arteries in the neck) to get just the right amount of sleepiness; and they had to coach me beforehand (actually one time it was during sex, where I was squeezing their throat lightly as I fucked them and they smiled that wide, Sphinx-like smirk of theirs, wordlessly and lightly moving my hand higher up under their jaw to press my fingers against their vulnerable throat; i.e., with just the right amount of pressure to have an effect. When I tried it, they slowly nodded, letting me know I had done a good job). They also liked to be fucked in their sleep, a rather common form of consent-non-consent that is regularly discussed between even your more vanilla sex partners; i.e., “Sure you can fuck me before work. Just no anal and don’t cum in my hair!” The idea, as usual, is a test of trust and established boundaries where one proves one’s loyalty and trustworthiness by obeying the sub when no commands can actively be given.
It’s worth noting that such behaviors are often popularized in vampire narratives, but also sex dolls and other motionless, “as dead” doll entities fetishized as naked[12] and helpless, usually female sacrifices—during sex-positive scenarios, of course, but also in unironic demon sex scenarios enacted by fearful-fascinated white people enthralled during the ghost of the counterfeit (we’ll talk more about sleep sex and vampirism in Volume One and Two; for now know that the undead tend to feed through a mechanism of paralysis associated with the freezing gaze to pin their victims in place). In sex-positive cases, the reclamation of control during calculated-risk experiments is generally conducted by lying still and inviting someone to inflict pleasurable pain, tickling and/or erogenous sensations on you while in a traditional feminine, passive/theatrical compromising position:
(artist: Nat the Lich)
I’ve been on the giving and receiving end of these kinds of doll-like performances (with Zeuhl, I would lie still and ask them to tickle my feet; and Cuwu obviously asked me to fuck them in their sleep). It can be incredibly cathartic in terms of interrogating and performing unequal power in relation to one’s own psychosexual trauma. And honestly it can just be a great deal of fun without the need for a strictly medicinal function (though one is often present, of course). We’ll examine more examples of the doll as an undead device of sexual healing and power integration in Volume Two (exhibits 38a/38b1, 2, 3, and 4).
(model and photographer: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard; source: “Dark Shadows”)
These complex experiments can lead to some pretty bizarre requests (which are generally symbolized in chimeric or Gothicized art depicting the female/feminine position of appreciative peril as a monstrous, fetishized one). The simple fact is that control and the inflicting of pain is a tenuous proposition, and through the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune[13]” that Capitalism bombards us with, people can react differently per exchange. Under such “tricky” circumstances, open negotiation and “compromise” are invaluable; i.e., not compromising each other’s values and human rights, but doing for each other what makes both of you feel good: “What’s your favorite poz-ish? […] it’s not my favorite but I’ll do it for you![14]” Same narrative arc: rising action, tension, climax, resolution, epilogue. People are conditioned by media to be expected to give or receive power exchange dressed up as particular theatrical aesthetics that appear unethical, but whose canon of war and rape can be camped by two (or more) people who love each other enough to create a happy reunion in reclaimed language: “Take me, I’m yours!” while they submit (or milk you with kegels and fuck you back like a tiger) during the assorted paradoxes of pleasure and pain: “Hurt, not harm”; “It hurts so good!”; and non-harmful pain as pleasurable unto itself; and asexual forms of pleasure and pain achieved through the same plastic dynamics of physical, emotional and/or sexual intimacy (and crossover, with ace people dating non-ace people to idiosyncratically determine sexual/asexual compatibility in any relationship).
However, there’s a difference between the private medicinal practicing of rape fantasy and public dogma; things don’t stay on the canvas and if someone is harmed by a particular member of a particular group it can be weaponized. The idea is to help people work within private, guilty psychosexual pleasure and wish fulfillment that doesn’t contribute to systemic trauma. But rather undoes its making through the proletarian reclamation of traumatic language (of or from) that transitions away from the profit motive’s exploitation thereof. For example, I’m a service top and fawn in the face of external threats of harm (to me or by me[15] towards others) that have been internalized by people around me, but also my own complex prey mechanisms, revenge/rape fantasies and quest for power through the palliative Numinous; i.e., wanting to feel like I’m in control, which requires the generation of things that trigger my prey mechanisms but must be used and taught responsibly to avoid becoming dogma: feeling naked and exposed, but not actually being in danger as a performative but also societal/pedagogic balancing act. “Hurt, not harm.” The exorcism, then, has to be of the systemic implementation of harm through dogma (my inner demons will die with me); i.e., through a raising of class, culture and race consciousness through emotional and Gothic intelligence using ludo-Gothic BDSM.
People forget that kink, fetish, BDSM and aesthetics aren’t just a codified belief system but a set of instructions that exist and reinforce/rewrite themselves on- and off-canvas. A common problem with vanilla people, then, is they are compelled through heteronormativity to stay vanilla through art/porn that they make, consume, or patron through endorsement; i.e., unironically assume everything else is chocolate and harmful, while also sitting within spheres of damaging sexuality and false intimacy that lead to toxic (unhealthy, harmful) relationships in physical, emotional and/or sexual forms that, unto themselves, become more problematic art to shove along; e.g., the unironic rituals of power and sex in Rosemary’s Baby or Midsommar (2019), whereupon the horror of the devil-sex ritual play’s out like a modern-day twisting of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown”: the in-group of puritanical “villagers”—through their moral panic and self-imposed righteousness—are the devil worshippers they see in actual out-groups. In other words, the in-group are the ones unironically sacrificing virgins, albeit through the harmful wish fulfillment and bad play of internalized canonical nostalgia: the opera, fairytale, black Western, Gothic novel, penny dreadful, or some such pulp (sometimes “elevated to respectable levels” by “respectable” white ladies like Ann Radcliffe gentrifying the genre). They’re the demon lover or torture scene without irony or camp; i.e., the menticided rapist harming others.
As such, “basic bitches” become badly conditioned by canon; i.e., to enact bad play as intended, which spills over into their personal, private social-sex lives, ignominiously colonizing themselves and their partner by being like Dorian Grey: taking things at face value, without campy nuance or irony thus accidentally (or deliberately) hurting themselves or the other person/people involved because they’re sexually frustrated, repressed and alienated from good education/emergent forms of play. Sex education includes education regarding the societal/theatrical elements of roleplay, kink, and BDSM, including “harmful” forms. You have to camp them, but this must be taught to minimize risk and encourage the health of concentric relationships: the couple, but also the community through good education as self-care, thus community care (and vice versa). We’re not just sex machines to put quarters in and bad sex comes out; but we can be taught to give or receive abuse as coded in all the usual heteronormative ways through canon (rape and war through hypermasculine dominance of a battered hyperfeminine). This must be camped and generally requires a paradox well at home in the Gothic; i.e., stemming from older dialogics between authors like Edmund Burke’s terror
It is interesting to note that for Burke, terror – fear of pain – was a terror mixed with a paradoxical delight. Ostensibly, this was because the sublime observer is not actually threatened. Safety in the midst of danger produces a thrilling pleasure (source: Audronė Raškauskienė’s Gothic Fiction: The Beginnings (2009)
and Ann Radcliffe’s
terror and horror
Gothic schools begot from the Neo-Gothic period (the 1790s, in particular, between Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis) largely concerned with looking—specifically showing and hiding violence, monsters, taboo sex and other abject things (this lends it a voyeuristic, exhibitionist quality). Defined posthumously and surreptitiously[16] by Radcliffe in her 1826 essay, “On The Supernatural In Poetry”:
Terror and horror are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes and nearly annihilates them […] and where lies the great difference between terror and horror but in the uncertainty and obscurity, that accompany the first, respecting the dreaded evil? (source).
as something to regard with fear and awe, but also humor and delight: “Sex is a joke in heaven?” Linda Fiorentino asks Alan Rickman, in Dogma (1999). “From what I understand, it’s mostly a joke down here too,” he replies.
(source: Kevin Smith, via Mayer Nissim’s “Kevin Smith Hails His Voice of God, Alan Rickman: ‘He was a HUGE cauldron of win,'” 2016.)
Also like Rickman, these BDSM fantasies are can’t physically hurt us—are “as anatomically correct as a Ken doll” (or a Barbie doll; exhibit 1a1a3)—but there are historical-material consequences to their competing praxial opposites. Radcliffe’s gargoyles don’t just stay in her books, and neither do ours in the media that we create/play out in our daily lives and sometimes share with other people as extensions of our bodies, labor and sexual/gender expressions. In the Gothic tradition, all of these things get up and walk around, but can be for good or ill: for class war or betrayal.
Before we consider more examples of camp during the “camp map,” we owe it to ourselves to consider how the game is played “wrong” as outlined above; i.e. through harmful heroic arrangements of power and performance that are taught to weird canonical nerds through canonical psychomachy, psychosexuality and psychopraxis (oppositional praxis). In turn, they become like “killer babies” in adult bodies (e.g., Broly from Dragon Ball Z [1989]—exhibit 39c2), having internalizing their praxial role and executing it with extreme prejudice: the brave warrior spots the small-and-weak (anything) and paradoxically infers them as strong-and-dangerous at the same time (the fear of revenge by the underclass) rooted in dogmatic markers of sin, vice, passion, etc; i.e., the (from the manifesto tree)
culturally appreciative, sexually descriptive irony of Gothic counterculture’s reverse abjection with sex-positive, demon BDSM, kink and fetishization; as well as asexuality and the ironic ontological ambiguities of trans, non-binary, intersex, and drag existence.
Such bullies see this not as something open to debate, but an enemy to censor by hunting them down and “erasing” them. So, the state proponent chases down the correct-incorrect, inside/outside imaginary threat during us-versus-them-as-praxis, corners/kettles them, and dominates them like a man does; i.e., subjugates them in a variety of ways through Man Box culture and “prison sex” mentalities (rape/compelled sex, murder and general abuse in too many forms to easily list).
To that, I want to examine the praxial inertia present within the canonical mythic structure’s artistic (crypto)mimesis: war isn’t just badass, but sacred, as is killing the monster and getting the girl within conventional violence and its expected fetishizing and dimorphic gendered roles. Unlike the weird iconoclastic nerd, weird canonical nerds aren’t taught to handle power—its performance and materiel—in any way except unironic violence; e.g., the FPS’s “bullet by holocaust.” Because they must dominant and kill as Western men classically have been trained to do for centuries, they wind up feeling owed more than their fair share. In their eyes, they’re not just special, they’re the ultimate warrior/badass thus exempt from judgement; they “saved the world,” thus deserve everything the world can give them (or they can take from it) and more.
Onto “Overcoming Praxial Inertia“!
About the Author
Persephone van der Waard is the author of the multi-volume, non-profit book series, Sex Positivity—its art director, sole invigilator, illustrator and primary editor (the other co-writer/co-editor being Bay Ryan). Persephone has her independent PhD in Gothic poetics and ludo-Gothic BDSM (focusing on partially on Metroidvania), and is a MtF trans woman, anti-fascist, atheist/Satanist, poly/pan kinkster, erotic artist/pornographer and anarcho-Communist with two partners. Including multiple playmates/friends and collaborators, Persephone and her many muses work/play together on Sex Positivity and on her artwork at large as a sex-positive force. That being said, she still occasionally writes reviews, Gothic analyses, and interviews for fun on her old blog (and makes YouTube videos talking about politics). To learn more about Persephone’s academic/activist work and larger portfolio, go to her About the Author page. To purchase illustrated or written material from Persephone (thus support the work she does), please refer to her commissions page for more information. Any money Persephone earns through commissions goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. Likewise, Persephone accepts donations for the project, which you can send directly to her PayPal, Ko-Fi, Patreon or CashApp. Every bit helps!
Footnotes
[1] I beg to differ. This depends entirely on the heroine and the reader. As heroines are theatrical devices, they can be utilized for a variety of purposes, including medicinal BDSM, “perceptive” pastiche and subversive power exchange scenarios, etc.
[2] Basically, Blue Beard from Charles Perrault’s “Blue Beard” (1697), the demon lover holding the delicate female swooner captive and relayed through fairytales or operas (and various other Gothic stories; e.g., the “black novel” or “noir/black detective story” as peering into the imaginary site of the black space/shadow zone as routinely fabricated by the ghost of the counterfeit, feeding the profit motive). Facing such a sexy beast, a less bellicose heroine might swoon and face almost certain doom; an Amazon, on the other hand, might pick up a sword and stab the fucker—a proposition that can certainly be cathartic but needs to be exercised with care to avoid harmful xenophobia as something to execute on- and offstage as informed by these kinds of stories; i.e., TERFs attacking trans people when their own trauma is weaponized by the status quo, turning them into harmful imitations of Dacre’s woman-in-black, Victoria de Loredani; e.g., Ellen Ripley—formerly traumatized by the myth of the black male/crossdressing rapist—is handed a gun by James Cameron and told to play cowboys and Indians in service of the state: “Become vengeance.”
[3] E.g., Nick Groom of Radcliffe’s The Italian (from the Oxford World’s Classics 2017):
Ann Radcliffe may have not been a revolutionary, but her work is far from being conservative—she repeatedly tested the boundaries of orthodoxy at a time of revolutionary foment. This may explain why everything is under scrutiny in The Italian. It is a novel suffused with secrets and mysteries, and pervaded by scrutiny, examination, and interrogation. […] It looks forward to a society in which order is enforced by institutions keeping individuals under perpetual surveillance. As such, The Italian [is] very much a novel for the twenty-first century.
Remember what I said about Radcliffe and legwork? You can take her ideas and do lots with them (as we shall do). Just don’t expect to her to say the quiet part out loud, or veer away from her own bigotry to make hard stances against the state. If not during the revolution then when, exactly? Moderacy is a conservative stance, Groom, and Radcliffe never wrote anything after The Italian except for “On the Supernatural in Poetry” (which was published posthumously and where she distanced herself further from Lewis and the revolution)! She was a sell-out, middle-of-the-road, incrementalist white woman, and her work not only kicked the can down the road; it went on to become studied, emulated and disseminated by white women in the Internet Age—also known as TERFs.
[4] From Tool’s “Prison Sex” (1993):
I’m treading water
I need to sleep a while
My lamb and martyr, you look so precious
Won’t you, won’t you come a bit closer
Close enough so I can smell you
I need you to feel this
I can’t stand to burn too long
Release in sodomy
For one sweet moment I am whole (source).
[5] Cuwu could hypnotize an entire room with ease, captivate all who saw them with their animalistic sensuality and raw eroticism; i.e., attracting as much attention as they possibly could so that all eyes were on them. By doing so, they controlled the attention they received by paradoxically attracting all of it, discouraging a predation response by always having an audience (witnesses): safety in numbers by basking in the spotlight as something to include non-harmful eyes. Controlling a room through sex is a classic fawning mechanism (and quality of the mythic fawns) but also powerful means to communicate and fight back; i.e., by showing ourselves as human and alienized by capital and its pimps (re: the whore’s revenge):
(artist: Cuwu)
Note: After writing Volume Two, which features images of Cuwu’s uncensored face (from the Poetry Module onwards; see: “Red Scare,” which featured the first such images in a collage [above] whereas “Castles in the Flesh” featured the first images with Cuwu’s body in them and Volume One featured the first drawing of Cuwu in it; re: “The Ghost of an Abuser“), I am deciding to introduce some images of Cuwu into Volume Zero retrospectively. —Perse, 3/24/2025
[6] E.g., girls feel gross or undead about themselves, shamed about but also fetishized regarding their natural bodily functions in ways most cis-het men heteronormatively aren’t: farting during sex, burping or spitting, but also “wild” behaviors associated with the Whore archetype: the hysteria of Medusa, including everything that comes out of her body’s every orifice. In short, the internalization can build up in feelings of “being undead,” which have to be released—sometimes literally (with farts, or anything else she feels inclined to share to whatever degree she and her partner feels comfortable) but also theatrically in ways that express matter-of-fact realities tied to Gothic theatrics that imply the beauty-in-question as thoroughly “immodest” without shaming her for it. These needn’t be implications of an automatic, acutely erogenous response, but merely a level of comfort and security regarding one’s partner as familiar to each other as potentially having shared more during intimate moments together than they would with the wider public (Jadis, for example, would inadvertently fart during sex; i.e., when they came. It’s not a big deal, and I didn’t want them to feel ashamed about it despite them frequently saying “god damn it!” whenever they let one slip).
[7a] I hesitate to lend credence to such “theories,” but there is a kernel of truth to them. For example, if someone has been conditioned to survive by controlling people more powerful than themselves, it can become instinctual; i.e., an abusive trend by the survivor growing accustomed to controlling others not because they need to, but because it has become internalized as a habit that is all at once self-destructive, but also destructive towards their ability to hold onto friendships with other people. At first blush, this isn’t strictly “their fault,” insofar as it was partially conditioned; but dialectical behavioral therapy exists for a reason: as an option for them to apply to their own lives according to choices that they ultimately make when deciding whether or not to continue abusive behaviors when being made aware of them (this is something I will discuss in regards to Cuwu, an ex of mine with borderline personality disorder who ultimately blamed me for their poor life choices, but especially their abusing of me as a friend and a lover).
[7b] “Random” is a paradox, implying that my behavior wasn’t informed by my past trauma and education. In other words, I sought trauma because I am hypersexual (a common side effect of abuse) and a Gothicist with academic Marxist training who enjoyed Metroidvania as a child and wrote about them academically as an adult adjacent to, and sometimes in connection with, my own psychosexual experiences/social-sex life as psychosexual. I was drawn to monstrous-feminine power/dark mommy doms and spaces to resist and critique with my own take on “darkness visible”: the kind I wanted to be, to fuck and be fucked by (more on this during part two of the “camp map”).
[8a] I liken sex-positive BDSM (and Gothic poetics at large, through ludo-Gothic BDSM) to a black mirror. If someone sees it and cries “groomer!” or “degeneracy!” then they’re self-reporting. That might sound bad, but it’s actually a good thing. The argument that BDSM must somehow be violent or “degenerate” is a common “slippery slope” fallacy that says more about fascists and moderates existing as weird sexless nerds (or at the very least weird nerds who suck at sex; e.g., Ben Shapiro vis-à-vis Behind the Bastard’s “Ben Shapiro Wrote A Book About Sex,” 2023) than it does about sex-positive BDSM. Such weirdos making catastrophic, bad-faith arguments about “gay Communism” is just them projecting onto a perfectly healthy and normal activity (similar to any kind of gender-non-conformity, really): “If drag queens read to kids at drag shows, they’ll grow up gay!” or “If women read Gothic novels, they won’t obey their husbands!” It’s literally the Hammer of Witches/Original Sin argument updated by the same useful idiots the status quo always relies on: Christian men, meaning unremarkable cis-het white men (and their token subordinates).
The argument comes from a misunderstanding of how sex positivity and Gothic Communism work. One, it isn’t unsupervised, it’s exhibited; and two, people don’t become gay (someone either is gay or they aren’t, then decides to closet or not closet when they realize this about themselves). However, Gothic Communism does treat children (or beings treated like children; i.e., women) like they can be exposed to education regarding topics that are normally forbidden to them by the state: sex, drugs, and violence, etc. Likewise, we make canon gay not purely to fuck with its defenders, but to know where they stand and where they are at all times; i.e., so they don’t become normalized within society. But we also do it to see who comes to their defense (moderates debating Nazis, for example). All are important ways to read the room and, more to the point, can be done online and from positions of relative safety (though also during live protests, of course).
[8b] Kind of an inverse to Barbara Creed’s monstrous-feminine (which I tend to focus on; re: Medusa and her Numinous offshoots); e.g., Adam Wedenius writes:
Horror films often use the male as monster, though conventional ideology says that it is not his masculine characteristics that make him monstrous. Barbara Creed writes that in the horror film, the male body is represented as monstrous “because it assumes characteristics usually associated with the female body.” The thematic thread of Todd Solondz’s Happiness, beneath its façade of domestic anxiety, is that of deviant masculinity. In mapping Billy’s horrific trajectory towards maturity, the film’s project is an abject representation of the specific rites of passage that he must undergo in order to accede to manhood. Masculinity in the film is constructed as monstrous via the very characteristics that are inherent to his experience of becoming a man (source: “The Monstrous Masculine: Abjection and Todd Solondz’s Happiness,” 2009).
[9] From Alexia Lafata’s “Yes, Female Blue Balls Are Actually A Thing” (2015):
Everybody’s familiar with the concept of blue balls: the fabled, gut-wrenching pain that results from not “finishing” after hooking up. To the many men whom I have personally given blue balls, let me just say that I apologize. I always thought you just told me you had blue balls to guilt me into giving you a blowjob to completion. It wasn’t until the past few years that I realized the blue balls phenomenon is actually a real thing. And no, it’s not because I kept hearing my sexually unsatisfied male friends complain about it; it’s because I myself experienced it. The first time it really happened to me was in college. My boyfriend at the time found it fun to finger me up until the exact millisecond before I was about to have an orgasm and then stop. When done correctly, this teasing move was the most delicious torture on planet earth and eventually led to a massive, explosive finish [aka “edging”]. When done incorrectly, like if his finger slipped in a stray direction that completely threw off the rhythm and killed my orgasm game, I was left with the throbbing, hot pangs of discomfort that I could only call “blue clit.” It felt like he’d engulfed my vagina in scorching flames without giving me a fire extinguisher (source).
[10] Cuwu, for example, loved the idea of teasing me until I asked for sex, brattily saying “no” to me (with lots of eye contact) and this going back and forth until they expected me to throw them onto the bed and “ravish” them. Except they were always in control. When I stayed with them, we’d have sex while there were people in the other room (their roomies); if there was too much noise outside their door, Cuwu—naked under me with their legs spread and their glorious, naked body on full display—would raise a manicured finger, signaling me to slow down or stop and be quiet. But my cock would still be inside them, and they would be “milking” me the entire time with a Mona-Lisa smile on their doll-like face.
(artist: Cuwu)
In short, it was a game, one that was—unbeknownst to perhaps both of us—conditioning me in relation to them. It got to the point that they had established near-total control over me even when we weren’t in the same room/were separated by great gulfs of physical space—an effect not eased by my telling them I had a mommy dom kink, to which they had started to tell me when to cum and where: “in their mommy pussy” (despite them being younger than I was). Frankly, I loved it. Eventually, though, it became abusive (Cuwu, it turns out, had a history of abusing their partners), requiring me to break things off (easier said than done; they were like a drug and me, having rebounded at the time, was addicted to them); but it wasn’t all bad. One, the mommy-dom sex was frankly out of this world; two, they gave me their copy of A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, which has been a boundaries resource in shaping Sex Positivity’s own argumentation.
[11] In the case of Cuwu and myself, our relationship failed because there was no aftercare. They took and took and took until I could give no more (I used to read The Hobbit to them, and their favorite character was Smaug the Stupendous; over time, they started to act more and more like him, albeit inside the body of a small, incredibly magnetic and fuckable [to use an expression of theirs] “fuck puppy”).
(artists: Persephone van der Waard and Cuwu; source: “Making Demons: Prometheus”)
[12] The paradox of the doll is it generally isn’t fully nude or bare. Its “vulnerable parts” (coded sites of rape in heteronormative theatre) are exposed (or drawn towards through Gothic veils) but the body and the scenery are rather dressed: for mood, of course; e.g., The Orion Experience’s “All Dolled Up” (2023) expressing gender euphoria and a sense of being up to no good according to the Straights: “I don’t wanna be a boy, I don’t wanna be a girl […] Let’s be gay, let’s do crimes”—thought crimes, according to the Western idea of sin, but also doing it yourself instead of buying the usual commodified ghosts of the counterfeit that Queensrÿche’s “Spreading the Disease” warned about on Operation: Mindcrime (1988):
16 and on the run from home
Found a job at Times Square, working live S&M shows
25 bucks a fuck, and John’s a happy man
She wipes the filth away
And it’s back on the streets again
[…] Father William saved her from the streets
She drank the lifeblood from the saviour’s feet
She’s Sister Mary now, eyes as cold as ice
He takes her once a week, on the alter like a sacrifice
Spreading the disease
Everybody needs
But no one wants to see (source).
[13] From Hamlet’s suicide soliloquy:
To be or not to be—that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And, by opposing, end them (source).
[14] From Tenacious D’s “Fuck Her Gently” (2001):
Sometimes you’ve got to squeeze
Sometimes you’ve got to say please
Sometimes you got to say hey
I’m gonna fuck you softly
I’m gonna screw you gently
I’m gonna hump you sweetly
I’m gonna ball you discreetly
Cuwu once sung this song for me after we made a sex tape at a motel, arching their back and thrusting their ass into the air while happily singing along to Jack Black’s closing lines:
And then I’m gonna love you completely
And then I’ll fucking fuck you discreetly
And then I’ll fucking bone you completely
But then
I’m gonna fuck you hard (source).
(artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard; source: Monster-Fucking and Furry Panic”)
[15] Early in our relationship, I asked Zeuhl if my cock was hurting them; i.e., that I fucked their pussy too hard with it. They replied that I “fucked their pussy just fine,” that they liked it hard. Nevertheless, all of this was overshadowed by my trans woman’s shame of the penis—my penis—as a canonical symbol of rape and violence that I never wanted to be imposed upon others; i.e., I didn’t want to become like my father and feared that my penis, when invoked, would somehow make that horror—however absurd (that’s dysphoria/dysmorphia for you)—come true.
[16] The dialog is expressed between two fictional characters having a debate; i.e., the standard-issue nom-de-plume relayed through prosaic anonymity to perverse Radcliffe’s public image. She waited until she was dead to publish it.