This blog post is part of “Make It Real,” a fifth 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). “Make It Real” shall do the same, but with Volume One/the manifesto (versus “The Total Codex” promoting Volume Zero/the thesis volume). 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 “Make It Real’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

Volume One is already written/was released on Valentine’s 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.

Nature Is Food, part three: A Deeper Look at Cartesian Trauma in Rape Culture (feat. phallic women/traumatic penetration and sports abuse)

[Francis Bacon, the father of modern science,] argued that “science should as it were torture nature’s secrets out of her.” Further, the “empire of man” should penetrate and dominate the “womb of nature.” […] The invention of Nature and Society was gendered at every turn. The binaries of Man and Woman, Nature and Society, drank from the same cup. Nature, and its boundary with Society, was “gyn/ecological” from the outset (source).

—Raj Patel and Jason Moore, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things

Picking up where “A Deeper Look at Cartesian Trauma in War Culture” left off…

War and rape go hand in hand. Now that we’ve examined (but not exhausted) the Cartesian trauma of war culture as something to subvert when synthesizing praxis, the roadmap’s next two sections considers how rape culture can be interrogated and synthesized in our own creative responses to canonical forms; i.e., how to recognize said canon (and its Man Box mentalities) in part three, and express our trauma in relation to it through successful praxis, during the finale. Systemic catharsis requires praxis as conveyed through our extracurricular instruction’s cultivation of good social-sexual habits; i.e., de facto educators relaying a pedagogy of the oppressed through trauma writing and artwork that speak to living with rape under warlike conditions, raising the collective, solidarized awareness and intelligence required towards preventing future abuse (ultimately dismantling the state). Except Capitalism is Cartesian, targeting anything with the power to creatively liberate itself through psychosexual theatre. To serve the elite, canonical forms of demon BDSM frame nature as monstrous-feminine food tied to the profit motive, which rapes and disempowers workers and nature by fetishizing their regal, empowering monstrous-feminine aspects; e.g., Medusa’s rage or Satan’s ability to shapeshift; i.e., through physical and mental violence of a highly divisive and terrifying sort. Nature is a fat, sassy bitch, which Capitalism thus divides (and cuts) into fetishized pieces of alien material before rendering it fatally into profit, chaining the bodies to an endless Cartesian Gothic brutality. Alienate, fetishize, dissect and feed. Genocide by design.

(source: “Vulvine Reine d’Extase” by Gobelins, 2022)

Part three considers Cartesian violence inside the Gothic mode; i.e., in relation to phallic women and their traumatic penetration but also male violence in sports; the finale examines the knife dick as something to reshape, disarmed through racialized porn tropes fetishizing dark/fat bodies (and body parts): as things to liberate through themselves using ludo-Gothic BDSM, whose ironic, Satanic-rebel variants of psychosexual violence are prohibited during canonical fetishization under Cartesian models of domination (through the state’s trifectas and monopolies).

Rape is a serious and complicated topic, and we won’t have time to unpack all the theoretical aspects to ludo-Gothic BDSM, here (refer to my thesis volume for the entirety of them), nor all the various forms of alienation that habitually occur under Cartesian violence. Instead, we’ll combine concepts we have already touched upon, juggling them holistically to arrange around us and connect like a constellation, while also promoting various poetic scenarios the rest of the book will explore deeper than this symposium has thus far (or its remaining fifty pages). For now, just remember that Cartesian dualism (and its subsequent rape) historically-materially reduce workers and nature to three main xenophobic (or harmfully xenophilic) classes of alien—and by extension criminal/slave status—as something that is born into, then fetishized and raped because of it; i.e., inside prison-like structures that, through the state of exception, perpetuate crime-and-punishment inside an established order of cops and victims: undead, demonic, and totemic[1] (which Volume Two will explore at length).

(artist: Legion)

Moving forward, part three exhibits nature and human bodies as irreversibly transformed into Man Box enforcers (female, then male) and pitted against criminal, monstrous-feminine fetishes; i.e., during rape less as a single event and more as an ongoing structure by Cartesian forces (who go on to rape these groups again and again during reactive abuse driving them to madness, but also portraying them as hideous, violent and inhuman). Then, the finale explores the resulting trauma and monstrous-feminine language synthesized through rebellious counterterrorist bodies, liberating themselves by pointedly reversing the Patriarchy’s bedrock notion of “counterterror and terror” in favor of workers, not the state (and its knife dicks); i.e., beings from the stars, the beyond or Hell whose devilish gnosis offers a delicious, forbidden gateway for future liberation, not a death warrant. Before part three continues, I want to spend the next four pages discussing various important ideas concerning rape in connection to ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., as a playful, potent means of reclaiming nature through Gothic poetics’ shared sphere: camp, intent, function, double standards, and assimilation.

First, camp. In our thesis, we discussed rape as synonymous with war under capital but also something to place in quotes when camping canon. Just because something is camped doesn’t mean an unironic harm can’t be found; it merely means that unironic violence is challenged as a dogmatic tool through ironic/appreciative forms of fetishized Gothic peril—our ever-important (from a cathartic standpoint) rape fantasies, guilty pleasures and wish fulfillment during ludo-Gothic BDSM.

Rape is both invisible and ubiquitous under Capitalism. This paradoxical arrangement has just as much to do with the arm of the state as the public imagination, though the two generally go arm-in-arm during military urbanism. According to the Marshall Project’s “Overlooking Rape: New Orleans Is Not the Only City Where Police Don’t Get It” (2014):

The undercounting of rape is becoming more common, according to [Dr. Corey Rayburn] Yung. Between 1995 and 2012, he found a 61 percent increase in the number of cities providing the FBI with rape statistics that seemed suspiciously low according to his methodology (source).

Power, as we have discussed up to this point, is something to tally and perceive, but also perform during expected roles enforced by state powers and obedience towards said powers: to do one’s duty no matter how painful or ignominious. Medusa is the ghost of the counterfeit, and the ghost of the counterfeit is always rape.

(artist: Grand-Sage)

Cartesian thought is predicated on harmful invention: Nature and Society vis-à-vis Bacon, but also the invention of terrorism through the Neo-Gothic vis-à-vis Joseph Crawford: the invention of us-versus-them to magically summon things “from beyond” like a Radcliffean nightmare, then execute or banish again with xenophobic impunity inside and outside a given police state. It canonizes power as something to perceive through nature not just as food, but criminal, alien food that must be kept down through force. Capitalism, then, automates war and rape as a canonical, police means of fetishizing[2] and harvesting nature-as-alien (thus dark) until both are all workers know and anything else is unimaginable. While both synergize under Capitalist Realism, the latter often targets the mind through menticide as a torturer/tortured dynamic predicated on isolation. Neoliberal Capitalism does something similar decades after Meerloo, breaking the minds of all workers (not just men) in sexually dimorphic, deliberately isolating ways: a Capitalist-Realist myopia that cripples their ability to see, think, create, or relate to, thus form relationships with, other workers and nature as brutalized.

Second, intent. Contrary to popular thought, rape isn’t just sexual or even physical abuse, but emotional and mental abuse conducted through nebulous threats of violence over long periods of time; it is synonymous with violence in all its forms, regardless of intent. Jadis, for example, would threaten me with abandonment, which served as a reliable trigger for them to manipulate me with: I couldn’t tell if they meant to, only deepening and extending their torture of me. Mavis actually feared behavioral conditioning far more than physical rape; physical violence demands work and effort from the rapist, whereas propaganda does much of the work for you inside the victim’s own mind. Exposed to threats of violence through “waves of terror” and brief pauses thereof, victims of menticide become subconsciously compliant towards rape culture as conspicuously gendered; e.g., women broken by Pavlovian conditioning often lash out at perceived threats offered up by conservative leaders during moral panics; i.e., triangulation, a common TERF tactic when manipulating members within their own social circles. And before you ask, “What about their intentions?” consider that rape is rape regardless of intent; moreover, intent can be ascertained by what historically-materially persists through structures that lead to, and generally apologize for or obsess about, rape through the ghost of the counterfeit’s process of abjection.

(exhibit 29: Top: In vino veritas, “In wine, there is truth.” Cersei getting plastered to prepare for the worst [as even under sex-positive scenarios, alcohol can loosen one’s body cavities]; in this case, the “hair of the dog that bit her” is also rape: She’s speaking from experience. Bottom, artist: Edward Munch, feeling alienated from the world, utters a terrific [and silent] scream.)

Third, and in other words, function. Express, conscious intent doesn’t matter if the historical-material outcome demonstrably contributes to, thus functions as, successful canonical praxis and abuse encouragement patterns. James Cameron, regardless if he “meant to” or not, still “pulled a Pygmalion”; i.e., making a giant, Communist, T-Rex “dragon lady” with an African tribal mask for “Girl Rambo” to catfight with. Offstage, rapes happen regardless if someone “intended” to, or if they lied or hid their intentions behind bad-faith performances before, during or after the crime, defending their abusive actions to whatever court they find themselves in (we’ll pointedly refer to this with Ian Kochinski’s own slimy tactics, in Volume Three, Chapter Four[3]). Rapes, however, not only leave behind scant physical evidence; they affect the testimony of those who survive who are reminded of them in stories that first-and-foremost aim to profit off the perception of rape under criminogenic conditions; i.e., heteronormative Gothic fiction.

In other words, canonical praxis turns workers (classically men) into stupid rapists who “accidentally” or intentionally rape their victims, then try to cover it up—often in Gothic forms; it turns men (or tokenized workers within Man Box culture) not just into soldiers, but mind-raped killers-for-hire who rape themselves and their fellow workers in perpetuity across all registers. Rape culture compels widespread, self-destructive service through threats of vague annihilation at all moments; it leaves behind no bruises, but the scars run deep and permeate all aspects of public life, but especially Gothic media as a voice for things normally shirked away from in politer dialogs.

One such inheritance anxiety is how the state is always in crisis and crisis leads to decay as something to normalize in canonical Gothic media. Ultimately this will fragment the state when Imperialism comes home to roost, but the brunt of the burden is historically bourne out by workers abused by the ruling class. For instance, the Nazis’ industrialized Holocaust offered their nation-state no material benefit; in fact, it actually used up tremendous amounts of valuable resources, bureaucracy and sheer labor that could have been diverted elsewhere during the war effort. Instead, top Schutzstaffel [the SS] like Heinrich Himmler, Reinhardt Heydrich, and Ernst Kaltenbrunner (The People Profiles, 2023) kept up appearances purely for profit so efficient it contributed to the Nazi state’s entire destruction. Long after the Nazis came and went, though, rape culture is very much alive and well in America—a constant, living force felt through Gothic language, but also reactionary politics that abuse the Gothic’s liminal potential to cultivate bad education. Enslavement is taught, and generally relates to trauma as something to express, surviving inside people and the media that survives them to inform future generations. In short, there is no clock on trauma; it heals when it heals and until then, you simply have to live with it; i.e., synthesize through your own daily habits.

Fourth, double standards, which heteronormativity leads to. Female servitude under Capitalism is different to male servitude, the latter of which tends to receive preferential mistreatment as the universal clientele. Both are raped under Capitalism, but differently through Man Box culture. Women (or beings forced to act and appear as women) are raped through figurative and literal labor theft and wage slavery—sold to male clients like useful animals or chattel slaves, but also as highly cultivated products that “beastly” men are likewise conditioned to rape, kill, or otherwise eat like gruel: Stepford spouses, “as calm as Hindu cows,” their minds and their eyes dead inside. Intersectionality extends this relationship to overlapping axes of oppression within the same basic pedagogy (and its complicated traumas) as perpetually contested under state mechanisms; e.g., people of color or GNC persons as corrupt, monstrous-feminine and correct-incorrect. An oppressed pedagogy will account for these complexities, synthesizing them in practical ways, including parody and irony as an unfolding, ambiguous proposition (e.g., Fight Club [1999], left); a state pedagogy (and its own means of instruction) will not.

Fifth, assimilation. Conformity to state education is generally unhealthy to workers, including the perceived benefactors. For example, Man Box culture conditions cis-het men to physically and materially prepare their bodies and minds for war and “home defense,” only to die on the front lines historically far away from women (save as voices, media, prostitutes, or medics). In turn, both sides of the gender binary invoke settle colonialism, thus sex within war and violence. Settler colonialism trains men (or token agents) to torture those around them through a “prison sex” mentality that bleeds into media as instructional towards state aims. Unable to stop because it’s the only way they can feel “like a man,” such persons regain their manly essence by taking it from others through traumatic penetration; they become killer babies—both violent, impulsively vampiric creatures-of-habit, and trophy-keeping serial killers (soldiers and cops, but also weird canonical nerds debating Nazis within nerd culture, etc) working for and trained by the state to rape others: manufactured competition inside us-versus-them, good-vs-evil teams instead of collective teamwork and intersectional worker solidarity. The consequence is internalized fear and dogma that keep workers violent and stupid, but also divided and afraid of nature; a raped mind is an isolated, dead mind.

Emotional/Gothic intelligence and class/culture/race awareness aren’t just social skills and know-how, but perseverance and resilience under struggle, during ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., it’s not something privileged groups—especially white, cis-het men—experience to the same degree, leading them when feeling the slightest bit threatened to automatically jump to conspiracies like the shadow state, Qanon and the Jewish globalists, and white replacement. It makes them highly susceptible to bullshit, thus easy to manipulate by unscrupulous ringleaders. They start to feel threatened by everything to a higher and higher degree, demanding real victims to alleviate their own terror at absurd, imaginary “threats.” Little by little, their home becomes a fortress, which they will defend from outsiders invading from a perceived elsewhere (again Hell, but also the stars, the unknown, the wild, etc).

(artist: Niki Chen)

This insecurity also regards property (things of nature) as potentially “compromised”; i.e., something for men to collect and obsess about, but also feed on/objectify in tremendously harmful ways for all parties (and natures) involved; e.g., necrophilia, pedophilia and zoophilia, etc (the removal of consent within canonical Gothic poetics). Women inside the colonial binary—which, beyond women, excludes anyone who doesn’t conform, turning them into hostile alien fetishes attack (re: the Medusa)—are canonically valued by sexist men as “porn food” that, when fattened up or starved (usually a combination, left), helps “grown-ass, manly specimens with manly appetites” indulge in “grownup junk food.”

This not only cheapens women, but nature more broadly through porn, reducing both to a cheap, disposable, sinful product that men “give into” when they’re “weak”; i.e., when their judgement “lapses” and they taste of the forbidden fruit “outside” of Cartesian society. But men conditioned through the state still prefer these conspicuously monetized “snacks” versus disobedient “ladies (3D or otherwise) who don’t know their place,” and other non-female embodiments of natural as “wild.” It’s easier for men (or token groups emulating men to triangulate against nature) to cope with their own exploitation and trauma; i.e., if they have control over something they can simply eat. This double standard usually presents as isolated, downplayed or displaced, but in reality stems from Capitalism having relied on men to do its dirty work since day one and is now trying quite badly to make up for the paradigm shift: women not wanting to sleep with every man they come across.

Through assimilation, female autonomy becomes something to appropriate under Capitalist Realism—specifically appropriative peril, whose expanded recruitment leads to canonical “TERF gargoyles”; i.e., girl/war/queer bosses; e.g., female drill instructors, lady Rambos and Amazons—all figurative and literal “sleeper agents” who respond stochastically to trauma as phallic women do: through traumatic penetration’s knives and bullets, but also a Cartesian willingness to turn these against other so-called “emergent beings.”

With that, let’s take one more page to outline the criminogenic conditions that sanction Cartesian violence to begin with; i.e., the paradoxes of violence, terror and morphological expression that ludo-Gothic BDSM camps. As we do, remember two things: One, both they and their linguo-material forms exist in dialectical-material opposition, doubling inside chaotic liminal territories and positions occupied by class traitors (cops) and warriors alike using opposing forms of cryptonymy. Two, once established by state forces, the illusory maintenance of state righteousness, sovereignty and legitimacy must never be challenged lest “the world end”; i.e., Capitalist Realism. On one side, the state preys on nature and human bodies as raped by Cartesian forces, the latter feeding on the former by transforming them into walking apocalypses: zombies, demons, and totems as hyperbolically menacing. On the other side, state victims endure police brutality’s embodiment of presumed, conspicuous guilt (the dark exterior) and internalizing of self-hatred and bigotry while subverting police misuse of Gothic poetics through a pedagogy of the oppressed: counterterror with a proletarian function.

I’ve repeatedly said that function determines function. Another way to conceptualize this is flow determines function. That is, during oppositional praxis’ dialectical-material struggles, terror and counterterror become anisotropic; i.e., determined by direction of flow insofar as power is concerned. Settler colonialism, then, flows power towards the state to benefit the elite and harm workers; it weaponizes Gothic poetics to maintain the historical-material standard—to keep the elite “on top” by dehumanizing the colonized, alienating and delegitimizing their own violence, terror and monstrous bodily expression as criminal within Cartesian copaganda: treating terrorism and counterterrorism as a Cops-and-Robbers lullaby to soothe white army brats (and other children during military urbanism) having become afraid of nature as one might be the dark: “My mommy said there were no monsters, no real one. But there are, aren’t there? Why do mommies tell little kids that?” / “Because most of the time it’s true.” Ripley and Newt’s conversation speaks to the abjection of nature as dark, rapacious and wild by colonial forces—the Medusa concentrated into an inhuman-yet-maternal dominatrix (the dark “mommy dom”) whose vivid, liberating combination of undead, demonic, and animalistic[4] will be criminalized and attacked by class traitors adopting more civil, outwardly “white” forms of medieval violence like Ripley (and similar Amazons, below) teaching “Newt” to fear the dark by raping it; i.e., subjugated phallic women castrating a female master rebel, once she visibly tries—through a dissident question of mastery—to reverse the status-quo binary (and flow) of terrorism and counterterrorism by showing her trauma, anger and willingness to fight back against a presumed overlord.

In doing so, a Galatea threatens the canonical, Pygmalion decree of what’s appropriate, insofar as the giving and receiving of xenophobic violence unfold inside a compelled moral order—one whose fear and dogma (during endless crisis, decay and moral panic) establishes the police and the state as good, thus legitimate, and those aliens inside the state of exception as bad, thus illegitimate. Per Radcliffe, the invention is one of state forces accusing others of banditry in bad faith; i.e., while functioning as banditti themselves, robbing others blind behind the ghost of the counterfeit’s process of abjection to deliberately further genocide (re: “Who’s the savage? Modern man!”). Cops are always good, human, safe and nature is always alien, criminal, dangerous. Anything that breaks the spell must be discredited, destroyed and/or exiled, scapegoating it all the more.

Within the reactive abuse of settler-colonial models, rebel villainy and outrage is manmade to receive state violence during moral panics: orchestrated by Cartesian hubris through arrogant, fame-seeking men like Victor Frankenstein (more on him in Volume Two) but also female protectors classically enslaved[5] during Amazonomachia to serve men (often through marriage) and kettle state enemies with a smile on their face. First, we’ll look at how through subjugated Amazons and other tokenized female agents’ traumatic penetration/carceral violence against state victims; after that we’ll look at violence against men in the sports world, then segue into the finale, which inspects racialized and GNC forms of pornographic expression before concluding the symposium (and volume) with a matriarchal anecdote.

(artist: Morry Evans)

Already-codified under Max Box culture, state abuse strategies become something to assimilate, internalize and release back into the world using canonical Gothic poetics’ fixation on phallic violence; e.g., knights, Amazons and their dick-shaped weapons as sexualized killing implements swept up in hauntological courtship. The unnatural coercion of the women involved becomes naturalized, normal; reacting to trauma, cis-het or cis-queer women (and male feminists and gay men) either bow to its markers through damsel-style regression; or they assimilate them, the Amazon angrily “dick-measuring” with Medusa in the canonical, bourgeois sense to their own and everyone else’s detriment: sheathing her sword inside her foe. They triangulate and attack the state’s enemies through phallic means: stabbing and shooting other marginalized groups. In other words, the “prison sex” phenomenon co-opts classic female/queer rage as false activism; i.e., a divide-and-conquer strategy to pit workers against workers through workers. The marginalized in-fighting is specifically performed by reactionary women, whose past trauma is weaponized—a Pavlovian conditioning that promises further abuse unless they act against state enemies to restore balance now.

As such, these TERFs reliably respond to moral panics in ways the state requires: through “prison sex” dominance hierarchies and rape culture coopted by second wave feminists against sex workers, but also trans, intersex, and non-binary people (and their allies) belonging to nature-as-food. All become something to harvest by Cartesian means—through rape and torture (as Francis Bacon would put it) by presenting Mother Nature (and her various offshoots) as “asking for it.” The monstrous-feminine becomes dark, queer and violent, but also composed of two unfair halves; i.e., a being of two worlds, both to blame for all of Capitalism’s woes and tied to the granting of savage secret desires and dark, repressed wishes Capitalism advertises in cliché forms: the bringer of fresh life amid intense, orgasmic torture, power, decay and death. A rival master to Cartesian dominators, the monstrous-feminine (often the Archaic Mother/rebellious phallic woman, among other such “corruptions” of nature) is both the obscene penetrator that drains you of your lifeforce, and the necrotic womb that takes you in before vampirically eating you alive: absorption, or a reverse birth.

 (artist: John Tedrick)

We’ve already examined Amazonomachia and the triangulation of women considerably in Volume Zero, and we’ll unpack its “prison sex” moderacy and TERFs (and their Amazons and Medusas) much more in Volume Three. In the meantime, keep this in mind this as part three proceeds: women who assimilate tend to emulate cis-het men’s typical Cartesian actions against nature. By extension, this books’ pedagogy of the oppressed isn’t really on cis-het men, because cis-het men generally aren’t oppressed compared to women and various minorities. That being said, this section will examine men briefly as givers and receivers of phallic state violence; e.g., by injecting their bodies full of dangerous chemicals (exhibit 30b1) or placing heroes within sacrificial positions of Gothic danger (exhibit 30b2) that demonize the imaginary past as vengeful against the current generation, not the elite; or turning them into serial killers who not only kill women, but transform them into phallic implements of Cartesian binaries, hence psychosexual violence (exhibit 31): brides of Dracula. Said men (and the women imitating them to whatever degree they’re allowed within the Imperial Core) need to stop using said violence to fetishize and attack those workers alienated, then preyed on, by the state: us-versus them porn (exhibits 32a, b, c, and d).

Of course, there are moments throughout the remainder of Sex Positivity that delve into patriarchy on different registers of power—e.g., weird canonical nerds in Volume Three, Chapter Three—but the emphasis still remains on sex positivity for all workers, who the state (and its proponents) rape. This goes well beyond cis-het men or women. Even so, assimilation fantasies (and their rapacious elements) require subversion and irony if they are to become cathartic during proletarian praxis and its creative successes’ de facto instruction; i.e., when processing state abuses and generational trauma through our own labor (and its myriad expressions/arrangements). These are very much discussed for the rest of the roadmap, but also in Volume Two and Three; i.e., their misapplication by TERFs and their battered, canonical girl bosses; e.g., Ellen Ripley (exhibit 30a) and Samus Aran, her palimpsest (exhibit 71).

As someone who grew up in love with these space cowgirls, I absolutely can recognize their liminal, oft-canonical background; i.e., as something to challenge within oppositional praxis during ludo-Gothic BDSM. We’ll explore that now, before returning to rape as tied to Gothic symbols of phallic violence when committed by men, but also women and other tokenized, Man Box proponents: the knife dick[6] as something to brandish at what the state has divided you (us) from and made alien (them) compared to yourself.

(artist: Kyle James)

To this, state hegemony threatens and executes invasion in the same complicated sphere. Per Cameron’s refrain, the imperial castle becomes a black fortress, an indiscriminate killing ground with one grim message: “kill the enemy.” Except, its broadcast travels inside a place where the distinction between friend and foe is eliminated. The colony doubles as a concentration camp for both sides, but also a territory to conquer over and over. Inside its state of exception, civil distinctions become meaningless; everyone is a threat (the xenomorph a potential invader hiding inside state employees) and the state can do anything to defend itself, to profit. Hostages, soldiers, and terrorists alike not only become confused, but collateral damage serving the profit motive. Cops, the prescribed hero class, transform; they become demons, pirates, and black knights—rabid-dog torturers, jailors and assassins who threaten everyone except the elite, far, far away.

This harrowing reality plays out in videogames under neoliberal hegemony, but also the movies that inspired them coming out of older, pre-cinematic works. In either case, us-versus-them owes itself to Cartesian thought pitting state violence—i.e., the traumatic, dick-like penetration of knives and bullets—against guerrilla forces wielding abject variants of the same ordinance inside prison-like conditions. Historically this would have been stolen American materiel, but in many shooters is symbolized as biomechanical/cybernetic during a prison break. This chimeric fusing of nature and the unnatural creates something utterly fearsome that America cannot defeat without “outside” help: the ancient male mercenary (the knight) hauntologically revived, but also the Amazon updated through neoliberalism as a war-themed girl boss “from another world.” As my PhD argues,

Under Capitalist Realism, Hell is a place that always appears on Earth (or an Earth-like double)—a black fortress threatening state hegemony during the inevitable decay of a colonial body. Its widening state of exception must then be entered by the hero during the liminal hauntology of war as a repeatable, monomythic excursion—a franchise to subdue during military optimism sold as a childhood exercise towards “playing war” in fantastical forms; e.g., Castlevania or Metroid. Conjure a Radcliffean menace inside the Imperial Core, then meet it with American force

Threatened, the state always responds with violence before anything else. Male or female, then, the hero becomes the elite’s exterminator, destroyer and retrieval expert, infiltrating a territory of crisis to retrieve the state’s property (weapons, princesses, monarchic symbols of power, etc) while simultaneously chattelizing nature in reliably medieval ways: alienating and fetishizing its “wild” variants, crushing them like vermin to maintain Cartesian supremacy and heteronormative familial structures […] Neoliberalism merely commercializes the monomyth, using parental heroic videogame avatars like the knight or Amazon pitted against dark, evil-familial doubles—parents, siblings and castles (and other residents/residences)—in order to dogmatize the player (usually children) as a cop-like vehicle for state aims (often dressed up as a dated iteration thereof; e.g., an assassin, cowboy or bounty hunter, but also a lyncher, executioner, dragon slayer or witchfinder general “on the hunt,” etc): preserving settler-colonial dominance through Capitalist Realism by abusing Gothic language—the grim reaper and his harvest. Doing so helps disguise, or at least romanticize (thus downplay, normalize and dismiss) state abuses through their regular trifectas and monopolies; i.e., the CIA and other shadowy arms of state mercenary violence fronted by myopic copies—pacifying the wider public by mendaciously framing these doubles as (often seductive) “empowerment” fantasies. Dogma becomes “home entertainment” as a palliative means of weaponizing the idea of “home” against those the state seeks to control and exploit on either side of a settler-colonial engagement: the cop or the cop’s victims. Either is sacrificed for the state through its usual operations; i.e., for the Greater Good, except heroes are glorified as monstrous sacrifices serving “the gods” (the status quo) out of Antiquity into capital, whereas their victims are demonized as evil, thus deserving of whatever holy (thus righteous) retribution comes their way. Both are chewed up and spit out, the state’s requisite “grist for the mill” as it uses its own citizens to move money through nature: by defending itself from an imaginary darkness “From Elsewhere.” A fortress’ sovereignty is forged, as are its manufactured crises and saviors, but the outcome is still profit; the castle remains haunted by the ghost of genocide, suggesting the unthinkable reality that the hero is false.

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

In neoliberal copaganda, canonical heroes are sent solo or in small groups, deployed as much like a bomb as a person; hired by the powerful, these “walking armies” destabilize target areas for the mother country to invade and bleed dry (a genocidal process the aggressor sanitizes with cryptonymic labels like “freedom” and “progress”). To this, they are authorized, commissioned or otherwise sanctioned by those with the means of doing so; i.e., a governing body centered around elite supremacy at a socio-material level. After infiltration occurs, they work as a detective[7]/cop, or judge, jury and executioner—either on foreign or domestic soil, the place in question framed as loosened from elite control, thus requiring the hero [and their penchant for extreme violence] to begin with. This makes them an arbiter of material disputes wherever they are: through police violence for the state in its colonial territories at home and abroad. They always follow orders: “Shoot first, ask questions later and enslave what survives.” In stories like Aliens, Doom and Metroid, the fatal nostalgia of the “false” doubled homestead is used to incite genocide, thus conduct settler colonialism inside of itself; i.e., through standard-issue Imperialism but also military urbanism; e.g., Palestine abroad[8] versus the death of Nex Benedict at home[9]. This has several steps. First, convince the hero that a place away from home is home-like; i.e., the thing they do not actually own being “theirs” (the ghost of the counterfeit) but “infested” (the process of abjection). Then, give them a map and have them “clean house”—an atrocious “fixer” out of the imaginary past who repairs the “broken” home room-by-room by first cleansing it of abject things “attacking it from within,” then disappearing with the nightmare they constitute; i.e., purging these alien forces through blood sacrifice or even total destruction of the home itself. The iconoclast can reverse this two-step process, but must protect those queenly things of nature normally persecuted by Cartesian forces and their cartographic schools of violence; i.e., by using counterterrorist language and ironic roles of violence, terror and monsters redirected towards the state: Athena’s Aegis and the dark queen’s chaotic stare of doom, but also literal, manmade weapons illustrated during performative shows of force against state invaders attacking Galatea (source: “Scouting the Field”).

Canonical heroes triangulate against state targets, then, becoming the necessary exterminator of the settler-colonial model, but also the sexy destroyer and superheroic retrieval expert during the monomythic fetch quest (hyperbole and state heroism go hand-in-hand, exaggerating the menace, emergency and rescue to equal measure); i.e., a budding flower of war and larger-than-life tempter-of-fate (and the audience) walking the tightrope between Heaven and Hell, life and death, protector and aggressor, child and parent, but also wild and tame, pleasure and pain, black and white, strong and weak, invincible and vulnerable, good and evil—all while delivering state subjects (and the nuclear family unit) from evil, chaos, death, darkness, Hell, etc: the dark chronotope as a false copy whose hellish architecture and monarchy (the medieval bloodline) threatens the perceived legitimacy of the West’s own forgeries (while also haunting them). A school of canonical violence, then, the liminal hauntology of war predictably emerges, summoning the hero to occupy then suppress a prescribed “disorder” during an orderly chaos/Amazonomachia that breaks and repairs the symbolic home; i.e., over and over when ludo-Gothic BDSM disrobes in public (a narrative of the crypt, circular ruin, infernal concentric pattern, Cycle of Kings, etc): a whore to closet and kettle by design, but where camp shares the same space of play with/without irony.

(artist: Gerald Brom)

And since we’re focusing on the monstrous-feminine, here, I consider the most famous of all modern phallic women to be Hippolyta-married-to-Theseus: James Cameron’s neoconservative, “feral mother” take on Ellen Ripley serving as a warlike, parent-themed mentor for the children of the present (or those who, thanks to waves of terror, regress to child-like states). She’s the housemaid with a gun, facing the barbaric imagery of the imaginary past mirrored by actual colonial abuses, upholding the latter by banishing the former to benefit the elite—in short, by playing out a heroic story much in the same way that modern versions of Beowulf would: through sex and force, rape and war expressed in theatrical language that maintains Capitalist Realism.

(exhibit 30a: Volume Zero extensively explored how rape is a triangulation device employed by state forces in Gothic media; i.e., of Amazonian women raping state enemies/targets: the state’s chosen female war bosses giving police, “prison sex” violence to nature-as-alien. Biological similarities and differences aside, their xenophobic function is identical to men’s—an assortment of gun, war, and rape pastiche through a co-opted, centrist Amazon: the good monster woman, Ellen Ripley, furiously slaying her evil double, Medusa, in service of the state [who redirect her rage at their abuse of her in the first movie towards whatever target they want killed next: destructive anger]. Policing the whore through bad BDSM, the neoliberal, neoconservative “revenge fantasies” of Aliens and Predator [1986-87] are rape fantasy in that regard, as are their videogame offshoots: “Rape the Communist; kill the pig, spill its blood!”—all in service of the owner class back at home posturing as righteous, but also displaced by neoliberal “arms merchants” like James Cameron and John McTiernan [the former’s other franchise, the Terminator movies, having a much more left-leaning “Western” flavor surprisingly Gothic/critical of Capitalism, exhibit 8b2]. These neocon fantasies canonically disassociate through state violence, producing a “bouquet” of “war daises” echoing T.S. Eliot’s infamous “Wasteland” [1922]: “April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land” [source].

Just as the shared, us-versus-them rhetoric owes a symbolic debt to Beowulf’s post-Roman treatment of monsters inside a Christian hegemon that survived in future English forms, neoliberalism’s prime videogame mode—Cameron’s refrain, the shooter—owes its own abject warrior symbolism to earlier stories putting future ghosts of Beowulf in seemingly unusual environments like outer space [whose dark hostility emulates Grendel’s mother’s underwater cave]: Starship Troopers. Beowulf’s various offshoots survived into a retro-future copaganda whose military optimism contributes to the ongoing myopia under Capitalist Realism in male and female videogame forms; i.e., “Conan with a gun” aping Rambo [the white savior playing guerrilla] and Amazonian, Hippolyta-in-spirit Beowulfs like Samus Aran doing the same. Both offer a de facto “good” parental role to challenge the bad parentage of corrupt and/or monstrous-feminine entities [the evil double of the hero’s homestead and its occupants]. Conjured up, Beowulf aborts the spawn of Cain and Grendel’s mother on their illegitimate home turf encroaching on colonized lands; Samus crushes her own tall, hideous enemies using her own armored body and superior “phallic” weaponry. He’s the Great Destroyer shooting Red Falcon’s biomechanical offshoots to dust; she’s the Medusa, as strong as the Earth as she cuts Mother Nature [and her draconian offspring] down to size [below].

Per the kayfabe clichés of wrestling monsters, its not long before both hero types get naked, reviving binaries from Antiquity stressed post-Renaissance—he, stripped down to stress his masculine “invulnerability” and she, her feminine “vulnerability” during a recent creation of sexual difference. Within this settler-colonial trend, they pointedly denude towards a native, “white savior” state, mid-combat, which then regresses back to nuclear family roles after the action lulls: Hippolyta, the if-not-bridal-then-at-least-maternal role, playing house/mother while Beowulf goes home to be a family man… until the fight begins anew [which it always will under Capitalism; if there’s no one left to fight, the elite will make new enemies to confront based on Cold War kayfabe archetypes: the Nazi or the Communist as a bad parent to the hero’s good parent].

[artist, bottom-right: Blue the Bone]

Through this canonical, neoconservative chase back to war—to track down and kill her own trauma—Ripley “pulls a Rambo” like Arnold and the boys do, becoming Beowulf, the fabled Great Destroyer persona and very thing she feared in the first film, during Amazonomachia: a cosmic, female war boss catfighting with a female-Numinous, xenophobic symbol for Communism in order to become “top dog,” queen bitch, etc, in service of Patriarchal Capitalism preying on nature. As such, Ripley’s “teeth in the night” performance murders, pillages and rapes the land and its inhabitants around her for the company and for Capitalism [with Cameron making FOX lots of money and contemporary videogame companies like Konami and Nintendo also becoming indebted to Aliens in future installments]. In this sense, her short fuse mirrors Victoria de Loredani’s short life in Zofloya, except “Lilla” [the recipient of state violence, exhibit 100b2] is disguised as both a killer army of queer, Communist space bugs and their abject, queenly broodmare’s Satanic power to create things that—like Satan or David from Alien: Covenant [more on him in Volume Two]—threaten “the end of the world” simply by existing at all; i.e., a termination of the status quo’s socio-economic order relayed through monster kayfabe/Amazonomachia and Galatean poetics: good monsters and bad, good nature and bad, good war and bad.

Cartesian thought emblematizes nature-as-alien through stigma animals as things to war against—often insects and other decomposers that mass produce through inhuman means of sexual reproduction, but also symbolize Indigenous culture and pagan religions; e.g., Tolkien’s fearsome spider women and orcish subterranean barbarians, or Lovecraft’s sea creatures “from the deep.” To some degree, all symbolize death, decay and ancient forgotten gods feared from a Western colonizer’s perspective; in turn, the ghost of the counterfeit abjects mighty-yet-weak [re: Umberto Eco] cultures that, once unleashed, lead to a black planet through a dark uprising’s hoard-like, black, queer and/or Jewish revenge: from the transgenerational surrender of “slaves give birth to slaves” to a slave uprising dressed in reclaimed implements of counterterror scaring whitey senseless. It’s a doomsday prediction built on colonist anticipations of eventual, inevitable collapse [no colony lasts forever]: Nature must be kept “in check” to preserve the world “as is”; i.e., Capitalism, which dominates the world/nature through military optimism as a brutal-but-effective means of maintaining the generational myopia of Capitalist Realism. As such, it also treats nature as savage—an unthinking “hive” multiplying in ways that, according to the West, “cheapen life.” Doing so abjects the West’s usual cheapening of nature [and subsequent kettling through psychosexual violence/reactive abuse] onto its victims around the world, claiming the East doesn’t “value life” the way the West does in its own good-war canon [Kay and Skittles’ “How Enemy at the Gates Lies to You: Saving Private Ryan, Othering, and Cold War Narratives,” 2023].

To this, Ripley is the CIA cop [the “advisor”] who, working for the Man in search of Promethean power [rival mastery] under a Faustian bargain, becomes the temporary Nazi to wade into the prison-like colony’s risen Hell and punch the Communist-framed-as-Nazi: the Archaic Bug Mom in fetish gear operating as the Satanic rebel, but punished as the zombie, demon, patchwork-animal cyborg when she invariably snaps under Western occupation/carceral violence. Once Medusa is vanquished and her feral legacy in chains, our Hippolyta seemingly returns “back to normal,” exiting Hell and coming back from the dead at the end of the Hero’s Journey. Except, the ontological horror—of the hero’s conditioned desire to attack such a monster—is it turns the fearful party into a genocidal murderer of the helpless [and their children] passed off as tyrannical, disgusting vermin reflecting state trauma perpetrated against the abuser towards the abused, in a ceaseless cycle of abjection, of extermination. Dark reflections of their own abuse cause TERFs to triangulate against the state’s intended underclass, the refuse of Capitalism’s bowels, its relegated, infantilized pieces of shit: the “killer queen” of the Goths and her den of abominable thieves. Hysteria isn’t quelled, then but maintained by abusing Athena’s Aegis to pass state violence along viral reflections of a perceived exotic bride to tame, an alien queen “of nature” to dominate, penetrating her fearsome womb until the end of time while Capitalism sexualizes everything.

[artist: Lera PI]

To this, Cameron’s Ripley was always a TERF Amazon, a phallic woman playing Brutus putting “Caesar” [corruption] down by abjecting white fears of medieval human childbirth [and the hysteria and humiliation of state-compelled birth trauma—of placental blood, amniotic fluid, slime and involuntary shit] onto alien bodies, biology and compelled reproduction metaphors forced away from Western powers and onto the Archaic Mother as a settler-colonial scapegoat; I’m merely exposing Ripley as one now through my instruction speaking to my trauma at the hand of cis-het/cis-queer TERFs who lionize Ripley and demonize me in the same breath. The irony is canon puts the hero-turned-heel to heel, and in the case of tokenized straw dogs like Ripley or Victoria, puts them down when they become man-eaters/”rabid.” On the flipside of this “euthanasia effect,” male “dogs” that “go mad” are normally prized for their valor and ferocity as useful to capital. They’re seen as “used to it” but also expected to “last longer” before they tire/fall apart like a spent animal corpse. Regardless, the praxial inertia remains, demanding opposition to state menticide through our own de facto education challenging its usual climaxes erupting out of exploited forms; e.g., traumatic penetration depicted as insectoid/queer to abject anything performing it, robbing them [and the endemic counterterror of their murderous, slimy “womb spaces,” but also biomechanical, stabby-stabby girl cocks, below] of valid revolutionary potential in the eyes of would-be converts; i.e., when the chickens come home to roost during mirror syndrome [re: “Always a Victim“].)

Enough about Ripley and Amazons. Now we’re going to look at those who women like Ripley emulate—men within Man Box culture through the sports world—before returning to knife dicks (for both genders) during the finale on page 547. In the meantime, remember that war and proving one’s manhood (or female place) through rape is generally to the detriment of male and female workers, queer people and other minorities (orgasmically raping and dismembering these faithful servants to serve a centrist kayfabe narrative, above: Mother Nature’s animal, but also posthuman, black/androgynous[10] revenge-by-wasp-ovipositor must be stopped, whatever the cost): policing Hell’s infernal territory is an always-needed job in canon, one performed by the hero—as Joseph Campbell put it—of a thousand faces; i.e., not just Ripley aping Hippolyta but millions of women just like her based on similar manly legends and recuperated stories of female rebellion, genderqueer potential and echoes of Beowulf inside the monomyth.

Except policing Hell is not just unattainable; it’s Faustian and Promethean in neoliberal power fantasies and ludic contracts—an ’80s “training montage” of assorted martial contests and feats of strength that lead to individual disempowerment and systemic downfall (the collapse of the male bloodline and Patrilineal descent). Gothic canon, but especially Pax Americana, abuses kayfabe theatre to synonymize strength with monomythic weapons, leaping from pugilism and swords to guns and bombs as rapacious, but also righteous. Simply put, it’s sold to us in small; i.e., the same quests for power that Capitalism exploits, weaponizing worker traumas through violent, monomythic refrains journeying into Hell that disseminate throughout popular media, but especially cinema and videogames in the neoliberal age lending us the illusion of power as false hope that utterly evaporates during state decay. Just as retro-future, throwback heroes like Mega Man or Samus Aran magically appear when darkness threatens the land (waves of terror), they suddenly disappear again when these anxieties are quelled; i.e., when pastoral bliss resumes onscreen, leaving a giant Walpolean helmet behind with no one inside. Like Walpole, it’s a sham, but one abused by capitalists (and complacent, thus complicit benefactors) to pacify workers nonetheless. What could be more Gothic than that?

(source)

My thesis has already established that conscious rebellion between the player and the game, but also workers and the world, can negotiate the unequal arrangement of power and distribution of information/consent as something to transform that, nevertheless, is shared between players and games during ludo-Gothic BDSM formulating new contracts of mastery and submission (from the glossary): “In other words, the ludic contract is less a formal, rigid contract and more a negotiated compromise occurring between the two; i.e., where players have some sense of agency in deciding how they want to play the game even while adhering to its rules and, in effect, being mastered by it.” Said transformation must be conscious and willing in order to demonstrably challenge Capitalist Realism’s centrist illusions of power that rape nature ipso facto; it must be inventive and game as a rebellious mindset cultivated by players interrogating Cartesian abuse while taking power away from the state—i.e., in game-like, emergent ways borrowed from centrist kayfabe (again, to interrogate power, you must go where it is).

Under capital, there are only masters and slaves, the hurly-burly likes of He-man (the babyface) and Masters of the Universe (the heels) being emperors with no clothes, no power as they’re sacrificed for the Greater Good (the heroic cult of death—of death before dishonor—part of an essential “tough guy” routine well at home in kayfabe, but also those who consume kayfabe presenting themselves online as “macho” to varying degrees of anonymity and public brand images); under Gothic Communism, there are no masters or slaves, only workers reunited with nature through monstrous critical lenses revived in various media types that help us process and relieve stress: in relation to psychosexual forces giving us palliative-Numinous, but also post-coital focus while grappling with complicated ideals normally alienated from us by capital. Hidden among them is the trauma of the state, but also the oppressed—our spectres of Marx yearning to be free through the same dreadful cryptomimesis.

To this, holistic, intersectional approaches like Gothic Communism combine various theories and social-sexual habits for new synthesis, or—as my teachers described my work—”new vistas of reflection.” These emerge through diversity and combination, not as so-called “weaknesses” but a flexible and mixed, playful ability to reimagine the Wisdom of the Ancients during ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., with fresh interpretations of old language, thus overcoming the complex and brutal enslavement of nature and the human mind through singular, Cartesian interpretations thereof: set paths vs paths made by us veering away from traditions that, while old, aren’t nearly as established as you might think. Keeping the prominence of these dialogs in mind (the Hermeneutic Gothic-Communist Quadfecta: Marxism and Gothic, queer and game studies), let’s reconsider the way that the rape of nature is educated through hypermasculine, sports-like stories as a kind of “opiate for the masses,” then explore the way that men, as beings to imitate through Man Box culture, are affected by Cartesian thought in ways that women historically aren’t (certainly not to the same degree, anyways).

For one, the Promethean outcome is foregone in ways that absolutely disempower men while punishing them and nature. Like Jonathan Swift’s “Little-Endians” and “Big-Endians” from Gulliver’s Travels or Dr. Seuss’ Butter Battle Book (1984), these foolish enterprises march like lemmings towards the same desolate outcome: yet another pile of used-up war dogs, their chattelized corpses spent like fuel in the engines of Capitalism’s profitable war/rape machine. Inside it, though, the petal-raining glory of fleeting conquest becomes replaced with a funeral march—one of glass jaws (Rummy’s Corner, 2023), chronic traumatic encephalopathy (Mixed Martial Academic, 2022); morbid obesity (which bodybuilders, professional wrestlers and other habitual steroid users constitute), non-steroid drug use and nepotistic exploitation dressed up in deceptive, hauntological theatre practices that bleed into real life (Behind the Bastard’s “Vince McMahon,” 2022) and the gladiatorial fool’s dogged chase of “immortality.”

These male chasers of glory can be literal military members, as well as athletes who personify war in drugged forms. The latter aren’t class traitors (at least not in the active sense)—more like Roman fools falling on their swords over and over. The guts-and-glory drama—of online, Joe-Vincent-style “neoliberal colosseum pastiche” (e.g., “Julio Cesar Chavez – 89-0 – Greatest Mexican Boxer Ever,” 2023)—tends to outshine the dialectical-material reality faced by often-poor men of color, white men (who can be poor though Tommy Morrison was not; he was related to John Wayne and had that man’s connections) and brown people from the streets of former US colonies, the US as an ongoing settler colony and current neo-colonies fighting for scraps every single day of their lives (a literal “victory or death” material reality). The fact remains, the product is sold in ways that are incredibly drug-like; i.e., a bread-and-circus approach having bonded to current mechanisms of capital from older, antiquated forms; e.g., from the Roman Empire to the United States of America.

Drug abuse is a common facet of Capitalism brutalizing nature through workers; rape, then, extends to drug abuse in relation to one’s body image in pursuit of unnatural strength as sold to workers very much like a drug. While actual drug use is a widespread problem as a response to trauma, both plague the sports world as a habitual site of rape and unequal power exchanges through theatrical forms that speak to trauma as Cartesian; i.e., “if only we (usually men, but also TERFs and various token groups) could be strong enough to face our demons and elevate ourselves by conquering our natural limits, thus the world!” The pushing of steroids through these kinds of stories serves to control people through addiction for profit, making consent just that much more of a myth.

This happens on and offstage and not just to men in the sports world. For example, studio executives would push drugs onto Judy Garland (exhibit 30b1), hounding her day and night to drink coffee, take uppers, and smoke cigarettes but not eat food. This sent her down a road known to many child stars. She was dead at 47. In the world of combat sports theatre, though, many athletes were and are abused by similar parental figures and arrangements forcing them to try and live up to hypermasculine gender standards: the impossibly manly men that, through the abuse of science, only have higher and higher hills to climb but never actually surmount (the “fodder” role is the point). Like Dr. Jekyll’s potion, suddenly men are turning into ‘roided-out Hulksters, trying to an imitate a literal giant who, in wrestling canon, had a disease that would ultimately kill him: acromegaly (an increasing of organ sizes, which eventually leads to heart failure, killing André the Giant when he was 46).

However different these men seem to Garland, they suffer from similar problems, their comorbidities shoving them into early graves to enrich the vampiric old men who own them, their bodies, their jobs, their livelihoods, their business contracts, etc. In turn, this becomes something to instruct through Gothic poetics as historically wrapped up in kayfabe narratives; i.e., the Amazon myth, but also Achilles as “superior” to nature—to any phallic woman with a sword (or sword-like implement). For them, such extensions of actual possibility go beyond Capitalism’s ordering of things, thus become aberrations to demonize and dismiss, but also fetishize and rope back into the usual schemes of patriarchal domination; e.g., Mizu from Blue Eye Samurai fighting to be recognized while appearing alien to the culture of 1600s feudal Japan (and, per the Amazon device, upsetting the archaic division of labor—sex and force—in medievalized spaces. Said spaces’ demand for these speaks to our confusion and intensity of feeling mid-disempowerment, always ensuring that such heroes find themselves employed from a diegetic and meta standpoint): “I’m vulnerable and will defend myself in ways normally denied to women in Gothic Romances/the liminal hauntology of war (the spectral warzone).”

In the case of Garland and the dead wrestlers of American kayfabe, the illusion to which these workers were part of is what ultimately killed them, in part because its continuation (and education of future workers to rape themselves and those around them) was seen as more valuable than the lives of the people propping it up (Emp Lemon’s “The Wizard of Oz and the Dark Side of Hollywood,” 2021)—by the directors, but also by critics like Roger Ebert, who cherish American cinema to a fault: “Maybe it helped that none of them knew they were making a great movie,” he wonders, prefacing this with,

Judy Garland had, I gather, an unhappy childhood (there are those stories about MGM quacks shooting her full of speed in the morning and tranquilizers at day’s end), but she was a luminous performer, already almost 17 when she played young Dorothy. She was important to the movie because she projected vulnerability and a certain sadness in every tone of her voice (source: Roger Ebert’s “The Wizard of Oz,” 1996).

Ebert cares more about what Garland brings to the performance than the actress behind the scene being raped (we’ll get back to him; re: “Summoning the Whore“); i.e., the cliché of suffering not merely for one’s art, but the art that others long to give them “transcendental” lessons that apologize for rape. This isn’t communal; it’s predatory and does little but essentialize the status quo through rape apologetics in the face of trauma bleeding out of canon and into our own lives echoing those who should seemingly be far better off. Yet rape haunts their glamorous (and at times ridiculous) portraits:

(exhibit 30b1: Drug use generally effects men and women differently according to a growing divide in heteronormative dimorphism, hauntology and poetics furthering Cartesian dualism; but its effects on both are infamously torturous and fatal. Judy Garland didn’t live to see fifty and James Brian Hellwig—aka “The Ultimate Warrior” [a hideous commodifying of Indigenous culture by white America]—was tremendously unhealthy from steroid use and cocaine binges afforded to him by those banking on his absurd, hypermasculine performances. Dying at 54 from sudden heart failure [a common side effect of steroid use], Hellwig was tremendously out-of-shape despite looking “in shape” per the Cartesian statuesque model; like Frankenstein’s Creature, minus the pathos—a dead man walking whose appearance of power was utterly hollow.)

In their own ways, then, hulking wrestlers like the Ultimate Warrior and dainty actresses like Judy Garland have quite a bit of common ground: dying for their art as literally injected into them (their skin penetrated by invasive needles). Beefed-up, they push themselves to exhaustion, then keep going because they were whipped into doing so until it became habit (and when raw habit wasn’t enough, addiction certainly did the trick). They became chattelized, as disposable as insects, their power false. Under more recent years, this horrendous, Cartesian exploitation has only increased and rewritten its own story under neoliberalism—i.e., to better chew workers up and spit them out, at greater quantities and faster speeds. More and more, consent vanishes, worker rights becoming an unattainable dream as the studio rapes bodies and minds to apologize for rape as something whose education (and Capitalist Realism) should never be threatened by the creative successes of proletarian praxis’ synthesis and catharsis. A failure to alleviate the trauma (and spell-binding glamor) of rape during ludo-Gothic BDSM is entirely what capitalists want. Centrism delivers such instruction, and delves into physical and mental cultivation well beyond the girlish innocence of Garland’s monomythic fairytale’s journey into Hell (and facing of the witch).

While there is violence and struggle in trying to synthesize a means of expressing and subverting trauma under capital through such stories as reclaimed by us camping the canon, centrism is fundamentally violent and physical in terms of the rape-like abuse it espouses. Its theatre globalizes martial arts and combat sports, whose good cops, bad cops and robbers materialize differently depending on the genre; e.g., white knights and black knights. Where such beings exist, and where critical thought is absent, there will be unironic rape as a criminogenic means of instruction dominating nature.

To understand how men suffer under Cartesian dualism, let’s briefly consider rape inside kayfabe. The sports world has many clichés that defend rape as normalized, and defended, by fans of the genre: “David vs Goliath” and similar underdog/deus ex machina narratives (e.g., the postcolonial fantasy of the iron-skinned Chinese Boxer beating the British officer, post hoc) that go hand-in-hand with the “tough hombre” language of sanctioned violence (usually against hordes of ’70s-style ninjas conveniently attacking the weak/strong hero one at a time in obviously choreographed body language). Their canonical quoting and blind war pastiche feed endlessly into a perpetual “Who is the greatest?” debate that can be summed up as mere “Bakhtinian” dick-measuring—i.e., dynastic power exchange and hereditary rites, often through symbols of actual dicks (and the warlike bodies attached to them, below): freaks of nature like Hellwig made mad by Cartesian science but presented as “of the past” and pitted against one another to make the elite money by demonizing nature in favor of a patriarchal hegemon.

(artist: Ichan-desu)

In other words, it is not conducive towards abuse prevention (thus successful proletarian praxis) to argue if the judges robbed Marvin Haggler during his fight with Sugar Ray Leonard. This is doubly so for professional wrestling narratives, whose racist tropes and fascist leanings[11] historically-materially leads to the deaths not just of single performers, but entire families driven by greed (re: “Vince McMahon“): Jack Barton Adkisson Sr., better known by his stage name, Fritz Von Erich, became a wrestling baron who—following his retirement in 1982—drove five of his six sons into early graves (four of which died in their twenties, and three of which committed suicide) by forcing them to play an infamous heel-type from professional wrestling’s Cold War equation: the Nazi. It’s a brutal business and always has been (ibid., timestamp: 1:02:21); according to Robert Evans from Behind the Bastards, it’s only gotten worse because McMahon a) doesn’t look like a Nazi and b) has proven to affect politics through his close friendship with Donald Trump (the latter having profited himself off the basic formula in the 1980s, bringing his own brand of fascist theatre into the White House). Love towards these kings of the sports world (often as patrons of gladiators) leads to an ubiquity of rape tied to the profit motive, but also the dogma and fear of things changing in ways that “extend the theatre”; i.e., in ways customers romance in relation to themselves as educated by the imaginary past as apologetic towards rape in sports-like narratives.

Full confidence, I say this even though I enjoy Rummy’s Corner, Second Base’s leftist politics/graph porn (“Fighting in the Age of Loneliness: Supercut edition, 2021) and a slew of martial artists/movie stars/athletes/stunt people, ranging from: Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Jet Li, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Scott Atkins, Cynthia Rothrock, Andy Hug, Mike Tyson (and his various videogame offshoots like Mr. Dream and M. Bison/Balrog—Street Fighter‘s neoliberal, combat sport “nation pastiche” something we’ll touch upon in Volumes Two and Three), Michael Yeoh, Michael Jai White, etc. I enjoy these artists, while still being consciously mindful of their professions, but also their politics and how said politics code their own art and day jobs as violently standardized; i.e., leading to an encouragement of rape towards various groups under the status quo. As beings of nature, women are historically fetishized and raped as alien to men, but also devoured by them as paradoxically delicious (“forbidden fruit”). Concerning men within this arrangement, queer men and men of color are demonized as incorrect but prided for their prescribed differences to white men in relation to nature: the draw of the dark horse or the fag when outside of the closet being part of nature-as-abject. Per the doomed sons of Von Erich, whitey also pays the price.

Per Sarkeesian’s adage, my enjoyment of sports (and camping “rape” in my own psychosexual stories; e.g., Amazonomachia) includes me enjoying the work of someone like Gina Carano in Haywire while abjuring her awful, awful politics and those she works for, the Daily Wire (José, 2022); or conversely recognizing Manny Pacquiao’s extreme generosity for the people of his homeland[12], despite being part of the same destructive business that advocates for cruelty “merely” as part of a brand[13] (this advocation often made by white men, however). Any way you slice it, rape is always somewhere close by. Be that the rape of minority culture, women or white cis-het men, we can subvert it in our own social-sexual habits; in doing so, we must be unafraid to examine how such abuse survives (and perpetuates) in canonical forms of instruction that can be recoded through liminal expression on and offstage. For example, people learn from the movies, and generally endorse the binarized, gendered violence found there with their wallets: the human condition expressed liminally through theatrical, psychosexual combat.

(exhibit 30b2: To quote the shaolin monk from Enter the Dragon, 1973, “An enemy has only images, behind which he hides his true motives; destroy the image and you break the enemy.” In Gothic stories, the same is true for the villain looking to rape his victim; we want to critique neoliberals who appropriate Gothic narratives to hide their own crimes behind, but also the Cartesian structure that enables the genocidal rape of nature and workers to begin with.

Top: In Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story, 1993, Bruce Lee must fight his greatest foe: his own inner demons. Except the film presents these as a transgenerational curse that follows Bruce wherever he goes—across space and time, even onto his film sets! Luckily for him, his nightmares eventually become lucid, with Bruce finally taking control and “saving” his next-in-line from the family curse. While the filmmakers’ prophecy sadly erred in real-life—Brandon Lee was killed less than a year later during a tragic shooting accident on-set—the concept still enabled Bruce, in-film, to defeat a largely illusory demon with pretensions of invulnerability informed by the victim’s own insecurities as fed to him his entire life: by the world and other workers around him; i.e., his father’s theatre troupe.

Bottom: Gina Carano is misled and ambushed by a trusted friend, who agrees to kill her for the main villain of the movie. Said betrayer’s greatest defense is his ability to lie and backstab, as unfortunately for him, Gina can fight better than he does. Not only does she absolutely trounce him; she illustrates the value in not swooning as Gothic heroines history-materially are prone to do. Their fight scene is quite erotic, intimating one of the usual places “vanilla” people learn about sex-coercive BDSM from: action movies—second only to murder mysteries, thrillers and Gothic horror, of course.)

(exhibit 30c: Adam Frost and Zhenia Vasiliev’s “How to Tell You’re Reading a Gothic Novel – in Pictures” [2014]. Neo-Gothic heroines were historically very passive, requiring them to be rescued by a male protector. Such a contrivance generally leads many women in fiction [and in real life] to suffer at the hands of their attackers dressed up as “protectors.” Canon, then, treats rape or threats thereof as essentialized within canonical, blind pastiche: “There’s gotta be a damsel-in-distress, because the status quo demands it in relation to Capitalism’s historical-material mistreatment of female workers!” Further explorations of swooning are crystalized in vampiric hypnosis as demonized code for the same basic event [exhibit 87c].)

From a capitalist standpoint, rape is a business tied to Man Box culture; challenging said business, and by extension the bigoted culture associated with it, is tantamount to rebellion of nature against the civilized world—i.e., a threat to the profit motive. Simply put, you have to be awake to rebel and you can’t do that if you’re constantly bending the knee, quoting canon and reducing your own “girl talk,” campy rejoinders and monstrous creative output to codependent, blind forms; canonical war pastiche is little more than sanctioned, mainstream violence, pointedly designed to put your minds to sleep and open your wallets: war tithes for the bread-and-circus “church” of war personified and its hypermasculine “soldiers” (whose rape of each other [and nature] parallels the state’s monopoly on violence, terror and morphological expression the world over).

These are not gods onstage, and they do not prevent rape; even if they “clean house,” they often die young and in sudden, embarrassing fashion—e.g., Bruce Lee, from a cerebral edema; Andy Hug, of acute leukemia; and Ramon “the Diamond” Dekkers, of sudden, acute heart failure. Enjoy their violent displays if you must (which I certainly do) but do not endorse the brutal structure of Cartesian dualism and its ruthless, greedy engineers’ education, thus canonical synthesis (rape apathy). It’s bourgeois kryptonite-for-the-brain and its raw consumption isn’t critical engagement. In fact, it’s precisely the opposite, designed to pacify consumers outright while worshipping rape-like spectacles, violence and lies encouraging future violence towards nature and things “of it”; i.e., in American iterations of the Colosseum praising the financial successes of the elite as a kind of Icarian “trickle-down” mechanism: basking in the glow of stolen, blood-drenched gold. Rape is a part of that, reflecting in the gilded shimmer as stolen from the natural world: money running through nature like a sword.

And if this all seems like “an outsider’s perspective,” I can wholeheartedly assure you it’s not. But I had to learn to see the difference between canon and camp insofar as nature was concerned, “making it gay” by embracing my truth as given to me by my surroundings[14]. Yes, I’m a girly bitch and hate team-based sports, but I’m also an American, thus no stranger to hearing about sports, war or rape (to borrow from common parlance, “raping” is what the winning team does to the losing team). For one, the United States has been at war for most of its existence (according to economist and mathematician, Arthur Charpentier, who calculated the number in 2017 to be for 222 out of 239 years). While professional sports have existed well before global US hegemony commenced in the 1890s, they utterly exploded in popularity afterwards. In American media, then, rape and war are commonplace—on the streets, in our stories, in our lives interacting back and forth through the social-sexual habits we cultivate as informed by Cartesian models. As for me, I am no stranger to violence or sports in my past life while living “in the closet” (exhibit 30d). Also, my father’s father fought in the Dutch resistance and I loved hearing his war stories as a child (especially the harrowing ones about Nazi war atrocities and their survivors’ testimonies: my bloodline’s raw courage). Here is Gramps, being interviewed about the war by Linda Meloche in 2005.

Simply put, I was born and bred on Pax Americana, exposed to its war-nation pastiche loop at a tender age. Yet in high school, I was also mocked for being “like a girl,” for drawing sexy anime pictures in class and for liking Alien and its Gothically “femme” stance on Cartesian war more than Cameron’s sequel (“Outlier Love: Enjoying Prometheus/Covenant in the Shadow of Aliens,” 2021). Sticks and stones; I saw my same classmates sent off to war and killed, or returning broken and shot up but worshipping their plights. In war, no one “wins” but the elite, and only until their palaces crumble around them (during state shift). Until then, workers are raped inside the Capitalocene—their minds and bodies, but also their homes; i.e., the land around them.

(exhibit 30d: Photos of me in TKD class/at tournaments in 2012.)

I can understand my (mostly male) classmates’ jingoism somewhat; I fought in TKD tournaments and attended classes sold to men, women and children (taught by a local SWAT sniper I very much didn’t like). Cheap platitudes of “moral character” and value were pitched to us with the express intent of wealthy Michigan parents paying out for they and their kids to progressively train for battles they would never fight (and when my twin—afro lad next to me, ponytail; exhibit 30d, above—broke his arm, our “master” ghosted him and left my brother to foot the bill and go under the knife through the nightmare that is the American healthcare system). Canon-wise, it’s just state-sanctioned violence under a bourgeois Superstructure that acclimates workers to a pacified mindset, one entirely accepting of manufactured scarcity, glorified war and rape, naturalized criminogenesis, and ubiquitous, displaced genocide.

To that, I’m not just a pretty trans face, sweeties. I came out from the same masculine closet as many Americans. Many more are still on the inside, guarding their fortress from nature-as-alien like a hawk. Sports is sacred, as is the unironic peril inside informing our own basic social-sexual habits; i.e., our gossip, monsters and camp. Under Capitalism, rape and war are constant, but also roiling back and forth during oppositional praxis as a battle for our minds, consent, and labor in service to or in resistance of the rape of nature on and offstage. Under complex conditions of systemic, transgenerational and menticidal abuse, men (and other weird-nerd practitioners of Man Box culture) transform into xenophobic, nationalist, ethnically “pure” monsters. They become mistrustful of nature, but also intellectualism and foreigners defending it. As such, American bloodthirst is boundless and bipartisan, directed by American consumers at those the state exploits first: the Global South (re: Ward Churchill’s “On the Justice of Roosting Chickens,” 2005).

As such, defenders of capital codify markers of fascism that appear more moderately under neoliberal Capitalism, but especially Gothic canon as its own reactive abuse. Recipients of this abuse (women, racial minorities, GNC people, etc, as “of nature”) frequently lash out, submit, or break down in response; i.e., resort to playing the game by patriarchal rules even when those same rules don’t apply to non-men/tokenized groups (“boundaries for me, not for thee”). And if potential war brides seem scarce or mum to white cis-het men as the most privileged benefactors of genocide, it’s because women more generally fear men as historical-material sources of ghastly murder and hyperbolic rape. No joke, the false protector is literally enshrined within Gothic canon and always will be: our aforementioned knife penis[15] (re: the “stabby cock dagger“) as having good versions and bad versions of either gender under settler-colonialism’s heteronormative dichotomy. In medieval language, this plays out through white and black knights; in more recent criminal hauntologies, it plays out through damsels, detectives and demons. This includes Amazons, but also serial killers as wild, “rabid” predators terrorizing polite society (and its white women) with traumatic penetration; i.e., as a fetishized form of alien, psychosexual violence that nevertheless commodifies nature-as-abject through the ghost of the counterfeit’s unironically mutilative, patriarchal rape fantasies (re: Radcliffe’s demon lover).

The finale, next, shall consider the knife dick, then, as the prime implement of Cartesian abuse (traumatic penetration) before investigating how to subvert it: by humanizing the harvest.

Onto “A Problem of Knife Dicks (and Conclusion)“!

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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). Any money Persephone earns through commissions or donations goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. She takes payment on PayPal, Patreon, and CashApp, etc; all links are available on her Linktr.ee. Every bit helps!

Footnotes

[1] Zombies are shot, demons banished, and totems hunted, trapped, and killed/tamed inside the state of exception; i.e., skinned in ways whose trauma is worn on the outside by people who may or may not be acting in good faith (more on this in Volume Two; re: “Bad Dreams“).

[2] “Fetishizing” as in, “to reduce to alien, psychosexual objects of darkness, power and force.”

[3] Said chapter considers years of abuse by Kochinski, which I shall list when the time comes. However, said evidence more recently has been confirmed through Kochinski accidently revealing to the world his private lolicon (and horse) porn collection (Bad Empanada Live’s “Vaush is a P*dophile (CONFIRMED),” 2024).

[4] Again, such categories of alienation generally overlap under Cartesian domination, while also making room for curious hybrids and subclasses. This includes the occult demon, but also composite bodies (cyborgs) and chimera animals produced with the undead, demonic and totemic modules (which Volume Two will unpack at length).

[5] Slavery, then, goes both ways—of the underclass, but also the middle class enslaved to, and disguised as “service” towards, God/the state; i.e., an endless paranoid duty chasing ghosts, dragons and other state inventions for the Greater Good until death and/or your assigned foil claims you; e.g., Inspector Javert chasing Jan Valjean in Les Miserables (1862) but also in more alien, thus Gothic forms of police/criminal behavior—Van Helsing vs Dracula, Beowulf vs Grendel, or Ripley vs the xenomorph (exhibit 30a; re: “Knife Dicks“), etc.

[6] And bullets/variants of either kind tied to state force, but especially carceral or lethal force; i.e., capital punishment for challenging the state’s patriarchal monopoly on violence, terror and hellish morphological expression. Again, zombies, demons and totems are destroyed to serve a Cartesian profit motive during the ghost of the counterfeit’s process of abjection.

[7] We’ll examine the Gothic role of various (often female) detectives in science fiction more in Volume Two, including the sections “Exploring the Derelict Past” and “Call of the Wild.”

[8] Which is generally something to deny (Noah Samsen’s “Genocide Denial Streamers,” 2024) or debate when, as the Youtuber Shaun points out, there is nothing to debate whatsoever—a genocide is occurring and it is wrong (“Palestine,” 2024).

[9] Persephone van der Waard’s “Remember the Fallen: An Ode to Nex Benedict” (2024).

[10] I.e., Freud and Kristeva’s handling of the Archaic Mother myth, but also the myth of the black male rapist/sexually aggressive black woman as “manly” being projected onto the same dark kayfabe figure as the Nazi or Communist. To this, canon presents rape as something that “dark” (non-white) creatures do. Or as my thesis writes (re: “Pieces of the Camp Map“),

Assimilation goes both ways, of course, and for every act of open rebellion there were plenty who refused to rebel due to the expected colonial countermeasures (re: “power aggregates,” from Atun-Shei Film’s “Fighting for Freedom“) […] This would go on to then be romanced and displaced by white-penned Neo-Gothic fictions of various kinds: white men’s open, settler-colonial bigotry and white-saviorism from the likes of Shakespeare, Conrad, Tolkien, Ridley Scott, James Cameron, Frazetta (exhibit 0a2c) and Wes Craven haunting the gutted castles of a seemingly abandoned colonialism with dark, vengeful spirits exorcized by white heroes; but also the so-called “jungle fever” entertained by white women like Radcliffe, Dacre, Charlotte Brontë and Angela Carter’s fixation on a white protagonist’s idea of rape fantasy inside the castled ghost of the counterfeit, and in the American porn industry at large; i.e., as a forbidden fruit to outlaw, commodify and sell back to middle-class people amid a widespread, systemic punishment of the non-white people associated with the image:

In the U.S. and other capitalist countries, rape laws were originally framed for the protection of men of the upper classes, whose women ran the risk of being assaulted. What happens to working-class women has always been of little concern to the courts. As a result, appalling few rapists have ever been prosecuted—appalling few, that is, if black men are exempted from consideration. While the rapists of working-class women have so rarely been brought to justice, the rape charge has been indiscriminately aimed at black men, the guilty and innocent alike (source: Angela Davis’ “Rape, Racism and the Capitalist Setting,” 1978).

Aside from strictly animal arguments, posthuman considerations would ask us to respect how alien spheres present the chattelized animal and robot as ally commodities; i.e., whose shared, biomechanical rebellion is foretold, demonized and sold back to American consumers within the Imperial Core: the xenomorph as part-insect, part-machine in ways that resemble a shared uprising—of slave animals, but also dissident robata (the Czech word for “slave” that “robot” originates from) defying Asimov’s Laws of Robotics by fighting back against their humanized masters’ “correct” hegemony. Nature is alien, thus roboticized in slave-like ways that, unlike an actual machine, aren’t strictly “unthinking” at all; they’re undead, made “like machines” and traumatized against their will. The trauma isn’t incorrect, according to Cartesian thought; its outcry is.

We’ve already considered the posthuman relative to Mega Man and Ghost in the Shell in Volume Zero (rogue robot masters and cyborg cops, exhibit 1a1a1c4), but will deliberately consider it more vis-à-vis the xenomorph’s composite, undead nature (and Mary Shelley’s posthuman critique using composite demonic bodies) in Volume Two.

[11] As Griffin Kaye writes in “Nazism in Wrestling—Wrestling’s Most Controversial and Troubling Booking Strategy” (2022):

Wrestling plays upon the source of controversy. Whether it is related to evil foreign heels, real-life deaths, and horrific social events outside the wrestling landscape – these are often seen as distasteful and offensive but one gimmick can encapsulate all 3: Nazism. Over the many decades, many bookers have utilized the use of this strategy to full effect, playing off understandable post-World War 2 fears to create a monster figure (source).

[12] “Asia Game Changer of the Year” (2022).

[13] Sam R. Quinn’s “Manny Pacquiao: Why Pacquiao’s Kindness Has Hurt His Legacy” (2012).

[14] E.g., camping Lovecraft’s patented racism and crippling xenophobia by consuming stories made by others; or in the case of videogames, played by others in a very meta sense: The Academic from Darkest Dungeon II (2021) lamenting, “I should have never bought that cursed clay, from which sprang this anathema!” to which Randy Potato deadpans, “I hate when I buy some clay and it just springs up an anathema—relatable!” (“Beacon GAMING w/ Random Party! Big Update is now LIVE!” 2024). Or as my grandfather or my mothers and uncles might say about Lovecraft’s ever-present “sanity damage” relayed then-and-now across media: “I hate it when that happens!”

[15] While traditional masculinity and the status quo are generally defended through active force by cis-het men, the brutal, direct violence of a knife, club or bullet can be emulated by fearful women in ways that make them triangulate, acting “like men” for men and the Patriarchy against state enemies: TERFs attacking workers fighting for their basic human rights and those of animals and the environment (which the state calls “terrorism”); i.e., “pulling a Brutus,” as TERFs—being token cops, good or bad—classically do, inspired by older Neo-Gothic examples; re: Sam Hirst’s “Zofloya and the Female Gothic” (2020).