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, the finale: A Problem of “Knife Dicks,” or Humanizing the Harvest; Hammering Swords into Ploughshares (feat. racist porn and fat bodies)

All hear my warning:
Never turn your back
On the Ripper! (source)

—Rob Halford; “The Ripper” on Judas Priest’s Sad Wings of Destiny (1976)

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

Having addressed Cartesian trauma as alienizing and fetishizing nature in dimorphized, heteronormative forms, the symposium finale considers the root of the problem—the knife dick—followed by its solution; i.e., by subverting the mechanisms of Cartesian abjection in racialized porn normally fetishizing nature as a fat-and-sassy bitch (demon, whore, etc) needing to be tamed, thus carved up while fucking her with the knife. Settler colonialism conflates sex and harm within a lack of consent burdened with genocidal overtones: the harvest. We need to humanize it with ludo-Gothic BDSM while acknowledging the sharpness of the blades we’re transforming.

To that, let’s quickly exhibit the knife dick/demon lover in these unironic rape/torture fantasies, then examine how the penis (and other body parts/phenotypes—fat bodies and dark skin), despite being normalized into alien fetishes during canonical porn, can—through informed, iconoclastic acts of praxial synthesis—prevent traumatic penetration’s symbolic proliferation, and with it, Cartesian violence against nature by its usual jailors; i.e., by using our own bodies in highly subversive forms of “strict” monstrous pornography and ludo-Gothic BDSM starting from these earlier points:

(exhibit 31: The bogeymen and bogeywomen for and [sometimes] against Patriarchal Capitalism/Cartesian dualism generally orbit around rape/sexual violence as synonymized with sexual activity at large; i.e., implements of torture that suggest [or explicitly perform] a biologically essentialized erotic function associated with psychosexual human bodies and their assorted compulsions, stigmas and fetishes. These historically-materially divide into a gender binary that GNC dialogs must challenge, subverting cis-het expectations of rape and violence within, and outside of, these fictions.

Top: Thoroughly broken, many men who cannot enjoy women—only “murder to dissect” them in cold, child-like curiosity [and boredom] in between hunts. As bourgeois agents—e.g., police, witches, detectives, et al—become “rabid,” men/man-like entities fuck their victims like Pavlovian chattel animals, coerced to give and receive violence, not love. This has the added effect of scaring women into “good girls” who hide indoors and don’t try to make money for themselves using what they got.

Bottom: The women who detect and investigate these braindead cretins often belong to problematic media, themselves; i.e., true crime [of which it, and the Radcliffean tradition it stems from, I took no prisoners towards during the thesis volume]. Fragile and superstitious—like Arthur’s knights cowering in utter terror before the awesome might of the killer rabbit [a pagan symbol of fertility]—nothing is more terrifying to a canonical warrior [overcompensating for his own broken brain and dick with literal knives and swords] than a moderate-to-well-educated woman-of-means who doesn’t need to rely on men to keep her safe, say nothing of trans folk and other minorities united together through worker solidarity! United against Capitalism, rebellious workers can collectively expose the cowardice of oft-male class traitors for the sad, mind-raped torturers of nature they embody alongside token ones.

To that, historical self-preservation makes for strange bedfellows. For example, TERFs are a liminal category pushed into a radical position of “home defense” by past brushes with trauma [re: canonical dick-measuring—their “cocks” are bigger than other women’s, but not men’s]. We’ll explore these “bad-faith” or unwitting [“sleeper agent”] detectives, witches and she-warriors in Volume Three, but for now just remember that phallic women embody/confront the myth that women cannot stab their victims or become class traitors through Cartesian abjection; they absolutely can. Medusa—a famous female being of nature—revives as the furious, indiscriminate rapist of civilized men and women alike: ancient hysteria as “phallic” cosmic destroyer of the nuclear home [a scapegoat].

Rape play and Radcliffe’s Black Veil, then, are essentially a giant gaslight that ludo-Gothic BDSM must camp while feeling its affects; i.e., knife [dick] play dealing with “wandering womb” variants of vaso vagal personified: an unruly whorish jouster to fear and punish to harvest nature as monstrous-feminine, per the usual monomyth pimpings of the Medusa. But such monopolies are impossible, making the whore’s chance at revenge all the more tantalizing with a strict aesthetic as much as a gentle one during ludo-Gothic BDSM:

[artist, left: Stephanie Drew; right: Jan Rockitnik]

In Zofloya, Victoria famously stabs Lilla to death. Written by a white, cis-het woman, the story’s confrontation occurs between two women, testifying to marginalized in-fighting during a moralized conflict: cis-het [often white] women fear rape, see the penis as rape, and use the “penis” to rape their prescribed enemies: trans people. And yet, given the universal adaptability of gender and “darkness” in Gothic stories, Dacre’s symbols yield countless interpretations.

For example, within queer dialogics, symbols of the battered woman can either be Lilla cowering in fear or Victora advancing on her with an open blade, stabbing and destroying “her” idea of weakness as conditioned into her by men: the diminutive feminine. The idea of stabbing that to death might seem symbolic in a purely abstract sense, but the historical-material reality is that abused women are frequently weaponized and mislead by Patriarchal forces against other women—i.e., to see softness as weak, or as an imposter that must be outted and slain [the “woman” with a penis]. It becomes paranoid, but also kill-or-be-killed. In fascist circles, “monstrous-feminine” accounts for anything man is not; in centrist circles, it’s anything that protests or commits abuse; in leftist circles, it’s one of survival against either of those things by using the same shared language: the knife and penis as ontologically confused. Except, while I like being a little princess dominated by Dark Amazon/Gothic aesthetics, I don’t actually want to be abused by my partner[s]. Even if my preference towards mommy doms were “strict” instead of “gentle,” being a strict dom or sadist never gives you to the right to harm your partner.)

Knife dicks (and similar weapons) are the so-called “virgin-killer” (one cannot have sex using a dagger for a penis, only rape) being secretly terrified by powerful women/monstrous-feminine types and—to borrow from Monty Python (again)—”desperately needing to be confused” (“Confuse-a-Cat,” 1969). Like, maybe fascists could learn something from the rabbit instead of blowing it up with the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch (a very bad habit)? In the interim, the Patriarchy’s natural/material toys and games “overcompensate” in violent, often knife-like bombast that compels the status quo through a gradient of veiled/exposed threats and explosive executions of social-sexual violence through Cartesian (thus rapacious) synthesis. The visible result isn’t just small knives, but big knives/multiple knives and a canonical treatment of them towards nature through fear and dogma when faced with settler-colonial trauma; i.e., “I was hurt in the past, but now I will hurt others to avoid that pain in the future”; e.g., Ellen Ripley.

The paradox of this entire arsenal is impotency—a social-sexual inability to actually bond with women/minorities as fellow workers, all of whom Capitalism frames as alien, animal, the enemy per Cartesian thought; i.e., the white rabbit as something to fear, not follow and certainly not someone to learn from. The physical effect on men (and token enforcers) is often literal impotence—a curious, often tragically sad inability “to get it up” unless dominating someone through threats, or executions of, authoritative force. A cultural desire to “be the man” radicalizes male/tokenized workers into more and more monstrous worker roles. Said roles condition men and other class traitors/state torturers to become easily-threatened by nature and those of it as abject, functioning as such through the holistic disempowerment of alienizing positions.

In turn, Cartesian proponents blanch at our social-sexual habits as cultivated by us, including calculated risk and informed consent, but also worker identity-through-struggle as something the state tries to commodify, thus project its trauma, abuse and complicit attitudes on. To that, our own identities and behaviors must become like Athena’s Aegis; i.e., a black mirror that paralyzes the state through revolutionary cryptonymy by showing them (and us) their true fragility in the face of ridiculously “dangerous” things. Like brave, brave Sir Robin, the state’s sexist enforcers promptly recoil and soil themselves the first moment the rabbit—normally a prey animal—bares its “sharp, pointy teeth” and draws blood. Remember, boys, it’s only a flesh wound!

(concept art from Dragon’s Crown, 2013)

Like a killer rabbit, “the enemy is both weak and strong.” And though language is naturally fluid, Capitalism—like a deck within a house of cards—mixes canonical metaphors to defend itself with (whereas Gothic Communism furtively swaps in iconoclastic doubles to undermine Capitalism’s hold on worker minds). In order to fortify their own tenuous, absurd positions under Capitalism, fascist ‘fraidy-cats install various superstitions informed by their own menticide and broad canonical praxis interacting back and forth over time; i.e., moral panic as increasingly vengeful against nature, blaming anyone except for those actually responsible for rape as an ongoing apology: the state, but also the state’s actors.

To this, canonical “decks” shuffle and exchange cards, doing anything they can to, as Meerloo’s Rape of the Mind describes it, turn words into “verbocratic” emotional triggers/conditioners instead of sources of independent thought

Propagandistic lies and catchphrases are an inexorable feature of totalitarianism. Repeated countless times from countless angles, the effect is to drill the desired thinking until accepted as truth. “Double talk” characterizes much of the narrative, with words like “freedom” [or witch] redefined to support the lies [e.g., of the witch as dangerous]. Words become emotional triggers and conditioners instead of sources of independent thought (source).

“Verbocracy” historically-materially crystalizes through various Cartesian-coded behaviors the state encourages through bourgeois propaganda in all its forms—the knife dick as something to brandish. This “saber-rattling” becomes something to challenge through our own praxial synthesis during liminal expression; e.g., porn and monsters as things to camp, thus raise awareness about rape through our bodies as things to gossip with in opposition to state education as endlessly repeated; i.e., Cartesian dualism as predicated on raping the natural world through “unthinking” (according to Descartes) extensions of said world (the paradox being that so-called “thinking beings” become knee-jerk killers who don’t think at all; they react).

I want to end this section of the roadmap—and by extension conclude Volume One—through a series of four exhibits that examine rape in pornographic, liminal expression; i.e., as a transgressive commentary on human bodies that can synthesize proletarian praxis, mid-opposition, counteracting the state’s Cartesian takes on porn to blunt their proverbial knife dicks. Just as liminality is expressed through conflict within thresholds and on the surface of things, pornography is generally controlled and fought over by those who wish to compel profit through binary sexuality versus those who want to liberate sex and gender from the state’s heteronormative constraints using Gothic expression. The emphasis of these exhibits is racialized; i.e., the gender binary as settler-colonial in ways that stress a racialized character from bodies of different skin colors (exhibits 32a and b), physical types (skinny vs fat, exhibit 32c) and monstrous forms of expression (vampires, exhibit 32d) that speak to Cartesian trauma as something to live with and prevent in the future.

Sex-coercive BDSM actually includes a gradient of impotence echoed in canonical porn pastiche; i.e., not just “knife dicks,” but someone “under” the state worker—a slave or token class traitor (which is basically a slave)—aping the blade: “prison sex” mentality. Under this mindset, an unwilling third can be conditioned to fuck another worker the way the state, thus the privileged worker, wants them to: according to the torturer’s canonical, alien-fetishistic worldview (and fatal promised glory, post-slaughter[1]) handed to them like a knife by the state, then synonymized with their biology as “all they are.” Insect politics.

(artist: Pancake Pornography)

One “card” in the state’s aforementioned “deck,” then, is racialized fetishization through traumatic penetration; i.e., the BBC as an internalized, “fattened” metaphor for phallic implements of state terror by black men against women (and other recipients) but classically white women. Originally on the plantations and colonies of the antebellum American South, the white man’s toxic view of the black man’s “giant animal cock” historically has become slave canon, post hoc—mythologized and repurposed to be turned on white women as a fearful prophecy fulfilled through sex-coercive rituals, then gargoyle-ish abstractions and extensions of those rituals: female gargoyles attacking perceptions of rape inside but also outside white populations, becoming vigilantes during interracial rape fantasies where they embody givers and receivers of sexual abuse in terrifying forms (state terror as a weapon). The cock needn’t literally be black, even—simply “too big” to be considered “white” within settler-colonial models, thus able to cause pain relative to traumatic penetration as something to threaten in oft-Gothic forms: being too big(size queens notwithstanding).

(artist: Slugbox)

Ludo-Gothic BDSM plays with rape, hence its clichés as urban legends (re: the chronotope, including less medieval-looking versions of the embodiment and/or localization of the Western home).Echoes of nightly slave abuse, then, have survived into the present—first lauded by powerful men like Woodrow Wilson towards D. W. Griffith’s aforementioned “black, rebellious slaves violate white women” rape fantasy, The Birth of a Nation, followed by Giger’s xenomorph as a postcolonial “lawn jockey” later crystalized by 1980s’ porn hauntologies (below). Something for moderates to preserve and for reactionaries to return to, said porn becomes an unironic product to consume and embody through canonical praxis; and it is precisely this kind of pornography we must de facto synthesize into healthier forms of sex-positive education (counterterror) during ludo-Gothic BDSM (re: “Concerning Big Black Dicks“):

(exhibit 32a: Artists: Victoria Paris and Sean Michaels. Since I’m writing about oppositional praxis as liminal expression [the execution of dialectical-material theory within thresholds] in porn pastiche, here’s a collage thereof: the black star athlete enjoying his forbidden prize, the white blonde in wifely silks. They kiss, then begin, him removing her panties and starting to fuck her. From every angle you can think of, the camera is curious and invasive, showing you things normally left to the fearful-fascinated imagination. Literally “sex with the lights on,”  the makers have placed these sights behind a canonical paywall; i.e., in medieval language, it’s a Catholic “sale of indulgence” or return to canonical norms. Rejected by Martin Luther and Protestantism during the Iconoclasm, this only led to the Protestant work ethic and Puritanism through American labor during the 20th century—work being holy and sold sex being unholy but profitable. In turn, this oscillating schism remained curiously in place under Reagan’s tenure, a high time of profitability during the latter-end of the “Golden Age of Porn.” VHS offered up a mass-produced, widely disseminated reprieve from one’s holy work through a taste of unholy decadence, laziness and unlawful carnal knowledge: blondie likes that big black dick, not only taking all of it like a champ but fucking back, power-bottom style. The potential for camp, thus ludo-Gothic BDSM, is there.)

The above exhibit might seem “harmlessly” cliché, but Gothic canon treats “black” as synonymous with “aggressively violent and racist” according to repressed sexual desires in the 20th and 21st centuries; i.e., black men sleeping with white women as a common source of contention among reactionary white men (and their token subordinates) declaring a state of emergency spearheaded by foreign knife dicks: a crisis of unwanted black penetration against white women. While canonical porn is full of whitewashed appropriations like these, it reaches back to older conflicts in American history we must dig up and confront. Generally uglier things are proceeded by cryptonyms of various kinds, including sex; but sex is generally a part of the problem being discussed in psychosexual bedlam.

For example, before the Wilmington Massacre of 1898, the Reconstruction-era town had black-owned businesses and politicians—until a white-supremacist mob retaliated with violence. This included a local racist editorial printing malicious slander against the black population, saying the latter were the rapists of white women (and implying that having “sheathed black daggers,” the modesty of white women was compromised forever):

Newspapers meanwhile spread claims that African Americans wanted political power so they could sleep with white women, and made up lies about a rape epidemic. When Alexander Manly, owner and editor of the Wilmington Daily Record, published an editorial questioning the rape allegations and suggesting that white women slept with black men of their own free will, it enraged the Democratic party and made him the target of a hate campaign (source: Toby Luckhurst’s “Wilmington 1898,” 2021).

Afterward, the town exploded into violence, resulting in the only successful domestic coup in American history. The massacre included a machine gun-armed white mob targeting and killing people of color and their allies. Sound familiar? Kyle Rittenhouse and the Proud Boys are merely copycats in a long tradition of upholding racist violence in the United States. This is not a glitch, but the system defending itself through bad-faith arguments projecting state rape onto state victims. Any voice of the oppressed must occur through the same basic dialog—in short, because that’s where power is concerned, thus amounts to where people are already looking and surviving.

The blindness of such gazes can be undone through iconoclastic narratives that subvert rape; i.e. ironic or critical rape fantasies that remove the harmful capabilities of the knife dick as a settler-colonial tool. These aren’t always playful in an obvious sense. For instance, the Wilmington Massacre inspired Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Morrow of Tradition (1901), an Austen-style novel-of-manners that devolves into a horrible riot partway through due to escalating racial tensions inspired by a local white supremacist newspaper. This paradigm shift was codified—teased decades later, post-Civil Rights movement, by canonical ’80s wish fulfillment; i.e., of canonical American pornography as a widespread extension of unchecked systemic American racism. The general sentiment stems from Lost Cause, Jim Crow and white supremacy and extends into various future groups like the Proud Boys. This happens through canonical behaviors and sentiments; i.e., coded behaviors taught by porn as incredibly body-centric, but also divisive regarding nature as alien under Cartesian rule.

This brings us to a corporal threshold, one the elite—try as they might—cannot fully monopolize in demon BDSM linked to Satanic morphological expression; i.e., the body and its knife dick (or vagina dentata) as a poetic offshoot of a greater inhuman[2] presence; e.g., Medusa’s snakes, Lilith’s demons; Sauron’s orcs, the alien queen’s insect brood or Dagon’s spawn; Cain’s son Grendel, Dracula’s thralls, etc, that reproduce in non-heteronormative ways (sodomy effectively meaning “non-PIV sex”) to endlessly produce armies of invincible barbarians, which as “forces of darkness/nature-run-amok” (e.g., Alex Jones’ “gay frogs”) must be conquered by state champions during returning “hard times[3]” that demand the knife dick’s resumed employment (which promises a bloody harvest to enrich the state-in-decay to a former glorious position).

First, we’ll examine the elite’s attempts at monopoly through Cartesian domination, then our counterterrorist responses dulling their blades in relation to what they cannot fully control as ours for the taking: our bodies reversing the process of abjection, hence psychosexual expression tied to various alien body types embodying nature and dark godly power that, in iconoclastic hands, can sever themselves from heteronormative sexuality (several of which we explored already in the manifesto; re: the BBC and BBW, in “Prey as Liberators“).

For us, this accounts for transition within thresholds amid perpetual trauma (in and around the body as part of nature) as a lived and inherited experience; but for those with relative privilege, said bodies are consumed—especially their swollen/cursed status (and tortured expression regarding state trauma) invoking those naughty of-nature sex fantasies that cis-het men—as beings of Civilization—aren’t supposed to have, watching

• their white women get fucked by a well-endowed black man’s BBC (exhibit 32b)
• a white man (their avatar) fucking a woman of color (exhibit 32b)
• a PAWG (“Phat [already colonized vice: “pretty hot and tempting”]-Ass White Girl,” exhibit 32b/41b)
• BBWs, which fetishize the female body in a return to pre-Cartesian appreciative forms; i.e., the Rubenesque, zaftig form revived in the modern age (exhibit 32c)

Such sanctioned voyeurism frames nature as grossly abject, its excessive trespasses tied to “interracial mixings” that aren’t allowed in “decent” society but curiously wait on standby in racialized pornographic forms; i.e., by powerful American companies with lateral neoliberal ties to a Christian executive. Under Reagan’s rule, porn flourished, as did the AIDS crisis and moral panic. Simply put, it was profitable. It might have clashed with his pure, family-friendly image, but it was far more lucrative to simply look the other way or scapegoat “the Gays” than it was to prevent harmful porn outright.

Canonical fetishes concern psychosexual violence through a Cartesian profit motive under which bodies become swollen fruits to harvest by knife-life genitals—albeit in a variety of psychosexual, alienizing ways per marginalized group: fat people vs white women vs people of color and their various intersections in undead, demonic and/or totemic forms. It is here where we must recognize the clichés and fetishes on their face; i.e., on our own bodies as fundamentally made of the same stuff in subjugated/complacent forms, but which offer up a proletarian function whose decision to fetishize ourselves in a subversive “exquisitely torturous” manner pointedly challenges the Cartesian profit motive (and knife dicks’ unironic rape scenarios brutalizing nature) in service to our basic human rights.

In keeping with duality and liminal expression, both types exist at the same time, and invoke similar forms of Gothic nostalgia presenting the body (and its genitals) as terrifying and powerful. Except, canon occurs in ways that are controlled by state forces serving Cartesian ends; i.e., exploited for their labor value along racialized lines (exhibit 32b) that must be reclaimed during ludo-Gothic BDSM: through bodies of all kinds employing a dark Satanic power that—while adjacent to sexual reproduction—isn’t the same thing as it or its knife-like enforcement.

(artist: Lera PI)

Nor is it a perfect copy of the state’s function of such devices. Instead of creating demons, per se, you have creative morphological expression as a double of state implements, resembling them but divorced through the paradox of terror[4] from the Cartesian means of alienating and fetishizing the monstrous-feminine as human-versus-animal: abject sexual reproduction, wherein the genitals become a knife to cause harm against nature. State predation fattens the human body but also consequently makes it into something that feels hideous, insect, and brood-like despite a relatively comely (or at least humanoid, above) outer guise. To that, any creativity that upends the status quo (also above) in this respect must humanize the usual targets of Cartesian violence treating people like vermin-in-disguise—a broad iconoclasm whose Satanic rebellion includes fat people (exhibit 32c) as “non-white” extensions of the natural world as normally penetrated and drained of their resources by Cartesian agents. If someone is fat, they are “dark,” thus incorrect for anything but the harvest, whose traumatic penetration and exterminatory slicing during harmful BDSM turns them into a variety of food types, but especially porn fetishizes (thus unironic psychosexual violence) for those both starved of sex and addicted to harmful, fetishized (thus alien) versions of it.

This reprobate punishment becomes something to face and acknowledge, mid-harvest inside Americanized media “stabbing the peach” on the Aegis as the Aegis according to anisotropic revenge arguments

(exhibit 32b: Artists: Heavenly Peaches and Advoree [the others are unknown or Google searches]. Pardon the expression, but interracial porn isn’t black-and-white. Rather, it assigns forbidden qualities to different fetishized bodies that historically-materially have different degrees of preferential mistreatment as “fruit for the harvest.” On paper, men are the universal clientele, with black men [and their BBCs] being framed as rapacious and white men as reprobate [which in Calvinism, a form of Protestantism, means “predestined to damnation”—i.e., “damned at birth,” but also “god-fearing”]. Women, meanwhile, are divided in settler-colonial terms: white women as “modest” provided they avoid being “like black women,” the latter being animalistic and full of gross, “demonic[5]” indulgences.

However, these various qualities can transfer from body to body—the fucker, the fucked, the sinner and the sinful associated with a gradient of skin color, organ size and body type. Generally, too, the booty and “doggystyle” are seen as sinful, secular or pagan ways of performing sex—non-missionary sex, in other words. Colonized variants of doggy generally present sexual activity and its attached body parts to rituals of compelled social-sexual domination, historically-materially tied to state violence. Pornographic expression can be reclaimed, of course, but those reclaiming it must partake in stigmatized rituals symbolically loaded with racist phobias and guilt; e.g., “It’s bad luck to do it doggy because God is watching.” Not only does Capitalism instill a sense of guilt within all workers; it grants the sinner a desire to rebel against a higher power by said power—i.e., the Paradox of Evil materialized as reactive abuse inside a high-control group’s test of faith, then disseminated under neoliberal Capitalism. Porn is a test destined to fail, thus meant to instill already undernourished workers with even more social-sexual guilt—menticide, through and through.)

and then transition endlessly away from psychosexual self-harm (seeing oneself as “knife-like[6]“) as a Cartesian byproduct regardless of where one is relative to the settler colony (which commodifies bodies differently based on location and type); i.e., towards an ironic, xenophilic state of self-acceptance whose complicated self-liberation happen though self-(GNC)-expression: humanizing the harvest. The fruit’s still delicious; it’s just not dehumanized and sliced up for profit, or slicing others up as such.

Synthesized within capital using our bodies’ counterterrorist function, doing so rescues our forbidden fruit and Satanic potential; i.e., girl talk, camp and monsters that yield creatively rebellious, liberating forms to exonerate Hell with, thus poetically open up hellish channels whose otherworldly gateways of exquisite, pleasurable “torture” hammer swords into ploughshares. This playful, consciously sex-positive xenophilia deftly subverts Cartesian norms, half-real perceptions of sovereignty and pretend state monopolies backed by actual lies, force and xenophobic manufacture (the trifectas) using Gothic poetics; i.e., across our lives and the lives of those we touch within a shared, at times incredibly soupy dialogic: a caterpillar that less turns into a butterfly whose symbolic metamorphosis the state fears, and more staying as it is (“dummy thicc”) while remaining equally fearsome[7]:

(exhibit 32c: Model and artist: Sinead Rhiannon and Persephone van der Waard. Sinead describes faer chubby caterpillar body as “basically a fat Barbie with holes”—not to depreciate its transformative value, but appreciate something that is desirable precisely because it is different and can be played with accordingly by two [or more] consenting parties. Larger bodies are canonically associated with/fetishized as stigma animals, Satanic hunger and vice, but also nutrients and vitality as something to enjoy in an iconoclastic, bacchanal manner between both sides; i.e., fruit-like, ripe and waiting to be sampled: the BBW as a pornographic treat laced with shame, which must be reclaimed by subverting said shame and its psychosexual violence harvesting fat bodies like chattel. The trick is to reverse European beauty standards [thus heteronormativity and settler-colonial dogma and animal stigmas] while expressing the desires and frustrations that these persons have, and which they express through their Satanic bodies and art in ways that evoke and revive the Rubenesque imaginary past to challenge the status quo in more inclusive, animalistic hauntologies.

 To that, fatness becomes a symbol to reclaim through language and negotiated play going hand-in-hand; e.g., as Sinead explains, “fat” is a generally-accepted neutral term in the fat community whereas a word like “ob*se” is considered a slur and should be avoided. Beyond spoken or written language, the reclamation of fat bodies through fat liberation [and not just positivity as something to sell to those with means] is partially devoted to consumption as a symbol that can be reclaimed from canonical forms, but has a hauntological [nostalgic] flavor—i.e., the likes of Rubens, Rembrandt and other Renaissance painters who had a different way of appreciating larger bodies in that period that has since become commodified in Western society and American hegemony on the global stage, but whose modern canon still has a dated flavor to it that evokes the stigmas of the Catholic church and fears of “outside” groups tied to forbidden desires and knowledge. The idea is to challenge Cartesian “othering” through our bodies and artwork, the collaborations that we do with other artists/SWers working towards the same goal: humanizing each other as normally harvested by the elite and their watchdogs.

For Sinead, this theatricality is highly specific: “My specialty is creatively costumed characters and corresponding fantasy-scene concepts including a super-wide variety of kink and dynamic options, and that I have a passion for glitter and chaos.” And fae often specifically caters to queer porn consumers using faer succulent body as plentiful, but also fantastical; i.e., the content fae makes for cis men is usually kind of an afterthought [and said men usually pay the misgendering upcharge]. Fae thinks it’s important, since content designed for people who aren’t cis men can be harder to find in general. And this is something I can help fae with through my art. The message I hope to convey through our negotiated labor exchange is something Sinead feels strongly about: “Like, it’s definitely getting easier to find queer porn, but a lot of queer and trans porn creators will still market heavily to cis men because they’re at least perceived to be the vast, vast, vast majority of the consumer market.” In other words, we want to appreciate queer culture sans pandering to the status-quo customer base who normally objectify us and commodify our struggles as Satanic during moral panics; i.e., fat bodies, in Sinead’s case, tied to pagan precursors to Satan as an animalistic religious figure of pre-Christian natures harvested by Cartesian forces: witches and faeries, Easter and Samhain [re: the monstrous-feminine “lady of the harvest,” but also said lady’s wild, forest-animal servants]. For us, the struggle[s] and solution[s] intersect.)

With exhibits 32a, b, and c, we’re returning to past forms of canonical media and studying them (and their Cartesian trauma) as codified worker relations and BDSM rituals; i.e., in anti-Cartesian ways that let workers learn to interpret canon for themselves—to understand its imaginary past from every angle, then repurpose and recreate demonic BDSM (the knife dick and the “pumpkin” it carves) through iconoclastic praxis in their own liminal forms. To this, pornography is extremely liminal under Capitalism, forced between states of consent and non-consent that cannot be easily determined; i.e., due to hyperreal depictions of beautiful smiling workers that historically cannot consent slowly having more rights but being tied to images traditionally associated with trauma: sex demons. The aim, here, is to challenge the “ghost of the counterfeit” in canonical porn: the penis (and traumatic penetration) as a codified threat of Cartesian rape and violence and the pussy (and by extension nature as “fat, sassy and dark”) the recipient; i.e., the torturer and the tortured through all the usual harvests. Whether a literal knife or dark “horseflesh,” these manmade rituals and coercive, toy-like fetishes invoke canonical praxis to evoke a rapacious Symbolic Order that compels sex worker submission. For example, unironic xenophobia affects men of color as scapegoated, animalistic rapists, while generations of cis-het white women collectively recognize rape through oral traditions passed down under reactive abuse. Over time, man’s natural “toy” starts to mirror the historical-material version, becoming one-in-the-same for wounded, scared victims: “Parents with sons have to worry about one penis; parents with daughters have to worry about all of them” (as if fathers can’t rape their sons).

The grander counterterrorist moral isn’t simply that traumatic penetration is psychosexual violence, which fetishes corporally represent; it’s that such devices can be reclaimed through iconoclastic praxis during liminal expression, wherein one chooses to fetishize oneself in controlled, informed psychosexual terms. Despite the ambivalent, conflicted nature of Gothic language, the awesome power to set ourselves free lives within us and our bodies as transcendent gateways to better worlds of infinite possibility framed as “impossible” by Capitalist Realism. Except, Hell—if it is to be a home for all of nature criminalized by Cartesian thought—must be a place on Earth. We must become of two worlds, then, “half-bred” to wreak havoc and sow discord towards a better kind of place than Cartesian order does when enforced by moderate cunning and reactionary brutes’ usual dogma. Their knife dicks rape and kill; ours “rape” and “kill” to drain our would-be-murders’ potency when aiming their weapons against us. They freeze under our power insofar as we humanize ourselves in their eyes and expose them as the brutalizers.

To this, Gothic-Communist instruction occurs through praxial synthesis telling a different story than canon does, the latter’s norms preying on nature and bodies tied to nature as something to harvest (“fat” being the classic state of something “ready-for-harvest”). By humanizing the harvest, the butt needn’t be a symbol of chattel, nor its owner’s smiling face a forced Doki-Doki-Literature-Club-style mask. The smile of the soon-to-be-fucked can be genuine; when the owner raises their butt, they can illustrate mutual consent, indicating how they actively want it from being hard-up: begging for some dick a particular way from a particular type of person while reclaiming the activity with their body and all too happy to do so—i.e., “We are not animals, nor are we guilty or afraid. Now gimme.” It becomes vitalistic in a vampiric way that celebrates the transmission of essence and vitality through all the usual vectors, minus the stigmas; i.e., a revival of older pre-Cartesian ways for seeing the world, updated for the kinds of dialogs-under-capital that have carefully evolved to bring these monsters (and their complicated humanity under state oppression) out into the open: a vampire standing in daylight, making them sparkle.

Trauma is always adjacent to sexuality and performance, but needn’t determine the outcome. Insofar as harm can be reduced to calculated risk in forms of iconoclastic playfulness, the imaginary past remains plastic, thus can be recoded by empowering monstrous aesthetics with a critical-instructional edge, but also jouissance; e.g., the vampire as a play on rape theatre, traumatic penetration (stakes and fangs) and vitalistic power exchange through medieval language as reclaimed by ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., from Cartesian thought’s bad instruction under capital: a harvesting of sanguine that enriches both parties through informed consent that profanes the church and returns to nature.

(exhibit 32d: Model and artist: Casper Clock and Persephone van der Waard. A huge part of my work is about updating pre-Enlightenment/settler-colonial nostalgia with a more inclusive Renaissance hauntology [medieval nostalgia]. Older authors discussed sin, pleasure and vice, and while they didn’t necessarily have queer language and queerness was [at least in the West] associated with sexual/gendered actions and not identities, this changed in the late 18th century in ways that canonized harmful variants of the medieval past and Gothic nostalgia; e.g., the demonization of Catholic excess linked to “non-white” bodies and heteronormative standards that basically fetishized other standards and descriptive genders and sexualities as “other.” Basically anything “Satanic”/sodomic became subject to state violence and control, whose abuses were then turned into shameful commodities; e.g., the homosexual man as a vampire, or the fat white woman as “black” in the stigmatized but also racialized sense. Race and sin, but also forbidden knowledge/devil worship, smashed together in the Enlightenment period, sold as vapors in Neo-Gothic novels before becoming more and more commodified during the 20th and 21st centuries.)

As we’ve discussed, vampirism (and porn at large) operates through various degrees of visibility and stealth during the liminal hauntology of war (and rape): “cruising” behind various layers of anonymity that treat the closet, dive bar bathroom stall, or backseat of a car as a cryptonym to turn Athena’s Aegis on our menticided foes, immobilizing them. We want to challenge this synonymous fusing of the marginalized body with violence, but also the canonical linking of all of these things to nature-as-alien; i.e., to a heteronormative binding of sex to gender hopelessly tied to human biology that weaponizes our shame against us while throwing our descriptive genders, sexualities and performances into an abject, self-policed state of existence.

So however ancient or modern—and whether it occurs inside a bathroom stall, church antechamber or coffin recorded at high definition or on a potato—the violent and sexual stories of kayfabe and the Gothic should speak to our experiences inside a settler colony while enjoying psychosexual likeness of systemic adversity we overcome on all performative and lived registers; e.g., the palliative-Numinous inside the castled Gothic opera. This intersectional solidarity also includes whatever generations we hail from, or degrees to which we openly or not-so-openly get by and off as on and offstage blend together (to various degrees of stillness and trembling under disturbing sensations speaking to our trauma as inherited across generations). But this also requires accounting for potential allies during revolutionary cryptonymy while speaking to and from own complicated experiences intermingling with others’ similar to, and incredibly different from, ours. Sooner or later, it has to meld, but it’s up to us fags (and other minorities) to speak with our voices: our drama not as a piece of popcorn food for the Straights (who are often part of the problem), but a means to tell them know, however imperfectly, the way we feel in relation to them inside the Imperial Core.

To escape the closeted freakshow status of nature-as-abject, we can employ monstrous language that allows for sex-positive forms of essence, knowledge and power exchange through ludo-Gothic BDSM; e.g., not just the Amazon or knight, damsel or demon, but the vampire (queer person), gross person (fat/muscular) or person of color, etc, as combined with a whole army of Gothic status symbols and arrangements of power and control. As profound ontological statements concerned with Cartesian abuse, these make up a collective ludo-Gothic paradox/educational act; i.e., rooted in Gothic play and psychosexual performance, thus adjacent to phallic harm as normally produced by the state and which we to overthrow through cryptonymic rebellion: to look the part, but no longer play it by refusing to obey the elite’s evil commands; e.g., as Anubis does to Emperor Tulpa: “Ronins, I am one of you!” Such is intersectional solidarity pushing towards universal liberation while rejecting tokenized forms during ludo-Gothic BDSM.

Per the knife dick, there are legions of examples in how Cartesian thought fetishizes nature to chattelize it, and the non-white/fat body or vampire are only three by which to camp canon with. Regardless of the monster (or body type/gender) being performed, reverse-abject revelations reunite viewers with an old truth mythologized by Capitalism, but also liminalized by it: Maybe women/GNC persons like being “ravished,” playfully using the old rituals and monstrous language in transformative studies of subversive, even transgressive expression—i.e., an iconoclasm that respects the past and wisely fears its tyrants, then laughs in their withered, old zombie faces by placing “rape” in quotes as a means of applying theory through cultivated habits that humanize the harvest. It does so by reclaiming the “tools” of worker enslavement for these same workers to “revisit” linguistic sites of Cartesian trauma with, and heal from its traumatic penetration through a reclaimed social-sexual ritual (we’ll be sure to examine asexual modes of expression in Volume Three, I promise): “Watch us get fucked the way we want to, by whatever sex organs (or toys) we choose together!”

During ludo-Gothic BDSM, the knife or the stake becomes camped, thus placed in quotes, but remains a time-consuming process; intelligence and awareness are drained by state xenophobia and must be restored over time through good-faith instruction—i.e., through reliable, time-tested means: power and sex, but also ironic xenophilia and appreciative peril more broadly acting as rewards. Their instructive pleasure and pleasurable pain (divorced from harm) can synthesize good social-sexual habits according to our manifesto arguments (and thesis backbone): a culture of state terror versus a Gothic counterculture of worker counterterror performing informed mutual consent, whose pedagogy of the oppressed delivers appreciative irony vis-à-vis Cartesian trauma. Power lies in Gothic theatre as something to reclaim from our colonizers.

(artist: Iahfy)

Cartesian thought treats workers as meat without ironic “rape” scenarios/calculated risk to safeguard them from genuine xenophobic harm; e.g., the palliative Numinous as an ironically xenophilic, thus beneficial ritual. As stewards, not harvesters of nature, we need to heed the dual function of fetishes when partaking in “exquisite torture” ourselves (and in ways that avoid Radcliffe’s openly spifflicating demon lovers). Subversion is our most potent weapon because its gender trouble and parody can transform the relationship between Heaven and Hell as a dialectical-material conversation. Post-Milton, anything that has the power to liberate through creation—especially morphological expression divorced from sexual reproduction—will be canonically fetishized by default; i.e., the Gothic and its “darkness visible” of the Satanic rebel; e.g., the thinking woman as alien and insectoid, but also darkly delicious when put to heel by Cartesian forces. In iconoclastic terms, such a double can hijack the aesthetic of power and death (re: Sontag’s black leather) to willingly act out the powerful mommy dom “destroying” the subby femboy (above) as they repurpose torture language (and “traumatic” penetration) as decedent, salubrious and various other complicated emotions[8]; i.e., speaking to our experiences as identities (not simply actions) mid-struggle while cruising inside the liminal hauntology of war—all to protect themselves from capital treating them as vermin-like extensions of nature-run-amok: things to sugar-coat, then exterminate. All the same, while fetishes humanize the alien as routinely harvested by Cartesian thought, it’s also vital to recognize the oppressed are not the fetishes they use to liberate themselves with; e.g., Satan, Dracula or Medusa is a performance, not a person. Even if those fetishizes concern their bodies as dark, queer, fat, or otherwise “other” in the eyes of the state, a fetish is an informed action—a performance tied to a body as one’s own by which to identify with nature as abjected by Cartesian dominators.

We’ll examine the history of demon BDSM and its evolution/regeneration in Volume Two, and our own present praxis in Volume Three as informed by the past during appreciative irony in Gothic counterculture. For the moment, just remember that, in a post-scarcity world without sin or scapegoats, iconoclasts can use monstrous-liminal expression to return to an older time in a new linguo-material world replete with implements of harm that have yet to be fully reclaimed. This reclamation can be appreciative rape fantasies, but also complex forms of subversive wish fulfillment that instill a liminal, “perceptive” sense of control into the ritualized pastiche of war and rape. It becomes a messy-yet-vital means of gossip through monsters and camp fundamental to proletarian praxis’ instruction: revolutionary cryptonymy through torturous devices like the knife dick as fundamentally liminal—a piece of the monster but also a historical-material reflection of state violence interwoven with queer people and other oppressed existences exploited by Cartesian forces. Part of the trauma is interrogating and disentangling ourselves from unironic forms, which involves ambiguity through a shared aesthetic whose function is not set. There’s a simultaneous application of disguise and exposure through competing codes that make up revolutionary theatres (which Volume Three’s Chapter Five will conclude on): “flashing” exhibits, exhibit 53; breeding kinks, exhibit 87a; and even ahegao when handled with care, exhibit 140d, as risky behaviors portrayed as safely as possible: depicting rough sex/consent-non-consent, where workers ultimately stay in control and simultaneously communicate the state’s Cartesian divisions to better emancipate sex workers from the harm said divisions cause.

And if the canonical knife penis still sounds like a stretch, remember that a) women are historically the heroines in, and traditional audiences of, Gothic literature; and b) that Joseph Crawford, writing in his introduction to Gothic Fiction and the Invention of Terrorism (2013), described “terrorist literature” in the late 18th century (the peak of the Neo-Gothic novel in Britain) as having developed in connection with state fears of worker rebellions’ counterterrorism deliberately mislabeled as “terrorism”:

The idea of a single Gothic literature of terror, stretching continuously from the 1760s to the present day, imposes a false unity on these early works, which were referred to as “Gothic stories” only because they were set in the “Gothic ages” (i.e. the medieval or early modern period) rather than the present day, and were more likely to be sentimental romances than tales of terror; the preoccupation with evil, fear, and violence, which is the defining characteristic of later Gothic literature, did not become a prominent part of the genre until the success of Radcliffe’s later novels in the 1790s. I thus became increasingly convinced that, although works referring to themselves as “Gothic” had existed since the 1760s, the true roots of the Gothicised rhetoric I had observed in the nineteenth century were to be found not in the anxieties of the mid-eighteenth-century middle classes, but a generation later; in the fearful decade at the century’s end.

It was in the 1790s that Gothic fiction and rhetoric first became truly popular in Britain; it was also in these years that Britain, like the rest of Europe, was struggling with the consequences of the French Revolution. […] In a very real sense, the Revolution created Gothic, transforming a marginal form of historical fiction chiefly concerned with aristocratic legitimacy into a major cultural discourse devoted to the exploration of violence and fear (source)

but also, I would argue, on account that it would potentially condition women to disobey their husbands(!) and GNC/colonized workers more broadly to rebel against Cartesian models likes of which Mary Shelley called out in her own works; i.e., to invent not as the state does (us-versus-them) but in the Miltonian Satanic tradition taken beyond what Milton, Marx or many others since thought possible.

The collective idea, then, is to evoke a pedagogy of the oppressed that can be applied through compounding habits that came from Gothic stories reflecting on rape through nature as abjected by Western forces raping the criminal, fetishizing the alien, etc, for profit. The passive, dubious rebellion of Ann Radcliffe (and her demon lovers) is literally history in this regard. Even so, I completely disagree with Jarad Fennell when he writes that only female authors “identify the source of fear and terror as existing outside the self and involve a critique of institutional power” (“Sublime Terror and Uncanny Horror in Gothic Novels,” 2023); Lewis, as we’ve already established in our thesis and manifesto, clearly had much to say about institutional power, but was merely more outlandishly queer/violent about it in ways Radcliffe stayed quite quiet on. Even if you aren’t female, of color, queer or non-Christian, you can still be an ally to these postcolonial struggles (far more than Radcliffe was); you needn’t be Radcliffe’s banditti towards nature, the Cartesian man-of-science/capitalist stealing everything behind an abject veneer framing others as alien criminals while you pilfer them and the natural world as dumb, monstrous-feminine and unthinking—easy prey for the Pygmalion genius, the patriarchal overlord, the Gothic villain.

Having considered the patriarchal nature of Cartesian dualism raping nature through traumatic penetration—i.e., as enacted by men and tokenized, Amazonian agents, but also pornographic expression—I want to conclude the symposium and the volume with a matriarchal afterthought for you reflect on when synthesizing praxis and subverting potential state trauma, yourselves. To that, I want to give an imperative, lesson, and anecdote to close out the chapter with.

First, the imperative. Now’s the time to be active! Absorb, learn, create and share! Whereas Wordsworth once implored, “Let nature be your teacher!” we need to account for nature as it exists presently informed by past-and-future ideas. Help you and your fellow workers, then, by creating a fresh socio-educational line of Matrilineal descent; i.e., whose Wisdom of the Ancients challenges the status quo’s rotting nepotistic standards. But also? Be bold! Don’t be cowed or discouraged. Don’t listen if you’re told you’re “wasting” your time or your talents. Coming from me, a former playmate once chided me for using my Gothic MA degree to get laid (that’s a long story but essentially I was writing Gothic roleplays on Kik, Reddit and Fetlife). However, when they told me “that’s not what a master’s degree is for!” I replied, “Why not both?” Why not, indeed! The whole point was to expand my mind/intelligence and awareness, hence ability to instruct new people in regards to my trauma; i.e., as something to contribute to a growing pedagogy of the oppressed. If that gets me laid and demonstrates revolutionary praxis in defense of nature, then mission accomplished!

(artist: Hiddend8)

Second and third, a lesson and anecdote. Lesson-wise, sex is a wonderful educator but so are sources of education prohibited by capital: performance and play when camping canon in ways that asexualize sex and prey on nature; i.e., through public nudism as de facto education, versus simply a Cartesian device to arouse visual excitement and nothing else. While there’s nothing wrong with visual stimulation through porn and dark aesthetics (mommy or otherwise), the abject function of Capitalism demonizes Mother Nature to devour her as an unironic psychosexual fetish. Generally this is very bad in how it routinely leads to the rape of nature and workers “of nature” through Cartesian, thus patriarchal, systems of capital justifying nature’s “incorrect” forms to sanction her own rape. Porn needs to be perceptive!

However, as Volume Two’s exploration of monsters will show us, nature isn’t just monstrous-feminine; it’s tied to forbidden knowledge, an iconoclastic, xenophilic Wisdom of the Ancients whose combined Humanities modules reveal Cartesian dualism’s myriad abuses and xenophobic alienations of nature—as food, but also undead, demonic and totemic. Matrilineal descent, then, is a maverick intellectual pursuit tied to the struggles of everyday life under Patriarchal Capitalism, and one that can cultivate powerful social-sexual habits/pathways in service of sex positivity liberating nature from its patriarchal rapists’ perceived air of omnipotence. The door to other worlds—be they the proverbial stars, Hell, or simply “the beyond”—isn’t something to dread, but welcome and relish as a precious opportunity to change into something new. But it must occur using the same basic language and aesthetics “passed down” through older monstrous-feminine educators pilfered from Cartesian forms. We’re not whitewashing Heaven or breaking into it through some kind of trial to prove ourselves[9] to a higher power. We’re making Hell our home-to-perceive through the Satanic deities caged inside our own breasts: “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.”

(artist: Asu Rocks)

To that, I want to give a short anecdote valorizing the very things Cartesian thought would seem to alienate, fetishize and rape: female/monstrous-feminine education/reinvention as criminal, once-upon-a-time, but also unthinkable by Cartesian proponents then-and-now crippled by Capitalist Realism (the paradox of the thinking zombie, demon, animal[10] and alien, etc). Just as Mary Wollstonecraft passed down the privilege of progressive education onto her daughter, Mary Shelley, the women on my mother’s side were/are all intellectuals. From my great-grandmother to me, they found ways to be active and do things “beyond their stations”; or within them—i.e., my grandmother throwing absolute shade Erica’s way for doing what she did to Uncle Dave, but also “staying in her lane” by generally letting men cheat because “men cheat, and it’s the woman’s fault.” No one ever said that Gran was perfect, but her imperfection is not absolute, either. Habits are like broken bones; you have to break old injuries to help the bone heal, thus achieve praxial catharsis through synthesis.

For example, my grandmother might be an old battleaxe who actually “does a sexism” quite often; she’s still fought plenty of battles for children, including those who weren’t her own (she worked in an asylum for mentally ill children for years and looked after the boys and the girls, which the state eventually released back out onto the street to die). To be sure, she often wore her rose-tinted glasses and didn’t speak out “for the children’s sake” when my grandfather had his psychotic breaks; but the moment my mother remembered her own abuse as a child and confirmed it through the wife of a relative (again, girls talk), my grandmother synthesized her daughter’s trauma through girl talk as a means of preventing future harm: she confronted the perfidious old man and told him to his face that she fucking knew what he did. The old creep confessed and later, Gran and Mom danced on his grave. How’s that for Gothic?

(photographer: Robert Massa)

End of the Road: Concluding the Roadmap and Volume One

How easy it is to deny the pain / Of someone else’s suffering

—Chuck Schuldiner; “Suicide Machine” on Death’s Human (1991)

With the roadmap finale concluded, so ends Volume One. Before we segue into Volume Two, I want to quickly (over the next ten pages) reiterate some key things Volume One has covered that you should keep in mind moving forward. You should now have a fairly sound idea of synthesizing praxis through our manifesto and its instruction; i.e., the conscious cultivation of social-sexual habits (and those in connection with you) into emotionally and Gothically intelligence and class/cultural awareness regarding state trauma, power and general abuse as things to interrogate, negotiate and replay out on the same shared stages. Your habits should collectively subvert the Cartesian trauma of war and rape using perceptive pastiche and liminal expression during proletarian creative success—in short, to express your own sex positivity and interrogations of trauma and power in opposition to state synthesis and pushback via reactionary behaviors: your instruction of simplified theory through a collective pedagogy of the oppressed vis-à-vis the basics’ gossip, monsters and camp versus the state’s harmful, unironic forms; i.e., good instruction versus bad, generally through cathartic psychosexuality and ludo-Gothic BDSM.

(artist: Fugtrup)

We’ll examine proletarian praxis amid Gothic poetics during Volume Three. As we move onto Volume Two, we will consider past proletarian praxis as a social-sexual process of Gothic poetics conveyed through various Humanities-themed modules: the undead, demons and totems. Each will demonstrate how sex-positive egregores have the power to reimagine the material world through creative expression conveyed by a living chain of workers responding to what other workers have already left behind; i.e., subverted trauma as something to reexamine and continuously negotiate with through a constantly updated Wisdom of the Ancients that reclaims the Base and recultivates the Superstructure by camping canon, raising worker intelligence and awareness during class/culture war amid a shared, intersectional pedagogy of the oppressed. Organically enacted by actively imaginary revolutionaries at various levels, Gothic Communism responds to the status quo of popular media as a disjointed collective seeking to reunite against the state. For this purpose, I’m not entirely trusting of the galaxy-brained eggheads in academia, leaning far more into Edward Said’s notion of non-accommodated/marginalized intellectuals. I specifically want to apply Said’s concept to various generations of artistic and sex-working persons: those of the Baby Boomer generation, Gen X, the Millennial generation, and Gen Z synthesizing praxis on artistic platforms and social media more broadly.

In doing so, Gothic Communism seeks update the flow of absorption—the literal direction and control of disseminated information and how it changes the way mass media is perceived and consumed; i.e., how we see ourselves as workers in relation to nature and the material world, and how praxial inertia and resistance are overcome through paradox. This elaborate strategy of misdirection (re: Frederic Jameson) can use iconoclastic praxis to push back against canon in ways those in power will notice and respond to, albeit in ways state-sanctioned force cannot “solve.” Indeed, state reprisals only historically-materially bring marginalized communities closer together, “girl-talking” more and more as a means of community defense/rape and trauma prevention against an ancestral, systemic foe that exposes their embarrassing failings in ways only impotent, callow men can generate.

(source: Maya Oppenheim’s “Incel Culture Should Be Classed as Terrorism,” 2021)

Iconoclasm is seldom black-and-white. Rather, development requires decolonization as a liminal proposition of gatekept thresholds; re: whose “Imperialism of theories” (re: Norton) extend historically-materially beyond the academic world and into a public Gothic; i.e., Gothic language and its complex, liminal expressions of power as colonized/decolonized during oppositional praxis by everyday workers, literally synthesized through the social-sex lives of those for or against the state. Gothic-Communist revolution is prolonged, subversive struggle, reclaiming canonical pastiche/praxis in liminal, “perceptive” forms that slowly open the gates and keep them open: our minds, our language, our creations, our praxis liberated through intersectional solidarity.

As already stated, I don’t consider pastiche to simply be “blind parody” like Jameson’s Postmodernism (1991) does; there’s room for ironic parody and satire, as well as enjoyment of canonical material without endorsing it. Through complex co-existence, the collective action of iconoclastic media’s liminal-didactic components manifest in ways that, over space and time, historically-materially make all of us better teachers and students in an active and passive sense: Put in more colloquial language, “Suddenly we girls are running the show, tellin’ the good from the bad and pushin’ the creeps to the side for our socio-material benefit.” Involuntarily celibate? Tough shit! Ain’t got time for bad students who don’t want to learn (or pay out)! If you can’t be bothered to do the bare minimum, don’t “play” by trying to cheat, or by forcing someone to play with you the way you want them too; i.e., abuse encouragement patterns that treat us like chattel. That’s gross and super fucked up. Might does not make right, my Manosphere dudes; if we can’t get that through your thick skulls, then at least we don’t have to sleep with you! As weird iconoclastic nerds, we can play our own games and make our own rules, odds, luck, fate, monsters, poetics, and covert maneuvers (e.g., “poker faces”) during revolutionary cryptonymy and the other Four Gs.

As mentioned in Volume Zero, our enemy is as much cognitive estrangement as it is dissonance. My (and your) instructional emphasis, then, lies in how people “actually talk”; i.e., “how people talk” in the Internet Age, according to a complex, organic blend of everyday speech, memes, anecdotes, code (a lot of queer activism is tied to memes and humor that pokes fun of the status quo, for example; Ty Turner’s “The STRAIGHTS Are STRUGGLING,” 2022)—and various other linguistic elements and artist expression that operate passively or actively as de facto exhibits of proletarian praxis. As a whole, Gothic Communism seeks to cultivate a sex-positive approach that avoids the pitfalls of academia (and if academics feel alienated by this approach, that’s ultimately a hazard of their overspecialized professions). Within oppositional praxis, the Gothic mode’s means and materials of production—it’s monsters, lairs, and mediums—are praxis when synthesized, are for or against Capitalism in ways that invite the viewer to look at Athena’s Aegis and be changed by it.

Our aim is revolution and development, which happens in active resistance to canonical praxis and its various pastiches. Pastiche is merely the presence of remediated praxis, which Capitalism reduces to cheap, mass-produced counterfeits; liminality is largely an attempt to enter the threshold and convey something different with pastiche (something to keep in mind as we talk about pastiche and liminality throughout Volumes Two and Three); e.g., porn, monsters, BDSM, etc. Thereupon, our furious, gossiping exhibits of ironic, “perceptive” pastiche become an active invitation to look—partly at this former midden with fresh eyes, but also our exhibits as refashioned from old parts to give you those eyes. Let the scales fall from them. Per my expansion of Castricano’s cryptomimesis, gossip with monsters, camping canonical ones in the process. “Make it gay” with your own Satanic power adding to the spectres of Marx chorusing already.

Gothic Communism is about overcoming praxial inertia and state violence by exposing state decay and abuse through monstrous language; it is not the rotting corpse of canon, but a perceived end of the world that challenges Capitalist Realism by killing Capitalism and its myopia of apocalyptic forces designed to rape and destroy your minds. If canon uses fear and dogma—but also freezing terror and a carefully cultivated inability to imagine a better world than the current socio-economic order—then Gothic Communism reverses this process through the same aesthetics to achieve an opposite function: the liberation of workers through iconoclastic art; i.e., sexualized, oft-Gothic counterterror and delight. We are not defined by how the state tries to criminalize us, but our own bodies, sexualities, genders and identities do lie adjacent to very-real harm as something to disentangle ourselves from. It requires a confrontation with ourselves as devils ordinarily persecuted by state forces, except proletarian logics assist us in ways that free us from state enslavement; i.e., by accepting the ontological irony of our own psychosexualities and subsequent catharsis, and developing a language for that we can share with others. This is often literal, but maintains a monstrous appearance adopted by new generations of people working through their own trauma, guilt and shame; i.e., subverting canon to better acquire joy and community in the process:

(exhibit 32d: Artist: Danomil, of their OC, Vilka the marshmallow dog. As Danomil says, “I’ve been really horny lately so here are 8 more stickers for you! […] Use them for your pleasure!” Indeed, my partner Bay and I often use them when communicating and playing on Telegram together. Vilka speaks to me and how I feel around Bay but also how I want to fuck them.)

A common Biblical symbol of death is the white horse; subversion achieves class and culture war as a conscious effort—i.e., through monstrous language that introduces incongruous new elements; e.g., a white dog (above) or rabbit, etc, as challenging canon’s heteronormative instruction to interrogate power and trauma. From an iconoclastic standpoint, then, “death” is simply change, transformation regarding these complicated matters. Active, informed iconoclasm (and its darkness visible) invite one to look at forbidden, satirical, half-real, undead/demonic and animalized things that, once seen, have the power to transform workers through what they consume; i.e., not the totalitarian myth of turning one to stone, but turning workers into something new and the world slowly with them: your minds, but also your language and how you present yourselves in relation to the natural-material world.

(artist: Danomil)

To that, do not fear chaos and death; embrace it! Follow the white rabbit or dog when you see its fur stained with the blood of canonical abuses; heed its pedagogy of the oppressed and inhabit the same spaces through empathy and love. The food will taste better, the sex will hit harder (all the good spots). Make it a part of yourself that instructs better behaviors moving forward; you’ll be surprised how different things seem. Precisely these mechanisms, once adopted, will slowly change how you think but also how you act; i.e., what you synthesize through your own creative successes.

Through the fulfillment of the Six Rs, the bourgeoisie will “turn to stone,” but also their victimized servants: the canonical rapists and warriors; proverbial trolls, silver-tongued vampires, and legions of the fascist undead, heroes and warlords, but also the entire structure that makes them and their false fears, their empty hopes, their deadly dreams. This includes their sell-out thought leaders, shills, and politicians telling you how to think (or not think) with canonical praxis—in effect, warning you not to look and see for yourself while turning you into canonical monsters that abuse yourselves and your fellow workers to support a select few “lucky ones.” It becomes a brand, so challenge that with your own praxis; synthesize it into something that doesn’t sell out like past groups have:

(exhibit 33a: Artist: Mick Cassidy. Metallica isn’t just a giant sell-out band; they’re “class traitors” who monopolized the metal industry for their own base ends. Or as Top Dollar once put it, “The idea has become the institution.” What once were young and hungry Bay Area thrashers from the streets slowly but deliberately became aging grandpas that can’t hold a candle to their former selves, or their career competitors actually keeping the genre energized. But Zombie Metallica won’t stop touring! Even so, I can shine a light on this corrupt monopoly and still love their first five albums [and some of their latter-day songs, even if the production sucks] and their merch. God, these guys really know how to promote themselves—by paying other talented artists to sell their brand for them, of course! But Metallica doesn’t own art or metal [despite them dominating the algorithms with fan-made pastiche [Persephone van der Waard’s “My Two Cents: Ep 3., Lux Aeterna on KEA,” 2023] riding that wave: “Metallica pastiche” and its various offshoots [refer to the Acknowledgements section to see examples from my “Two Cents” interview Q&A series]. This includes Megadeth and other famous contemporaries reanimated by fans decades later [Ali’s “ Tornado Of Souls w/Peace Sells Tone,” 2023]. Much like the entire NWOTHM movement, it becomes its own thing for fans to work at as endless labors of love. Take what they produce and make it your own. Make metal your ironic anthem, a cornerstone of your praxis as you “set the world on fire,” iconoclastically transforming the status quo for workers everywhere.)

The state and its defenders aren’t sacred, nor are corporations or industry giants, celebrities and greedy musicians. Become informed and aware then help other workers do the same, collectively instructing a collective means to interrogate generational abuse. But also, don’t put the cart before the horse (with you being the horse in this case). Yes, all iconoclastic workers must be “motherly” to some extent—protectors, providers, teachers with liminal-iconoclastic language: those who hunt the hunters in linguo-material ways, through countercultural “war” mascots (we’ll examine these more in Volume Three; e.g., Chapter Five, exhibit 102). Be that the “memeing” of (or as I call it, “transformative quoting”—usually in relation to campy films with memorable scenes; e.g., “Garbage Day!” from Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2, 1987) or some other form of creative playfulness, Gothic subversion works at an individual and societal level when creating for other workers, not for the bourgeoisie (all bourgeoisie [and their proponents] are war profiteers within Man Box culture). Ludo-Gothic BDSM is the holistic approach, and one that gets to the core of the issue; re: Capitalism sexualizes everything.

Have fun with it and don’t be afraid to try new things to make something special; e.g., Russkaja’s “Russian Turbo Polka Metal.” There’s nothing new under the sun, but all things are made up and remade again, so give it a shot! Be brave, be visible, and stand up for yourselves; otherwise the image of you—like Picasso’s women—is destroyed, along with your history the image represents. This history is generally annihilated and whitewashed in Capitalism’s rainbow façade as “true activism/controlled opposition.” Opposition isn’t just a t-shirt for sale (though it can involve t-shirts and logos, like the Raised Fist or Che Guevara, exhibits 8b2); it involves the destruction of property for the betterment of workers, animals, children and nature, etc: rioting in demonstrable ways that protest very real (and repressed) abuses of power. You have to take that power back by finding your own voice to speak out with; even if you’re punished, you’ll have made that visible—something that cannot easily be ignored.

For example, as Kathryn Ferguson says of Sinéad O’Connor in Nothing Compares (2022): “So many women are reduced to footnotes in history. I couldn’t bear that for Sinead” (source: Sylvia Patterson, 2022). But O’Connor’s famous destruction of an image of the pope for him defending pedophiles was, itself, tantamount to seditious vandalism of Catholic canon—i.e., a very real and precocious stand against the state-of-affairs that threatened her burial by the state through a banning by SNL (itself a centrist institution filled with American liberals supportive of Pax Americana):

Perhaps her most iconic moment was in 1992, on Saturday Night Live. O’Connor, who was raised Catholic, was performing a version of Bob Marley’s “War.” She changed some of the lyrics to reference child abuse and then held up a picture of Pope John Paul II as she reached the final line: “We have confidence in the victory of good over evil.”

Then she ripped up the photo and said, simply, “Fight the real enemy” (source: Tori Otten’s “Banned From SNL for Calling Out the Pope,” 2023).

(source tweet: Feminist Collages, 2023)

All the same, as girl-talking “mothers of the world,” this isn’t some zero-sum game where class/culture consciousness makes it impossible for you to subsist in the barren fields of Capitalism, its endless retro-future hauntologies treating worker unity and teamwork like a fantasy with a price tag. It starts with you looking out for yourself and yes, having fun (remember Sarkeesian’s adage). Decide your level of commitment to the Cause, being that rioting or commercial protesting or extracurricular education. But also: figure out for yourself what you like in terms of self-care as a means of political-material endorsement; experiment, look, swim, fuck, try on new clothes, use new toys, speak in code, in memes; laugh, cry and share. Make friends—boys, girls, queer folk, animals, mythical creatures—and go from there. Inform your own consumption and production habits as praxial factors; don’t settle for those given to you by the bourgeoisie.

And if the end result is that you want to do your part by making a podcast that speaks out against oppression instead of rioting in the streets—and that, in terms of cuties, you prefer chubby androgynes/deep-throated nerds who wear college alumni sweaters, have fuzzy pussies, freckles and horn-rimmed glasses (that “Velma” look) and “know what they’re doing” in the bedroom when it comes to toys, fucking and getting topped or topping you—then cool, that’s what you like! The same goes for being sex-repulsed and “grey ace” gradients. Canonical praxis, on the other hand, is workers actively wanting to like what Capitalism deems acceptable and abjecting everything else, including sex-positive workers and their art as something to extinguish entirely. It’s the canonical desire to “fit in” and punish those who don’t—i.e., violent genocide, but also neglect, scorn, and ignorance thereof administered by literal or figurative police agents.

Zeuhl did that to me, telling me not to write because it concerned them as someone who didn’t want to be seen or associated with me and my work (and who did their best to appropriate activism through BLM as a recuperated movement that ultimately sold out); Jadis told me not to write either. Anyone who tells you not to stand up for yourself serves the status quo. Books exist to critique and hold power accountable; so does music (e.g., New Zealand reggae: Kora’s “Politician,” 2004; or inuk circumpolar hip-hop/rap[11] [a combination of rap, metal, and traditional inuk folk] Uyarakq’s “Move, I’m Indigenous,” 2021). Telling others not to riot or stand up for themselves is at worst, openly abusive, and at best, controlled opposition/centrism as a kind of suppressed abuse, the latter entirely befitting of zombie metal acts like Metallica who, at the end of the day, really only care about making as much money as possible for themselves by monopolizing the market; they’re shit activists and shrewd, aging businessmen—i.e., the very thing they were protesting against in their heyday! Don’t be like Zeuhl, Jadis or Metallica; don’t snuff out your fire because those in or aligned with power tell you to. Be like O’Connor, instead. Have courage and express that courage; i.e., in ways whose ludo-Gothic BDSM discourages systemic abuse, priming the conditions for a proper blaze among the kindling. Better to burn property than people. Silence will not stop abuse, but prolong it:

In defense of his own people, Bruce Lee once said, “We are not sick men of Asia!” We are not terrorists; we’re counterterrorists, activists. Ignorance of worker abuse is no excuse towards demonizing us—not in the Internet Age when the entire world is at our fingertips, waiting to be reexplored, rediscovered, and reclaimed, along with our labor, our power, our bodies. Unified workers can lead sex and its ambivalent markers away from their current traumatic history (and dissociation with canonical “pleasure”) towards new pleasurable histories. The dick can certainly feel good, or the little toy or getting royally pounded, rapidly fingered, softly licked, tenderly cuddled post-fuck, snuggled without sex at all, etc; but only under sex-positive socio-material conditions between emotionally/Gothically intelligent workers who have the means to master their emotions, but also “mother” new connections and bonds that unteach the old fearful, menticidal ways under Capitalism.

In more dialectical-material language, I’m framing creativity itself as a proletarian thought response to a historical-material world and the natural processes contained therein—either activity informed by material production (the Base), which art affects differently depending on how it’s controlled and cultivated (the Superstructure). Material image production, for example, determines the images that people consume—i.e., as products to endorse, reject or reinvent through a cultivated imagination tied to class consciousness (and “false conscious” variants forwarded by neoliberal ideologues, patrons and consumers). While this socio-material process involves various factors, I’ve chosen to focus on sexuality within sex work as a means of transforming popular artwork as it already exists, thereby treating iconoclastic imagery as a sex-positive, educational mode that allows people to become sex-positive themselves, thus emotionally/Gothically intelligent. This, in turn, can help already-exploited workers imagine a world beyond Capitalism by pointedly highlighting the trauma it causes surrounding our own bodies and identities as entangled, specifically its targeted exploitation through heteronormative canon of sex workers using various codified stigmas that make abusers abuse and victims victimized: blind, deaf and dumb to the world as it decays around them and their “god” falls silence (the cruelty and eventual death of the owner class); the only way out is through solidarized intersectionality according to what we produce together and speak out against state forces with using what we have at our disposal: iconoclastic art as liberating workers under Capitalism by humanizing the harvest during ludo-Gothic BDSM.

(artist: Sinead Rhiannon)

This concludes the roadmap and Volume One. Now that we’re armed with both the thesis argument from Volume Zero and the “basics”—of girl talk (and an expanded understanding and vocabulary of trauma recognition/rape prevention language), menticide, the liminal proposition of subversive revolution, constructive anger and “perceptive” pastiche (of rape and war); along with the core manifesto of Gothic Communism—I want to proceed into the Humanities primer in earnest. To that, Volume Two will examine the past history of monstrous expression; i.e., its canonical usage made to sexually exploit non-heteronormative workers, as well as the oft-queer mechanics used to humanize these same workers through ludo-Gothic BDSM. It will be something to learn from when we consider enacting monstrous sex positivity and proletarian praxis towards universal liberation ourselves in Volume Three.

Onto “A 2025 Foreword: On Volume One’s New Edition Focusing on Ludo-Gothic BDSM (and Cuwu)“!

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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] Generally of the hero, but also the hero’s victims, whereupon the conqueror’s death is enshrined in a vault of worship pushing the mythic life-and-death glory forward into new, unsuspecting minds. Or as my thesis volume argues; re (from “Author’s Foreword”):

In other words, canon (thus Capitalism) is full of ritual sacrifice with a Christianized flavor (crucifixion) or Westernized abuse of paganized forms whose divine right revives the glory of recuperated Roman aesthetics (the Nazi as quasi-pagan); e.g., the sacrificial rooster or lamb, the virgin or scapegoat, as something to bleed out for significance and good fortune, but also stalled demise for the holder of the knife: the Christ-like Herculean warrior as babyface or heel to sacrifice when the state’s crises enter decay while firing up production, which in turn requires more and more sacrifice the hotter the furnace gets. Engorged, the elite need ever more blood to satisfy their hunger as the ultimate parasite, thus demand of their loyal followers, “Defend our land; defend your land from the infidels” (which curiously the elite stole the land from, to begin with). As Hilter put it, “What is life? Life is the nation. The individual must die anyway. Beyond the life of the individual is the nation” (source).

[2] Nature-as-alien canonically achieves demonic power (allegory through transformation) through sexual reproduction tied to an inhuman stigma-animal life cycle; e.g., Kafka’s Metamorphosis (1915) but also the xenomorph.

[3] From Bret Devereaux’ “Hard Times Don’t Make Strong Soldiers,” 2020): “‘Hard times create strong men, strong men create weak times, weak times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.’ The quote, from a postapocalyptic novel by the author G. Michael Hopf, sums up a stunningly pervasive cyclical vision of history—one where Western strategists keep falling for myths of invincible barbarians” (source).

[4] Further paradoxes endemic to capital (and its ghoulish maintenance) include the precarious existence of a stigma-animal monster that should both not exist in the presence of immutable sovereignty and, conversely, a decayed imperium that requires an exterminable chattel to conjure up like a plague and exterminate/prey upon to demonstrate so-called “total power” as faced with “external,” alien menaces. As an elaborate and conflicting series of lies, then, Capitalism yields bizarre liminalities by design (the inside/outside, correct-correct).

[5] A Neo-Gothic trope—of demonizing Catholic excess—that stuck to people of color through racist Enlightenment thought/settler colonialism haunting the ghost of the counterfeit.

[6] A very trans-femme fear—speaking from experience with this one.

[7] Like the zombie, pain lives in the body and around it, the broader world. It bottles up like a potion, that if not “uncorked,” will explode in ways the state knows how to handle (through settler-colonial force). Sometimes, the best course of action is to open it and let things breathe, giving others a taste in the process—not fruit from the poison tree, but from the Tree of Knowledge exposing God (and Cartesian thought) as tyrannical. We’ve already discussed how state forces like to invade discos as breeding grounds for rebel action. If they invade this time, they won’t find a monster to kettle, but Athena’s Aegis; i.e., as a part of collaborators actually having fun that, when opened, like Pandora’s Box cannot be closed again. Like the xenomorph, it cannot be killed and will never obey the state: a liminal, spirit-monarch “Galatea” that will serve no one, can never be destroyed or fully recuperated and may create anything out of anything. In short, it is free to self-fashion and self-determine, but is hunted by xenophobic canonical agents, who style its uncontrolled, xenophilic opposition as their Great Destroyer—e.g., the arch-fiend, or technological singularity (more on this, in Volume Two; e.g., “Seeing Dead People” or “Making Demons“).

[8] Hollow, gutted, like dead meat; reduced to chattel, vermin; but also destroyed in a Numinous sense, trapped between the living and the dead, often in animalized forms of an undead/demonic poetic. Volume Two shall examine why someone inside the state of exception might choose to identify with a given stigma animal as alien: the parasitoid insect, gory worm, hoarding vermin, bloated broodmother or slimy octopus, etc. And likewise we’ll consider why these feelings might be close to trauma and home as confused, thus closeted, contradictory and repressed: like a vampire in a coffin or a corpse underground, surrounded by the likeness of death, ensconced within self-hatred and decay as something to, like Sontag’s death theatre, turn inside-out. Doubles make this potent, campy inversion not only possible, but practical, even preferable inside alien costumes while interrogating and negotiating power and trauma inside the shadow zone; or as my thesis argues—re (“Interrogating Power through Your Own Camp”):

good play amounts to Gothic poetics as a potent means of regaining control through reclaimed implements of terror (the manacle, castle, rapist, slur or baton, etc) but also being that which terrifies the state and its proponents to no end: a refusal to conform or obey […] Despite their poetic nature, performance and play are an absolutely potent means of expressing thus negotiating power through the Gothic mode (source).

Paradox, performance and play during ludo-Gothic BDSM, then, process Cartesian abuse through praxial synthesis, gradually achieving catharsis through a newfound perception of/reunion with nature as liberated from Cartesian models—the harvest freed from the knife.

[9] I.e., as Milton put it: ” Long is the way and hard, that out of Hell leads up to light.”

[10] Mary Wollstonecraft was commonly demonized as animal: “Brickbats hurled her way were pretty vicious, ‘a hyena in a petticoat,’ as well as the usual whore, vixen, emasculator of men” (source: Rosita Sweetman’s “Mary Wollstonecraft: ‘Hyena in a petticoat,'” 2017).

[11] Hip-hop/rap and metal historically are music of protest that has been recuperated over time. Like monsters (and generally in concert with more overt, fantastical forms), these musics demand reclamation by workers creating music to stand up for their own rights; likewise, dancing in slave culture and music should be used while exploitation and genocide are currently going on—any form of art-as-protest to make these abuses known. Genocide isn’t just death camps, but every abuse of power leading up to fascist hegemony that was permitted by those the Nazis emulated, including American police states and pro-police individuals within society at large consuming “neutral” media that attempts to commodify genocide/settler colonialism; e.g., Laura from Street Fighter V (exhibit 10b2; re: “Prey and Liberators“) but also Deejay as a black capitalist, smiling ear-to-ear from having “made it” out of the colony gutter.

Genocide is culture and societal death at a pace that is meant to be so large and gradual that it becomes normalized, denied and invisible. This bigotry must be challenged, including against so-called “progressive” branches of society and establishment politics; e.g., Rosario Dawson, a cis-queer person, abusing trans woman, Dedrek Finley (source: Derrick Clifton’s “Trans Man Details Abuse Allegations Against Rosario Dawson,” 2019). Solidarity is not refusing to punish the lesser of two evils while singing about them. And the singing must continue, lest history carry on much as it has. This includes demonizing the Left and its activists not simply as “fake” or “childish,” but as “terrorists” (or useless according to liberal moderates, who simultaneously rely on the Left for votes, but also insist they never did and never will:

There is no outcome to any election in the United States in which the Democratic Party acknowledges votes from Communists and thanks them for their grudging support. If the Democrat wins, the most that the Left gets is not a Republican, and is then discarded, ignored and mocked—at least until the next election when the Left is needed but somehow also not needed. It is always the leftists who are accused in the media of ruining the alliance, even though there is no real alliance and the disagreement is on both sides […] Our capitalist media will favor voices from those who support Capitalism [which the Left does not, making them terrorists in the eyes of both sides of establishment politics; source: Renegade Cut’s “2024 – Thoughts and Speculation,” 2023].)

The moment the singing stops, the abuse will continue unabated. So it must continue regardless of what is thought by either side of the American establishment.