This blog post is part of “All the World,” a sixth 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” (2024), as well as “Make It Real” for Volume One and “The Total Codex” for Volume Zero. Those promotions sought to promote and provide their respective volume’s individual pieces for easy public viewing in single-post form; re: for the Poetry Module, Undead Module and Demon Module, followed by my PhD and manifesto. “All the World,” by comparison, caps off my book series with a promotion for Volume Three; re: my Praxis 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 “All the World’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.
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.
Informed (Ironic) Consumption and De Facto Educators Using Parody and Parallel Space
Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale
Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don’t Create The Torment Nexus (source tweet).
—Alex Blechman, in a 2021 tweet
Picking up where “Half-Real: Recognizing And Performing Empathy” left off…
Critical thinking isn’t limited to singular positions. While de facto educators regularly serve as illustrators, models, critics and comedians, these separate roles often overlap. Their combined goal is to rehabilitate heteronormative consumers through informed consumption. We’ll explore these tactics through proletariat parody and parallel space before examining the symbiotic relationship shared between sex-positive artists and models—how their combined descriptive/appreciative sexuality upends the status quo through the process of reverse abjection. Lastly, we’ll explore some of the hurdles these educators face under Capitalism as a sex-coercive system: neoliberals, but also their appropriation of descriptive sexuality (which we’ll delve into more in the following subsection).
For the sex-positive individual, ironic consumption is where an informed consumer actively questions canon instead of dutifully consuming it. While this involves viewing sexuality and gender in a descriptive, appreciative manner, this first requires critical thinking in relation to material consumption as supplied by iconoclastic artists counter-cultivating the Superstructure (the elite own the means of production, but they can only regulate/cultivate the Superstructure—its cryptonymy and hauntologies. Totalitarianism is a progression towards total power, never its realization). These artists serve as de facto educators, teaching critical-thinking skills through extracurricular arrangements (like this book, or Giger’s artwork, see above): They aren’t taught in primary school; they are accessed through ironic consumption and counterculture media as sporadically available, but also optional (and gatekept by neoliberals privatizing secondary education).
Not all critical-thinking skills rely exclusively on descriptive sexuality to foster empathy (though they can). Two such methods are
- parody (from Sean Young’s earlier Blade Runner photo: “haha, that cigarette is a penis”)
- pastiche through liminal expression, often inside parallel spaces (from the same photo: “The world that Sean Young’s character inhabits can be a parallel, Vaporwave space that mocks the authoritarian nature of 1980s Capitalism, visually appreciating ’80s corporate aesthetics while isolating them from destructive corporate ideology.”)
Both are material responses to the status quo as a structure. We’ll briefly explore how before moving onto descriptive sexuality as a potential ingredient.
Proletarian parody is a form of play that reduces totalitarian influence by making it the direct target of fun. It’s a mistake to assume this fun occurs through pure nonsense, though. Rather, parody often relies on solid theory to poke fun at serious topics (exploitation of the masses). By comparison, the things they’re making fun of generally argue through dogma and force.
For a good example of academic theory versus dogma and violence, consider Monty Python’s 1969 “Constitutional Peasants” skit. The scene transports us to the hauntological medieval past where Dennis, a 37-year-old peasant, tells Arthur how Arthur became king: by exploiting the workers, specifically the “dated imperialist dogma which perpetuates the economic and social differences [of Great Britain].” This is all very true, but also incredibly funny because of how anachronistic it sounds. Completely baffled by Dennis’ Marxist jargon, the cognitively estranged Arthur responds with feudal dogma—except his arguments clearly make no sense! That’s the joke, which our de facto educators are using under hauntological circumstances to make a larger point about Capitalism.
Much of the scene’s critical bite comes from its night-and-day comparison between Marxist academic theory and the Divine Right of Kings, the down-trodden peasant exposing the annoying monarch for the daffy fraud[1] that he is. Dennis hilariously calls Arthur out, saying “Listen: Strange women lying in ponds, distributing swords is no basis for a system of government!” He even repeats this several times, swapping out nouns for emphasis. Enraged, Arthur attacks Dennis, then leaves—frustrated, but thoroughly convinced that he’s won the exchange: by rubbing Dennis’ lowly station (re: peasant) in his face.
It’s worth noting that, while the “Constitutional Peasants” scene continues to be remembered decades later, those recalling it do so inconsistently. Yes, Dennis’ polemic was made for laughs (and supported by theory performed onscreen by Oxford and Cambridge graduates); he’s also evoked by 21st century conservatives who unironically spout “Help, help! I’m being repressed!” as something to literally merchandise. As part of this bad-faith material scheme, they project their political targets onto Arthur, conflating social-sexual activists with tyrants while their own bourgeois, colonized parody reduces Dennis to a single, self-pitying slogan (aka the reactionary victim complex; The Kavernacle’s “The Right’s Victim Complex,” 2022]. Not only are these shallow readings selective; they’re woefully out-of-joint. They allot standard, not parallel space, into the parodic framework.
As stated during the companion glossary, parallel space (or language) works off the anti-totalitarian notion of “parallel societies“: “A [society] not dependent on official channels of communications, or on the hierarchy of values of the establishment.” While state media/Superstructure is inherently manipulative in a cryptic sense, the creative responses to this manipulation invoke parallel spaces where politically-savvy artists can exist: New Order’s Hacienda nightclub, their postpunk, disco-in-disguise an invitation to escape Margaret Thatcher’s bogus, decaying England by imagining something better out on the dance floor (a none-too-subtle allusion to Fisher’s “Acid Communism”): marching to the beat of their own drum as part of a disjointed collective combatting state abuses, power and lies. State chronotopes aren’t simply illusions, but mental “thought prisons” that tuck the larger hidden barbarity of transgenerational power abuse and lies behind words-that-hide in a colonizing manner—complicit cryptonyms for those who view and administer them through the language of commercial goods: canonical personal property. X marks the spot, showing what is both revealed and closed off!
Whereas mainstream/state media blind and trap the mind, New Order demonstrates that parallel spaces seek to emancipate the mind using language and techniques pilfered from the state; the spaces they offer are often hauntological, presenting a once-upon-a-time that “could be” but never actually existed, except in the minds of those who try to envision it. I say “try” because these minds are already burdened with a pre-existing idea: a “better time” supplied by those in power, who buttress it with unfair material conditions (more on this in Chapter Two). Although New Order was painfully young and partied hard, their iconoclastic behavior was nevertheless made in response to old ghouls like Thatcher—thievishly “re-liberalizing” Britain for personal gain (and lying through her teeth[2] every chance she got).
In early ’90s, New Order’s Hacienda went bankrupt, sold for loft space (which I saw during my stay in Manchester). The band’s emancipatory hauntology didn’t fail because it was universally unethical; it failed because the band themselves were hilariously poor[3] businessmen who did drugs a little too often. Even so, the academic theory behind the club was sound, but also valid: Margaret Thatcher was a ruthless neoliberal who gutted England’s Labor Movement (citing her greatest achievement as “Tony Blair and New Labor” [Oleg Komlik’s “Thatcherism’s greatest achievement,” 2018] because she forced her opponents—the British working class—to change their minds and help tow the British neoliberal line); New Order offered a parallel space that that undermined the original crypt through a troubling presence of decay amid hedonistic joy (source: Mahatma Grandig’s Quora answer to “Do Post-Punk Songs Have the Same Political Overtones as Punk?” 2016). Canonical spaces aren’t wonderlands, but fallible and corrupt—built on plausible deniability and outright lies that must be exposed by reflecting critically upon the historio-material decay they reliably produce, then imagining something better through media as an instructional, transgenerational device.
New Order and Monty Python both worked within Capitalism to critique Capitalism, funding their magnum opuses the Hacienda and The Holy Grail through music profits (the Beatles’ George Harrison donated $400,000 so The Holy Grail could be made, and New Order financed the Hacienda* through their record label, Factory Records). Despite their modest budgets, these creations were still financed from somewhere. More to the point, both projects are still remembered decades later as an effective means of counterculture parody and parallel space, which inform future material imaginings, retrospections and forays into abjected territories in pursuit of something beyond Capitalism (abjection must be approached and combatted, which we’ll examine more at the end of the chapter and for the remainder of the book).
Though no strangers to sexual material, both Monty Python and New Order seldom default to sex. Even so, their “alternate routes” helped consumers deprogram, thus break away from canonical mentalities tied to sexuality. In turn, their consumers could potentially move widespread material consumption (and inspire future production) in a more sex-positive direction. The key to this breakthrough is hauntological disillusionment, exhibiting older styles recreated for new purposes, thereby turning them into a powerful tool of critical engagement: the critique of canonical icons and aesthetics.
Canon is not sacred, or even ethical. It’s simply the status quo, the will of the elite as normalized. In sex-positive terms, this normalization also can be challenged through descriptive sexuality as a means of performative nuance—something to ironically consume through teachers using their bodies to personify the lesson: i.e., “Genuine self-expression can exist under Capitalism, co-existing as a means of emancipatory profit and material critique.” Often, this iconoclastic tutelage occurs through positive sex work—not just “tasteful” (modest) nudity but gratuitous bodily displays meant to produce genuine erotic responses in other laborers viewing them: quite literally NSFW—Not Safe For (bourgeois-sanctioned) Work!
Under Capitalism, sex work is generally portrayed as “lazy” and corruptive of workers more generally (“women weaken legs”). By breaking with the shameful conventions of a Protestant work ethic, de facto educators reclaim their bodies and rail against the bourgeoisie’s raw material advantage by using what they got. Not everyone is born with a silver spoon in their mouth, but everyone is born with a body. Work it!
(artist: Maya Mochii)
Sex-positive artists lead by example. Their bodies aren’t just objects in artistic displays; they represent subjects, often autographically according to a carefully chosen aesthetic. For example, many sex workers have a logo or brand associated with their bodies, whose various images and videos constitute their artwork being a morphological extension of themselves, their descriptive sexualities and genders tied to hauntological parody and parallel space. These topics involve ideologies framed through artistic expression more broadly—a persona within an intentionally dated artistic movement (“the big-titty goth GF,” see above/next page) or highly idiosyncratic[4] forms of sexual activity commonly illustrated through criminal-hauntological sex work: kinks, fetishes, and BDSM (more on this criminalization in Chapter Two). The steamer Susu, for example, often combines anecdotal humor with “goth” aesthetics attained with improved material conditions, using both to communicate broader sex-positive ideas (susu_jpg spam’s “Ocean of Booba,” 2022). But such things are generally overshadowed by psychosexual harm as something to camp; re: Maya Mochii. Humor and sex are modular, not mutually exclusive.
(artist: Maya Mochii)
Under sex-coercive conditions, the elite exploit workers by stealing their labor in non-consensual ways. Under sex-positive conditions, sex workers embody critical thought by sexualizing it as a means of communication. They then use this sexualized art to promote empathy for themselves through a mutually consensual arrangement. Self-expression and commodification aren’t mutually exclusive concepts; an individual sex worker can still choose to self-fetishize to generate profit (or achieve a desired sex response from a client or partner), improving their material conditions while recognizing and discouraging the sexist nature of sexual objectification at a systemic level.
As we’ve already touched upon, these power relations are incredibly complex, but also vast. This makes them extremely hard to communicate through single-body images with zero font. This includes pin-up art, but dialogue-lite mediums like erotic video and performance art more generally. For the sex-positive iconoclast, the aim shouldn’t be direct communication via pin-up art in isolation (even when its bodies are descriptive and appreciative), but something perceived as much through negative reactions towards the troublesome art itself: the sexist audience wringing their hands. “It is not the spoon that bends, but yourself.”
This “bending” can be Arthur, King of the Britons; Hernando’s homophobic dunce, or your garden variety TERF/SWERF. In either case, the lessons that iconoclasts offer beget from emancipatory education as socialized. While iconoclasts are often privileged (Monty Python went to Oxford and Cambridge and Hernando was a professor), the fact remains that anyone can be sex-positive, can express basic human rights through hauntological art. Totalitarian societies are generally resisted by rebellious citizens with relatively little material power, but still possess some degree of privilege compared to less unfortunate groups. Given the right lessons, these rebels can help society move away from the status quo, counter-cultivating the Superstructure out of the crypt and into sex-positive territories through emancipatory variants of famous hauntologies: parodies of, and parallel societies within, the Gothic—its monsters, atrocities and haunts.
Much of this transformative potential lies in the power of the human body as something to describe in ambivalent material language (which has room for parody and parallel space among sex workers). Few things are as regulated or provocative, especially when said body is “incorrectly” portrayed. In this case, correctness pertains to prescriptive societal norms: what reactionaries think is right and what the bourgeoisie finance. Whether on purpose or by accident, iconoclastic statements provoke these people for a variety of reasons: to change minds, make money or entertain (often all three). This isn’t to incense reactionaries in isolation, but involve them in the process of consuming and creating art as a larger social process: the process of abjection.
Put simply, abjection is the rejection of assigned abnormalities to cultivate a normalized status. This process isn’t a one-way street; it goes in either direction, towards or away from normality. Capitalists abuse the means of production to brute-force the appearance of “normal” through abjection. They maintain this charade for as long as possible, exploiting workers behind a neoliberal veil that shames them and their bodies while keeping them enslaved and unimaginative. The only way to lift the veil is to reverse the process that created it, reclaiming worker bodies and their bodily functions through social-sexual means that reimagine parallel hauntologies: descriptive sexuality as something to ironically perform and appreciate through Gothic ambivalence—i.e., BDSM, kinks, and fetishes (generally sprinkled with a variety of emotional “spices”).
The next several subsections explore atypical sexual performance through abjection-reversal, criminal hauntology and appreciative irony in greater detail. For now, think of reverse abjection as a black mirror that exposes the viewer’s abusive tendencies—an especially handy device when countering the elite’s privatization of sexual labor as xenophobic. Privatization is generally normalized through automated abjection, shaming workers collectively while driving them to work as hard as possible in heteronormative, unimaginative ways (the cookie cutter approach). Iconoclasts reverse abjection to make sexist people self-reflect in transformative ways about Patriarchal Capitalism. This occurs by forcing sexist into various telling responses that highlight a sex-positive, xenophilic lesson through reverse abjection. Abjection normally triggers a cultural “gag reflex” or “defecation response”: shock and disgust at coercively demonized hauntologies. The idea is to throw that back at the viewer—to redirect their revulsion towards their own dogmatic beliefs (and the hauntological crypts that produce them) rather than any dogmatic scapegoats. By humiliating the tool of their own mental imprisonment, sexist people can replace their shameful stances with empathic ones. Worker rights, body positivity, and sexist label reclamation overwrite their harmful opposites: the worker repression, body-shaming and unironic sexist language of heteronormative canon as carceral, crypt-like.
(artist: Andy Golub)
In other words, reverse abjection seeks to undermine anything that normalizes state apathy and violence against marginalized groups. This process occurs not just through sex worker bodies, but any sex-positive artistic role: models, photographers, biographers, illustrators, etc. Like Hernando’s classroom, this performative “chain” is holistic, communal: A sex-positive artist, for example, can draw non-cis-het bodies by selecting real-world examples to model for them (so-called palimpsest bodies). Their discerning gaze demonstrates two radical ideas: that gender, sex and performance are
- entirely separate
- highly variable, arbitrary and fluid concepts that individual people can self-mold according to their own desires and preferences, all without infringing on the rights of others (re: positive freedom) within working relationships/labor exchanges that involve sex or the material expression of sex
In either case, their combined demonstration occurs through gender trouble created in the real world, not abstract ideas dislocated from material reality. Radical ideas intersect with socio-economic norms, highlighting traditional boundaries that serve as focal points for abjection. In terms of active rebellion, abjection is the refusal to imagine outlawed forms of thought that challenge the status quo. For radical ideas to replace cultural disgust, thus have any impact on society at large, they must initially co-exist alongside seemingly incompatible norms before ultimately replacing them. In this manner, counterculture serves as a revival of emancipatory imagination, hitherto pacified by Capitalism’s carceral hauntologies enshrining the public imagination inside a cryptic Superstructure.
Said replacement involves a great deal of consumer nuance, but also tolerance. As something to criticize through ironic consumption, problematic sexuality is expelled by a horrifying proposition: that one’s nostalgic worldview is monstrous and infantilizing. Sexist people don’t see themselves as sexist, but holy and righteous. So this Promethean revelation has to arrive through transformative, underhanded self-reflection (the twist, in writing terms). In this manner, sex-positive artists/models motivate heteronormative consumers to change their problematic consumption habits by creating surprise pathways for iconoclastic introspection. This includes parody and parallel space, but also descriptive/appreciative sexuality in hauntological art. All three can alter how canon is viewed, consumed and digested, cultivating an empathetic audience whose collective imagination ultimately favors mutual consent within a larger, sexist world (until one day that world is changed for the better).
(source: “Head-Crushing In Search of Darkness Documentary Trailer Goes All in on 80s Horror,” 2018)
As a linguo-material approach, abjection is perilous in either direction; the current power structure will defend itself, attacking countercultural proponents and their material extensions in various ways that nevertheless draw attention to its own structural failings: systemic abuse. We’ll examine these more, including abjection as a reactionary mode, from Chapter 2 onward. For now, consider how reactionaries generally attack sex-positive critical analysis for being the death of canonical “fun,” unable to see the paradoxical joy in critiquing what you consume, especially media with criminalized-hauntological sexual elements (the moral panic of 1980s slasher films, for example). These same detractors fail to understand how guilty pleasures[5] can be safely enjoyed in private (many slasher movies are tongue-in-cheek).
Likewise, private consumption habits can easily become public, making it a question of optics. If this private consumption becomes public knowledge, there needs to be a sex-positive lesson to impart—that is, the iconoclast needs to promote public awareness about the sex-coercive and sex-positive elements being exposed. Neither is black-and-white. They manifest ambivalently to a matter of degree in the ambiguous grey area, requiring their careful exploration on an individual basis.
To escape the crypt of the bourgeoisie Superstructure, sex positivity needs to expand inside sexist culture by tampering with historically sexist media. Sadly, sex teachers are often shamed, but also killed for being sexually descriptive/appreciative (a common reaction to reverse abjection is reactive violence and abuse, which we’ll explore in Chapters Two and Five). But even if sexism were reduced to acceptable levels, educators would still have to remain constantly vigilant, lest history repeat itself through a return to carceral forms that spell real-world violence (the harvest of the fascist, which we’ll briefly examine in Chapter Two before exploring it in greater detail in Chapter Four). To this, they mustn’t combat individual sexists, but the source of those persons’ sexism and abject moral panic: Capitalism, but also its assigned champions (neoliberals) and blackguards (fascists) that weaponize hauntology in faith.
We’ll explore fascists more during Chapter 4, including how neoliberals defend fascists in moderate-centrist ways. For now, simply know that neoliberals more broadly defend the free market, hiding the abject nature of their own illusions in the process. They do this by appropriating feminist ideas of mutual consent, descriptive sexual and cultural appreciation into a “queer friendly” label they can exploit with impunity. These “stickers” of Rainbow Capitalism recuperate any anti-Capitalist ideas that pop into existence, specifically so the elite can turn a quick, unethical buck. If they can profit by recuperating feminism, including trans activism, they will, but Capitalism’s underlying design remains the same: profit above all else, achieved through the exploitation of sex workers by shrinking their imaginations with, what Bo Burnham in Inside (2021), would call “brand awareness”:
I don’t know about you guys, but, um, you know, I’ve been thinking recently that… that you know, maybe, um, allowing giant digital media corporations to exploit the neurochemical drama of our children for profit… You know, maybe that was, uh… a bad call by us. Maybe… maybe the… the flattening of the entire subjective human experience into a… lifeless exchange of value that benefits nobody, except for, um, you know, a handful of bug-eyed salamanders in Silicon Valley… Maybe that as a… as a way of life forever… maybe that’s, um, not good.
I’m… horny.
Global US hegemony under neoliberalism means that sex-positive re-education must be performed under late-stage Capitalism. Sexualized artwork is already colonized, and any lesson will intersect with material consumption as
- fundamentally unethical
- symbolically loaded/interpreted to enforce profit through various marketing strategies that are inherently sexist
I don’t condone the first fact, but individuals also have no power to replace Capitalism on their own (sex-positivity is a group effort). The second fact is merely a reality of dialectics-within-Capitalism more broadly. Materials, including hauntological materials, function within competing ideologies that borrow and use the same language to generate profit as a means of visibility. Money talks, even for Communists; but so do icons that reliably produce wealth—so-called “money-makers”: the butt, boobs, breasts and other parts of the (often female) human body.
Meanwhile the penis, and the pleasure it depicts during arousal, penetration, and climax—the “money shot” during the 1970s and ’80s as the so-called “Golden Age of porn”—is incredibly overrepresented in heterosexual pornography at large (re: exhibit 32a, “Knife Dicks“). Though Swapnil Rose writes how apparently Willem Dafoe’s penis in Antichrist was so big it “confused” screening audiences, “requiring” the director to reshoot the scene with a less-endowed stunt double (source: “The bizarre story of how Willem Dafoe…” 2020). This tracks with the penis itself as a cryptonym of sorts—i.e., something to hide, but also that which constant discussions about hides various embarrassing truths: an endless source of guilt, shame and jokes, with many men feeling inadequate through their penises by failing to “measure up” to the monolithic standard (the quiet part remains unsaid for most men, who are socially conditioned to not talk about their feelings).
Nevertheless, the use of either organ can allow for incredibly morphologically diverse hauntologies, which we’ll examine, along with revolutionary cryptonymy (disguises go both ways) in the “Transgender Persons, Intersexuality and Drag” subsection of Chapter 3. Think the “Trojan Bunny” from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, except Gothic, busty and Communist—a furry alter-ego: “No Commie war vaginas, here. Just us ‘bunnies.'” Whereas we explored in Volume Two how many stigma animals are reviled for being physically dangerous by state proponents (whose own veneer of strength is actually a veil for their cowardice and paranoia), prey animals are stigmatized, thus bullied for being weak and feminine; but if Jordan Peele’s exploration of prey animal violence in his race- and class-conscious works is any indication, the prey animal as something to assign to historically targeted groups can be used to express their traumas (e.g., Art Spiegelman’s Maus, 1986), subsequently striking fear into the hearts of their would-be hunters. This can happen while concealing the strength of the person wearing the disguise; i.e., as a kind of code that advertises what they’re really about for fellow conspirators: an uncanny cross between the wolf and the rabbit, but also something to underestimate for not being pure and authentic, mistaken for a servant in ways those with low emotional intelligence cannot fathom or know how to handle (animalized qualities can also be assigned to Amazons and other playful forms of revolutionary cryptonomy by which to convert hypervigilance and a sense of always being hunted to actually having a good deal of fun, which we’ll examine in Chapter Five).
(exhibit 65: Model and artist: Keighla and Persephone van der Waard. Keighla markets herself as an educated stay-at-home cutie with self-marketed “mom bod.” It’s literally part of her marketing technique. I drew this for them as something we negotiated together.)
The paradox—of a sex-positive Communist making money by drawing erotic art/porn—is not lost on me. However, I also understand that we, as individuals, become invisible in the absence of material conditions. I also know that minds are changed through language as already-coded and defended by those in power. Whereas power aggregates to defend material interests for the elite, Marxists-within-Capitalism specifically generate wealth as a means to critique formal power by disguising as proponents of it (“When in Rome…”): to recode the Superstructure, altering the Base in ways that give workers the means to liberate themselves… while also making it fun? If the Count can declare, “Counting is fun!” so can I with hauntology and cryptonymy. Hauntology and cryptonymy—specifically emancipatory/revolutionary variants—are fun. Universally ethical people love nostalgia, monsters and sex; they also love being tied up, “abused,” and made to wear furry costumes provided it’s mutually consensual (or at the very least fighting for mutual consent as a basic human right).
Emancipation through these devices includes selling body positivity to express mutual consent. However, it also involves engagement with body negativity by granting viewers special perspective. The iconoclast explains cultural bias to the audience before directing them at historical markers of persecution. This demonstrates the viewpoint not only as harmful, but one that many in the audience already have.
This second function is our aforementioned black mirror. Sex positivity uses reverse-abject self-reflection to undermine the Patriarchy as an ideological structure, treating iconoclasm as the process of abjection in reverse. The aim is to advertise bodies outside the established norm: piercings, tattoos, skin color, hair color, hair length, body hair, muscle, alternate body types, and various other attributes that pointedly cause gender trouble—not to sow discord for the sake of it, but to break the spell of sexist Enlightenment thinking by critically engaging with Modernity through proletarian praxis, including gender parody. To do this deliberately is to foster a movement beyond Modernity (the Enlightenment) and its harmful ideologies, carceral hauntology included: Gothic Communism. Carceral hauntology includes sanctioned violence, formal power defending itself through hostile reactionaries whose tiny imaginations expand hatefully in mortal fear of progressive, emancipatory change (the latter often framed as “naïve” or “envious” by men like Nietzsche and his Apollonian/Dionysian dichotomy—the psychomachy of gendered reason-versus-chaos. As far as I’m concerned, Nietzsche kind of sucks).
We’ve discussed how informed consumption is sex-positive because it highlights canonical abjection as carceral towards the public imagination. Let’s further examine descriptive sexuality and reverse abjection as a means of confronting these problems, targeting the hidden atrocities cryptically enshrined in Gothic canon (re: the ghost of the counterfeit during the dialectic of the alien).
Onto “Reversing Abjection: Describing Sexuality vs Prescribing Sexual Modesty“!
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] If hating on the monarchy seems quaint, remember that monarchy worship is alive and well (Hasan’s “Everything Wrong With The Queen EXPLAINED,” 2022). The lasting legacy of the monarchy needs to be challenged, but also neoliberalism as an extension of power worship through the bourgeoisie.
[2] These lies include repositioning wealth behind the scenes and fudging the numbers to the British public (“What We Get Wrong About Neoliberalism,” timestamp: 10:49); as well as abusing state power through a militarized police force to achieve pacification through class warfare (John the Duncan’s “Neoliberalism: Class War and Pacification,” 2021) then disguising all of this. Fear, dogma and lies, the historio-material outcome hauntologically outlined by New Order and Monty Python, but even more aggressively by Derek Jarman’s artistic panache/queer splendor in The Last of England (1987).
[3] For a fascinating read, consider Peter Hook’s The Haçienda: How Not to Run a Club (2009).
[4] This idiosyncrasy extends to the artist drawing the model, who, by drawing them in descriptively sexual/appreciative ways, communicates their own preference in kinks, fetishes and BDSM practices. This includes mutual consent as being a turn-on (versus a lack of consent, which for sex-coercive proponents, is a turn-on: sexual abuse isn’t about mutually consensual sex and pleasure; it’s about power and control being entirely in the hands of the abuser).
[5] For me, guilty pleasures include camp, shlock, and trash that fail on purpose, but also less conscious forms of either. As I write in (“My Least Favorite Horror Movies?” (2020):
…what are my least favorite horror movies and why? To answer this question, I’ll have to talk about movies more generally. Unfortunately, if you asked me which movies these were by name, I wouldn’t be able to tell you what they were. This is because, in my experience, even the so-called “worst movies of all time” generally have something to offer. Case in point, I grew up watching Plan Nine from Outer Space (1959). That movie is instantly special for having been such a horrible failure for all the right reasons. Yes, it’s awful; but as Susan Sontag might put it, it fails in a way as to be enjoyed for the attempt, and for how seriously it was embarked upon (source).
However, guilty pleasures mean something completely different in regards to purity culture, which we’ll explore more fully in Chapter Two.