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.
Reversing Abjection: Describing Sexuality vs Prescribing Sexual Modesty (feat. Alien)
Many men have a tendency to divide “love” into two components: an affectionate (and asexual) element; and a passionate (sexual) element. Furthermore, since the areas of affectionate and sexual love are fraught with complex emotions of guilt and anger, many men manage these difficult and (to their way of thinking) dangerous feelings by projecting them onto the women about them. Thus, through this process of projection, men may perceive the world as a place inhabited by two kinds of women: “good” women whom they idealize and who have no sensual desires (and for whom, of course, the men themselves feel no sexual longings); and “bad” women who are sexual by nature (and with whom it is permissible-perhaps even expected-to have sexual relations). This imaginative construct has come to be called the “Virgin/Whore” syndrome (source).
—Cynthia Griffin Wolff, “The Radcliffean Gothic Model” (1979)
(artist: Frau Haku)
We’ll return to Wolff and Radcliffe’s imperiled detectives much, much more in the Demon Module (e.g., “The Puzzle of “Antiquity” but also the entirety of “Exploring the Derelict Past“). Here, reversing abjection is a super important idea—effectively synonymous to reversing profit during the whore’s revenge/ludo-Gothic BDSM, “on the Aegis.” While “On Giving Birth” from my PhD would cement reverse abjection as something to explore more in Volume One and Two (re: “Everything sits within a cycle of imaginary history that plays out through an endless, genocidal mirroring that must, if it is to cease, be met with mirrors”), here is where the idea actually started. —Perse, 4/22/2025
Picking up where “Informed (Ironic) Consumption and De Facto Educators” left off…
In Volume Two, we examined the history of abjection within the Gothic; i.e., the Medusa as the ghost of the counterfeit, thus felt more and more as an emerging mode of monstrous-poetic discourse along Capitalism’s own emergence onto the world stage (re: “Vampire Capitalism”). I want to return to abjection as something to consider when generating our own creative successes during oppositional praxis under late-stage, neoliberal Capitalism; re: by hugging the alien/nature as monstrous-feminine as something that has been sold to us as “unhuggable” during the dialectic of the alien (re: “Some Prep When Hugging the Alien,” 2024).
As a precursor to those ideas, this piece explores simply reversing abjection, period (refer to my 2025 Metroidvania Corpus to see my full extensive body of work on the Alien franchise). To it, we’ll examine Alien yet again, using it as a popular staging point when thinking about how factors of sex positivity like descriptive sexuality are opposed by their heteronormative foils.
First, a mild refresher before we proceed: If abjection is a system of division that creates canonically demonic scapegoats, reverse abjection confronts their persecutors by subverting the language and the process into something more xenophilic than it was previously. By shaming the competitive nature of reactionary aggression, social-sexual activism aims to unify workers against Capitalism through cooperative measures: to imagine symbolic arrangements that undermine the status quo, whose bourgeois Superstructure abjects descriptive sexuality—how people choose to express themselves regardless of heteronormative rules, restrictions and omissions. Canonical abjection occurs through reactionary countermeasures that rely on heightened aggression to justify official (and stochastic) reprisals. By essentializing problematic sexuality through canon, the elite commodify moral panic in defense of sexual modesty; re: the conspicuously white, straight Radcliffean heroine threatened by dark rape as the go-to reactionary approach, celebrating the ghost of the counterfeit as “flavor” to spice up a Gothic jaunt: “Threats of ‘rape’ are part of the fun!”
Again, we’ll dissect and salvage Radcliffe in another book (re: “Radcliffe’s Refrain,” “Non-Magical Detectives,” “Dissecting Radcliffe” and “In Measured Praise of the Great Enchantress“). Here, we’re only isolating the reversal of abjection, period. For the rest of the subsection, then we’ll explore Radcliffe’s modesty dilemma in the 1979 horror movie, Alien: something to prescribe in reactionary fashion by presenting itself as hauntologically “under attack” by abject sexuality (namely the pure-white virgin threatened by a pitch-black attacker). Then, we’ll consider it’s broader relationship to proletarian praxis—not just abjection, but chronotopes, hauntology and cryptonymy as a colonized historio-material process that must be examined, recognized, and rebelled against using covertly clever countermeasures.
To be clear, abjection covers a wide range of topics besides just sexuality (social or political xenophobia, gerontophobia, etc). However, sexuality tends to intersect with all of them at various points. This mutability permits numerous interpretations when it comes to monsters, which—through the language of fear in powerful hands—function as compelled signifiers that regulate sex as a controlled substance. This hauntological role can be reversed while still being contested by both sides inside an ongoing linguo-material exchange.
(artist: Lord Mishkin)
Take Giger’s famous creature: Classic moral panic denotes it as a cosmic rapist/rape cryptonym, itching to peel away Ripley’s pale armor (of the Radcliffean, European-supremacist sort) with its dark claws during the liminal hauntology of war (the chronotope). However, a famous feminist counterexample turns Enlightenment misogyny against itself: the Archaic Mother. Less of an explicit argument and more of a vague, nebulous symbol whose social-politic stance can be interpreted in vastly different ways, the Archaic Mother is commonplace in Gothic fiction. Alien portrays the monster (an egg-laying parasite) as female and ancient, but also mightier than mankind. A kind of “wandering womb,” this murderous, hysterical entity sits closer to the primordial cycle of life and death: sexual reproduction as entirely irrational, emotional and animal, but also parthenogenetic (not requiring a male mate). Personifying this process, the monster actually challenges Patriarchal hegemony by appearing as its oldest, greatest bogeywoman inside a womb-like space, or a space to make womb-like: queen bitch of the universe (who Ripley would defeat in the Americanized sequel, Aliens, 1986).
In either case, Gothic performance invokes abjection within an oscillating dialogue about sex and gender made through borrowed terms: scary rape fear (Jameson’s class nightmare; re: Postmodernism) appears, which the token warrior nun fears and exorcises through exposure and force (re: the whore’s paradox). While the elite canonize descriptive sex (acts not tied exclusively to biological reproduction and patrilineal descent) as vacuously hideous (framing them as disposable pastiche that anyone can consume), sex-positive workers reverse this “gag reflex” as a moral position within the same overarching conversation: sex purely for pleasure, but also liberation from outdated, coercive norms that celebrate the troubling toleration of hidden barbarity as something to celebrate as “zesty!”
The larger, warring dialogue actually invokes positive and negative feelings (attraction and repulsion) through ambivalent, liminal markers: the monster, the woman, the castle, the blood sacrifice as hauntologically summoned. Yes, they historically convey cultural anxieties and phobias regarding sexuality and the human body as classically forbidden, but they needn’t have to be. Instead, cordoning them off is an attempt to prevent their study by proponents of Capitalism, who use sex-coercive doubles of these things to generate coercive fear that maintains the current order of things: carceral hauntology and consent towards its imprisoning worldview as cryptonymically manufactured in times of constant impending crisis—tremendous, obfuscating distractions, in other words.
Hauntology—especially under Capitalism—is fractally recursive, a creature of chaos whose many-different incarnations spring from specific material factors relating back and forth from moment to moment. This leads to different hauntology types, and many “different” near-plagiarizations whose traced, uncertain lineage constitutes a singular hauntological type.
(exhibit 66: Artist, right: Frank Frazetta; source, left—note: The similarities between the box art for Castlevania, 1986, and Frazetta are hard to ignore, but also part of a common practice in the 1980s and ’90s [source: Arcade Sushi’s “25 Stolen Images in Video Games, 2016] that saw videogame designers blatantly ripping off movie posters and production stills left and right. Nevertheless, the mysterious artist for Konami’s original box design continues to go uncredited. Within this scheme, the role of the hero is a flexible one: the white knight versus the black knight, the black knight as romanticized in a toxic criminal hauntology, the man facing the ghost of the Numinous, or the crusader attacking the degenerate; etc. And all of it a necromantic dance within the ruins that furthers the monomyth as a legitimate form of state violence that can be reclaimed, but just as often isn’t.)
One such type is liminal hauntology. We’ve already discussed liminality and hauntology separately in Volumes One and Two. However, as the companion glossary stipulated, liminal spaces—in architectural terms—are designed to be passed through. The same is true inside Neo-Gothic architecture and its colossal wrecks/chronotopes (exhibit 5c, 5d, 64c). However, the effect is anisotropic; re: different per direction traveled when examined through a bourgeois or a proletarian lens. Advertised by empty-like museums that denote a reimagined barbaric past, the Gothic chronotope is something to visit and experience that, when moved through, communicates various signature emotions tied to the underworld, its presence felt by nebulous, imprecise markers and tremendous feelings beyond everyday existence. In short, liminal hauntologies are visited, generally after being dug up and reassembled; re: Jameson’s “archaeologies,” they’re visitors from the reimagined past, thresholds that arrive. For our purposes, they are regular symptoms of Capitalism-in-crisis, whereupon the dividing membranes become thin, transparent and fragile, and through which the ghost of the counterfeit may be felt and demands for something better potentially be made.
I say “potentially” because such demands must be made in the presence of shadowy doubles, these potentially complicit (which depends entirely on how people use them) cryptonyms leading to a great deal of confusion inside and outside of the text. Capitalism, for instance, is invested in a lack of material change, generating pacifying illusions that keep things materially the same. This “transference” extends to an exchange of material goods—hand-outs from the exhibit to those passing through. For example, Halloween’s candy-like effigies and costumes make for carceral nostalgia—cheap, sugary treats that distract children from larger issues like American genocide, all while coding them to respond to present-day reactionary markers of persecution (more on this briefly in Chapter Two and Chapter Three, and in greater detail during Chapter Four). A common visual outcome, then, is movement through their childhood homes, all while surrounded by other children doubling as otherworldly visitors codified under Capitalism: spirits, monsters, scapegoats who have passed through the barrier of the past into the present. As a byproduct of American neoliberal consumerism, Halloween is a cryptonymic, franchised commodity that encourages passive consumption, bent on quick, child-like gratification in the face of perceived evils made into masks that distract from the real perils under them (we’ll return to the idea of masks in Chapter Four): the status quo as perfidious.
For FOX to even frame the “eighth passenger” as a hideous violator of pure maidens inside a liminal space that FOX sell as bourgeois (despite the Nostromo spacecraft being rife with neoliberal criticism). To treat Alien and its monster as bourgeois, FOX must sell it to an audience whose literacy only continues to climb with better access to publicized information about sex. The studio’s sexism therefore involves a highly specific framing that doesn’t hold up under intense, humanizing scrutiny—not just the guy in the suit, but their performance as connected to, if not aligned with, monstrous socio-sexual norms tied to the space itself as a parallel Gothic chronotope. Regardless, these coerced viewpoints exist as part of the equation when looking at the creature as an artistic legacy (much like Hernando’s homophobic student got their ideas from sexist sources). Luckily the creature itself is more ambivalent, nebulously inviting interpretations that aren’t strictly endorsed by those in power. While the elite funded Alien to invite abjection as a means of sexual control, they can’t force moral panic onto critically-educated consumers who feel the enormous weight of Capitalism’s hidden abuses beyond a cryptonymic veil/ghost of the counterfeit.
(artist: Char Something)
This degree is variable, but especially holds true for groups targeted by canonical abuse: women as witches, and other historically scapegoated groups that serve as “oracles”—spiritual-symbolic guides between the world of the living and the world of the abject, of nightmares, of the damned, etc; but especially as secret-keepers of buried past knowledge, their “magical” predictions, in Marxist terms, commenting on a historical-material “loop” that power has covered up. As symbols of female power, witches are the prototypical feminist. “Good” witch or “bad” witch isn’t visually black and white, then; it depends entirely on who they align with—for or against Capitalism, in our case (which can be disguised in either direction; we’ll explore this concept in relation to TERFs, during Chapter 4, disguising themselves as “witches” in bad-faith; and real-life witches dressed up in consumes that pass them off as tolerable commercial fakeries, in Chapter 5).
Beyond education, part of the reason simply lies in the method of prescription: the invitation to look at taboo things that are commonly sold to consumers as a means of bourgeois control. By showing the viewer an image that can be critically explored, the elite need an uncritical audience to defend canonical counterfeits as authentic. But even those outside of the Humanities can generally observe a curious paradox: Behind the Black Veil, the monster isn’t as hideous as they were led to believe. In fact, it’s actually quite beautiful (“I admire its purity.”), unmistakably sexualized and entirely surreal. Hence all the smoke, mist and darkness to conceal the monster’s “real identity” in the original, 1979 picture: the false pretense of a petrifying mirror. This occurs through an obscured, dirty lens, pointed at a forbidden target that’s meant to terrify the uneducated. Look at it, FOX argues, but only long enough to keep you scared stupid.
This purity culture is FOX playing with fire. Their prescription—that descriptive sexuality is intrinsically repulsive—only holds up if the audience takes the horror narrative at face value (re: the monster is a cosmic rapist). The room for appreciative irony cannot be fully suppressed, allowing iconoclastic narratives to emerge through emancipatory hauntology as a form of political allegory (more on this at the end of Chapter Two). Despite Ripley flushing the monster out the airlock—rejecting it like an aborted fetus, attempted rape, or piece of shit—the monster remains ambivalent, displaying a chaotic potential: to be any of these things depending on how it’s framed, but also performed. These combined variables guide viewers towards politically desired interpretations, the outcome incumbent on the performer’s own agenda.
Now that we’ve outlined the larger systemic framework abjection takes place inside, let’s examine the abjectors—the elite whose desires course through a particular vein, like Alien‘s modesty narrative—and the sex-positive performers whose rebellious imaginations use the same ambivalent visual language to reverse the flow of abjection. Rather than treat the ghost of the counterfeit as pure product “fluffery” (the act of up-selling material goods), iconoclasts deliberately give voice to the unspeakable by scrutinizing these atrocities at a human level: to humanize historic icons of persecution. They do this by reclaiming “slutty” or “wicked” signifiers, ironically transforming them into sexy fashion statements and other appreciative symbols and spaces[1] of sexual freedom/material advantage (we’ll explore this behavior and foils more in Chapters Two and Three). Doing so, sex workers disarm their historical function as didactic instruments of public shame and guilt, countering the elite’s capacity for social-sexual abuse under Capitalism at the linguo-material level.
(artist: Cherry Blossom)
Sex workers achieve reverse abjection by meaningfully presenting themselves as sexually attractive and autonomous cultivators of sex-positive sentiment. Cherry Blossom, for example, is a sex worker who makes her own rules; she has her own OnlyFans, and specifically states for all to read:
“No hardcore or explicit nude content of my pussy (🐱❌) I work with topless nudes and teasing pics and vids. I love to be cute, provocative and feel comfortable and confident showing my body!”
Through her art, Cherry illustrates descriptive sexuality as the setting of personal boundaries. These boundaries outline what she, as an individual performer, is willing to consensually display in the larger social-sexual market. This liberation isn’t something to merely describe, but appreciate within a larger hauntological mode: “oracle” bodies that present forbidden sexual knowledge during everyday material production and consumption, including the idea that bodies can be controlled by workers (and don’t try to attach all women to one particular form of demonized knowledge: i.e., women only know abject knowledge, specifically the knowledge of life and death as learned through sexual reproduction and the struggles of childbirth).
By comparison, the status quo sells sex through prescriptively coercive, non-consensual displays. Sigourney Weaver didn’t agree to being fetishized by her male bosses. This tracks with how the elite regulate canon by invoking paradoxical modesty that manipulates target consumers through moral manic: a pure body whose chastity must be preserved no matter what. By presenting sex as “modest enough” and attaching it to lucrative projects, the elite transmute modesty as a neoliberal virtue—a kind of tightrope where the selling of regulated sex becomes the worship of capital: As a particular arrangement of moral panic, Alien reliably
- makes the elite a profit.
- grants them substantial bargaining power through the spontaneous acquisition of raw wealth.
What’s more, this profitability can be advertised alongside hauntological media that upholds social virtues in the face of threatened modesty. Alien, for example, earned the studio a lot of money. While viewers recall this rags-to-riches story about FOX, they don’t remember how FOX famously refused to pay out, citing a lack of profit (re: Charles’ Schreger’s “The ‘Alien’ Papers: Can a $100-Million Film Lose Money?” 1980), they remember the haunted house and Gothic shenanigans it contains. Regardless, the studio had gained themselves a lot of capital to work with (and a future franchise to toy around with). They did this as a giant company would: by prescribing sexuality through a moral panic that targeted a large conservative base, said base would unironically payout big for canon to console themselves with. Having the numbers to back this up, FOX hedged their bets did so despite hauntology requiring cryptonyms whose linguistic ambiguities can swing the entire exercise in a sex-positive direction (the elite want cryptonymy to be carceral-complicit, but can no more own this process than they can the Superstructure; they can only prepare, groom and encourage).
This consumption occurred through Sigourney Weaver as someone to advertise (with her becoming a de facto scream queen of retro-future horror in the process). Except her body is fairly anomalous. She’s not a short, skinny woman in the prescriptive sense; she’s descriptively tall, square-jawed and flat-flanked. In fact, she looks less like a dainty (and inoffensive) classic Gothic heroine, and more like Charlotte Dacre’s Victoria: masculine and violent, ready to throw down and make war as a war boss/queen bitch. According to Ridley Scott, the company president chose to make Ripley a woman (Tom Chapman, 2020).
Progressive optics aside, FOX’s onscreen treatment of their lanky debutante sought to further a highly prescriptive modesty narrative: the imperiled maiden of the Gothic horror. Even so, the filmmakers couldn’t hide that Sigourney didn’t look the part. Her powerful body looked incongruously masculine, a scrappy cat mom who looks after the crew by actually following the rules (which the elite discourage through efficient profit, seeking scientific discovery as the door to infinite growth: so-called “Promethean” Capitalism). While FOX checked Weaver’s masculine persona by presenting her as highly sexualized (with elements of rape thrown in to stress her nudity as vulnerable and feminine), the producers carefully dodged the NC-17 rating through modest nudity. Not only could Ripley not be naked (as Ridley had originally wanted); her body had to be well-groomed. According to Scott, Weaver allegedly resisted this idea (source: Hailey Piper) acting sexually descriptive by refusing to pull up her panties or shave her crotch. This allegedly forced the studio to intervene by censoring the actress’s “mom bod” in post: In a bizarre act of efficient profit, they secretly paid someone five grand to painstakingly erase Weaver’s pubic hairs—all because they thought the mere sight of those (and not her genitals) might swing the review board in an unprofitable direction!
The box office tally functions as a manipulative takeaway—that censored nudity sells more than blatant, pornographic nudity (regardless of context). The elite then use this sex-coercive lesson to shape consumer attitudes, presenting them with the idea that female bodies—specifically pure, maiden-like, and infantilized female bodies—are lucrative because they’re modest. In the process, these same consumers will start to adopt another neoliberal creed: personal responsibility. They see their purchases as empowered, as somehow dictating which movies get made according to what is or isn’t visually acceptable. They either mistake canonical endorsement as revolutionary (which it generally isn’t) or police morality through their purchases, enforcing elite hegemony by abjuring descriptive sexuality as an implied means of societal improvement at the hauntological-material level. So while the elite’s commercial goods decorate the home of free market defenders, the purchases made by these defenders endorse the current material arrangement of things: the privatization of carceral hauntology as something to communicate through its actors on set.
(artist, right: Persephone van der Waard)
As we’ve already established, total media control is impossible. Likewise, cryptonyms that adumbrate certain doom under Capitalism cannot be completely omitted in the revolutionary sense from future iconoclastic stories. However, the prescription of carceral hauntology and its sex-coercive elements is already so common as to be invisible, never mind that FOX concealed their “shaving” of Weaver’s crotch. So thorough was their subterfuge that I had no knowledge of the studio’s wacky behavior, 44 years later (despite being a huge fan of the movie)! When I deliberately drew pubic hair under Amanda Ripley’s panties (see: above), I specifically thought, “Like mother, like daughter”—the irony being I remembered her mother’s panties, which the studio had canonized; I had no memory of Ripley’s pubes, which the studio had excommunicated (even so, a part me figured I was being too sexually descriptive for those studio prudes).
The reason for all this fuss is that pubic hair describes sexuality and descriptive sexuality automatically includes elements that are abjected from artistic canon. This affects not just canon, but its proponents. Consider the sobering possibility that famous art critic John Ruskin allegedly couldn’t perform on his wife because he didn’t know women had pubic hair (Betsy Reed, 2014). Even funnier, she (ostensibly) wouldn’t shave her hair during their five-year marriage and eventually left him for his protégé, John Millais, who had no problems performing in the bedroom (the two had eight children together).
Conversely, descriptive sexuality also allows for conventional sexualities among sex-positive feminists, which SWERFs will gatekeep. Consider the guest star for Episode 107 of the Alien Minute Podcast, “Women Do Wear Long Johns” (2016), who stubbornly argues that Alien isn’t sexually descriptive because Ripley should be wearing long johns under her jumpsuit. Her argument? “Because women wear long johns.” This statement not only assumes that men in the film don’t switch to panties after they wake from hypersleep(!); it also implies that no woman anywhere in the universe would ever wear girly panties for herself. In doing so, the guest blanket denies sex-positive underwear selection as something to perform onscreen regardless of who’s in the audience.
So while I agree that the original scene was shot in a voyeuristic way for cis-het men, I also believe it can be appreciated in a sex-positive way in the 21st century while also acknowledging its sexist roots. The guest doesn’t even try, stubbornly prescribing modest underwear as something that (all) women wear. Little does she realize, panties—a symbolic consequence of Patriarchal control—can be cryptonymically reversed, teaching a sneaky lesson about sexism inside the Gothic as a long-colonized (and historically playful/fake) mode! The whore is liberated while naked, but also under attack in duality, and it is here where she can have her revenge for or against the state (re: “Rape Reprise“)!
Viewed another way, “authenticity” becomes a form of gatekeeping (re: gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss) that 2nd wave feminists execute, specifically SWERFs. As Wisecrack asks about Samus Aran, Ripley’s videogame counterpart: “Is a woman still authentically acting like a woman if she chooses to wear a bikini?” (“What is Woman? (de Beauvoir + Metroid)” 2015). Sex-positive feminists would say “yes,” provided she chooses to for reasons that empower herself; SWERFs would say “no” regardless of the reasons—a similar approach to burning bras except it’s burning bikinis (with a flair for trans emasculate and other modular persecution language; re: “blood libel, witch hunts and sodomy“).
We’ll examine SWERFs more in Chapter Two (and revolutionary cryptonymy in Chapter 4). For now, note how my descriptiveness of Amanda Ripley’s hairiness appreciates body hair rather than abjecting it. By doing so, my art also deconstructs the studio’s original canon, specifically the canonical notion that pubes are a visual extension of the vagina; to see one is to see the other. Not only that, but the vagina is abject, as well as the vulva, labia[2] and, yes, pubic hair. My “head canon” treats the bare body as empowered—not just something to appreciative unto itself, but something that reveals the abusive men-behind-the-curtain.
Canon shames body hair, the manufactured disgust towards it cultivating heteronormative bias: PIV sex between cis-het men and women according to highly specific body types and gender performances: adult, patriarchal men and young-yet-nubile, infantilized women. While these regulations severely limit sex-positive kinks and fetishes, the official position on female body hair oscillates between conflicted stages of public acceptance and rejection—ambivalence owing to critical positions that seek to undermine canonical attitudes about body shaming more generally.
While the elite use canon to fetishize body hair and appropriate sex-positive examples, the artistic appreciation of pubic hair demonstrates how deconstruction desperately needs an image under Capitalism—more often than not, an image to sell: the sale of sex, specifically that of sex subjects displaying their (often hairy) bodies. I say “subject” because someone choosing to sell their body at a particular hairiness is very different from having that choice made for them by the powers that be: “Sell your body for us, but shave your crotch first (except when it’s trendy not to).”
Women refusing to shave in defiance of male power structures is nothing new. To close out the chapter, I want to examine sex-positive art as one of a regular revolution whose various countermeasures like refusing to shave result from hauntology and cryptonymy as a colonized historio-material process. Doing so requires examining the process itself through its “ghostly” left-behinds, which we’ll do now before articulating how savvy rebels use iconoclastic art as a kind of visual shibboleth—to grow and cultivate into a larger message that critiques the giant, industrialized deceptions of formal power and its socio-material extensions. It does so through various covert countermeasures: the art itself. Gothic art excels at creating fear, often through ghostly suggestion. Used by those in power, fear can keep people stupid, suspicious and afraid; used by the iconoclast, fear can keep you alive, but requires you to take informed liberties—to deliberately lie in ways that must be cultivated and taught by older (often linguistically spectral and ambiguous) lessons; i.e., the revolutionary’s cryptonymy deceiving those in power by outthinking them with fearful art as an instructional tool (fear—specifically fear of death and pain—is an excellent teacher). In the words of Pat Benatar, let’s “get nervous!”
Onto “Toxic Schlock Syndrome; or, an Early Stab at Cryptonymy“!
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] For a parallel sex-positive space, consider Monty Python’s Castle Anthrax (re: exhibit 1a1a1i2, “Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n Roll“).
[2] A real-life example of the “Barbie Doll effect,” Linnea Quigley’s genitals were infamously concealed (Mr. Skin’s “Anatomy of a Nude Scene: Can We Talk About Linnea Quigley’s Barbie Doll Crotch…” 2020] by a plastic “Barbie Doll crotch” designed to show her butt, but conceal her labia—all to avoid the unprofitable X rating. Moreover, the film presents her seemingly perfect body as paralyzing to those who gaze upon it, frozen in place while Linnea consumes them with a giant, gaping maw (a metaphor for abject female sexuality and rage). Despite being a cryptonymic “chastity belt” compelled by Pygmalions pimping the whore, a sex-positive author could use the crotch piece to easily retell the same hauntological story as a parody of itself and the men/systems responsible.