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.
Synthesis Symposium: Nature Is Food; a Roadmap for Forging Social-Sexual Habits, or Cultivating Gothic-Communist Praxis in Our Own Daily Lives/Instruction
“People don’t really connect, you know?” “What?” “Like those dots simulating humans. We all live totally separately. That’s how it seems to me.”
—Harue Karasawa and Ryosuke Kawashima, Kairo (2001)
Picking up where “Sample Essay and Paid Labor” left off…
Approaching the end of Volume One, we have moved beyond outlining our manifesto’s stated goals—its core tenets, simplified theories (from our thesis), and means/materials/methods of study—to increasingly examine the trauma of other people and ourselves. Whereas the postscript considered acknowledging the pain of others to process collective trauma, we’re now going to consider the execution of theory during oppositional praxis when acknowledging trauma ourselves in a combined pedagogy/performance; i.e., praxial synthesis towards praxial catharsis through good instruction as enacted by us when confronting Cartesian abuses that treat nature not simply as female, but monstrous-feminine food that harms Indigenous peoples, racial minorities and GNC people (so-called “incorrect” or “non-men” of the white, cis-het European sort) to varying degrees of settler-colonial genocide: by cheapening their lives, their bodies, their labor to serve the profit motive.
(artist: Skylar Shark)
Note: The following terms are all ones I devised from older words to simplify and explain my manifesto tree; i.e., in its most basic form, and the one I expect most people to encounter, experience and employ on a daily basis. —Perse, 4/9/2025
As stated during the preface, praxial synthesis executes theory by cultivating good social-sexual habits that simplify theory during oppositional praxis’ camping of the canon with ludo-Gothic BDSM. This instruction happens in order to raise emotional/Gothic intelligence and class/cultural awareness, preventing Cartesian war and rape through trauma writing and artwork as de facto (extracurricular) educational devices; e.g., ludo-Gothic BDSM as a form of proletarian creative success, not a means of material gain performed by bad-faith actors concerned with profit and punching down instead of educating people through their work in a sex-positive way (re: Autumn Ivy). This raising of intelligence and awareness can point towards more complicated theory (e.g., postcolonialism) but the emphasis remains on the functioning of theory through a collective, second-nature cognition that cannot be strictly controlled. It must take on a life of its own within a complicated system of interrelating factors: oppositional praxis and Gothic poetics, but also good education and acting versus bad education concerning nature as regularly alienized and harvested by settler-colonial forces.
Praxial catharsis is the application of practical theory to resolve state trauma at the source: through our own connections to systemic issues, which we then express through interpersonal, intersecting pedagogies/trauma in practical ways. Doing so means taking simplified versions of Gothic-Communist goals and theories while progressively dabbling more and more in the exploration of the anything-but-simple—and indeed inherent messiness of—interpersonal and transgenerational trauma; re: Cuwu and I supplying the backbone of that idea with the manifesto postscript, which evolved into my and Bunny’s work followed by many other models and I leading back to Cuwu and pushing forwards again. We whores are like ninjas, then: whatever the distance, however long our absence, a shadow warrior can always come back for one last ride (“Ninjas are paid in wisdom!” says I Am Ninja, in 20-freaking-25; timestamp: 3:22)!
(model and photographer: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)
As such, the manifesto and postscript have carried out a mounting progression of trauma writing and artwork towards this roadmap, which was preceded by a small essay to test your theoretical fluency (and introduce the idea of the Cartesian harvesting of monstrous-feminine entities) and a quick pause after that to also consider the financial nature of successful labor exchanges exhibited using Gothic poetics. Now we arrive at the synthesis roadmap itself, which considers the cultivation of the rebellious mindset and habits needed to apply good praxis towards achieving systemic catharsis; i.e., through said poetic’s creative successes challenging Cartesian thought.
The synthesis roadmap, then, constitutes its own symposium-style chapter (similar to the symposium at the end of my thesis)—except, its interpersonal rhetoric of trauma writing and artwork doesn’t fixate on the generational abuse of police states like the manifesto and postscript did. Instead, it shifts focus towards what I consider to be the root of the larger problem, and one we can devote praxial synthesis to achieve catharsis in ways that rescue workers and nature from: Capitalist Realism as a Cartesian enterprise. Under Cartesian thought, nature is female food tied to profit in ways that alienate workers and the natural world in classically Gothic ways that lead to police states and grim harvests, but also harvests at large regardless of their outward appearance; i.e., of nature as monstrous-feminine through settler-colonial models that continue to plague workers and nature as victims of capital, female or not. The Medusa is genderqueer and whose “rape” during the dialectic of the alien must be put into quotes during ludo-Gothic BDSM—on our Aegis, fuck-starting rebellion’s face during the whore’s paradox and revenge (unicorns look cute and stab things)!
(artist: Blxxd Bunny)
Note: “Nature is monstrous-feminine” is another concept of mine (camping Beauvoir and Barbara Creed)—a tremendously important idea I would expand on heavily in Volume Two, but especially in “Rape Reprise” (and the following chapters); i.e., when discussing the whore’s revenge as something to have against profit in duality during ludo-Gothic BDSM (and its subsequent liminal expression). To it, “nature as monstrous-feminine” and “humanize the harvest” are super productive ideas, and factor into many of the post-scarcity arguments made by Sex Positivity throughout its entirety—in Volume Two, but also the second edition to Volume Zero and One (and eventually Volume Three when it releases).
Second, the best way to understand complex systems is to break them down into simplified models that—in hindsight and through application—may have complex theory applied to them, during holistic study. To it, capital is a complex system of exploitation, one whose pyramid shape conceals and reveals itself during the cryptonymy process to further abjection with chronotopes, hauntologies and Gothic poetics: virgin/whore monsters, whose heroic variants often tokenize to police nature as monstrous-feminine with nature as monstrous-feminine; re: Amazons being token cops who—formerly dainty Gothic heroines—weaponize for the state to scapegoat even-more-marginalized groups, thus gentrify and decay feminism; e.g., trans women being the scratching post for fascist feminisms playing the white Indian to punch down against society’s most vulnerable parties, the former who then have to suffer the usual bullshit on top of being token traitors (re: “Policing the Whore“; e.g., The Kavernacle’s “Conservative Women are STILL SHOCKED that Right-Wing Men HATE Them,” 2025). The manifesto’s whole point, then, is holistic study returning to older arguments after I’ve made complex theoretical models to explain them, which I then simplify/reverse engineer through their simplified forms, here; i.e., there and back again… again.
This simplification is two-fold: The “Manifesto” section returns the PhD’s complex theory back to a general state of simplicity (while bringing new ideas from Volume Zero into the fold; re: ludo-Gothic BDSM). From there, “Instruction’s” synthesis symposium simplifies things even further by considering the manifesto tree as something to synthesize through daily habits, on and offstage; i.e., through the cultivation of good daily social-sexual habits that theatrically supply the behaviors needed to synthesize praxis: praxis happens in opposition, which is to say it synthesizes in opposition towards catharsis. Praxial synthesis; oppositional synthesis towards praxial catharsis and systemic change as a matter of oppositional praxis, the bourgeoisie (and their various traitors’ persecution language) versus the proletariat (who subvert said language imperfectly during oppositional synthesis). This, in turn, comes back to our series title in praxis, mid-synthesis: sex positivity versus sex coercion regarding universal liberation undercut by the usual Judas characters and cops-and-victims Faustian bargains that immortalize them!
To that, oppositional praxis is more complex and oppositional synthesis is more basic, but both tie into the same larger struggle and—as far as I’m concerned—can be used somewhat interchangeably when discussing Gothic-Communist development and its many hurdles; i.e., there isn’t an obvious point where one begins and the other ends. That being said, the “creative successes” of proletarian praxis are essentially remediated praxis (re: parody and pastiche), which Volume Three discusses at length; i.e., oppositional synthesis initially appears, here, but explores most heavily through application during Volume Three (versus Volume Two, which concerns history and application to varying degrees); re: as something that Cuwu and I essentially pioneered in its most basic forms, “Healing from Rape” onwards. Time is a circle inside space; this book is made of space-time as the Gothic do—through the camping of monsters and sex (re: “Castles in the Flesh“)!
(artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)
In either case, the model for opposition synthesis, including the synthetic oppositional groupings (from the manifesto tree) are unpacked here; i.e., in the simplest of ways that Volume Zero could not, then explored throughout the remainder of this book series after Volume One: through ludo-Gothic BDSM as a praxial-synthetic challenge to tokenism oscillating on the same Aegis, using the same basic aesthetic! The rest of this symposium largely presents “as is”; i.e., to preserve its historical elements (and ability to stand on its own/not interfere with me citing it repeatedly in future books), this addendum predominantly the only substantial extension the synthesis symposium shall receive. —Perse, 4/8/2025
The synthesis symposium divides into a smaller primer and three fundamental pieces (followed by a conclusion): “the basics,” or synthetic oppositional groupings that occur during oppositional praxis, as well as the canonical endorsement and reifying of unironic war and rape as things to prevent vis-à-vis these basic factors when synthesized during iconoclastic/campy approaches; i.e., according to our good social-sexual habits/synthetic oppositional groupings:
- Part zero, or the pre-symposium (including this post), explains what synthesis is, as well as providing equations and trauma to prime the reader with before pressing into the symposium itself.
- Part one, “the Basics of Oppositional Synthesis“: An examination of the basics, or pure reductions, of our synthetic oppositional groupings; i.e., how our pedagogic emphasis involves oppositional praxis as something to synthesize according oppositional synthesis with a proletarian agenda: to prevent war and the rape of workers/the natural world by raising emotional/Gothic intelligence and, by extension, a class/cultural awareness that leads to systemic catharsis; i.e., through trauma writing and artwork as things to express and teach through a basic educational approach. Features Medusa and stigma animals, but also Georgia O’Keefe, H.R. Giger and more recent auteurs.
- Part two, “a Deeper Look at War“: An iconoclastic consideration of war culture and how it can be interrogated and synthesized in our own creative responses to canonical forms; i.e., how to recognize said canon and express our trauma in relation to it during class/culture war as a means of challenging Cartesian arrangements of power and outcomes. Features Robert Heinlein and Akira Kurosawa.
- Part three, “a Deeper Look at Rape“ and “finale: A Problem of Knife Dicks”: An iconoclastic consideration of rape culture and how it can be interrogated and synthesized in our own creative responses to canonical forms; i.e., how to recognize said canon and express our trauma in relation to it during class/culture war as a means of challenging Cartesian arrangements of power and outcomes. Part three features Amazons, phallic women/traumatic penetration, and violence in sports; the finale examines morphologies policed under such binaries during pornographic expression; e.g., racialized tropes, but also fat people at large and human (often female) bodies targeted for having “fat, immodest” qualities, which are then alienated by capital, before being fetishized and harvested like crops. We have to humanize the harvest during ludo-Gothic BDSM, camping our own rapes by taking control during calculated risk that minimize the chance for harm (re: the whore’s revenge against profit)! We’re avatars of the Medusa, and Medusa is the final boss of Capitalist Realism for a reason! Look on our Works, ye Mighty! Heaven in a wildflower, indeed!
(artist: Leeza)
Synthesis Roadmap, or Nature Is Food, part zero: Pre-Symposium; or, Synthesis, Equations and Cartesian Trauma (war and rape)
The magic circle is not something that comes wholly from Huizinga. To be perfectly honest, Katie and I more or less invented the concept, inheriting its use from my work with Frank, cobbling together ideas from Huizinga and Caillois, clarifying key elements that were important for our book, and reframing it in terms of semiotics and design—two disciplines that certainly lie outside the realm of Huizinga’s own scholarly work. But that is what scholarship often is—sampling and remixing ideas in order to come to a new synthesis (source).
—Eric Zimmerman, “Jerked Around by the Magic Circle” (2012)
Before we dive into the symposium proper and the basics, I want to prime you with some core devices: a more comprehensive explanation of synthesis (which the camp map finale touched on in Volume Zero) and several equations and ideas to keep in mind when processing trauma ourselves; i.e., while regarding the simplification of theory when teaching it through the expression of trauma as a Cartesian byproduct—one that alienizes and fetishes nature, turning it (and workers connected to it) into monstrous food during genocide expressed through war and rape, which ludo-Gothic BDSM can camp in a variety of ways:
(artist: Legion)
First, the idea of simple versus complex. Again, Gothic Communism relies on the simplification of complex theory to tackle complex structures (Cartesian thought and Capitalism) as simply as possible, but also in oddly relatable, even hilarious ways; i.e., by people who don’t have a total understanding of theory but can still apply it according to their shared trauma in popularized exchanges that thrive on linguo-material contradiction/abstraction according to human language (and its dark materials) as fought over but also with; e.g., Skynet as an abstraction of capital, but also the xenomorph (above) as a potent means of performance and play during Gothic psychosexual expression camping the canon with Gothic play and unequal exchange (dark desire, revenge fantasies, etc).
Whereas praxis is the practical execution of theory as reified out of a grander compiling to choose from (my thesis argument in volume form), synthesis amounts to how said theory is simplified into livable forms to achieve praxis at all. It is how praxis is cultivated and taught through play during ludo-Gothic BDSM, and good de facto education feeds synthesis with varying emphasis on theory as applied through habit; i.e., as something to practice and instruct to future generations relative to trauma using Gothic poetics in our own media. It must become, to some degree, second-nature.
In turn, the synthesis roadmap concerns oppositional synthesis, pointedly the synthesis of good social-sexual habits that contribute towards proletarian praxis mid-oppression and mid-conflict under Capitalist Realism; i.e. as de facto educational devices that make workers collectively more intelligent and aware of trauma as something to identify outside of themselves and respond to/interrogate, but also identify and negotiate with: in sex-positive Gothic dialogs shared between themselves and other workers as emergent beings (tired to nature) harvested by Cartesian agents demonizing them.
As my thesis volume argues, the extracurricular function of sex positivity amid Gothic poetics must become second-nature; i.e., through creative successes whose ludo-Gothic BDSM can be passed on and subsequently learned from in popularized forms; e.g., the inherently violent, liminal and paradoxical expressions of the operatic Gothic castle/danger disco, psychosexual rape fantasy and monster pornography/Amazonomachia kayfabe we’ve examined thus far in Volumes One and Zero as quintessential forms of trauma writing and artwork. There’s always a form of nefandous abstraction, but this is hardly “mute.” It’s just a different form of data to feed the brain with. Call it food for thought, insofar as it turns us away from Capitalism’s usual, Cartesian harvests hidden by Capitalist Realism. We can remain delicious and monstrous without being reduced to profit for the elite.
Continuing this ghoulish nourishment, I also want you to consider the fact that I am revisiting this roadmap while attempting to preserve its conversational flavor in light of my thesis volume. Similar to the symposium from Volume Zero, these changes are happening after completing my thesis argument, except the roadmap was originally devised before the thesis crystalized. This might make it seem more basic or conversational by comparison, but I think that might actually be useful when grappling with these ideas yourselves—i.e., an invitation of sorts for you to consider how you might encounter these arguments in your own simplified approaches when dealing with complex things. In your own lives, you probably won’t encounter block quotes of my theories except inside the volume itself. However, you will encounter pieces of what went into it as you go about your own lives, and can adopt a more conversational Gothic dialogic when conducting and reifying oppositional praxis yourself; i.e., synthesizing theory and trauma to achieve systemic catharsis through a raising of emotional/Gothic intelligence and warrior awareness in defense of the state’s usual victims.
The point in doing so is to demonstrate how to teach the successful execution of theory (recultivating the bourgeois Superstructure) by examining iconoclastic art as something to create in relation to healthy social-sexual habits that we not only pick up, but learn to perform in our own daily lives living under the power of state forces—not just as workers, but sex-positive de facto educators who teach the world through what we create and leave behind: the educational legacy of our sex work, artwork, and various other exhibits that routinely survive us. These aren’t instructions to harm, but prevent harm on a global scale by camping the very canonical devices that lead to harm in the same complicated shadow zone; i.e., “harm” as a theatrical, sex-positive device camping Cartesian gargoyles. Imagination and experimentation—while canonically deplored—are essential to escaping state tyranny and addressing its phantom pains by bringing them out in the open.
If you’ve read the symposium from Volume Zero (and the end of the manifesto), you’ll have an idea of what to expect, moving forward; I didn’t want to change things too much despite having written this second symposium well before my thesis. Like the thesis volume’s symposium, it represents a point when I was still figuring things out, and I think it serves as a good thought experiment insofar as it will represent a middle stage in your own thinking that will match up with this talk of mine. Its cluttered, “messy attic” quality might speak to you better as you interpret and grapple with these ideas yourselves. And if you want increasingly more complete forms of theory that spell things out as much as possible, there is always the manifesto and thesis. Compared to those, this symposium is a conversational way to close out Volume One. After the symposium primer supplies its own ideas, part one will try to illustrate them (and the basics of oppositional synthesis) through a seminar that walks you conversationally through their application; parts two, three and the finale will consider this application in relation to rape and war in canonical forms. For the entirety of the roadmap, I want you to consider the basics yourselves. I will do my best to mention them and evoke the simplified theories of the manifesto as a means of thinking about labor and art, but also generating and utilizing it ourselves in our own day-to-day relationships (which explore our own trauma).
(artist: source)
It’s true that Gothic Communism is built on systemic trauma as something to acknowledge and articulate, but its achieving of systemic catharsis happens through good praxis; i.e., as a teaching approach whose theories live and breathe through creative expression, which process and interrogate trauma in our daily lives then pass said information on using synthesized, abstracted forms (e.g., ghosts). That is, rather than cancel each other out, they fuse and corrupt into a unique form of data at home in Gothic expression: trauma as a psychosexual presence, but generally one complicated by competing class/cultural factors. For Gothic Communism, this means oppositional praxis. All the while, power and resistance share the same space, haunted by the spectre of state abuse and Marx; our retailored derelicts and their complicated paradoxes operate less as raw reductions of theory and more as pieces to a collective societal puzzle that, when assembled and holistically examined, constitute the reformulation of the Wisdom of the Ancients to achieve systemic catharsis when regarding transgenerational trauma; i.e., as a thing thoroughly trapped inside a cultural imaginary past. In it, the trauma cannot be neatly exorcised, but it can be performed in different ways that lead to its gradual healing over time through ludo-Gothic BDSM.
(artist: Frank Frazetta)
Said healing happens not by killing dragons or whitewashing castles, but returning to nature (and reclaiming our labor) through the informed, steady changing of socio-material conditions that prevent systemic harm in the future. Doing so is meant to challenge complex things with simplified approaches that make up a larger solution to a grand problem: our material conditions and historical trauma, which are often abstracted into past-like, hauntological forms. The core issue, then, stems from a lack of resolution tied to the crux of my thesis argument—that Capitalism sexualizes all workers to exploit them; i.e., a heteronormative, Cartesian dimorphic whose global sexualizing of workers and nature leads to a terminal myopia of Capitalist Realism through cyclical Gothic poetics (the ghost of the counterfeit and process of abjection, but also Shadow of Pygmalion/Cycle of Kings, infernal concentric pattern, etc); the solution is to reclaim these haunted poetics and reverse their class/cultural function through our six Gothic-Marxist tenets and four main Gothic theories’ creative successes.
We’ve listed these successes entirely earlier in the volume, including mutual consent, informed consumption and descriptive sexuality as things to express ourselves. Volume Three will stress all of them; Volume One’s symposium emphasizes de facto education as something to illustrate through the synthesis of subversive Gothic poetics. To that, their practical teaching element married to lived trauma is what I want to spend the remainder of the volume introducing readers to. By working as a direct, counterterrorist solidarity against the state, we aim to prevent war and rape as Cartesian byproducts by raising emotional/Gothic intelligence and class/cultural awareness towards nature as alien, food, monstrous-feminine; i.e., through the cathartic processing of personal and systemic trauma along various intersectional routes traveled by real workers and occupied/shared by them collectively. To this, other peoples’ creations—what they make and fashion out of the clay of the Gothic imagination (what Descartes would call emergent beings) for the purposes of humanizing those seen as raw materials—are just as valid as anything I could make myself:
(exhibit 20a2: Artist, top-left, bottom-mid-left/-mid-right: Chronorin; bottom-far-left: Kukuruyo Art; top-mid-left: Le Faux Creux; top-mid-right: Rivolution; top-far-right: Oujuo1; bottom-far-right: Reiq. Beings of darkness are generally made from stigmatized materials/natural resources that—when divorced from settler-colonial aims during ludo-Gothic BDSM—serve a vital iconoclastic role during rebellious morphological expression. To that, Satanic morphology uses Gothic nostalgia to bring us closer to our alienated bodies, but also their trauma as requiring psychosexual healing through an assortment of analogous materials: slime, metal, chitin; oil, rubber or latex; dead tissue, animal tissues [chimerism] and so on. There’s an animate-inanimate quality but also a seditious element that must, under canonical circumstances, be presented as abject and commodified. Satan becomes something to control through commodified “opposition.”
Keeping with the sculptor’s metaphor, monster-making produces bricks in a “primordial” series, their corrupt, monstrous-feminine wall singing the hysterical chorus of a reimagined past; the chorus becomes an enormous challenge to the status quo and what it seeks to dominate through the ghost of the counterfeit and process of abjection: the Earth and things associated with it/of it as hellish, dark, and forbidden, but only ostensibly under their control. As Frankenstein shows us, Victor’s Cartesian ploy fashioned a giant statue he had no hopes of controlling. Indeed, it grew to resent and rebel against his embodiment of systemic abuse by embodying a side of himself that had become alien, which he then tried to deny and abort, but also torture [an approach the Creature then adopted “to better the instruction”]. Unlike Milton, monstrous self-expression also applies to consciously rebellious sculptors and their complicated golems, except they identify with their clay as traumatized, thereby speaking what is hidden through the same base materials’ cryptonymic rebellion. As such, their self-expression, -empowerment, and -determination embody the Satanic spirit of a self-fashioned deity challenging the Almighty who claims to have authored all things by having “total power” over all forms of authorship: “God” can make devils, but devils are not allowed to play god and make their own things. This is easy enough to disprove.)
I hope the above exhibit illustrates how, while the rest of the volume draws upon jargon—and I consider such heady theoretical concepts useful to understanding my central thesis and its ideas; i.e., as things to teach through iconoclastic art made by individual artists working in concert—the roadmap’s language is still largely figurative and simplified to make it more accessible when processing trauma at interpersonal levels. As such, think of my thesis argument (and relevant language presented in the manifesto) more as a handy guideline for executing the core ideas of Gothic Communism, while also thinking about the bigger picture of systemic trauma and its confrontation using commonplace language that relates to or relays your own trauma as something to express; i.e., with a shared pedagogy against larger oppressions: what Shakespeare’s Hamlet would call a “quintessence of dust,” and Milton “darkness visible.” Make it your own, and breathe life and pedagogy into your own creations, that these golems-esque egregores—be they undead, demonic, and/or naturalized—might speak of taboo things that help the world to heal.
To that, don’t be afraid to substitute my terms with your own language as you go; and if that seems daunting at all, consider how we’ve already been doing this with various authors already. Selective reading is a conversation made with our own contributions to what already exists, making something new in the process: a roadmap towards systemic catharsis as something to exist under historical-material conditions that, among themselves, harbor unique elements that we contribute towards when developing Gothic Communism together. If the thesis volume is my theory and the manifesto simplifies it, then the roadmap is how I would go about it in the most flexible way I could think of; except I don’t see the approach as “mine,” insofar as it’s been tailor-made to transform into something new through Satanic poetics and counterterrorist thought as a mode of campy reclamation that anyone can do, provided they stay sex-positive and focused on universal liberation during ludo-Gothic BDSM.
If it’s not mine then why give a roadmap at all, you ask? Well, it’s all too easy for me to do exhibits and just talk about them as I spout theory from Volume Zero. But I don’t expect people to just “get” these things without having the same exact experiences, education and outlook that I do (which is impossible; my identical twin doesn’t have that—in fact, he and I are actually quite different despite having similar opportunities; we’re actually mirror-imaged twins with different dominant hands [I’m left and he’s right] and clashing personalities, which is why I think he’s cis-het and I’m trans).
Nor do I think it’s a good idea to just “hurl” theory at students in any scenario. Rather, I want to explain how theory can be applied to worker lives as they live them—as people first, whose praxis happens to whatever degree they curate art as an extension of emotionally/Gothically intelligent habits, which can then be connected to Gothic-Communist theories post hoc. Take my teaching approach and make it your own to process and defuse state trauma with, but also weaponize your trauma as a form of self-identity within ongoing struggles.
(exhibit 20b: Artist: Persephone van der Waard. The monsters that we make are generally extensions, if not of ourselves, then complicated aspects of the human condition that we synthesize through our own labor using our language, bodies, and body language. The idea, with Gothic Communism, is to synthesize good praxis through sex-positive Gothic poetics; i.e., to raise emotional/Gothic intelligence and class/cultural awareness by cultivating healthy social-sexual habits: with ludo-Gothic BDSM in our own daily lives, including the monsters we create.
To this, the Drow as I envision them, aren’t strictly evil, but something that can embody a buried, taboo form of sex positivity that we bring to the surface and educate people with; i.e., not associated with the delivery of harm by the Drow, but their canonical receiving of harm when placed into the state of exception as evil, matriarchal spider people with purple skin who practice black magic. Luckily this deliberate collection of stigmas can not only be survived by those forced to wear them, but subverted and embodied as a form of rebellious sex-positive struggle whose cryptonymy weaponizes the basic imagery against state propaganda doubling said imagery; i.e., by humanizing the state’s chief nemesis through trauma writing and artwork, thereby constituting intentional [and seductive] reclamations of settler-colonial hatred tied to sexual trauma that is synthesized into a sex-positive, postcolonial form. The Drow and the trauma they broach become, like Milton’s infamous darkness: visible.)
I want to stress that self-identity involves connections that require praxial synthesis as part of a larger equation. That is, “sampling and remixing ideas in order to come to a new synthesis” isn’t unique to scholarship (re: Zimmerman) but applied to everyday people from all walks of life performing proletarian praxis in opposition to state forces through several equations I want to resupply you with from the thesis volume; the first involving oppositional praxis:
Sex positivity happens during oppositional praxis’ class/culture war (class traitors/weird canonical nerds’ class dormancy and betrayal vs weird iconoclastic nerds’ class [thus race and gender] consciousness); i.e., sex positivity vs sex coercion to recultivate canon/the bourgeois Superstructure, thus reclaim the Base (means of production) according to our proletarian tree of Gothic-Marxist tenets and other factors.
and the second about proletarian praxis:
Successful Proletarian Praxis (recultivation of the bourgeois Superstructure through iconoclastic art creation, critique, or endorsement; the “creative successes” of proletarian praxis) = Thesis Statement + Praxial Coordinates (manifesto tree) + Synthesis (social-sexual habits, emotional/Gothic intelligence, and financial support during worker’s daily lives; i.e., the camp map from the thesis volume and the synthesis roadmap from Volume One) + Poiesis History (the Humanities primer)
Yet, (most) workers aren’t like computers that operate strictly through equations; they’re physical, biological creatures. As extensions of them, their art is often spontaneous as a result, but also often subconsciously part of given artistic movements that workers may not be actively aware of (as I wasn’t for years, despite making prolific amounts of sex-positive writing and art, slowly “waking up” as a trans detective regarding my own evolution).
Propaganda is code; workers absorb and internalize code as “human computers” do—slowly and inefficiently over time, according to competing “lines” that support or reject the status quo. Planned, coordinated resistance generally requires class-conscious or at least semi-conscious efforts that resist the propaganda of the state, but also the rape and war cultures they beget and transfer onto one’s own social-sex lives, power exchanges and labor exchanges: the socio-material markers that stochastically trigger horrifyingly violent responses from sleeping minds—at the domestic level, but also in foreign territories back and forth. Praxial synthesis includes recognizing these things and, if not outright rejecting them, whistleblower-style, then at least not openly endorsing them, either. This includes critiquing things we, as workers, are taught to endorse as central to our lives, even academically or at least in connection with academic institutions and their holistic output—e.g., popular sports at the college level (with colleges neoliberally centering diploma mills around sports teams as things to emblematize achingly Liberal platitudes; you get a “free” ride if you’re an athlete who can help “the school” [meaning its owners] make money):
(exhibit 21a1: An exhibit of “false consciousness” conducted by “sleeper agents” waiting to trigger and conduct Man-Box abuses that lead to military urbanism? Maybe, but it’s still stochastic under Capitalism as a living structure carried out by people, not robots. Then again, maybe our boys holding up the frog [toads are frogs, even hypnotoads] are actually revolutionaries in disguise! If so, they still have to hide inside the grander structure of Capitalism’s tableau; i.e., its heteronormative sphere’s crowds and sports-driven bread-and-circus. And the recipients of any social-sexual violence that results from these interconnected factors are right to be wary of those most likely to perform it: cis-het men [or those in the closet who self-hate for failing to perform as such, conflating their true selves with unironic, psychosexual harm]. Heteronormative canon and its male workers—be they star athletes, husbands, cops, soldiers, doctors and/or your goddamn mailman—historically rape women and abuse minorities; the poisonous nature of rape/war culture is how it extends into the public imagination alongside conspicuous fear and dogma that whisper of a larger terrifying reputation, a transgenerational curse. Racism, misogyny and other imbricating bigotries become both ubiquitous and endemic, like a common cold or seasonal flu evolving into more lethal forms [which, as Covid showed us, the most privileged, fearful and bigoted will opt out of inoculating themselves against regardless of the damage it does to less privileged/more vulnerable groups].)
As activists, it’s easy to point the finger at obvious examples, and not just the American secondary education system, including copaganda and the Military Industrial Complex working in concert; e.g., “Those Nazis sure were bad, weren’t they?” However, before the gas chambers, there were bullets and knives (“Holocaust by bullet”); before these, there was German propaganda; before there was German propaganda, there was American propaganda and genocide having inspired them (re: Bad Empanada’s “How the USA Inspired the Nazis – From Manifest Destiny to Lebensraum,” 2022): a unified front against nature, founded on and concealing Indigenous exploitation during a continual process whose structure rapes and murders the world well before and after the Nazis have been sublimated; i.e., into a neoliberal likeness of themselves working as centrist foils during Capitalist Realism. The human emblems, above—our athletic white knights and their at-times theatrical moderacy—fill a special role within the profit motive: obscuring Nazis and other fascist groups during neoliberal kayfabe (which extends to any sport—not just dueling pairs but teams and their supporters).
War, rape and genocide exist everywhere under Capitalism, but so do the neoliberal illusions that less cover these things up and more essentialize them through deceptive refrains: “Rape cultural is a myth! Pay it no mind! Gun violence? It’s a way of life! Here, have a gun to protect yourself with!” Whether on the frontier of faraway lands or back at home, war and rape extend from capital, giving birth to neoliberal gargoyles whose flesh-and-blood equivalents internalize these lessons and spring to life once “triggered.” They become an endless glut of pleasurable, drug-seeking behaviors tied less to literal, external drugs and more to intense biochemical responses felt and pursued under the prolonged stressors of perceived duress: Gothic, canonical expressions of Cartesian violence, terror and bodily abuse/regulation through capitalist apologia; i.e., monsters “only” exist in horror stories, whose canon must nevertheless have abject monsters and torture porn with an unironic edge (to menticide workers with through the ghost of the counterfeit’s process of abjection within unequal material conditions).
As such, canonical “love” (rape) and war are merely “natural,” essentialized games—where only the strong survive and get the girl: “Might makes right, winner take all, to the victor go the spoils,” etc; which, under neoliberal Capitalism, has workers fighting more for less; e.g., Capcom’s “unprecedented” 2024 million-dollar 1st place prize for Capcom Cup X. It’s an Internet-Age “jousting” tourney where gladiators—relics of Antiquity—duke it out for scraps; i.e., relatively poor people/slaves, usually men, having extended to (usually male) weird canonical nerds/tech bros trained to be infantilizingly[1] violent through neoliberal, might-makes-right dogma in sports-like language, especially combat sports with a kayfabe element informed by Gothic poetics/psychosexuality haunted by medieval abuse[2]. Wrestling is an artform that historically pits Nazis, Communists and Americans against one another as living weapons whose pastiche projects onto various media forms; e.g., videogames. These, in turn, become regular sites of monstrous avatars (and targets of violence—bosses, lieutenants and minions) useful to the pacifying of workers through so-called “empowerment fantasies” that, in truth, master and dominate players (re: Seth Giddings and Helen Kennedy) more than you might think. Informed, half-real negotiation can challenge worker subjugation and its harmful conditioning. Except you still have to recognize and critique the games themselves as praxis; i.e., insofar as kayfabe and BDSM are concerned within daily synthesis: Marisa from Street Fighter 6, below, as an icon thereof, serving to inform whatever habits we cultivate ourselves or already prescribe to.
(artist: Persephone van der Waard; original lines and background image by Reiq)
Such habits include the body-as-a-weapon, which takes on different forms in wrestling pastiche. Compare, for example, the shared operatic nature of pugilism and knife play kink (exhibit 0a1b2c, but also the Dragon’s Crown [2013] Amazon’s axe, below). In either case, you have a master/slave dialogic informed by the dimorphized aspects of kayfabe that lend themselves well to BDSM parlance.
Playing out onstage with athleticized fetish gear and performers, there’s a visual element of danger minus the actual threat of guaranteed harm (accidents still happen, of course). And the back-and-forth of this particular dance involves a partner who cannot actually harm you, but whose warrior aesthetic—specifically one personifying national war—lies adjacent to state theatrics that do promote harm through the same general performances and play: Marisa literally playing the Nazi[3] heel or black knight/destroyer role linked to Spartan-Roman hauntologies of the Zack Snyder sort (versus the babyface with virginal, angelic aesthetics “grappling” with their polar opposites during Amazonomachia). Practicing their expression is ultimately liminal, meaning the paradox of terror (and violence) arise while we interrogate past trauma; i.e., with fresh bodily forms that double state power and potential. When using our own play and performance to camp canon (and its monopolies) with the same basic (often kayfabe) language, this is when ludo-Gothic BDSM starts to take shape; i.e., as a means of camp that—like a doll—can be played with to instruct such things:
(artist: Jan-H Sculpts)
Regardless of the exact form, it’s vital to remember that the mechanisms/operations of capital affect everyone, and just as they affect everyone, they can be subverted in liminal forms of expression whose meaty kayfabe bodies and performances aren’t strictly controlled or operated by state forces looking to fatten and harvest them; i.e., “Trojan-style” disguises that convey revolutionary allegory through cryptonymic displays of Cartesian-grade violence, terror and morphology (the brutalizing of nature-as-monstrous-feminine) on and offstage:
(exhibit 21a2a: Artist, top left: Silverjow; top-middle: Jan Rockitnik; top-mid-right: elee0228; everything else: Ichan-desu. Marisa is one of many Amazons. Furthermore, the athlete is a common physical marker of war personified through the imaginary past as something to evoke in popular media at large. By extension, social-sexual notions of “warrior” and “strength” interlock and “argue” through cross purposes; e.g., the body of the Amazon, bear or twunk as ripe for political discourse within the human form as a hauntological, cryptonymic expression of power tied to combat sports and military culture. Subversions of this culture include the open fetishizing of muscular bodies with various masc/femme flavors that grapple with, or otherwise interrogate, double standards concerning the monstrous-feminine; i.e., in the paramilitary world of contact sports [which extends to the cryptonymy of “adventure” through the sublimation of war and rape]. Inside said world, it’s not uncommon to “recorrect” the feminine man by gifting the bear/polar bear with Herculean bodies whose chiseled muscles automatically translate to giant penises in the eyes of cis men [and have a pitcher and catcher with a presumed “womanly” bottom]. But it can also be reclaimed as a statuesque performer divorced from their intended role. It becomes a look/mood unto itself.
My point is, it’s not “the look” that’s the problem, but the context for how it’s viewed within said world as it presently exists [function determines function, not aesthetics]. The language of “bears” and “twunks” have had to exist in a military sports environment that, outside of the aristocracy or famous athletes, would have discouraged actual sodomy [non-PIV sex] in Western culture since the time of the Ancient Greeks: big muscles were statuesque and hypermasculine then and now through the personification of the Greek/Roman pantheon as thoroughly “Zeus-like” [the paradox of the gay superhero under Capitalism is that they are tolerated precisely because they are exceptional; i.e., the exception that proves the rule under Rainbow Capitalism: queerness is a commodity tied to war pastiche as predominantly straight, excepting tokens as the perpetual outsiders/smaller group]. Meanwhile, the non-binary approach to this morphological treatment of strength as corporal-sexual can also apply to women through gender trouble and parody as variably engaged: the Amazon as a musclebound “herbo” with the giant tits and six-pack; the skinny-thicc Barbie doll with pornstar curves and Pippi-Longstocking strength; or a cavewoman with traditionally masc qualities whose body evokes a Renaissance effect of morphological descriptors largely kept the same, but swaps genitals/sex organs in order to escape what is normally prescribed within a heteronormative binary [the “Conan with a pussy” concept, though Urbosa is basically female Zeus protecting Link by proxy]. The cis Amazon’s sodomy is less reviled in canon if only because, unlike the trans woman, she is born with a vagina, thus can be converted back to the canonically “correct” usage of that sex organ. In short, she can be tamed, rode and ostensibly bred in the appropriate hole [though not always] by her master.
To be crystal clear, this interpretative approach isn’t perfect. Marjorie Taylor Greene is basically a really mean herbo: a buff, incredibly dumb and frightened bigot/scared gym rat thriving in a culture war whose canonical praxis merges class war with the aesthetics of war in a fairly obvious way: muscles. Her Amazon disguise sucks—in part because cryptofascists rely on partial transparency but also because an anti-intellectual like her is welcomed by people like them who will exploit her position for a larger regressive movement: “Look at how loud and proud she is, but also strong like Xena!” She’s like a cheap wrestler in this respect; i.e., bad-faith but also “campy” in a thoroughly blind and bourgeois sense. It’s tragic.)
(exhibit 21a2b: Artist, right: Jason Edmiston. Nation pastiche commonly personifies war through larger-than-life cartoons of men [and token agents] who fight within geopoliticized theatre as a grand kayfabe: the simplicity of the arena as a stage to punch away your problems [and sell tickets and other merchandise within a free and glorious market]. This doesn’t just apply to male Man Box culture, but will be something to keep in mind in Volume Three, Chapter Four when we examine how TERFs perform as regressive Amazons that emulate the same heteronormative mentalities [albeit from token positions within the capitalist paradigm].)
As the above exhibits depict, combat sports under neoliberalism are war personified through national theatre stemming from more antiquated forms of the same basic hero-monsters. In times past, the whole world was watching to the extent that it could. This blood-and-sand, bread-and-circus vibe has expanded well beyond historical knights and gladiators to a variety of performers within and outside the Man Box using shared language. Clearly the tropes endure, but have become hauntologized, contested. Knights serve more of a police function (the good/white knight, bad/black knight) and gladiators more as chattel/wage slaves operating inside a bread-and-circus model (this includes tokens offering the circus-level curiosities of Amazon or Adonis as commodified within the general business scheme of a babyfaces-and-heel switch).
Regarding EVO, Capcom Cup and videogames, such ordeals generally come with live bands/music to remind you it’s a legitimate sporting event despite the relatively unathletic nature of videogame players: NASCAR levels of corporate sponsorship, phallic trophies and player kayfabe personas that move product with their digital bodies parallel to the Military Industrial Complex overseas, the two operating in unison; e.g., Wayne’s World (1992, exhibit 34c2) connecting war in videogames to geopolitical maneuvers that use war inside capital to profit as highly as possible; i.e., by moving as much money through nature as can be done, all while exploiting as many workers as possible while dodging the consequences at every turn. This isn’t terribly difficult when you have means. For instance, a million-dollar purse barely qualifies as peanuts to a billion-dollar company like Capcom.
Likewise, as the elite work within their means, collateral damage is to be expected, but also canonized, worshipped and fetishized on and offstage, at home and abroad. Under such privatized, coercive conditions, canon’s menticide belies real abuse (rape or otherwise) long before it’s “proven” in a court of law—one run by powerful male (or token) judges and biased, cherry-picked juries having a vested, monetary interest in a selectively punitive and illusory course of Justice. Chosen to benefit, if not wealthy then certainly privileged white male defendants, the status quo banks on a legal system operating not as “corrupt,” but exactly as intended; i.e., according to the real world as echoed within copagandistic portrayals that celebrate this Faustian arrangement as naturalized and immutable, hence lucrative for Pygmalions like Dick Wolf maintaining the spell to profit off of its pro-state myopia (Skip Intro’s “Law & Order‘s War on Your Rights,” 2024).
You must understand, then, that oppositional praxis—its mode of expression and execution (through workers synthesizing praxis)—are hopelessly entangled, twisting into a Gordian Knot. Untangling the mess doesn’t call for a sword to slice through everything; it takes time and effort to interrogate, and must be done as it actually operates: “an unweeded garden grown to seed.” The important distinction for workers lies in seeing Capitalism’s ownership of the figurative “seeds,” their “planters,” the “pots” and the “soil” of the public imagination. Under these stark, pre-owned conditions, workers should do whatever they can when they can to contribute to whatever degree they’re able that raises the class/cultural awareness of a larger pro-labor movement seeking liberation; i.e., one that enacts sex-positive change through iconoclastic praxis synthesized according to emotional/Gothic intelligence, the social-sexual habits of which develop over time. It’s not a sprint, but a marathon performed by a disparate union of workers and various class allies (friendly millionaires, professors, politicians, industry legends and other privileged/accommodated workers) grappling with class traitors (cops; unfriendly millionaires, professors, politicians, industry legends and other privileged/accommodated workers). All are menticided to some degree and exposed to waves of terror through the state trifectas and monopolies. What defines workers as bourgeois or proletarian is how they respond within oppositional praxis, be that passively or actively (the more active/awake the better). In short, you want workers who “gotchu” when class traitors start to fuck around, like this very pissed off (and very awesome) Boston mom (Jaclyn Smith, 2023).
Speaking in fictional terms, Star Wars: Andor gives the perfect model, I think (and extrapolate on in my own glowing response video): Maarva/Cass Andor and friends are rebellious workers/active conspirators; Axis and Mon Martha, class allies; Dedra Meero and Syirl Karn, class traitors; Karis Nemik, the twink manifesto-writer (“the brains”); Faye Marsay, muscle (“the brawn”/Amazon warrior mom); Saw Gerrera and Kino Loy, liminal workers (factionalism, but also turncoats/converted allies); and B2EMO, the cute robot mascot. Nemik’s manifesto is the theory behind the operation; Mon Martha funds the rebellion and Axis facilitates it (in admittedly cutthroat ways); Andor vs Karn or Meero vs Axis and Martha are oppositional praxis; and the combined drama and intrigue between everything, in dialectical-material terms, synthesize through social-sexual, emotionally healthy and intelligent habits that “grease the wheels” of revolution and tyranny (there’s not much overtly Gothic content in the show but retro-future is retro-future).
To emulate these working concepts as part of oppositional praxis at large, the remainder of the synthesis roadmap divides into our aforementioned four parts: the “basics,” or social-sexual habits tied to emotional/Gothic intelligence as they presently exist, followed by fleshing out these concepts more deeply as we supply further exhibits about canonical war and rape as historical-material “side effects” of Capitalism/Cartesian dualism operating as normal.
Before we proceed onto the basics in part one, consider one more time the paradoxical means of applying Sarkeesian’s adage to the human body in popular entertainment as something to embody ourselves. Traditional mechanisms of strength and power are easily alienated and fetishized through Cartesian violence/abjection, to which function determines function, not aesthetics. All the same, there is generally a great deal of overlap, so remember this when conducting dialectical-material scrutiny through your own consumption, creation and/or patronage of the arts:
(exhibit 21b: Artist, top-left and right: Jan Rockitnik; top-mid-left and top-mid-right: Luigiix; bottom-left and bottom-mid-left: Inputwo; bottom-might-right: Velladonna.
The body—especially the female body—is a highly controlled canvas [which reflects back on AMAB variants of the monstrous-feminine/corrupt, of course]. As we have discussed regarding Amazonomachia so far in the book, the embodiment of strength is generally in conflict with hauntological traditions that serve the state, or become unmoored from state mechanisms to interrogate themselves in worker-produced, semi-asexual forms of poetic catharsis [e.g., rape play and public nudism]. The aim isn’t just to empower oneself in relation to one’s own trauma, but to prevent trauma in the future by reclaiming the potential theatrical devices that normally concern or otherwise bring trauma about for all peoples. The body as a canvas, then, becomes a battlefield with which to issue a variety of warrants and commands from and towards; i.e., through body language itself as normally policed with these bodies and their expressions of power, but through Gothic-Communist performance and play lets workers negotiate their own [a]sexual destinies by corrupting the usual mechanisms of worker enslavement: material conditions and propaganda.)
Heroes are often monstrous and sexualized, and the monstrous body is a huge paradox. Orcs are clear example, as we have discussed in Volume One and Zero
“umm I hope you guys know orcs would kill you if you tried to fuck them” whaaat holy shit man orcs are typically depicted as chaotic evil savages? no waaay dude, this whole time I’ve been eroticizing the monstrous as a deliberate critique of the racist and ableist undertones in the classical orc archetype, when I should have simply realized that elements of popular fiction are objective absolutes that can’t be reexamined or remixed through the cultural lens of the ever-shifting presentttttt (source, Tumblr post: Orc Boxer)
but really it can be anything monstrous or fetishized adjacent to monstrous stereotypes, thus able to intersect with systemic trauma through parallel expression (similar body types; e.g., the PAWG, below, as luscious, fruit-like, and ready-for-harvest); i.e., as something to expose psychosexual trauma and teach good play through (a)sexual renegotiation amid the creative successes of proletarian praxis grappling with state forms (which automatically compel sexual activity through segregation and force). This evokes the language of camp and ludo-Gothic BDSM to camp canon with, on the Aegis. Keep this in mind as we proceed.
(artist: Super Busty Art)
Onto “The Basics of Oppositional Synthesis“!
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] The elite, as Elon Musk terrifyingly shows us with his diaper fetish alt account (re: depsidase), are not immune to the infantilizing effects of Capitalism.
[2] The likes of which still occurs behind the scenes; i.e., men enslaved to their contracts, their bodies being destroyed while women are sex-trafficked for those men by those at the top—Vince McMahon being investigated for sex-trafficking:
In 2022, McMahon announced he was stepping down from the WWE after an internal probe that found allegations of a hush-money payment to a former employee, with McMahon allegedly paying $3 million to the then-unnamed female, a WWE paralegal, to keep their “consensual” affair private. Following the investigation, he returned to WWE in July 2023. However, in January, that woman — Janel Grant, who was hired in the specially made role of “administrator-coordinator” in WWE’s legal department — filed a lawsuit against McMahon, WWE head of talent relations John Laurinaitis, and the wrestling company outlining years of alleged sexual assaults. Among the allegations in the lawsuit, is McMahon’s demands that Grant make herself sexually available to both himself and Laurinaitis (who is also named in the suit), as well as unnamed “WWE Corporate Officers” and a “WWE Superstar.” Grant also accused McMahon of degrading her, and in one incident, said that named and Laurinaitis locked her in an office and raped her (source: Daniel Kreps’ “Vince McMahon Under Federal Investigation Amid Sexual Assault Lawsuit,” 2024).
[3] Technically she’s an Italian fascist, who—as a token Man-Box bruiser—channels the alt-right, female prime minister of Italy, Georgia Meloni. But you’d be forgiven for thinking otherwise; one, all fascists defend capital, and two, the Nazis have far greater propaganda value in centrist stories—are far more revered within kayfabe at large—for their perceived strength/warrior prowess. Despite modern fascism starting in Mussolini’s Italy, no one really makes movies about cartoon Italian fascists. Much of this has to do with American myth-making after WW2, hiding American Imperialism behind the Myth of the Good War (which requires a recognizable and feared, but also game enemy to work).