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.
Artistic Nudity and Asexual Bodies/Relationships in Art; Gay Artists (feat. It’s Perfectly Normal, As Good as It Gets, and Tilda Swinton)
“So many drawings and paintings and sculptures of the human body! Artists must love to draw the human body!”
“Artists love to draw the bee’s body.”
“I haven’t run across a painting of an insect.”
“Hold on. We haven’t seen everything yet.”
—the Bird and the Bee, It’s Perfectly Normal
Picking up where “Pigtail Power and Crossdressing: Sex Repulsion in Gothic/Queer Narratives” left off…
Asexuality’s neurodivergence from heteronormativity is touched on through Barbarian‘s behind-the-scenes meta-narrative, from last section. Now I wanted to highlight asexuality in textual/metatextual expression using overtly ace/grey ace examples: the idea that nudity isn’t inherently or automatically sexual and how this revelation weaves into famous narratives that often leave sexualized nudity out entirely—i.e., artistic/pornographic nudism, but also education materials aimed at children to teach acceptance and love, as much as biology’s nuts and bolts; e.g., Michael Emberley’s work from various books over the years, though we’ll look specifically at his 1994 book, It’s Perfectly Normal, with sex educator Robie Harris.
(artist: Michael Emberley[1])
We’ll also examine a common trope in heteronormative stories that uses asexuality in art to further sexual agendas: the homonormative trope of the gay artist, usually a gay man painting a female model to help her find sexual love (with a cis-het man). We’ll introduce the basic idea—e.g., with the artist/model pairing in As Good as It Gets (1997) and Derek Jarman/Tilda Swinton over the years—as well as some broader social concepts tied to these, such as shadism (racism) and sexism, which the above ace relationships to nudity can either endorse or interrogate to varying degrees.
Note: Here is a 2025 extension on It’s Perfectly Normal—one defending its continued publication in light of ongoing censorship by fascist forces. —Perse, 5/6/2025
(exhibit 90a: Artist: Michael Emberley, whose art style remains largely unchanged since 1994, but has expanded to be more racially and culturally diverse; re: with its 2021 re-release, twenty-five years later!
On that, Katie Hintz-Zambrano writes:
There’s no question about it, sex education in the U.S. needs an update. And while sex-ed in schools isn’t always under a parent’s control, what one teaches at home is. Which is why stocking your personal library with age-appropriate sex-ed titles is important.
Enter the best-selling book It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, and Sexual Health, which has sold over 1.5 million copies since its debut over 25 years ago. Now the classic family resource, written by Robie H. Harris and illustrated by Michael Emberley, is getting an important update, starting with its cover and title.
The newly named It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, Gender, and Sexual Health (note the addition of “Gender”) features a vibrant purple cover with non-binary characters, a subject who uses a wheelchair, and another holding a cellphone, bringing it more firmly into circa 2021.
Of course, the more up-to-date and inclusive aspects don’t stop there. The brand-new edition includes such updates as gender-inclusive information and language throughout; an expansion on LGBTQIA topics, gender identity, sex, and sexuality; the latest on sexual safety and contraception; a sensitive and detailed expansion on the topics of sexual abuse, the importance of consent, and destigmatizing HIV/AIDS; a revised section on abortion, including developments in shifting politics and legislation; and resources on how to safely use social media [source: “Best-Selling Sex-Ed Book It’s Perfectly Normal Gets An Inclusive Update,” 2021].
The point of such works, then, is iconoclastic—to demystify the human body as something the state normally controls; i.e., as canon through ignorance in service to profit [re: the Protestant ethic].)
First, a point about nudity in asexual works. Should it appear, ace persons tend to treat nudity in the “artistic” sense; i.e., not inherently sexual. The art in It’s Perfectly Normal, for example (which we’ve already examined in Volume Two [re: exhibit 55a, “Furry Panic“] and earlier in this volume; re: exhibit 87h), artistically celebrates the human body as sexually and morphologically diverse. Nevertheless, the book, despite frequently depicting the human body as a site of sexual reproduction, also illustrates it as something to appreciate unto itself—enjoyed artistically by artists/non-artists alike, regardless of how they orient.
Nothing is more controlled than sex, which the state regulates through force in alienizing language (re: “Reclaiming Anal Rape“; i.e., the human body—as something to canonize and control by the Church into capital—has been controlled out of Antiquity’s ancient canonical laws into a Protestant ethic that polices sexuality and nature-as-whore into the present space and time. Sex back is labor and land back, which the state cannot permit; i.e., faced with the possibility of children being educated about sex, moral panics erupted by fascist families punching down in defense of the nuclear model. And though not immediately comparable to Hirschfeld’s Institute of Sexology being burned to the ground, in 1933, the basic idea is very much the same: controlling workers bodies, gender and sexuality through dogma. History doesn’t predicate entirely on class struggle, then (re: Marx), but the control of sex through force to police nature; re: as alien monstrous-feminine whore (re: “Nature as Food“). Through that control, a messy convergence of class, culture and race war results; i.e., one regarding the endless clash of state-corporate rights versus worker/natural rights, warring back and forth until the end of time. ACAB, ASAB, APAB, etc. Push back against them as soon as they start to push, trying to control us (re: “Survive, Solidarize, and Speak Out“)!
A huge factor regarding said control is education through art—meaning about and with nudity as an asexual vector for education; i.e., regarding the human body (and its various biological and poetic functions) as asexual versus explicitly sexual (the two are not mutually exclusive, but there’s generally a tendency to divide them when teaching children about sex). To that, Emberley’s work with Harris was banned—less for the written information inside, all on its own, and more for the visual diagrams presented to children tied to various moral panics; re: which fascists like Matt Walsh propagated by treating Emberley’s illustrations as anathema, thereby meriting nothing but extreme censorship—book bans.
To it, reactionaries reacted predictably to It’s Perfectly Normal, banning the book publicly around the United States from 1994 onwards (re: exhibit 55a, “Furry Panic“). Nazis and white/token moderates—thus the capitalists for whom they serve—want you stupid and scared, but also complicit when book bans overlap with genocide during the liminal hauntology of war policing nature, gender and sex. When books burn, the library is the world—the ones who suffer the very animals and children such stories attempt to express vis-à-vis the Gothic mode (re: “Follow the White-to-Black Rabbit“):
Furthermore, fascism is when society grows toxic through the nation-state model merged with corporate bodies to further genocide; genocides—and their extermination rhetoric per Cartesian thought, heteronormativity and settler colonialism—rely on ignorance to function in defense of profit: by hiding said toxicity in plain sight, doing so through the perceived righteousness of the moral panic(s) at play and their subsequent arbitration by crusaders against knowledge as a “corrupting” force. Corruption is the data they want to quell: Capitalism sucks (whose Realism menticides workers to kill themselves for the state; re: “The Nation-State“).
In Gothic, the imperial home and its anxious, faulty inheritance are both false and doomed, hellbent on surviving by eating the resident(s) and their neighbors. Education-wise, this nigh-Biblical regression and its monopolies include attacking the book(s) in question
Children’s book author Robie H Harris’ and artist Michael Emberley’s million+ copy bestselling book, It’s Perfectly Normal, A Book About Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, Gender, and Sexual Health, has been continuously challenged and/or banned since it was first published in 1994 and continues to be challenged even in recent days. In November of 1994, NCAC supported the book and fought efforts to ban the book from schools, libraries, and bookstores as well as other books on sexual education by those who object to sex education books even for older kids, pre-teens, and teens, who are entering and going through puberty. Harris, a member of the National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) board, was pleased when a recent Book Riot cartoon story about It’s Perfectly Normal ignited an outpouring of continuing support on social media (source: NCAC’s “Supporters Rally Around It’s Perfectly Normal,” 2023).
but also the authors of such things, themselves—with Harris falling under fire for writing the books to begin with:
Harris and Emberley believe that writing the “truth” with accurate, responsible information and facts can help protect kids, their friends, and families.
Harris went on to say, “I will continue to speak out on the freedom to read and write for kids of all ages, no matter what the perils have been for the creators of children’s books and the perils that are continuing to occur at an alarming and even faster pace than in the past few years. Even though my own safety and so many others’ safety have been threatened over the years, and pages of my books and others’ books have been ripped up and thrown in the trash and/or burned in bonfires with adults and children watching those pages being ‘disappeared,’ I will not be silenced. Many of you have taken the same stance. We need even more of you to join us. And what about our nation’s children? Most children of all ages know about the tragic deaths of their peers, or family members, or friends they have known and those they have not known but know that they have died. And yet, I have hope. Our kids and teens are our hope for the future of our democracy because so many of them have not been silent and are continuing to speak out and protest and petition for the principles of the First Amendment. Even with the threat of being jailed for writing the books I write and for speaking out in defense of free expression, I still will not be silenced. A giant and heartfelt thanks to all those who also will not be silenced and continue to defend free expression and the principles of our nation’s First Amendment (ibid.)
Liberation starts with being better stewards of nature; i.e., ourselves and our bodies as represented in asexual ways regarding sexuality and gender as things to teach through nudity of all kinds. “Wokeness” isn’t a virus, but is something the state will police as such (re: “Bad Dreams“). Silence is genocide, so make some fucking noise; i.e., through porn/art as visually “noisy” regardless if it’s seen as ace or not!
“Opinion is the wilderness between knowledge and ignorance,” Plato once argued. The fact remains, if sex and monsters weren’t powerful, the state wouldn’t police them, and sexuality—as something to depict and educate with nudity—is historically brutalized; i.e., as whores have been since Ancient Athens. The policing isn’t censored; only the information itself as anything remotely positive—becoming something of a forbidden fruit whose “food for thought” is highly discouraged, but also sold back as cheap junk food workers must demonically subvert in their own work (re: “Of Darkness and the Forbidden“). The whore’s revenge is existing to educate as the iconoclast do!
In Emberley’s opinion, then, his world with Harris is among his best despite the Puritan censorship occurring towards it—indeed, because of it demonizing what amounts to ourselves, but especially women and children sexualized coercively by state forces (who project said abuse onto their abject victims). Specifically regarding his work with Harris, Emberley replies in a 2017 interview with Kathy Temean (to the question, “What do you think is your biggest success?”):
Well, overall I’d have to say my collaboration with author Robie Harris on the series for various age kids on sexuality and puberty. They have been a game-changer for me and for the field of comprehensive sexuality education. The two of us worked at times like one mind, designing and composing the books with the only mantra being, “What’s in the best interest of the child?” I must have spent an entire year out of the ten we worked on those books as well as others, in Robie’s kitchen, crafting, tinkering, writing, pushing for the best we could do. It was all for a higher cause I guess you could say. The lives of children, their health and well-being, were all that mattered. People say they like one of my books, but these books people have thanked us for producing. I’ll never be thanked like that again, I’m certain. We contributed to a genre of children’s non-fiction that is being copied to this day. 20 years and over 30 languages later, they’re still going strong (source).
Divorced from sexual activity, Emberley’s figures demonstrate how artistic creations—when viewed independently from erotic displays, or at least erotic mindsets—can separate the human body from an artist’s personal orientation or published work’s stated goal. In his case, this happens even while communicating the human body with various stereotypical looks, minus the dogmatic messaging (and allergy to gender and sex) that frequently goes along with them:
- Skinny female bodies are less “charged,” libidinous or fertile—unable to visually convey sexuality through nubility (which historically has racialized characteristics: the trope of the sexually voracious woman of color—the colonial shaming of such explored by Jean Rys’ Wide Sargasso Sea [re: exhibit 21c1, “The Basics“] still being felt by women of color today: “It’s almost taboo to talk about sex in the African-American community, especially for women. In the United States, unless we are belting out the lyrics to ‘Let’s Talk About Sex,’ black women discussing sexual liberation are often immediately judged,” source: Sharelle Burt’s “This Traveling Seminar Promotes Black Sexual Liberation Across The Country,” 2018).
- “Thicc,” busty, female bodies are likened to fruit, ripe for plunder and fertilization.
- Skinny male bodies “lack” virility, while muscular male bodies are more sexually potent.
- Disabled persons in general lack the desire or the means to have sex.
The fact remains, many stereotypically “sexy” bodies can be owned or drawn by persons who orient asexually to varying degrees (e.g., Cuwu was demi-pan and Blxxd Bunny is ace, below). The inverse can also be true, as well as a great many liminal gradients that serve as conscious ways of thinking about nudity and the human form more broadly.
(artists: Cuwu and Blxxd Bunny)
For example, Jadis, despite knowing I was an erotic artist, would get incredibly jealous if I looked at physically attractive joggers. What Jadis constantly failed to realize was how I could recognize the body as something to artistically appreciate in the asexual sense—i.e., divorced from immediate sexual attraction despite my pansexual orientation and hypersexual disposition allowing for sexual attraction. The primary difference lay in how I chose to interpret the bodies I was looking at. Usually, I would absent-mindedly swap sexual attraction in favor of an asexual appreciation towards physically attractive bodies, on par with a life study.
Simply put, the joggers interested me in an asexual way because I thought about their bodies asexually—as an artist actively appreciating the human form in motion or at rest, which comes with a certain bias according to what I find interesting or fun to draw. For instance, I love to draw boobs a lot more than I like to fuck them, actually preferring butts insofar as those stimulate me: “Anyways, this cake is great; it’s so delicious and moist!” Still alive, bitches; workers suffer but the Medusa cannot be killed! So we pass forbidden information along upon itself, my own Sex Positivity books a logical-and-happy continuation of the same trend that Harris and Emberley demonstrated (and censored from the start of my website to present circumstances by Google, Facebook and other giant corporations): leaning is fun, as is developing Gothic Communism through all manner of social-sexual displays! Survival is victory and victory is success of education to aid in our survival; re: when the Man comes around, show him your Aegis!
(artists: Persephone van der Waard and Cuwu; source: “Goblins, Anti-Semitism, and Monster-Fucking”)
In turn, many life-drawing artists like to draw older or heavier bodies without necessarily having a mature/fat fetish. But there is arguably a gradient that oscillates. Reubens arguably did erotically enjoy larger women, but not always. According to Ian Walker in “Sex, Violence and Big Bums: Rubens and the Birth of Modern Europe” (2017); re (cited in Volume Zero’s “On Giving Birth“):
Rubens was obsessed by flesh; young flesh, old flesh, men’s flesh, woman’s flesh, dead flesh, damaged flesh, the flesh of children and angels and saints. His paintings are packed with the stuff. […] This was Rubens’s genius. He got in among our basic desires and our raw physicality and he gave them form. In this specific case it is flesh and sexual desire, but this preponderance of flesh in Ruben’s art wasn’t always erotic. More often than not the flesh was just there, distended and bloated or stripped or lean. We can see the blood coursing through it, we can see its folds and its scars. The painting of the “The Last Judgement in the Alte Pinakothek” is surrounded by other paintings by Rubens full of jowly fat men with distended paunches, muscular naked warriors, fat babies suckling on bloated breasts, sinewy saints, twisted martyrs and dozens and dozens of plump woman with big bums (source).
The fact remains, had I thought about those lovely joggers erotically then it would have had an erotic effect, but it didn’t because I didn’t. To be transparent, voyeurism is a kink of mine, but generally remains a separate activity from those I’m drawing. While I have gotten involved sexually with models before, it’s hardly the default. I do tend to draw people I find attractive, but drawing someone you deem attractive isn’t automatically a courtship ritual, either. It can be, but such things must be determined on an individual basis.
For instance, models indicate a profession, whereas someone modeling for you may or may not be a full-time model. Many sex workers aren’t even full-time; they moonlight, and there’s room to appreciate them as people with attractive bodies and wonderful personalities. Nuance allows us to appreciate someone’s “hotness” without making them a sexual participant, or bonding within the limited purview of online friendships guided by monetary transactions tied to erotic sex as nudist. Ultimately the relationship between artists and models isn’t cut and dry (despite transphobic sex workers trying to tell me—a trans woman artist, writer and sex worker—otherwise; this is an adventure I’ll unpack more in Chapter Four).
(model and artist: Itzel Sparrow and Persephone van der Waard)
While I neither forbid the sexual enjoyment of the human body/art nor separate pornography from art, the feelings I have about my own art remain largely asexual: I have never felt especially aroused in a sexual manner by my own creations; rather, I have always desired through my creations to represent different kinds of bodies whose nudity may be appreciated in a variety of ways. By that same token, Emberley’s work in It’s Perfectly Normal predominantly portrays human bodies in relation to sexual education and health. Even so, his art invites the viewer to consider the human body as an artistic symbol that conveys nudity whose artistic displays can be appreciated in sexual and asexual ways.
In either case, popular media isn’t simply a vacuum in which sexual nudity dominates; nudity is something for the audience to relate to in different ways according to what the model and the artist create metatextually. For the remainder of the section, I’d like to explore the complexities of this ongoing relationship as it pertains to various sexual and asexual forms of nudity.
Note: I wrote this piece back in early 2023. Since then, October 7th happened and Loner Box has gone “mask off”; i.e., he’s since been thoroughly exposed as a Zionist, therefore genocide apologist who largely uses his leftist aesthetic in bad faith (e.g., Bad Empanada Live’s “Ending Loner Box’s Career,” 2024). Also, his once-friend Destiny was exposed as a sex pest (Bad Empanada Live’s “Destiny is a Sex Criminal,” 2025), the two going to Israel in the middle of the Gaza genocide (Bad Empanada Live’s “Destiny & Loner Box’s Deadbeat Dad Journey to Israel,” 2024) and only parting ways because Destiny allegedly slept with Loner Box’ partner without his permission (alas, poor Yorick, I cucked him, Horatio; Bad Empanada Live’s “Loner Box Sexts With Viewer LEAKED,” 2025).
All this being said, I want to keep the link to his video here for two reasons: to have a reason to expose Loner Box, here, but also because the because info in the video about black fetishization seems basically fine (a broken clock). That being said, always defer to artists of color speaking to their own oppression; i.e., the pedagogy of the oppressed; e.g., Anansi Library’s “What The Student Resistance NEEDS to Learn From Ethiopians” (2025). Let past-and-present struggles fuel and reinforce your own! —Perse, 5/5/2025
First, sexual nudity. A common theme of canonical artistic nudity is sexual appetite. For example, white supremacy ties non-white bodies to “gross” (excessive) sexual appetites through racialized Enlightenment tropes, leading to fat-shaming and black fetishization (source: Loner Box’s “Jordan Peterson and Beauty,” 2022; timestamp: 6:40). Reverting these tropes requires returning to pre-Enlightenment ways of appreciating nudity in art, but also reinventing carceral hauntology under Capitalism. Avoiding these pitfalls in the artistic expression, and interpretation of, sexual nudity can help non-white/non-skinny bodies become sites of non-sexual enjoyment and (a)sexual pride in their owners’ eyes, not sources of taboo sexuality viewed lustily by powerful white men who want to exploit them.
Canonical exploitation leads to intraracial in-fighting through a shameful desire to embody “correctness” in one’s own form. By recognizing the ways in which white supremacy shapes our self-image in relation to others through art, we as viewers, artists, and patrons can help combat symptoms of compelled assimilation as a desire to escape genocide (shadism, tokenism, manufactured sexual difference, etc) through nudity as something to portray appreciatively in sexual and asexual ways. For example, despite black bodies being portrayed as rooted in and indicative of prehistory and pre-civilization, they are no more or less “ancient” than white bodies are, no less savage or brutal. Escaping these dated clichés can help the public imagination see beyond Capitalism, but it has to start where these trammeling attitudes originate: from the Superstructure.
(exhibit 90b: Source, top-left; Reubens, top-right; Harmonia Rosales, bottom.)
However, while asexual nudity is entirely valid as part of this process, the sexual portrayal of nudity remains an incredibly common practice—so much so that asexual stories don’t exclude the possibility outright. In fact, few stories are exclusively about ace characters, only increasing the odds that sexual attraction and nudity will be explored in some shape or form. But from a phenomenological perspective, the enjoyment (or repulsion) of sexual activity/nudity occurs differently per individual. Sometimes, this overlaps, leading to outright conflict or commensal arrangements (where only one party benefits, but neither comes to harm).
(artist: Blxxd Bunny)
Grey ace persons, for example, can have sex with someone for whom sex is profoundly erotic, while they themselves view it more indifferently—like playing cards or watching TV (re: Bunny finds it fun, but definitely has a more ace approach to it, enjoying the public nudism as something to exhibit for other people’s pleasure, above). Conversely, asexual stories might omit sexualized nudity altogether. A hilarious, dialogue-heavy drama like Stein’s Gate (2011) invokes rich and engaging performances, all without the heavy-handed, heteronormative nostalgia of something as marriage-focused as Back to the Future (1985) or It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). There’s still sexual tension between certain characters, and Mayuri Shiina herself works as a busty catgirl hostess at an otaku bar (also, the show was based on a dating phone game). However, whereas the male clientele fawn over Shiina in sexual ways, she herself views the job as simply being cute, divorced from eroticization. Likewise she and Rintaro Okabe have a largely chaste relationship, one that feels incredibly touching despite a total lack of sexual activity or nudity.
Meanwhile, The Last Unicorn tells a surprisingly mature and somber tale that includes love, but remains primarily engaged with characters unconcerned with romance, sexual nudity or erotic love: Schmendrick cares about magic; Molly, about Robin Hood; the Unicorn, about reunion; Haggard, about unicorns. Only Prince Lear, Haggard’s son, cares about romantic love, which he innocently[2] discovers with Amalthea in her human form (with flashes of asexual nudity thrown in). Their combined tragedy involves the swift finding and sudden death of romance—an intense experience, to be sure, but one that ultimately merges inside a potluck of persons relating back and forth about a great number of things.
(artist, left: Genzoman)
Disparate stories like Stein’s Gate[3] and The Last Unicorn demonstrate how easily ace and non-ace people co-exist in situations that promise or promote some form of affection. The struggle lies not in potential, but in reminding audiences that ace experiences are just as valid and worthy of communicating inside popular stories. Forget making love, whatever happened to fucking? What about holding hands? Having one’s heart race at feeling seen and understood by someone to whom they feel attracted, including non-sexual examples? Laughing at each other’s misfortunes, triumphs, struggles? None of these things are mutually exclusive, but they are unique per person when relating to other people. Artistic expression should allow for all of them to exist side-by-side, not in opposition; i.e., just having access to them at all at a young age will allow us to change—specifically for workers to wake up and become more emotionally/Gothically intelligent and aware; re: during class, culture and race war as, at their most basic, battling for flow of information.
Take it from me: Being shown these devices—be they fantastical or ordinary (as The Last Unicorn or It’s Perfectly Normal respectively are)—allowed me to change and write/illustrate this book series; re: while working with a variety of models interested in similar means of sex/gender education as a sex-positive liberatory force; e.g., Delilah Gallo being a sex educator and coach equally passionate about these topics in poetic forms tied to bodies; i.e., whores are monsters possessing great power the state will hunt them for, and we cannot defeat the state by keeping quiet and hiding forever! The Aegis is our greatest weapon, and one that must be seen to work its magic: “Magic, do as you will!” Believe in its power because its power speaks for itself; i.e., as an attractive means of reifying trauma to play with, during ludo-Gothic BDSM’s calculated risk!
(model and artist: Delilah Gallo and Persephone van der Waard)
Friendship is magic, and so are sex and education’s unicorns punching up against fascism; i.e., at the sex police raping nature by pimping it (thus sex workers and by extension all workers), mid-DARVO: lying through bad-faith disguise to steal power for the state, in effect being afraid of the state’s enemies, which is anything and everything not the bourgeoisie; re: fascism is false rebellion. As we’ll see with Caleb Hart, next—but also TERFs and other token traitors, in Chapter Four—serving the state will turn you into a weird horny coward; i.e., one who harms everyone around you cryptonymically while alienating yourself through dogma from any chance at meaningful connection. You’ll become a cop, a sex pest, a rapist, an unironic vampire. The Aegis, in our hands, exposes what fascism turns workers into, but also what they pimp us as; i.e., which we reclaim on the Aegis through the same cryptonymy process as revolutionary (a topic for Chapter Five). Such education is organic and dynamic, not static and dead; i.e., it compounds through spectres of Marx gayer than the man himself was; re: all the dead whores of past generations speaking out through us, having Medusa’s sweet revenge!
Furthermore, stories with ace potential invite examination of characters historically examined in a particular way—sexually. However, if Tolkien’s hobbits (for example) can be viewed as gay in modern times (re: Molly Ostertag), it’s hardly a stretch to see them as ace, including their nudity. The same potential extends to pigtailed girls-in-black solving mysteries; the Archaic Mother trope and various hag personas; the sexually indifferent or sex-repulsed; or even artists drawing people viewed as “women” purely for their nude beauty as something (for us) to appreciate and show/view asexually! Such things don’t “cancel out”; they tend to overlap, if anything.
While artists and models needn’t be sexually attracted to cooperate, popular media tends to emphasize the heterosexuality of nudity between them. While Picasso can be blamed for this, a common homonormative example is the trope of the gay artist. In the 1997 film As Good as It Gets, we see an asexual scene between artist and model, performed through the gay servant/artist trope: Helen knowing her watcher is an artist who won’t have sex with her. There’s safety and consent amongst a “harmless” observer, the gay man helping her “loosen up” to become more sexual around her future partner, played by notorious real-life womanizer (and rape enabler), Jack Nicholson (re: “Dark Xenophilia“).
Though not conducted through immediate sexual attraction, the scene still feels homonormative whenever the artist—ecstatically sketching Helen’s shyly exposed body—effusively pays her cliché compliments like “You’re the reason [straight] cavemen painted on cave walls!” The implication is that she—a straight, cis-woman—is where his latent homosexual inspiration erupts from. While it’s certainly possible from an asexual standpoint, defaulting to a female muse without explanation remains problematic: It expects straight audiences to intuit the gay artist’s asexual point of view, when in reality they’ll more than likely project a heteronormative male stance on the woman’s body according to the gay artist’s bombastic praise. He’s a gay proxy for straight eyes.
Furthermore, by making the artist homosexual to start with, the writers don’t even broach asexuality as its own unique thing. Plenty of sexually-orientating artists can appreciate the male and female body without wanting to have sex with it; and while the trope of the female muse is already incredibly overused in artistic circles, just as many don’t orient sexually towards the women they feature in their works. For every Pablo Picasso declaring “sex and art are the same thing,” you have Derek Jarman celebrating the androgynous wonder of Tilda Swinton (exhibit 90c), and elsewhere though even less known, ace artists telling their own stories. Doing so isn’t always easy but it is important. As James Wenley writes in “Essay on Sunday: Asexuality and the Artist” (2022; emphasis, theirs):
Deeply divided for years between his lack of sexual desire and his longing to connect, James Wenley ultimately used theatre as a means to understand himself as an artist, a sometimes-romantic, a human being, and an ace.
[…]
I don’t find asexuality easy to talk about – how do you articulate an experience of absence? What makes me push past my personal discomfort is the importance of ace awareness. Decker argues that “asexuality needs to be in the common consciousness so asexual people… know their feelings have a name – and can stop thinking they’re broken if they don’t conform.” I’m also motivated by the vital need for ace people to stand in solidarity with the wider rainbow community against bigotry, for acespec awareness to play a part in continuing to open people’s hearts and minds to the multispectrum of ways of being and expressing that are open to us as humans.
In Asexual Erotics: Intimate Readings of Compulsory Sexuality, Ela Przybylo utilises the work of Audre Lorde to argue for an asexual erotics that centres forms of intimacy beyond the sexual, challenging the lingering Freudian notion that sexual attraction is the “benchmark for desire and wanting” and prime motivator of our actions. Western amatonormativity privileges a restrictive and imaginatively-bound form of love and relationships. No matter where you fall on the blurry ace/allo or romantic spectrums, all of us can benefit from more expansive narratives about love, desire, and social connection. As Angela Chen, author of Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex, explains, “when sex loses its dominance as the most important and intimate thing… more ways of relating and connecting become clear” (source).
Regardless of where, ace revelations occur through novel interpretation operating as a mode of experience. Be that experience personal or vicarious, opting in or out of sexuality occurs depending on subjective epiphanies: what someone learns about themselves over time. “I’m ace!” is as valid as “I’m gay!” or “I love Steve!” or “Boobs don’t turn me on, but they sure look nice!” The journey and discovery therein are entirely the point. Along the way, plenty of opportunities manifest through ambiguous ontological factors—factors that sadly lead to violence from hate groups targeting members of the queer community as gay alien to canonically pimp to Hell and back.
We’ll explore some of these complicated ambiguities next, namely among transgender persons, intersexuality and drag as targeted by bigots within nerd culture; i.e., as part of the same fascist groups targeting Robie Harris, Emberley and myself, but also any element of social-sexual education (GNC or not); e.g., Tilda Swinton, a person who, while far from perfect themselves, remains an ace icon unto themselves: Derek Jarman’s androgyne muse!
(exhibit 90c: Photographer, top-left, -right and -bottom: Tim Walker. Tilda Swinton originally debuted in Derek Jarman’s 1986 Caravaggio, but has since made an entire career around androgynous gender performance. Despite her excellent work with Jarman—and the blatant gender-non-conformity present throughout her decades-long work as an actor, artist and model—Tilda defended convicted rapist and Hollywood royalty, Roman Polanski, in 2009. When interviewed by Variety in 2021, Swinton upheld her decision, saying it was “just” for Polanski’s extradition from a “neutral country.” In other words, she refused to take a hard stance and reject the industry giant for his notorious and long-known crimes of rape [re: Dreading’s “The Case of Roman Polanski”] illustrating the deep connection that exists not simply between abusers and their victims, but also models and artists that goes into a perpetual whitewash of Hollywood sex crimes.)
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!
Footnote
[1] Arrived from The New York Times, in 2005: “An illustration by Michael Emberley from It’s Not the Stork, by Robie H. Harris, a sex education book for children age[d] 4 and up, to be published in 2006″ (source).
[2] Historically unicorns are viewed as phallic creatures “tamed” by female virgins (re: “Follow the White-to-Black Rabbit“). The movie turns this on its head by having an initially passive unicorn “awakened” by a male virgin.
[3] Which Cuwu enjoyed; i.e., when they would regress, the show giving them an ace relationship to look at from the outside, in (and which we would watch together as their ex and they have once watched, in the past). This being said, while the show was ace, it was actually based off a dating-sim game (a history reflected in the show, whose female character works at a neko bar dressed as a catgirl for predominantly male clients).