Book Sample: Attack of the Bad-Faith, Pussyhat Feminist Undead/Demons

Posted on by Persephone van der Waard

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.

“What is a Witch?” part three: Attack of the Bad-Faith, Pussyhat Feminist Undead/Demons; or, the Fascism-in-Disguise of “Witch” Girl Bosses, Male Gatekeepers, and the Gender-critical Movement (feat. Ian Kochinski)

“You know, soil cleans off a lot easier than blood, Quintus.”


“But with an army behind you could be extremely political.”

—Maximus and Quintus, Gladiator (2000)

Picking up where “Nerdy Patriarchs, ‘Real Men’ and So-Called Male ‘Witches'” + “Kento’s Dream” left off…

(exhibit 100a1: Artist, bottom: Katy’s Cartoons. Not everyone can draw well; the root context is what matters, not its ornamentation.)

Note: Sex Positivity started as a critique of the TERF movement in popular media. This subchapter contains much of my early writing of TERFs; i.e., focusing on their brand of fascism extensively and at a time when I was watching Essence of Thought‘s coverage on TERFs, as well. —Perse, 5/5/2025

As stated during the introduction, TERFs are fascists-in-disguise. They think they’re good, righteous, victims (re: the monstrous-feminine as under attack by trans people). Described as such by Judith Butler (Emanuel Maiberg’s “Why The Guardian Censored Judith Butler on TERFs,” 2021), the genderqueer icon notes how TERFs are “one of the dominant strains of fascism in our times.” They will not be there to help, but commit genocide against trans people as a marginalized group. Indeed, as cryptofascists, TERFs deceptively posture as moderates under neoliberalism, an ideology that aids and abets the very reactionary abuses Butler fights against: “racism, nationalism, xenophobia, [carceral] violence, [femicide and the] high rates of attacks on trans and genderqueer people.” TERFs commit all of these through varied obscurantism: an assortment of monstrous, undead/demonic disguises and deceptions, whose cryptonymy we’ll explore now (theirs—we’ll delve into ours, in Chapter Five).

The biggest disguise that TERFs use language as a mask, specifically the feminist label as a loud and angry cryptonym—i.e., the Medusa in bad faith, generally what Cheyenne would call “pussyhat feminists” (“Why Women Join the Alt-Right” (2023). As such, they present radical beliefs as “gender-critical” towards genuine activism; i.e., reviving the bigoted suffragettes of another time—the UK suffragette colors: purple, white, green—(and stealing the color scheme to Marilyn Roxie’s genderqueer flag when doing so) to infiltrate and infect activists subversively sex-positive movements from within, but also to batter and discredit during reactive abuse during us-versus-them brawls, polemics, and spectacles disguised as “debates”; i.e., fascist feminism dressed up as centrist, as progressive, as “one of us”: “‘I’ won, and might makes right/cooler headers prevail, so now freed the market and turn loose the wolf.” It’s weird canonical nerds versus weird iconoclastic nerds; i.e., per oppositional cryptonymy as pimp versus whore, whore cops punching down in bad faith, monopolizing oppression to weaponize it against state victims. Fascism—including token fascism—is theft of power through disguise for the state.

Note: There is a fairly active debate raging about whether to use the word “TERF” if it “poisons the well” of activism through a corrupted label (Caelan Conrad’s “‘TERF’ vs ‘Gender-critical’ // Addressing the Criticisms about My Gender-critical Series,” 2023). I think questioning the wisdom—of using a label that was always built on the equality of convenience (feminism; John the Duncan’s “Transphobia: The Far Right and Liberalism,” 2023)—is its own debate that, while entirely valid, I can separate from my decision to call a TERF a TERF [and, as Thought Slime points on in their 2025 video, “Fascists Will Waste Your Time,” we should make fascists uncomfortable, not mollify them].

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

Personally I consider myself a feminist, but don’t like to call myself one for the same reason I don’t call myself an atheist even though I am one: because of assholes popularly associated with the movement. I’d rather call myself something cool like “Satanist,” Gothic Communist, “gay faggot” or “gender studies expert”; i.e., something that a) doesn’t have nearly the same history of colonizing others because it’s always been a symbol of rebellion and b) dickheads wouldn’t try to call themselves because it’s reclaimed hate label or thing that they’re conditioned to hate. Your enemies can’t attack you if they’re experiencing cognitive dissonance (not without outing themselves, anyways)! Hoist them on their own petards! —Perse, back in 2023

Put another way, TERFs are bourgeois witches—i.e., fascist zombie Einsatzgruppen who materially during cryptonymy align with proponents of genocide, be those corporations and the banal evil of systemic abuse through cold economics, moderate politicians who turn a blind eye, or bloodthirsty ideologs (with fascism often having an openly occult flavor that extends to TERF “witches” and “war dogs” in seemingly muzzled/moderate forms, like Caleb Hart, The Liver King or Ian Kochinski). To it, capital decays feminism, and token, bigoted feminism can take many forms; i.e., often hauntological ones tied to war that dress it up in the already-deceptive language of American Liberalism, but also feminism, itself (e.g., Stormfront, who we’ll get to in a bit).

Except while much of the remainder of this book focuses on female TERFs in that regard, a brief word about male TERFs: Moderate feminism disguises reactionary politics by appropriating bodies through an inclusive façade. Whether male or female, it then adds further disguises to the already moderate mask and reactionary core, sporting concentric veneers that lean further and further left. We’ll explore these “gobstopper masks” more in the NERF section. For now, just know that TERF feminism and its undercover deceptions extend to cis-feminists of the male or female biological sexes (while deliberately excluding intersex people, of course).

Like their female counterparts, male TERFs act in bad faith. This stems from dogmatic ideologies funded from the top down; i.e., AstroTurf movements meant to police actual grass-roots organizations. Sexist dogma and Capitalistic hegemony intertwine through materialized ideals that advertise the arrangement for all to see. In turn, the benefactors of Capitalism financially incentivize TERF habits, empowering individual agents by granting them the basic means to make trouble. It doesn’t need to be an explicit agreement if the ideology and structure are already in place; the entire relationship can be plausibly denied regardless of what occurs. Meanwhile, TERFs thrive on obfuscation—muddying the waters through reactionary “leftism.” Just as emancipatory feminism interacts to varying degrees with artistic expression and various worker rights, reactionary abuses also intersect through multiple comorbidities.

Note: Ian Kochinski is a horrible person, and one I’ve promised to cover since Volume Zero. I didn’t do so in those books because I had already written about him, here. He was pretty terrible back in 2023, though has been exposed as a pedophile and zoophile more concretely since then (re: Bad Empanada Live’s “Vaush P*dophilia Controversy,” 2024). He’s truly bottom-barrel chudwad, and here we’re dragging him at last. —Perse, 5/5/2025

(exhibit 100a2: Source: Vaushv on Instagram, 2020. The Internet Age is thoroughly deregulated, to such a degree that people can say pretty much whatever they want without needing to cite sources or legally provide counterarguments. Simply put, it’s a grifter’s business, and one where “the pen is mightier than the sword” becomes weaponized against worker interests by people like Ian Kochinski. All you need is a computer, a mic, a camera, and a willingness to lie and exploit others for personal gain.)

For example, Ian Kochinski truly runs the toxic gamut, a

To hide all of these things, Kochinski must don a multilayered disguise that says he’s not Man Box/white supremacist. This includes his brand name, “Vaush,” which comes from a blackface narrative Kochinski wrote (Orikkun, 2021) about a black woman called Wacheneide (that shortens to Vaush). “Vaush” isn’t just a character Ian’s playing for fun; it’s a “bad” mask that intersects with his bad-faith, white supremacist/misogynistic takes on black nationalism fueled by Zombie-Vampire Capitalism. Like the canonical vampire, he’s a parasite posturing as benign. For example, in his famously hostile debate with female person of color, Professor Flowers (Professor Flowers’ “The Master Debater Vaush: On Black Nationalism,” 2022), Kochinski famously calls out black separatists (through Flowers) for “acting like black Nazis” against their white colonizers (a DAVRO trick, on par with calling Little Hoot “gay Hitler“; re: Little Hoots’ “Elon Musk Personally Banned Me From Twitter!”; timestamp: 4:38).

During the debate, Kochinski carefully frames his racism as “reasonable,” but also “not actually racism” by dressing up his reactionary outrage in moderate, feminist language. Such disguises didn’t stop Kochinski’s fans from harassing Flowers for months while Kochinski looked the other way. That’s the whole point: to create an unsafe environment for activists that doesn’t immediately announce itself. However, Kochinski also talked down to trans woman of color, Kat Blaque, patronizing her for not condoning his usage of misogynistic rhetoric against J.K. Rowling in “defense” of trans people (Kat Blaque’s “What My Spat With Vaush Taught Me About Being a Black Woman Online,” 2022), refusing to placate a moderate, in other words. Kochinski would describe Kat the same way he historically has described trans people, but also Professor Flowers: as fragile and stupid, but also less informed on their own daily struggles than he, a cis-het white man.

As discussed in Volume Two, Vampire Capitalism is tiered. It yields an orderly vertical arrangement of power with coercive functions: The Big Bad (the bourgeoisie) followed up by smaller and smaller proponents in the same overall army. To that, Ian is kind of vampire “middle management,” masquerading as a truth-teller that actually wears his worst mask on the outside. Simply put, he’s a duplicitous cunt who feeds off vulnerable women like a vampire for their essence, unable to make any himself through meaningful social-sexual relationships that actually value workers.

Like a Skeksis Lord at the Castle of the Crystal, Kochinski has become divided by Capitalism, a system that splits those defending it, tolerating it, or resisting it into different camps of exploited workers: cops, vigilantes and battered victims (class traitors) versus enemies of the state in praxis. Kochinski is very much a bad copy—a Trojan virus (that was a hacker pun). Crediting him—a still-sleeping, lobotomized shill, and menticidal rapist/warlike zombie-vampire—as leading people towards the Left is to thoroughly poison the well (the same goes for Caleb Hart, Liver King and all the rest of “the boys”—somnambulists only too happy to throttle anyone who tries to wake them up).

Such “reasoned” tone policing is also common among white atheists like Jimmy Snow (re: Rhetoric & Discourse’s “The Hypocrisy of the Atheist Community”) and Rationality Rules, who punch up against the “low-hanging fruit” of organized religion, but punch down against “uppity” feminists and other social activists who take things “too far.” For example, Jadis hated it when I—despite being an atheist—publicly preferred to call myself a Satanist as to not be associated with the New Atheist movement and incredibly popular/visible social wackjobs like

Not only are these accommodated anti-intellectuals not immune to state-sponsored fear, bigotry and hatred, but they’re frequently complicit, often getting paid to punch down and say shit that’s demonstrably false (Wisecrack’s “Why are Smart People So Dumb?” 2021) and get worshipped for “not being reactionary” because they’re not religious, which is absurd; Alex Arrelia on Twitter is absolutely on the money when countering that claim:

I think there’s a misconception that religiosity is inherently reactionary, and as an atheist I think it’s import to reject that framing, because it actually allows secular conservatives to be broadly accepted as “more moderate” than their religious counterparts (source, 2022).

The damage such persons can do is compounded by their disproportionate influence over victimized groups (similar to Winston Churchill or J.K. Rowling but less overtly racist or transphobic; all they have to do is be smug and white). We already explored the idea of “weird canonical nerds” at the end of Chapter 3; now we’ll examine those frequently gatekept by weaponized (white) male consumers: weaponized activists, aka male TERFs.

During their arguments, Blaque made a curious point to Kochinski: that bigotry is often informed by actual[1] trauma, especially within marginalized groups weaponized by moderate orchestrators (often men, or persons with material advantage working for the elite). Transphobia, for example, often comes from chicken hawks like J.K. Rowling, who use their own past trauma to encourage to emotionally-vulnerable cis women to conflate trans women with past male abusers in their own lives.

Capitalism demonstrates how persons in power can compel the bullied to bully fresh victims, making them punch down by exploiting their compound, canonized fear. In these cases, the chain of abuse grants the initial, opportunistic ringleaders (themselves part of a larger circus) a pass, working abused people like puppets. By sporting multiple disguises, suppressing legitimate activism, and collaborating with open reactionaries, men like Kochinski also highlight the general TERF MO at an individual level: material profit through rhetorical concessions with formal power. At a systemic level, neoliberals cover for fascists, which cover for Capitalism through a tenuous, complicated alliance of perfidious, multilayered distractions. Inside bourgeois democracies, the elite require these distractions—and the complex socio-economic circumstances that bring them about—to hold onto power.

(artist: Mathiole)

At either register, supremacy is supremacy. However, the elite treat war as a means to an end under Capitalism in ways they can structurally enforce: owner/worker division, efficient profit and infinite growth through mass exploitation, which leads to the cultural and literal deaths of entire peoples (often along ethnic, but certainly cultural lines). For profit to continue, though, war must pass prolonged moral scrutiny through complex concealment. Not only must the elite use Liberalism (fighting for democracy and freedom) and neoliberal illusions/dogma (war is a business that keeps America strong, thus prosperous for everyone) to conceal genocide from activists; they must conceal Capitalism’s inherent instability as a genocidal system structured around vertical power. That’s where TERFs, including men like Kochinski, come in. They’re the veneer of white, manly reason (which girl bosses, trans meds and female TERFs at large emulate through their own disguises).

When Capitalism inevitably enters crisis, neoliberals shift blame from the elite onto a conspicuous destroyer persona: fascism (or Communism, which we’ll explore in the “Bridging War” section). Imperialism does this easily enough against foreign enemies. However, fascism’s violent dogma isn’t relegated to faraway lands; through the Imperial Boomerang, fascist dogma appears domestically within disgruntled, often privileged workers. These malcontents include soldiers, but also business owners, landlords, actors, and so on acting as paramilitaries; i.e., solider-like. They must be disguised while still being able to do their jobs.

However, classic fascism cannot disguise these groups effectively because it abjures female warriors and executives by consigning AFAB people to women’s work (cooking, cleaning, childbirth and sex). To compensate, neoliberalism hides fascism by appropriating fascist feminism at home as grafted onto cultural exports with moderate personas: TERFs hidden by various popular personas, like the girl boss, but also as monstrous-feminine—e.g., witches, demon queens, cyborgs, Amazons, etc. Moderacy conceals reactionary cores, the former being “discarded” in times of crisis, but also retreat. TERFs affect moderacy by using their expanded rights and material advantages to whitewash war by playing “dress up.” Predicated on vengeful dogma clothes in sensible manners and friendly costumes, TERFs use neoliberal moderacy to

  • conceal open fascism on the homefront.
  • disguise war, genocide and “peace through strength” as reasonable positions to uphold through popular heroic archetypes; e.g., the Amazon: Wonder Woman clones like Red Sonya or Samus Aran, exhibit 100b1 (and various demonic/undead personas, but also Gothic conventions revived in the present space and time: Dacre’s Victoria, exhibit 100b2).

All the while, they demonize non-violent activists by co-opting their reclaimed symbols of rebellion through force: the undead/demonic egregores we examined in Volume Two as something “to rock” for the state; i.e., through false rebellion against trans people and their allies as “the real threat.” Doing so intentionally obscures the dialectical-material factors at play. “Top dog” is a tenuous proposition for a token agent, because assimilation rendered null and void first when the state decays and begins eating itself. The first war dogs put to heel for going heel are the token ones, the outliers. They become mounted, muzzled, and gagged by hypermasculine male dogs under the status quo, and punished if they fail to comply. As the state of exception expands, they must surrender more and more power. Failure to do so exposes the double standard of the “euthanasia effect,” whereupon the female warmonger—”I am woman, hear me roar!”—is forever silenced by being put down (while male variants of the “mad dog” are allowed to fight to the death under the status quo).

(exhibit 100b1: Artist, top-left: Akira Raikou; top-middle: Erik Von Lehmann; top-right: Jan Rockitnik; mid-left: Reiq; middle: Jonpadraws; mid-right: Jan Rockitnik.

The idea of the subjugated Amazon-as-terror-weapon is nothing new and something for which I have researched at great length. However, in terms of the Amazon as a feminist symbol that exists in opposition, its counterpart—as something to claw away from activists again during the Internet Age—is more recent; i.e., “I am woman, hear me roar!” as supplied by girl-bossing through a mythic-looking framework: “Hippolyta” as conquered by “Theseus” after their Amazonomachy or the Medusa’s legitimate rage leveled against other victims of male violence instead of Perseus. The language becomes useful to the state because it co-opts famous symbols of oppression within the language of monsters and power exchange presented as attractive, but also under attack; i.e., a carrot to dangle in front of marginalized groups, specifically cis women, to get them to assimilate then punch down. TERF variants of the Amazon uphold the status quo, voicing “oppression” in order to perform an expected duty of themselves through their privileged position as token women: to attack trans people.

Such compromises utterly ignore the subversive ironies of William Marsden while regressing towards a pro-Patriarchy depiction of Amazon force [one common during the times of the Ancient Greeks, but also under neoliberal Capitalism thanks to TERF pandering to and by corporate entities]. Intersections also include Amazons of color like She-Hulk, whose tempered, black rage is kept in check within a lawyer’s suit; and whose body is given the adequate amount of standard-issue curves. Similar body restrictions can be seen on the bodies of Samus Aran, but also Cammy White from the Street Fighter franchise; i.e., two soldiers who serve the state as bounty hunter/privateer and assassin, respectively. The sexiness of their oppression is co-opted to serve the state by matching traditional, colonial-binarized, feminine optics with the body language of war as masculine/male: the curvy-muscular female sexpot.

It’s certainly possible to have a muscular femme person who adorns the symbols of war for peace-like, proletarian purposes, but this proposition is always going to be liminal [exhibit 102a4/111b] so long as Capitalism and its agents exist; indeed the language of the “imaginary past” aesthetic is historically-materially used to justify [and disguise] the re-emergence of fascism when Capitalism enters overt stages of crisis. As a ghost of the counterfeit, the male body—as something to inject into female ideas of counterculture and oppositional force—features a Saturnine, patriarchal visage. As Jan Rockitnik tweets, “God I can’t get over how much Augustus’ patronage dominates the idea of ancient art. All so pristine. It’s only when you dive into early-Roman empire you see it was all saccharine propaganda as his era was bookended by civil wars and incest” [source, 2023]. The balanced, Vitruvian grace of post-Renaissance morphology in hauntological art is a cipher/dog whistle for fascist shenanigans.)

(exhibit 100b2: Artist: Jan Rockitnik; top-mid: Ey Yo Jimbo; top-right: koda1ra; bottom-left: Michi Pinup; bottom-right: Tarakanovich.

The girl boss is a cop/action hero that takes many forms, though these forms are not always girl bosses in the functionally bourgeois sense. In BDSM terms, the gym queen, protective secretary, schoolyard virago or vampire matriarch can certainly be presented in sex-positive/proletarian ways [the Warhammer 40k she-wolf is Imperialist any way you slice it] but this distinction is functional, meaning it requires context to parse; i.e., girl bosses normally serve men and patriarchal institutions; e.g., Ms. Bellum serves a child-like Mr. Mayor as his de facto “waifu.” In short, who’s wearing the costume and what does their performance/opinion of the material concern?

While monstrous language can be reclaimed through the wearing of contested identities like a literal mask/costume—as something to enjoy/endorse to varying degrees, this proletarian reality isn’t guaranteed [if you want to critique fascists aesthetics, reclaiming the “Sandow-esque” body is a good place to start; e.g., Claire Max]. For example, if a TERF is masquerading as a Gothic dark mommy to convey a BDSM arrangement of power exchange, their doing so remains dressed up in visually immediate symbols of female resistance; the proposal is doubly a ruse in their case because the mask isn’t just something that is worn, but worn to be understood immediately as a symbol of resistance that has already been reclaimed. The TERF doing so will be counting on such; i.e., that onlookers will identify with the notorious image inside popular media as something to enjoy sans critique, thus not investigate the TERF’s sexist/transphobic behavior when they start acting like class traitors [transphobia, along with other bigotries, are ultimately classist because they enforce material conditions along racial/gendered lines to meet the class interests of the elite]. This betrayal becomes endemic to the climate of a particular medium as saturated with various symbols operating at cross purposes; i.e., that are liminally contested by opposing groups embodying the same basic language, then fighting back and forth for centuries.

A good, Gothic example of this ongoing liminality is Dacre’s Zofloya, wherein the tall, imposing Victoria stabs the fragile and achingly vulnerable Lilla to death. In orchestrating this murder in her novel, Dacre destroys the symbol of feminine fragility that Victoria’s masculine embodiment resisted. Yet, her resistance still occurs through cis-het clichés that endorse the status quo in fascist ways; i.e., traditionally masculine violence that turns Victoria into a tremendously monstrous caricature [written by a cis-het white woman]: the feral bitch. To that, Victoria isn’t a rebel on par with the Satanic sort; she’s a fascist, meaningful traumatize, but incredibly treacherous, petty and uncreative in her approach [receiving her instructions from someone else—a man, no less—and then refusing to follow them]. Furthermore, the catharsis of transgression is somewhat dubious because it treats female rebellion as hysterically brutal and unhinged; re: “I am woman, hear me roar!”

Even so, it’s not entirely without merit. As Sam Hirst writes in “Zofloya and the Female Gothic” (2020):

For Hoeveler, Zofloya is an incredibly conservative text which condemns female sexuality. She sees the destruction of Lilla as a portrayal of the danger inherent in everything that Victoria represents. / Other readings have seen the death of Lilla as a profoundly feminist moment in which Victoria destroys the fetishized version of femininity represented by Lilla. The portrayal of Victoria suggests this second interpretation is more viable. As the central character, she is portrayed with a psychological complexity which precludes her being a mere symbol of iniquity. We are offered extenuating circumstances for her downfall, such as the paucity of her education, and evidence of redeeming qualities, such as bravery. She is also allowed her own voice, which at times challenges the stated narratorial interpretation. […] While clearly not entirely sympathetic, Victoria is a fully-formed character who resists a simplified ‘misogynistic’ reading like Hoeveler’s. Zofloya does not offer an inspiringly virtuous heroine but this does not preclude it ‘rewriting’ the female. The monstrosity of Victoria itself relates to female experience, it can be seen as acting as a dark double of the author reflecting her own ambiguous relationship with repressed elements of her own identity [source]. 

It’s important to remember, though, that Dacre’s discourse is cis-gendered—diverting the Satanic, shapeshifting poetics away from female bodies and minds while also being divorced from, and ignorant towards, trans, intersex and non-binary dialogues centuries later. Relative to queer struggles at large, the violence committed against Lilla by Victoria is pitted against whatever villain state agents teach TERFs to emulate.

To borrow from Hirst, the elite can “rewrite the female” by incentivizing previously traumatized women to act on their current empowerment in fascist ways. The state does so by taking advantage of female abuse, weaponizing it against labor movements; i.e., by handing the battered housewife or former prostitute a knife [and badass costume] and steering them towards someone they hate [and women are often taught to hate each other in manufactured competitions, but also anything different from the Symbolic Order/colonial binary they are competing inside]. Just as Victoria responded to her abuse by becoming a violent fascist, TERF Medusa/Amazon against a liminal symbol of female oppression [the Gothic heroine], this “coin flip” applies to TERFs in general who might admire, thus use, Victoria’s volcanic, xenophobic capacity for masculine street violence [knives and stabbing weapons, but also bullets and pugilism] against their political enemies in differing monstrous forms: the beheaded/tamed Medusa or Hippolyta as fascist/centrist attacking “bad,” sodomic variants.

In a word, they’re appearing to switch from poison to direct paramilitary action instead of poison[2] [the cliché “woman’s weapon” which Victoria saves for her husband, someone she sees as stronger than her but also someone she desires to marry, thus disempower herself in the traditional amatonormative bargain: the marriage] but something poisonous reminds behind the badass façade. This genocide includes not just trans people, but other cis women in heteronormative gender trouble; e.g., the blonde, delicate Jesse being stabbed to death by her knife-wielding co-stars, in Refn’s 2016 The Neon Demon [above], because they resent her performance for being “better” than theirs. In Refn’s retro-future, disco operas, the violence of theatre becomes a powerful-if-at-times-confusing allegory for cis critiques. In other words, it’s “trash” that shouldn’t be investigated by TERFs beyond mere dismissal, similar to their rejection of Ridley Scott’s own Gothic pastiche should it become overtly xenophilic.)

By presenting violence against trans people (and their allies) as reasonable, TERFs meet queer activists more broadly with varying degrees of nostalgic condescension and open force. In doing so, they weaponize feminism to attack the elite’s political enemies. While this extends to anyone whose politics aren’t bourgeois, the TERF focus remains on trans people (or intersex people who identify as trans). Adopting “cool” girl boss (or male ally) personas to gaslight and gatekeep them with, TERFs control gender and sexuality more broadly through a cis-supremacist stance that centralizes white cis women (which extends to symbols of cis-feminine expression in Gothic poetics; e.g., Victora from Zofloya, above, or the Wicked Witch of the West, exhibit 112c). As trans woman Iris Lee writes in “TERFs Uprising: Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists Gatekeeping Womanhood” (2017):

The problem with “trans inclusive feminism” is that its premise is still based on cis supremacy. It’s the cis women who are centred in this idea of feminism. It reminds me of a comment a cis women friend of mine made when I came out to her: that I’d “joined the club.” As if trans women and femmes, and gender non-conforming people, are an accessory and an addition to the club of feminism. The writer Sarah Schulman in her book Ties that Bind on familial homophobia discusses how homophobia is not actually a phobia but a pleasure system enforced by straight society. In the same way, my experiences of transmisogyny aren’t necessarily a “phobia” cis women have of me, but a way of making themselves feel superior, or have more power, in a system they benefit from (source).

(exhibit 100b3: Photographer: Iris Lee, from “TERFs Uprising.”)

Let’s examine cis supremacy as something to further disguise—which TERFs help achieve—before looking into the larger geopolitics. First, TERFs remain cis-supremacist even when sanitized by corporations. Many are materially elevated, hence look normal, safe, and Americanized. Even so, moderacy merely hides more severe forms of control and dogma. When moderate, TERFs are effectively “mask-on” cryptofascists. But even openly reactionary fascists still wear a mask “half-on.” This is because fascism achieves its goals through deception and normalized violence. So does neoliberalism. Both conceal and normalize genocide. They just do it differently. In Gothic terms, they abject genocide, spouting a ceaseless deluge of material and rhetorical deceptions across American politics at home and across the world. Only when total war becomes acceptable does the mask fall away entirely.

In either case, canonical indignation remains the universal response to emancipatory activism. Moderate TERFs simply operate in a more selectively vindictive and tempered manner than reactionary TERFs, favoring moderate condescension over open aggression when punching down against trans people. However, there’s no concrete line dividing neoliberalism and fascism. Neither is a political party but an ideology expressed through material conditions across a broader socio-economic forum. Through this spectrum, the two historically exploit the world as covert business partners. While fascism tends to sit inside neoliberalism (which owns the means of production), both disguise parallel motives through idiosyncratic obscurantism: Some have power and some seek power. This overlap leads to a continuous outpouring of visual chaff that aestheticizes the codified dogwhistles (re: exhibit 0c, “Twin Trees“) and historical figures of yore for cross purposes: our old friend, disguise pastiche (which cryptonymy is, complicit or not).

(source: Fashwave)

Disguise pastiche is often a culture war of aesthetics that expresses more or less politics depending on the type: Laborwave (re: exhibit 42d1a, “Seeing Dead People“) having political awareness/class consciousness for the simple reason that Vaporwave is more passive and lost in the act of deconstruction without direct, Marxist critiques of power and fascism argues for the exactly opposite: a dearth of intellectual capacity and class, culture and race character conducive to universal liberation during the cryptonymy process.

Fashwave, then, is a kind of “poster-monster” pastiche hybrid tied to TERF war pastiche, whose connection and socio-material fusion we alluded to in Volume Two, but also during exhibits 100b1, b2 and b3 (targets and givers of state violence, including Amazons as code for or against state abuse). As we discussed in Chapter Three, the deathly aesthetics of fetish gear aren’t intrinsically canonical; ironic consumption and production, for example, disguise ulterior sex-positivity to conceal themselves from bourgeois reprisals.

However, pastiche in broader linguo-material terms includes fascism and neoliberalism as “masked,” which both engage in activist suppression maneuvers disguised as canonical indignation and self-defense. Modern cryptofascists include the so-called American Patriotic Socialists (re: NonCompete). Like those weirdos, TERFs offer “false revolutions” (a core component of fascism) that help detract criticism against bourgeois power while hijacking socialist language, doing their best to render it nominal, thus critically inert. Not only are centrists duped by fascist tricks; many are fascists-in-disguise, wearing masks on masks on masks…

Those with more privilege perform fascism against those with less, party leaders or capitalists pitting reactionary workers against even more vulnerable targets, all in the name of old money and power (re: Parenti). Fascism is historically enabled by billionaires, a “banality of evil” narrative playing out in real-time through Elon’s normalization of fascist rhetoric on Twitter:

Over the past few weeks, we’ve seen Elon cozy up to the right wing. They’ve noticed. And are hoping they can deplatform left leaning accounts on Elon’s Twitter. Right wingers don’t support free speech. They only want space for their speech to be freely made (zellieimani, 2022).

Just as mutual consent isn’t self-explanatory and requires context through dialectical-material analysis, so do the many disguises of fascism-inside-neoliberalism. Material conditions beget history as a series of disguises, to which cryptonyms for or against the state denote trauma as disguised by the fact it, itself, is a disguise. When studied, these remain ambiguous in ways the elite can reliably use as a personal cloaking device. Kind of like Where’s Waldo? (1987) except the bourgeoisie are being hidden by Nazis, which are hidden by the bourgeoisie in cartoon forms (which, as the rest of the book shall explore, are endemic to Capitalism).

The fact remains that the elite have always owned the means to expose fascists and prevent war. Instead, they globalize war to capitalize off its genocidal borders. In neoliberal terms, this prolonged exploitation relies on several factors: the veneer of self-superiority pitted against an essential foe, and a game partner who will throw in the towel by starting a war they cannot hope to win (the Axis powers, for example, lacked the material means to defeat the Allies). This grand exchange isn’t strictly agreed upon in advance; it flows around giant power structures (nation-states), unfolding organically between hegemonic capitalists improvising alongside their lesser counterparts outside of the United States: the cryptonymy of nation-states dressed paradoxically up in performative emblematic “disguises.” A dogwhistle is a dogwhistle, centrism full of such things from the days of colonial American (re: Zinn), onwards.

(artist: Joe Simon and Jack Kirby)

Also like jazz, the ensuing chaos is less random than it appears. Through the theatre of war functioning as yet another disguise, the American elite (then and now) posture as the Greater Good[3] (a model codified in comic books during WW2 [Matthew Wills’ “Captain America and Wonder Woman, Anti-Fascist Heroes,” 2020] leading to the so-called “myth of the Good War,” which Saving Private Ryan [1998] according to Howard Zinn, helped rescue shortly before the War on Terror began:

In Saving Private Ryan, there is never any doubt that the cause is just. This is the good war. There is no need to say the words explicitly. The heartrending crosses in Arlington National Cemetery get the message across, loud and clear. And a benign General Marshall, front and back of the movie, quotes Abraham Lincoln’s words of solace to a mother who has lost five sons in the Civil War. The audience is left with no choice but to conclude that this one—while it causes sorrow to a million mothers—is in a good cause.

Yes, getting rid of fascism was a good cause. But does that unquestionably make it a good war? The war corrupted us, did it not? The hate it engendered was not confined to Nazis. We put Japanese families in concentration camps. We killed huge numbers of innocent people—the word “atrocity” fits—in our bombings of Dresden, Hamburg, Tokyo, and finally Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And when the war ended, we and our Allies began preparing for another war, this time with nuclear weapons, which, if used, would make Hitler’s Holocaust look puny (source: “Private Ryan Saves War,” 1998).

and which we’ll examine in the next chapter section). They then offer their evil enemies a de facto position: to be the punching bag of a bigger, better equipped bully. While this might seem like a raw deal, fascist leaders and rogue dictators (CIA plants) escape brutality by exploiting their workforce. By turning workers into soldiers (a form of militarized labor) who can die for a cause, the elite (on either side) enjoy the material benefits reaped from worker exploitation.

As the collective beating unfurls on the global stage, war becomes something to sell in various forms—raw military goods, but also through militarized artwork. This commercialization of war helps ensures that global US hegemony continues through Imperialism as something to whitewash through neoliberal propaganda. Neoliberals disguise fascism by

  • hiding its function cryptonymically (visibly) inside a large material system: the logical byproduct of Capitalism-in-crisis
  • framing American Imperialism as the exclusive “better” option

As crisis nears—which it invariably will—social-sexual activism becomes something to recooperate. This includes feminism. By using feminism as a disguise, the elite further global hegemony behind a false variant appropriated to serve bourgeois needs: TERFs.

As bad faith performers, TERFs can present as mask-on, half-on, or mask-off; as urbane neoliberals, vengeful fascists or some in-between variant presented in monstrous-feminine language (re: Amazons, which feminists [of any wave] are classically depicted as). Even so, the covert practices of either ideology vary by degree and flavor, not function: to defend and conceal the elite’s continued material advantage. Some TERFs are moderate, adopting neoliberal dogma and centrist argumentation (more on this in a bit) to appear normal on the outside. The Boys critiqued this material reality by having Stormfront appear as female:

Speaking about why the show decided to gender-swap Stormfront, showrunner Eric Kripke explained that he wanted to hurt Seven leader Homelander more. “We wanted to sort of create Homelander’s worst nightmare,” Kripke said. “And his worst nightmare would be a strong woman who wasn’t afraid of him and proceeded to steal his spotlight. “I think that would hurt him way more than if it were a male character because he is a gaping hole of insecurity.” Kripke went on to explain how this new version of Stormfront has mastered social media to frame her message in a way to build support for her ideology. “A lot of hate and negative thought these days, if you look online, is packaged in really slick, social media-attractive ways,” Kripke said. “It’s not like the old dudes with crew cuts in the 1960s newsreels anymore.” Kripke added that this version of Stormfront will show how new hate movements are led by “young people, who are trying to hook in a new generation and we sort of wanted to reflect how insidious that is.”

Previously Cash said of the character: […] And she can be quite the feminist. There’s a lot of, I wouldn’t say misdirect, but she also is a very empowered woman” (source: Stephanie Chase’s “The Boys Boss Explains…” 2020).

The showrunners’ aim, then, wasn’t to achieve “equality” by letting girls play Nazis; they were showing how Nazis operate in neoliberal spheres, concealing themselves by fooling the audience: with the moderate material language of appropriated inclusivity and female “empowerment.” Like Kellie-Jay Keen (re: Shaun), Stormfront is not just a girl boss for lip service, but a sleeper agent whose weaponized hatred triggers in response to perceived enemies: anyone who threatens white supremacy as a rising ideology during state crisis. She’s a particular kind of a feminist: a Feminazi in disguise acting like a man through Man-Box espionage (the unfortunate irony being that “feminazi” is an actual phenomenon, just not what conservatives mean when they use the term).

To this, Stormfront has literally internalized fascist dogma as something to hide until the moment is right. She’s a scared bully with superpowers, un enfant terrible without a soul. However, she wasn’t cloned like Logan’s Gothic double X-24 (itself a killer baby dressed in black, Nazi-style); she’s a battered Nazi housewife pumped full of drugs, the wunderkind as the wunderwaffe. She personifies war as a walking lie, a deranged murderer in a bad disguise. Nazi propaganda made her think like this, but the Reich’s palimpsest was American settler-colony romances: the Western. She’s anti-intellectual, fed on corporatized narratives, putting her head in some very dark clouds: the forgone harbinger of not just her destruction, but all life through a seminal tragedy stuck on repeat.

Stormfront’s deception cautions against fraud: Once fascism formalized, she would merely drop the “gender-critical” act—surrendering her active, heroic role to become Homelander’s Nazi broodmare (two manmade, procreating super beings straight outta Victor Frankenstein’s nightmare). She’s not trying to preserve the status quo; she wants to push it further to the right. The show frankly kind of misses the mark, framing Stormfront as a true ally who talks the talk, whereas the gender-critical movement is riddled with dogwhistles that give them away to those in on the code. In other words, they’re not nearly so opaque as Stormfront appears.

To be clear, not all TERFs are closet Nazis patiently waiting for their moment to discard a top-layer and dismantle human rights wearing their “true form.” Many buy into the good-versus-evil schtick as unironic consumers, embracing neoliberalism’s assigned values first-and-foremost. They think fascism won’t happen to them, or that trans people “really don’t understand biology or gender.” In either case, intent, ignorance or stupidity (from the TERF) doesn’t matter, material outcomes do. First, whether moderate or reactionary in rhetoric, TERFs continuously defend Capitalism and war as the rational position through their political positions, which their artistic purchases/creations laterally endorse. Meanwhile, these veiled gestures serve as political action disguised as “neutral” consumer activity.

Second, all TERFs scapegoat trans people, levying condescension and open aggression against them. This selective retribution places TERFs within a larger structure that commits, tolerates, or encourages active genocide on the world stage—often through acts of revenge dressed up in righteous, Enlightenment-era dialogue. To maintain their role in this collective charade, TERFs employ obscurantism through transphobic prejudice with dogmatic origins (trans women are “men playing dress-up”). In this sense, they presents themselves as “true activists,” abjecting sex-positive individuals as perfidious rabble-rousers harmful to “true women everywhere.”

For TERFs, trans people constitute a “fake” category, while the artists who illustrate them (erotic or otherwise) undermine the status quo through cultural appreciation: Draw Ms. Chalice with a penis (re: “Poison Was the Cure“) and you erase “actual” women; i.e., fostering gender trouble from second wave feminists, who see trans existence as poisonous to the state (re: “Defined through Sex“). Genocide is holistic, a bigotry for one a bigotry for all.

In other words, TERFs antagonize sex-positive iconoclasts through DARVO obscurantism abjecting universal liberation, mid-complicit-cryptonymy. They abuse others, gaslighting and gatekeeping them from a position of feigned persecution—playing the victim while abusing the victim in the victim’s reclaimed language (the Amazon, the Medusa, the succubus, etc). It’s all TERFs know how to do, “prison sex” being the closest thing to social interactions on a political level. Everything is reduced to rape and war. For example, while iconoclasm generates gender trouble through reverse abjection, many out-and-out sexists call this process “political.” Unlike Hernando from Sense8, TERFs devalue emancipatory politics by denouncing “TERF” as a slur against them, a false witch hunt they can codify through unequal material conditions aligned with heteronormative power for decades following second wave feminism coming and going. As Ecce Homo writes in “TERFs and Other Evils”:

To begin with, the acronym TERF stands for trans-exclusionary radical feminists, but don’t let this “radical” fool you. This term was initially coined in 2008 by trans-inclusive cisgender radical feminist blogger Viv Smythe, but it is dismissed by those identified by others as TERFs as a slur. Despite the fact that this term has been popularized over the past few years due to celebrities—such as Harry Potter series author J.K. Rowling—who have drawn the spotlight to the issue of the inclusion of trans women or femininities in the feminist movement with their transphobic “feminist” views, this debate has unfortunately been around at least since the ’80s with the rise of the transgender identity as a distinct gender identity in the USA and Europe. Among the criticisms that the second wave of feminism faced was the fact that it wasn’t intersectional enough because it was based on a very limited account of who counts as its proper political subject, the woman. Along with a series of criticisms raised by the feminists of color or the lesbian and bisexual women, the movement of that time was accused by trans women and femininities of being too cisgender and at times trans-exclusionary. And that’s because, even though gender was/is considered to be a malleable social and historical construct, sex on the other hand seemed/seems to be thought of as biological and unchangeable, the anatomical “least common denominator.”

According to this line of reasoning that has been revived recently despite the decades-long deconstruction of sex as biological, trans women are not ‘real’ women and as such they must not be included among the feminist ranks since their political claims are not only different from those of cisgender women, but they also undermine the latest’s rights. In this transphobic rhetoric, trans women are many times depicted as confused lesbians or narcissists or even “attention sluts.” From the point of view of the lesbian TERFs, trans persons, along with intersex persons, do not belong to the LGBTIQA+ community since they do not share with gays, bis, and lesbians a same-sex desire but instead, they are all about gender, and not sexual, identities. On their part, the TERFs themselves, that usually prefer the term “gender-critical” for their self-identification, deny being transphobic and present themselves as radical feminists who fight for the rights of “true” women. They deny any violence, apart from the transphobic violence of misgendering of course, and they base their views on their personal experiences that focus mainly on bodily functions in order to highlight the biological definition of gender (source).

It’s important to recognize, though, that “radical” goes both ways and isn’t just something to assign to the Left; furthermore, feminism—while it should be reclaimed from fascist and moderate forces—should not be ignored as having been historically used by conservative groups. By silencing alarms about their harmful behavior or discrediting what they’re about, this is just another disguise, one often presented in more benign language: gender-critical feminism. So while it can be tempting to say that TERFs aren’t radical and/or feminist like Ponderful does (“‘Gender-critical’ is Not Feminist & Here’s Why,” 2023), there’s simply no ignoring the fact that they are operate both within opposition praxis, albeit in favor of the state and Capitalism. Nazi feminists are totally a thing and have been since feminists has been a recognized movement (re: “Transphobia: The Far Right and Liberalism”); capital survives through tokenized divide-and-conquer decaying feminism that our cryptonymy must counter in opposition (more on this in Chapter Five).

On the surface, TERFs demonize emancipatory activism for simply being wrong. In truth, this goes far beyond simple disagreements. To suggest otherwise is—you guessed it—yet another mask, and that’s exactly what TERFs do; they play the socialist the way Nazis did, the way that Americans do then (the American Nazi Bund) and now (re: “American Patriot Socialism, MAGA Communism and National Bolshevism“). By presenting themselves as “merely disagreeing with trans people” through competing ideas, TERFs are pointedly distracting the public from their true aim: to exterminate trans activism, thus erase trans people, by using co-opted monsters to defend the status quo from worker liberation as a material threat. There is no compromise regarding ideas that are mutually exclusive. Fascists and anti-fascists cannot co-exist because fascism installs a hierarchy that intentionally kills a select group inside of itself.

TERFs don’t merely disguise themselves. They obfuscate social-sexual activism into a poisonous form. By framing trans people as bad actors inside a reasonable debate, TERFs either rob them of legitimacy by calling them mentally unsound, or display them as harmful outsiders (usually some kind of invader threat: zombies, demons, aliens, bugs, etc, as bad-faith costumes/disguises). By removing trans agency and painting a target on them through Gothic poetics, TERFs invite violence against trans people, opening them up to increasingly brutal (and disparate) forms of self-defense by bad-faith feminists stealing their agency through recuperated Gothic language. It makes no difference whether TERFs swing the cudgel or look the other way while someone else does; they still encourage systemic violence through intrinsically dishonest means backed by capital.

Consider the TERFs of Great Britain (aka TERF Island; Chrissy Stroop’s “I Don’t Feel It’s Safe to Visit the UK,” 2021). J. K. Rowling is their chief, the corporate girl boss claiming to speak for “all women” (including trans men). Not only is this a lie; Rowling appears strong and TERFs love her for that, including how she spreads bias through widespread, unchecked media visibility (novels, movies, tweets) and a pronounced ability to dogwhistle through regressive activism (the suffragettes of Great Britian [and elsewhere] having a fascist/white supremacist flavor)—our aforementioned pussyhat activism, or advocating for women’s oppression in disguise. In doing so, Rowling and her followers frame trans people (and the oft-Gothic doubles of sex/activist symbols they represent themselves with) as inherently impure and false, gaslighting them by downplaying the abuse as a “simple disagreement,” not actual genocide. TERFs will even court known fascists (“JK Rowling and Matt Walsh Bond Over Transphobia, Get Blasted Online,” 2022) to facilitate this myth—teaming up with strange bedfellows against a perceived “Greater Evil” to defend “true feminists'” hard-fought “gains” (the “This is as good as it gets” argument).

To this, TERFs self-deceive, disguising their own killers. It doesn’t matter that fascists will eradicate TERFs once they are in power. Fascism cannot tolerate anything that threatens their racist, sexist, xenophobic dogma, but TERFs fail to realize this for the same reason that all agents of fascism do: Like neoliberalism, fascism lies to those it professes to aid, destroying them in the process. The Imperial Boomerang starts with the promise of great rewards. Over time, the structure gradually colonizes itself, starting with the most marginalized—an underclass—and gradually cannibalizing its own soldiers, from most to least marginalized (a ladder of preferential mistreatment; re: “Pieces of the Camp Map“). As Rowling shows us (from Radcliffe onwards), TERFs fall somewhere closer to privilege than not; i.e., tokenizing more out of convenience than desperation.

Even so, all fascists are victims of fascism, including its fatal promise of endless strength (sublimated genocide). Polite, urbane, deliberate—TERFs are fascists-in-disguise; they might think themselves safe, fighting for “true equality” through “reasoned” arguments (e.g., Rowling’s bad-faith tweet “women are a biological class” is on par with “the moon isn’t made of cheese,” 2022) and appropriative brand recognition: monopolizing oppression as an uncover police costume. This selective shell of reason won’t keep them safe from fascism/Capitalism; it isn’t actual armor that can deflect bullets or knives—more like armor in the Radcliffean sense: swooning in the face of danger to protect a fragile mind from obliteration. They aren’t Victoria; they are Lilla, and Lilla got royally fucked up—i.e., the ignominious death afforded to the Gothic damsel, not the villain.

This self-destruction originates from emulating vengeful strength serving the pimp, mid-cryptonymy. Because TERFs idolize strength, they hate sex positivity as liberatory more than they hate open fascists. Both ideologies view the present through the esoteric language and outmoded symbols of an imaginary past (what fascists call “greatness”): a warped fantasy that doesn’t intersect with the dialectical-material complexities of the here-and-now. It’s precisely this here-and-now that must be considered by iconoclasts—phrasing sex symbols and gendered language descriptively and appreciatively with an oft-Gothic imagination to foster empathy towards marginalized groups.

That being said, bodies (or images of bodies) can be interpreted as representing actual persons according to ideologies that fundamentally disagree on shared language—especially gendered terms like “men” and “women” (to the point that non-binary transactivists will deliberately say “transmasc” or “transfemme person” instead of trans man or trans woman). With this kind of duality in effect, someone’s politics can be incredibly difficult to ascertain according to their outward appearance, all but requiring picket signs to spell things out (or conversations). For the sex-positive protestor actively punching up, this can actually make them a target of moderate-directed reactionary violence punching down:

(exhibit 100c1: Source: Teresa Navazo’s “‘Feminism’ TERF.” Trans people are, and have been, labeled a threat by second wave feminists since the 1970s in multiple countries. In short, whenever fascism can be found, trans people must voice their oppression against these people by picketing. Trans people are an identify defined through struggle, not biology. The innate inability to separate the two puts them at risk when voicing their oppression in public spaces. While the act is done to raise awareness towards minority rights abuses, it also serves to raise awareness towards the existence of fascists trying to normalize themselves in the audience of the picketer’s audiences. Fascists will try to say that activists are a threat to the audiences way of life, not the fascists. It’s standard-issue DARVO with terrorist labels being thrown about to demonize activists in Gothic ways—i.e., the French Revolution is reignited; its Terror and enemies are “at the gates.”

All the same, exposing fascists is important work; though not without risk, it must be done to counterattack genocide as an old struggle to fight against tied to state actors. As Navazo writes [Google-translated from Spanish]:

The term originates from the 1970s and is an acronym that stands for excluding Radical Trans Feminists. This feminism is characterized by rejecting trans people and by seeking the exclusion of trans women from feminist spaces and, at other times in history, these feminists have demanded governments, such as in the United States, to withdraw medical and legal care for trans people. Janice Raymond, main theoretical figure of TERF feminism, in 1979 published the book The Transsexual Empire[: the construction of “the fag with tits”] where she argues that transsexuality is an evil creation of the man’s empire to enter the spaces of women and show off the power that they have there. In addition, she accuses transsexual women of carrying out a male rape of women’s bodies by reducing their forms to a “mere artifice.”

Since this publication, different approaches have been elaborated on trans people, all of them with different political implications, but if these approaches have something in common, it is the construction of an image of a “true woman” that is taken as the banner to say that trans women are not those “true women.” Since then TERF feminism has been expanding both in ideas and in members and geography until reaching our days. With all of the above explained, I am basically describing a group of people who believe they are feminists [for all peoples], but who only fight for equality for convenience, excluding trans people (what comes to be transphobic). To make it clear, there is nothing [inclusively] feminist about that. Feminism, the concept of which still does not seem to be well understood, is: the fight for equality between men and women and against all forms of oppression. This group is a hate group. Yes, I’m sorry. I know that hate groups do not like to be singled out as such, homophobes are shocked by being singled out, racists, sexists, abusers, etc… In many cases it is because the people who act like this do not really do it with the awareness of doing so much damage. But the reality is that discriminating is an act of hate [source].

Capital toxifies rebellion to police its usual victims with themselves; re: antagonize nature as monstrous-feminine with nature as monstrous-feminine.

Capital toxifies rebellion to police its usual victims with themselves, routinely leading to cryptonymy in bad faith; re: antagonize nature as monstrous-feminine with nature as monstrous-feminine. The Judas is cheaply bought—doubly so for the token Judas; i.e., as cheap in service of capital as cheap, but especially when the fascist bust period cheapens life further seemingly than before. Amazons or otherwise, token cops are cheap pimps that whore themselves out; i.e., to police labor and nature out of petty revenge. They suck more than anything because assimilation is poor stewardship, and so much of capital’s expansion, around the globe, owes itself to token betrayals, big and small [re: “The Roots of Trauma“].)

(exhibit 100c2a: Artist: ryoimaru. As we’ve established throughout the book, art is ambiguously political, illustrating mutual consent [or its absence] through the context of poiesis and praxis. Sexuality and power are things that can be used by TERFs and SWERFs, and—like fascists are, more broadly—these groups are hardly in agreement or consist about the correct approach to war bossing and police tactics [even the strongman/woman deciding what is correct will often change their mind; i.e., führerprinzip]. The above image is both censored, but has an uncensored version as well. While TERFs would in-fight with SWERFs, but also themselves, to determine what is correct—e.g., should the apple be removed or not—the fact remains that they would be happy to use sex to get what they want; i.e., to weaponize it within patriarchal circles to make things more convenient for themselves, including the ability to posture as strong in ways that are slightly less constrictive than being forced to appear traditionally femme [a “privilege” that Jadis loved to proclaim as the end all, be all of “equal rights,” perfectly happy to use their body to get what they want, while denying others the same privilege]. While it remains valid to understand and express that female sexuality and “strength” of masc/femme types are generally sold to cis-het men as the universal clientele, it’s equally important to avoid committing fascism in the process: The moment the Amazon [above] is used to enforce the status quo, she becomes false rebellion; re: a subjugated “Dark Hippolyta” [or centrist, goody-goody “Paladin” version] defending masculinity and all that be won as already having been won, thus under siege by fearsome enemies at the gates: transgender twinks, non-binary cat boys, intersex bottoms, etc.)

Simply put, TERFs love strength, but also fancy themselves as self-righteous, undead, and victimized by the people they bully for “failing” to seeing TERFs as the victors who “won the war.” Like a lane of cars stuck on the same road during a traffic jam, everything feels more acceptable for them if they think they’re “beating” the other drivers. Indeed, they want iconoclasts to examine sexualized media through their canonical lens: “the correct way.” Anything else is silly obfuscation and meaningless chaos.

However, as stated during Volume Three’s introduction, there’s a difference between being correct within the norms of a particular group and being correct according to the idea that people have basic human rights. Fascist hierarchies are incompatible with universal human rights, which they frame as dark, dangerous and degenerate (while paradoxically embracing a black, oft-paganized medieval themselves). As a result, TERFs gatekeep trans activists because most trans people believe that human rights apply to everyone (excluding NERFs and transmedicalists and their disguised biological essentialism, but more on them and that in a bit). Also as a result, eco-fascism takes over and (some) humans become the virus; the zombie apocalypse begins, its instigators becoming zombie tyrants that cull the activist herd for the men behind the curtain.

For all their purported strength, then, regressive Amazons will be swept away by the whirlwind when the time comes (and it will, again and again and again, until “the last syllable of recorded time” is cut short by the termination of the Capitalocene and the end of all life as we know it on Planet Earth).

History teaches us that the mechanism of the state—however dramatized—results in mass exploitation and death. Indeed, canonical sound and fury begin through seminal tragedies that revive the slaughter of the Great War through emotional appeals and heteronormative dogma:

One last try to stop that crushing chain of causality leading the world inexorably to war, Pourtalès—the poor German diplomat playing a bit part in a tragedy that he has the desire but not the means to avert—has one last meeting with Sazonov. Pourtalès drops to his knees and says, “If we fight, it will be revolution; it will be the end of monarchy, the end of us both. […] I beg of you in the name of all that is right and decent, call off this war.” Then Sazonov says, “No.” Then, Pourtalès rises to his feet and takes a piece of paper from his pocket and says, “In that case, sir, I have the honor to inform you that we’re at war.” […] and a month later, a million men are dead. The seminal tragedy had begun (source: Extra Credits History’s “World War I: The Seminal Tragedy – The Final Act – Extra History – #4” [2015]; timestamp: 8:28).

Through the personification of strong-yet doomed, futile gestures, the sole canonical bulwark between certain destruction and imperiled survival is a servant of the state in some shape or form. Ignoring the literal diplomat, this is reflected in future wars, foreign and domestic, where Capitalism found a way to make war good again and overlook or justify the slaughter of soldiers, nature and the world for profit—i.e., the evocation of the liminal hauntology of war and its death knell of those who are different (i.e., fighting for their human rights) as executed by the arm of the state for cold, hard economics. There’s nothing “seminal” about repetition, which capital enforces through complicit cryptonymy as criminogenic; i.e., a breaking point foisted onto workers until they menticide and betray their own—monopolizing violence, terror and monsters for the state eating all workers per Cartesian, heteronormative and settler-colonial thought (re: “The Nation-State“). DARVO is DARVO, obscurantism levied against labor in grandiose language:

(ibid.)

Again, capital is a system of continuous replacement that tokenizes mostly before fascism begins in earnest; once the killing starts, tokens are chewed up and spat out first. Until then, fascism has a million-and-one disguises to steal power with; i.e., during state cryptonymy gaslighting workers through inheritance anxiety making them perfidious in terms of weaponized self-preservation—to be born into a system, the police state, that will kill you if you don’t play ball: “We will not be replaced!” being the calling card of white genocide fearing the bourgeoisie if they don’t punch down. However bad-faith, though, their lies always betray them, ipso facto; i.e., as something we can expose through them attacking us when we propose universal liberation without debating Nazis. To expose their bigotry during the cryptonymy process is to break their friendly veneer on the Aegis: they never meant us anything but harm, any and all moral panics a spearhead exposing their ill intent during the liminal hauntology of war (when Amazon cops appear). It’s rape play without irony, which our ludo-Gothic BDSM can camp, mid-praxis.

As we shall see in Chapter Five, then, the sex-positive iconoclast can alter the diplomacy of good war and its Morton’s Fork by recognizing that sexualized media can be universally ethical; i.e., can uphold the rights of everyone while also being aesthetically dark, sexy and monstrous. Certainly it’s not a human rights violation to like sex, or to even advertise sex as something fun, even transgressive; it is a human rights violation to induce compulsory heteronormativity in bad faith, serving the state as the Great Destroyer of all life on Earth. By endorsing the racial and sexist pseudoscience of fascists, this is precisely what many “moderate” TERFs embody (even if they are cis-queer or otherwise making the homophobic, LGBA argument that things “were better” in the ’80s when it was “just” cis gay men and lesbians; source tweet: mattxiv, 2023)! However, their compulsion also results from sexist norms in popular media that go beyond the obvious examples; re: subjugated Amazons as a kind of police disguise: something to retreat into (and punch down with).

(artist: Wolfhead at Night)

To deflect criticism, TERFs treat overt sexism as something to reject (re: “The Hawkeye Initiative”). While that’s certainly a good starting point, their activism promptly stops there (i.e., “I did a good thing so I can do no wrong!” despite it being a fraction of the bare minimum). Rather than accurately represent marginalized groups, TERFs abject the consequences of their moderacy onto foreign targets. They do this by voting at the ballot or with their wallets, endorsing a sexist Superstructure through the intersection of political action and material diet. Said diet embraces ideological habits pandered to by neoliberal appropriation: the girl boss, specifically the noncorporate “war boss” popularized through sublimated war pastiche; e.g., Amazons (exhibit 100b1) who kill the states enemies, but also punish anyone who isn’t different through “death by Snu-Snu!” (the TERF war boss chasing the femboy as someone to dominate as men do: through “prison sex” coercion and force). Gotta rescue the Good War with cool monsters, bone-studded herbos and hot, sexy redheads clad in tomboy muscles and fur bikinis (sold everywhere, unlike iconoclastic media, which tends to be wholly extracurricular—like this book).

(exhibit 100c2b: Artist, top-left and bottom-right: Matt Groening; top-right: Laurel D. Austin; bottom-left: Shikarii. During oppositional praxis, “Death by Snu Snu!” becomes something to threaten the boys with—who, in canonical terms, are the universal clientele, thus entitled to the BDSM cliché of relinquishing their power momentarily while being topped by someone who is aesthetically pleasing to them, yet still looks physically capable; a similar idea can be provided through the classic dominatrix fetish outfit as intimating the fascist spectre of death and power as conjoined on a fetishized female body [the dominatrix outfit often a cross between living latex and a French maid’s, delivering her own kind of “death by Snu Snu” not like the Amazon, but also Slan the succubus, Count Dracula, the xenomorph, etc, as indicating death and Snu-Snu of a particular kind: sodomy and monstrous-feminine BDSM theatrics].

Obviously there’s room for subversion; it’s the policing of the mode in favor of the status quo that you have to watch out for. While overt fascists are clearly a problem, the centrist argument of “equality for all” falls under the purview of American Liberalism as adopted by burly “herbo” recipients of the girl boss mantle sublimating genocide in centrist media; e.g., Sonya from Blizzard’s Diablo series, but also daintier models with their own force equalizers. Both have vaginas, which “feminize” war in the classical heteronormative model (it also imagines female sodomy as acceptable death for the scared bigot, who [at least in his own imagination] sees himself as still getting to use his penis, versus someone putting something phallic inside his hole[s].

 As I write in “Zombie Police States,” it’s possible to enjoy the fantasy without endorsing it, providing criticism through critical awareness, mid-game: 

The politics in Ion Fury are hardly neutral. This being said, there’s room to enjoy the heroine as a nerd playing a cop, versus a cop whose actions reinforce the game’s underlying police state. The outcome is performative, but at least I have the option—to hold my nightstick like Sarah Connor instead of Judge Dredd” [source]. 

In short, imagination is vital during an oppositional cryptonymy process; i.e., amid performances where you can’t change your costume because it is supplied for you to accent those aspects of yourself that are less easy to alter [skin color and genitals]. Doing so allows players as future poets to subvert the imagery and change the costume [or role of the performer] in various ways; e.g., the Drow or orc, but also the Amazon or war boss sports queen as not shackled to a neoliberal status quo that endorses war through its pastiche in tabletop games, videogames and various other media forms.

For example, Austin’s Amazonomachia doesn’t really do much to try and subvert the status quo—Amazonomachia being as much the Amazon’s allies and enemies as the Amazon herself and the rape fantasies she revisits on her perceived enemies during bad-faith argumentation sold as videogame power fantasies [and similar media; e.g., comic books, movies, etc]:

[artist: Laurel D. Austin]

Subverting this, then, occurs on a gradient to a matter of degree, allowing the Amazon to be subverted, but also her performance relative to other identities and performers as things to produce and sell, but also enjoy and endorse/criticize under Capitalism. Heteronormative allows for a bevy of alternatives outside of the singular established norm—the latter, despite its proliferation, actually being ontologically rigid in terms of what is allowed. We, by comparison, are Legion; there’s virtually no limited to the ways a story can be subverted in a genderqueer sense, “darkness visible” the raw, passionate, chaotic potential of Satanic rebellion as a subversive, class-conscious force waiting to wake up and render the authority of the state [and its furious defenders] utterly meaningless in the face of greater things: the power of worker solidarity through a reclaimed Gothic imagination; i.e., “seize the means of seduction,” exhibit 62a2.

 

[artist: Persephone van der Waard]

For example, the D&D Drow/tiefling [re: exhibit 41b, “A Lesson in Humility“] is canonically “pure evil,” thus kill-on-sight; by presenting her as even remotely harmless or friendly in ways that allow for negotiated exchange, the process of abjection has already started to reverse; the same goes for goblins, Amazons, Medusas, dwarves, or any other monstrous-feminine stereotype you could think of, as well as their assorted, endless forms of gender trouble and parody as divorced from sports and war as automatically violent and heteronormative. The degree to which this subverts or transgresses can vary considerably—with some barely different from the status quo. Link in handcuffs isn’t performing the role of the hero in any obvious way; he’s “bait” for our Amazon “damsel” who wants him to please her [she’s the queen, her curse lifted at the end of the game]. To this, my drawing takes an already subversive heroic story to its logical [from a queer perspective] conclusion: Link would ironically prefer this arrangement instead of being the hero-killer for the state. He’d want to obey his queen by not beheading her, but being tamed by her to accept her phallic love or obey her various commands.

Meanwhile, Shelly isn’t presented as not being a mercenary but seemingly “just” posing with her gun within a Gothic tableau; i.e., not actually shooting anyone, but also not adorned with her trademark death insignias. Still, while she’s posing in the buff against a kind of painterly Sublime—i.e., a BDSM threshold thrown back into the dark forests of desire—it’s basically gun porn, making it doubly liminal and less of a hard stance than the other pieces in this collage because it’s mostly concerned with aesthetics. But the aesthetics can be taken to degrees that are difficult to account for under Capitalism.

To that, a cop adorned in antifacist regalia is a class-traitor paradox, but nonetheless a cop. So a cop-turned-class-warrior requires these stickers as taught behaviors to cryptonymically transform themselves [or be transformed by iconoclastic artists] into something useful to Communists; rebellions are generally fought with stolen gear by former military-turned-smuggler types or those who otherwise have access. While Rainbow Capitalism can try to empty the flags and reclaimed labels of the LGBTQ through “blind” aesthetics, an effective counterstrategy is simply covering a female/monstrous-feminine body in symbols of rebellion the elite or their watchdogs cannot recuperate: antifa/anarcho-Communism.

You can also resist control in body-positive forms: wildly colored hair and “excessive” tattoos, piercings, sex worker paraphernalia [cat ears, tail butt plugs and fishnet stockings] and body hair as part of that subversively indominable scheme. Instead of a poster girl for police-state order dressed like nuclear-grade T&A, then, I’ve chosen to envision Shelly Bombshell as an antifash turncoat foil to mega-chud Duke Nukem, her statuesque body a radical graffiti, camp-level billboard for sex-positivity and human rights, her “living weapon” status repurposed for revolutionary violence; i.e., on the surface of the image during the threshold of pornographic liminal expression.)

(original design: George Broussard and Allen Blum)

Sexism under Capitalism is warlike, imprisoning and rapacious; TERFs frequently adopt this bellicose attitude through girl bosses, unable to imagine anything beyond canonical variants. While the corporate girl boss personifies corporate, political and public leadership with geopolitical ties, the girl war boss competes through team-based displays of strength—re: Ripley or Samus as space tomboy pirates; i.e., Girl Rambos, queen bitches good and both. As strong as Hercules and seemingly impervious like Achilles, girl war bosses actually kill enemies of the state and of corporations (specifically targets of US neocolonialism, becoming neoliberal/fascist canon in the process). For this reason, TERFs love her (re: “The Puzzle of ‘Antiquity’“); she is strong and cis, another disguise to hide their bigotry behind while also abjecting genocide behind the normalized consumption of war—i.e., more sublimated trauma as they hack symbols thereof to bits: the state’s chosen scapegoats (that was a pun; re: Austin).

We’ll explore girl bosses’ explicit relationship to selling war in another section, including queer appropriation. For now, just remember that iconoclastic art has to be more than “empowering” in the way TERFs generally view power—not through the individual agency of capable team players that serve the elite, but as something that exposes elite abuse through these same actors. In doing so, iconoclastic praxis can demonstrate how canonical war appropriates teamwork, using the competitive language present in war pastiche to discourage cooperation against the powers that be: a united worker front, historically called rebellion.

For example, an iconoclast can’t just show a woman with a sword killing an orc, demonstrating her team as good and the orc’s team as bad; they have to tell the story of the entity described as an orc as it actually existed—as a worker, a slave, a subject to imperial rule.

In other words, the past, present and future oppressions of a human people need to be described. For this to happen, there needs to be good orcs and goblins—meaning, sadly, victims of US Imperialism (aka, “the highest form of Capitalism”). D&D doesn’t allow for this, structuring racial conflict along moral lines that players police through violent competition. This plays out in orcs that, if they are humanized, become a “dark family” from a place with a funny-sounding name (“funny” because it has been erased by Western Imperialism and is abjected by Cartesian dualism, thus must be revived in undead “sleeping beauty” forms; re: Ghil’ad Zuckermann); i.e., whose own right to exist is “canceled out” by the civilized doubles in the West. The reality is the two ideas co-exist in opposition, leading to oft-transgressive interactions, including the rape fantasy as a kind of popularized pedagogy of the oppressed, mid-rememory:

(exhibit 100c2c: Artist, left: Owusyr [originally featured in Volume One; re: “Concerning Rings“]; source, top-right: Forgotten Realms Fandom, “Orc pantheon.” The rape fantasy can allow those with privilege to disintegrate the mantle of their own bias, degrading the princess as a kind of “shaming ritual” [similar to penis shaming as a means of confronting one’s shame regarding their body or gender identity]. In turn, it can present ethnic minorities as not being automatically violent, performing the fantasy in ways the privileged girl expects, subverting them through transgressive means. As such, they offer a liminal commentary on the reality that bias and actual, systemic abuse are always close at hand—i.e., the “waifu” of popular media furthered by fascist cultural values; the proximity with those invites comparison for the sake of differentiating the two.

The same idea applies to twinks, whose own negotiation towards reclaiming their own label as a self-depreciating slur [twink being an insult used by gay men in the ’90s] required a starting point: the consent-non-consent of Gregg Araki’s twinks-in-peril bringing the reality behind the performance to the fore while offering the performers some sense of agency in having survived that reality long enough to subvert it using their own bodies, their own “pulverized” holes. Like Cooper’s Frisk, the point of their anal “memento mori” is to lead people to ask questions about the status quo, led on by transgressive art as a hammering blow that breaks the comfort of pacifying illusions. Conversely De Niro’s rape scene in Once Upon A Time In America isn’t so much a subversion, but a heteronormative tragedy of the toxic male acting like a spoiled brat:

That “sexiness” is worth spending more time on. There is a disturbing, virgin-whore dynamic at play in Once Upon a Time in America, with Elizabeth McGovern—as Noodles’ childhood crush-turned-Hollywood-starlet—on one end and Tuesday Weld—as a rape victim-turned-willing-plaything—on the other. Every other woman we meet is somewhere in between those two (although most fall in Weld’s direction). If a female character isn’t a sexual object in this story, then she’s a victim of [overt] violence. And in the two rape scenes those elements are queasily mixed (reminiscent of the way Leone treated Claudia Cardinale in Once Upon a Time in the West) [source: J. Larsen’s “Once Upon a Time in America,” 2017].

The same incel-grade, state-sanctioned sex has been documented by TERFs, with cis-lesbians promising sex to their foot soldiers if they perform well enough [Essence of Thought’s “How Bad Is Jill Bearup’s Anti-Trans Bigotry?” 2022]. From Ethel Thurston’s script for the same video: “That is why people who have escaped the gender-critical ideology note the fact that prominent voices in the movement promised to personally help them find a wife if they moved to a different country and did well in spreading the gospel.” Likewise, from the usual transphobic nonsense of the second wave, the pointing of the finger at a dark scapegoat is standard-issue blood libel: “Cis women rape people. Myself and my brother were both raped by a cis woman inside a domestic violence refuge. But, in Ms. Bearup’s mind, all cis women must be pure in their actions” [ibid.].

It’s white knight behavior through palingenetic scapegoats, where their accusers commit in-fighting revenge against other members of a collective underclass for a feeling of being owed sex [waifus] as yet another kind of weird canonical nerd having bought into the settler-colonial dogma. It’s also, like always, a pyramid scheme; the money flows up, as do the moneymakers, the models of the in-game waifus or those unfortunately valued as “being comparable.” The soldiers flounder and fail up through the privilege of being hired muscle in a never-ending frontier romance—hauntologized and full of comforting certitude, apothegmic cryptonyms, and raw genocide as just around the corner. These facilitators of genocide become the stars of their own Quixotic dramas, eventually falling on their own swords or otherwise losing what they care about: their certitude and promised prizes and glory as they empty their brains, hearts and nerve, losing the ability to attract people openly and honestly as equals. They love through theft, force and deception, putting their Dulci-level “maidens” on a pedestal.)

Now that we’ve outlined how TERFs cryptonymically disguise fascism through Amazonian/Gothic aesthetics, including its relationship to neoliberalism and genocide, let’s examine the TERF relationship to all of these things commodified: as a mirage of dutiful, “straw dog” consumers of war pastiche, and how neoliberals stonewall during moderate rhetoric to stymie activism: the gender-critical façade within war pastiche—war as sacred!

Note: If I say, “gender-critical” from here on out, I’m acknowledging bigoted feminists’ preferred label as a cryptonymic school of rhetoric; i.e., what they want to be called as a means of disguise. So if I say “TERF,” I’m calling them what they function as/don’t want to be called. The two terms are more or less synonymous, but one gets to the point of actually outing these fuckers. —Perse, back in 2023

Onto “Selling War as Sacred: Sublimated War Pastiche and Gender-Critical War Bosses“!

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] In my own social circle, my sex-positive friend, Mavis, was turned fervently pro-life by an abusive ex-boyfriend. When he demanded she go and get an abortion, she refused, to which the boyfriend physically beat Mavis to try and force a miscarriage. This pushed her into a radical, politically divisive position that leads to marginalized in-fighting to the detriment of working-class solidarity.

[2] As my partner Bay mentions, poison is a disadvantage method of killing one’s victims, whereupon women historically are denied the ease and privilege of being “badass,” thus able as “phallic women” to stab someone to death and be celebrated for it (re: Brutus’s attacking of Caesar’s barbarism clashing with democracy—the zombie tyrant—or Macbeth killing King Duncan). Seeing as women are forced into singular positions that cannot be threatened by their own use of masculine force, they must resort to using poison in a highly calculated and difficult way of executing their victims. While the luxury of impulse killing is normally denied to them, they must likewise bear the stigma of universal poisoners despite men famously using poisons to kill each other [see: the “food taster” section from Unknown5’s “5 Most Dangerous Jobs In History,” 2022; timestamp: 33:59]. Poison-as-cowardice only became stigmatized the moment women used it for themselves; i.e., they started thinking and acting for themselves [which isn’t always perfect: Victoria kills Lilla and date rapes his husband with poison—a kind of poison-centric “TERF Medusa” who paralyzes her victims with literal poison; it can also be a metaphor for stored female trauma—e.g., Kagero from Ninja Scroll, exhibit 17a (re: “Healing from Rape“).

The lie of fascist feminism is the deputizing of the knife in the woman’s hand as “her own” thought/liberation; it is not, merely the machinations of male tyranny recruiting deputized women to act like centrist action heroes [war bosses] inside an expanded death cult to enforce the colonial binary through false “activism/revolution.” While two conflicting ideas can and do co-exist on the same contested image, Ripley’s killing of the Alien Queen isn’t her killing her past trauma as attached to those who would historically rape her—i.e., men; it’s her scapegoating queerness by conflating one form of monstrous-feminine as “always dark,” thus illegitimate, whereas Ripley’s fascist moment of darkness is “fleeting” and ultimately serves the state. Her own violent sex repulsion is selective, Ripley acting sex-negatively towards free love, labor and anything else the state needs dead by imprinting those onto a dark, uncertain menace she xenophobically associates with past abuse; i.e., someone that vaguely resembles a former rapist.

This standard-issue TERF recruitment and weaponization allows the monster to be whatever the state needs it to be, thus antagonizing female/feminine victims of abuse to attack each other (and various other intersections; e.g., the black male rapist, the trans woman, the Muslim assassin, etc). It’s psychological “kettling” that defends the heteronormative status quo and all of its clichés and historical-material outcomes through a female harem guard. In short, nothing changes.

[3] The Greater Good, in canonical media, becomes a kind of nostalgic code of law that—in the presence of opposition to the law as an oppressive force—becomes a second kind of code; i.e., something to recognize as a cryptonym, one that signals those who are conditioned to respond to it positively by seeing activists as threats to a “better time” and its Puritanical values. In cinema before, during and after WW2, this became known as the Hays Code (Maria Lewis’ “Early Hollywood and the Hays Code,” 2021)—literally a code of ethics tied to what normalized society deemed acceptable according to those holding the reins during the Great Depression/Capitalism-in-crisis. A similar regression in the face of moral-panic alarm bells screaming “degeneracy!” can be seen with the hero, Superman, whose own outmoded code of ethics was literally enshrined in the Comics Code of 1954 by an Authority of the same name. The outcome was predictably regressive—i.e., an enforcement of a perceived good through the moral panic of Fredric Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent crying foul (Thought Slime’s “Give Me Superman’s Underwear,” 2023) on par with the 19th century demonizing of Gothic media as “terror literature” in relation to renegade activism/terrorism [re: Crawford]. This mentality continues to survive in other moral panics; e.g., Red Scares, yellow menace, Satanic Panic, etc. All are done according to the Liberal “invisibility” (and apologetics) of Edward Bernays’ optimism towards an American public relations that controlled the minds of its subjects “for the better.” In short, such tactics pacify consumers, but also make them fearful of making mistakes according to a Puritanical status quo; in the presence of moral panic, so many everyday healthy activities like sex or questioning police states suddenly became not just punishable offenses for being printed, but thought crimes.