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.

Crash Course: An Introduction to Asexuality and Demisexuality

Here is a list of things I like more than having sex: Reading. Lying flat on my back staring at the ceiling. Peeling back the skin of a grapefruit. […] Riding my bike away from parties. How the night swallows me like a dragon. The wet heat of one body alone. Love is a girl who slept beside me barely touching for two years. Love is whatever kept us fed. And this is how we knew that we belonged to it. If orgasm is really what makes the body sacred then the best love I have ever known was sin or sacrilege (source).

—Cameron Awkward-Rich, “A Prude’s Manifesto” (2015)

Picking up where “Selling Sex, SWERFs and Un(der)paid Sex Work” left off…

The following epigrams—specifically those of Cameron Awkward-Rich and Ela Przybylo—were recommended to me by Dr. Sam Hirst (re: author of “Zofloya and the Female Gothic,” a piece I’ve cited repeatedly throughout this series); i.e., after our own conversations on asexuality and the Gothic. —Perse, 5/3/2025

As stated in Chapter One, empathy is a mindfulness towards trauma, be that one’s own or that of other people. Asexual people are often traumatized or overwhelmed by sex as foisted onto them, as something that negates who they are; or they view it as traumatic, having suffered trauma themselves (to which the heteronormative Symbolic Order sublimates rape through the ghost of the counterfeit and its various cryptonyms). While no one wants to be raped, the experience for ace people often involves a recipient who would find the act of consensual sex incredibly unpleasant, unremarkable or insipid under the best of circumstances (controlled regression, as with age play and “Bigs”/ “Littles,” is often nonsexual in nature—invokes agency by deliberately choosing not to have sex as a form of cathartic agency with a dominant, good-sport/-faith partner).

Some ace people are shaped by their trauma; some are neurodivergent in ways that lead them to experience personality disorders and mental conditions that historically are abused/pathologized by societies that often scapegoat, gaslight or neglect the mentally ill, neurodivergent or genderqueer. Even if we orient sexually ourselves, we must think on our feet (and our toes, when caution calls for it in relation to Capitalism as something to protect others from) for others who don’t orient sexually. Because art is an expression of the artist and their own gender and orientations, it’s not strictly up to artists to curate their own galleries to suit the needs of other people; but it does behoove one to be considerate and respectful when someone has made their boundaries plain (not all sex-repulsed people do, mind you, and there are reasons for that shouldn’t be held against them; e.g., the comorbidity of neurodivergence and histories of abuse).

Before we delve into asexuality and demisexuality more deeply, this chapter section will define them in relation to heteronormativity. Heteronormativity is canonical, thus capitalist (as are its relative terms); it compels erotic/reproductive sex, a process that alienates anyone who isn’t a white, cis-het Christian male in relation to the future—what will be as tied to past images and arguments. For example, Beauvoir’s infamous expression, “Woman is other,” frames otherness within female sexuality. However, heteronormativity also alienates queer people. By likening them to sex, it anchors queerness to normalized, compulsory roles of sexual reproduction that affect the public’s general/Gothic imagination (and subsequent image production) moving forward.

While I want to be thorough and focus on the general imagination for a bit, I promise we’ll return to the Gothic imagination and its monsters, lairs/parallel space and phobias before long. —Perse, back in 2023

For queer people, escaping these roles has become a fight to be heard, a “loudness war” during sexual discourse. As noisy bigots control discussions about sex, the act of having sex and feeling euphoric about it dominates sex-positive proceedings—so much so that many authors of sexuality, myself included—often forget about the other aspects of sex-positivity and queerness: the asexual side; i.e., not having sex, or having it despite feeling indifferent about it.

(exhibit 87h: More examples of Michael Emberley’s artwork. Many of the book’s illustrations have stayed the same since 1994. However, several have been updated in recent additions. The book seeks to raise awareness about sexuality [and gender, in the 2019 version] to help children and parents understand issues that are both commonly misunderstood but also deliberately kept out of public/private schools by conservative lawmakers and their proponents.)

For example, even the sex-positive milestone, It’s Perfectly Normal, frames sexual attraction and activity as normal. Though continuously banned throughout the past three decades (even being featured on Matt Walsh’s hateful polemic What is a Woman? in 2022), the book barely-if-at-all delves into people who feel sex-repulsed. Even so, it remains challenged and seen as heretical by concerned parents resisting the idea of children being educated on sex at all:

Author Robie Harris says she always knew the book could be controversial. “I was warned by several people not to do this book, that it would ruin my career,” she remembers. “But I really didn’t care. To me it wasn’t controversial. It’s what every child has a right to know.” Now in its fourth edition, the book has sold more than a million copies. Harris asks experts like pediatricians, biologists and even lawyers to fact-check each edition, to make sure updates to AIDS prevention information or birth control laws are accurate. Michael Emberley’s illustrations, like this one showing an egg traveling through a fallopian tube, make sexual health information accessible to an elementary and middle school audience. But elements of the art, including naked bodies, make some parents uncomfortable. Candlewick Press Internet safety and sexting are new topics in this edition. “There can be a lot of inappropriate, weird, confusing, uncomfortable, creepy, scary or even dangerous websites that you can end up on when you’re looking for information,” she writes.

Harris also updated her explanations of gender and sexual abuse, and includes information about and for transgender youth. A lot of parents say they don’t want their kids learning about that kind of sensitive information without supervision. Carey Fritz of Culver City, Calif., has two children in elementary school. He says he’d rather his kids not see the illustrations in the book without him present. “If they saw this without me, I’d probably feel a little frustrated,” he said, referring to a page with illustrations of various birth control methods and how to use them. “It’s talking about sexual activity, which I don’t think a 10-year-old needs to worry about,” he explains. Over the years, many parents who share this sentiment have asked for the book to be put in a restricted section of the library. It’s not a ban — parents just don’t want young children to come across it accidentally. Author Robie Harris doesn’t think that’s a good solution. “No child’s going to go up to a librarian and say, ‘You know, I’m going through puberty, I’m having these changes, I seem to have these pubic hairs, and could you recommend something to me?'” she says. “If a book is in a special section of the library, maybe the kids who need it the most are not going to get it” (source: Rebecca Hersher’s “It May Be ‘Perfectly Normal’, But It’s Also Frequently Banned,” 2014).

(exhibit 87i: The artwork of Stephen Gammell [source: J. Meyer’s “The Dark Illustrations of Stephen Gammell,” 2020] may have terrified many other children of my generation, but for me was something that I happily read; the artwork appealed my trauma as a young girl, I think—one who was already experiencing child abuse at home, but also being one of three or four divorced families in my grade. I found my home-away-from home in forbidden places and texts.)

To that, when I was in the fifth grade, I was exposed to a sex-ed talk in school. Curious, I wanted to read about sex, but It’s Perfect Normal not at my elementary school library [though Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark was, another banned book that, in light of its 2019 revival, I decided to write about in “Gothic Themes in Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, the trailer,” 2019:

I would know. I grew up in Chelsea, Michigan, a small American town. The town itself was, and is, innocuous, insipid. We had (and still have) dime stores, gas stations and post offices; there was (and is) a graveyard and a clock tower (no bullshit). In 1991, I was a first-grader at North School, one of Chelsea’s two (at the time) elementary schools. It featured a small, private library hosted by Mrs. Locks, the librarian. A stout, smiling woman with long, mousy hair, she loved telling horror stories. As the children gathered ’round, a great horned owl would loom overhead, stuffed and standing inside a glass case (“He’d flown into some power lines,” Mrs. Locks promised us). I loved the owl, but the stories more. And on the shelf sat one of my favorites: Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (1981).

By the time I was old enough to read, the books were already banned in many public libraries. Yet, Mrs. Locks had a penchant for ghastly things, and the library was a private one. Under her care, the books were allowed a home. For all I know, they’re still there. Outside of private libraries and private ownership, however, the book’s public distribution was ardently stymied. It became something of a legend in its own right, a relic out of the past. I easily imagine it a collector’s item, stashed far from prying eyes. M. R. James’ ghost stories leap to mind. Concerning antiquarians beckoned to haunted curios, their discovery was always unfortunate (source).]

but I was able to go to the local library, the McKune Memorial Library, to acquire books on sexuality. Shortly after that I discovered It’s Perfectly Normal sitting my grandparent’s bookshelf, as if just waiting for me like magic; the book would have new at the time, with me being in the fifth grade in 1995 (as for the Memorial Library, it was expanded upon—going from a single building to be emptied of most of its more interesting orthographic material in exchange for cheap, forgetful paperbacks.)

Heteronormativity stems from compelled ignorance. As something to foster into the Internet Age, it tends to compel erotic sexuality inside a ludic, audio-visual scheme, so much so that American canon describes the path to sex in literal baseball terms. “Scoring” amounts to PIV sex between traditional cis-het “players” (which often results in pregnancy). For traditional “players” of American “baseball,” snuggling isn’t even on the board. 1st base is kissing and touching. What’s more, their existence on a numbered list heavily implies progression towards increasingly sexual activities: kissing to heavy petting to straight-up fucking.

(source: Leah Stark’s “Stanford Scholar Blazes Pathway for Academic Study of Asexuality,” 2015)

For some ace persons, though, cuddles aren’t “just” a surrogate for 1st base; they’re home base. This happens because many ace/semi-ace (aka demisexual or “grey ace”) people prioritize gender performance[1] and emotional intimacy over compulsory erotic sexuality. This extends to non-normative queer persons who reject the heteronormative tropes of reproductive sexuality in canonical and countercultural stories—i.e., the neoliberal, homonormative appropriation of the “two moms/two dads” trope as an alternative parenting scheme: gay parents raising straight children (so basic and overused as to become stereotypical “queer bait” in popular shows like The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, 2019, or Wednesday, 2022).

However, before we discuss asexuality and demisexuality in terms of queernormative media (media that frames queerness in a sexual light), I want to outline their basic distinctions. Both are orientations, denoting entire or partial asexual attraction/sexual repulsion. Conversely heteronormativity canonizes sexual attraction, reifying sexual orientations to diminishing degrees of normality. A homosexual cis-man’s orientation, for example, is semi-typical because, despite being attracted to other men, the attraction is still sexual. Sexual attraction—its tension, build-up and eventual release—are legion in popular narratives, many couching queer sexuality within normative, even nostalgic scenarios: the marriage, the affair, the coming-of-age kiss, etc.

 

Call Me By Your Name (2017) contains all of these things. When a younger man falls for his father’s older pupil, the two fall in love, kiss, and eventually have sex. At the end of the movie, the older man marries a woman and leaves the younger man behind. The tragedy of the movie is heteronormative because the older man closets himself on purpose (explaining why over the phone). Moving forward, I want to examine normativity in queer cases that aren’t closeted, including how they override ace potential in canonical stories and how to resist this effect in queer counterculture.

Queer-/Homonormativity in Sex-Centric Canon (feat. The Matrix, Sense8, Sherlock, etc)

Sedgwick, in particular, questioned what gets condensed into sexual identities, providing a dynamic list ranging from one’s own gender identity, the gender of the recipient of one’s attraction, sexual acts, fantasies, emotional bonds, power, and community. Thus, sexual identities are formulaic labels that exist within the modern regime of sexuality and glaze over most aspects of relating, including the many possible manners of attraction and the practices they generate. Yet, because of the central role that sex has played within determining sexual identity, sexual identity has been understood as based on sexual attraction (source).

—Ela Przybylo, Asexual Erotics: Intimate Readings of Compulsory Sexuality (2019)

Note: The Matrix is a very important piece of GNC media, one whose philosophical merger with action-hero tropes it camps in critique of Capitalism. While “The World Is a Vampire” close-reads The Matrix‘ GNC an-Com legacy (and adoration of Plato’s famous allegory of the cave) at length, here is where I starting flirting with that idea. —Perse, 5/5/2025

Although Call Me By Your Name’s heteronormativity prioritizes sexual orientation, reproductive sexuality and formulaic love take equal precedence in many openly queer narratives, often restricting their ace potential. In this section, I’ll cite The Matrix (1999) as an example. Then, I’ll examine how Black Butler showcases sexualized gender performance and dialog that are visibly divorced from sexual consummation (which historically would have been to legitimize marriage and its patriarchal bloodline). The next section will examine the broader ways that queer canon and counterculture alienate asexuality by normalizing sexuality in popular stories, including fan fiction written by ace persons. In the two sections after that, I’ll explore ways in which sex-positive Gothic media repels these advances and how asexuality manifests in nude art.

Many queer narratives radicalize sexuality through a sexually queer stance: “Don’t listen to these hypocrites, Neo,” says Mouse from The Matrix. “To deny our own impulses is to deny the very thing that makes us human.” By arguing that sexual impulses are intrinsically human, the speaker inadvertently dehumanizes ace people—either entirely for individuals who don’t experience sexual desire at all, and partially for those who feel sexual attraction, albeit to an atypically lesser degree, or only in one particular way but not another. Put another way, The Matrix is, at best, queernormative; at worst, heteronormative, predominantly sex-centric and laden with cliché themes that define queerness through the pursuit of heteronormative sex. It’s less the film outwardly repressing its queerness through open rejection, devoting much of the screen time towards potentially queer individuals doing visibly heteronormative activities. Neo is a man, Trinity is a woman, and they gotta kiss before the credits roll.

Until the Oracle intervenes, however, sex is barely discussed. Ridiculing Neo for missing Trinity’s muted signals, the Oracle shoves him in a sexual direction. This is significant, as Neo didn’t care about sex before her interference. He ignored the girl with the rabbit tattoo (a symbol of fertility) and everyone at the dance club; he also didn’t accept Mouse’s offer to bang the woman in the red dress. By the time he and Trinity kiss, however, the script has practically reversed, making everything about true, heteronormative love retrospectively. Trinity always loved Neo and vice versa; they just needed an old sage to spell things out, letting the hero enjoy his reward: the kiss from a princess that wakes him from an enchanted slumber. This concentric dream-inside-a-dream has retro-future elements that have ironically become franchised; i.e., not just Jean Baudrillard’s idea of “hyperreal,” but a desert of the real as alluded to diegetically by the movie pointedly synthesizing the concept (the liquidated dead being fed to plugged-in newborns an apt, ouroborotic metaphor for the cycle of war and the treat of the Global South). As Abigail Lister writes in their free article for those who sign up to The Companion, “The Matrix | Explaining Jean Baudrillard and the Desert of the Real” (2023; exhibits, theirs):

The Matrix is also a fulfillment of the ideas of one influential French philosopher: Jean Baudrillard. In his 1981 philosophical treatise Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard examined popular culture and argued that in the new technological world—and I say this in the simplest way—reality has ceased to exist.

Baudrillard’s ideas are so entrenched in The Matrix that fans couldn’t fail to recognize them, even if they’ve never read a word of Baudrillard. He stipulates that in the postmodern age (he’s talking about the 1970s and 80s, but his words still ring true in the internet age), our world has become so entrenched in signs and symbols—in part down to our saturated media culture—that we’ve lost all connection with the real, and instead live in the world of the hyperreal. Reality no longer exists; we aren’t connected to the real world; we live in a simulation. In a strange coincidence, my translated copy of Baudrillard’s Simulations from 1983 even has a black-and-green cover eerily reminiscent of how the matrix itself is rendered in the films.

Neo (Keanu Reeves) stores his illicit floppy discs in a copy of Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation in The Matrix (1999).

We know that the Wachowskis were interested in Baudrillard’s work. The cover of Simulacra and Simulations even appears in the first Matrix film—Neo (Keanu Reeves) keeps his floppy discs for clients in a box stamped with the treatise’s title on it. When he opens the box, the interior is turned to an essay from Simulacra titled “On Nihilism,” in which Baudrillard argues that “the universe, and all of us, have entered live into simulation.” Humanity’s nihilism (and isn’t Neo the archetypal nihilist human?) “has been entirely realized no longer through destruction but through simulation and deterrence.” The irony here is that if Neo had bothered to read this, he would have had an inkling of what Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) will reveal to him later.

In fact, it’s Morpheus who delivers one of the most significant lines in the entire film. When he invites Neo into Nebuchadnezzar’s simulation system to reveal the secrets of the real world, he says “welcome to the desert of the real.” This line comes directly from Baudrillard, back in his explanation of Borges’ 1:1 map:

“It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the desert which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself” (source).

and later expounded on by thinkers like Slavoj Zizek’s Lacanian, Marxist analysis to the September 11th attacks, Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 (2002); his own stance is an appeal to Americans who—unlike Ward Churchill—were white, extends to more thinkers and artists commenting on an illusion that’s meant to conceal the lived experiences for many behind illusions that, in the hands of minority directors like the Wachowski sisters, can direct an audience towards a particular point of view shaped by their axes of oppression recognized in a popular allegory. The thing to remember moving forward is iconoclastic praxis: emancipate “game” workers through hauntologies that always have the potential to become canonical while various people fumble around for the truth in semi-obfuscating pedagogies.

To be fair, I wouldn’t call Zizek entirely “chickenshit,” just an old fuzzy racoon stuck in his ways. He can be frustratingly circuitous sometimes, which stems from his general lack of a Gothic-Marxist fluency—i.e., an express and lucid ability to talk about Gothic things in actual Gothic and openly dialectical-material language. Like, lose the psychoanalytical models, my dude! I get what you’re hinting at, but for the love of Gay Marx, call a spade a spade, not the “Big Other” when talking about David Lynch, the Wachowskis or John Carpenter! Why learn about these lateral, generalized dialectical models that occasionally dabble in material things when you could just talk about material things directly and in material-dialectical language designed to keep things as clear as possible and safeguard workers in the process?

Moving on. Neo and Trinity’s union is a simple reversal within the same, overarching formula: prescribed sex, specifically modest sex (threatened by robot squid demons with glowing red eyes, no less). This changes radically in the sequel, when the writers have Trinity and Neo bone in an incredibly forced and overlong sex scene. Though pushing things away from a modesty narrative, it still feels like compelled heteronormative sex. Any queerness is implied at best, though largely lost in the hippie-like orgy that ensues.

I wouldn’t attribute strict malice to the directors—two trans women outwardly presenting as cis men when the first film released. However, they still materialized a heavily conventional story sprinkled with queer potential they deliberately sexualized when they didn’t have to (no doubt pressured by Hollywood, a legacy the directors would fight to undermine decades later). Likewise, while the Wachowskis’ transness was and always is valid, a difference nonetheless exists between them as individuals and how they visibly appear through their work. Despite having changed noticeably over time, both sisters appeared as men when The Matrix released, were credited as men, and helped materialize various heteronormative and homonormative themes in their movie. In her own words, the process was closeted, relying on limited-yet-vital imagination:

The character Switch – who didn’t make it past the first film – shows “where our headspaces were,” Lilly says in a Netflix video. “The Matrix stuff was all about the desire for transformation but it was all coming from a closeted point of view. We had the character of Switch – who was a character who would be a man in the real world and then a woman in the Matrix.” Lilly doesn’t know “how present my transness was in the background of my brain as we were writing” The Matrix. “But it all came from the same sort of fire that I’m talking about.” She was always drawn to science fiction because “we were existing in a space where the words didn’t exist, so we were always living in a world of imagination” (source: Newsbeat, “The Matrix is a ‘trans metaphor,’ Lilly Wachowski says,” 2020).

Even though the Wachowskis are and were trans, the hatching of their trans “egg” wasn’t materially obvious inside a queernormative magnum opus whose approach would change radically by 2022 when the fourth film came out (Renegade Cut’s “The Matrix Resurrections Is Absolutely Beautiful,” 2022). The sex-centrism of their heroic story remains textually apparent despite Lana calling The Matrix a trans metaphor post hoc (saying what fans had already determined years prior). Despite this rejection of old compromises with Hollywood, her movie decidedly lacks an asexual focus, making heteronormative sexual arguments onscreen in monomythic language: Neo and Trinity’s destined love story, sealed with a kiss (and later consummated in the sequel very erotically) through a larger hero’s journey stuffed with action clichés.

Also, while officially “out” as trans thanks to Lana, The Matrix trilogy’s call-to-action visualizes in thoroughly sexual language. So does its enduring legacy as queer canon. Inspired, no doubt, by The Matrix Reloaded’s (2003) infamous rave scene, future efforts like Sense8 celebrate queer existence and rebellion as united through overtly sexual displays. Over and over, the queernormative message remains constant: “Queer rebels love sex.” Often, group sex, apparently.

(exhibit 88: The rebels of The Matrix evoke a kind of retro-future Free Love facing off against cybernetic squid Nazis and state-corpo panopticons.) 

To Sense8′s credit, it focuses on erotic sex as part of a larger whole—a community of queer people who have sex sometimes—but there is no one among them who identifies openly as ace and rejects the act of group sex (which much of the feature-length slow-mo birthday bash is dedicated to). For one, the rejection of immodest or casual sex is generally regarded as a homophobic stereotype in heteronormative canon. Tropes aside, the show’s lengthy metaphysical union requires sex—specifically group sex—to take part in. Ostentatious, collective eroticism become a kind of “glue” that binds everyone together in queernormative ways (which straight people can partially understand; i.e., the heteronormative myth that everyone likes sex).

Nevertheless, no attempt is made to discuss the asymmetrical relationship of sexual and asexual persons within this larger commune. While group/solo sexual activity and rebellion is entirely valid (this whole book is about it), popular stories like The Matrix and Sense8 focus on sex as a selling point for their rebellions. In turn, these propositions shape the material world that asexual persons belong to, prescribing social-sexual norms through queernormative/potentially appropriative stories. By attempting to explore their stories as part of, or against, these norms, the rest of this section and the next few sections will argue asexuality and demisexuality as groups historically alienated by queer canon and counterculture alike; re: “art is love made public” and love exists on a social-sexual gradient.

Asexual orientation (e.g., heteroasexuality) is rarely acknowledged or explored in academia, let alone as central to adult-themed narratives. Although it’s possible to depict asexuality using the same basic body/social language of sexual spheres, I think the focus remains on sexuality in popular stories, even when challenged through queer counterculture. For either, “adult” means “nubile,” of age/related to adult sexuality activity. For example, my dialectical-material analysis concerns sex positivity and coercion, but refers to variables of either in “social-sexual” terms. Because ace people exist inside sexually-dominant societies, I want to discuss asexuality in relation to social-sexual terms—less through a pure lack of sexual markers, however, and more according to what makes asexuality its own thing regarding these markers: the reclaiming of one’s body through agency as a choice to have sex or not if that’s what one needs to feel empowered.

The Reapers from Black Butler (2008) illustrate how this choice is commonly interpreted, even by ace persons wrestling with queernormativity—as sexual. For Grell Sutcliffe, though, empowerment arguably comes from dressing snazzily and performing in queer ways through the thrill of sexual tension, not sexual consummation. Yes, the chainsaw is visibly phallic. However, Grell predominantly teases our heroes with it. What if doing so is entirely the point—to flirt, not to fuck? To make their performance entirely about physical sex is to stymy asexual potential within queer narratives, foisting fucking onto the narrative when it should be up to the viewer to interpret the imagined outcome to all that sassy, fabulous sword-crossing.

(artist: Vermeille Rose)

Grell shows us that sexual empowerment isn’t exclusively about having sex; it’s about choosing whether to have sex or not when the idea is being discussed. All the same, assumptions of them orienting sexually is not uncommon, even among ace people (who are often forced to look at compelled sexuality in queernormative stories).

These widespread assumptions emerge from a deeper understanding of sexuality in media as being automatic. Queer movements often stress the reclaiming of sexuality from the Patriarchy as a means of liberation. While reclaiming the body as an asexual site is perfectly legitimate within these discussions, asexual theory also remains relatively new and misunderstood within the Humanities, let alone in popular media. This leads to general misconceptions in either sphere: i.e., ace persons don’t have appetites, don’t experience sexual pleasure at all, or are somehow sex-negative (against the idea of mutually consensual sex). Quite the contrary, they have appetites, but experience them within a gradient that allows them to orient along divergent lines.

I would go a step further and call ace categories neurodivergent—a robust orientation that, while certainly subject to potential change, isn’t automatically going to. Rather, it manifests through self-discovery and experimentation amid changing circumstances, including the brain as neuroplastic. The aim, here, is to highlight compatibility. Normally the expression is “sexual compatibility,” but asexuality is equally present in this equation, if not more so. Asexuality—like sexuality—pertains to fluid bodies and brains that change over time yet have more fixed characteristics like hereditary components, fetishes, and trauma markers.

Therefore, it would be a mistake (and tremendous insult) to default to social-sexual norms—including academic or queer ones—that infantilize or pathologize ace people for “not liking sex.”

Not only do sexual impulses canonically manifest as childlike and violent (re: Ambrosio), but ace persons are as adult and healthy as anyone; they just don’t prescribe universally to standard “adult” material every waking moment. They certainly don’t want to be automatically demonized or excluded for who they are and expected to change because they don’t demand, devour or identify with erotic sex from dusk till dawn, refusing to adhere to various queer stereotypes that normalize sex.

(source: Geeky Fanboy’s “ Discussing Asexual Characters In Fiction,” 2021)

Straight/queer stereotypes automate sex. However, fights against this automation become complicated by the unique manifestations of individual asexual persons. My friend Mavis (as mentioned in Volume One and Two; re: “Healing from Rape” and “Vampires and Claymation“), for example, is grey ace/cis-heteroasexual. They avoid sex given the choice, partly because they associate it with violence—something to do to survive; and yet, they’re almost vampirically allergic to cuddling as a display of affection, and use it to get their way (this includes fucking for attention, as invisibility invokes a paradox of desiring to be seen by one’s protector and unseen by one’s abuser, itself a liminal proposition on the surface of the image of the same kinds of bodies and genders a damsel might be attracted to).

For Marvis, the end result is violent sex with cis-het male strangers, which feels the best in terms of erotic pleasure, and a total rejection of sex with people they know and care about intimately. For them, the scenarios are night-and-day, but afford them relative agency based on what they know about themselves. They don’t feel the need to change in regards to how they feel about themselves; it’s simply who they are and they’re cool with that. All the same, they feel broken in relation to canonical media because post-coital affection is so often sold to the public as a universal love language. Their tastes and habits clearly diverge with this habit, leading to the informed consumption of media with problematic elements: guilty pleasures that cover rape and degradation as something they can consume—not because they condone abuse, but because they attain agency by revisiting trauma through fictionalized variants.

In their case, an entire genre (exploitation) allows someone whose asexuality stems from trauma to make empowering decisions about what they privately consume. It parallels their ability to decline sex through the asexual aspects of their orientation.

Not all ace people are even traumatized in the criminal sense, however. Some are natally neurodivergent, born literally with different brains that place them on the autistic spectrum. While existing here can be intense and differentiates them from non-autistic people, it’s not an illness; it’s a neurodivergent condition. So is asexuality in this context. They shouldn’t have to change just to fit into heteronormative society’s neat little box (especially since this box materially functions like a prison that exploits workers for their labor). So while sex is important for a great many people, it isn’t transcendental. To argue otherwise is to compel sex, which leads to violence against unwilling participants.

We’ll explore these effects next, including how canonical media and paratextual “fan” fiction cater to the visibly queer, social-sexual appetites of ace persons, which, while not always openly erotic, often lead to sexualized canonical myths about the broader queer community. In other words, the symptoms of ace authorship sometimes become collateral canonical praxis regardless of authorial intent; i.e., reactionaries will be livid regardless of why the ace person made Harry Potter gay with Draco in their personal head canon (to literally make Harry Potter gay in spite of Rowling’s extreme and ongoing queerphobia).

(artist: Nedjemmm)

Sexualized Queerness and Ace Voices in Sex-Normalized (Fan/Meta)Fiction

He started putting his penis near her vagina. It was BIG. His penis, that is. Not her vagina. THAT was small. Anyways, so his penis is starting to get near her vagina.” […] Her tits were there (source).

—a tweet from Patti Harrison, who quotes “her sexy kinky book,” 2019

“He said he wanted to fuck me. I said he shouldn’t, but he forced the head of his prick into the mouth of my cunt. Then giving a great heave he drove it up. It smarted me a good deal at first, but when it got in altogether, and he commenced to work it in and out, the pleasure was so great that I could not help telling him, when he asked me, that I liked his fucking very much, and that his prick felt very nice in my cunt” (source).

—May, “My Grandmother’s Tale, or May’s Account of Her Introduction to the Art of Love” (c. 1797) from The Pearl: A Journal of Voluptuous Reading [as] The Underground Magazine of Victorian England (1968; originally published in 1879)

(artist: Edouard Chimot)

Note: The second epigram, above, comes from a book given to me by Alexandra “Sandy” Norton. Sandy was a professor I wrote for as an undergrad (re: “Beneath the Church-Isle Stone: Posthumous Liberties,” 2015), but also whose work—specifically their essay “The Imperialism of Theory” (1994)—I’ve cited multiple times (re: “Preface: Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism“). Said citation includes, all the same, The Pearl, including its opening (re: “Rape Reprise“). —Perse, 5/5/2025

Fan fiction, aka “head canon” or paratextual media, is often conspicuously sexualized, but also penned by ironic sources. In this chapter section, we’ll explore the existence of sexuality and asexuality side-by-side regarding literal fan fiction. We’ll also examine the canonical media that inspires fan fiction—not just the texts themselves, but the meta/para relationship between consumers, performers and producers that encourages various canonical myths about sexuality in spite of a story’s ace potential or author’s orientation.

The creation of sexualized fan fiction displays a curious paradox among ace persons: Many experience sexual fantasies with fictional characters, not real people (many ace people are xenophiles: monster-fuckers; re: “Dark Xenophilia“). However, the degree of this sexuality varies tremendously, allowing for a variety of sexual activities beyond penetration, orgasm, marriage or babies (not always in this order). Despite being “tame” in the eyes of regular sexual consumers, snuggling and emotional intimacy are often the order-of-the-day for ace persons. Likewise, the orientations of the characters become open-to-debate, the playful attitudes of the authors extremely liberating for those who wish to experiment without a real, physical partner. This goes for ace people, but also outwardly sexual people trying something different—a “bit of strange” having infinite forms when hugging the alien!

(artist: butchtats)

In either case, the deeper context separating them is not immediately apparent. Nor is the fanfic meta-goal always masturbatory. If it is, the sexual activities occur “off-screen,” happening when online dialogs are paused or while the individual is not present within them. Even so, what people do in private doesn’t survive through public record. Rather, a collective break from convention is immortalized through:

• epic sagas: Msscribe (Eldena Doubleca5t’s “Msscribe: The Harry Potter Fandom’s Greatest Con-Artist,” 2020)
• hilariously ironic fanart (re: Nedjemmm‘s gay Harry and Draco piece)
• and surreal camp (seriousness that fails): Snapewives (STRANGE ÆONS’ “The Story Of Snapewives,” 2022)

Anything goes in Harry Potter fanfics, the curious case of Snapewives or Msscribe demonstrating a social desire to play with fictionalized sex. The same goes for Sherlock, whose collective, hidden thirst among fans flows out into the public sphere through saucy paratexts. The authors may or may not orient sexually at all—might be in it purely for the laughs (this 2013 Edward “Eddie Snowjob” Snowden fanfic by Andrew Schaffer is especially glorious). If so, their underlying irony and parody must be investigated; the sexual immediacy of their imagery largely speaks for itself. Moreover, an author’s fun in writing an erotic scenario is enjoyed very differently by them than by consumers who often relish in the sexual irony through their own specific orientations.

(artist: Sweetlittlekitty)

The authorship of fictionalized sex is nothing new, any more than murder or marriage are. Austen did not marry; Poe, Radcliffe and Dacre did not kidnap maidens, bury them alive or stab them to death; Stephanie Meijer does not sparkle in sunlight; Laurel K. Hamilton doesn’t fuck werewolves, sidhe or goblins. These were/are ordinary human beings with large imaginations, catering to a public fascination with BDSM and signifiers of queer sexuality, not things they necessarily experienced or did themselves. This extends to ace persons exploring sexuality in their own creative performances. Divorced from the physical acts that occur between two (or more) people, this creativity helps them flirt with sensations they cannot wholly or partially experience with others (it’s not unheard of for monster-fuckers and “service tops” to be ace, for example).

The fact remains, many fanfic authors are inexperienced. But the reasons for their “thirst” still vary considerably. Some are indisputably young. However, many more are not. Of the latter, a bored housewife’s repressed sexual fantasies might seem a likely culprit. Equally probable, though, are the sexual incompatibilities of ace persons, whose lingering desire to explore sexuality in their own creative output despite knowing their own sexual incompatibilities is often mistaken as compulsory sexuality. This accidental outcome leads to an oversaturated legacy of “thirsty” taboos eclipsing a given author’s deeper ironies and general know-how in the process.

Less contested is the overall presence of sex. Whether canon or counterculture, sex is sold everywhere and endlessly experimented with/talked about. As part of these grander dialogs, the blatant pan-eroticism of fanfics supports underlying presumptions of sexual consumption/orientation that become near-universal in popular stories regardless of where or how the popularity comes about. Those seeking confirmation will generally point to fan fiction, gleefully highlighting the prolific sexual variety on display. In fan fiction, the havers-of-sex try seemingly everything there is to try purely for its own sake, serially exploring sexual ironies and curiosities as wide and diverse as the world can afford.

Orientation bias leads to a series of canonical, sex-prescriptive myths in oft-collateral ways—i.e., in canonical fiction but also fan-fiction and countercultural fiction, continually pushed onstage or onscreen by a throng of disparate performers, including older/ace fanfic authors:

1. Potentially ace people are assumed sexual unless explicitly stated otherwise (the “celibate” or closeted nerd/bachelor).
2. People with genitals must want to use them.
3. Sex is universally enjoyable once experienced (e.g., male ejaculation/erections are always enjoyable).
4. Everyone enjoys sex the same way.
5. Everyone wants sex the same way.
6. Queer people aren’t simply sexual; they’re hyper

We’ll explore the first four for the remainder of this section and the second two in the next section; in the two sections after that, we’ll explore how—as time goes on—ace authors find ways to openly identify as ace by rejecting these myths (and by extension sex) through Gothic iconoclasm: Gothic counterculture conventions and the asexual treatment of nudity in general artistic life studies (that extends to the monstrous examples we’ve already talked about in Volumes One and Two, and will talk about more in this volume).

Our first sexual myth is the closeted bachelor or castrated nerd, which tries to sexualize potentially ace intellectuals (often with queer overtones). Though famous characters like Sherlock Holmes and Varys the Spider aren’t explicitly stated as ace, the possibility is no less likely than them being gay or straight (so-called homo- or queernormativity enforcing a heteronormative role onto queer and ace characters). Sex isn’t the end-all, be-all for Sherlock and Varys, who choose to devote their lives towards what actually interests them: mysteries, puzzles, espionage; etc.

It’s not that either cannot be queer/ace. However, they’re often assumed to be straight, or at the very least, sexual, because heteronormativity normalizes sexuality. It either sexualizes everything or focuses on sex as something that’s missing or incorrect within outliers and exceptions. The fact remains, some canonical heroes feel more ace, regardless of what’s said about them officially. While coding the perpetual bachelor or old maid as gay is undoubtedly standard behavior even inside queer circles, exclusively doing so denies ace people some semblance of representation. Intersectionally it makes far more sense to investigate, “Does this character actually care about sex at all?” than try to forcefully pin a sexual relationship onto them. In situations where both interpretations work, vying entirely for one over the other risks breaking into unnecessary in-fighting.

These interpretations are challenged by the gradient between sexual and asexual persons (and the sexual creative output of either). While I want to examine predominantly asexual persons, I also want to inspect “grey” or demisexual persons. My goal in doing so isn’t to survey each and every variant, but introduce a parallel gradient that, while being interwoven like a helix into sexual norms and counterculture, frequently goes unnoticed in either circle. Their mutual alienation of asexuality comes from work within or around social-sexual dramas with eroticized and romanticized components. This includes the paratextual contributions of ace people, writing sexualized fanfiction instead of focusing on their ace-ness (a habit that is slowly starting to change as ace awareness increases).

As bigots sexualize queer people, queer people—including ace people—seek to liberate themselves through ironic sexualized variants. However, sexualized queerness leads asexual persons to be seen as anomalous within both groups: a lack of something that is popularized by both forces as “best in life”—sex. Even Monty Python called sex “the meaning of life,” its own satire echoing a regressive form of reactionary politics: tying everything to biological sites and markers, including sexual reproduction (the joke, the plot, the drama—all of these things have to be about sex; we’ll see TERFs doing this in Chapter Four). Yet even satirizing this trend tends to focus on sex, ironically ignoring the fact that many in the queer community would rather focus on things other than sex and genitals, if only part of the time.

This brings us to our second myth: genitals must be used/those who have them want to use them. In truth, many queer people (especially younger queer people) despise being branded with/defined by their sexual orientation—i.e., having their identities decided for them by others according to their birth sex as something to publicly announce: their genitals and how to use them. Not only is this assignment made entirely without their consent; it gatekeeps queerness as sexually dependent and genital-centric, when in fact (a)sexual orientation, gender performance/identity combine to denote someone’s gender expression more broadly. However, nor are public discussions about explicit genital ownership or preference the default queer approach. Often made in opposition to a status quo that forces queer people to justify their own existence, queerness allows genital-centric language to exist, but seldom employs it save when coerced by those in power.

Note: Paradise Lost and Original Sin come up extensively in this book series; i.e., as a campy agent; e.g., starting with “Notes on Power” and extending into “Food for Thought” (re: “Of Darkness and the Forbidden“), and frankly involving anything discussing the character Satan, including offshoots; e.g., exhibit 0a1b2b (re: “Notes on Power“) and exhibits 7c/d (re: “The Nation-State“), but also Jamal Nafi’s essay, “Milton’s Portrayal of Satan in Paradise Lost and the Notion of Heroism” (2015), which we repeatedly cite—among other things—vis-à-vis Frankenstein and David the Android from Alien: Covenant (re: “Making Demons“); i.e., whores give birth to monsters, Eve a maiden that is corrupted versus Lilith the Jewish-coded whore being the mother of demons previously made from clay. —Perse, 5/5/2025

A note about this language before we proceed onto other heteronormative myths, as it leads to their continuation along linguo-material lines that queer people tend to avoid. This includes unironic sexualized art, whereupon the ironic variants of queer artists giddily celebrate the consumption of sexualized media. By venerating sexual consumption as ironic and informed, genderqueer iconoclasts dismantle ancient heteronormative dogma like Original Sin (if the artist below is ace, then the image, as usual, fails to communicate this deeper context):

(exhibit 89a: Artist: Erotibot. The usual Gothic stereotypes about body hair and “flashing” extend to a legend largely denuded of obvious monsters. The canonical monster here isn’t the snake, it’s Eve. “Abashed the Devil stood, And felt how awful goodness is, and saw Virtue in her shape how lovely” [source] is Milton finding a way in Paradise Lost to comment on the Devil’s shame at seeing Eve nude, while later demonizing Eve and blaming her, not the devil or God, for tempting Adam. Despite Blake going to bat for Milton by saying he was “of the devil’s party and didn’t know it”—and despite and others partially decolonizing Paradise Lost by calling Satan a revolutionary—Milton’s praxis was patriarchal and xenophobic towards women, thus canonical to some degree: An old blind dude having his daughters transcribe Paradise Lost from his dreams and into Latin, day after day:  

Milton was raised to assume a place in the Anglican Church but chose instead to write in every major literary genre of the Renaissance: elegy and epic, ode and sonnet, drama and pastoral. Milton went completely blind in 1651 and, until his death in 1674, he lived with his three daughters who transcribed Paradise Lost while secretly selling off volumes from his library [re: Lapham’s Quarterly’s “Misspent Youth“]. 

This took literal years. Call this daughterly servitude to their father “staying in a woman’s lane.” However—much like widower Patrick Brontë and his three novelist/poet daughters, Charlotte, Emily and Anne called themselves “neutral,” male-sounding names like Currer, Eliot and Anton to get their works published [largely through Charlotte’s game persistence despite being subservient to canon in their own ways; even so Charlotte Brontë would be a TERF by today’s standards; re: exhibit 21c1, “The Basics“]—Milton’s children were still living in a man’s world that allowed their privileged dad to lord over them in the first place. Simply put, he “knew best,” but so did society—i.e., seeing the Milton daughters as dumb, unthinking property to be married off.)

Beyond Adam and Eve, heteronormative myths more broadly flow from canonical linguistic habits. When skirting these habits, a curious quality of queer discourse lies in how people’s genitals generally aren’t implied or stated in everyday gendered language/media. This includes pronouns, orientations and gender roles; or canonical stories that famously promote these things. If you’re a cis-het man and say you’re heterosexual, by extension you’ve already implied that you’re into female genitalia; there’s no need to make a concrete distinction because heteronormative discourse denies anything beyond the colonial binary. Whether subtle or overt, the distinction as part of a larger socio-material structure is very clearly in place.

Conversely queer discourse detaches gender from an automatic connection to biological sex—with terms like pansexual denoting an (a)sexual attraction to someone regardless of either parties’ gender or biological sex (whereas terms like “hetero-” and “homosexual” are historically binarized and denote an explicitly sexual attraction to biological sex). Queerness views gender and biological sex as distinct, modular categories that often intersect. To this, queer people use the same general diction that cis-het people do when emphasizing sexual attraction; they just don’t imply the genitals involved. However, to spell things out would also require unusual genital-centric words for both groups: “androphile” and “gynephile.” Uncommon for being genital-specific language that stipulates erotic preference, both go unused by either sphere, albeit for different reasons.

First, in heteronormative spheres. As we’ll see more of in the “Hatred Against Transgender Persons, Intersexuality and Drag” section/Chapter Four, cis-het language essentializes an automatic connection between gender and biological sex, defaulting to enforced dichotomies that operate in rigid conjunction through compelled unions announced by heteronormative language.

Furthermore, said language treats gender and sexuality as tied to and defined by biological sex, implying genitals, gender and various sexual activities associated with either through a colonial binary that valorizes sanctioned reproductive sex: the institution of marriage and the linguo-material connection between consumers and canon. This relationship leads to some truly bizarre Latin jargon (with Latin being the language of power and historically sexist institutions like the STEM fields, next page), but also associative behaviors and myths whose sodomy double standards can be camped to Hell and back; e.g., “Save your spunk for marriage, boys (re: Monty Python’s “Every Sperm is Sacred”); girls, your maidenheads; and only have unprotected PIV sex!” (re: Garfunkel and Oates’ “The Loophole”):

Although specific terms illustrate the sacred hierarchy of sanctioned sex, defaulting to them says the quiet part out loud. While this already sounds weird as hell, it nevertheless outlines a socio-material structure that can be inferred regardless if the language is explicitly stated or not; or if the distributors, authors or consumers are overtly religious/secular or somewhere in between. Being heteronormative, the free market allows for all of the above, but some will undoubtedly be louder in support of the status quo.

(artist: unknown—originally known to me by Zeuhl, in grad school, as a joke)

Unlike their straight counterparts, queer interlocutors tend to favor sexual attraction as happening towards gender and leave out taboo mentions of genitals or heteronormative prescription. There’s still room to imply—you can have cis-gendered homonormative gay men, for instance. You can also have an attraction towards trans-men or trans-women, which generally denotes a starting position (AFAB/AMAB) that binary trans people deviate from on their own paths of self-identity and -discovery. But attraction isn’t binary for bisexual/pansexual orientations; nor is it for people who identify as non-binary or those born as intersex. In fact, the casual usage of words like “gay” or “trans” tend to supersede specific definitions unless someone has something specific they wish to impart (“I feel gay”; i.e., “I feel [gender]queer/trans, etc”). However, the explicit public mention of genital ownership or preference remains rare in queer circles for all parties involved. I think this largely has to do with such things being taboo, thus private—i.e., private parts. But terms like androphile or gynephile at least attempt to articulate the sexual attraction towards a person’s sexual equipment independent of their gender or marital inclinations.

While genitals being the instruments of erotic sex can certainly be something to think about inside larger sex-positive discussions, queer iconoclasts avoid automatically baking them into public sexual discourse, including sex-positive artwork or the labor exchanges that produce them. From a dialectical-material standpoint, everything hinges on context: who’s using it, how, and why. Personally I would simply state my preference for something directly; i.e., I am into androgyne AFABs and vaginal sex (re: Zeuhl, “Non-Magical Detectives“). But the open usage of genital-explicit language is tremendously discouraged outside patently frank/sex-centric dating scenarios: “Hi, I’m Persephone and this is my dating profile; I like vaginal sex.” For cis-het people this will sound redundant and crude; for queer people, it’s less about crudeness and more that many queer people don’t like being reduced to genitals, or known purely through sexual attraction in either direction. Instead, the sharing of this information becomes a privilege one merits under specific situations (itself a kind of agency that grants the speaker autonomy within public/private discourse about gender identity/performance and [a]sexual orientation/activity).

In other words, terms like androphile and gynephile are specific and granular, emphasizing a physio-erotic aspect of someone versus the sum of their existence. It’s also something that generally doesn’t need to be said outside the company of people you want to fuck (in which case, stating that one prefers AMABs/AFABs or phallic/vaginal sex is more likely anyways; yet all preclude asexual scenarios of non-sexual affection due to a sexual emphasis on genital ownership being reflected in/informed by popular language/media). Regardless, unless you’re an exhibitionist or a loudmouth, you’re not going to announce your erotic preferences to everyone in public spaces where dating isn’t expected. However, even on dating websites, these kinds of details tend to be limited to one’s dating profile—concentrically arranged in how they’re publicly available on private websites for inquiring minds to investigate. Even here, though, people tend to avoid sharing out of an instilled sense of heteronormative shame.

Returning to the idea of sexual/asexual consensus, the phenomenon varies within canon and counterculture. Canon tends to frame asexuality as being inherently dishonest, but also clueless. Ace people become canonically “confused,” depicted as painfully out-of-touch with their own bodies (though especially their genitals)—to the point that being ace amounts to simply lying about not liking sex. The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005), for example, reinforces virginal status as a mark of shame that must be overwritten with marriage and sex. It treats the revelation as tragically stalled, but obvious after the fact, resulting in two more myths: Sex feels good and feels equally awesome for everyone.

Unfortunately sex doesn’t always feel good. Even if it’s consensual, the activities that transpire between two incompatible persons will be, at best, unmemorable; at worst, disastrous. Moreover, even if they are compatible, sex is often asymmetrically experienced and enjoyed; i.e., doesn’t feel the same for both sides (simultaneous orgasms can happen, but remain tremendously oversold in canonical media). This is doubly true for asymmetrically compatible couples where one side is ace, the other not (or one is an exhibitionist and the other isn’t, wanting to “share” their activists with a third party who likes to watch, etc; we’ll return to this idea in Chapter Five during the “Transgressive Nudism” subchapter). Even if both parties are experienced, comfortable and on good terms, the ace side will still experience sex differently than the non-ace side. This goes for cuddles, foreplay and the act itself.

While perfectly valid, such asymmetricities remain largely unexplored in romantic canon and queer counterculture. Responding to romantic canon, queer circles sometimes identify too strongly with transgressive sexuality as a countercultural lever. Doing so tends to favor the expression of queer people’s sexual activities (invented or otherwise), simultaneously ignoring asexuality as a legitimate form of self-expression within the sex-positive mode: one’s personal right to decline sex, including by choosing not to write about it in fan fiction.

This sexual bias leads us to our second pair of heteronormative myths: One, everyone wants sex; two, queer people are hypersexual monsters. In the next section, we’ll explore how these xenophobic myths inform the false notion that asexual people “aren’t as queer” as sexual people, aren’t actively queer as a means of societal change unless they’re clearly being transgressive—i.e., performing in a clearly hypersexual way—or at the very least being sexual in some shape or form that violates conventional boundaries. It’s Medusa’s pledge to do so—her sacred honor to defile canonical norms: a gorgon, a dark angel, a gender slide ruler (with Harmony being agender, for example; see: “An Interview with Harmony Corrupted,” 2025).

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

Defined Through Sex: Sex Normativity in Popular Media

Reader, I married him.

—Jane Eyre, Jane Eyre (1847)

Note: When I say “sex normativity” in this section, it attaches to heteronormativity through the neoliberal monomyth model; e.g., the hero faces the monster in Hell, kills it, and either returns to pastoral bliss or dies from contacting a toxifying[2] element from Hell, mid-genocide (re: exhibit 1a1a1h2a1 from “Scouting the Field” or exhibit 30a from “Rape Culture“). However, their focus is heteronormativity insofar as Capitalism sexualizes everything” (re: “Thesis Body“), which would come after writing Volume Three. Here in this subchapter, I would focus on sex normativity as amatonormative, insofar as marriage is normalized, and whose subsequent normativity toxifying whores subverts in GNC language applied to canon. Revenge is classically blind, but we can make it perceptive (with me camping DBZ in “Cruisin’ for a Brusin’” analyzing the himbos of Toriyama’s work). —Perse, 5/5/2025

(exhibit 89b1: Artist: Harry Turney. The satire of Dragon Ball is that that Goku—ever the himbo—thought “marriage” was something you ate. And when he defeats King Piccolo he weds Chi Chi through an arranged marriage, who he will always come home to when she has a meal for him; i.e., “The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.”)

The remediation of queer hypersexuality and erasure of asexuality comes from how popular stories historically prioritize sex: something that sells because it is sold a particular way—globally and aggressively. Whether through courtship, consummation, or scandal, heteronormative stories incessantly prescribe sex to people, especially activities that lead to institutional (reproductive) sex as normative behavior. In turn, canonical proponents grant sex a narrative “weight,” cementing sexuality as the “ultimate” love language: the final, oft-implied destination that everyone supposedly wants because it implies socio-material elevation (marrying into a castle and becoming a princess). The same notion is seemingly assimilated within many queer stories, whose degree of normativity must be carefully explored: homonormativity within the nuclear family structure, or queernormativity as an attempt to connect general queerness to either the institution of marriage and its outcome of sanctioned sex, or at least something that speaks a similar sexual dialect: premarital sex opposed to extramarital sex, or at least the latter in response to the former as something to resist.

Looking in on prescribed marriage or sex in popular stories, asexual audience members are often forced to look at sex even in queer examples. To be fair, ace persons, despite differing orientations, can still emotionally invest in resolutions of conflict regarding sexual characters they appreciate (a gay man crying when Adrian tells Rocky she loves him, for instance). However, they must still contend with sex normativity treating anything short of the act of sex or its pursuit as “lesser,” including themselves. The linguo-material consequence of sex supremacy is a global draining of ace-inclusive language among commodified queerness, which corporations appropriate for profit. Meanwhile, many queer persons assimilate to varying degrees through queer-normalized roles in these stories or while creating them. Even amongst queer audiences and their own paratextual material, there exists an overwhelming urge to discuss sex, if only to find one’s asexual place amongst a hoard of sexual conventions—e.g., the hypersexual queer person, but also the closeted queer person as both lacking the asexual lingo to navigate around, and disentangle from, common portrayals of queer people.

Asexuality is rarely if ever seriously discussed as its own equal thing in relation to sex. Heartbreak High (2022) is the unlikely exception, but still leads off with common queer stereotypes it later dismantles, if only partially. Cash, for example, initially comes off as transphobic, rejecting the sexual advances of openly queer person, Darren. Not only does the show hypersexualize Darren’s non-binary homosexuality (which, to be fair, communicates the pent-up sexual frustrations of many queer people who struggle to find romantic/sexual partners); but neither Darren nor Cash have the asexual language to counteract common attitudes in relation to queer people: queer persons are hypersexual, and asexual queer persons are “lesser” within this arrangement. Heartbreak High reverses/non-binarizes the gender roles within something called the cotton ceiling. Said ceiling is anisotropic, meaning its significance varies depending on the direction it flows in; e.g., how the penis is viewed as a demonic symbol of rape by cis-het women, even when it isn’t visible, only presumed based on someone’s face, jawline, makeup, shoulders, etc:

(exhibit 89b2a: Maxine Conway from Wentworth, a story about an Australian women’s prison. In Wentworth, Maxine is a trans woman who looks after the main protagonist. From a 2015 interview with the actor who plays Maxine, McKenzie Morrell writes (emphasis, theirs): 

Meet Socratis Otto, who plays Maxine Conway, a transgender character who in spite of having undergone gender reassignment surgery prior to her incarceration still looks unequivocally male. Even while exhibiting her true self, wearing a wig and make-up, our beloved Maxine often experiences transphobia, misogyny and unthinkable hardships by inmates and officers just because of her powerful build and height. […] 

MM: When you landed the role of Maxine, you had just finished up on Carlotta. Do you think working on that project helped you prepare for this part? 

SO: Absolutely it did. Yes, fundamentally. It was quite serendipitous, really. I was kind of—not clueless—but not sure about the intricacies of what being a transgender person meant. We haven’t gotten too much information from the media about what being transgender meant. And Carlotta herself was one of the first transgender, male to female transition [persons] back in the very early days of the ’50s and ’60s in Australia. So she told me that people within the gay and lesbian community just didn’t understand what she was trying to do. So even back then she was definitely an outcast in her community. And people still don’t understand what it means to be transgender. They kind of think it’s a cross-dresser, and still people think—actually, I don’t think they know what it means. You can still be transgender without having genital reconstructive surgery. It’s very complicated. There are so many intricacies. And it seems to me that everyone wants to define the un-definable. These days there’s so many labels on social media; we need to know everything, and we need to know everything specifically, so we can box everything, despite the amount of information these days thanks to all these programs and all these stories coming out about people transitioning. People are kind of treating it like it’s a fantastical thing that they don’t really understand. So to go back to your question—sorry about that—to me, I kind of got all that information, and I went, “Whoa! I can imagine Carlotta back in the days, back in the ’60s, feeling so incredibly lonely.” And to me, I thought the character breakdown for Maxine showed such a gentle soul and gentle heart. She’s trying to show off in a world telling her that she mustn’t, she can’t. Basically, I just kept that in mind, preserving her heart in these worlds she’s lived in, the outside world and the inside world [source: “Wentworth’ star Socratis Otto talks Maxine”].)

Transphobia uses the penis as a queernormative object of fear against the trans community by TERFs. As we have already discussed in Volume Two, then, the penis is a heteronormative symbol of violence that continues to weaponized by second wave feminists against trans people using the penis in xenophilic displays. Cassie Brighter addresses how complex it is to acknowledge transphobia, as it butts up against real sexual abuse/dysphoria. In part one of “What Do We Do About Women With A Penis?” (2019), she writes:

We talked about the symbology of the penis. Jimena and I immediately agreed that penis-owners have historically hurt vagina-owners in many ways. Some of these ways have specifically included the penis as a weapon, as an instrument of harm. Some of the women in the circle could be survivors of rape or sexual assault. So, it is really important to start by openly acknowledging that history, and that symbology. And by directly addressing those concerns. The event leader can explain that, while there is an obvious similarity between a trans woman’s genitals and those of a man, this person’s genitals have received years of female hormones. They respond differently, they carry a different energy. While a man’s penis is an object of great pride, a trans woman’s member is often a source of dysphoria and shame. A man’s penis swaggers and struts, conquers and acquires, penetrates. A trans gal’s genitals generally carry none of this energy. Speaking in generalities, a man’s sexuality is urgent and assertive, and can be invasive. A trans gal’s sexuality is docile, patient, hesitant, fragile. (I’m speaking in broad strokes – each individual is different.) […]

A common scenario used by trans exclusionists Is the women’s locker room at the gym. It might be startling or upsetting for a woman to see a naked person in the gym locker room, and to find that person has a penis. One gal recently told me that her first day at her gym she walked into the locker to be immediately confronted by a very naked 70-year-old (cis) woman. And that was startling for her. I asked her what could have made the situation better. She said,  “Well, the old woman could have covered up.” Then she added, “or, I could have fewer hangups about the naked human body” (source: “Part 1: The Penis in Women’s Spaces”).

(exhibit 89b2b: Artist, left: Aki; right: e.streetcar. The schlong as canonical Satanic panic/rape epidemical is something to overcome through informed exposure, consumption and consent. Generally a femboy or gender-non-conforming AMAB has to live with, thus subvert male stigma through camping the penis as an automatic and inferred sense of rape [the sexualizing of the surface image to threaten the presence of a penis before it is visible]. This can be thoroughly camped through xenophilic genitals like the dragon dong [re: exhibit 37c1b, “Back to Jadis’ Dollhouse“] or zombie monster cock/”BBC” [re: exhibit 37b1, “Healing through ‘Rape’“]—i.e., as a cathartic form of rape play that “ravishes” the subject as autonomous during consent-non-consent with demon-BDSM, potentially Numinous aesthetics that constitute a profound trust-building exercise between dom and sub. As stated in volume Zero, exhibit 1a1c, the cock doesn’t need to be inordinately large [though it often is, exhibit 91b2]:  

Regardless of the size or usage—or even if the person is naked or not [exhibits 89b2a/2b]—the ludic-Gothic-BDSM goal stays the same: a chance between two [or more] parties to theatrically interrogate and negotiate, thus regain stolen worship and love that has been denied by Cartesian thought/scientists and their radicalized victims-turned-bad-faith activists; e.g., TERFs having been abused by a cis-het man and repeatedly conflating their former rapist with a trans woman through dogmatic propaganda they help write—i.e., destabilizing gossip/punching down. In response, punching up is generally done against a “Cotton Ceiling” [from Drew DeVeaux; source: Cassie Brighter’s “The Often Misunderstood Premise of the Cotton Ceiling” 2019]. And such rioting absolutely should be allowed; calling it a “stone in a glass house” is to put property before people” [source: “Symposium: Aftercare”].)

In part two, “The Often Misunderstood Premise of the Cotton Ceiling” (2019), Brighter tackles the complicated reality that trans women are often attacked by transphobes for feeling threatened by them in bad faith:

The term “cotton ceiling” has been viewed as quite the incendiary phrase. It was coined by porn actress and trans activist Drew DeVeaux in 2015. It’s been used to refer to the tendency by cisgender lesbians to outwardly include and support trans women, but draw the line at considering ever having sex with them.

Sadly, I’ve seen at least two YouTube responses from irate vloggers who profoundly (and maliciously) twist Riley’s words to connote an obligation to sleep with trans women. If this interpretation has occurred to you, please stick around. The point of such discussion is not, EVER, to exhort anyone to have grudging sex without enthusiastic consent. The point of such discussion is to exhort folks to examine their inherent bigotry. We change, we grow, we learn through familiarity and exposure. We can challenge and re-examine our prejudices and fixed ideas. I wish I could include Avery Faucette’s full article at Queer Feminism here – but I’ll just drop this one paragraph (and urge you to read the rest):

I pinned a misogyny that at the time I attributed to almost all men onto trans women, as well. I assumed that sex with a trans woman would be penetrative and violent, that I wouldn’t have the camaraderie with a trans woman that I felt at the time with many cis women, that female history was somehow very important. I didn’t think about what a trans female experience might be like, or what a trans woman’s relationship to her body might be. I was pretty naive about sex. I put a lot of stake in body parts because I was fumbling with my own gender, body, and sexuality. I said that I was against transphobia but knew no openly trans people.

These threats include by the term[3] itself as something to trigger cis women with; i.e., “trans women are dangerous. Such a “threat” has been furthered by old homophobic stereotypes revived in the 1970s and ’80s and later still by J.K., Rowling’s latter-day novel writing under nom de plume Robert Galbraith, a historically anti-LGBTQ+ conversion therapist:

But after Troubled Blood (2016) came under fire earlier this week for a transphobic subplot in which a serial killer hunts his victims while dressed in women’s clothing, Rowling denied that the alias is a reference to “ex-gay” therapy. Rowling “wasn’t aware of Robert Galbraith Heath” when selecting the name, a representative said. “Any assertion that there is a connection is unfounded and untrue” (source: Nico Lang’s “J.K. Rowling Denies Pen Name Is Inspired by Anti-LGBTQ+ Conversion Therapist,” 2020).

Whether Rowling “knew” it or not, she still kept the fucking penname after denying a connection between the two after having pointed a big DARVO finger at her would-be detractors through a hired representative:, Nico Lang’s previous article, “J.K. Rowling Compares Transitioning to ‘Conversion Therapy,'” 2020. The second article was written two days previous. Since then, Rowling’s unchecked abuses as a TERF billionaire have led her—on Elon Musk’s aforementioned conservative bent as Twitter’s new ownership—to support known fascist “I’m not a feminist” Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull’s global-trotting hate campaigns against trans people (source: Shaun’s “Kellie-Jay & the Neo-Nazis,” 2023).

So while many ace people are sex-repulsed from trauma, denying them the linguo-material means and agency to interrogate their own genders and orientation is infantilizing (and spare me the “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks” argument; even my fat, stupid cat understands that, when I walk past the stairs, they go up to their “torture spot” on the landing and wait expectantly to be spanked; if she can do that, then humans can learn the difference between unironic torture and “exquisite” forms).

Returning to Heartbreak High, its characters lacking the words; neither Cash nor Darren understands that Cash is asexual when he only wants hugs and kisses in the bedroom; each misunderstands their own feelings in part of a larger conflict about compelled sexuality often disseminated through popular stories about queer people with overlapping axes of oppression (for those giving and receiving trauma using shared language that often emerge too late): Cash knows what Darren wants (sex) and feels like he should, too. When their true, differing appetites emerge, Cash feels ashamed, while Darren feels confused, even angry with Cash for lacking a similar sex drive. Despite critiquing their own father for writing hypermasculine love stories, Darren assumes that everyone likes sex as much as they do. Darren’s preconceived ideas don’t emerge ex nihilo; they come from canon and counterculture relating back and forth inside a larger material dialog about sex.

However, while counterculture actively resists canon, someone’s sexual preference—how they feel about sex as a defining character trait—will strongly influence the degree and flavor to which they resist compelled sexuality and its various myths/trope-y stereotypes. Sexuality is fluid, people liking sex however much they like it—at a given time, with a given partner, during a given mood, inside a given headspace. Through the turbulent drama of a semi-compatible tryst, Heartbreak High comments on the common assumptions that queer people regularly make about their own community members, including themselves.

It also highlights the confusion that queer people experience when they feel sexually inadequate according to society’s queernormative standards. By having Cash, an ostensibly cis man, asking for less sex from an obvious, willing source, the lovers’ individual needs come into conflict. However, neither can easily talk about it because they don’t have the words. This inability to neatly voice their distress comments on the larger misconceptions about sexual incompatibility that come from a lack of dialog between ace/non-ace people even within the queer community (which again, thanks to queer normalization, tends to be oversexualized).

Whether through canon or counterculture, popular media informs the positions of people like Darren and Cash: hetero-/queernormative stories that treat sex as a universal commodity necessary for human bonding. Such compulsion denies the potential for

• persons who are capable of profound human interaction/connection despite orientating as asexual, therefore uninterested in commodified erotic sex.
• people, even sexual people, to enjoy sex purely through artistic means—i.e., nudist displays partially or entirely detached from erotic bodily function or notions of courtly love, etc.

Said compulsion can be tremendously invalidating and confusing for those outside the sex-normative model. Cash’s lack of desire, for instance, leads Darren to question his commitment within their relationship, but also for Cash to question his own value as a person. Both of them feel wronged, broken, and inhuman in relation to various linguo-material markers—their bodies, their genders, and their genitals as objects to self-authenticate through various humanizing appeals to members of the in-group and out-group.

(source: “Jonathan Pryce does Shakespeare,” 2016)

Note: So-called Jewish revenge ties into any minority revenge fantasy that upends profit; i.e., through Gothic Communism avenging nature as monstrous-feminine into medieval Capitalism evolving into more modern forms (whose calumny still uses, but repurposes, the same dated persecution language used to originally persecute Jews alongside GNC people and Pagan women as controlled opposition; e.g., sodomy and blood libel but also witchcraft; re: “A Vampire History Primer” or “Policing the Whore“). We cite Shylock’s speech back in Volume Zero (re: “Doubles, Dark Forces and Paradox“), doing so to evoke the darkness of such revenge: as a collective, potentially solidarized means of giving the oppressed voice to express within Gothic media, onstage and off. All the same, said revenge exists in duality during cryptonymy as black war of mirrors that never ends; i.e., state proponents will abuse and colonize said darkness (re: DARVO and obscurantism) while punching down to pimp it. —Perse, 5/5/2025

Consider the famous line by Shylock, the Jewish moneylender from The Merchant of Venice: “Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?” Just as Jews remain equally human as Christians, ace people are no less human than non-ace people are; nor is their own humanity somehow refuted by lacking eyes, or other senses/organs (in a figurative sense, here, though the same argument applies to ablest considerations). This includes genitals and sexual orientation, which tend to function as humanizing markers in heteronormative and queernormative discourse; by lacking it, the possibility of abjection once again rears its ugly head—from bad-faith “queer” persons, but also legitimate queer circles whose bigotry extends from genuine misunderstandings about genitals and how they’re semiotically portrayed in famous stories.

Whereas straight groups tend to link gender to the visible markers of biological sex, queer groups tend to emphasize sexuality through gendered language minus an explicit connection between the two. Nevertheless, we’ve already explored how an emphasis on sexuality remains normalized, including conversations about genitals and sexual activity. Asexual people, meanwhile, are generally defined by others through absence, often materializing through a lack of sexual attraction or feelings, but also a visible lack of genitals. Even so, queer-appropriative fiction and metafiction still tend to discuss these factors in sexual terms.

Varys, for example, is both eunuchized and queer-coded. Yet his queer coding often comes off as homocentric in Game of Thrones, the (cis-het) writers exacting homophobic tropes they sexualize by default. While “gayness” entails far more than mere orientation (and equipment), gender performance and gender identity are also more idiosyncratic than orientation when orientation is levied through the reductive historical standard: the “instructional manual” approach to one’s family jewels, even when the person no longer has them or otherwise doesn’t use them “correctly.” Describing Varys as “gay” or “queer” is far more common than calling him ace, despite how asexual interpretations would make far more sense within the text. Instead, he’s sexually “broken,” forced into the role of a chatty, sexless spymaster due to an injury to his genitals, not his orientation.

While Varys’ medicalized deviation from sexualization-by-default demonstrates a tendency to sexualize people using their birth gender and sex, the haunting of one by the other, post-castration, implies a larger pro-sexual bias outside the story:

• the myth of asexuality as manmade: an inherent form of castration
• the heteronormative treatment of potentially ace men, including eunuchs, as gay-through-compelled-service: the castrated [4] protectors of cis-het palaces and their cis-het harems (whereas female castration still allows AFAB persons to sexually reproduce, just not experience sexual pleasure)

Though commonly exuded by the audience, these biases arguably extend to the actor’s metatext, a performance that feels stereotypically gay from a visual standpoint—especially Varys’ effeminate body language and colorful attire as being historically assigned to gay men by queer-appropriative fiction. Meanwhile, his dialog might explain the lack of genitals; it remains altogether different than stressing his asexuality as an actual presence regardless of his visible castration or gender performance.

Disarmingly open about his condition, Varys still feels gay according to what others say about him textually and paratextually. The dialog of other characters is ultimately written by the screenwriters, who choose the show’s focus regarding queerness. Queerness, as a result, feels homo- and genital-centric, is homosexual and identified by sight, or conveyed through testimonies that express Varys’ neutered status in visual terms. While playing doctor is an old means of confirming someone’s in-group status or sexual purpose (“expertly” parodied by Jon Jolie’s “Show Me Your Genitals,” 2008), Varys revealing “his gash” becomes homophobic by effeminizing his lack of genitals in a sexualizing manner.

The confirmation happens inside and outside the show. Littlefinger likens Varys’ “gash” to an exposed vagina, forcing standard homophobic coding onto Varys despite him not having the equipment (or inclination) for sex. However, audiences taught to recognize gayness and identify it as sexual by sight can also recognize this coding. By “claiming” Varys for themselves, even gay viewers can commit possessive, territorial acts of queer acephobia that lead to marginalized in-fighting.

Apart from genitals and homosexual tropes, modular compatibility poses a unique categorical challenge—with some ace persons favoring romance and others casual sex, and others still liking neither but enjoying emotional vulnerability. Some treat sex like a handshake, while others see it as courtly and dear. Others still focus entirely on emotional connections (alterous) instead of romantic or sexual ones. A lack of any of these interests doesn’t cheapen the individual, nor lessen their connections with others. They simply characterize the narrative in neurodivergent ways, even if the story leans more noticeably into Gothically sexualized tropes.

We’ll examine some of these tropes next, including how the Gothic (and adjacent stories) allows for distinctly asexual narratives by rejecting automatic sexuality in counterculture narratives: the calling of the pigtailed ace detective!

Onto “Pigtail Power and Crossdressing: Sex Repulsion in Gothic/Queer Narratives“!

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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 theatrical terms, performance is often thought of as “acting,” denoting a fake or forced quality. However, in terms of gender, performances amount to genuine expression of one’s legitimate, authentic self—their chosen gender and orientation through various coded behaviors; i.e., gender performance, including performance as identity.

[2] “Toxification” being a process “often seen in genocide, whereby groups of people are depicted as inherently poisonous to the well-being of the body politic” (re: Behind the Bastard’s “Part Three: The Pol Pot Episodes: How A Nice, Quiet Kid Murdered His Country”; timestamp: 34:53). It’s something we’ve touched on poetically through the symbolism of toxic waste and replacement rhetoric per a structure of invasion that repeatedly goes toxic (re: “Toxic Schlock Syndrome“). However, the same basic idea—of genocide through markers of persecution; e.g., blood libel, witchcraft, sodomy and Orientalism (re: “Idle Hands“)—embodies a similar state of exception that comes home to roost during different apocalypse-scenario arguments; e.g., zombies (re: “Police States“). People—and by extension, all of nature—must be antagonized as monstrous-feminine as cheaply as possible for profit to occur repeatedly to enrich the state: “antagonize nature and put it cheaply to work” by pimping it as dark, alien, other, but also Nazi and Communist during centrist kayfabe refrains (e.g., Nazi werewolves; re: “Hell Hath No Fury“). The whore’s revenge vocalizes said antagonism while reclaiming such things “on the Aegis”; i.e., during the cryptonymy process to reverse abjection, thus profit (re: “Rape Reprise“), weakening police influence pimping monster language to normally abuse it.

(artist: Matt Smith)

Moreover, this includes various forms of self-destruction within fascism on a gradient; i.e., Eco’s “cult of death” point from “Ur-Fascism“; e.g., the “death before dishonor” mentality of the Nazi SS and mirror syndrome versus the Khmer Rouge’s more literal “auto-genocide” approach—the former toxifying Socialist argumentation and aesthetics versus Cultural Marxism, and the latter toxifying Marxist-Leninist rhetoric with Stalinist paranoia and French noble-savage argumentation: to push for Final Victory in one, and the other for a Year-Zero erasure of the present world; i.e., out of the same-old revenge arguments in either case pushing towards post-Rubicon desperation whenever the leader might otherwise appear to be mistaken; re: “the leader is always right” being a fascist principle, both regimes being sick with genocide as something to exact: military optimism becomes a cult of death (often a mechanical one, if industry is preserved, or an inhumane and primitive one, if not; re: insect politics,” regardless).

Except the latter example literally cannibalized its own population, doing so for ideological and material reasons: they had destroyed their country’s food production and declared everyone inside an Enemy Within; i.e., fascism is a disguise that eats itself for the state to the state’s detriment because the state relies on inherent us-versus-them paradoxes to alienate, fetishize and pimp nature with. So while the Nazis ate themselves alive on the Eastern front, the Khmer Rouge literally did it at home (and lied about it to hold onto power). It weakens itself to then feed on the already-vulnerable: a horrific self-lie as you immolate, then eat your own children, calling them “brood” (mirror syndrome reaching delusionally inwards).

(artist: Francisco Goya)

This is why I’m an anarchist, kids (re: “Preface“); Marxist-Leninism “horseshoes” into fascism because the state, Marxist or not, always decays to protect itself by eating itself through lies that hijack its own war/persecution mechanisms; re: punching the alien as a disease to purify through military optimism devolving into persecution mania and finally death. This isn’t a “bug” but a feature of the nation-state model, which capital balloons; i.e., from decimation, or one tenth of a population being killed as practiced by the Romans to their victims, to the Khmer Rouge arguably killing over half of theirs: “Cambodia’s last census before the Khmer Rouge came to power in April 1975 was held in 1962. It counted the country’s population at 5.729 million” (source: Ben Kiernan’s “The Demography of Genocide in Southeast Asia”); estimates for the genocide range “between 1.5 and 3 million” (source: University of Minnesota’s “Cambodia”). This was aided by genocide fervor to be sure, but also denial—including from so-called American “leftists” (re: Noam Chomsky and “How the West Missed the Horrors of Cambodia,” which we discuss in “Police States“). “Leftism” and “Communism” become nominal/fascist when they deny or perpetrate genocide through anti-war obscurantism, causing rape and war pursuant to genocide, ipso facto.

[3] Cotton ceiling is, like “TERF” itself, treated with disdain by TERFs. Simply put, it is a TERF-critical term referring to the difficulty trans women face when trying to sleep with cis-lesbians who act like TERFs; i.e., to be used when punching up against so-called “gender-critical” persons, often cis-supremacist lesbians who resort to petty DARVO tactics to punch down. For example, transphobe/transmed Miranda Yardley writes:

[Compelled trans inclusion] is the antithesis of freedom; this is a new form of fascism through economic coercion, which has cleverly been disguised as a civil rights movement. If the transgender rights movement may be described as a revolution, it is now time for counter-revolution: bring on the backlash [source: the article has since been taken down in violation of Medium’s terms and conditions].

all while bragging about being hosted on AfterEllen.com in 2018 (which is still up, and being SEO’d for top spot on Google during a search result of 50,000 hits for “the cotton ceiling”).

[4] Gender-conforming surgeries are not the same thing as state-compelled castration or conversion therapies.