Book Sample: Praxis Volume Outline, part two + Chapter Four: Bad Faith (opening and “Ladies First; or, the Grift of False Rebellion”)

Posted on by Persephone van der Waard

This blog post is part of “All the World,” a sixth promotion originally inspired by the three I did in 2024 with Harmony Corrupted and Romantic Rose: “Brace for Impact,” “Searching for Secrets” and “Deal with the Devil” (2024), as well as “Make It Real” for Volume One and “The Total Codex” for Volume Zero. Those promotions sought to promote and provide their respective volume’s individual pieces for easy public viewing in single-post form; re: for the Poetry Module, Undead Module and Demon Module, followed by my PhD and manifesto. “All the World,” by comparison, caps off my book series with a promotion for Volume Three; re: my Praxis Volume. As usual, this promotion was written, illustrated and invigilated by me as part of my larger Sex Positivity (2023) book series.

Click here to see “All the World’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

Permissions: Any publicly available images are exhibited for purposes of education, transformation and critique, thus fall under Fair Use; private nude material and collabs with models are specifically shared with permission from the original model(s). For more details about artist permissions, refer to the book disclaimer (linked above).

Concerning Buggy Images: Sometimes the images on my site don’t always load and you get a little white-and-green placeholder symbol, instead. Sometimes I use a plugin for loading multiple images in one spot, called Envira Gallery, and not all of the images will load (resulting in blank white squares you can still right-click on). I‘ve optimized most of the images on my site, so I think it’s a server issue? Not sure. You should still be able to access the unloaded image by clicking on the placeholder/right-clicking on the white square (sometimes you have to delete the “?ssl=1” bit at the end of the url). Barring that, completed volumes will always contain all of the images, whose PDFs you can always download on my 1-page promo.

(model and artist: Harmony Corrupted and Persephone van der Waard)

Volume Three: Praxis, part two: Sex Positivity versus Sex Coercion

They told him, “Don’t you ever come around here”
“Don’t wanna see your face, you better disappear”
The fire’s in their eyes and their words are really clear
So beat it, just beat it (source).

—Michael Jackson, “Beat It,” on Michael Jackson’s This Is It (1982)

(model and artist: Transguy Tyler and Persephone van der Waard)

Picking up where “Obliterating Phoebe: In the Shadow of Pygmalion” left off…

Volume Three covers praxis, specifically the informed, continuous application of successful proletarian praxis as we interpret the Gothic past moving forward. Whereas part one laid out sex positivity, sex coercion and the liminality between them, part two contains Chapters Four and Five plus the Conclusion, which concerns the creative successes of proletarian praxis versus state praxis. Time to fight!

Hard Dicking: Praxis Volume Outline, part two

The thing to remember is that acting, music, poetry and theatre are all powerful ways to communicate, but also a time-tested means of survival against bad-faith actors […] People act all the time for a variety of reasons; many more “lie” at particular places where lying is expected (e.g., the postpunk disco) as a means of getting at the truth in ways designed to help others (thus policed and infiltrated by undercover state agents) [source].

—Persephone van der Waard, “On Giving Birth” (2023)

(artist: Mu Hut)

Whereas part one laid out sex positivity, sex coercion and the liminality between them, part two contains Chapters Four and Five plus the Conclusion, which concerns the creative successes of proletarian praxis versus state praxis. That is, if the state frames it as us-versus-them, we “better the instruction” as a subversive, Gothic means of developing Gothic Communism through class/culture war.

  • Chapter Four (partially included in this post) explores sexism and other bigotries within a gradient of canonical moderacy and reactionary politics in popular, sexualized media—TERF hauntologies, sublimated war pastiche, girl/war bosses, and queer tokenism at large.
  • Chapter Five seeks to provide lasting solutions based on emotionally/Gothically intelligent activists who can detect, recognize and separate all of the above when creating their own cryptonymic material, all while enacting Gothic Communism, outing state proponents, and living in a brave new world of sexy “awakened” monsters: the liminally subversive/transgressive zombies, ghosts, vampires, witches, Amazons, etc.
  • “Pussy on the Chainwax!” closes the book series out, giving the reader two basic choices: a) to serve the state and Capitalist Realism, bringing about the actual end of the world, or b) to face the perceived “end of the world” in order to stop of the Promethean cycle (and ultimate desolate conclusion) of Capitalism.

As I wrote in Volume Two (citing Volume Zero):

“All heroes are monsters, thus liminal expressions that are sexualized and gendered” (source). Challenging state monopolies by reversing the dialectical-material function of said labels (and their poetics) is exactly what we must do in order to succeed.

The state, in other words, will triangulate and send its killers after us wearing the same monstrous masks (and theatrics of unequal power) we humanize ourselves with:

(artist: Rino99)

Chapter Four: Bad Faith. “Rise, my pretties! Rise!”—TERFs and Other Flying Monkey “Witch Cops” and Girl War Bosses in Nerd Culture vis-à-vis Neoliberalism, Fascism and Genocide

“You weren’t kidding. They’re spinning out of control.”

“Spinning out of control?” 

“Yeah!”

“Oh, what is?”

“The power of the…monkey? Monkey. They can kill, you know? It’s just… it’s something they did for a long time.”

“The monkeys?”

“Mmm.”

—an actual conversation, where Jadis recorded me talking to them in my sleep (exact date unknown, 2021)

(model and artist: Harmony Corrupted and Persephone van der Waard)

Up to this point, we’ve examined throughout the book how state proponents are conditioned to see themselves as action heroes starring in their own tenebrous productions, whose unironic kayfabe becomes the language of pro-state espionage; i.e., aggregating in shows of state solidarity and lethal force to bravely fend off the forces of darkness within a script of never-ending violence against labor (the end of the world in their eyes, thus fight bitterly against). As such, they operate through their own strategies of misdirection to achieve Macbeth’s “walking shadow.” That is, they are the “poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage” within Pygmalion’s shadow.

The lack of significance, in their case, is the myopia of Capitalist Realism within, the desert of the real; like weird canonical (male) nerds, there’s nothing for them to imagine except unironic cataclysm inside the shadows of Plato’s cave, defending the state in righteous, infantilized anger (whereas queerness is acclimated to darkness and the shadows, initiated and molded by “darkness visible” as a poetic, transformative power that can revive the awesome voices of the Communist dead, thus develop a better world outside Plato’s cave—more on that in Chapter Five).

Within this regressive fury and creative void, TERF masks, uniforms and muscular bodies—but also kayfabe and weaponry—become sacrosanct, but also false bravado and kindness: a web of lies that subordinate people have agreed upon for a shared love of the canonical theatre of war itself. In short, they are not Galatea, but an offshoot of Pygmalion’s offshoots. From white, cis-het men, to white, cis-het women, to tokenized parties under the TERF umbrella, all are centrist at best, which is to say “fascist-in-disguise” (or otherwise hidden by self-deceptions that are bad-faith or legitimately Quixotic). Any way you slice it, they cannot create anything that doesn’t, in some shape or form, lead to genocide. The structure must be challenged, which means recognizing its proponents for what they are: billboards, and in many cases, outright soldiers.

We’ll explore these now with feminisms muddied history as fraught with betrayals and bad-faith impostors possessed by the spectres of fascism under neoliberal hegemony. Our focus is the Amazon as the quintessential war boss; the Medusa, her dark double, an openly queen bitch. Yet liminal expression leads to various forms of deception (disguise pastiche) within the threshold and on the surface of the monstrous-feminine image during oppositional praxis. As with Volume Two’s focus on the undead and demons, remember Weber’s maxim: the violence of the state is legitimate, this time through deputized female, queer and activist minorities that internalize the oppressor’s bigotries, then bastardize activist symbols of resisting oppression to bring these bigotries about through regressive subversions/unironic disguise pastiche (e.g., internalized misogyny and racism through self-guilt and shame, but also oppressor personas; i.e., Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks applied to any axes of oppression or nexus of overlapping modules).

 

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

Ladies First; or, the Grift of False Rebellion: A Brief Summary of the Regressive Amazonomachia of Girls Trapped inside the Man Box (Girl Bosses and War Bosses)

“You have heart! I’ll take that too!”

—the Hunter, The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance (2019)

Note: Sex Positivity was begot from my past struggles with GNC abusers; re: Jadis; i.e., TERFs as fascist feminists to expose, mid-cryptonymy and during Amazonomachia as a poetic device. While Amazons are things I would obviously go on to explore at far greater length (re: “Amazons“), here is where I took the idea “witch cop” and began to conceptualize it in duality through the cryptonymy process. —Perse, 5/5/2025

(artist: Gregory Manchess)

All centrists “witches” (feminists their various monstrous personas: Amazons, Medusas, banshees, etc) are cops; all cops are bad, including those who see themselves as “shepherds” (good wolves/hunters) protecting the “sheep” (dumb and stupid workers) from “wolves” (scapegoats), but also the de facto deputies and fascist vigilantes posturing as the oppressed (and magnetic) Hippolyta or Medusa in babyface or heel language. Regressive Amazonomachia, then, is copaganda BDSM that emulates the unironic monomyth (re: Wonder Woman minus the performative irony and informed class character), including its gladiator-sports personas as hunters, wolves, fighters, protectors, providers, and mercenaries of either moral pole; good or bad, they’re all weird nerds Quixotically trapped inside the Man Box as something to advertise proudly or “resist” through false rebellion, thus contributing to the myopia of Capitalist Realism through Gothic tropes like the Great Destroyer and black knight, Archaic Mother (the Medusa) or phallic woman (the Amazon) as, again, regressive Amazonomachia.

As such, they emulate or submit to the active violence of men in service of the status quo, wielding canonical BDSM’s implements (and personas) of carceral violence, mental and physical torture, and straight-up murder against the state’s enemies. These killers-for-hire become unironic death fetishes, the fascist wearing a displaced fascist costume: a post-fascist Hugo Boss with a pulpy videogame or comic book flavor with which to get close and strike the vulnerable down at close quarters. Like a Gothic novel, the disguise becomes over-the-top, theatrically coded and trapped between good and bad faith portrayals. But the person wearing it in bad faith always wants to be in control, to keep someone under their power forever—to force them to submit, to love them, to see them as a god.

(exhibit 98a1a: Artist: Illustration and outfit by Lucid-01; background, outfit alterations and character design by Persephone van der Waard. Genuine abuse can be subverted, through a controlled “call of the void”/calculated risk.

Glenn the Goblin, for example, is a formerly anti-Semitic symbol that invades the pre-fascist Christian wardrobe to wickedly play around with the garments inside. In short, she’s taking them back. The source of play comes from symbolic, doubled tension; i.e., the metaplay of fan fiction’s paradox of pleasurable pain lying adjacent to perceived threats of harmful pain and its assorted legendarium. On the surface of the image, black is loaded in Western imagery with a variety of conflicting data: the threat of power as a destroying force, but also the color black as thoroughly dimorphized under Western thought—i.e., of presumed subservience [and misbehavior] for women under a perceived medievalized order of existence, the police state-of-affairs signified by black uniforms that hold punishment over those judged as good little girls and bad little girls who live under fear of rape as something to endure and avenge.

Just as canon is all according to design, so is my iconoclasm; i.e., Glenn—as a shapeshifter and Satanic atheist who isn’t much interested in being good, but nor being a scapegoat—wants to have fun through consent-non-consent by walking the tightrope. The idea is doll-like, undressing Glenn like a doll [implying a similar subversive element of control to the sub being undressed as such, instead of the heteronormative idea of intromission, coitus and creampie—i.e., “Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am!”] in ways that beg the disco refrain as disarming of unironic harm within a Gothic, BDSM threshold; re: New Order’s “How does it feel, to treat me like you do?” In this case, the question is asked under informed consent, from two parties who know exactly what they want and are reveling in the unique, delicious sensations as normally denied to us under Capitalism. Glenn didn’t pick her clothes in the sense that she’s a cartoon, but she is an extension of myself and I chose her to represent myself during the appreciative peril: Just as I designed Glenn to shapeshift themselves, and me to shapeshift into them by proxy, the “goblin transformation” fantasy is me being tied up and threatened with “death”/a palliative Numinous.

[artist: Lucid-01]

Latter-day uniforms, then, become similarly loaded with canonical connotations of torture, treachery and forbidden seduction as dimorphically gendered; the eliding of angelic patience with Radcliffe’s “black penitent” as a kind of xenophobic caricature of destruction that, under fascist/post-fascist conditions, takes on different meanings for beings perceived as “woman,” but also monstrous-feminine; the regressive in holy garbs, but also the queer BDSM subversive playing at the dark god for heretical reasons of Satanic apostacy and hellish delight. There is an undeniable link to trauma; the wearer could just as easily be a Christian missionary on the Oregan trail or 1800s China, but also a ninja, gun hand or some other operative training in bondage, torture and murder that is nevertheless fetishized in the [classically] white cis-het fantasies of women [or men playing the “heroes” in these narratives].

As Glenn demonstrates, the formerly problematic can be tipped away from its regressives aspects while keeping the medievalized, religious-tinged outer shell, but there will always be ontological tension within a broader dialogic interrogating what results. Further fun can be made by chaining her to the pillar but having her grip it with her fingers; at a glance she seems imprisoned, but on closer inspection is actually have the time of her life? There’s a loose sense of improvised chaos, too. Glenn takes what’s on hand—the nun’s habit, the convenient pair of manacles next to the bed, the hot candlewax on her bare, muscled skin, her anachronistic pussy tattoo: In Hoc Signo Vinces [“In this sign thou shalt conquer”]—and runs wild with it. She’s not the hopeless impostor-victim, stricken with dysphoria or dysmorphia; these are abusive conditions to redeem through emergent play.

As such, Glenn at home in her body and herself as in flux and at odds with the tyrannical past, carefully rewriting her own destiny by throwing caution to the wind: reclaiming the prescribed instruments of colonial abuse in thrilling paradoxically ways—i.e., the thrill of ritualized violence, minus actual harm [I’d say it’s a game where no one gets hurt, but what’s life without a little pain?].)

(exhibit 98a1b: Artist: Blxxd Bunny from a shoot their provided for one of my paintings of them.

Compulsion isn’t strictly authoritative; it can be the cathartic pursuit of what feels good, which is often a subconscious impulse. Yet, the adage, be careful what you wish applies to the sobering reality that harm is not historically-materially divided from pleasure, pain or power exchange; i.e., during social-sexual rituals where all of these things are distributed unevenly, dimorphically and abusively through fetish, kink and BDSM aesthetics. In short, the best things in life [in terms of stimulation and jouissance] come with a dialectical-material element of risk: is my lover a tool for the state, the status quo? But without pursuing catharsis, you run the risk of being a slave not just to society’s polite norms, but their hidden , brutalizing ones too: the snowy bridal gown and the black nun’s habit intimate the same systemic issues. If they wear a uniform, then it must mean something—with the uncanny possibility of their being a false option or replication that isn’t the intended function.

Again, this can be sex-positive or coercive; it all boils down to dialectical-material context: what is the point of the costume within the piece in relation not to Capitalism, but it’s core, systemic values, etiology and symptoms (e.g., the Virgin/Whore syndrome)? And more to our purposes, how can these be subverted within the paradox of cathartic, exquisite torture in ways that don’t endorse or promote actual harm or canonical iterations of something as seeming throwaway and performative as a nun’s outfit—a hauntological mask, costume or role to play that brings one joy and other denied pleasures in parallel societies: lost histories and possible new worlds within the half-real fictions of Gothic poetics as de facto education: Come and see, but also do; critique through experience as profound, intense, iconoclastic.

The ludic nature is, like a videogame, divorced from actual harm; the ritual is there, but not the dreaded result, allowing for instruction to occur through repeated, simulated experiences involving the same ingredients. While this can be for or against the state (with fascists embracing the heroic cult of death through the slaying of demons as a codified message), “slaying” in sex-positive language has a highly specific meaning and desired outcome: rape prevention and the disillusion of systemic harm. Within this broader network of opposition, denial becomes a power ironic device in relation to unironic doubles: the denial of polite restraint, of compunction, of pleasure; but also the denial of correct sex, of orgasms of prescriptive harmful norms and their forms of compelled restraint, abstinence, ignorance, protection.

In short, denial becomes a profound because of gender trouble and parody with desire outcomes for either side. Heteronormatively sees queerness as a death of the world [e.g., the 2022 Netflix miniseries for Neil Gaiman’s Sandman selling queerness to the straights as a kind of morbid death fantasy]. For us, the goal is crossing over from the right to the left by virtue of reclaiming subversive denial and indulgence as a positive vice at a societal level: a world without sin, but still has sexy nun’s and the Gothic pastiche as geared towards euphoric pleasure and pain.)

The raw sentiment of a moths drawn to the flame isn’t that hard to understand (above)—e.g., the bottom reaching behind themselves to grab the headboard, all while spreading their legs to take the fucking ever deeper and harder—if only because sex [or asexual rituals] happening during power exchange with a cool-looking badass can feel stupidly good. Yet, while cathartic gradients last and build trust and healthy relationships, coercive examples—if negotiated badly with someone presenting themselves as a sadist in bad-faith—can promptly fuck over the submissive by subjecting them to addictive, fleeting pleasure under an unscrupulous and/or unwell manipulator’s give-and-take cycle of rapacious power abuse. Caution is important, but it’s hard to be overly cautious when you feel vulnerable and enthralled with a “protector” archetype who has your number and doesn’t mean you well; i.e., they smell the trauma/madness on you and know how to exploit it. In some shape or form, the desire for cathartic fantasies grabs hold and never lets go, because trauma isn’t just something you “get over.” You can only transform it as part of you, once and forever.

Keeping that in mind, Chapter Four as a whole will examine, expose and push back against canonical disguise pastiche, aesthetics and rhetoric as state operatives; i.e., the myriad, bad-faith deceptions adopted by witch cops and (oft-female) war bosses and other expendable class traitors and token minorities in neoliberal/fascist nerd culture; Chapter Five considers the iconoclastic side of this same risky equation, including the various aesthetic deceptions and revolutionary subterfuges that writers, artists and sex workers can reclaim, mid-conflict, from those attempting to recuperate or sublimate revolution—i.e., by undermining Capitalism and toxic masculinity/the Man Box as the scapegoats of manufactured crisis disguised as its greatest champions. Queer Trojans. —Perse, back in 2023

(exhibit 98a2: Source: David Graver’s “Behind the Scenes of Netflix’s “The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance” [2019]. The Skeksis Skekmal, is the “primal” eco-fascist: the lone-wolf, “Batman” Great Destroyer dressed up in pagan icons, skulls and bones. His self-styled savagery searches for power as something to take culminates in a desire to conquer death. In thinking himself having done so, his other half sacrifices itself to restore balance; i.e., an exchange of the Leveler to prevent fascism’s emergence onto the medieval stage, which—in the Age of Capital—allows the fascist death lord to emerge, but at a terrible price. Of this ravenous, systemic appetite, I write in “The Dark Crystal: AoR – Appetites” [2019]:

Here, the Skeksis veer wildly away from Gelfling needs and wants. When a Gelfling dies, it returns to Thra; memories of the dead are preserved in icons, trinkets and rituals. These help them live on in non-destructive ways. The Skeksis lack these talents, hanging the Hunter from the rafters. As the Ritual-Master says, there is no service for a dead Skeksis. They have no idea how to bury their dead, nor how to confront death at all. For them, death is a great mystery—something to fear.

This fear is what drives them. Birds eat to live, but not for fear of death; Skeksis eat because they are afraid, and mortally so. This fear sends them into gross and indiscriminate splurges, hideously overwrought with vampiric comfort food. And since there is no amount of food to be consumed that staves off death forever, the Darkening spreads, weakening the world. The Skeksis do not care, their all-consuming need to live blinding them to the mayhem their murderous hunger wreaks [source].

For him, there is only strength and despite its mythic quality [there always someone stronger] only continues to be nowhere near enough to save him from himself or the Darkening [the so-called “puncher’s chance”]. The same goes for the Skeksis at large, they and their dark crystal’s torture castle of chains, mad science and general skullduggery doomed to crumble, but not before sacrificing everyone around them.)

Before we get into the meat of things—going through feminism as a checkered movement through different subchapters—we should go over what regressive Amazonomachia is. Simply put, regressive Amazonomachia is an aspect of culture war within feminism that peels back worker liberties due to concessions with the elite through tokenized culture and assimilation fantasies: witch cops. Witch cops aren’t just tall, imposing queens; it includes their underlings, their “flying monkeys” and purported allies of the oppressed working for a bought-and-paid-for queen bitch. In The Wizard of Oz (1939), flying monkeys were the airborne servants of the Wicked Witch of the West (quiet part: a displaced female scapegoat for Patriarchal Capitalism—attacking the gay “Friends of Dorothy” while demonizing female power); Theremin Trees likens them to narcissist worship (“Worshipping Narcissists,” 2018).

For us, it’s a combination: Capitalism is a liminal position of tremendous conflict that yields a variety of socio-material effects, including cryptonyms that can be used by actual revolutionaries to dethrone the man behind the curtain as being the real wicked “witch” (well, a wizard in Baum’s case, but it’s the same idea when dealing with TERFs ). Like the zombie or the vampire, the expanding state of exception invokes the witch as sublimated trauma for or against the state: proletarian witches or bourgeois witches.

In Chapter Two, we examined proletarian witches as victimized by the state, including more overtly fascist forms/undisguised moral panic: witch cops as babyface heroes and heel antiheroes in “their own” stories, including Shelly Bombshell as a fascist feminist providing equal opportunity genocide during Amazonomachia for anyone and everyone (exhibit 84a1). Chapter Three looked at the weird nerd as overtly belonging to the status quo: white, cis-het men as manipulated through their manufactured, heteronormative insecurities to do the elite’s bidding.

Apart from Ripley and Samus; Medusa, the xenomorph and Alien Queen; and again, Shelly Bombshell, we’ve yet to really scrutinize class traitors in-“disguise” (the disguise is generally a dogwhistle) during Amazonomachia: TERFs and their own “prison sex” behavior as violently fetishized, fascist monsters, but also more overtly centrist variants; i.e., the “Greater Good” Amazon or Medusa girl boss as unironic war bosses that punch up against fascists but punch down against the Left during their own Amazonomachia and aesthetics. Combined, these hegemons and other token, minority cops/vice characters project their coercive rape fantasies/wish fulfillment and survivor’s trauma onto their fellow workers (fascist recruitment feeds on trauma, targeting battered housewives and comparing their abusive husbands to trans people).

This includes the visiting of war and rape as canonically disguised (coercive sublimation) through unironic pastiche—a type of war propaganda whose cycle of various sublimated masks serve as “uniforms” through domestic material consumption: invaders, defenders, and fortress-minded “witches” that hauntologically promote sudden exchanges of violence pertaining to otherworldly dangers being seemingly everywhere. Moral panic becomes the norm, the masks of theatre employed to execute, not prevent it. In a similar bending of the knee to capital, the fascist crises of white, cis-het men are adopted by their female counterparts.

(exhibit 98a3: Marisa is a war boss TERF; she might seem like a pure “Dark Amazon,” but in Street Fighter 6’s centrist approach, actually employs “wheyfu” kayfabe to oscillate between the wrestler’s dialogic-pugilist position of babyface and heel: the American and the Nazi [often, in not dressed in leather and lace, at least black and white; i.e., a marriage of geopolitics, kayfabe, and 20th century BDSM rhetoric as hauntologically “backward”/regressive through the medievalized dichotomy as a rhetorical-theatrical dialogic]. Historically fascism is an American export, rooted in the United States and exported to Germany and elsewhere around the world [e.g., kaiju schlock, carried over into Godzilla as converted to “good, but also fighting a variety of evil-looking bio-mecha baddies—a trend imitated by Nintendo’s Mecha Ridley from Zero Mission, but also Metaquarium’s Super-Metroid-meets-Metroid Fusion romhack work-in-progress, X-Fusion]. To disguise themselves, fascists wear masks: the heel’s badass garb as false power they weight against the false power of centrist cops; to disguise their relationship to fascists, neoliberals/centrists will also wear masks over their fash-adjacency status: the babyface’s goody-little-two-shoes uniform as a false rebel in their own right, with the subjugated Amazon fighting during regressive, not subversive Amazonomachia. In defense of capital, both sides of a given performer sublimate genocide as bread-and-circus wrestler’s pastiche enacted between state bodies; to become sex-positive, they often have to be divorced from sports altogether—i.e., a meta “hard stance” that goes entirely against the monomythic grain and its Faustian promise of heroic power and material advancement, and sexual fulfillment; exhibit 111b.)

Neoliberalism extends the war boss “privilege” to women, performing in the interest of the state. Simply put, the TERF is a “bad bitch/witch” and a “bad bitch/witch” is a class traitor with or without the badge; i.e., a witch “cop” (vigilante) often LARPing who (often) dresses in black-and-red or -purple, and has non-white skin colors that denote a presence of otherworldly death and power tied to an older hauntological space and time: masks, uniforms, muscles, T&A and weapons.

During state decay, this liminal hauntology’s capacity for violence spills over through the TERF as a police agent inside a copaganda narrative that treats canonical, centrist rhetoric and media as sacred, but also increasingly under attack; the TERF-in-question delivers reactive abuse towards the state’s enemies, dividing and conquering them through marginalized in-fighting enacted by less marginalized or token parties against those more marginalized who refuse to betray their own class interests.

Unlike Milton’s Satan—or a vengeful, terrorist necromancer like David, from Alien: Covenant (re: “Dissecting Radcliffe“) or Carmilla from Castlevania, etc (re: “Castlevania, season 3 review“)—TERFs one and all bend the knee to power by taking in the neoliberal illusion and fascist dogma as a Faustian “deal with the devil”: the owner class as either granting them a brief reprieve, or a life of servitude where they kill and betray all of their comrades for thirty pieces of silver. The same fate that was true with Alice in Borderland or Squid Game, but also Wayne’s World’s made-up Desert Storm Commando Warrior (re: exhibit 34c2, “Fatal Homecomings“) and the many actual palimpsests present for the critique: the hero is a vigilante within the infernal concentric pattern, who suffers at the hands of the sole victor in the entire scheme: the Cus D’Amatos and Don Kings who run the show.

As a kind of unironic disguise pastiche/regressive double, the uniform becomes something to put on by writers, consumers, and other socio-political agents, making their own actions within capital a form of copaganda. It’s Michael Parenti’s notion of false revolution and victimization by class traitors buying into the assimilation fantasy while following the leader (or rather, a chain of leadership in vertical arrangements of power).

To it, the TERF as a war boss is a victim who is conditioned to attack the states enemies while wearing disguises, including ones meant to fool themselves: that a re-aiming of the Medusas legitimate anger at Patriarchal forces—her stone vision—at the state’s enemies during Amazonomachia, not unlike Zach Snyder’s Superman or Homelander’s eye lasers, is legitimate, but also just; she becomes lethal and blind, killing what she sees through her body as a destructively angry extension of her pro-state ideology whose vision is “set to kill” towards anyone who threatens her idea of home relative to herself and her trauma (fascists fear anyone different than themselves; so do centrists, but dress it up as Nazis or Communists): the redirection of worker grievances—their legitimate anger towards systemic abuses—aimed at other workers in a destructive (exploitative towards people) sense. Her insecurities become weaponized and she and those solidarizing with her punch down as hard as they can: “As one!” Maximus might scream right before charging headfirst into the barbarian horde.

(artist: Wolfhead at Night)

We’ll get to that and how to subvert it during proletarian Amazonomachia, in Chapter Five (our own disguise pastiche/subversive doubles and constructive anger—the destruction of exploitative hegemons, paradigms, systems, what-have-you through worker solidarity and subterfuge). For now, just remember that in American consumer culture, overt patriotism is sometimes swapped for seemingly more moderate forms that furtively join arms against labor as a whole: gamer/comic book culture and its own “junk food,” badly educated mentalities. Media indicative of an American global “presence” is often tied to war in duplicate forms, especially the shooter genre as a common form of canonical propaganda (“Military Optimism“).

By extension, the pastiche of war sublimated through videogames and their palimpsests often becomes something to ideologically defend from various, poorly defined enemies: dangerous “outsiders” who can suddenly appear and “compromise” you without warning: orcs, Drow and other states of exception that feel increasingly undead, but similar to you, parasitoid. The irony is, the regressive “activist” becomes self-deceptive but also self-destructive: the killer vortex that vacuums everything up, including themselves and their loved ones. In short, they colonizes themselves in the process, happening through an Imperial Boomerang that is always in motion, always hungry and always afraid.

(artist: Alex Andreyev)

The same basic idea applies to other modes of self-consumption, whereupon moderacy is generally advanced by political groups identified by the media they associate with or identify around. This includes TERFs and other cryptofascists, who often attempt to posture as more left-leaning than they actually are. This proceeds up to a point, course; i.e., apart from token examples, TERFs are cis, but also presenting as centered and reasonable when they tone police, condescend, or otherwise deny queer people their basic human rights (I don’t have a lot of cis friends for this reason, precisely because it’s far easier to explain my oppressed position to other trans, intersex or non-binary persons than it is someone who doesn’t experience that oppression, themselves; but also because cis people, including cis queer people, are prone to either get confused, or decide to condescend towards me or otherwise lash out in a variety of ways. I don’t need that shit). Their LGBA moderate/reactionary polemics work on par with MLK’s “white moderate” foil in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (source tweet: hachx0, 2023).

Moderates, then, are generally super lame and disingenuous, so they wrap themselves in badass things to seem cooler than they really are—i.e., by liking “cool” things like Aliens, Doom or similar retro-future stories tied to war as a “pick me” appeal to the status quo (and a “weird flex” to gender-non-conforming persons). The hauntology’s liminality is twofold: from a cosmetic standpoint, and because the hosting media becomes a mask with multiple functions that extend Capitalist Realism forward:

  • to hide the consumer’s true intentions behind.
  • to wear proudly like a badge or uniform, weaponizing the wearer during fascist times of crisis.
  • to build the walls of the myopic crypt higher and higher, discouraging emancipatory variants through a gradient of Capitalist Realist myopia: transphobia, racism, misogyny and anti-Semitism, etc.

Before we proceed, a note about moderacy in general: Over the next six sections, we’ll examine moderacy as it to canonical iterations of the Four Gs and social-sexual activism’s emancipatory forms. We’ll start with TERFs, outlining their deceptive/fascist nature before examining how it, along with their endless consumption—of war pastiche and neoliberal dogma—continuously informs TERF centrism as something that hauntologically weaponizes in crisis; from there, we’ll move onto enbyphobia in binary trans women, NERFs; and lastly we’ll explore the role of the girl/queer boss in selling war and how to respond to it differently than TERFs do: in a sex-positive way (re: with Nyx’ help, below).

(artist: Nyx)

Note: Out of these four sections, the next two cover deception, war pastiche and stonewalling as it connects to TERF behavior. Like neoliberalism and fascism, though, these are not discrete categories; they intersect and must be discussed interdependently as part of a larger issue. Each subsection will try to illustrate this reality while focusing on a primary topic. —Perse, back in 2023

Onto “Nerdy Patriarchs, ‘Real Men’ and So-Called Male ‘Witches'” + “Kento’s Dream”!

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!