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.
Selling Sex, SWERFs and Un(der)paid Sex Work (feat. Art Frahm)
While women are not considered full subjects, society itself could not function without their contributions. […] As is, Irigaray believes that men are subjects (e.g., self-conscious, self-same entities) and women are “the other” of these subjects (e.g., the non-subjective, supporting matter). Only one form of subjectivity exists in Western culture and it is male (source).
—Sarah K. Donovan, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (1995)
Picking up where “Chapter Three: Liminality (opening and “Exquisite Torture in the Internet Age”)” left off…
Note: This section delves into the problem sex work as both underpaid/not paid and demonized, which I later address in “Paid Labor” from Volume One. —5/3/2025
(exhibit 87e1: Left: source and model: Glasses GF; right, model: Glasses GF. In Gothic, whores are monsters. Catherine Mackinnon writes, “Sexual objectification is the primary process of the subjection of women. It unites act with word, construction with expression, perception with enforcement, myth with reality. Man fucks woman; subject verb object.” However, in “A Gender Analysis of Global Sex Work” from Selling Sex in the City: A Global History of Prostitution, 1600s-2000s, Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk argues, “While most of the chapters do not provide much information about male or transgender/transvestite sex work (and in most historical [legal] contexts prostitution has been defined as “female”), some countries such as China and the Ottoman Empire had a rich tradition of prostitution by men or boys.”
In other words, much of sex work is historically AFAB since ancient times but includes AMABs from as far back who are treated in a traditionally feminine sense under the current colonial model [whose exploitation under Capitalism we will examine in Chapter Three when we cover discrimination against femboys, “traps” and twinks in the “Patriarchal Hatred Against Transgender Persons, Intersexuality and Drag” section]. Regardless of sex or gender, all sex workers are heteronormatively slighted to varying degrees. Among them, men expect women [or beings forced to identify and perform as women] to labor in various ways that appeal to cis-het men as the universal clientele under Capitalism. These expectations objectify women for said gaze, but also treat them like disposable garbage.
To this, Glasses GF sadly falls into the industry standard of women who do sex work. They were abused by someone they trusted, a person called Don [DonDRRR on Twitter] who knew Glasses GF did sex work but tried to force them to keep quiet—after the initial abuse they did against them in 2021 [source tweet: Lex Updog, 2023] but also for years after. Only after Updog/Glasses GF released a YouTube exposé discussing the abuse at length [Lex Updog’s “My Experience With DonDRRR And SuperMega,” 2023] did Don release his own statement, wherein he attempts to describe his side of things:
We had been intimate since day 1 but on the 3rd night I had asked her for oral sex she at first said no because she had a cold sore. Later I asked her again and she yes but to be careful not to be too rough. During the intimate act I had pushed down her head, after which she recoiled and told me that I was being too rough. I then profusely apologized and we ended up watching TV and going to bed after. Things were normal for the rest of the week until the trip was over and we went back home. During this time I was under no impression that anything traumatizing had occurred, however I realize now this was extremely upsetting for her [source tweet: DonDRRR, 2023].
The source of the trauma wasn’t just Don, but with Matt and Ryan from SuperMega trying to sweep everything under the rug:
I called them before I got there to tell them what happened so I could avoid being around Don, but they gave me mixed messages; Ryan one of support and two days later Matt, a phone call where he went into lawyer mode and promptly explained to me that “technically Don isn’t an employee so we don’t have to do anything,” how SuperMega is his “magnum opus” and how this would be very bad for them if anyone found out [source tweet: Lex Updog, 2023].
After the initial confrontation, Matt and Ryan—despite Don having a history of grooming [source tweet: whitemagemain, 2023]—kicked Updog and a friend of theirs [iamRav] out of their office where they had been staying. Afterward, the two were not only robbed while living in their car and moving between hotels; they were unable to get what belonging of theirs that were still at Matt Ryan’s office because the two weren’t talking to Updog. In short, SuperMega’s material advantage and “dude bro” brand concerns [their Twitter bio literally reads “Pick-up artists”] put them in a position to lie and manipulate people around them, throwing Updog and their friend under the bus.
[source: Wikitubia]
Claiming ignorance to defend powerful higher-ups is not uncommon; it happened with Harvey Weinstein in Hollywood, but also happens in YouTube. For example, Blair Zoń aka iilluminaughtii‘s own abuses as a highly manipulative grifter have recently come to light, exposing her as someone unafraid to use her material advantage to content farm, build a company town, force people into abusive contracts, and share someone’s suicide note to shame them into silence [source: Swoop’s “The END of iilluminaughtii: She Has ALWAYS Been This Way,” 2023]. In Matt and Ryan’s case, they were formerly the editors of Arin and Dan, the Game Grumps; they were [and remain to this point] industry fellows whose abuse towards Updog happened years ago. In other words, you can’t just rely on the better angels of peoples’ nature or assume they must be good because of who they know; rape and other forms of exploitation happen because people hide behind their connections, banking on society keeping quiet in order to protect the brand, name or reputation as more valuable than workers are but especially those who are habitually exploited: by men in the larger, male-dominated industry that turns said men into violent killer babies, next page.
To it, capital is founded on rape, hence begets abuse as a culture of rape; i.e., one that dutifully polices nature as monstrous-feminine on all registers; re: “Nature Is Food.” Denial and self-pity for the abuser becomes yet-another-means of predation on state victims [which whores classically are]. Male or not, white or not, out abusers to challenge profit, having the whore’s revenge—one classically of testimony that immiserates the rapist[s] in question!)
(exhibit 87e2: Artist, left: Glasses GF; right: SuperMega. “Woman is other.” Heteronormative cultural standards lead to common assumptions that are sexually dimorphic regarding body exposure. Female workers are judged far more for their bodies, while heteronormative, gender-conforming male bodies are allowed to look however and still be treated like kings; i.e., persons with privilege whose fans will worship them despite them being demonstrably awful persons; re: Ashley Williams in “Valorizing the Idiot Hero” or his arguable palimpsest, Donald Trump [a notorious rapist whose crimes are well-documented; e.g., Renegade Cut’s “Donald Trump is a R*pist,” 2023]—in short, men that Matt and Ryan emulate and who are defended by their own legion of vampiric, lobotomized imitators and nepotistic parasite-fans. Apathy is a socio-material structure and event that requires constant participation to function, including xenophobic neglect, scorn and denial; the same degree of participation if not more is required to combat these abuses during oppositional praxis. Even Updog kept quiet for as long as they did because, according to them, they felt like they owed it to people they “needed” to protect—Don, but also Matt and Ryan. Keeping silent is a form of giving abusers what they want, which only guarantees that abuse will continue on an individual and systemic level.)
Thanks to its own ambiguities, the sale of sex remains a hotly-debated issue. So-called “working girls,” for instance, were historically owned as personal property by men, leading 2nd wave feminists—specifically SWERFs (which TERFs are)—to weaponize their own trauma; i.e., through xenophobic rhetoric, thereby treating sex work globally as enslavement and coercively exhibitionist and voyeuristic in their eyes; e.g., the Alien Queen was a Communist madame/abject brothel whore; and Jane Eyre “triumphed” when she got rid of Anne Cosway and married Rochester, etc. Under the proper conditions, however—conditions that admittedly didn’t exist in the West on a wide scale in the 1970s (or before)—the sale of sex can actually
- provide freedom of sexual and gender expression, including mutually (albeit relative) consensual fetishization; i.e., xenophilia
- liberate sex workers by letting them claim ownership over their bodies. By doing so, they seize the means of individual sexual image production (much of the world’s sex work today is conducted online), generating wealth to improve their own material conditions. Yes, companies take a static, 20% cut, but the terms are dictated individually by sex workers who can set their own rates in a larger market. This success is relative, of course, workers being incentivized by OnlyFans to earn more (with those who do so often marketing their success—i.e., the top “1% on OF” status).
So while it’s a truth universally acknowledged that sex sells, it’s not enough (for a Gothic Communist) to say that most people “just enjoy sex.” Rather, the heightened reliability of sex-as-lucrative is enforced through compulsory means, fetishizing sex workers to make them as profitable as possible under heteronormative conditions. Sex work doesn’t disappear during moral panics; it just becomes stigmatized and chased after (either to kill, exploit or both).
Canon as a means of control stems from the Patriarchy—specifically sexist norms ratified during the Enlightenment through the emergence of Cartesian thought: dualism, or the separation of the body and the mind. Dualism has had many sexist consequences. Chief among them is that men are framed as rational and women are not. Men know best, men deserve best; they are the universal client among the worker and owner classes. This sexist division (re: “the creation of sexual difference” by Luce Irigaray) is inherently exploitative and xenophobic—a lopsided, colonial binary that conflates sex and gender to specifically benefit the elite. The binary exploits women—or people forced[1] to identify as women/the monstrous-feminine—privatizing their sexual labor and siphoning the socio-economic benefits directly to the owner class.
To achieve social activism and defend worker rights, one must resist capital. This xenophilic process happens in steps, with earlier steps being taken by those with relative means. The cis-white women of yesterday certainly had more means than more marginalized groups did, but tended to make arguments that only took things so far. 2nd wave feminists not only prioritized white cis women over other women; they generally critiqued sexist mediums or institutions that represented white cis women as a target commodity/audience. Conversations pertaining to trans women or women of color generally had to come from elsewhere, let alone individuals existing outside the binary altogether.
As a result, 2nd wave feminists didn’t routinely stress queer distinctions towards individuals they themselves called “women.” Simone Beauvoir famously wrote “Woman is other” in 1949, leaving others to put in the legwork for trans, intersex and non-binary persons. For example, in the 2014 essay “Gender Identity and Expression and Simone de Beauvoir” from Northern Michigan University, an unnamed author writes:
“One is not born, but rather becomes, woman.” This is perhaps the line most often quoted from Simone de Beauvoir’s groundbreaking work The Second Sex, and as such has raised some interesting questions. Because Beauvoir first published the book in 1949, her biological interpretations and social commentary are somewhat constrained by the information that was available at the time. I do not think that this weakens her arguments, but do find that some important questions about her work can only be answered by evaluating her ethical arguments and seeing what conclusions they lead to. One example of such a question involves what her attitude would have been towards people who are now considered “transgender”- that is those who decide to live as a gender different than the one assigned at birth. In this paper, I will argue that Simone de Beauvoir’s ethics and concept of gender roles would commit her to the acceptance of transgender individuals. Thus, this compels her second-wave feminist followers to the same commitment, which should lead to an environment of transgender-inclusivity in these feminist circles (source).
The essay’s filename says it was submitted in 2014, approximately three years before the rise of TERF culture online.
Unlike Beauvoir, Laura Mulvey (another second wave feminist) describes the definition specifically through the act of looking: the male gaze, illustrated not just by icons, but the cinematic gaze showing viewers what to look at (the female body as woman) and how (voyeuristically). While a good first step towards addressing sexism in general, the rhetoric of either remains grossly inadequate regarding racism, transphobia and material inequality. The idea has since been revisited; re:
The male gaze describes a way of portraying and looking at women that empowers men while sexualizing and diminishing women. […] first popularized in relation to the depiction of female characters in film as inactive, often overtly sexualized objects of male desire. However, the influence of the male gaze is not limited to how women and girls are featured in the movies. Rather, it extends to the experience of being seen in this way, both for the female figures on screen, the viewers, and by extension, to all girls and women at large. Naturally, the influence of the male gaze seeps into female self-perception and self-esteem. It’s as much about the impact of seeing other women relegated to these supporting roles as it is about the way women are conditioned to fill them in real life. The pressure to conform to this patriarchal view (or to simply accept or humor it) and endure being seen in this way shapes how women think about their own bodies, capabilities, and place in the world—and that of other women.
In essence, the male gaze discourages female empowerment and self-advocacy while encouraging self-objectification and deference to men and the patriarchy at large (source: Vanbuskirk).
Whether biologically female or not, those dubbed “women” are treated as the non-subject, the xenophobic sex object in heteronormative canon, which extends to the monsters of Gothic canon. Said media tends to exclude trans, intersex and non-binary people by treating them as “women” (which we’ll explore more in the “Discrimination and Ambiguity” subsection/Chapter Four):
- making them invisible by ignoring their existence or conflating them with cis women
- making them conspicuous by inaccurately portraying them as inhuman, often as criminals or demons
Queer or not, women are fetishized against their will, turned into sexual property. However, the same condition is applied to anyone who exhibits traditionally feminine characteristics within the colonial binary: AMAB/AFAB (assigned male/female at birth) homosexuals, intersex people, ace persons, crossdressers, and yes, sex workers whose so-called “female” or “feminine” nudity is seen as vulnerable, thus deserving of exploitation within the status quo; or whose xenophilic interpretations are outed as impostors deserving of moderate/reactionary intolerance.
Sellers of sex can be workers-as-owners (of their bodies) or workers owned bodily by an owner class. To this, it’s not the sale of sex that’s bad, but the means of selling sex in ways that are unethical. The marketing of sex—vanilla, as well as kinks, fetishes and BDSM—as sold and controlled by the owner class is unethical because it takes control away from the owner of the body by making that worker’s body—or images of their body—as property owned by someone else. Xenophobic canon.
(artist: The Doll Channel)
For example, if a cis/trans woman makes an OnlyFans account to own her labor, she’s one step closer to owning her own body. To this, a model, photographer and artist are generally one in the same. This rationale extends to all aspects of production from a labor standpoint: diet, clothes, sets, lighting, filming and marketing. Such control is relatively ethical because the woman, even when catering to fetishists, is still vying for equality and ownership over her own body (and the labor profit it affords) within an inherently unequal system.
Conversely, if a banking company denies OnlyFans the right to process credit card transactions, the elite are effectively monopolizing the means of production through the banking system, fiscally gatekeeping the woman’s body and all the money she can generate with it; re:
So why did OnlyFans (briefly) decide to ban the kind of content which had come to characterize its platform? “The short answer is banks,” said Tim Stokely, the site’s British founder and chief executive.
Banks, he claimed, are refusing to process payments associated with adult content. In an interview with the FT, Stokely singled out BNY Mellon, Metro Bank, and JPMorgan Chase for blocking intermediary payments, preventing sex workers from receiving their earnings, and penalizing businesses which support sex workers. He declined to reveal OnlyFans’ current banking partners. This follows similar behavior by payment service providers which have begun to dissociate from the porn industry. After a New York Times investigation found images of rape and child sex abuse on Pornhub, Mastercard and Visa prohibited the use of their cards on the site in Dec. 2020.
In response, Pornhub removed all content produced by unverified partners and implemented a verification program for users. In April this year, Mastercard announced tighter control on transactions of adult content to clamp down on illegal material. The requirements included that platforms verify ages and identities of their users (source: Eloise Berry’s “Why OnlyFans Suddenly Reversed Its Decision to Ban Sexual Content,” 2021).
Under such circumstances, consensually ambiguous activities (re: fetishes, kink, BDSM) become non-consensual through unequal power relations the worker did not agree to (called “negotiation” in BDSM language). When workers do not consent to being sexually exploited by the elite, this forces them into coercively humiliating positions. The only option is collective worker action, generally an organized/unorganized walk-out—a strike, and if that fails, an exodus lead by xenophilic, “Satanic” personas.
Sex workers go where they feel the least threatened or exploited, but aren’t always spoilt for choice. As Electric Frontier Foundation notes:
Tumblr’s ban on “adult content” is a treasure trove of problems: filtering technology that doesn’t work, a law that forces companies to make decisions that make others unsafe, and the problems that arise when one company has outsized influence on speech. It’s also the story of how people at the margins find themselves pushed out of the places where they had built communities. And so Tumblr is also a perfect microcosm of the problems plaguing people on every platform (source: “What Tumblr’s Ban on ‘Adult Content’ Actually Did,” 2018).
Indeed, when Tumblr panned porn in 2018, sex workers left to a new social media platform because one was conveniently available. However, as Twitter becomes increasingly conservative under new ownership, the lack of a larger safe space for sex workers and minorities has yet to materialize, leaving them waiting under dangerous, coercive conditions until a new space opens up; BlueSky is invitation-only thus hard to get into, and Facebook’s Threads, though already quite new, is already rife with extreme bigotry from corner to corner (Renegade Cut’s “Republican Twitter,” 2023).
The difference between privatization and mutual consent is not visually immediate. Certainly the existence of non-traditional variants in sexual media affords sex workers the means to express themselves sex-positively through historically sexist language. The sexism, here, is less about content and more about a lack of mutual consent when content is created: Some people like to be humiliated, if it’s their choice.
However, a monopoly over the means of production is more than forcing workers to do sex work, then stealing their labor as profit; it includes body theft and image theft, too (re: AI). It’s no different, in concept, than Disney recursively treating Mickey Mouse (and other canon) as their intellectual property in perpetuity. This is called privatization, and capitalists (thus TERFs) do it by design; i.e., “This is our feminism!” They’re (witch) cops, thus colonizers of former activism having gentrified and decayed into unironically toxic forms (more on this tokenism in Chapter Four). Not all guerrillas are good—a fact that goes beyond TERFS, even, and extends into Americans victims; e.g., the Khmer Rouge following the Cambodia bombings (re: “Police States“); i.e., radicalizing the Marxist-Leninist peasants enacting fascist Buddhism out of revenge against local enemies when American bombers (and the bourgeoisie) were absent (Behind the Bastards’ “Part Three: The Pol Pot Episodes: How A Nice, Quiet Kid Murdered His Country”; timestamp: 11:45). Bombs or no, genocide leads to genocide, though bombs seek to destabilize areas, not depopulate them; re: “Cryptomimesis“). Pimps serve a similar role. A cop is a cop, a traitor a traitor (which TERFs are; re: subjugated Amazons).
(artist: unknown)
As we’ll see moving forward, SWERFs aren’t against all sex work. Most reject unethical sex work in the abstract (sex trafficking as a criminal concept). But many more will defend heteronormative sex roles commonly expressed through gendered language (even fetishes)—i.e., those present within mass media/personal property—while also abjuring emancipatory sex work. This double standard (and its DARVO/obscurantist arguments) stems from how SWERFs function, operating as centrists who value the order of Capitalism over positive social-sexual justice for the victims of Capitalism. Rather than critique Capitalism, they centralize it by becoming the arbiters of reason, the moral team for which any action that preserves order is allowed. Partly they can’t help it, unable to imagine anything better as they worship the limited, cis-white supremacist feminists of the past, but also the whore of the past as something to abject in service to profit: jungle bunnies, PAWGs, etc.
(artist: The Doll Channel)
In the process, SWERF attacks against obvious, coded enemies—the feminist versus the chauvinist—become hollow and performative while punching down at whores. However, they’ll aggregate with sworn enemies to combat a common foe: anyone who threatens Capitalism, including whores as the original and oldest form of labor as policed. The traitor feminist, then, instates moral panic, demonizing erotic sex workers en masse by globally scapegoating their entire profession. By fearfully positing the “re-enslavement” of women, SWERFs reject intersectionality in favorite of dated, carceral-hauntological feminism: posters of women as entirely “liberated” from all erotic sex work (and in a grand, sex-negative paradox, slaying anything that might even suggest free love and sexual labor as a positive alternative to amatonormative models; re: the Alien Queen). In doing so, SWERFs fail to see the empowering qualities of sex work: a genuine means of self-expression, personal enrichment and material change through the rapid accumulation of personal wealth and veneration of the female form (we’ll examine the male body more at the end of the chapter).
Instead, SWERFs denounce the whole process. Trusting sexuality as privately enjoyed, they reject the possibility that sex work can be realistically perceived and actualized as gainful employment. For them, the public payment of sex work and its wider acceptance by the common public amounts to a massive betrayal, a return to bondage. However, by denying cis women the choice for paid sex work and excoriating sex-positive depictions thereof, SWERFs only ensure a lack of wages and choice for all female sex workers. SWERFs aren’t preventing sex work nor sex abuse; they’re keeping sex work privatized and un(der)paid, celebrating their moderate, centrist “victories” in glamorous, hauntological parades that conceal systemic abuse. Privatization, from a material standpoint, enslaves everyone, including SWERFs. On par with a prison warden giving a particular gang protection from his guards, the status quo grants SWERFs special rights for defending canon by attacking ideological enemies of the state (and conceals the structure of state sexism and its nature as a prison).
(artist: Art Frahm)
Compelled privatization discourages iconoclasts by design, turning marginalized groups into conspicuous targets that can be readily treated as sexual property during canonical sex work. A SWERF might reject open prostitution or the coercive nostalgia of female exploitation media (see above); they realistically deny women the means to do anything but resort to ignominious forms of sex work in times of crisis. In other words, besides punching down at minorities, SWERFs only ensure the sexual disempowerment of white straight female sex workers, too; i.e., their material deprivation, continued shaming and inevitable regression towards compelled objectification for all but the privileged few. Nothing meaningful changes; the ability to imagine anything beyond Capitalism is hampered by hauntological depictions of the imaginary past—specifically feminism’s second wave—that hamper progress indefinitely. The reimagined past becomes “as good as it gets,” a tacit compromise with the elite that prosecutes gender-non-conforming people in defense of the colonial binary.
Meanwhile, sexist conditions make sex work “easier” for women, in the sense that it’s expected of them and they have a large customer base. It also gives SWERFs something to reliably attack, albeit unevenly. AFABs who conform as cis-het women, for example, face less prejudice than those who don’t—identifying and performing standardized social-sexual roles through compelled, prescribed labor. In this way, sexism very much allows for sex work that upholds the status quo. However, prejudice under the status quo compounds intersectionally—with queer, secular and non-white AFAB workers being targeted differently than cis-het, religious, white ones. While either group is imprisoned and abused during sex work, only members of the out-group reliably experience open persecution during moral panics. Though shaming women is nigh-universal, reactionaries “protect” in-group women from out-group women (and their various xenophilic associates) by branding the latter as wicked degenerates who threaten decent society.
In turn, “decent” women (maidens) are shamed for associating with “shameful” women (whores, or “scarlet/false women,” concerning GNC persons), whereupon further deviations from in-group standards—skin color, class, religion, etc—invite greater and greater discrimination, but also factionalization. Sex work, as with other forms of compelled labor, promotes preferential mistreatment. This leads to a variety of assimilation fantasies by historically oppressed groups. By trying to fit in, including doing acceptable sex work (marriage, children, housework, etc), a poisonous desire to conform emerges—working to please one’s master, not oneself.
As we’ve already discussed in Chapter Two of this volume (and previously in this series; e.g., “Policing the Whore” and “Reclaiming Anal Rape“), pleasing the state includes policing one’s own minority group to coercively fetishizing extremes; i.e., employing DARVO to hamstring activist movements by portraying them, not fascists, as the “real” terrorists: the state is always right, and faggots must die. It’s not uncommon, then, for queer people to hate themselves, wanting to wear a mask to blend in with their conquerors (re: Fanon); re: Amazons being the oldest token in Western civilization.
Often, this conformity mimics an idealized, perfected form of servitude/personal property tied to carceral hauntologies versus criminal opposites: the obedient, “high-maintenance” woman; white, cis and heterosexual (which becomes something to enforce in reactionary or moderate ways, as we’ll see in Chapter Four) versus the criminalized slut, the homewrecker, the witch, the Medusa, etc.
Furthermore, these aren’t simply old ideas; they’re viewed in nostalgic ways that reactionaries and moderates reinvent and return to, over and over. Sure, moderates will wag their fingers to admonish fascists in times of relative freedom; but once fascism returns, SWERFs (normally white, materially advantaged cis women) will either flee if they’re able; or surrender their rights and become “kept,” with persons like Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull playing the part of the zombie-vampire Stepford Wife while teaming up with fascists (thus becoming fascist themselves) to combat a collective scapegoat: Communist zombie-vampires! Instead of extinguishing monsters, xenophobia demands their proliferation within a sex-coercive content to maintain the state in perpetuity within inherently bad-faith rhetoric (a “gender critical” trademark: “Why do fascists keep showing up at your rallies. Yeah, well why do anti-fascists keep showing up at yours?!” source tweet: Katy’s Cartoons, 2023).
(exhibit 87f: Artist, left: Ernest Chiriaka; middle: Sveta Shubina; right: Art Frahm. Shubina’s nostalgic leanings, if not entirely consciously, still demonstrate mimesis through the nostalgia of artists who were, themselves, already nostalgic in their own time periods. Cryptomimesis challenges this nostalgia in ways that see past canonical nostalgia as “rose-tinted.”)
White women are a marginalized group. However, assimilation/emulation fantasies occurs differently per marginalized group: black skin, white masks; the closeted trans or non-heterosexual; the subservient white woman who polices them, but also competes with other white women for coveted positions—i.e., the privileged to not be raped by the state. All experience various forms of dysphoria, dysmorphia, and racialized angst in pursuit of something that SWERFs will reject in the abstract, but enable through a deliberate failure to move beyond moderate concessions (more on these in Chapter Four, when we examine TERFs): submission and class betrayal sublimated as “concessions.”
It’s also worth noting that marginalized persons can appreciate the objective qualities of sexualized art featuring privileged models. Art Frahm’s voyeuristic art easily lends itself to camp (exhibit 87f, above)
This certainly happens every day, doesn’t it? This fine picture has all the classic elements of an Art Frahm underwear vs. gravity battle: public humiliation, hand in the crotch, a uniformed working man in close proximity, the open fallen purse (consult Freud for the actual meaning of that one), and, of course, celery.
It has a brilliant invention worthy of the Northern European Renaissance: a mirror that adds an ironic twist. Note how Frahm places the mirror and the driver’s eyes so that the driver is simultaneously able to look at the maiden’s crotch and breasts (source: Lilek’s “A Fare Loser” from “The Art of Frahm: An Artistic Study of the Effects of Celery on Loose Elastic,” 2022).
and Chiriaka’s pin-ups are expertly made, chic and tasteful (if that’s your thing). Provided the viewer endorses model agency instead of canonical disempowerment, there isn’t anything intrinsically carceral or sexist about wearing red lipstick, high heels and one’s birthday suit and enjoying these things for oneself (or creating it in one’s art; re: Shubina, above): camping the canon with “violent,” exquisitely torturous language; e.g., “stab my muffin!” below. MUFFIN STABBED!
Rather, doing so can become sex-positive provided the display—as something to view, perform or sell—doesn’t automatically promote institutionalized, coercive variants and social attitudes. This occurs relative to informed consumers, whereupon de facto educators help people synthesize and transmute their guilty pleasures while staying true to a better political self. In turn, their radicalized values favor basic human rights over corporate profit and state power disempowering everyday workers, while still appreciating objective sexuality in art; re: through voy/ex dialogs of appreciative fear (which the Numinous ultimately is, in liberatory hands): tongue-in-cheek calculated risk.
(artist: Tyler and Husband)
Across a gradient of outcomes, then, the material reality of canonical sex work remains constant: manufactured scarcity as something for xenophiles to challenge. AFAB persons frequently resort to sex work (rather than do it for disposable income, fulfillment or both) because they’re poor and trying to survive; i.e., incumbent on either the “generosity” of privileged, entitled men, or the dubious mercies of people who share and uphold said men’s tyrannical views (with there being room to operate campily in such spaces by GNC sex workers, above; see: “An Interview with Tyler and Husband“). Moreover, much of this bias is complicated by the natal and gender-performative ambiguity of the human body and its overarching signifiers: camping state-corporate (fascist) cheapening and liquidation of nature into toxic waste (re: similar to blood, black bile, or anything else standing in/for capital at work; see: “The World Is a Vampire“).
We’ll examine these ambiguities relative to trans/intersex people and crossdressers, exploring the unique discriminations they face at the end of the chapter. First, I want to highlight asexual “ace” persons and the parallel gradient they occupy under Capitalism—specifically its general cryptonymic effect on ace artistry as part of a queer imagination that normalizes sex (shortcuts to sex as a liberatory coded act, mid-interface). For non-assholes, games are fun on equal terms (despite the unequal distribution of power in BDSM scenarios/Gothic poetics).
Please note: The following subsections are less about examining specific hauntological examples and more about interpreting art in non-heteronormative ways, which then can be used to recognize heteronormativity as something that frequently attaches to carceral-hauntological/complicit-cryptonymic forms; i.e., that must then be resisted, often covertly through cryptonymy in duality (Chapters Four and Five are entirely devoted to this concept). —Perse, back in 2023
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] The cis-gender binary treats the man-male-masculine:woman-female-feminine dichotomy as the sole, universal state of affairs (elevating it to a natural order). Anything else is anathema, alien, worthy of attack.