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.
Transgressive Nudism; or, Flashing Those with Power (re: Cryptonymy’s Origins)
Refuse is our inspiration
Terrorism our trade
Sabotage and piracy
Chaos our mental state
Mesmerizing, festering
Intended for the faint of heart
Cultish and anthemic
Until death us do part (source).
—Sascha Konietzko and En Esch; “Megalomaniac[1],” on KMFDM’s Symbols (1997)
Picking up where “Chapter Five: Rebellious Subterfuge. “Rise up, comrade zombies!”—The Revolutionary Undead’s Covert Activism/Cryptonymy during Liminal Counter-Expression” left off…
Note: This section is where I started to conceptualize revolutionary cryptonymy as a praxial device; i.e., as something we would revisit backwards in Volume Zero, One and Two (re: “The Quest for Power,” “An Uphill Battle,” “Inside the Hall of Mirrors,” “Perceptive Zombie Eyeballs,” “Always a Victim,” and “The Future Is a Dead Mall,” etc). Said section is partially incomplete, and I will point out any unfinished areas. —Perse 4/17/2025
(artist: Stephanie Rodriguez)
Public nudism is our first revolutionary trick, mid-cryptonymy. The paradox of sex positivity is how it often (though not always) involves a fair amount of naked, pornographic exposure through voyeurism and exhibitionism; less hiding one’s identity seemingly at, but instead putting it all out under an alias that advertises through partial, imperfect concealment. We’ve touched on these ideas briefly throughout the book, but here I’d like to apply them to revolutionary praxis. “Poker face” suggest an expectation of deception as being part of the game in question, but nudism isn’t inherently sexual despite canonical proponents thinking otherwise. In praxial terms, then, opposition is expressed through monstrous-ludic language for social-sexual purposes that challenge state power instead of being duped by its killing jokes and Faustian bargains. There is often a tremendously ostentatious component towards subversive expression—one’s body as something to reveal to others, while still hiding one’s proletarian intentions.
For some, this behavior is expected in surface-level terms (re: Segewick), but threatens the players with ordinary dangers amplified by the idea of revolution as a form of “cheating” that “dupes” more fragile players: white, cis-het men (and their subordinates) who constantly gripe that sex work and male-dominated professions (such as streamlining or YouTube content creation) shouldn’t mix because it isn’t fair. In a nutshell, private parts should stay privatized—i.e., “for men” under Capitalism. Nevertheless, playing with state proponents’ heads, hearts and libidos remains an important skill—one vital to Gothic-Communist development that should still be performed in ways that keep workers as safe as possible while being sex-positive in transgressive ways. Sex is always risky to some extent, but legitimate danger can and should be minimized wherever possible when voicing our own oppression and reclamation of power through subversive, even transgressive exhibitionist displays of vulnerability and power exchange.
To it, if we want to expose our enemies, thus disarm them as voyeurs before fascism can become normalized, this requires routinely being ourselves in ways they will gag to in disgust, stare in shock, defecate in fear or otherwise overreact/lose control towards in telling, oft-amusing ways: Coleridge’s “stare and tremble” schtick being middle-class, white cis-het pearl clutching while afraid of gay Communist terrorists. We must remove not just one mask, but each layer of the concentric veneer until there are no masks left for them to use, until their insecurities are laid bare and some attempt at open discourse can actually be met. This, as it should be clear by now, requires our own masks and disguise pastiche: kink and BDSM aesthetics being a popular choice; e.g., consent-non-consent, voyeurism/exhibitionism of the body as laterally associated/synthesized with socio-political aesthetics and hate speech as something to heal our own wounds, address our own dysphoria and dysphoria as state-provided ailments.
For the rest of this subchapter, then, we’ll unpack several nudism in different forms: flashing and voyeuristic/exhibitionistic breeding as standard-issue performance methods, while also touching slightly on disguise pastiche and ahegao (which we’ll unpack more in the subchapters that follow).
Below are several exhibits that showcase the basic idea of worker control as something to establish through public nudism during ludo-Gothic BDSM as a cryptonymic “flashing” device:
(exhibit 101b: The privatization of sex generally relegates AFAB sex workers [and homosexual men, trans women, twinks, etc] behind a veil. They become fragile and caged, but also voiceless during the exchange—i.e., of money towards the elite, who exploit customer and sex worker alike. Conversely any attempts to alter this equation and its material conditions are demonized during moral panics, inaccurately presented as homicidal and degenerate; e.g., the “guy with the gun” in Adventures in Babysitting.
And yet, displays of nudity can used to nurture those under duress [e.g., Oliver Stone’s 1978 Midnight Express] or torment them; e.g., can be used by those living under oppression to tease those who, under normal conditions, have more rights than the performer but thanks to the prison system suddenly do not: “Lucille” from Cool Hand Luke, 1967. Lucille was played by then-27-year-old actress, Joy Harmon, who—by her own account—was “just washing a car to my best ability and having fun with it, with the sponge and everything” [source: Jeff Labrecque’s “Catching Up with the woman…” 2017]. Apparently the men in the cast didn’t require direction:
When she emerges from the dilapidated country house, turns on the portable radio and the hose, and goes to work washing the car, Rosenberg pointed the cameras at the men, watching her from a distance. They didn’t require instruction on how to act. “The only one that I talked to was Stuart Rosenberg and the photographer,” Harmon says. “He just worked it like—’Now, get the sponge, and squeeze it, and wash the car’ and so forth. I just followed [his instruction]. The shots were all like kind of broken up, you know, how he wanted me to do it. It was easy. It was so easy” [ibid.].
Keeping all of this in mind, the men in the film were playing convicts, but also couldn’t touch Harmon in real life. Knowing this, her “come hither” expression becomes knowingly unfair in more ways than one. The same strategy can be employed by internet sex workers who aren’t working under a male director—i.e., are making content for themselves as an expression of their reclaimed power under the heteronormative establishment.
As such, mutual consent is conveyed by the public space as free to exhibit nudity. Normally within capital as condoned by the elite, collective worker action can be made following attempts to privatize sexuality and gender-non-conforming behaviors, keeping them in the public sphere as educational tools by virtue of workers going on strike—of relocating to new social media platforms [e.g., from Tumblr to Twitter or OnlyFans to Fansly]. In realms of mutual consent as a negotiated concept understood by all parties, violence against the “tease” or the “trap” becomes entirely impossible, granting the perceived submissive or feminine party the greatest degree of power there is: service unto the beautiful according to what they’re born with—their bodies and their rights. They surrender power to the dom, knowing the dom is saddled with the responsibility of enormous trust and the equally tremendous consequences should that trust be broken.)
(exhibit 101c1: Artist, left: Emma Johana Orozco; right: Charles Eisen. Models aren’t in danger just because they’re naked, and this sentiment that they are is coded into canonical media that often relies on women who have been conditioned through their own abuse into reactionary ways of thinking; i.e., into the arms of their would-be “protectors.” The reality is that most rapes aren’t from random strangers; they’re intraracial and committed by someone the victim knows. Moreover, the person[s] filming an amateur, in-public shoot are in no more danger than a vulnerable woman during a scene of appropriative peril on-set for a big-budget movie. They’re with someone they know who’s holding the camera, which lowers the odds of attack. Furthermore, like with police abuse, the mere presence of a camera streaming to the internet or a cloud server lowers the odds of an attack as it enables the victim to upload their attacker’s identity immediately and directly to thousands, even millions of people.
A risk remains, though, in that once something is publicly shared, it becomes a matter of public record; to make a pun out of it, Pandora’s “Box” isn’t something you can just close once it’s out there in the world. Granted, it’s easier to erase records of it if a sex worker is more anonymous; e.g., no face in their photo and avoiding any large kind of notorious website and/or branding deals. Something to keep in mind is that public forms of sex worker art that brand as such and are treated as advertisements; i.e., directing customers to pay sites to purchase similar content. Thus, as something to present and critique [as I do in this book] is similar to a movie still image or a piece of art that advertises the artist’s portfolio as a form of nudist, asexually conveyed erotica [if a sex worker isn’t ace, their working relationship with clients often is—excluding exhibitionists who get off on being seen]. They fall under Fair Use, meaning they don’t require permission to be used in a transformative, academically critical, or satirical sense.)
Flashing is arguably the most transgressive nudism at a glance (i.e., erotic canon as a guilty pleasure that promotes coercive voyeuristic themes; e.g., Psycho). I don’t mean this in the literal sense—like provoking a bull in front of you to charge, per se—but rather that public displays of nudity (or even just gender non-conforming behaviors) are treated as strictly taboo and automatically sexual/predatory during moral panics; i.e., something that “no one” wants to see, thus shouldn’t be shown, period.
As the state is always in crisis, thus in panic to some degree, the showing of nudity becomes something to sanction—to allow in privatized, pornographic showings and to police those exhibitions thereof that aren’t cleared by the elite as “artistic” or otherwise lucrative for them. Nudism, then, becomes a form of degenerate violence equated with “weaponry” (exhibit 101a1) whose legitimacy is determined by whether or not it adheres to the status quo. Yet, it is precisely in this kind of vulnerable revelation that our own struggle for equality against oppression can be exposed: through nudity that transgresses against those who would oppress us, exploring the relationship between nudity as artistic vs pornographic, but also sexual versus asexual; i.e., public nudism versus pornography as something profane relative to canon that is nevertheless “for sale” behind the usual paywalls.
These buffers apply to revolutionary praxis as a kind of “aegis” to keep us safe (exhibit 101a1), but also to speak out against our oppressors with in exhibitionist ways. They reverse abjection but also work as defensive cryptonyms that get at trauma protectively—i.e., through voyeurism and exhibitionist as a sex-positive practice: “Art is love made public,” with the act of looking non-shameful and appreciative, not persecutory.
Nevertheless, the secret identity comes into play in some shame or form; i.e., it (from our thesis statement) “can allow victims of trauma to face their trauma without exposing themselves to a confessional of public scrutiny and shame regarding taboo abuse (and societal tendencies to blame the victim) but also—with revolutionary cryptonomy—to hide our scars and trauma from our enemies.” This happens while outing them as out would-be destroyers; i.e., “We can show them what we want them to see while minimizing risk to ourselves” during revolutionary activities that a) require some kind of stage and/or audience that crosses over into real life, and b) turns the gendered tables on the theatre of the man-in-black trope (a bandit, outlaw or highwayman; a rebel, crimefighter and/or blackguard, ninja, sell-sword, etc; but also a ballroom lothario/rake). The mask as imbued with these clandestine, romantic variables, can furtively (thus safely) play with the role of the wearer in ways that reclaim it as well; e.g., as a “nun” in disguise merely by virtue of the opponent mistaking the wearer as just another wallflower. My inner princess desires that strong-thighed mistress with just right the air of mystery and danger to her. Even so, danger-at-a-glance should still give way to sex positivity under dialectical-material scrutiny.
Bear in mind, mutual consent is vital to proletarian praxis, so any nudity or gender-non-conforming behavior—be it during live performance art such as drag or burlesque, or on a gallery invigilator’s canvas or television screen, or a voyeur mutually consensually watching a couple fuck—must be revealed under conditions that actually respect and convey mutual consent. For instance, if an event is exhibiting adult nudity as a form of sex-gender education, then age limits should be imposed in advance (which includes speaking to different groups of students relative to their age and maturity in the language they would actually use; i.e., “When in Rome…”; e.g., this California high school teacher using words like “booty hole” when talking to her students about prostate stimulation (source tweet: Hesh Comps, 2023) or the principal from Heartbreak High deadpanning the teenage slang, “tongue-punch her fart box” to our embarrassed protagonist). But once implemented, this counts as fair warning for any who might argue “their” women and children are being “groomed” by the de facto, extracurricular instructors of said, reverse-abject exhibits.
Voyeurism and exhibitionism within porn are a common guilty pleasure within canonical media’s arrangement of abject, shameful sex, so it standards to reason that the process for reversing it lies in the same procedures in iconoclastic media made by emotionally/Gothically intelligent workers. Regarding myself, I am a voyeur but only watch couples who like to show off—e.g., any of the models I’ve worked within in this book. There’s an indulgent, voyeuristic quality to porn in general, an invitation to watch that becomes increasingly sex-positive the less oppressed from a material standpoint the models are (thus more able to negotiate) that sits behind the imperiled, voyeuristic/exhibitionist image on display (e.g., Nina Hartley and Victoria Paris; re: exhibits 47b1a, “Non-Magical Damsels and Detectives“). The idea is one of danger-at-a-glance; i.e., of voyeuristic peril that fools the viewer in a mechanism that excites them in a healthy way that can be related to trauma, but also just excites them without harming other people.
(exhibit 101c2a: Artist, left: Angel Witch; right: unknown. A cock needn’t be a symbol of rape, but a rope to pull on “to ring one’s bell.” This can mean confronting false copies of trauma or danger to help one heal in a serious, therapeutic sense; or it can be more of a guilty pleasure that flirts with danger as commodified. Either is fine, provided no one is actually being harmed in the process. It can also be shared; couples like to have naughty sex and have people watch [and vice versa].
For example, the man-in-black trope and the voyeurism of peril is, itself, a kind of rape play whose pastiche and violent figurative language involves a consenting third party and two individuals, themselves consenting to a performance scene of exquisite torture/voyeurism of peril that isn’t [unlike its historical-material counterparts and general aesthetic palimpsests] actually harmful [exhibit 47b1/b2; re: “Non-Magical Damsels and Detectives“]. The doll-like performance can be subtle or overt. In a theatrical sense, the partner in the black mask suggests a modernized version of the highway robber[2] stealing one’s “jewels.” In truth, the “pearl-clutching” becomes a form of instruction designed to teach people the means of profound enjoyment through subversion and transgression as its own activity within de facto education and Gothic counterculture; i.e., “mutual consent is fun, and teaching it through exhibitionistic xenophilia is a job well done!” The paradox of sexual healing is that it is often performed through voyeuristic peril and consent-non-consent using repurposed demon lovers in a sex-positive sadistic attack to achieve catharsis.)
This “bandit-fucking effect” can be one that people make themselves. Here are a variety of sex-positive examples of voyeurism/exhibitionism, featuring people I’ve worked with showing themselves and their playmates off in a variety of fetishized ways. The fetish or dark/”metal” aesthetic isn’t harmful because it’s a device that reclaims trauma to a reverse-abject degree; i.e., through the reclamation of death aesthetics, kink, and demonic BDSM through Gothic counterculture art (the “demon” lover is ironic because does harm the subject, nor does the context for its exhibit encourage such displays of unironic damage). It camps Percy Shelley’s “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”; re: by playfully asking the canonical enforcer and potential revolutionary to look at our “murder” and “rape”—all the better to “stare and tremble” with the proverbial “weirdest boner.” It might not be their “proudest fap,” but there’s a mysterium tremendum (the palliative Numinous) to impart: the ability to reduce risk through consent-non-consent, but also just straight-up exhibitionism between couples wearing the general aesthetic (in the words of Jadis, “Oh, yeah! Put your mysterium tremendum in my uncanny valley!”).
Note: The following exhibit is one between me and a variety of couples, prepared in advance as couples having sex for this book. That being said, some of these exhibits are currently unfinished; i.e., I don’t have time to finish them before my deadline. Someday I plan to revisit and finish any incomplete pieces. —Perse, 5/9/2025
(exhibit 101c2a: This collage is a series of thumbnails from a sex tape custom that I commissioned from Quinnvincible and their partner. Originally I paid for a solo shoot [the images of them alone on their green shoots or with the purple background]. Not only did I do their witch drawing based off that shoot [re: exhibit 52g, “Furry Panic“] but some of the images were also taken and used to storyboard a shoot between Quinn and their partner. They filmed it at the angles I requested, following various instructions describing each shot’s angle, pose and time length [usually in seconds], as well as other relevant information [glasses on or off; creampie or cumshot, etc]. The combined projects were a lot of fun to do together [so much so that Quinn’s partner thanked me for giving her permission to come out of her cock cage so she could fuck Quinn’s boy pussy with her girl-cock]. The entire exercise was designed to be sex-positive, promoting and endorsing the beauty of Quinn and their partner as they exist/identify as: gender-non-conforming people but also sexually active cuties who like to be watched on camera as they fuck.
[model and artist: UrEvilMommy and Persephone van der Waard]
This collage of UrEvilMommy was commissioned specifically for the book [re: “Back to the Necropolis“]. Though initially I just thought they were hot and wanted to watch them fuck [like rabbits], I asked if the commission could be made into an exhibit; Mommy and their partner agreed and this illustration, collage and sub-exhibit were the result; i.e., the “staking” of the Carmilla-esque “dark mommy” with the “hunter’s ‘stake.'” This being said, I did ask if I could call them “mommy” as I jerked off my girl-cock to the ref material they sent, to which they agreed. Afterward, I came for them as a kind of tribute and thanked them; they were delighted in the mess that I made for them. In other words, modesty and cleanly order weren’t the point of our covenant; making a sexy little mess for a dark mommy god was.
“Let’s go to the dark gods!” The “fallen” angel, devil, demon or dark god needn’t be fascist/regressive when using death/fetish, vampiric aesthetics. Indeed, during gender-non-conforming exercises and sex-positive discourse, the dark aesthete/Galatea can celebrate the pagan [often symbolized as a rabbit or a butterfly] in ways that reimagine lost histories that were colonized, assimilated, appropriated or destroyed and buried by Capitalism; i.e., a non-violent, often-neurodivergent consent-non-consent ritual that isn’t recuperated and, just as well, can speak to potential converts/allies through a nigh-universal language: sex or [for ace people] affection, tenderness and negotiation during BDSM as ironic peril/countercultural Gothic expression—nudism as much as sex [which, like with any kink, won’t work if both parties aren’t into it/a good fit].
The coveted nature of the inaccessible [“look but do not touch”] makes it a viable means for workers to, at the very least, supplement their income/support themselves, but also voice themselves through disguise pastiche they can remove at any time; or apply just as quickly [like Zorro] to metamorphose before our very eyes: makeup, accessories, animal personas, and otherwise, playful customized appearances provide a sex-work-meets-Satanic flavor [and a legion of gradients, of which the “dark rabbit” is just one of an endless bestiary]. This works alongside what they can’t simply remove without non-trivial effort [which varies per performer but generally falls into two traditional, settler-colonial categories: their skin color and their genitals] and the performance as half-real—i.e., the “death face” of an orgasm working within the ahegao aesthetic, but also feeling legitimately good for various reasons at the same time: one’s sexual pleasure at being touched or seen, at showing off one’s body or equipment, their devil/angel or virgin/whore leather or lace [or “living leather”] as fetishized, at seeing one’s partner pleased for similar-if-not-always-identical reasons, knowing the audience enjoys the performance for any or all of these factors, etc. It all comes together [so to speak] in a holistic, liminal threshold that can be tried, time and time again by idiosyncratic performers.
From the psychological side of things, is something to face in controlled chaos/rituals of exquisite “torture” that allow us agency through the risk reduction of prey maladaptive responses. If we need to, we can confirm a perceived danger as false, or flirt with danger to regain some sense of control over things that have been beaten into us; we can also empathize with the vicarious victim as an avatar for us to embody through empathy so that we don’t feel alone. These medicinal functions of the palliative Numinous are part of the same psychosexual schtick, regardless of how intense it actually is.
[artist: Miss Nia Sax]
Nia self-represents as demonic. In turn, demons represent forbidden knowledge and power exchange, generally through uneven/unequal forms. But they also upend what’s being said. In traditional/conservative representations of demonhood, a monster enforces the status quo by dehumanizing it as alien and fetishized; the inverse is true in sex-positive forms, whose calculated risks camp dogma to liberate sex workers (of which all workers are, insofar as Capitalism dimorphically sexualizes all workers through the dialectic of the alien, of us vs them). This means that when something appears unequal in iconoclastic forms, they deliberately foster a countercultural element of appreciative irony to educate others with.
Not only can the sub never be raped in mutually consenting scenarios, but they actually have rights and power that are upheld within an informed exchange thereof; i.e., using Gothic poetics to interrogate and negotiate trauma through calculated risk by going where power is: the usual places and roles of performance in a paradoxical BDSM framework that aids in worker liberation through calculated risk: the cryptonymic acquiring of power and control as normally denied when feeling out of control. This means reclaiming them during psychosexual theatrical scenarios that mimic inequality but install the ability to a) consent and avoid harm, and b) exert control over an ostensible dominant; i.e., through the issuing of veiled threats and commands that are pleasurably therapeutic to both sides. Such is revolutionary cryptonymy.
To this, Nia embodies the place where power and play are stored, thus can be invoked—themselves. They represent someone who incorporates the aesthetics of power and death through an ironic informed exchange that, when negotiated, produced and invigilated between all parties involved, globally humanizes them as monstrous. The underlying goal is to synthesize praxis to achieve psychosexual catharsis (the addressal and prevention of sexual trauma and harm) on a wider societal level; i.e., through the informed-thus-healthy confrontation of generational trauma that ludo-Gothic BDSM entails: a pedagogy of the oppressed, whose creative success between multiple workers illustrating consent provides a collective statement that embodies something sacred to workers in opposition to the state—basic human rights as unalienable, including their bodies, genders, and overall labor [and its power expressed through artistic expression] as owned exclusively by them.
In other words, to break Capitalist Realism by illustrating mutual consent, we all have to be more creative and artistic; i.e., by working through paradox together to foster intersectional solidarity through praxial synthesis, using cryptonymy to raise emotional/Gothic intelligence and class/cultural awareness: during the struggle to liberate [and criminalize] workers challenging the state and Capitalism’s automatic exploitation/cheapening of them for profit. Our cryptonymy challenges the state’s.
[model and artist: Ms. Reefer/Ayla and Persephone van der Waard]
This collage of Ms. Reefer and Ayla provides contrast of their bodies and genitals, but also the couch as a strangely erotic piece of furniture; i.e., thanks to canonical porn—difficult to have sex on, but certainly fun to watch. Camping such maneuvers, revolutionary cryptonymy conveys a sense of the domestic and the urgency of improvising: when a bed is not immediately at home within the home [e.g., when I was in Manchester, Zeuhl and I would do it on the floor or a small, one-person mattress. There was something desperately hungry about that arrangement; re: “The Eyeball Zone“].
[model and artist: Autumn Anarchy/Sinead and Persephone van der Waard]
This collage of Autumn Anarchy and Sinead, whose own shoot conveys the kinds of things that—while commissioned—go beyond porn normally reducing the actors involved to sex objects; i.e., both are people first, the exhibit’s cryptonymy meant to illustrate that vis-à-vis dialectical-material context.
[Baby the cat; note her squish from the handprint embedded in her furry chonk.]
All kidding aside, there’s countless ways to relate to nature as something normally policed by state forces. Anything the state normally chattelizes can be reclaimed during revolutionary cryptonymy.)
Reversing abjection, we become less like Cartesian adults and more like “singing kitties” (the expression Bay used for my constantly meowing cat, above); or—between consenting adults—horny rabbits that healthily act on animalized impulses when we want something in the presence of intimated trauma: a lack of fear when asking for sex, intimacy and various other needs and wants denied to us by Capitalism as a systemic repressing, thus regressive, force; but dressed up in things reclaimed from a wardrobe of stolen robes: our borrowed implements of torture and bondage “borrowed” back through ironic roleplay’s new waves of deathly jouissance that, while they sound fun, in the postpunk tradition embrace and find new, unknown pleasures during state deception, crisis and collapse (e.g., Modern English’s 1982 “I Melt with You” literally a song about two lovers fucking and melting together as a bomb drops on them—sort of a more morbidly cheerful version of Nena’s already-morbidly-cheerful-while-keyboarding-about nuclear-war-during-the-rise-of-neoliberalism, “99 Luftballons,” 1983).
Our subversive playfulness isn’t the sort of fearmongering that postures death as a “cool” suicide cult, but finds a sense of grace, dignity and joy through the hauntological aesthetics of death amid the threat of total destruction; i.e., when “Majora” threatens us with the moon in geopolitical subterfuge, we remember what ol’ Jack Burton does in a situation like that (such a delightful himbo): “You just stare that big ol’ storm right back and say, “Give me your best shot, I can take it!” (re: “Meeting Rebels“).
This includes our relationship to media. Jadis, for example, couldn’t take away my love of “The Lady of Shallot” (despite it becoming an ironic ballad of their seduction of me through a knightly pastiche I ultimately had to reclaim—re: exhibit 43d, “Seeing Dead People“). In other words, such lunacy fucks with your head; sometimes, when death fucks with us, all a fag can do is fuck back with our own brand of madness (re: “Escaping Jadis“).
To attach this to a broader narrative scheme of subversive poetics, Gothic poiesis and BDSM operate through a call-and-response on par with Camus’ Myth of Sisyphus (1942). Indeed, whatever hauntology this takes—from Loreena Mckennitt’s Elemental (1985) to Ridley Scott’s matelotage in outer space to the Cohen Brothers’ The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018) and its evocation of Chaucer, Percy Shelley and Lebensraum in the Western mode—there is room within these violent, Romantic choruses for unaccommodated voices sharing a pedagogy of the oppressed that yearns for solidarity within a love for vulgar (common) and “dead” aesthetics: our sleeping beauties that threaten to reawaken.
Point is, there’s always more to say from different points of view within the same code; i.e., in response to various material conditions and parallel societies under Capitalism, the Cohen’s own quoting of “Ozymandias” suggests an iconoclastic refrain: “Look on our works, ye Mighty, and despair!” (re: exhibit 40a4, “The Problem of Futile Revenge“) as liberated from Liam Neeson’s doll-like “chicken,” thus free to make not just art, but revive lost culture in unique forms that—in the Communist tradition as ushered into existence—offers glimpses of a better world through parodic wit: “People are not like ferrets!” This prophesized new world is tied to the old, but sex-positive and humane for all people’s exploited by Capitalism then-and-now (and not a compromise of cheap, empty spectacle’s profit… for the lives of “useless eaters” who quote British Romantics).
There’s certainly an element of gallows humor in its genesis, but humanity is defined by struggle to immense dehumanizing forces; “I am not an animal!” can be declared in so many different ways [and not, I might add, at the expense of animals or the land by prospecting capitalists/anthropogenic activities and inherited fears of stigma creatures. To paraphrase my partner Bay, “We’re not born loving of all things; we’re evolutionarily born selfish to keep us alive, and it takes serious work to unlearn these “creepy-crawly” phobias taught to us by Capitalism; i.e., to learn about the world by playing with it as a mechanism of brain development and societal construction in any social group: how we learn about each other and the world as a means of interacting together that readies us for a safe state of maturity.
To it, cryptonymy is a social means of survival, of protecting us from the state, I would add, it is a means of interrogating a system of material conditions that interferes with our own survival and, interconnected with us, the wellbeing of the planet’s ecosystems around us. Bay calls this Whakataukī (“fu-kuh toe key”), which loosely translated, means “a saying that has become settled over time”/a proverb[3] without an origin: “Ki te kore nga putake e makukungia, e kore te rakau e tupu,” or “If the roots of the tree are not watered the tree will never grow.”
The oral tradition is historically harder to police and stamp out than the written word; verbal histories are more easily lost in the face of eugenics, but also traditions that deal in aesthetics that do not have set meaning thus can be used against the state and its proponents’ opportunistic fear of death (exploiting the land to stave off death) to tell our stories about our own lives and deaths but also those lost places, peoples and things we feel a strong transgenerational bond to.
In my case, I feel like I’ve always processed trauma in a feminine way—i.e., through danger and sex from a female perspective, meaning the fear of rape is something I have always feared as a trans woman despite feeling the odds of it being “lower” on account of my birth sex (which doesn’t matter if you’re trans, because chasers will attack and abuse you for simply being different than the heteronormative standard).
Simply put, I always empathized with the plight of the heroine, and for me, I like to stress this in the art I produce myself or sponsor from others. For me, the Numinous of sexual healing through fetishized media (exhibitionist/voyeurism) is a kind of styled language that addresses my emotional trauma from someone I was sexually involved with (and talked about the Gothic with a lot). It feels so potent that even writing about it, I can feel the volcanic, Zofloya-esque eye of an angry god on me; but it can’t hurt me anymore because the feeling of peril is being supplied without the risk of death through a controlled event. But it’s still intense and requires aftercare: “There is no life in the void; only death!”
“Art is love made public.” The above exhibits demonstrate our exhibitionist’s adage with permission, inside an age-gated book designed to educate people about the process of reversing abjection through the Gothic mode. I should that that showcasing this added context reveals the actual abusers when they do flip out, hiding behind a DAVRO façade as they try to repress sex-positive education and figurative/literal forms of monstrous expression; i.e., nudity as something to panic about, thus dress up as a “Satanic/groomer” threat that must be met with paramilitary crack-downs by “concerned” citizens who don’t want to see that (anywhere; i.e., the strawman implication that degenerate, unwanted forms of sexual/asexual gender-non-conforming expression are being shoved down “everyone’s” throats without their consent). The only way to expose their hypocrisy and bad faith is to be ourselves, which requires degrees of nudity and gender parody as a form of reverse-abject, liminal expression—revolutionary cryptonymy through a variety of proletarian masks worn in opposition to state hegemony attacking not just our active resistance to them, but our way of life, our parties, coffee shops, or discos; our “torture” chambers and sex dungeons by replacing them with unironic variants.
At times, our own veneers become complicated, concentric; there is a standoff-ish quality to the display but also a silent prayer that you won’t be condemned by bigots for partaking in healthy and safe activities (it’s the bigots and their canonical conditioning who make them unsafe, in other words). Here are several examples illustrating those points during the cryptonymy “flashing” process:
Note: Ginger was unable to finish the drawing but I’ve kept the sketch in the book, anyways. Also, when asked about it, Ginger replied,
I’ll see what I can do, but I can’t make any promises. If you have to release it half finished, or take it out, you have my blessing. If you release it half finished you can add this quote “Neither I nor this depiction of Persephone were able to finish due to the shackles of capitalism (my job wants spreadsheets). Something, something, “to unlock this orgasm please organize a better economic system.”
—Perse, 5/9/2025
(exhibit 101d1: Artist: Ginger, Han Solo “shooting” under the table, mid-cryptonymy. Our friendship is asexual but we’re able to talk about each other’s sex lives [and other people we think are hot] in a platonic way, which comes in handy when talking about work. During one conversation, I described a moment when working with someone who was acting sus [during my transphobic episode when dealing with bigoted AFAB sex workers] and despite having my “gun on the table” as a show of good faith, actually had a second “gun” under the table to “shoot” the bad-faith party with. It’s not a call for violence against abusers, but a metaphor for the reality of the politeness trapping that occurs when you’re “stuck” with someone who’s clearly acting in bad faith and you need to safely but effectively disentangle yourself from the conversation.
As mentioned in Volume Two, the gun is also a metaphor of caution and social cues and tools for dealing with bad-faith persons that one learns from living under abusive conditions; e.g., Jadis’ treatment towards me and their unwitting equipping of myself with the means to deal with future assholes, but also something to not use against potential allies by learning how to put the gun down when interacting with potential threats but also friends. Affective socializing is a liminal ordeal, needling the maze while deciding how much to blend in and stand out.
In the case of this drawing, Ginger proposed that rather than a second gun, there be a sexual ally [the twi’lek being a sexually exploited minority in Return of the Jedi, 1983]. I was so confused/intrigued by what they meant at first that I asked them to draw it, which they did for my birthday. In a show of aceness between us, there is further irony inside the fact that “Han” [me] would be getting sucked off, yet I do not actually enjoy oral sex in real life; i.e., the enjoyment of oral is the fantasy at play as something that goes beyond my normal sexual experiences: during ludo-Gothic BDSM as I now call it.
Likewise, by the time I met Bay—whose like-mindedness, mana, and sweet nature was paramount in finalizing this book—I was a very different person from when I started dating eight years prior. I had a lot more experience under my belt—was writing and thinking critically on a level that far surpassed anything from several years ago, let alone in 2014! In short, I could tell that Bay was different than past cuties in that I could sense they weren’t going to harm me, but also was someone I could appreciate by how actively supportive they were of my work [comparatively, all of my past exes—Constance, Zeuhl, Jadis and Cuwu—were all thoroughly self-absorbed in different ways]. Bay is a sweetie, through and through. Also, they’re totally the twi’lek under the table sucking me off.)
(exhibit 101d2a: Artist: Bay. They are soft and cute, but also identify with animals that, like them, “squish and chonk” [and compare favorably to goblins and gremlins in a reclaimed, sex-positive way]; i.e., during the cryptonymy process, Bay loves animals who are “genetically designed to be fat, and have weird rolls and are chunky [also, frogs don’t have ribs, thus look super chonky].” They further explain how “fatness equals unhealthy” is an incredibly Western concept that promotes eating disorders and disguised obesity—e.g., body building as a drug-induced morbid obesity that ties to a maladaptive, toxic and ultimately Western view of health, one that equates unhealthiness with animals but also people of color, as overindulgent, stupid, lazy and Satanic, etc. Bay likes to identify with animals and fatness in a way that subverts fatphobic stereotypes and broader Indigenous xenophobia. Their cryptonymy ties to nature as educational [re: “Call of the Wild“].)
(exhibit 101d2a: Artist, bottom-right: Nothosaur Toys; top-right and bottom-middle: Bay. The heroic/villainous cabinet of the curiosities and its “weaponry and costumes” are a trope that can be unironically violent/ironically so; i.e., the knife penis and other implements of actual torture as fetishized vs the fetishization of dark revenge as having a gradient of dialectical-material possibilities , mid-cryptonymy.
In The Crow, you have both: one, the hedonistic unironic torture of supervillain Top Dollar’s sword collection, which he proudly displays to us and Gideon before stabbing the other man to death [for our entertainment, of course]; two, Eric Draven’s revenge of the poor man’s Goth, which comes alive, mid-hauntology [the slum; re: “Ruling the Slum“] to seek actual violent revenge against his fiancé’s killers. Yet Eric eventually grows tired of revenge and trying to negotiate with a man who knows no limits; re: the original graphic novel was written by James O’Barr after his wife was killed by a drunk driver [source: “Shadows on the Wall,” 1994].
But the best revenge for the whore, I would argue is the cryptonymy as a kind of torture without harm; re: the torturing of the unironically violent by turning their fetishized implements of torture against them through our own cabinets of curiosities and costumes; e.g., my own take on Eric Draven from years ago, standing with guitarist/keyboardist/songwriter for Steam Powered Giraffe, Michael Reed [who, again, I would later investigate as a sex pest, ibid.]—but also Bay’s shelf of sex toys and pup gear [which they’re happy to show off in my book; they always feel like they have to cover it up when people enter their room, but secretly are incredibly proud of it] or Nothosaur Toys’ “Strawberry Gothic” surreal-meets-delightful, candied expression of the “strawberry with teeth”; i.e., the vagina dentata gag minus the destructive “castration fantasy” but still having some of the visual implements of harm melded to the delicious and cutesy.)
An important device to remember is that nudism is asexual unless negotiated to be sexual, mid-cryptonymy. As we have already explored, asexuality can occur in sexual language—with an ace model relating to sexual-orienting persons in sexual language that they themselves feel indifferent about. Likewise, the exposure is controlled—i.e., behind the spatial divide between the ace person and the sexual person, illustrated by the screen as something that cannot be crossed. Indeed, it’s this very buffer that allows for negotiated exchanges to safely take place: a “safe space” for cash transactions regarding what is, for many models, a form of nudism that—per the cryptonymy process—hides and shows whatever we want it to, on the Aegis as shared by our enemies.
The idea, for us, is to reclaim this ability to negotiate for the benefit of sex worker rights according to how they are perceived, mid-cryptonymy. Nudism can be eroticized, even tied to profit to varying degrees, but it is always an expression of sex workers and their rights as paramount (it also invokes a knowing playfulness, one where sex workers take the opportunity to delightfully flash those slightly less marginalized than themselves under canonical duress: “Oh, boy, she knows exactly what she’s doing! Drivin’ us crazy lovin’ every minute of it!” And ol’ Luke was right: During oppositional praxis, sometimes “nothin'” can be a real cool hand.)
We’ve established porn and monsters are always liminal; as a transgressive nudist tool, sex work in the Internet age often takes place online—in public spaces where anything and everything can be shared. Twitter even condones the soliciting of sex, albeit with a bias towards ways that adhere to the status quo (social media platforms are owned, after all). Any displays that delineate from the heteronormative standard and its universal clientele will be punished to whatever degree they are perceived as “trespassing” (a failure to stay in one’s lane, even if that “lane” is the proverbial gutter).
And given that progressive politics have normalized cis-queer persons, the goalpost scapegoat has shifted onto a smaller minority group trying to exist unmolested during displays of public nudism and sex work as potentially ace: trans, intersex, and non-binary persons as increasingly non-gender-conforming than even their cis-queer counterparts. There are dangers when nakedly showing ourselves, but also layers of safety despite being naked onscreen. Sex workers generally show their faces, but work within aliases; the work is often temporary and later will involve companies specializing in model protection that scrub their images from the internet (and from websites that pirate sex worker material).
Yet, as a friend told me once, there is no full-measure that can be taken to run or hide from our exploitation; it cannot be avoided because those who fear us will, like the Red Bull, push us to the ends of the earth and into the sea. This kind of segregation must be fought against, not submitted to or assimilated. In short, the fear that workers-in-solidarity can generate is often best represented by a famous, powerful, and yes, at times angry monstrous-feminine: the surface of their body/the image as cryptonymy!
(artist: Eniaart)
In those unhappy circumstances, nudity as a means of exposing our true selves through some sense of agency can dazzle or petrify our opponents behind the barrier of a phone screen, but also confuse their harmful conditioning by showing them something they have also been taught to work towards: sex as owed. In short, nudity becomes something of a “bargaining chip” that never fully loses its bargaining power (short of some futurist Utopia where fully realistic and subservient sex dolls become the norm; or a complete fascist uprising that dimorphizes everything in sight). Likewise, gender parody becomes something to chase be even the most staunch defenders of the faith. And once they dabble, they can be outed and exposed for the hypocrites they are. Added with the paralysis of mixed messages during a forced, buffered negotiation of sex as exchanged, there’s a mixture of danger and liberation that gives proponents of Gothic-Communism room to breathe.
We’ve touched on costumes a little bit and ahegao and rape pastiche. We’ll unpack these in the following subchapters, but first I want use the remainder of this subchapter to outline more threats of what we’re up against with unironic examples of the death fetish, the rape-through-war as valorized in the relationship between fiction, and the rules playing out in domestic and foreign territories. Under the status quo, realism is a state of constant reinforcement (race realism, Capitalism Realism); it cannot always be met with polite conversation, but requires transgressive nudism as guided by constructive anger and healing that outs the harmful by exposing them to the thing they fear most: worker solidarity as a reminder of their own reality as in crisis.
It’s an invitation, then, to rise up through an apocalypse of our own. Let our actual bodies, labor, newfound voices and power show them the truth of their own fear and weakness, our “magic archaeologies” exposing their own canon as dogmatic lies through borrowed masks and robes worn undercover against our undercover adversaries—a double agency (to make a pun) that whittles away the reserves of those imitating us as we imitate them to control the conversation in ways useful to use: outing the Nazi without becoming one ourselves (a death fetish, some spankings and a blindfold does not a Nazi make).
The fact remains, we will not win today or tomorrow or in a hundred years, but keeping closeted and quiet is also no protection even in the short run. We cuties and twinks and intelligent minds are what they fear the most; every step we take towards development is a victory—a new strain of composite, hybrid undead friendly to the cause that effortlessly reject the dualist, dueling past as an outmoded, pathetic and hopelessly violent way of thinking. To lift from Ho Chi Minh, they will kill ten of us and we will “kill” (transform) one of them, but in the end, they will tire first (the canon cannot win if its cannons will not fire, or if the cannon balls sprout wings and fly away). Our power stems from what they can’t strike down, like Obi Wan if Obi Wan were an openly Gay Communist Wizard (and not the franchised space job FOX turned him into through Lucas’ latter-day billionaire Marxism).
Even so, it’s important to remember what we’re up against: the power of the state to wage war in the shadows. Fascism, for example, is false power and knowledge, its users terminally allergic to the kind of exposure that iconoclastic emotional intelligence offers. Under Capitalism, the hauntology and the cryptonymic dog of war act as a displaced threat of legendary violence and rape that finally comes home to roost—something “mad, bad and dangerous to know” (sorry, Byron) that’s badass, which many Americans worship with lobotomized zombie-vampire brains adopt upon their own masks. In love with the centrist fable of the black knight, they are simultaneously unable to imagine anything beyond their own fantasies of the glorious retro-future’s new feudalism. Their state of emergency sends out waves of terror/war pastiche that forever reinvents itself to preserve Capitalism in a mode of endless self-deception and self-destruction, of the “Join Us or Die” mantra except the number of admissible undead shrinks and shrinks (a fascist FOMO tactic: “fear of missing out”). Humans become the virus and the dead walk the earth.
Except, when there is no more room in hell (the police state), the false-rebellious, undead witch cops/Amazon war bosses will spring up from the faded castles and build a new dark age. In conquest of the self as in crisis, they set upon the wretched regular, wretched refugees, the homeless (friendly zombies) and the fugitives (proletarian witches) as literal-figurative targets or collateral damage of Capitalism’s devious proponents: the old rich, the nouveau riche, or those vigilantes and class traitors wanting to be rich at various registers of power and in various modes of expression both real or imagined but all historical-material (all poor in spirit and alienated from their fellow humans, from labor, from animals and nature).
Simply put, the nation-state will self-colonize, the Imperial Boomerang that reinvokes the ancient rite of passage into a fresh nightmare of sanctions, total war, warrior shrines and torture porn. Everything that they dream about, including lebensraum and its liminal hauntologies, are once more compelled under crisis, conducting a radical settler colonialism in covert: “Go everywhere, young [ninja] zombie! Bring me the earth!” (exhibit 99e). The likes of Himuro Genma (re: exhibit 15a, “Healing from Rape“) or Emperor Tulpa would be proud, but also jealous of that kind of impunity—i.e., privatized war thumbing its nose secretly at vain proponents of so-called “democracy” framing this procedure as anything but bourgeois. The subterfuge trifecta has become internalized to a lobotomizing degree, a bad mask that hides nothing:
(exhibit 101a2: Source: Just as concentric masks must be removed from the faces of cryptofascists, the war masks of overt fascists must also be addressed. Khalid Mohammed, from David Chen’s “Chief of Army Bans Soldiers from Wearing ‘Arrogant’ Death Symbols” (2018):
[A member of Iraq’s elite Special Forces wears a skull mask in the fight against the Islamic State in 2016.(AP:)] Australia’s Chief of Army, Lieutenant General Angus Campbell, has issued a directive that prohibits the wearing of “death” symbols. Lieutenant General Campbell said the practice was arrogant, ill-considered and that it eroded the ethos of the Army. The directive was circulated as an internal minute on April 17, and later posted to unofficial social media pages for commentary. Several symbols were specifically prohibited because of their violent, murderous and vigilante symbolism including the Grim Reaper, the Skull and Crossbones, Spartans, and the Phantom or Punisher [ibid.].
Fascism is a cult of death tied to national heroism.)
All these are cut from the same “funeral shroud,” the same ghost of the counterfeit that’s written across every dimension that centrism depends on for its daily blood tax and yearly grim harvest: the altar of the nation as watered with the fresh blood of new young patriots, the capitalist State and preserving itself through fresh paramilitary victims and their victims. All but the elite are seemingly touched, of course; but they, high in their ebony towers, will grow old and slowly die, alienated and alone.
Until then, their nepotistic bloodlines give birth to bourgeois zombie-vampire babies who become dependent on these unholy tithes to make them fat, but whose cursed arrangements rots their brains, blinds their eyes, and makes them hopelessly reliant on the system to give them more, more, more. They cannot make their own, cannot labor themselves, are alienated and vulnerable to those in control of them should revolution come home to roost. Nothing scares them more than workers who are awake: people who see through one lie, the another—through the corporate-colonized Nazi pageantry of post-1977 Star Wars, through the zombie-vampire centrist giant dogwhistle of Zombie-Capitalism summoning tin soldiers.
For now, many workers feel “made for war” but cannot grasp the reason, under war fatigue from being out of work (work, under Capitalism being stolen, alienated/alienizing labor) and knowing nothing but war and playing at make-pretend, miniature war. It’s like a lesser drug that gradually becomes less and less satisfying to bigger forms of promised make-pretend: genocide (the payoff to their struggle) as Ragnarok, the war to end all wars.
This conditioned, denied bloodlust—of war as a drug to push—make these impostors not just bad—as in, stupid, inept liars who kill the homeless and other peoples useless to Capitalism (Dreading’s “‘The Scourge of Society’: The Idiotic Case of Dalton Aiken and Cory Fitzwater,” 2023)—but are simultaneously unable to perform their work effectively. To this, fascists privileged, not clever (efficient profit in action); they’re rabid dogs-of-war—little more than Pavlovian, straw bloodhounds, howling mindlessly when called to heel, to fight desperately for less and less scraps (a Pavlovian menticide of “discipline and punish”) and annually cull the herd of tokens, TERFs and other false-beggar grifters (The Rational National’s “Ben Shapiro & Candace Owens Strike Back At Steven Crowder,” 2023) and state-assigned scapegoat (the fascist “plot of a conspiracy” tactic)/useful idiots amid a shrinking-yet-rising paywall (monopolized violence and financial “soft power/economic bullying” against workers); but also kill any covert, revolutionary and or vagrant witch “just passing through.” We transient queers are not the accommodated intellectuals in their monasterial fortresses sending covert messages in bottles down the river. We live on the streets, in the trenches, and must be careful but also bold because this is where the war is fought. We must transform, quickly slipping into our own disguises and doubles to deceive with “borrowed robes”: allegory and liminal revolt that shows the false tigers what we’re both made of—them of paper and us of sterner stuff.
We’ll get to “borrowing” as a concept in just a moment. First, though, let’s briefly give some more examples of “flashing” as illustrated by myself and other artists that “borrow robes” (nudity is almost always couched within the parting of clothes that are not entirely removed from the body). As branded commodities that are being reclaimed by us, the aim is to “flash” those in, with, on the fence about or against power in liminal ways—intentionally showing the goods under our robes, but also hiding them exposed in plain sight with similar informed/informing intent and cryptonymic language (our bullet with butter wings, our bombshells and grenades, our undead war without violence, through monster pastiche, poster pastiche, disguise pastiche and other forms of proletarian praxis weaponized covertly against the state):
(exhibit 101b: Artist, top-left: Akira Raikou; top-right: Persephone van der Waard, of a flashing “furry” version of Amalthea from The Last Unicorn [re: “Follow the White-to-Black Rabbit“]; bottom: Persephone van der Waard, from back in 2016. The “flashing of the naked body is more than “simply being transgressive.” It’s illustrating a historically-materially ironic display of someone who cultivated their appearance and gender themselves, has seized their sexual labor and production of media attached to it to illustrate a sex-positive lesson through iconoclastic art—illustrating mutual-consent in other words: “Look because I let you, but don’t touch!” The iconoclasm doesn’t even change the visual markers all that much; it’s move what these expressing in live exhibits and records from authors who show how they want to be seen and treated socially and sexually that simultaneously alters the public perception of demonized sex workers and their various linguo-material components. Moreover, the body itself is literally the canvas and the brush, a “cloak pastiche” that literally-figuratively “cloaks” workers from danger by posturing as art to begin with [often of popular canonical figures or crossovers].)
At once everywhere and seemingly nowhere, we become the bricks of the walls these warlords’ pensioners have ignominiously made for themselves, passing through like ghosts, an assemblage of revolutionary monsters communicating codes (girl talk, the pedagogy of the oppressed)—whose modular Babel and expert code-switching speaks to all revolutionaries in ways the elite cannot see or decipher save as the revolutionary cryptonymic language they think they know. It disguises the revolution itself from them.
Yet even if they did “get wise” (fat chance), they cannot force people to work, as their structures of fascist violence have been alienated from them, too. They would have to risk everything on grabbing for old gambits and become fascists themselves, except they wouldn’t know how because one, they’re capitalists and two, are infantilized to some degree, alienated by the very structure whose teat they greedily suck on: “The cat likes fish but does not like to wet her paws,” Lady Macbeth. And while the elite are already old, afraid and dying (“A king has his reign and then he dies.”), they remain utterly ruthless and far from defenseless.
We, likewise, are far from invincible or perfect (which liminally extends to the palliative, merciful platitudes of the well-meant, but out-of-touch liberals, and bad-faith neoliberal and reactionary examples who still show demonstrable, if preferential kindness/mistreatment in some shape of form). There are risks to rebellion from many directions and across many avenues. As we proceed towards danger, this chapter will continue to explore said risks from our perspectives—i.e., what we see, experience and feel when communally transmuting war pastiche and dealing with the worst and “best” that Capitalism has to offer. Their mindset is historically rigid and inflexible; ours is like a kitten in a snifter glass: supple and fluid, able to bend (and use our claws) under reactive abuse while our enemies inevitably snap and cave. In the absence of total force, it’s all they can do, all we can do.
Let’s not mince words, lethal force is a constant threat under genocide, and genuine riot is always an option in the absence of justice; genocide must not, however, become normalized under any circumstances, and oppositional praxis through various creative successes can achieve that by changing minds. This includes “flashing” those with power while wearing “borrowed robes” and masks of xenophilic (monster) disguise pastiche. The act of “borrowing” certainly walks the tightrope, so I’d like to examine it a bit more closely. By doing so, I want to illustrate a paradox we’ll have to confront and work with when exploring war pastiche and how it’s created and viewed: liminality as something that will be used to scapegoat us; i.e., even when it—through reclaimed language—works best to express our true selves being oppressed in ironic forms (whose irony depicts the whore’s revenge during cryptonymy as performance). During Gothic Communism or not, “rape” and rape tend to look the same; i.e., mutual consent being something to impart through cryptonymy as ludo-Gothic BDSM, which relies on dialectical-material scrutiny from those viewing the performance (whatever that is; e.g., penetration, below):
(artist: Harmony Corrupted)
On to borrowing robes per the cryptonymy process! Onto “Borrowed Robes (opening and part one, ‘Proletarian Warrior Moms and Breeding Kinks’)“!
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] As Se7en123 writes,
“The song, ‘Megalomaniac,’ is meant as an ironic song to satire other punk bands that have gone mainstream and over their own heads. In this song, KMFDM talks about how they are the best thing since Jesus Christ. The video is the perfect ironic statement, filled with marketing, and even a disclaimer stating “WARNING: THIS VIDEO HAS BEEN CREATED FOR PROMOTIONAL PURPOSES AS A PART OF THE MARKETING STRATEGY FOR THE SINGLE MEGALOMANIAC BY KMFDM”‘ (source: Se7en123, on Genius, 2015).
I would argue its branded “counterculture” and “appropriate rebellion” has a German, shock-flavor similar to Rammstein, but also bands like Sepultura (re: exhibit 94c2b, “Obliterating Phoebe“) or System of a Down (re: “Toxic Schlock Syndrome“). There’s rebellious potential, but the allegory—as something to activate—is still packaged and sold to a mainstream (white, middle class) audience; e.g., The Matrix or Barbie (2023).
[2] Or the vampire stealing one’s essence, symbolized by the traditional source of female power: her virginity as symbolized by her panties, her crotch (re: “Understanding Vampires“). The idea of the extramarital lothario’s “stake” being produced to penetrate the sleeping or otherwise helpless woman would have been unironically mutilative to scare/intrigue Neo-Gothic female readers; i.e., to flirt with danger but ultimately go home and marry the hero. In truth, female desire as unregulated by heteronormative proponents would do as Angel Witch or the other woman in the above photo does: to grab the “stake,” spread her legs and guide it [safely] inside her to partake deeply of a healthy penetration amid the death ritual as reclaimed [in some cases while literally asleep, but otherwise bound and gagged, unable to move or scream; re: exhibit 11b2, “Challenging the State“]. In porn, this is called “aiming” or “guiding”; i.e., for the woman to be penetrated safely.)
[3] Paraphrased from Twinkl.co’s own definition:
A Whakataukī is a Māori proverb where the origins are unknown. They have an important role in Māori culture. Whakataukī are often used as a motivational tool and can be used in speeches or everyday conversations. They can include poetic language and have an underlying meaning. Whakataukī can show thoughts and feelings in Māori. The word whakataukī comes from 3 different words, “whaka” (to cause), “tau” (to be settled) and “kī” (a saying). Whakataukī is a saying that has become settled over time, from when it was first said and regularly repeated up to this day (source).