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.
“Which Witch?”—”What is a Witch?” part one: An Example of Proletarian Witches in The Last of Us (2023; also feat. Myth and Everquest)
The time has come for you, my friend
Your journey has come to an end
So hark the Devil’s angels sing
Or will they? No one knows
A destiny you can’t avoid
Your spirit slips into the void
Then sucked away without a trace
Into the great unknown (source).
—Mandy Martillo; “Beyond the Bells,” on Satan’s Hallow’s Satan’s Hallow (2015)
Picking up where “Chapter Two: Sex Coercion (opening and ‘Witch Cops and Victims’)” left off…
As we saw in Volume Two, hauntological discourse and fascism under capital evolved into itself over time, leading to creation of many different witches to conduct state violence with or towards. Whether hunters or hunted, the status “witch” clearly comes in many forms. We’re going to look at the warring iterations that result from oppositional praxis throughout the remainder of this chapter and the rest of Sex Positivity (with part two of “What is a Witch?” being in Chapter Five). However, in this particular chapter section, I want to invite the viewer to look beyond the heteronormative lens at a particular kind of proletarian witch: the bear (queer code for a fuzzy gay man).
We’ve examined 2023’s The Last of Us in Volume Two (re: “Cryptomimesis“); i.e., hinting at Mother Nature’s revenge through xenomorphic stand-ins—the essence-seeking mushroom men (whose “clicking” echolocation has a bat-like, vampiric quality to it that harkens back to Matteson’s zombie-vampires from I Am Legend, 1954)! Now I want to examine a pleasant-but-welcome surprise: two witches—but specifically two gay men named Bill and Frank—as buried, mid-apocalypse, but alive and together (aw)! We fags are classically hunted by the state, and these two bears—our gay Romeo and Juliet—don’t tokenize (one Cartesian metaphor for the dualism of the mushroom being disease and AIDS, but also a refusal to radicalize, which we won’t comment on, here). Bears or not, does capital classically trot us fags out and torture us for straight folk. A lesson remains all the same, written on the walls in the likeness of gore as suitable transformative: the roots of trauma.
Note: This close-read is quite short, and jumps to other media besides The Last of Us.; re: Everquest and Myth. For more emphasis pointedly on zombie apocalypses and their history/poetic application, refer to “Bad Dreams.” —Perse, 5/2/2025
Frank is a survivalist; his “pet bear” and eventual life partner is Bill, who he captures in one of his traps. Both love music and art, but inside Frank’s little compound, Bill is the one who plays dress-up, decorating the empty streets and boutiques with fresh life. In short, Bill teaches Frank to be less of a xenophobe isolationist and more openly gay/xenophilic. And Frank, to his credit, protects Bill and looks after him, too. It’s incredibly sweet, but also cliché: Both gays die at the end, dead and buried as go-to targets of Capitalism and its enforcers. The xenophilia is overshadowed by terminal prejudice the victims internalize and execute.
The Last of Us illustrates the witch hunt as canonized in American canon: the retro-future of pre-colonialism, a smash-and-grab regression backwards into the future that exploits workers through their survival mechanisms. By trying to survive, Capitalism is the survival mechanism gone haywire, a state of exception that turns everyone into zombie-vampire pirates (the original word for pirate being privateer) according to the uniform as something that becomes a part of someone’s identify in a way they can’t simply “take off”: e.g., Darth Vader’s cybernetic suit or the swastika forehead scars from Inglorious Basterds. To that, Capitalist Realism pulls away pulls away the mechanisms of the state and uses fear and dogma to pointedly make everyone and install raiders at the highest orders of power that still stand. Frank saw this in the real world, thinking Nazis were everywhere before the Imperial Boomerang came back around, the grim reapers appearing more openly during Capitalism-in-crisis; he’d already put up his fences and traps, scared to let anyone in (with his catching off the disarmingly sweet Bill being a metaphor for letting the right one in, past one’s defenses), making his story ultimately one about growth as gay in the presence of state death: he comes out and dies out on his own terms during said crisis as beyond his control.
In our world, the symptom has become the product. When Max Brooks write a book like World War Z (2006), neoliberals cash in with Brad Pitt to make people respond predictably to prophesied war (they’ve had centuries of practice to draw upon, war being a historical-material byproduct they can frame as not of this earth); fascists live for this shit, cannot wait to become the fearsome death dealer. In either case, the manufactured apocalypse of canonical praxis is pure emotional/Gothic manipulation. It becomes the end of emancipatory imagination beyond its own stupid rules, a mind prison where there is nothing beyond the state and its undead enforcers and victims. Within this phenomenological boneyard, Hogle’s vanishing point hoards a presence not quite there that is, on some level, intimated by the oppositional praxis (and its monsters, perils, lairs/parallel space and phobias) on display. It’s also felt by the disillusioned who, in their own fortresses, are at least somewhat on the mark: Frank.
I say “somewhat” because Frank “hates the world” and his diegetic conspiracies simultaneously validate those outside of the text who unironically scream “Don’t tread on me!” as they wave the Gadsden flag (which he has inside his gun bunker). Simply put, the Gadsden flag is a big red flag. It’s American canon that symbolizes historically dangerous groups and ideologies like right-libertarianism and classical liberalism; it champions abused ideas that dogwhistle to fascists—with terms like “small government” or distrust for or defiance against authorities and government period, which are things Hitler exploited in his own false revolutions against those in power and things those in power employ in they own canon. Indeed, the Gadsden flag is co-opted for right-wing populism or far-right ideology on par with the very cryptofascists that Frank and Bill fight about: “The Nazis weren’t in power back then—well, they are now, but—!”
In this sense, Bill is both right and wrong. The elite were in power, distinguished largely from the Nazis by their material conditions, not their ability to lie, cheat, murder and steal. For them, the Nazis are the scapegoat, the proverbial assassin’s blade they can distance themselves from but put into motion. Or as Tyrion Lannister once put, “What sort of fool arms an assassin with his own blade?” The Nazis, that’s who. They are dumbasses who deck their dirks with pirate skulls and other stupid shit; the neoliberal is the Greater Good, disguising theirs behind the Nazis, the American flag and various other cryptonyms. Fascism is bred in American to defend American as the elite’s fortress, their home base.
As the neoliberal sells war as default, they naturalize it as righteous and populated conspicuously by fascists as stubbornly diehard. For the neoliberal, the end of the world becomes a call-to-war that invokes the new dark age as a constant threat of collapse—of total, unadulterated bedlam; for the fascist, they’re tired of being the elite’s garbage boy and dream of replacing them at the top, no matter how fallen these institutions are: the kings of the open graveyard, standing on the neoliberals midden of disguised, canonized corpse fields (what Queen called “The Princes of the Universe” [1986]: “We’ve come to be the rulers of you all!”). As these fields and their zombie monarchs awaken, they become fresh killing fields; those inside the seemingly benign colonized spheres find themselves besieged by those they hate and fear—themselves, turned into abject monsters and raiders under this “new” world order who “want it all, want it now!” (also Queen, 1989).
(exhibit 84a2: Top: war pastiche exhibits of the hauntological past, all directly from Myth: the Fallen Lords [source: Myth Journals] except for the middle-left picture of the mighty warrior-wizard, Rabican [artist: Fabio Di Castro]. Bottom: art of my alter-ego Revana, including an old illustration redone for the cover and one done for Christmas last year.
The game is a curious fossil—reassembled from the low-res CDs images of a pre-Halo, less-privatized Bungie, whose LOTR-meets-Lovecraft-meets-He-Man-and the-Masters of-the-Universe has sexist, “idiot hero” vibes on par with Ash from Evil Dead chopping off the hag’s head with his chainsaw—with Rabican doing the same to Shiver, Bungie’s proverbial hag [fun fact: my alter-ego/persona, Revana, actually comes from a misspelling of Shiver’s original name, Ravana [Mythipedia]. Doing so was my gradual, increasingly trans attempt to reclaim her from Bungie’s Raimi-esque treatment of the character—i.e., “Honey, you got real ugly!” I wanted to, in a gradual, liminal-trans sense, the gender-troubling proposition, “imagine Conan with a pussy,” slowly reclaiming the heteronormative language from its sexist histories in my own praxis; I also draw her as having optional genitals and breasts]. The fun with Myth lies in the Promethean overtones of the chronotopic power exchange and hereditary rites, which ultimately return to the Imperium and the “watering” of the altar of the status quo with fresh manly blood. My twin and I both loved this game. In particular, we had grown up on Braveheart, 1995, which clearly inspired the game’s mythical berserks—to such a degree that my own video demos of the game have titles of me overcoming the Greater Evils of the Dark with only one sole surviving member of my own war party.
As a teenage girl in the closet, I pointedly called this short-lived video series “Braveheart”; even if teenage me didn’t fully understand why Shiver was bad or had to be killed, I still valued the heroic, glorious sacrifice of my soldiers as an extension of me. Eventually I took the fantasy language of the ’90s—looted from games like Myth; Diablo 1, 1996; and Everquest, 1999—and spent the rest of my life transmuting them in xenophilic ways; i.e., among the usual racialized language Tolkien populated evolving into future variations, like barbarians, haunting Rome’s perceived fall into future campaigns to buttress the gates:
[source: Fandom]
Also, side note: Everquest was one of the first MMORPGs that, while online, was released in the dial-up era, thus heavily reliant on keyboard typing and socializing in ways where players had to congregate and organizing in large, open, forum-like spaces and town squares; i.e., “chatroom MMOs.” It was surprisingly educational in ways that videogames of today in the AAA industry aren’t really recognized for. Instead, later games become far more cherished by corporations, who turned players into data/commodities through enforced live-service/FOMO models with subscriptions and microtransactions that serve only to milk players of their money beyond what the product’s gameplay can be reasonably expected to last. It has become entirely exploitative in this day and age, but also portable; i.e., mobile/phone games.)
(exhibit 84b: Artist: Keith Parkinson. Fantasy tropes in older videogames tended to be heteronormative, especially in D&D [whose portrayal in Stranger Things, season 4, basically told the Satanic Panic narrative from the POV of privileged white, cis-het boys—and token characters—feeling oppressed for being associated with Satan by conservative groups]. D&D wasn’t merely the precursor to ’90s fantasy videogames; it was the palimpsest, offering both the rule set [dice rolls] and aesthetic that was often incredibly heteronormative, thus Male Gaze. As I write in “Borrowed Robes”:
Characters, though especially their clothes, ostensibly appeal to player optics—how they want to be seen. Traditional female characters have little to do with female desires in this regard. Instead, these characters are “visual treats” for a male player-audience to enjoy. This logic applies to female game events more generally. The more substantial an event or character is, the more sexualized they tend to be (see: the “best” ending for Strife, when Blackbird, a female operative, is offered to the male hero as a sexual reward).
The problem is, female players have to exist in the same gameworld. Their own desires are either ignored, or inaccurately portrayed. Either through her own avatar or the NPCs she encounters (see: the Dagger witch covens), a female player is forced to see how men want her to appear. This goes beyond escaping the traditional, passive roles like the damsel-in-distress. Female heroes are invariably sexualized no matter the type. The women who play them must put on the girdle, or see other women fetishized for men. Any sense of autonomy is bridled [source].
Indeed, games like Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall [1996] were very sexualized for the period, allowing players to entirely disrobe to reveal their bare, naked bodies, but largely for white, cis-het boys and men fetishizing women. Even so, this eroticizing of anthropomorphic/stigma characters like Argonians or Khajit [xenophobic furries] melded into paganized xenophobia; i.e., a fear-fascination with witches [and crosses between these ideations]. Ideally this xenophobia can be subverted into xenophilia, transmuting the sexualized elements in ways that lead to adoration for the oppressed groups.
For example, I used to play Elder Scrolls III: Skyrim [2009] for years, modding the game tirelessly [a practice whose parent company, Bethesda, made nearly impossible through the efficient-profit, cost-cutting practices of using outdated softwares, while also relying on players to “patch” their games for them—a service they would undermine with every single developer patch they released]. I went so far as to make “Nick’s Skyrim Improvement Guide” in 2012, featuring a list of cosmetic/gameplay improvements:
Greetings, fellow Skyrim users! I made this guide with the intention of educating people who like to use mods; in other words, it isn’t in any shape or form a guide on how to make mods. Before I begin, I just wanted to say thanks to all of the people, the creators of these mods, software, and guides. Skyrim is a much better game for me thanks to you! : )
Disclaimer: I am not a modder — i.e., someone that creates mods. I merely use them. I have spent many sleepless nights trying to get this damn game to work correctly with all of the mods on this list. Now that I finally have, I present to you a list of all the mods that I use (and a few handy tips) to deliver to you a version of Skyrim I consider to be far superior to the original, vanilla one.
Again, this is simply the way I play Skyrim. I downloaded all the mods in this guide off of the Nexus and recommend that you do the same. These people work hard on these, so make sure you respect their wishes. Don’t be shy about dropping by and endorsing their hard work! This includes my guide. If you like it, endorse it [source: Nexus Mods, “Nick’s Skyrim Improvement Guide NSFW Version“].
Apart from the guide, I also made various early YouTube videos promoting the guide, which are still up on my old channel; e.g., Nicholas van der Waard’s “Nick’s Skyrim Improvement Guide: Enhanced Character Edit,” 2013. The idea of modding the game was partly gameplay-oriented, but just as focused on an honest interest in sexuality and gender expression. I loved playing beautiful characters with strong, curvy bodies, generous endowments and scanty clothing—i.e., a very ’70s-’80s Amazonian swords-and-sorcery fantasy revival, but sex-positive in its inclusion and celebration of the go-to “furry” races as fully nude [versus ascribing “nudity” on the surface of clothing in the Gothic tradition; re: Sedgwick] alongside Amazons and witches practicing nudism without fear of punishment. By taking the shame out of the equation of sex as “profane,” xenophiles address how canonical monster sex is nevertheless sold to the universal clientele as a kind of profitable “forbidden fruit” the elite could [and can] exploit into the present. Said exploitation occupies the same place liberation does, and they use the same language in duality.
My xenophilic approach subverting such canon includes sexualizing orcs in ways that made me feel pretty and strong; e.g., having curves, muscle and on-point makeup. I loved to play dress up, putting on different outfits and makeup before venturing forth to kill some bandits while listening to the OST from Goldenaxe [1989] or Annihilator songs; I also enjoyed the ability—much like Second Life [2003]—to be able to disable the HUD [heads-up display] and manipulate the camera however I wanted. Like sex work in general, this was useful for photography as a larger, holistic process—one that involved models, sets, and costumes, but also nature something to simulate and inhabit through one’s avatar as “photographed” through screencaps. To that, nothing was more satisfying that getting the perfect body angle, lighting and outfit; it became an artform divorced from the core gameplay experience, devoted solely to sex-positive expression.)
This anthropocentric nightmare is at once an appeal to isolation and simultaneously a call to war to bring them out of the woodwork. It’s Peter Pan syndrome, with a promise to reclaim “what’s rightfully theirs” (settler colonialism turned in on itself to defend the elite as Capitalism decays). The resultant wish fulfillment is liminal and complex: a tomboy’s wet dream, the modern man’s desire to be savage, the survivalist prepping for the literal zombie apocalypse. Any of them wants to put their skills to the test, to—in capitalist terms—feel useful in a privatized way. The conspiracy theories and conspiratorial, Quanon-level mercenaries come to the fore, the inmates running the asylum as the elite retreat and watch the world burn from their hiding spots (the greatest trick the elite ever pulled was to convince the world they were dead/didn’t exist). It’s all fear and dogma, an elaborate canonical misdirection that leads to yet-another-grim-harvest, a fetid “Thanksgiving” of unburied death and wanton destruction.
In short, the actual genocide is materialized, no longer a ghost of the counterfeit by waved in front of workers to scare them accordingly. Fear immigrants, free lunches and Communists! Kick your survival instincts into overdrive! Invoke the shooter’s fantasy and solve “your” problems! Meanwhile, all workers are made into witch cops (class traitors) or criminals, each exploited accordingly.
Capitalism makes you hungry and then exploits it. The problem with manufactured scarcity is it can backfire spectacularly. “Everything tastes good when you’re starving!” says Frank, babying his new pet with fresh lamb. Having someone to sit at his table, he feels love and slowly comes out of the closet. In this case, the touching part is how this isn’t “prison sex” at all. We have two ideal revolutionaries from different walks who are both a good fit for the other. It only took the end of the world to bring them together.
The sad truth is, for gay people and other witch targets under the state of exception, the end of the world is simply Tuesday. To borrow from Kyle Reese, they never see the war that brought about their present calamities. They grow up after it, are always in the ruins, “starving and hiding from HKs.” Kyle described these hunter-killers as patrol machines built in automated factories. Such a chain of consumption evokes the manufactured consent and military industrial complex of the early 20th century that has become what it presently is, in love with its own past self as canonical nostalgia: It kills everything but saves Americans for last, on a descending rung of preferential mistreatment.
(exhibit 85: Left, artist: Persephone van der Waard; right: screencaps from The Terminator. My drawing is the unknown female soldier from The Terminator. In the novelization, she’s called Corporal Ferro; in the movie, she was played by Linda Hamilton’s stunt double, Jean Malahni [which went uncredited; Facebook: Tech-Com: 2029 – A Terminator Game, 2020]. She was the soldier woman Kyle failed to save. After re-dreaming her death, Kyle dreams to live on and meet the legend; his dream comes true, with him living on to teach Sarah to fend for herself in the face of Capitalism run amok: her dream-like warrior from another time.
At first, Kyle barks “bad BDSM” at her [“Do what I say! Exactly! Don’t move unless I say, don’t make a sound unless I say! Do you understand? Do you understand?”], but eventually learns to be more gentle and open up about his feelings. He tells Sarah that he loves her like he never did with Ferro; Sarah, in turn, is able to be braver and stronger, “loving a lifetime’s worth” with someone special and standing up for herself in ways her own victimized roommate, Ginger, could not. Sarah escapes her immediate doom, but in the face of a bigger calamity finds something to live for and pass on: her son, who teaches Kyle “how to fight, how storm the wire of the camps and smash those metal mother fuckers into junk!”
I’ve made Ferro more motherly and sweet, but still sexy and strong in ways that stress her Communist role as a mascot/role model for organized revolt; she’s a parody of the canonical Amazon meant to cause gender trouble. My own gender-troubling legacy involves me playing around with gender and sexuality by illustrating liminal heroes/heroines in trans/sex-positive ways—to apply “imagining Conan with a pussy” [exhibit 112] to Kyle through Sarah as his female double: a postcolonialist, but still on the poster.)
Under this xenophobic pall, gay men are hunted and killed, forced to fight under reactive abuse when the raiders return. Stranger danger and worker exploitation becomes disguised as highway robbery in a displaced, dissociative American wasteland. Pro-state isolationists are pitted against Communists and other pro-labor enemies of the state, whose community defense is pitted against “defense” of the state’s fortress.
Under these fear-and-dogma circumstances, there is no woman to love. Instead, our two bears in the forest invoke a de-alienated form of homoeroticism; divorced from “prison sex,” they reunite with the very things that Capitalism alienates us from: each other, our labor, our bodies, our language, our sexuality and our bond with nature. They are buried for it, re: the homonormative “bury your gays” trope being the only way that many Americans can even think about homosexual men at all. However, they consciously die on their own terms, unbowed and proud and with each other. It’s a relatively long life spent between two partners who protect and love the other, then pass on their implements of protection to those they respect. O, Commie zombie bears! “Adieu! Adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades!”
Personally I’d like an ode to the queers that doesn’t automatically condemn us to death, but with such a confederacy against us, the truth must also be exposed in liminal ways. So why not both? “I’m no unicorn, no magical creature! I’m human and I love you!” said Amalthea; and Schmendrick, in an aside, replies, “There are no happy endings because nothing ends.” The idea is to rub off onto others, I think. Indeed, as my friend Mavis and I watched this show, they told me how they were made of sterner stuff and how their partners (the non-abusive ones) were generally “big softies.”
To it, meeting those who cried helped Mavis learn how to cry by loving and protecting in ways beyond the heteronormative order of things—to love and protect as Bill and Frank did, to connect with each other and help the world do the same. Mavis and I both wept watching this. There were no shameful tears for the dead; crying processes trauma and emotions, through which the Gothic imagination can be reclaimed—how people talk and create and think as something closer to the heart. No violent chauffeurs in service of false heroes, like Guts was to Griffith from Berserk (1996); no more lies, no more false consciousness. Or, as Sarah Conor put it, “If a machine can learn the value of human life, maybe we can, too” (minus the whole “salvage the nuclear family model” thing that Cameron really leaned into for T2—learn to cry, men!). That’s xenophilia with potentially the right amount of irony to aid in universal liberation (which Cameron abandoned; re: the Avatar franchise, exhibit 8b2, “Predators as Amazons“).
The opposite of that is criminogenic per dogma and economics leading to fear of the unknown; i.e., as something to fetishize and attack, which we’ll look at, next.
Ruling through Fear: Dogma and Economics
“Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”
—Reverend Mother (evil space nun written nun written by homophobic author[1]) Gaius Helen Mohiam, Dune
Now that we’ve outlined the underlying ideological structure of witch hunts and witch cops—and looked at something xenophilic as haunting those graveyards, in cop-like ways—let’s further investigate the fetishizing mentality they promote (under neoliberal Capitalism) through intersecting dogma and economics: a culture of fear and toxic love centered around the automatic criminalization of descriptive sexuality. So is neoliberalism an economic model built around fear through toxic love!
First, dogma. Prescriptive punishment relies on dogma made within relative institutional language (whose guilty pleasure per the Protestant ethic we’ll introduce here and examine more, in “Gothic Ambivalence”). Just as organized religion cryptonymically employs religious scripture to push descriptive sexuality into taboo spheres, secular canon uses secularized, bad-faith cryptonyms inside its own morality arguments. The hauntological consequence, in either case, is criminal sexuality. By publicly condemning sex-positive BDSM, kink and fetish as coercively romanticized, the elite force people to see, thus think, in black-and-white. This makes them easier to control, thus command in xenophobic language.
In material terms, toxic love and criminal sexuality arrest mainstream society’s cultural development and class character, preventing the activation and growth of sex-positive imagination through artist, art and consumer alike. Under these carceral conditions, sex-positivity cannot exist and mutual consent becomes a myth; BDSM, kink and fetishes become perverted, twisted by sexist canon whose carceral hauntology faithful consumers refuse to question. Instead, they regard its hidden (or not-so-hidden) atrocities with unironic fascination and fearful, repressed lust.
Kinky demon sex, for example, remains paradoxically common under purity culture. Rather than exorcize them, legions of the “forbidden” materialize as fearsome images of violent, coercive demonic sex. Automatically gendered and rapacious, they furtively illustrate patriarchal dominance through ubiquitous scenes of rape: masculine demons, visibly bigger and stronger than their female “victim,” punishing the wanton and disobedient for their transgressions against male power. The elite tolerate such hauntological perversions because they rob the submissive party of catharsis and rapture, but also xenophilic imagination.
The point, here, is not only does this promote female enslavement; it abolishes sex-positive variants that actually empower cis women (and other marginalized groups; re: nature as monstrous-feminine) through sex-positive demonic language. Sex-positive imagination—as a liberatory device—suitably becomes tokenized, hence anathema beyond its toxic doubles; i.e., papered over by generations of violent sexual threats turned into banal-yet-sacred media that pacified audiences dumbly consume: heteronormative canon as forever inside, and expressive towards, moral panic’s guilty pleasures and wish fulfillment. To it, the ghost of the counterfeit is still there, but it furthers the abjection process (thus profit motive); i.e., through the middle class as conditioned through liminal expression to serve the elite through a police mentality that is internalized through externalized symbols; e.g., demon sex and women unironically raped by demons (which becomes a guilty pleasure during mirror syndrome): “death” makes the sex better but also compels unironic dominion (re: dynastic primacy and hereditary rites, Bakhtin) and moral panic when consent is didactically absent from the lesson!
(exhibit 86a1: Artist: Cristóbal López. Baldrick notes the backwards-looking gaze of the fascinated domestic will always view the medieval period as a site of fear and harm. This tracks with ’80s moral panic as invoking a regressive demonology that promises actual rape of disobedient women, or the desecration of them through sodomy by queer demon lovers—i.e., Virgin/Whore syndrome as seemingly enacted by someone other than the patriarchal husband. In truth, queer men and women aren’t inclined to rape straight women, the woman’s husband is.)
Canonical demons lack empathetic context, offering a voyeurism of peril that promises unironic rape through, at best, a Radcliffean demonic lover. For example, any woman who refuses to have sex with her husband (or can’t bear children for one reason or another) finds herself surrounded by hyperbolic images of demonic torture and rape—not through mutually consensual enjoyment, but compulsory punishment for “failing” to reproduce (ignoring the fact that many people who give birth cannot conceive due to health complications). Reserved for those who threaten the status quo, its conspicuous-yet-veiled threats dispute their moral character as tied to their biology. Disobedience is an inability for women to serve what Capitalism expects of them.
As such, the accused must be fucking the devil, a prescriptively evil act; the devil cannot be good because that privilege belongs automatically to cis-het men (all quiet parts that speak over an ever-quieter part: Capitalism). As the sole agents of compelled good, white cis-het male privilege intersects with knee-jerk, self-righteous retribution—conducted not by the invented demon, but the inventor making displaced, cryptonymic threats towards the women they aim to control by scaring them in highly specific ways: “You’re a witch, a heretic, a problematic lover, a sodomite, a devil-worshipper, a xenophile; you practice the love that dare not speak its name!” (re: “Understanding Vampires“).
As purity culture dominates women (and people forced to identify as women) by surrounding them complicit ghostly cryptonyms—exclusively coercive demons and rituals of social-sexual violence—these hauntological implements become “guilty pleasures” secretly and hypocritically cherished by people with relative privilege. We’ll examine this phenomenon more in the “Gothic Ambivalence” section. For now, let’s continue investigating the material conditions responsible: the economic history that leads to sex-positive demons being criminalized, and how those policing them become more violent through prejudicial material advantage.
The point, here, is that coercive demonization controls thoughts by branding them as sinful under capital. In turn, canon fetishizes witch hunts through ostensibly secularized witch hunter language. I say “ostensibly” because organized religion was never abolished in America; it merely lies dormant to varying degrees (depending on where you live).
For example, American Puritanism, a Mayflower transplant and evil stowaway, offered numerous virtuous end-goals that continue to thrive in present-day America: sexual purity, the sanctity of marriage, and rigid, nostalgic gender roles. Carryovers from England, all were married by Reagan—a Hollywood professional during the 1950s—to neoliberalism, which, long after he died, continues to turn out “bad” ghosts and bad witches (the latter of which we’ll examine more in Chapter Four) that keep people stupidly afraid; i.e., revolutionarily unimaginative and passive, but obedient consumers who prefer the neoliberal ghost as “cool,” trustworthy. This is basically tantamount to a sort of imagined reversal: liking the weird old principal from The Monster Squad when he tells you that he actually likes monsters and ghosts, gleefully saying “I dig it, man!” while lamely giving you an awkward thumbs-up.
In the Protestant ethical tradition, Reagan was an openly Christian, neoliberal plutocrat who didn’t do that himself (nearly all American presidents have been Christians, specifically non-Catholic denominations; re: Sandstrom). However, he had many powerful corporate friends who did, making stories just like The Monster Squad (or stories that movie talked about) that framed hauntology as “totally rad” under a neoliberal consumer model. This model remained oddly mistrustful of outsiders that might contest its grander pacifying aim for universally ethical reasons (degrowth, in other words). Thanks to Reagan’s corporate know-how and religious theatrics, “virtue” became synonymous with economic prosperity (code for “elite hegemony”) communicated by heteronormative popular stories nevertheless fearful of, yet fascinated with monstrous-feminine love/sodomy (manufactured by corporations with lateral ties to the state).
Meanwhile, austerity politics and personal responsibility offered the elite an effective ideological tool for consolidating state power and wealth around dishonest corporate messaging with a Christian neighbor, not direct overseer. As Margaret Thatcher put it, “Economics are the method: the object is to change the soul.” True to form, their collective approach ushered in a return to tradition, setting its sights on theocratic state control by gradually replacing intelligent workers with obedient consumers. This process is reflected by a neoliberal shift at the state-political level, with American politician Bill Clinton mirroring Tony Blair just as Reagan and Thatcher bear their own similarities—socio-materially present in the widespread canonical attitudes accreting from their respective tenures, included horror stories as evocations of those times: when monsters were “totally cool” and no one was politically active!
In the meantime, carceral hauntology’s sexual caution and modesty became something to cherish and protect from all manner of alien forces, including emancipatory variants threatening the beyond. The emergence of a Christian executive with direct ties to the means of production (through his corporate buddies) allowed these cultural attitudes to materialize, thus be repeatedly exposed to American families using mass media/personal property as a proxy for state power. Cheap, popular stories became sex-coercive through carceral-complicit horror as financially incentivized; “think of the children!” became a regular, widespread appeal, generating waves of terror (a totalitarian tactic) that reliably led to moral panic en masse but also ad infinitum against xenophilic activists.
Enforced through neoliberal economics, a glut of cautionary, dogmatic romances helped dislocate and divorce descriptive sexuality from everyday experience. In turn, mass media promoted unvirtuous or immodest love (namely sex outside of marriage) as increasingly sinful or dangerous—something connected to society’s “moral decay” as attached to crime, but especially sensationalized, depraved crime. This includes
- singular, fetishized acts of sexual violence (re: the knife strap-on from Se7en)
- targeted assault occurring through complex abuse, which conditions victims through unequal, nonconsensual power exchange and abuse of unequal power over time—capture, torture and rape; but also grooming interactions, be they targeted or parasocial (Essence of Thought’s “Lily Orchard Sexted A 16 Year Old,” 2022).
- performers of any of these things: sexual deviants, mass murderers, or serial killers, but also groups demonically scapegoated as such by canonical media and its reactionary defenders
These toxic variables mirror the real-life abuses committed by various self-proclaimed “defenders of (cis-white) women,” “protecting” them from various alien forces: those pesky queers. Taught by those at the top, fascists do not protect women like they insist; they uses their relative socio-material means to deprive them of their basic human rights and bodily autonomy. This make women terminally reliant on men, who then exploit, shame and deceive them through power abuse, sex-coercive language and bad-faith rhetoric Capitalism, as a structure, constantly downplays but encourages. In the process, the “defenders” covet, seek and hunt women—to transform them into ideal victims, while killing or alienating anything that might make this task more difficult (they also chase and fetishize queer people, a concept we’ll examine more in Chapter Three).
Clad in the outwardly holy attire or truthful personas of relative institutional language, sexist men like Matt Walsh amount to perfidious defenders. Not only do they abuse cis women (and those seen as lesser than cis women, which again, we’ll explore more in Chapters Three and Four) by lying to women and feminist proponents every chance they get (Jessie Gender’s “Debunking Matt Walsh’s ‘What is a Woman?’ 2022; timestamp: 2:52:55); they abject their hypocrisy onto various scapegoats already punished by a system of demonic, coercively fetishizing canon: “Evil is out there, and we must protect (white, cis-het) women’s purity from its malign influence.” Based on real life scenarios, fictional media foments conservative attitudes with a heightened confirmation bias—presenting crime as something to identify by sight. In this fashion, assigned punishers may root out and destroy essentialized targets with impunity. They literally can’t imagine anything else, nor realize how the elite-cultivated Superstructure has trapped them inside their own killer mindset.
Note: I go on to write about The Darkest Dungeon elsewhere in my book series; e.g., the Countess, in “The World Is a Vampire.” —Perse, 5/2/2025
To keep systemic abuse from being scrutinized, totalitarian rhetoric demands the existence of demons from elsewhere. Meanwhile, those in power downplay systemic violence by scapegoating mental illness (Some More News’ “Mental Health And Mass Shootings,” 2022; timestamp: 10:24). Women, for example, are gaslit by default, while powerful anti-Semitic men like Kayne West are given the benefit of the doubt. The fact remains that anyone, regardless of their state of mind, can be afflicted with such a code—one that enables them to become coercively sexual and brutally sadistic. In this manner, Adolf Eichmann (the architect of the Holocaust) was only outwardly banal. Hardly a neutral “desk murderer,” Eichmann’s fervent belief in the just slaughter of a natural enemy made his displacement and apathy thoroughly sadistic in non-consensual ways. Re (from the thesis): As Meghna Chakrabarti in
60 years later, the banality of evil has been so oft repeated, it’s been reduced to cliché. Just yesterday, a guest on this show used the phrase when trying to explain why so many Republican operatives quickly abandoned their principles in support of the authoritarian slide that led to the Capitol insurrection. So the banality of evil has become a comforting myth we tell ourselves.
Arendt’s idea that evil comes from a failure to think is a popular and powerful way to comprehend how anyone could willingly participate in the unthinkable. But in the case of Adolf Eichmann, we now know that Hannah Arendt was wrong. Because Eichmann said so himself. This is Adolf Eichmann, his actual voice, speaking in recordings made in Argentina in 1957, four years before he went on trial in Jerusalem. And in the recordings, he says, I regret nothing.
Every fiber in me resists that we did something wrong. I must tell you honestly, had we killed 10.3 million Jews, then I would be satisfied and say, good, we have exterminated an enemy … that is the truth. Why should I deny it?
Eichmann’s evil is not a failure to think. Eichmann’s evil is the product of deliberate thinking that made him proud to orchestrate a genocide. So it may be time for us to drop our belief in the banality of evil (source: “The Eichmann Tapes,” 2022).
Sexual coercion through xenophobic is fundamental to bourgeois hegemony. From a material standpoint, hegemony amounts to an ongoing relationship between consumers and media that men like Eichmann habitually exploit using hauntological, cryptonymic propaganda. Furtively appealing to the fears of the working class, such persons maintain the status quo through a larger structure, one whose material configurations of power control the Base as a means of limiting open, honestly xenophilic discussions about sexuality (and other taboo subjects).
Instead, the elite’s inherent dishonesty materializes through canonical media as a social construct: the fetishized witch hunt as something to endorse until the end of time. This relationship reflects widespread cultural attitudes that reliably lead to sexist abuse through the canonical depiction, and unironic enjoyment, of toxic love; as well as a ceaseless fascination with, and exploitation of, criminal sexuality through guilty pleasures, including serial killers, but also coercive BDSM, kinks and fetishization with a quasi-religious-but-still-deeply-spiritual flavor to experiencing them, and which can be acted out; i.e., through “Psychosexual Martyrdom“; e.g., the convulsionnaires of yesterday echoing future cryptomimesis chasing the ghost of the counterfeit for similar palliative-Numinous, rapturous effects during ludo-Gothic BDSM(re: “Healing through Rape“).
Now that we’ve explored the basic ideological structure that fetishizes hauntological scapegoats and witch hunters (monsters from the “past,” defenders of past “glory”), as well as dogma and economics’ canonical role in centralizing toxic love and criminalizing descriptive sexuality within this cryptonymic Superstructure, let’s move onto to the media cycle itself. Before we move onto the more demonically outlandish examples (succubae, vampires, etc), we’ll look into real-life and its apocryphal offshoots. In doing so, we’ll examine how true crime certifies criminal sexuality and toxic love as sensational-yet-“real” events begot from liminal scenarios during oppositional praxis: criminal hauntology.
Onto “Toxic Love and Criminal Sexuality in True Crime“!
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 a footnote from “They Hunger” reads:
With Frank Herbert, again, being a massive homophobe who abjects queerness onto a kind of Nazi vampire that’s somehow anti-Semitic (re: “Frank Herbert’s Dug-up Homophobia“); i.e., Nazis and Communists occupy the same theatrical shadow zone as BDSM and vampires, exploitation and liberation: the Harkonnens are basically a post-fascist regression to a cartoon, overly Freudian medieval. It’s tacky but par for the course, as far as the monomyth goes (which is heteronormative) [source].