Today is June 1st, and I wish to celebrate the culmination of my six-book series, Sex Positivity (2022-present), the longer title being Sex Positivity versus Sex Coercion, or Gothic Communism: Liberating Sex Work under Capitalism through Iconoclastic Art. The last book released on May 9th (“My Sixth Book Is Out“), followed by the final book editions on May 10th. Today—the day of my birth, June 1st—I briefly recognize the life and times of the whole shebang. We’ll rehash/plug my shit as food for thought, but also that of those who worked alongside me offering up their own butt-plugged, the-cake-is-a-lie forbidden fruit (“peaches” or otherwise). As a medievalist (and familial go-to, having done her fair share of weddings and funerals), I’ll mix ceremony with gravity and levity—displaying the usual Gothic, Conan-to-Castlevania-style promotions of confrontation amid comfort-food promises of adventure, lust and danger-as-performance: sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll, delivered cryptomimetically in the face of encroaching unknown; re: per Hogle, the ghost of the counterfeit’s usual fairytales, “ancient” romances, ghost stories, operas, urban legends, noirs, murder ballads, and gutter ballets, etc. Let’s dance on this grave, babes! It’s time for the final showdown, the grand finale, mid-unheimlich! “That’s no moon, it’s a space station!” Galatea’s caked up, so hit it from the back, little man (echoes of a womb state/state shift)! Fuck to metal; everyone loves the whore (the Gothic replete with hauntologies home to whores of all sorts, below)!

It Began with a Whisper—Now Scream! A Grand Finale to My Book Series

As you can imagine, profit’s structure and grim prostitution historically-materially translate easily enough to revenge by one side committed dualistically against the other in praxial opposition—of man/the nuclear model and token Man-Box forms betraying nature and labor vs nature-as-whore and vice versa; i.e., commonly expressing as Amazonomachia during ancient to “ancient” wrestling kayfabe dialogs, psychomachia and similar “derelict” theatricalities, but also the Medusa and many other monstrous-feminine GNC forms that routinely play such things out as vice characters generally do: through monstrous theatre and its myriad death masks, costumes and mirrors (from animals and undead, to demons), but also birthday suits! Whatever the monstrosity exhibiting itself, antiquity and weaponized nudism go together like peanut butter and chocolate! The mommy dom is delicious and crushing—like a black hole, sucking us inside! Except, notions of psychosexuality aside, it’s not strictly nihilism if the end result of such playtime is an end of profit, thus rape; a profane wicked joy waits for us at the ass-end of space, a dark star to take us to its hellish center and crush us to oblivion! (source).

—Persephone van der Waard, “A Rape Reprise” (2024)

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

Note: This conclusion was originally dedicated to closing the series while commemorating various models (whose dedication is now closer to the center of the finale than the start). Having a bit of extra time, I’ve expanded on this grand finale; i.e., in my usual gonzo, conversational style, pointedly emphasizing a variety of ideas important to Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism: as an incredibly diverse, inclusive and holistic movement that reflects the praxial complexities of development, mid-iconoclasm—not just an uncanny merger of anarcho-Communism with Marxist theories, intersectional gender studies, ludology, deconstructionism, postcolonialism, etc, to raise emotional/Gothic intelligence and class, culture and race awareness (what Marx called “consciousness”), but a collective pedagogy of the oppressed composed primarily of whores and/or racial minorities, disabled people, neurodivergent persons working outside academia (as billboards, above), and all while stealing fire from the gods: to liberate all parties with through adequate versus exclusionary argument[1] framing various out-groups as “conspiracy.” Capital divides, keeping workers at each other’s throats (a form of prescribed power abuse); Communism unites, its iconoclastic aesthetic of power and death preventing harm—i.e., by camping canon’s sexualizing of all workers per the nuclear model, profit motive, virgin/whore syndrome, etc.

Thesis-wise, whores are classically unpaid homewreckers that upend home, specifically the nuclear model and all its genocidal effects. Under capital, home = prison, a secret brothel housing unpaid labor as perpetual alien inside, and one whose perennial alienation must be steadily renewed by the middle class furthering abjection for the elite during Capitalist Realism; i.e., from Radcliffe’s Black Veil to Lovecraft’s cosmic nihilism to Cameron’s military optimism reviving dated-but-die-hard ethnocentric tropes, post-Vietnam. There’s always a goalpost to move, one that incessantly frames the whore as enemy within, from city-states onwards! If silence is genocide for us, then our voices—our whore’s tawdry voyeurism and wanton exhibits—actively compose the state’s demise by testifying against the elite calling us criminal, dirty and up to no good! 

My finale is conversational despite its thesis, and moreover stays relatively short despite its additions (roughly fifty pages, plus illustrations). In it, we focus on the Medusa, the Numinous and the whore’s revenge against profit and the pimp’s revenge (re: “Rape Reprise“), but there’s dozens of other ideas endemic to the series at large, which I’ll barely have time to mention, here; i.e., some being more broad and some more niche; e.g., the entire series is dedicated to combatting Mark Fisher’s idea of Capitalist Realism (see: series abstract), generally by reclaiming monstrous language/reversing the abjection process (us versus them) during rape play to combat tokenization (re: “Regarding Tokenism and Fighting It“); re: during ludo-Gothic BDSM, which, apart from having an entire research compendium dedicated to it (similar to Amazons, Metroidvania, and Tolkien), also explores alienation (and reclaiming it) through different monsters modules; e.g., vampires, zombies, demonic abduction, and werewolves, etc. If you see something you want to explore more, be that modular or intersectional—e.g., witches, and why they classically like to eat babies (re: exhibit 41f2a2), which overlaps with vampire mythology/sodomy and problematic love, at large (re: “Eat Me Alive“)—my book series has already explored it at length; i.e., across four volumes/six modules, over two million words, over ninety models and dozens of muses.

Being the grand finale for a larger online, non-profit book series, I’m going to assume you’ve at least skimmed things, previously. If not, then, hi! Nice to meet you! Use my individual book promotions to search through Sex Positivity‘s four book volumes (and two monster modules). Beyond that, refer to these links for even more information: “Paratextual (Gothic) Documents” (regarding our four main Gothic theories—abjection, hauntology, chronotopes and cryptonymy—but also Castricano’s cryptomimesis and Hogle’s narrative of the crypt, as well as the state trifectas, monopolies and qualities of capital, the last of which I commonly refer to as “the state’s tools”); “Audience, Art and Reading Order“; “Gothic Communism Logo Design“; “Acknowledgements“; “About the Author” and the series glossary and disclaimer! —Perse

(source: “Borrowed Robes”; exhibit 103: Artist, left/right: Persephone van der Waard…)

Fret not, “there’s always another castle“; I’ll still be questing for the Numinous in the future, but my series here has seemingly ended its life—closing out, only to live on like the Phoenix or the Gorgon: through my friends, but also the “brave” warriors who police them; i.e., as merely the seemingly-good opposites to what are, in essence, Venus warrior twins (us aliens) fucking back, on the Aegis. Taking this duality into account (and to its logical conclusion), reincarnation and warrior culture aren’t monopolized by the state, but whose application towards universal liberation exists in dialectical-material opposition through intersectional solidarity as the antidote to capital’s historical-material death loop (aka “profit” and the profit motive’s Protestant ethic going hand-in-hand with moral panics, which centre the whore as perpetual victim). The fight is one that occurs more generally through testimony—what Eleanor Neale describes as “the sharing of stories [being women’s greatest weapon]” (“hello again,” 2025). What she likens to gossips of a more earthly sort, I speak to anger/gossip through the language of monsters (re: “The Basics of Oppositional Synthesis“) but specifically Barbara Creed’s monstrous-feminine; i.e., the ilk of succubae, sirens, witches, Amazons, oracles, and yes, whores as caught between two worlds, like Persephone or Hippolyta (among countless others). Whores are classically captured, and screech from beyond, out of “Hell,” as a space of dreams where exploitation and liberation both occupy (and whose liminality the succubus [and their wicked testimony] calls home to offend home as devised by capital and the state): “A drop of this in a bit of tea… IS WHAT IT TAKES TO SET THEM FREE!” (King Diamond’s “Tea,” 1988).

That’s the gist of things. Keeping it (and my finale thesis statement) in mind, I’ve organized the grand finale into different sections for your convenience:

• Dark Whispers: Whores, and Whence They Come/Their Revenge versus the State (and Its Pimps) during Ludo-Gothic BDSM (feat. Cara Day)
• The Whore’s Refrain: Sex Work Is Work, and All Whores Are Monsters (feat. Angel Witch and Cuwu)
• A Chorus of Profligates; or, All Whores Are Monsters Struggling to Survive: Recognizing My Friends’ Help (and Value) in This Project (feat. Mugiwara, Kay of Sunshine, and many others)
• A Crescendo: Medusa—Iconoclast, Warrior and Spy (feat. Mom, Delilah, and Itzel)
• Screaming from Hell; or, Finding Your Power (and onto Better Things)—in a Planetary Brothel Run by Whores! (feat. Itzel and Harmony Corrupted)
• “Here We Go Again”; or, a Devilish Encore: Medusa’s Siren Song… Putting the Pussy on the Chainwax! (feat. Harmony Corrupted)

Dark Whispers: Whores, and Whence They Come/Their Revenge versus the State (and Its Pimps) during Ludo-Gothic BDSM

Whores camp canon to survive; camp concerns castration, be that figurative or literal (rape fears and play), and such ubiquitous, ominous and endemic sentiments are neither new to capital, nor did they emerge, ex nihilo: the iconoclast, destroying “Rome” and all its yesterdays into the future! Beheading goes both ways, a desire to whisper our revenge, for once! In Gothic, black = whore, bastard, criminal, “Goth,” destroyer (or Great Destroyer), and so on—meaning in duality while trapped inside the nuclear model. The state doesn’t fight fair, so why should we? “You think one against four is a dogfall?” Let this be our dumb supper, feeding our killers their own brains (echoes of Tamora, Shakespeare’s Queen of the Goths)! We hand the ignominious death back to them, Medusa beheading Perseus!

(artist: Caravaggio)

Speculations of sentiment (and their murky origins) aside, we whores—which generally consist of GNC folk, and other minorities—camp canon because we must. That’s what ludo-Gothic BDSM essentially is: playing with “rape” by putting it in quotes, testifying to what is normally unspeakable, artist-to-muse, to the have the whore’s revenge. Often this happens by playing with taboo topics, as the Gothic does, and what whores represent to catch one’s eye with (controlling the scene); e.g., rape, incest, parental abuse, infanticide (and similar forms of classically female [and intersex] violence; e.g., tokophobia, rape pregnancies, abortions, female circumcision, stalking and toxic love, possessive marriage, forced-to-voluntary substance abuse/disassociation, etc), mutilation, murder and so on—and often portrayed in the ancient, paradoxical language of drugs, dreams and theatre (comedy and drama, but also camp). These include the Gothic statue or portrait: as linked to a fearsome past or terrible crime testifying to survival as the imprecise ghost of a former victim—not just hugging but fucking the alien to befriend it, mid-dialectic, onstage and off (re: “Some Prep When Hugging the Alien“). In keeping with pimps vs whores, we’re commonly left with a battle of the sexes, which Amazonomachia essentially is. It’s a binary and binaries under capital are canon, therefor colonial; i.e., delivered through domestic-to-foreign forms of unironic police violence that routinely yield rigid, singular interpretations: murder. It’s prescriptive versus descriptive. Mankind is his own worst enemy but also ours, turning our extermination into a spectator’s racket with regular token betrayals (whores policing whores; re: TERFs).

Under this violence (and its surveillance), we whores must describe the scalding caustic violence prescribed to us (one of the creative successes of proletarian praxis). This demands working the audience while also, just as often, being of the crowds we please (often under duress); i.e., capital sexualizes everything (re: “Thesis Body“), and whores—among other things—are often loud-and-proud gay theatre nerds working with fatal nostalgia, dated tropes (e.g., warrior athletes), fear in all its forms (and subversions), banned books, gallows humor, vaudeville, stylish menace, the poetic abstraction of various hyperobjects (namely Capitalism vs Communism), sinister-if-vague criteria (e.g., a nocturne), and Gothic panache to camp, thus turn said past (and fascination with it) against state proponent; i.e., by, turning their mechanisms (and flow of power) anisotropically inside-out; re: the state is straight (“Understanding Vampires“) and colonizes everything for for profit in ways GNC folk classically reconcile with through theatre onstage and off (from Shakespeare’s slutty faeries in A Midsummer Night’s Dream to Matthew Lewis to Vincent Price to Devine). There must always be a whore to punish, under state models (the state of exception); the whore’s revenge roots in camp as revenge from positions of automatic and paradoxically sacred relegation (the pecking order). To it, flow determines function through dialectical-material context; freaks in the streets and the sheets, we gay space whores channel the voices of the dead, demonized, and verminized—helping demystify their exploitation while, in the same hushed breath, speaking in code, mid-cryptonymy through praxial opposition screaming as loud as possible!

In keeping with nature as monstrous-feminine alien to police by state forces (often token forces; re: whores), such things speak dualistically to the damsel and hag (crone, fate, Gorgon, etc) but also the virgin and the whore, angel and devil, damsel and demon regardless of age. Medusa is—like any being accused of falsehood by state forces—both laced with actual trauma and marked for death regardless if said accusations hold true (re: the whore’s paradox). As far as the West cares, this dichotomy is the oldest police/criminal element there is; it is ancient and “ancient,” hauntologized: the ambiguous black mark on a pearly-white Paradise long before race as a concept came about (though certainly one that abused it, afterwards). The whore, from Medusa onwards, is a trick-puller (so to speak)—one to canonically blame for its own brutalizing by state forces playing the pimp in bad faith; i.e., the latter sacrificing the former to save the princess and her so-called “purity”: a creature both undead, demonic and/or animalistic, depending on your poetic bent, and one speaking to Imperialism (the highest form of Capitalism, but also the oldest) and its routine hyphenating of sex and force (and similar confusions; e.g., predator/prey and friend/foe, nun/slut, Catholic/Protestant, etc)—for all monstrous-feminine, female or not, white or not, human or not!

In turn, the state endlessly takes the whore, which is older than the state (the oldest profession, in fact), and kills it to exist; the whore’s revenge, in turn, is the oldest there is—the oldest profession, exploitation, and desire for liberation from canonical images touting Medusa’s regular castration (thus rape): a pariah, convict, closet case and guerilla show pony sentenced for repeated massacre, defilement and harassment to elevate state symbols of authority and strength. Male or not (re: witch cops; e.g., Amazons), state actors prove their manhood by killing the whore inside nature as colonized (re: home as prison); i.e., enforcing silence to conduct genocide, with existence something to silence by closeting it through menticidal force; nature is always lesser than the state, whatever form either takes (e.g., TERFs). Furthermore, gentler tone-policing obscures the usual cautionary-tale brutalities routinely on display through Man Box arguments/prison sex mentalities: to be seen, not heard inside the brothel. The whore is not a valuable witness, in canon, but a regular scapegoat: something to attack, blame, unhouse, unbelieve, kill (and preemptively because she’s a vengeful backstabber per the state’s usual false flags). She’s a terror and/or drug to war against, the original “other” privatized by justice (thus prison) as corrupt by design through an addict’s refrain: the pimp, addicted to rape, punching the whore for the pearl clutchers previously enriched through genocide; i.e., inheritance anxiety manufacturing controversy by dressing up whatever sacrifices invariably result, spuriously calling them “rescue” (re: Andromeda freed with Medusa’s cesarean rape baby, the Pegasus, but also Persephone abducted and taken to Hell as property the state must classically retrieve through equally rapacious force, below).

(artist: Benvenuto Cellini)

Extinction isn’t an event but a structure, Wolfe (though he’s perfectly right about settler colonialism and the elimination of the native), and nobody love bombs like the state (who holds the virgin and the whore ransom: as Indigenous, wild, and untame to an “ancient” degree constantly being rewritten)! It’s the liar’s paradox; i.e., binaries are classically false, but they’re what the state uses to rape the world through its usual essentialized deceptions: the romance of shattered innocence, but also a signature fragility of memory and broken childhoods framing the home as tragically but fundamentally undermined by whores to blame on repeat (normalizing their rape, mid-forgetfulness). Luckily the Gothic is fundamentally arcane/deconstructionist, passing itself off as “mere trash” to broach the taboo; i.e., doing so through found documents, concentric puzzles, and outrageous sex (and black magic/reanimative violence; re: Lewis). As such, it remains entirely unconcerned with time as linear, embracing anything circular and confounding to favor the oppressed, not the state treating us like fetishized, us-versus-them thought crimes! It (the state) apologizes for rape to a Protestant, messianic degree (re: the Puritan ethic); we whores, by comparison, confront our own rape during calculated risk: as the animal scapegoat, playing out the usual abuses on the marriage altar (and its dark double, outside the bedroom as much as inside it/the nuclear home)! The fact remains, whores are chattel that predate the West (e.g., Ancient Egypt’s godly furries showcasing the whore’s animalized hauntological components), but since the West’s inception (as we commonly recognize it, nowadays; e.g., Athens, Sparta, and Rome) have been canonized as the criminal, yawping anti-maiden to punish (despite the virgin/whore paradox); i.e., through the monomyth and ancient canonical codes dictating the whore as something essentially villainous: to police by heroes for as long as Civilization™ has demonstrably been around; re: Freud and Freudian pastiche which Creed essentially is, but also Moers, Carter and a lot of other (white, straight, European) women from the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s stuck in the same Shadow of Pygmalion, obfuscating Marx’ historical materialism and dialectical-material analysis in favor of psychoanalysis[2].

Freud was—among many other things—a sexist homophobic pimp with mommy issues, and the Gothic happily camps such nuclear dogmas (which my work on Gothic Communism extends to Marx’ own failings); i.e., by evoking funerary resurrection through camp, punctuating its own black humor with wanton murder and sardonic lust—mocking the canon’s fairytale view of the world by deliberately attacking sacred symbols for reasons that aren’t always obvious; e.g., Dacre’s Victoria de Loredani from Zofloya destroying the symbol of the lily-white maiden (suitably titled Lila) because of what it represents: a smaller, weaker, segregated version of Victoria, the proxy warrior for Dacre’s own iconoclasm, making Victoria a dark reflection of Lila, the maidenesque simulacrum/darling for Dacre to kill (and parody of the Gothic heroine taken to its fatal, logical conclusion; see: Sam Hirst’s “Zofloya and the Female Gothic,” 2020). Camp plays with murder and rape in neo-medieval forms; ergo, I call camp “making it gay” (re: “Camping the Canon“), insofar as doing so injects an alien element into canon, reversing abjection—often, as it turns out, from otherworldly zones associated with past death, damnation, exile, and abuse, but also prostitution: something ancient and Numinous for viewers to seek out for different reasons. These include the whore or the pimp’s revenge, liberating or incarcerating/exterminating such beings; i.e., abjection being a routine matter of profit tied to nature as underworld whore vs canonical heroics. Heroes are cops and ACAB because cops assist in profit, which rapes nature as monstrous-feminine by design; i.e., under Pax Americana, onstage and off, treating nature as alien whore: as jailors and executioners, but also infiltrators working for the elite (the “free” component of the Land of the Free) by enslaving the rest of us to their master’s idea of destiny (re: profit, tied to geography, cartography, biology and anything else they want to exploit nature with). Pimps have bosses, little pimps working for big pimps (not all pimps are bourgeois, but all pimps serve the bourgeoisie).

Just as sex in the ancient world relegates to graveyards (re: B.B. Wagner), death and resurrection become a lineal tradition of survival; i.e., against the state mimicking us, and we them inside the maladaptive hauntology re-adapting itself as needed (re: “The Caterpillar and the Wasp“)! “Live burial” is code to switch through nightmares (re: the Medusa was killed in her sleep). Endless forms for the whore to assume (thus pimp her as), yet granting endless power to subvert the nuclear model’s prison-like relegation of sex to the bedroom (through gender trouble and similar virgin/whore means of camping the canon)! Whores are undertakers that reverse the flow of death; i.e., as guides and witnesses alike (e.g., like Virgil, from Dante’s Inferno), albeit to a Foucauldian degree of reversal: capital’s toxic sense of home jails labor as something to reclaim inside its gobstopper self. “Labor back” synonymize with “land back” and “sex back” (or monsters and their symbols); i.e., by breaking the colony (thus the prison) down from inside. The alien and it spectre of rape haunts the counterfeit, which the state will pimp as usual, but what we as whores must reclaim by reversing abjection to break the jail and take what is jailed back from capital; re: as a process of abject prostitution—of rapacious cryptonymy (and hauntology/chronotopes)!

Can you tell the difference? Is the screaming whore apologizing for rape, mid-canon’s virgin/whore syndrome, or conversely defeating it, mid-iconoclasm; i.e., as a liminal, dualistic and anisotropic, therefore ergodic matter of performative irony and calculated risk? A Gothic castle is essentially a brothel, after all, one whose trademark regression yields strange sensations while bypassing odd doors; e.g., Giger’s own Gothic surrealism touching upon the same basic liminalities my book series has (re: “Giger’s Xenomorph“). Every Gothic novel has a castle and every castle houses a bastard or a whore, inside; confronted, the whore says or does something vulgar—canonically damaging the viewer abjecting them, but iconoclastically helping the witness of the witness exit Plato’s cave using darkness visible. Temptation is the order of the day, but also the hyphenation of sex and force, pleasure and pain, etc, speaking to profound survival haunted by holocaust: “clean” being a cryptonym for genocide, but also “vermin” during extermination (thus replacement) rhetoric. Whores are classically vermin invading the nuclear home as protected by state proponents; re: who fetishize their victims born inside said home, per the usual paradoxes afraid of replacement in reverse (a false equivalency made by the colonizer towards their victims): weak and strong but also dead and alive, biomechanical. Whores are born dead, slated for routine fetishization per a genocidal model of ouroborotic exploitation: antagonize nature and put it cheaply to work (re: me, vis-à-vis Patel and Moore).

(artist: H.R. Giger)

Yet, Don Quixote was a simultaneously a tragedy reliant on illusions while commenting on them, per the modern novel; e.g., the imaginary princess Dulcinea foisted onto an ordinary barmaid, or the titular hero tilting at windmills (dragons)—and all to continue state force swept up in a love for the barbaric knightly past; i.e., in ways that continue idiotically into the present Gothic; re (from “Valorizing the Idiot Hero”): “Impunity is the apex of privilege” (source) but said privilege yields routinely stupid people unused, as whores are, to working within subversive angles that take power back. The praxial difference mid-opposition isn’t aesthetic, but dialectical-material context (with Gothic Communism emphasizing the social-sexual elements, per exchange); re: the anisotropic flow of power going towards the state, mid-abjection, or away from it while utilizing the same vampiric means to synthesize praxis (re: “The World Is a Vampire“). Capital combines corporations with nation-state models, which steal worker rights by design; i.e., we’re born into a world where we must fight for our rights against the state being designed to exploit us, the two—thus neoliberalism and fascism when capital decays—forever being at odds (cops and victims/robbers/criminals/etc). Rape is endemic to capital because capital is founded on rape through hauntological police abuse; i.e., form follows function and a cop’s a cop, but they occupy the same stages we do, oppositional cryptonymy synonymizing Nazis and Communists, mid-kayfabe. What we ironically secularize through Neo-Gothic reinvention (e.g., Catholic miracles with vampires, or Jewish myth and Miltonian Satanism with Frankenstein), the state abuses for profit and has do so since Western Antiquity. While the damsel-in-distress dates back to Ancient Greece, requiring a whore’s die to save a damsel-in-distress (re: Perseus and Andromeda), the medieval period immortalized it with courtly love carried into Capitalism and its post-Renaissance fascination with such things. They (the elite) stole from the past to continue its worst aspects; re: abjection.

Ergo, profit = rape and cops defend profit through heroic (monomythic) revenge arguments personified by classically patriarchal/token hunter agents conditioned to attack hauntological vice characters (which the whore classically embodies and rails against; i.e., the lady/angel/maiden archetype, on and offstage; re: Victoria de Loredani killing Lila for her soft, child-like qualities). For example, Doomguy/the Slayer[3a1] openly ravishes demons, Rambo-style, in FPS (while specifically being a reskin of Ellen Ripley’s subjugated Amazon pimping the Gorgon/whore blamed for her own rape; re: “Always a Victim“; see: Hadley’s “Medusa Misunderstood“); i.e., witch hunters, dragon slayers, and holy men/token parties like the Belmonts (and similar centrist agents) monopolizing what are, for all intents and purposes, modern-day witch hunts stuck inside the same basic dialogs of torture (the Vampire Killer whip being a slave driver’s tool—one not only backed by dogma, but covered in salt to literally rub salt into the wounds of those forced to repent). Canon uses such things to further state hegemony and pimp nature; we whores, to liberate all of nature from Western brothels-inside-brothels, humanizing whore-and-bastard demon lovers Konami and Nintendo (among many other corporations, overseas or not) pimp from to children into adulthood (re: “Castlevania, season 3 review” and “Sex in Castlevania“).

.

(artist, Bokuman; commissioned and modified by Persephone van der Waard)

Armed with stakes, silver bullets, and crucifixes—but also swords/axes/spears/maces, machine guns with grenade launchers, and similar canonical, ritualized-therefore-fetishized wunderwaffe implements of torture sanctioned by the state—canon dresses up its wunderkind, death’s-head persecution maniacs in past language; i.e., as virgin/whore paradoxes, answerable to no one but themselves inside the usual redlined brothels, prisons, and warzones’ “neutral” pretense of justice: a clever Radcliffean disguise for the pimp’s endless revenge, a concealed weapon hiding in plain sight and recognized through born-again, retro-future context and code calling whores, however native to the region being policed, “trespassers.” Death is the byproduct of capital chasing profit, fetishized itself through phallicized cultures of war and rape (re: “War” and “Rape Culture“); palingenesis is criminogenic in service to profit, which we must challenge inside Pax Americana‘s hellish glass womb; re: Plato’s cave, and those inside it being slaves to technology[3a2] versus freeing themselves from state control through subversive connections and play—hooking up, essentially (with abjection being the ultimate process of division, one whose marginalized in-fighting said play can counteract; re: “The World Is a Vampire“). Genocide requires denial to function, meaning on any register combined with codes for violence, during moral panic; e.g., slurs—with insults for women (or beings forced to identify as women) being nigh endless/endlessly used (and sing-song-y): bitch, witch, whore, cunt, hag, slag, nag, slut, harridan, virago, vixen, gold digger, diamond dog, battle axe, and so on. The whore is damned regardless, and exploited for consequently speaking out—compelled like Prometheus to suffer endlessly through the same-old double standards; i.e., of a man’s world and its selective-yet-collective punishment/reactive abuse: visiting canonically upon the whore as the aforementioned eagle does, hungry for liver (and other tissues). “Gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss.” Despoil the cumdump; rinse and repeat.

“With such a confederacy against her” (as Austen put it), what’s a girl to do? Survive, for starters, but also speak out during oppositional cryptonymy “getting that bag” (there’s a fine line between getting by and selling out, mind you). Doing so is less about solving things in any immediate sense and more about exploring deep trauma in surface-level ways pursuant to lateral solutions; i.e., that invite a class, race and/or cultural character beyond what is normal, yet embedded in normality through trauma responses wedded to survival mechanisms: societal critiques dressed up in monstrous-feminine, therefore commonplace language. The whore is commonplace, affording it a degree of disguise and reach; e.g., demons classically being teaching devices, but also metaphors for changes, including but especially the uncanny and its signature unreality. Something needn’t be “real” to attach to material conditions that shape how we think; i.e., as half-real. When you’re being gaslit, as the elite (and their servants) do to us, a bit of flexibility and experimentation go a long way! The modern world is largely fake, so fight fire with fire; reuniting with alien things to acclimate to state deceptions/embellishment is crucial: to regress, as the whore does, towards whatever we can in search of answers, however Faustian or elusive—not the future, but the past. Embrace it without restraint—for all the dead generations (and whores), come and gone!

(artist, right: Frank Frazetta; source: left)

Gothic concerns the return of the past as whorelike; re (from my Metroidvania corpus): one that involves

the exploration of tremendous obscurity, power and decay from a disadvantaged (and erotic) social-sexual position when a prophesized bastard or whore comes home to roost; i.e., the return of a tyrant or profligate, whose fatal homecoming emerges from a half-formed rogue barbarity/derelict, imaginary past, again usually a castle [but specifically the black castle/whorehouse/den of thieves]. While said castle’s morphology is architectural, its operatic hauntology and cryptonymy each bear an oddly whorish stamp while furthering or reversing abjection; i.e., seeking revelation and revenge, mise-en-abyme (source).

While capital conceals its own liminal hauntologies’ endless returns (the state rapes by design), they can be revealed through holistic study as returning to old objects (and means) of study. In turn, liberation happens inside the prison as coming home to roost, a dark inheritance we take and liberate ourselves with; i.e., versus the pimp defending their “inheritance,” a lie told to the middle class by the elite so they’ll continue the structure of profit as usual: through inheritance anxiety yielding toxic bloodlines; e.g., the Belmonts (and similar fallen houses, like the Jedi from Star Wars) proving themselves to state masters, force-of-will, by recursively punching whores when Imperialism comes home to empire (see: “Back to Necropolis” and black Nazis in Castlevania: Nocturne, 2023); re (from “Prey as Liberators”):

When such a castle appears, it is time to be afraid; the colonial harvest is at hand. Yet, precisely because the state does not hold a monopoly over violence, terror and morphological expression, a demon or castle needn’t spell our end; it can represent our sole means of attack, reclaiming said poetics’ endless inventiveness to turn colonizer fears back into their hopelessly scared brains (source).

From barrow downs to Gothic castles to liminal, danger-disco spaces in general, such opera house, dream-like spaces of relegation, of shame and sin—hence wet dreams and nightmares (nocturnal emissions including blood, but also wasted semen)—speak to unspeakable things nonetheless tied to industry as a banal evil; i.e., one pimping whores of all different kinds: the slaughterhouse, gladiatorial circuit/duelist arena, toilet, carnival (circus, casino, fairgrounds, amusement park, grand guignol, etc), plantation, jail, torture chamber and panopticon, beauty pageant, etc, as one-and-all shackled to the rise of the owner class, the bourgeoisie, through state-corporate mergers dating back centuries. The whore sits inside all of these, something to root out/vengefully perceive through ergodic (non-linear) motion and non-singular interpretation, mid-liminal expression; re: sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll being as much an instruction (and rhythm) as anything to appropriate by state forces. “Yeah, baby! There you go! Fuck momma just like that!” Unmoored from pimps, these whorish echoes of incest, rape and unequal power at large can occur without actual abuse, but generally riff off canonical forms; e.g., Dracula’s problematic love and brides, “the love that dare not speak its name” predating Jewish blood libel[3a3] but having since married to it on a variety of arbitrary (flexible) persecution languages the state simultaneously pimps out (doubling us).

Like Gozer the Traveler’s dreaded portal, calculated risk opens the doors of abjection, but also anisotropically reverses the Black Veil’s flow of power (terrorist/counterterrorist; re: Robert Asprey); i.e., “choosing the form of the Destructor” by humanizing the whore in reverse-abject dialogs. We have to cross the streams, and that means treating sex work as work. It’s the oldest form of work there is, something always in demand. Canon needs whores to further itself and its revenge; whores, to speak to the state abusing us, therefore transform it into something better! Said revenge includes speaking out, mid-cryptonymy! We’re not just whores, then, but polyamorous, oft-plural survivors of unspeakable trauma; re: the ghost of the counterfeit reversing or furthering abjection, mid-opposition/on the Aegis!

(source: “Cornholing the Corn Lady”; exhibit 19c: model and artist: Cara Day and Persephone van der Waard)

The Whore’s Refrain: Sex Work Is Work, and All Whores Are Monsters

Sex work is work, but remains classically over and underrepresented—in canon and academia, respectively—as well as unpaid and reviled by bought-and-paid-for politicians, judges and cops demonizing nature; i.e., by treating all whores as monsters (money talks to defend profit as a system of theft built on Imperialism and genocide). By comparison, it’s our job as whores to change that, extracting value (stolen labor) from these doubles, thereby working through the usual love/hate relationship whose freakish worship the monomyth crystalizes on all registers. They triangulate violence against nature as monstrous-feminine, which we, in turn, must subvert; re: the whore as secret boss, their “fan service” assets the engine to continued enslavement and reform, lust-or-love. The whore is blamed as gold-digger through the presumption of automatic ownership of women but also all of nature by straight white men shaming the slut (or people acting like straight white men). Except, the only way capital stops is if universal liberation is achieved, and you can’t pick-and-choose who deserves a fair shake. So often whores get shamed by other oppressed workers (e.g., The Boondocks‘ season one, episode three basically being sexist vaudeville whose irony doesn’t extend to sex workers). From nun to house slave, home = house as something to gain entry from outside; i.e., through Jameson’s dialectic of shelter and subsequent class nightmare (re: Alex Link’s “The Mysteries of Postmodernism, or, Fredric Jameson’s Gothic Plots,” 2009) but with token elements: internalized bigotry leading past victims to betray other workers also on the outside (or stealing an insider spot, from time to time).

In reality, no one’s position is secure except for the bourgeoisie. Omelas is a fool’s errand, then, and one whose spurious “Utopia” workers must walk away from, together! This dialectic of the alien happens not through smaller pockets of rebellion left to their own devices, but all rebellions banding collectively together against the pimp; i.e., the latter being the same thing as the Nazi, KKK member or white liberal stabbing you in the back (or convincing you to betray your fellow workers). A cop’s a cop, a pimp a pimp by virtue of function; trends and aesthetics don’t matter if they assist that process of abjection. To it, whores aren’t something to root out, expose and convert, Radcliffe-style, nor a bounty to collect/disease to cure, but workers deserving of equal, fair and ultimately humane treatment; i.e., to treat, thus recognize, as being just another form of labor that capital destroys like all the others.

The whore isn’t someone to hate, then, but love and embrace alongside other oppressed workers contributing towards a common liberatory goal; i.e., because of the secret knowledge they offer concerning fetishizes, kinks and BDSM to learn from the alien with, thus achieve universal liberation through similarity amid difference (re: “Healing from Rape“)! But they remain someone haunted by unironic terror and violence (echoes of street life brought into the dynastic setting that a revolving court like Dracula and his succubean brides’ demonstrates, below); i.e., manufactured consent applies to rape as manufactured: consent for the consumer and not the whore—the latter someone chained to the Male Gaze, exuding that classic dark surface charged with hellish entropy and, at the same time, a repellent push-pull quality that actual black holes don’t possess. They’re a mirage, a siphon, a ruse—a hot/cold sexpot honey trap to fleece the rubes; i.e., with their “ballistic rizz” and big titty Goth GF’s fuck-off vibes going both ways: wild sex from a chimeric animal-undead-demon babe’s non-white thiccness[3b] (regardless of skin color), but also an ace baddie’s chance to transform and take power for herself (and teach her prey a thing or two).

As such, she (and by extension we, regardless of gender) become not just death incarnate, but Medusa reborn through fire and agony (minus the snakes)—the Mother of the Beast/phallic woman (Grendel’s mother/the Archaic Mother) ruling the zooish slum/joy division! Chaucer’s Miller’s wet dream something of a revived dark nymph/monstrous-feminine Pan! Thicc ‘n hairy (with Lilith’s legs rumored to be covered in thick, stocking-like hair) and playing our flutes (or other instruments)! It’s a lesson, not a punishment, but one where “harm” and penetration (or envelopment) aren’t off the table! “Monster” = alien, but also criminal, a trade, obscene, something of gargantuan (therefore immodest, unvirtuous) size, etc; i.e., the phallic woman as having feminine elements; e.g., the whore’s monster tits full of classic revenge, not mother’s milk/the milk of human kindness:

(artist, left and right: Ayami Kojima and Angel Witch)

To that, the Gothic has been hot, gay, and nerdy, but arguably into sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll long before 1764 (the mode kickstarted by women and gay men; re: “Prey as Liberators“). As such, it helps matchmake; i.e., by reintroducing the same disillusioned workforces to a half-forgotten idea of revenge, thus grow accustomed to discouraged modes of poetry (ergo thought): as conducive to the whore’s vengeance, inside the brothel!

For example, the stigma of exposure (and consequent sex repulsion) generally concern state abuse, including jails and police violence; i.e., the undead explore trauma and feeding that—while modular—can intersect through strange appetites (re: “A Cruel Angel’s Thesis“): to merge phantasmagorically with demonic wishful thinking/guilty pleasure, transformation, and unequal exchange (e.g., killing or fucking your professor and/or your boss), as well as monsters of nature whose animalistic egregores explore the above ideas, but also drug-like consumption and embodiment (anthropomorphism, but also fascist aesthetics/camp; e.g., werewolves). All happen through Gothic theatre and play’s all-around reestablishing of trust and boundaries, mid-trauma, while putting “rape” in quotes to achieve what I call “ludo-Gothic BDSM.”

As such, the Gothic more broadly commonly explores generational trauma in asexual ways; i.e., generally on a social-sexual spectrum that includes—among other things—public nudism to exhibit/voyeurize; re: the Victorian embodiment (and fetishization) of madness in the flesh, specifically vaso vagal, traumatic penetration, and black-and-red hysteria (with modular genderqueer elements the state recuperates alongside everything else); re: the phallic woman, above (related to Freud’s Archaic Mother vis-à-vis Creed’s work salvaging him, and me camping both authors): robust jugs, whose infernal pitchers—a sultry disguise and open-secret dinner bell—hold the vitalistic, give/take (vampiric) secrets of nature in and upon themselves, a taste for life as forbidden and erotic, but also foreboding and Satanic. “Mommy’s got what you need! Come hither…” But her shapely body can take a pounding from all angles; i.e., she’s Bruce Lee on a skateboard (with a black corset, thong, choker, opera glovers and stiletto [read: phallic pareidolia and function] thigh highs)—both over-the-top and understated courtier while her shuddering pussy drools and growls with rapturous, animal excitement. She finds your lack of faith (among the churchly whorehouse’s kinky chaos) disturbing! The beast with two backs, she makes her own exclusive clubs, stretching on to the crack of doom (echoes of the witches from Macbeth); “you gotta pay the troll toll to get in!” (the vampire’s incestuous [master/slave] echoes of sleep sex).

(artist: Angel Witch)

Feminine or otherwise, monsters testify to “rape” as a matter of preferential code. So despite the pillow princess refrain, the best romance isn’t gentleness alone (and this is coming from someone who loves slow, deep missionary sex). Like everything else, capital has alienated labor from that fact (along with death and sex, as a whole). Sex—even healthy sex where harm is absent and consent assured despite the risks (re: RACK)—has a fair amount of actual pain (data), but also performative violence and genuine roughness to it (which isn’t the same thing as harm, despite any steam let off appearing or sounding harmful to non-participants); i.e., the Neo-Gothic love for replica, egregore/simulacrum, counterfeit, and miniature/facsimile (small or giant; re: Walpole’s giant homunculus, the suit of armor from Otranto symbolic of a burgeoning Capitalocene); e.g., faking an orgasm not so different from Uncle Bruce, holding a punch and grimacing while shouting loudly for the camera (through glorious 1970s dubbing): “Why did you kill my teacher?!” Sex and death/war overlap, oxymorons alluding to harm but also existence through curiously exaggerated-yet-inadequate phrases; e.g., “little death,” “hit it,” “choke me,” or “slay that pussy” (versus total unmitigated hyperbole)—all well at home, in camp as endemic to Gothic: music to Medusa’s ears!

Everyone loves the whore, but capital loves her for toxic reasons; i.e., as a peach to harvest in perpetuity (re: “Nature Is Food“). In keeping with imperial inheritance fears, the West fears the whore’s revenge replacing them; e.g., white supremacists chanting “we will not be replaced!” at Charlottesville while being alienated from women; i.e., for every virgin (female or otherwise), you have a whore threatening to replace the bride (or groom) by virtue of succession as a matter of violence through sex (courtship)—a bat-like belle of the ball, a walking nightmare (for the prudish and self-righteous), the fearsome queen of the Reich well versed in the usual bastardized language of power and death: the shadow of extermination, per state-corporate models, but also its heteronormative, patriarchal double standards (and Male Gaze fetishizing such things, choking the release valve). Her power is fake, Capitalism? So is yours, my dudes[3c1], and death comes for us all. Let’s see who wins, your lance or mine (an Amazon classically being a militant whore: a pissed-off naked woman [or anyone treated like a woman] who can thrown down and get down)!

(artist: Angel Witch)

Misery loves company; she’s the Wandering Jew, her body—its shapely tush, massive rack and tight little box (the Lament Configuration) reifying Hell, the Twilight Zone, and Purgatory all rolled into—a fabulous disaster/composite Sale of Indulgences framed, by the state, as essentialized evil; i.e., what Creed calls the murderous womb, except whores classically breed through demons and other illegitimate spawn, such hysterical reproduction and fragmented cryptomimesis tied to dark wishes of revenge, Lilith onwards (and whose summoning demands payment of all kinds, including adoration); re: an animal woman tied to vampire bats, but also Medusa’s snakes, black widow spiders, and similar demonized elements of nature pimped by capital, as usual—a chimera of sin (especially lust), a furry without the fur, a lycanthrope to panic about while taming the savage, mid-Amazonomachia! Canonical or not, the whore is always a little off-limits, and all the hotter for it (re: the whore’s revenge being to have fun while twisting normies into knots); Medusa expresses a perceived immunity to dogma and charm, making her something of a gives-zero-fucks career girl who’s badass and absolutely knows it: the Fifth rider of the Apocalypse, a hellion “sorceress of battlestorms, [where] armies tremble in fear!” (BÜTCHER’s “Iron Bitch,” 2020).

Since gasping its first terrifying breath, the Gothic shows us history’s plasticity. Doing so through a trademark disdain for boundaries (thus bans), but also its formidable tolerance for pain and transgression, the mode is utterly rife with paradox, oxymoron and gender trouble—meaning when worker counterterror challenges state monopolies/stochastic terrorism, but also broader categorical (ontological or otherwise) mischief that monsters (female/feminine or not) can inflict against the nuclear mode through fatal vision (as the Gorgon does): through parody and pastiche, half-real, living on video—a vanishing point of concentric sematic wreckage whose accretion-disk “place of concealment stands on ashes of something not quite present” (re: Hogle, “The Restless Labyrinth,” 1980); i.e., according to class, culture and race remediated: monster trouble. I’m coining that one, Judith Butler (alongside my monopoly of monsters/the Numinous, versus Asprey’s paradox of terror and Weber’s monopoly of violence; re: “Paratextual Documents“)! Power is ours in ways we can perform using what we got—both not in our hands (“I clutch thee but have thee not”) while simultaneously being what we were born with; i.e., as extradimensional/eternal/out-of-this-world (e.g., Angel Witch’s massive tits and butt, below). Sex is power, including (a)sexual dialogs about sex through Gothic “when in Rome”:

(model and artist: Angel Witch and Persephone van der Waard)

So enchant this, Radcliffe! Such wicked, topsy-turvy testimony is the whore’s revenge—the sexy miniature or portrait coming alive and feeling all the better for defying God/the state by having fun; i.e., the Gothic loves its golemesque oxymorons and gargoyle throwbacks, death and pleasure occupying the same place we whores use to pass iconoclastic data along: a dance, a dalliance, a duel that stresses the physical, spiritual, emotional and ontological, psychosexual nature of things—by hyphenating sex and force (food, sickness, war, etc) through a monstrous-feminine bent, which the state will police (thus pimp) ever and always! Fate personified, the whore embodies sex as jilted—becomes a kind of battle that draws you close, gets one’s licks in, and retreats from striking distance. Fear and fascination with fascism (re: Sontag with a twist) combine upon/within the femme fatale as a neo-classic love bomb, the Black Penitent with nothing to confess and everything to lose (and gain)—the bounty and the bandit, the widow and the recluse, the attendant to our darkest desires, including society’s need to be close to dangers both invented and actual, during calculated risk.

There is a dichotomy at play/work, mid-opposition. The pimp treats war and rape as a redlined territory to occupy and immiserate through police-state/moral-panic antics, but also a suspension of disbelief tied to state enemies sold back to consumers chasing the dragon[3c2]; the whore walks the tightrope, weaving powerful spells of death and love—of fight, flight, and fawn—to survive by taking control back (and paying rent). So does the whore’s revenge challenge the pimp’s revenge against the Numinous: a standard/tokenized pimp avenging their loss by punishing the whore for the very disobedience that the pimp paradoxically demands of them. By comparison, the whore’s revenge breaks profit on her backside, thus genocide along with it during power struggles big and small (re: “Rape Reprise“); i.e., by taking the weapons (thus monopolies) of violence, terror and monsters back through the usual fetishes/castles in the flesh: “the more you whip me, the more you tire; I love it—am still alive, burning in Hell as something I bring to Earth!” Numinous isn’t a casualty but end goal; it’s important, and more to the point, foundational to the Gothic as a critical device breaking Capitalist Realism with.

As such, the Gothic transcribes, transforms, translates, and preserves; it endures, dealing in “death” as a silly-serious bad joke that is grave and cool, fun and forsaken—i.e., whores are cool and streetwise, but off-limits, pay-walled by canon until genocide is done (e.g., Samus Aran finally showing some skin after you blow up a planet). Such is the whore from Antiquity into the present world—wet nurse to misery and delight, a competent death dealer living in the shadow of rape and war while lulling their prey to sleep for trying to spank the whore to death: to take vengefully from them their power but also give something back to new students (the youthful lovers). Something is always given back, per exchange; trauma, for the whore, lives in their flesh and exacts from it (and ours), mid-mortification. Black = death as much as religion, Gothic thriving on cryptonymic ambiguity and Numinous “rewards” desecrating the state (fatal knowledge during Promethean Quests; re: Metroidvania and similar stories where the hero is dwarfed by their surroundings literally being dead empires; i.e., Ozymandias syndrome; e.g., “Away with the Faeries“).

To it, the complexities of modern life cannot fully separate danger and delight, mid-comfort; yet all the same, everything is alien (and fetish) to some social-sexual degree—i.e., the Gothic interrogates generational trauma as living in and around our bodies, negotiating with things we can never fully extract, and for which state proponents will be drawn towards to siphon from us, anew. For good or for ill, trauma attracts trauma, weird attracts weird, and data is a process of pollination among a social-sexual species of whores (e.g., Cuwu and I, exchanging our own “data,” below, to reanimate our revenant selves—with their robust boy pussy and my Goldilocks girl cock “docking” for much-needed release); but the state is always a pimp, perpetually seeking victims to profit off of—the patriarchal necromancer (or token matriarch) whoring Medusa as undead animal demon, playing on words interwoven with poison as the the cure (re: “Angry Mothers” and “Following in Medusa’s Footsteps“).

(artists: Persephone van der Waard and Cuwu)

As such, whores are bait, in Gothic canon—bewitching “pretty penny” predators “of the night” capable of seductive violence with a poisonous element (re: Victoria de Loredani using poison as well as knives) but ultimately a freakshow attraction/uppity merchandise meant to keep customers coming back for more, thus paying out till the cows come home. But this, too, cuts both ways—is something the state doesn’t monopolize (nor its infernal concentric pattern and deviant contents—with all the whores featured here being paid ventures; i.e., per this book series endorsing paid labor as essential to Communist development; re: “Paid Labor“). Power decays and rebuilds, its cummy accretion all part of the same oppositional cryptonymy playing at incest through wicked parentage; e.g., Walpole’s Mysterious Mother doubling down on the idea (re: Christensen): “the fear of inheritance [a] ‘secret sin; [an] untold tale, that art cannot extract, nor penance cleanse'” (re: “Healing from Rape“). So come to mommy, little one (the whore classically touted as fake, deviant, “asking for it”)! Halloween—once a celebration of death and labor tied to nature—has well-and-truly been corporatized. That’s what we’re up against—with “trick or treat,” for us harlots and hellions, becoming a deadly game made fun, once more. For us, Halloween is year round, the neo-medieval’s tacky surrealism a rebellious way of existence; i.e., one that challenges profit during a rememory of whores dead or alive, then and now!

Rememory’s a doll house, but also a sex doll back “from the grave” with a vengeance (re: “Back to Jadis’ Dollhouse“). Every Russian doll holds an iron maiden, the rebel both completely fake/tied to an imaginary past and something haunted equally with commodified assimilation/controlled opposition cornering the market that we must challenge again: upon the usual echoes of dynastic primacy and hereditary rites; i.e., sex and force; re: Bakhtin, the Gothic chronotope (the castle) composed of egregores, medieval miracles/puns, and displaced/flying icons of sin as a power to counteract state doubles and their bread-and-circus opiates amounting to little more than junk food (echoes of sugar and other luxuries made cheap by capital; see: Patel and Moore’s A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things). Speaking of junk food, a witch cop and victim both use the same Halloween-style costumes to achieve completely different aims: state preservation vs transformation. State varieties are always expendable, Medusa something to slay to keep capital’s crimes from coming to light. So do they pimp “the Beyond,” recruiting from various underworlds to better install the usual patsies in monomyth legends; i.e., that spuriously invalidate any doubles (ours) outside themselves. Any fake the state abuses, we lurk on the same surfaces while inside the same live-burial thresholds (re: Segewick’s 1980 “Imagery of the Surface” but also Coherence of Gothic Conventions, 1986); re: graveyard sex communicating through trauma/feeding and exchange/transformation evoking the return of undead and demonic, animal forces that whores adumbrate. We rebellious whores refuse to tokenize, but revel in our alien power as yearning to be freed from state control (thus genocide): through mimicry and disguise as primordial survival mechanisms, the whore cloning herself to live on like Sadako Yamamura (of Ringu fame).

Hogle correctly argues how monsters and taboo subjects (e.g., rape, death, and cannibalism) are incredibly popular according to the abjection process as furthered by the middle class’ own bogus media; i.e., “Hogle argues that modern Gothic is grounded in fakery” (source: “Implementation of Gothic Themes in The Gothic Ghost of the Counterfeit” vis-à-vis “The Gothic Ghost of the Counterfeit and the Process of Abjection,” 2023 and 2012). Neato. Except there’s no monopoly on monsters (re: “The Nation-State“), hence the whore and their stacked, castle-like body’s own quasi-ecclesiastical façades (and viral cryptomimetic curse) attached to such churches in small speaking to Capitalism and genocide; i.e., the whore a relic of the imaginary past (and its fakes) communicating as much through pain regarding repressed harm as anything explicitly pleasurable (though whores love to blur the lines; re: Radcliffe’s demon lovers and exquisite torture; see: “Exploring the Derelict Past“). The Gothic is ambiguous, sarcastic, and ironically silly/demented in ways that—while they can historically resist the danger of singular state interpretations—just as often oblige state realities; i.e., of the ruling class demanding dead whores to progress into their own charnel houses: objects of funerary revenge to kettle and attack, thus “slay” in ways we can camp; re: the whore’s revenge vs the pimp’s, one dismantling profit through Gothic poetry and theatrics (displacement, among other things), and the other aiding in profit by signing nature’s monstrous-feminine death warrant (re: “Rape Reprise“). Darkness visible sits within the usual bastardized conventions: a pissed-off naked lady who, bereft of virtue, will happily reach up from Hell to stab a bitch! Whores are historically criminals, a priori, subject to the very omerta capital violates to abuse their chattel-like, verminous assets for profit: something to breed, yet treat like spawn, like Dracula’s brides, like xenomorphs, etc.

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

Said cryptonymy is oppositional; i.e., a good whore can camp their own abuse during ludo-Gothic BDSM while owning the aesthetic the state hogs; e.g., graveyard sex, but also murder sex (re: ahegao; see: “Japanese Exports“). Whores are—among other things—star-crossed profligates tied to disease, sin, and criminal enterprise, which capital, under liberalism, tiers according to established pyramids of sin, guilt and blame; i.e., scapegoating the whore and nature as “hysterical,” through DARVO and obscurantism; e.g., groomer allegations: “If drag queens were fucking your children, they’d be covered in glitter!” (Don’t Tell Comedy’s “Drag Queens vs. Priests”; timestamp: 0:46). Yet “wicked bad naughty Zoot’s left her Grail Beacon on!” A similar cautionary adage applies to overeducated women (cis or not) being treated simultaneously as property that—should it be able to think for itself—might tempt state benefactors and/or seek revenge, like Frankenstein’s monster (re: the virgin/whore paradox; re: “Rape Reprise“); i.e., the Gothic heroine a detective threatened by ghosts of dead whores they effectively exorcise through hauntological detective work: exploring the castle, mansion and/or haunted house by candle, torch, oil lamp, or flashlight (re: “Radcliffe’s Refrain“). Whatever the victim, the home in Gothic is always Promethean (fallen), and God is dead; except the nuclear scapegoat is always, always a monstrous-feminine whore, bastard, rapist simulacrum “from elsewhere” (e.g., the whore living in sin, the trans woman in delusion, etc).

Furthermore, this paradoxical witnessing through Rashomon-style half-truth can be expressed in any kind of monstrous-feminine as such; i.e., beyond Creed’s Freudian bad bitches refusing to be victims of a conspicuously female, admittedly at-times-token design—with Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism being a composite holistic enterprise of revolutionary cryptonymy (on the same half-real surfaces, inside the same “magic circle” thresholds opposing state doubles; re: witch cops, “Witch Cops and Victims“). Nature and poetry comprise of endless varieties in duality that include cis-het women, but really any marginalized or policed group under the sun that said language can describe at cross purposes: for workers reversing abjection, or the state eating us by policing nature as monstrous-feminine with nature as monstrous-feminine (re: “Nature Is Food“). Whores take endless shapes because the state requires tokenizes to be endless (thus exploit labor as much as it possibly can). There is always another whore to pimp, Pygmalion-style, another world to conquer as Alexander once wept about (re: Anthony Madrid’s “And Alexander Wept,” 2020).

For the state, the whore is always alien, haunting home as soaked in genocidal whore’s blood, native blood, out-group blood; i.e., some degree of criminal, outsider and perpetrator homewrecker menacing the nuclear model or chained to it like a radiator (a makeshift ball and chain) during the whore’s paradox: the nadir/cumdump to despoil and dehumanize, the slave to whip, the native to eliminate. There’s no monopoly on victimhood, but capital, by definition, needs a victim to rape, thus polices the whore as the OG source of Armageddon; i.e., the state blaming the victim starting with the whore (as something that would extend into other marginalized groups, per capital policing such things to wider intersectional degrees; re: “Policing the Whore“). Canonically the whore must be gagged, shackled, closeted and/or killed, lest Civilization “fall” (the classic gaslight: we can’t pay unpaid laborers because profit would disappear).

Such is Capitalist Realism, including the neoliberal period’s endless military optimism; re: through videogames, said games (and their multimedia offshoots) immortalizing Rambo and Ripley as the usual standard/token cops of the Gorgon; i.e., gentrifying and decaying into toxic forms (the fatal cheapening of nature through labor’s assimilation). A pimp is a pimp, the testimony of those “beyond” the Black Veil recuperated by the state; i.e., the latter controlling opposition through whores it can never fully quell, but can gag through theatrical force as, unto itself, a pimping mechanism: the vice character (which the whore, again, ultimately exemplifies) giving our joyless lives a bit of color through guilty pleasure and endless wish fulfillment; e.g., black being the color of whores and green the color of stigma and envy (among other things, below)! Except there’s no limit to rebellion, because that’s what existing for the whore ultimately is: a Valkyrie freed en medias res (under state duress), liberating oneself by transforming the state as an army of whores exerting themselves to defy gravity. Worship Satan all you like. Just don’t be a Nazi about it (there’s a balance); e.g., Tolkien and Cameron canonized Milton (re: “On Twin Trees“), but we don’t have to!

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

Labor and its dark forces (which the whore again embodies, above) take infinite form, thus have infinite power insofar as exploitation and liberation both go (to make genocide palatable, but also bearable while surviving it). There’s no way to validate ourselves without reclaiming said language and its betrayals; i.e., as whores in service to ourselves fucking back, including the usual cops-and-robbers rivalry the state uses to pimp/persecute us with: during recursively staged-yet-seasonal moral panics replacing thus exterminating us. On loop and on brand, the holy man stakes the vampire or exorcises dark spirits; the plague doctor cures the disease (“Sickness, be gone!“); the hunter burns the witch at the sake and shoots the werewolf through the heart; the monomyth warrior beheads Medusa, and the noir detective or Gothic heroine gets to the bottom of things that smell fishy (re: whores). Regardless of the aesthetic at play (e.g., cowboy, knight, barbarian, etc), a cop is a cop, their violence mere Force of Will/might makes right. Whores are things to summon, then kettle and push around.

To it, we want to become opposition that, like Medusa herself, cannot be entirely controlled or fully tokenized, cured or cleansed; i.e., by breaking the monopolies of violence, terror and monstrous bodily expression the state, since its inception (and certainly since the Victorian era) has used to treat sexuality—and by extension, the people who do sex work—as unspeakable aliens; re: whores, which the police (actual or de facto) can pimp, thus brutalize with impunity during the abjection process. However dressed up these arguments are (or aren’t), they boil down to state’s rights versus worker’s rights and the rights of animals and the environment, which translate easily enough to pimps vs whores. Challenging the pimp requires listening to the whore when they sing their tone-poem stories, celebrating unknown pleasures behind the Black Veil that—with the Aegis—suddenly appear on the other side, or transport us straight to Hell: to look on the Aegis, and covert to the Gorgon’s cause (e.g., the curse of undeath classically coming from a kiss on the neck)!

A Chorus of Profligates; or, All Whores Are Monsters Struggling to Survive: Recognizing My Friends’ Help (and Value) in This Project

Silence is genocide, and few things speak louder than sexy monsters chanting to rafters they themselves built (an anti-church, but also anti-state, which Gothic Communism is)! The Gothic collocates, and all whores are monsters tied to sex; we’re the curse haunting the Gothic fake—the toxic waste that turns people green, the statue that speaks, the ghost of the counterfeit reversing abjection through the usual saucy temptations! Sex work is survival, a kind of testimony that speaks through the whore’s transfer of power (through sex, below, as a means of trade during survival sex work; re: Mugi is a survival sex worker who, like all sex workers, faces unequal degrees of oppression [with Mugi being plural and disabled as well as a trans masc parent] those with more/relative privilege must assist in light of capital pimping the vulnerable alien; re: “Conflict and Liberation“). We whores play devil’s advocate to ourselves, mid-courtship (on a social-sexual spectrum): combating racism, sexism, transphobia, whorephobia; i.e., as radical intersectional bigotries that require, as such, radical intersectional solutions (often Sisyphean laughter and love; i.e., “you gotta laugh”). “Eat the apple,” babes; we’re the apple workers must learn from (with Mugi a delicious orchard, below)! Top or bottom, we fuck back for Communism—on the Aegis, to metal, for shits and giggles but also to own the means of production! Time to make a deposit at the spank bank, but cross the banker’s palm with silver, first! Then dance the Devil’s dance when he extends his hand (abstinence merely a form of alienation/segregation during the abjection process): “Come get some” turned back on Ash Williams’ smug visage (so-called “soul swallowing” speaking to hag horror more broadly [not just Raimi’s] as lurking behind comely maidens threatening state virtue, namely semen: a failure to keep it in one’s pants; see: “Dark Shadows: the Origins of Demonic Persecution and Camp“).

(artist: Mugiwara)

Being a Gothic ludologist/pornographic historian (much of the Gothic and its poetic histories are porn; see: Volume Two), multimedia and BDSM expert, sex worker and all-around invigilator of popular media (re: sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll, but also videogames being how people communicate), I’ve not only drawn but written a lot about Amazons, the Medusa, Amazonomachia, and Creed’s monstrous-feminine (as well as Metroidvania, Tolkien and ludo-Gothic BDSM combined holistically with those); i.e., mid-study and performance, per revisitation, unfolding like a kind of standup, burlesque, or performance art (which includes public nudity and sex)—all for we whores to challenge Capitalist Realism’s cryptonymy process, ergo tokenism and profit’s usual state tools and Cartesian, heteronormative and settler-colonial qualities: during rape play inserting irony (zero harm) alongside exploitation, mid-liberation. Previously I mentioned Valkyries, and I have written about them elsewhere; re:

In times of crisis, the self-styled “righteous beyond reproach” are systemically the most guilty and dangerous—demonstrably kettling the women, children and minorities they fear to pimp them as alien. But revolutions go both ways, the Medusa speaking through us on the Aegis, and us to our enemies through our nude flashing of the Gorgon’s power to have the whore’s revenge (re: “Rape Reprise” and “Chapter Five: Rebellious Subterfuge“). We can’t rely on the police to protect us because cops pimp whores to defend property and capital rapes[4] by design. We must be our own Valkyries, defending our homes from these cheap creepy thugs; i.e., by exposing them as the dorky pimps they are, licking the state’s boots. So when the Man comes around, show him your Aegis and let him testify to his own treachery when angrily trying to closet you; segregation and silence are no defense, so no pasarán! (source: “Karl Jobst: Still Racist (and Fash), in 2025”).

i.e., a kind of classically female warrior/monstrous-feminine not unlike Amazons, but also hags, witches and oracles. Also classically, they were the gaslit gatekeeper girl bosses of the ancient world into capital: at the present space and time which we can camp, preventing genocide by denying the very token betrayals that lead to holocaust. Men, but especially straight men (or people acting like straight men), love their artefacts of power—their crowns, scepters and swords, etc, wielded by Campbell’s hero with a thousand faces pimping the whore across Hell’s half-acre; for women and minorities, by comparison, their power can reify through prurient offshoots—e.g., a queenly crown or witch’s broom, but just as often from the powers of the underworld being rooted firmly in their whore-like bodies[4a]: what the state tries to control by pimping as forces of nature to exploit from Columbus, Descartes and Bacon onwards (out from the older patriarchs of a pre-Enlightenment globe). Infinite power means infinite exploitation for whores to subvert through Numinous relegation rising to the surface; i.e., through non-binary and non-Vitruvian means; e.g., BBWs, PHAT, trap and similar pornographic labels used, one and all, to pimp nature as reprobate. The whore can tease and coax through such things, but just as easily throws their weight around to crush naysayers flat (to administer punishment through its usual vectors in reverse, Doomguy-style: from fully alive to more and more dead or vice versa, below).

(models: Tyler and Husband [top] and Kay of Sunshine and parter [bottom]).

Let’s not stand on ceremony, here! Stand and be recognized, my friends! “We’re talkin’ ’bout a revolution!” When the castle of the tyrant appears, don’t freeze and flee from its liminal hauntology of war (re: “Prey as Liberators“); humanize the harvest to expose the state as inhumane! Become the Valkyrie who transforms “Valhalla” from within, the peach and the knife, your castle a necropolis of music and motion galvanizing new Frankensteinian histories while lost inside! Each of you is a fortress, a dark cathedral of delightful wonder viewed from all angles, explored recursively and ergodically and concentrically (a kind of [a]sexual cubism, viewed from all sides minus Picasso’s pedophilia and caustic sexism; re: Marta’s “The Women of Picasso“)! The spirit of the Great Destroyer lives in you, labyrinthine likenesses of the Gorgon turning capital to stone!

Whores are down-to-earth, but also are the Earth; i.e., they get down to business, as dirty as the soil (of the grave) but full of nutrients and life itself as—suitably enough—tied to death big and little, spoofed to death: bound to the same ancient equation, canon treating the whore ever-and-always as ancient necrophilia enemies to the state raping them through monomythic force (and singing about these “eyes” of confusion to stab, per rite of passage sacrificing the usual whores; e.g., Manilla Road’s “Eye of the Stygian Witches,” 2018). State heroism polices sex through force, the former policed far more than the latter by virtue of the state needing sex to exist (despite so-called monopolies on terror and violence, it requires constant misuse of sex, which people like my friends, below, reclaim “on the Aegis”): the mystery of sex, closeting the whore… or setting her free by fucking with her in taboo ways; e.g., graverobbing and the fetishized nature of nameless whores who feel either dead before their time, or are conjured up through Gothic play (with dead things) to speak to secrets of abuse!

(source film: “Jane Doe” [2024]; artist: Ricky Greenwood)

A corpse, onstage, is generally not an actual corpse, but painted in doll-like ways to resemble one. Regardless, the cop always underestimates his victims, addicted to what said victims control as a means of charms for him to resist… or not; e.g., the lonely doctor seeking love, but said love also seeking him; i.e., sex as camouflage, seeming soft and tender to the desperately lonesome chaser but upon and inside themselves the whore shows the full immeasurable might of the Medusa laid bare! You never really know someone until you work with them, including sex; the point is conversation through art, which includes the Gothic (and porn) as artistic through conversations about, among other things, dead whores revived in theatrical language not just hundreds but thousands of years old (with Rob Zombie’s corpse-painted bride from “Living Dead Girl” [1997] evoking the graveyard whores of Ancient Rome; re: Wagner)! Death is simultaneously sacred and not—with the Gothic profaning the sacred by playing with it in ostensibly criminal ways that, point in fact, are perfectly legal.

In short, it’s what me and my equally whorish friends below make up through this series, thus have made and are made of, ourselves: an army of queer folk and sex workers whose Satanic apostacy (for all intents and purposes) versus the state pimping us in essentially the same linguo-material ways; i.e., regardless of how different each case might seem on the surface/within thresholds, harm is harm, and our creative successes abjure that by camping actual violations of our basic human rights (re: necrophilia, above—a corpse unable to consent); re: “as something to challenge the state by fostering our own creative successes of proletarian praxis, and whose mutual consent, informed consumption and informed consent, sex-positive de facto education, descriptive sexuality and cultural appreciation boil down to sex positivity (and liberation) versus sex coercion while developing Gothic Communism (with a huge focus on resisting tokenization; e.g., TERFs)” (source: “All the World” summary).

Behold the teachers of an alternate past, thus possible future—we whores (dead or alive) camping canon because we must. So is ludo-Gothic BDSM (and Gothic Communism) something I founded on all these beauties! To speak out is to survive, segregation no defense! Capital is not merely a gravesite, but crime scene of potential rape as much as actual, yet also one we place in quotes based on yesterday’s ambiguously consensual spoofs; e.g., “She’s the cunt that thought she was God, but that’s okay. I don’t give a shit, as long as she sucks me off when I tell her, ’cause she’s my zombie. I captured that motherfucker, and she’s my cassette” (Sublime’s “Raleigh Soliloquy Pt. I,” 1994). We have to be our own zombies—not the sex slaves of fringe mentalities bringing Imperialism home to empire (re: Raleigh evoking what’s essentially fascism proselytized by a mentally ill homeless person, above), but the zombie whores who bring Medusa back to life as a liberating force: one alive in all of us!

(artists, from top-left to bottom-right: Tyler and Husband, Blxxd Bunny, Victoria, Eldritch Babe, Tooth, Beat, Vera Dominus, Ginger’s cat, Mugiwara, Kay of Sunshine, Angel Witch, Crow, and Bay)

• Bunny: You’ve taught me a lot about asexuality and public nudism, over the years; i.e., using these to interrogate trauma through Gothic performance (e.g., painal and clown sex). You’re a rockstar and incredibly sweet personal, without which Sex Positivity (and ludo-Gothic BDSM) wouldn’t exist as they do presently!
• Victoria: Your feedback in regards to my own survivor’s testimony (of my own rape) has helped me conceptualize a voice to speak more clearly about rape survival, be that my own or in relation to other people’s.
• Tooth: You’re an incredibly sweet and loving person, so much so that my nickname for you was Sweet Tooth. I hope you’re well, my friend.
• Tyler and Husband: You’re both exceptionally easy to work with and hot—so much so that I get excited every time I talk to you!
• Kay of Sunshine: A newcomer to the project, but one whose boundless enthusiasm (and excellent end product) made me feel lucky to find you, last-minute!
• Beat: Keeper of chickens and kitties, with a “fat Jewish ass” (your words), the fact that you can quote “Jabberwocky” and “Ozymandias” from memory blows my mind. Also, learning about world history from you has been a treat!
• Angel Witch: Someone I’ve worked with for a long time, you’ve always respected my boundaries and been clear with you own. And you’re frankly one of the hottest people I’ve worked with physically, which just synergizes wonderfully with how kind and considerate you are! Also your outfits kick total ass!
• Vera: Mommy dommes are my jam, and you’re one of the best (soft pleasure dommes for the win)! Thank you for supporting my work and reading so much of it in your spare time!
• Crow: My sweet marshmallow wolf! Though our relationship has changed to become more romantic and less sexual since we first met, I love you more and more and am very proud of you!
• Mugi: A good friend, you’ve stood by my side since befriending each other. I appreciate you showing solidarity and continuing to work with me, producing amazing content as you did!
• Bay: My sweet space dog! Thank you for giving me the inspiration needed to write my PhD, and for sitting through my entire initial manuscript as I read it to you. You radicalized my work more than it already was (re: stewards of nature), and have brought constant joy and sunshine into my life!

Note: These models were specifically commissioned to appear in this grand finale; i.e., with me reaching out to them across the month of May (and several in late April; e.g., Blxxd Bunny and Angel Witch) to appear here, and something we agreed to, in advance; e.g., Crow and I (above). Since its inception, Gothic Communism has been founded on mutual informed consent, not coercion; i.e., as something to illustrate via dialectical-material context, scrutiny and study as education devices. As with all collaborators for my book project, our negotiations were paid based on mutual agreements; i.e., meant to go into the context of any images being shown, to help illustrate mutual consent as persuasive by virtue of its labor-fiscal elements (re: “Paratextual Documents“). Not all of these models are muses of mine, but some are (re: Blxxd Bunny). To see all the reviews for models that I written, as well as all my muses, go to my website’s Sex Work page. Conversely, to see everyone involved with Sex Positivity as a whole, go to my Acknowledgements page.

Mercenary Muses from the Island of Misfit Toys, from Wonderland, Narnia or the Castle of Otranto (any operatic, danger-disco [4b] place to go and experience/give voice to what capital has alienated workers from; re: the palliative Numinous)—you are not ghosts to exorcise or bandits to expose, banish and arrest, but almost-holy spectres of Mary Shelley and Karl Marx: paradoxical beings blurring the line between pleasure/pain, predator/prey, have/have-not, fight/flight, friend/foe, and familiar/foreign, etc, as something unique-yet-uncanny to worship, adore, fear and play with, mid-oscillation (the Gothic’s classic “push-pull” sensation)! To it, you echo the Fates, the Gorgon, Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (whose dream hath no bottom)! Embellishment is your dollish trade, expressing power as something to find and explore, through ludo-Gothic BDSM as relaid on and across a social-sexual gradient (re: “The Finale“)!

(source: “Toxic Schlock Syndrome”; artist: Mugiwara)

Female or not, my book series is full of such subversive cuties sharing the stage, and which—while I’m the art director and primary writer/illustrator and funder of the larger project you’re reading about, here—all have minds and hearts of their own to camp canon with; i.e., on individual stages that sometimes cross over into others, Heaven-and-Hell, or go offstage into regular earthly domains. Standing in defiance of a routine rising tyranny endemic to capital, their Aegis is the door to the whore’s revenge: Medusa the Archaic Mother (queen ghost of the counterfeit) again speaking through us and our work that we denude—bare and strong like Amazons—versus the fascist cult of the strongman (or strongwoman/non-binary person; re: Autumn Ivy in “The Nation-State“)! So finish strong, my little avenging angels (you readers, that is). No one ever meaningfully challenged fascism by being polite to Nazis, or holding back against their many degrees of weirdness (re: Eco’s “Fourteen Points“). Widespread issues require widespread participation—to overcome silence, shame and stigma as normally compelling omission, abjecting the whore. Rape is a silent sin offloaded classically onto women (or those treated as women; e.g., trans men like Mugi, above); i.e., as the one’s asking for it. As if! All we ever wanted was equal treatment, equal pay in a world where rape doesn’t exist. Is that really so much to ask?

Furthermore, radical intersectional bigotries (re: “imbricating persecution networks”; see: “Idle Hands” discussing witchcraft, blood libel and sodomy accusations, first and foremost) require radical intersectional solutions, and fascists are dorks who worship false strength and fatal Gamergate nostalgia tied to an equally false, harmful imaginary past (e.g., that guy from The Chronicles of Riddick, who Karl Urban worships through Nazi space dogma: “He’s a holy half-dead who’s seen the Underverse“). So was the Wizard of Oz a hypocrite witch hunter weaponizing children to kill witches (thus whores) for the Emerald City (Omelas by another name); the best way to expose a hypocrite is through whores taking such things back—on the Aegis, with the same aesthetics laid bare to expose genocide! Never surrender! Fight them and their paper-tiger censorship (thus silence/genocide) every step of the way (Persephone van der Waard’s “Project 2025 Affecting My Work, Censorship At Home/Abroad, Fighting ICE“; timestamp: 29:07)! Remind them the king hangs the hangman on his own rope—laughing at the Roman fool so afraid of death he thought he could avoid dying by eating his own friends and eventually himself, toe to top! A fatal portrait showing the cracks in canonical law on and offstage, we whores hoist pimps on their own petards!

This revelation/rememory requires our part in a larger Song of Infinity reshaping the Wisdom of the Ancients (re: “A Song Written in Decay” and “On Giving Birth“), camping the canon to achieve infinite power according to where power is always found: concentrically within/around us as dark warrior and monstrous-feminine sex symbols, mise-en-abyme (re: the Gothic chronotope; see: “Castles in the Flesh” as well as my Metroidvania research); i.e., breaking state monopolies on violence, terror and monstrous expression, ergo strength in masculine and/or feminine forms (re: “The Nation-State“). Take it—land, labor and love—back! Upon yourselves, all the dead whores of past generations weigh like a nightmare on the brains of the living who worship the state (re: me, vis-à-vis Marx’ “Eighteenth Brumaire“)! Our power fantasies must counter theirs and what they stand for—not just pimping nature through increased neoliberal division, efficient profit and infinite growth, but literally embodying and policing these things in duality versus us while in proximity (re: “Military Optimism,” “War Vaginas,” and “Policing Bodies“)! “Mother is the name for ‘God’ on the lips and hearts of all children.” My mom’s cooler than yours!

(source image: A Polaroid taken of my mother when she was younger, shortly after the Fall of the Soviet Union; i.e., circa. 1991, while hanging with the Red Army. Mom’s incredibly educated, but one whose streetwise past ensures she that always has a trick [or two] up her sleeve! She also gave me a room of one’s own, in essence funding entire my book series.)

The exploitation of mothers and educated women is a very old theme, with the Gorgon famously being the mother of monsters begot from rape (re: in one’s sleep): fast, loose, and scarlet—a force of nature commonly called wandering womb, hysteria, wicked and so on. Trauma begets trauma but also attracts it (and often in maladaptive ways; re: me vis-à-vis Jadis, Zeuhl and Cuwu while struggling to bond and learn from others with similar struggles often preying on me). It behooves us not merely to listen, then, but embody such beings in positive, healthy ways; i.e., as human beings reclaiming the mendacious language of alien to honor and remember older survivors having “paid the rent” (and told a few lies): to make ends meet, us being the result of various “oopsies”! The state is classically white, straight and male, female examples always token by virtue of Beauvoir’s admittedly inadequate phrase, “woman is other.” My work—and by extension my friends’ work married to mine—expands on that; i.e., by fighting for universal liberation (versus female tokenization), but whose series still started from what Ma taught me when I was little: don’t hit women, Stalin sucks, and tip your sex workers (re: “Paid Labor“)! Let’s unpack unpack that. Double time it, babes!

A Crescendo: Medusa—Iconoclast, Warrior and Spy

All language is dualistic; Medusa, the ghost of the counterfeit, lives not just in our zombie brains, but undead babies reversing abjection during the whore’s revenge—e.g., from Mom with the Red Army (above) to li’l ol’ me critiquing Marxist-Leninism as much as the West (no Omelas, my dudes); i.e., her sickly-strong babes (of the dark scary woods or otherwise) in and not in the blood (social and material conditions) illustrating mutual consent as sexy through the Superstructure: in the face of those sick with virgin/whore and mirror syndrome who don’t value consent, favoring coercion of whores and brides alike! “Do you want to live forever?” Love is a battlefield of courtly love, the Galatea escaping Pygmalion’s patriarchal shadow to break the monomyth Cycle of Kings within the infernal concentric pattern (re: Tolkien and Cameron’s refrains, the High Fantasy treasure map and shooter/Metroidvania; see: my Tolkien research at large, but also “A Note About Canonical Essentialism” and “The Quest for Power“).

All war is predicated on deception, said Sun Tzu; the same goes for whores waging class, culture and race war during the cryptonymy process reversing abjection (with masks and costumes [e.g., animal skins, teeth and bones] but also bodies and art, as well as poetic extensions [egregores] of those things, of those things, cryptomimetically on and on)! Strength combines masculine and feminine, but also stealth and exposure, mid-kayfabe, onstage and off, during canon vs camp in praxial opposition. It’s bound to get messy because revolution is messy at its core (and which the state will try its best to infiltrate and tokenize our movement). But the revolutionary strength of the Amazon is breaking said chains, thereby showing off her classically naked power in voyeur/exhibitionist ways that—in our subversive hands and theatre of domination and bondage—defy profit as a structure: of vertical power arrangement and abuse, endless freakshow invasions, inequality and harm (rape or otherwise, compelled sex extending to forced labor of all kinds)! Again, the difference between cop and rebel is function, the rebellious whore using the outlaw aesthetic to place power systemically in worker hands (e.g., not just the Amazon, but the knight or ronin, below); i.e., to defend all of nature (thus all whores) from state predation! We share the same stages they do, doubling our enemies to invite for troubling comparisons: to burst their bubbles while busting our nuts! Death on two legs? Get it, girl! Pirates are cool, ninja pirates are cooler still!

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

So be brave; join hands and collectively expose the enemy as fallible, false, and cruel, but also embarrassingly stupid (afraid of the voices of those they abuse, treating the hearing of such testimony as death, below)! Our unity is their kryptonite, their Achilles Heel having fetishized us beings “of dark vengeful nature” into nothing they fear more than death itself: “Your power comes from us, embodying the River Styx you merely bathed in! Now stare and tremble!” Exposure (revelation) is what they fear most of all, so make them face it, on the mirror (and multi-sensual combinations; i.e., a confusion of the senses, selective absorption, and magical assembly during the Song of Infinity as penned by us; re: “A Song…“). God What Awful Racket, indeed (GWAR not actually being an acronym but onomatopoeia, like many battle cries)! Poison was the cure, noise pollution something we mommy dommes (and similar oppressed powers) embody in the aforementioned flesh market as controlled by whores, reclaiming their own bodies. Fight Amazons with Amazons, mid-Amazonomachia as dualistic. Turn revolution into kayfabe; Medusa is always a victim in the state’s eyes, so turn that on its head (e.g., Amazons and anal rape; re: “Reclaiming Anal Rape“). Make Medusa’s voiceless screams (and raw naked fury) your weapon; i.e., to wage intersectionally solidarized class, culture and race war in ways not dissimilar to my friends and I! Look to the past and you will find all the answers you need (re: James Baldwin).

(artist: Bill Watterson)

The models featured here are but a small handful of the larger whole who agreed to be a part of Sex Positivity. The entirety (about ninety at this point) can be found in the Acknowledgements section to Sex Positivity. Also read their interviews in “Hailing Hellions.” Lastly, the citations throughout this finale should give you some different places; i.e., to dig into, searching for searches only whores can impart. Whatever the form, learn from our stories, including the ones told by my friends and I to have our revenge against the pimp! Beyond these books, though, tell your own stories in art, writing and public nudism (among other forms of art, above); i.e., to rewrite history on your Aegis as shared with so many others. In short, Capitalism is a bad lie whose Realism (and faulty legacy of endless death and destruction) we break on the Aegis reclaimed! War is a racket; class (culture and race) war is not! Instead, it picks up steam by reclaiming value as something to sing about (or perform however an iconoclast wants to; e.g., Bill Watterson camping the Protestant ethic with his own Calvin and Hobbes; re: above).

Revolution began with a whisper, sang Tracy Chapman. Now scream! Be heard as much as seen; i.e., like as my friends and I have, here! Vis-à-vis Anita Sarkeesian, enjoy the garbage of the past, but endorse universal liberation through intersectional solidarity’s pedagogy of the oppressed; i.e., the subversion of canonical norms during the dialectic of the alien to hug Medusa (re: “Some Prep When Hugging the Alien“); re: by putting “rape” in quotes during ludo-Gothic BDSM—often the visual threat of violent torture, or at least the marriage of sex to power and death as a perceived invasion from the awesomely torturous, ritualistic past (re: “Psychosexual Martyrdom“); e.g., “Bring me the Earth! And join every dimension!” or “Ass is whera I berongu to. I won’t gibu yuu ze ass!” (re: exhibit 99e and post from “Kento’s Dream” and “Inside the Hall of Mirrors“). And as you sing loud-and-proud, the state will frame us as Radcliffean shadows to banish, like all whores; e.g., as evil goblins, wicked necromancers, and/or Numinous gorgon rulers from beyond the stars (re: Capitalist Realism pimping the ghost of the counterfeit to further abjection; see: “Radcliffe’s Refrain“). You must not stop! Tokenism is poor stewardship, so turn away from Judas pay. Be stewards to nature, including yourselves, animals and the Earth (re: the Pale Blue Dot, vis-à-vis Carl Sagan; see: “Time Is A Circle“); become the voice of the dead whore that outs the state as pimp eternal! Their lies are too good to be true, so tempt them with the homewrecker’s testimony that’s too stubborn to die, a nightmare that never ends! “We have no beginning and no end; your legacy is dead!”

Such visions are poetically described as Original Sin being both what Plato once called opinion, “the wilderness between knowledge and ignorance” (the unknown); but also the classic granter of wishes (their fulfillment and guilty pleasure) tied to blind paralysis feeding on trauma (re: strange appetites conditioned by capital, “A Cruel Angel’s Thesis“). As capital is patriarchal, there is an ancient sexist element. Maegen McAuliffe O’Leary describes it well:

Eat the fucking apple.

They are going to blame you

regardless.

You might as well go to the gallows

with a full belly

knowing more than God (source: “What I would Tell Eve”).

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

I would add, “Be the apple as something Numinous to eat”; re: capital sexualizes everything (re: “Thesis Body“) to rape everything (re: “A Cruel…“); i.e., in ways we dark mommies must subvert through sustenance and protection; re: Laura Ng’s “The Most Powerful Weapon You Have” (2003) vis-à-vis Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism (1993)—with my own “Rape Reprise” speaking to Amazons being classic victims and terror weapons pimped by the state: in undead, demonic, and/or animalistic, drug-like ways (re: “On Darkness and the Forbidden,” “Healing through ‘Rape’” and “Call of the Wild“), but also through (multi-)mediums, too; e.g., flesh, but also clay as a likeness of flesh, and similar simulacra such as ink, paint, metal or bone. Don’t be afraid to play with “rape” through monsters, which whores are (Amazons or not): de facto educators to turn into during sex with the lights on, staring the state speechless (that was a pun, Medusa the queen of staring contests)! Teach through testimony as partially poetic, speaking to secrets that survive as boner-inducing and pun-heavy simulacra (“boners” again alluding to graveyard sex, the boneyard filled with dead whores and their servants and enemies alike); re:

The Western world is generally a place that testifies to its own traumas by fabricating them; i.e., as markers of sovereignty that remain historically unkind to specific groups that nevertheless survive within them as ghosts of unspeakable events linked to systemic abuse. Trauma, in turn, survives through stories corrupted by the presence of said abuse. There is a home resembling a castle, where a ghost—often of a woman—lurks inside having been met with a sorry fate. But undeath is something that can be felt through echoes of ourselves that aren’t diegetically spectral; they feel spectral through an uncanny resemblance, like standing over our own graves. This becomes something to play with during ludo-Gothic BDSM, akin to an (at-times) humorous, even trashy gallows theatre rife with dark, forbidden language: sin, vice, violent sex, all-around death, and other taboo subjects discouraged by privileged (and unimaginative) moderates who historically frame the Gothic as a puerile, good-for-nothing backwater while simultaneously suffering from conservative delusions of privilege and/or tokenism (re: Jameson). In other words, the pedagogy of the oppressed faces its classic foil: tone-policing (source: “Healing from Rape”).

Damn the critics and pick up the pace; revolutionary cryptonymy is sentiment relayed through code, history an everchanging document of Gothic fakeries, Walpole onwards—i.e., “The only time such persons are happy is when they’re in control and harming others with said control, so we must take it away from them: through our voice as the antidote to silence, thus rape and genocide” (source: “Karl Jobst”); re: capital alienates and sexualizes everything insofar as nature is pimped out by capital as dark alien whore—an iconoclastic performance whose not-of-this-Earth showcase becomes something to fear thus control. This makes controlling it (re: us, the monstrous-feminine) the state’s historical-material imperative; i.e., they love, hate and fear what they try to control as being fundamentally out of their control. Much of that equation lies in fantasies of revenge to enact, the place for its execution simultaneously of no entry or exit, mid-divorce. The usual frontiers come home to roost, the Black Veil parting to reveal an Ozymandian ruin behind: where the usual Scooby-Doo piracies[5] are denied, instead occurring in reverse. So activism is reclaimed, feminism or otherwise reclaimed by whores as monstrous-feminine—meaning anything not a white straight European Christian man, albeit to modular degrees of privilege and oppression, but also arbitrary persecution language and enforcement; i.e., whose system of reward, crime and punishment lead, one and all, to a holistically menticidal discipline; re: profit pimping nature as whore. Behind every shadowy bugbear is an imposter to demask, a secret sinner on par with Radcliffe’s titular Italian, Father Schedoni, echoing Lewis’ crossdressing whore—the devil-in-disguise, but also the ghost giving testimony to its own rape and murder (or vice versa)!

Again, Radcliffe’s refrain classically polices nature (the out-group) through cartoonishly evil in-group scapegoats; re: banditti, pimps and whore pirates in duality (regardless of sexual biology and orientation, race, religion or gender identity/performance). Medusa a Big Whore/colossal butt pirate taking the booty back with the booty to make it valuable again (versus classically cheap, as the state does). Except, there’s no monopoly on cryptonymy through violence, terror and monsters; i.e., as we’ve acclimated to such duality. Nevertheless, their function results from what is done with power as performance, our bad-faith LARPer enemies unable to penetrate us (to get what they want) but simultaneously lured to their doom by us: a siren-song’s intoxicating unknown, one whose entropic graveyard thrives on disorder to anisotropically break Capitalist Realism (and its vast, generational system of nostalgic lies and theft, which the Black Veil is); i.e., as tied to the whore’s native state of existence exploited historically through ethnocentric ideas of destiny (classically through geography [re: “A Note About Canonical Essentialism“] but also biology as linked to sex and gender not being separate; re: Butler).

For example, I’m a woman regardless of my biology. Indeed, I labor in spite of it (and capital’s powerful TERF advocates calling people like me home invaders; i.e., capital constantly colonizing itself to keep power with the elite, thus profits [and genocide] high). Beyond me, whores come from many different stripes. Regardless, they are fruit to consume, the harvest’s cornucopia something that can humanize itself to expose the usual pirates of our labor’s fruits: the elite/pirates of Silicon Valley and their servants, the middle class, emulating them (essentially Nazi Dilbert and technocratic fascism, from Peter Theil to Bill Gates to Mr Beast and similar billionaires/venture capitalists); re: as inhumane, privileged by the usual, die-hard ethnocentric models (and their racism, sexism and other bigotries being self-defeating enterprises). Embarrass the state by humanizing your whorish elements; fight back with whatever’s on hand (the guerilla historically relying on invention, below), and when you do, make it a riot (riots famously involving the throwing of food, also below)!

So do we whores come from dark, Numinous, underworldly states of relegation; i.e.,  likened to a harvest; e.g., the female genitals (or anus, female or not). Such orchards of despair yield bounties of “food” we lob at our enemies; i.e., the very things they love and hate, but also fear and worship as sacred/profane, virgin/whore! Something to rub their face in, we beings of the street, the jungle, the ghetto, but ultimately the ruined angry land deliberately use the Aegis (our goods) to reverse the flow of abuse; i.e., by demasking state powers to break said Realism to bits, burying our thirsty enemies alive. So do we pelt them with the very fruit they normally carve from us, weaponizing what is normally stolen from ourselves—our land, labor and bodies—to rob our foe of their structured appetite (attack from the produce isle, the ghost of the banana republic embarrassing the colonizer, above). “Exit only, bitch! Now the shoe’s on the other foot!”

I say “structure” because the Gothic is writ in disintegration (re: “A Song Written in Decay“); i.e., as a structure unto itself and on to explore, mid-peril as a suitable “Gothic” feeling (the rotting castle, colony or homestead, etc). Though classically fake, this is where power—true power—is found when whores reclaim such things; re: by reversing the state’s hold on us and what they fetishize of us, mid-abjection: “I clutch thee but have thee not,” indeed! Hell is our home, one we’re used to exploring in ways the state has literally divided itself from; i.e., by endlessly fetishizing and exploiting workers and nature as alien, during proxy war (e.g., Lavos from Chrono Trigger, “Darkness Visible“). The closer you are to the central status quo, the less exploited/alien you feel, but capital will arbitrate abuse against those with more privilege, too; e.g., Mick Gordon (Mild Conviction’s “The Mistreatment of Mick Gordon – A Freelancer’s Worst Nightmare,” 2023). No one is safe from the pimp, and if you don’t believe me, ask all the lonely men out there; capital has taught them badly on purpose, cuckolding their little pimps-in-training in the hopes that they’ll snap and punch down. “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”

For we whores, though, these fantasies aren’t an escape, but a sexy alien’s guerrilla weapon of endless power against the state and its husbandry of cowards (cops are bred to fear nature through state menticide, but also promise of jungle brides); i.e., versus the oppressor controlling sex-as-alien through force (e.g., the xenomorph or Sailor Scouts; re: “The Puzzle of ‘Antiquity’” and “In Measured Praise of the Great Enchantress“). In Gothic, tyrants fear the return of the past liberating the whore, so it tokenizes whores and their allies. Tokenism is fascism, decaying capital towards itself as something to revive, mid-abjection; we whores reverse the process, resurrecting ourselves to foil state rebirth. Bread and circus is their recipe, and breeds endless betrayals; re: “Karl Jobst“; i.e., through alien language piloted, Radcliffe-style, by cops (token or not), which our mendacious cakes reclaim, one labor exchange to the next! Hairy animal whores (women or otherwise, below) hold all the secrets; i.e., those that capital seeks to steal not once, but time and time again!

(artist: Delilah Gallo)

Whores, once awake, are billboards for Communism. So does sex mark the spot (one last pun); i.e., during the cryptonymy process (showing through concealment). Instead of canceled, the future comes alive through undead nostalgia rising from the grave, out from Hell, the jungle, etc. Like the Creature from Frankenstein, we anisotropically reverse counter/counterterror through universal liberation achieved via intersectional sex worker solidarity (and similarity amid difference); re: to raise emotional/Gothic intelligence and class, culture and race awareness, thus challenge/abolish profit and all things tied to it that cause widespread harm—to say to our so-called “makers” during the Promethean Quest, “You are not gods” (re: “Making Demons“). Again, the state is straight and ASAB, ACAB, ABAB, APAB, AKAB (states, cops, billionaires, presidents, kings, etc)! Medusa’s return embodies a testimony that shatter’s patriarchal legacy by reminding the world the king is a pimp, and a mortal, venal one. Who better than a whore to castrate them—someone comfortable with themselves and being made of “evil” flesh and bone, but also with being penetrated?

So come to mommy, motherfuckers! You’re just as expendable as us, and infinitely more guilty of abusing everything around you (whores being the classic scapegoat/victim of capital, which the Gorgon turns on the consumer of stolen plunder from Medusa’s Numinous vaults). We are not pigs for your abattoir! Ancient abuse, ancient revenge—with nothing more satisfying than the flesh (that most ancient of merchandise) turning the tables on its prescribed purveyors, mid-market. The butchered become the butcher and vice versa, the so-called pieces of meat fucking fucking back while consumed! Everyone loves the whore, and no revenge is sweeter than ours! While the cop feigns immunity towards educational sin, the whore adapts through experimental vice; she’s the fruit to eat, and understands that—while no one is immune—she has home court advantage; re: whore = homewrecker vs the nuclear model to secretly (or not-so-secretly) despise! From Sappho to Mother Brain, her creampie “cauldron” is the birthplace of dissent, its stank juices ambrosia for the mind set free through illusion reclaimed (the Gorgon doubling Plato’s cave with her own sticky vault; e.g., The Matrix and Vampire Capitalism; re: “The World Is a Vampire“)! Dark, wet, tight, and writhing wickedly tied to “antiquity” as thoroughly hauntological (re: “The Puzzle of ‘Antiquity‘“), wherever you go, she’ll be waiting you!

The fact remains, you can’t camp canon without killing your darlings. So take this series’ title extension—Liberating Sex Workers through Iconoclast Art—to heart! Facing death can change the fiercest of attackers and their warped perspectives—to give new appreciation during calculated risk relieving stress, mid-representation: as a state of intersectional solidarity among whores versus racial, cultural and class division (re: no Omelas children), but also exposure to our enemies who try and count themselves among our number! We whores can invent whatever we need to survive; i.e., inside the labyrinth as our home to reclaim! Our peach to feast on (or with, vampirically reversing the flow that food travels—a charnel house, carrion flower or poisoned apple, etc), we burrow through common “horrors” to delight in your disgust! Whatever panic spasm racks your soul, we take your power by virtue of you having given yourselves (and your bad faith) away when viewing us: poison not just a woman’s weapon, but paradox a place to turn it to our monstrous-feminine’s preferred holistic advantage (re: female or not, regardless of gender or skin color or religion, etc)! Unchain the night, our revolutionary cryptonymy sucking from you that which you call “poison” save when you’re stealing it from us! Steal this!

(model and artist: Itzel Sparrow and Persephone van der Waard)

To it, the whore’s ultimate revenge is speech, and our cacophony of whores steal state power by virtue of testimony to state falsehood; i.e., the state is the impostor versus the whore, the latter’s unmasking of the former reminding workers during calculated risk that mutual consent is sexy (versus police violence, hence lack of consent, worshipped canonically as heroism against nature). The fact remains, capital is haunted by rape, hyphenating sex and war as things to camp; exploitation and liberation share the same half-real, Gothically nostalgic (retro-future) spaces, ones whose interrogation of power by whores being to go where power is and navigate it; re: mise-en-abyme, through play (see: “Interrogating Power“). Revolution, likewise, keeps it together by shared love, a kind felt among strangers; i.e., the whore skilled in the perceived (and performative) confusions of friend and foe, pleasure and pain, master and apprentice, or predator and prey. So do they suitably keep a cool head, one able to separate impostors during the cryptonymy process putting “rape” (thus exposure, per the Gothic heroine surrounded by danger) in quotes (re: “Healing from Rape” and “Healing through ‘Rape’“): our nudity and agency over said nudity (and trauma attracting equally traumatized people) enraging the infantile, who angrily see what they can’t control as something to attack (e.g., Gen-X Gamer attacking the sex workers who model for me, saying they both aren’t oppressed because they’re sex workers, and also that I’m oppressing them like Andrew Tate oppresses his victims; re: “Intraracial Bigotry from a Token Pimp“; timestamp: 51:25).

Cops are the biggest impostors, infiltrating the brothel, the church, the danger disco! The louder we scream, the more they squirm in their shitty disguises!

Screaming from Hell; or, Finding Your Power (and onto Better Things)—in a Planetary Brothel Run by Whores!

Again, if whores lacked power unto themselves, the state wouldn’t try to police us, on and offstage; i.e., through the same strange appetites that capital conduces and affords. To it, the state’s biggest fear is Medusa set free, which it polices everywhere it can; re: out of revenge, through persecution mania/attack-the-alien and extermination[6] rhetoric it abuses to feed itself, mid-gaslight: the fear of the Gorgon unleashed, spilling its guts to expose state secrets mid-war-cry as, unto itself, orgasmic, rapturous, alien, free—the flying fortress whose promise of a black planet (of whores) amounts the proverbial fat lady singing when it’s finally over!

Yet, time remains a circle, one where the monstrous-feminine screams the unspeakable as loudly and as rapturously (therefore orgasmically) as possible; i.e., the very Earth—that whore to harvest like fat sassy fruit—curling its toes to humanize the harvest by testifying to generational trauma! Reversing abjection, Medusa walks the tightrope between victimizer and victim, requiring her human counterparts (we whores) to be paradoxically unfettered and gingerly in our personal uproars; i.e., lest we gentrify and decay through capital’s cops-and-criminals tokenization of whores (re: subjugated Amazons). Assimilation is poor stewardship, knowing our own worth as whores (with infinite value) meaning not selling out to the usual pimps promising us “protection.” Medusa is the master of memento mori, but also ahegao (and many whores are gorehounds; e.g., I’m a horror movie fan).

From the classic Western variant (which includes more recent versions, like Pyramid Head or the xenomorph) to non-Western doppelgangers (re: Sadako Yamamura), Medusa is always a monstrous avenger of past wrongs occurring in the present space and time; i.e., something to hark and heed, mid-rapture, the whore replete with psychosexual paradox, a fury to feel through her bodily unheimlich as Communism (and its spectres) camping everything in sight (which include Marx, who was always a bit dry and dull; re: “Making Marx Gay“)! Yes, you can experience pleasure and pain in their presence—to give and receive such things, the whore’s body built to withstand punishment. But more than that, you can look upon them for sexual and asexual reasons, thereby witness whatever escapes the whore’s hellish container when poked: “Harder! Faster! Beat that fat pussy up! Clap those cheeks! GIVE ME YOUR POWER!” Medusa skirts the line between vulnerable and invulnerable, armor and exposure; e.g., too-small panties, or a Gothic heroine’s nightgown while warding off fears of dark courtly love; i.e., the whore’s tight pussy (and frog-like amplexus) able to navigate such perils to enrich themselves, voyeur-and-exhibit—effectively using all Hell’s power trapped between one’s legs to turn the planet (therefore the proverbial frogs that call said planet home) gay as hell!

(model and artist: Feyn Volans and Persephone van der Waard)

This goes both ways, of course. To it, rape as a structure (the Gothic castle) is dogma; re: for the state to antagonize nature as whore and put it cheaply to work in monomythic forms, itself an aphrodisiac for anyone inside the Man Box, token or not. For us, “rape” combines with creativity as ostensible wizardry to the uninitiated. Power is performance perceived for different aims, during the usual forgeries’ liminal expression (re: “Notes on Power” and “Doubles, Dark Forces, and Paradox“). So use your own naked mirrors’ dark forces and paradox to showcase whoever attacks your buffers, and remind those who do (often in bad faith) that certain things are true no matter how hard they deny or deep they bury them; i.e., Medusa is always waiting to freeze them in their tracks, hence profit. We must play with such things, for playing is not only how we learn but learn to change the world around us through itself: by establishing control while feeling out of control; i.e., as pretty soldiers making the world more Communist, ergo a better place! In Gothic, the nuclear home is always false, scapegoating its own rapacious crimes (those of the drunk husband, jealous boyfriend, pedophile coach or false preacher and their respective defenders) onto the usual hellcats, outsiders, whores, et al. Cops talk tough but fear whores, showing the state their belly by punching down at said whores in Hell: the way a husband beats his wife, but also how a child breaks their toys. Capital infantilizes in the worst ways, leading to policing sex with force because doing so is profitable and has been since the beginning. Profit isn’t just literally built on rape; it is rape.

I’ve said repeatedly during this finale (and elsewhere) how sex work is the oldest profession, thus the oldest labor exploitation; i.e., where workers can have our revenge by screaming our existence—as pleasurably as possible (above) to terrify our would-be captors pimping us! Pandora’s box cannot be closed once open, so open wide and testify in spite of the usual witness tampering and intimidation (the whore being the classic witness to tone police; re: “Policing the Whore“). Such things are fundamental to state operations; e.g., the Spartan secret police, the Crypteia, pimping its own victims, the enslaved population; i.e., the death squad commando not unique to Achilles, Beowulf, or Rambo, but all these killers being forced to empty their humanity versus nature as whore (re: “Police States“): something to summon against us, and whose mirror syndrome we must anticipate and exploit; re: Man Box, prison sex, and weird canonical nerds (and their various death cults, state-corporate or not) versus weird iconoclastic nerds. They menace us; we menace back, the bait and the trap:

(source: “Darkness Visible: Dark Faeries”; model and artist: Annabel Morningstar and Persephone van der Waard)

So shame the incel with their own failure of the mirror test/complete inability to form healthy social-sexual bonds with other humans; make the spineless, heartless, brainless rapist (and their home of rape) fear their own replacement/deconstruction when the oppressed come home to roost—on the Aegis, the whore’s pussy a perverse palace of forbidden pleasure, their ass a genie’s lamp that—when rubbed—releases dark wishes tied to abject objects of power! So is the Gorgon’s “cave” advertised repeatedly as something to invade, shelter to steal from some Indigenous force the state—already classically white, male, straight and finally Christian out of a Pagan past known for public torture (the Romans) bastardized into Catholic and Protestant dogma—goes on to deem unholy hence worthy of sacrifice: decimation and crucifixion brought to levels of slaughter the Caesars couldn’t dream of achieving (e.g., the Palestinians). All serve the same superior/inferior argument pushing for legitimacy vs illegitimacy (thus legal and illegal) on and offstage, except it’s been thoroughly racialized through the usual state tools; i.e., as the state decays into older hauntological versions of itself (with the elite always shielded by the gobstopper core’s outer layers)!

To it, the state preys on nature by design, which it shows/conceals through cryptonymy during the abjection process leading to state shift (re: climate change, as described by Patel and Moore). But Medusa comes for us all, token or not. Life and death are never truly separate but two sides of the same decay-and-rebirth scheme; so become Medusa-in-small, punching up at capital in small—i.e., its traitors aping our own rebellious language (the Amazon, when tokenized, being a false rebellion whose subjugation must constantly be subverted by genuine activists). Diversity is strength when it cannot be divided, inclusive nudity the whore’s armor during the liminal hauntology of war’s oppositional cryptonymy! It paradoxically enacts anti-predation that happens behind invisible buffers (e.g., phone screens), but also because anyone attacking the whore’s shadow outs themselves as a pimp (e.g., SWERFs).

In doing so, monsters (which whores are) demonstrate poetic arguments arbitrated through “ancient” theatre. This amounts to anything the state denigrates while pimping such territories; re: preferential code with hauntological flavors; e.g., “family” and “home” likewise being anything the state leverages habitually against us homewrecker whores: the secret sins of empire. They view (thus treat) us like trolley problems to “solve,” stigma-animal vermin to destroy linked to the usual sites of plunder and death; e.g., the cryptonymy of female bodies and Original Sin speaking just as easily to trans hauntologies (with Itzel formerly being a regular of mine to depict in that respect, below); re: Shelley and Frankenstein proceeding Marx by virtue of women/queer folk largely being closer to oppression and exploitation than straight men (see: “Making Demons“). To exist at all despite state harm is our revenge—doubly so if we hammer home whatever point we need to, using what we got to do the job: the GNC, power bottom showboat with the jackhammer ass beating the cop at their own game! Sex is the drug and we’re the ones dealin’ it, the devil to deal with petrifying our executioners! When they weaponize the moon against us, we whores turn around and blast its Numinous power back onto them (re: “Escaping Jadis“). Stare and tremble, bitches! Fuck the alien, trading your “soul” (whatever that is[6a]) for a helluva time!

Family for the whore isn’t blood, but what we make for ourselves: despite those “just asking questions” to defend state ideas of home selling our own rapes back to us; e.g. the Jewish Question, Trans Question, or similar dubious queries; i.e., the state brothel a death lottery upholding perceived moral orders where more privileged workers can afford to temporarily look the other way/turn a blind eye towards Medusa. Such solutions and their orderly disposal are never “final,” but made to rinse and repeat (e.g., Rathbone’s “‘Controlled Starvation’: Israel Implements its Final Solution in Rafah,” 2025). Those who defend such repetition can’t face that terrible reality until they can, when suddenly it’s the easiest choice in all the world: us versus them, the Roman fool donning the executioner’s hood “when in Rome,” selling bread-and-circus toys during genocide as the main attraction; i.e., punching “enemies at the gate” (e.g., Doom: the Dark Ages; see: my review of the game, “Fuck id, Free Palestine“). We whores turn that back at them, using our Aegises to do the trick (so to speak, below)! They never owned us.

(source: “Call of the Wild”; model and artist: Itzel Sparrow and Persephone van der Waard)

All the same, they certainly try! So does the Gothic transplant older language as “past”; i.e., to discuss and dissect the present enchanting the oppressed (or vice versa). Imperfect reminders that lead, paradoxically, away from “harm” by putting it in quotes, the whore makes trophies of men as such: a demon who abjures the Protestant ethic. Literally not safe for work, they’re a black rabbit to follow into Hell (re: “Follow the White-to-Black Rabbit“). So is their cryptonymy an ouroboros, one whose befuddling and alluring morphological statements—while we won’t have time to unpack them, here—routinely hyphenate body and home, mise-en-abyme, as the Gothic do; i.e., as something to get lost inside; re: a castle, necropolis, Dante-esque forest (and lonely cabin), Metroidvania, or similar chronotope to exude the infernal concentric pattern: as dark brothel holding the whore and their bastard’s revenge inside, a Lady Death lying in wait; re: classically female but also monstrous-feminine spaces and occupants penetrated by standard/token officers of the law framed as “intrepid explores” to conduct settler colonialism again; e.g., Samus pimping Mother Brain’s own city-sized womb, a hysterectomy performed inside the belly-of-the-beast (re: “War Vaginas“)!

Small wonder the castration fantasy (and its ontological confusions; re: the phallic woman and Archaic Mother) are some of the most common Gothic wishes being presented (say nothing of size difference and the Gothic’s trademark feelings of tremendous obscurity, power and decay). Regardless of my intent, most of my enemies—despite surface-level mockery—avoid my work like the plague (too hot to handle); i.e., because they one, can’t profit off investigating it, and two, because there’s so much of it (they’d rather make YouTube slop or lie about genocide overseas; e.g., Bad Empanada 2’s “Liberals SHOCKED to Find Israel Is Genociding Gaza,” 2025). By comparison, there’s nothing for us whores to hide, and everything for them to expose by fucking with us. Pimps ransom their victims; we whores are guerrillas who bait our enemies inside the usual brothels, then get ’em good to reclaim such poetic territories’ recursive value; i.e., through Gothic fakery’s anisotropic replacement, reclaiming the planet for ourselves by representing its abused elements! We workers aren’t merely rewards to harvest, virgin/whore. Land back, labor back, sex back, stories back! We “choosers of the slain” (which whores are) decide who can play with us and who cannot, then rub it in; i.e., like GLADOS: “Anyways, this cake tastes great; it’s so delicious and moist!” (Jonathan Coulton’s “Still Alive,” 2007). It’s ok to lie if it helps us survive; i.e., by challenging state operations without harming others, yet reliably raising emotions, blood pressure, stakes, erections, etc.

The cake is a lie, and a beautiful one; learn to bake that your bakeries might liberate you and all the world! You are not expendable, so dispense with any ceremonies that unironically say you are (again, context matters)! Sex work is work, always, and something the whore classically does to survive; i.e., by speaking out, mid-cryptonymy! Charm is a whore’s weapon, a means of taking control through sex duping the pimp (versus them duping us); and just as it helps workers survive, it also speaks vampirically to those who did not entirely survive: those who learned the hard way in the past, paying the usual price that capital demands of its victims—everything. So do whores freeze our prey in response, warming what capital has chilled; re, Marx: “Capital is dead labour, which, vampire-like lives only by sucking living labor” (source: Kapital, “The Working-Day”). We reverse that to free all workers, but cops addicted to harming us will—without their usual peaches to squeeze into pulp—undoubtedly suffer. Serves ’em right! No one ever died from blue balls! Suck it, dickwads!

To it, trauma lives in the body and a victim is always, to some degree, undead; i.e., as a matter of trauma also being demonic/animal; re: a paradoxical means of revenge through dark desires. Medusa’s avatars, like the goddess herself, have cute and furious sides; i.e., their castles-in-the-flesh are stacked, speaking through abstract Amazon exposure. For every secret cop lying in wait, a secret rebel does the same, ready to kick ass with ass! “I’m the Gorgon in small, fighting fire with fleshy fire! Darkness visible! Tits and ass, a hairy vice-like pussy’s lips that grip!” So do we class, culture and race warriors purge the pimp, waging war on graveyards of past battles that never were—evoking the ghost of the counterfeit to reverse abjection, dancing with Her Majesty to hug (and fuck) the alien! Purity of virtue isn’t what we care about, but rather not being pimped by the same-old dead worlds hidden masters (the owner class concealed through neoliberal, retro-future, monomyth fantasies [often videogames; re: shooters, Metroidvania, High Fantasies] framed as false power sold to assuage the anxious): not to hug the alien, alone, but fuck them/trade with them to help free the world from Capitalist Realism, once and for all! They’ll demand your submission; say “make me” while making them your captive audience (the Gothic prone to speaking of capture by playfully reenacting it)!

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

Imagine a world divorced from state aims, hence state abuses manufacturing conflict, scarcity and consent; i.e., where we all could just exist, naked as jaybirds, and fuck who we want even if that means no one at all! Through pre-capitalist ideas and language (re: the Gorgon), we whores push vengefully against profit towards a post-scarcity world (an end to crisis, energy or otherwise, ergo an end to pimps, cops and unironic xenophobia)! So we become the empress of our fates! What capital conditions, we slaves can reject; nor is it strictly a bad thing if we can control our flaws; e.g., to lie, cheat and steal for our friends; i.e., rebels seek to avoid abandonment, sticking by each other in times of crisis forced upon us. One Gorgon’s a sitting duck but three? Perseus would’ve been toast!

The lesson—as Medusa shows, but also her avatars (e.g., me and these books’ army of whores)—is that no one is perfect, especially a death goddess marked by rape. But trauma lives in and around the body as something to instruct, all the same. So look on the Gorgon’s ghostly gorgeous backside (or her equally portentous front side, above); i.e., to speak through the usual code as, often enough, naked as babes but shrouded as sheets in awesome mystery! The Numinous, for us, is palliative, but also full of the same-old tropes repackaged for a new generation of adventure-seekers forming Medusa like Voltron: a composite body too big to see all sides of. So does cryptonymy hide and conceal, the Black Veil something you may not have realized: a pirate flag (with black knights not just being mercenary bastards [which whores essentially are, on the male side of things] traveling from place to place through medieval protection rackets, but as land-based pirates; i.e., blood-drinking Easterners associated with the Ottomans even as enemies, as Vlad the Impaler was).

The Gothic, as I’ve repeatedly said, loves pirates; i.e., from the land to the sea. From Shakespeare’s Hamlet to Radcliffe’s Udolpho to Conan, The Princess Bride (either version), The Pirates of Dark Water and Cuphead, pirates are classically fake. So are whores, whose that spirited adventure and forgery is where freedom lies; i.e., while recultivating the Superstructure to reclaim the Base as partly performative, hence phenomenological: rebellion is half-real, full of myths and legends, matelotage (re: “That Ass Is a Higher Truth“), wicked servants, false friends, giants and titans, shadows and whispers, and yes, whores—all beckoning with bedroom eyes that you come for them (and in more ways than one)! They seem closed off, the way that capital closes everything off, but Gothic invention summons them again through nuptial parodies; re: all the cuties in this book a kind of swashbuckler’s pantheon, their own collective “pull” attracting us; i.e., through an uneven desire for connection, similarity-amid-difference (re: “Healing from Rape“). Sometimes they come and go, like wind or dreams, nightmares or love; but to have had it once (or more than once) is better than never! Gothic Communism teaches through love as forbidden, hence through whores as pirates; e.g., Harmony as someone I worked with plenty throughout this series, but wasn’t available for its conclusion. The show must go on, and I’ll always consider them my friend… even if I don’t see them again. If that ship has truly sailed, it is what it is, and there’s always another quest (thus Numinous whore) to quest for! A plank to walk, booty to plunder! An Aegis to show and revel in, the site where power—true power—calls home!

Such is calculated risk, which feels good regardless if its cultivation/commodification and intoxicating digestion, post-consumption, makes total sense; the devil is in the details, amounting to ludo-Gothic BDSM: a revenge pioneered by me, but also and friends like Harmony Corrupted finding value in our bodies as art; re: what the state treats like cheap throwaway adventure yarns (the Gothic since day one) but which we whores turn into poetic weaponry whose prime real estate (and ecstasy outside of the raw chemical elements) is misbehaving in cultural ways (re: acid Communism; see: “Follow the White-to-Black Rabbit“)! “Yarrrrr!” AMAZING CHEST AHEAD! but also booty! It’s a mimic, crushing your puny skull (or junk) between its asscrack like walnuts! You’re the patient and she’s the surgeon, hatching scheme after scheme while eating your brains! Om, nom, nom! The best sex is silly sex, making room for jokes and playtime, hence laughter and love; same idea with rebellion: “Are ya ready, kids?” “Aye-aye, captain!”

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

Hypnotoad ain’t got nothing on me, but also my opinionated band of ragtag assholes (and their various instruments, ass or otherwise, above)! Genocide sucks, as does collective punishment/reactive abuse and revenge arguments against whole populations (ethic or otherwise; e.g., religion or gender), and banning media—including the people in said media, commonly sex workers—is a form of genocide! This shouldn’t be controversial to announce, but it is because the state rapes nature as monstrous-feminine by design. Be that death by firing squad, life sentence for a petty offense, lynching or gang rape, genocide is genocide; i.e., different degrees and flavors of shit the state doles out historically-materially in pursuit of profit as something it can never satisfy because the chase is the point. All our yesterdays languish under the banality of evil: Tolkien was a wrinkled old pimp.

Luckily the state and its mendacious corporate hegemon don’t have monopolies on such matters (re: white straight men monopolizing computers before and after the rise of videogames; see: “Those Who Walk Away from Speedrunning“). To it, Gothic Communism encourages relating to workers different than we are; i.e., through unequal privilege and oppression pursuing universal liberation through holistic pedagogies of the oppressed (re: similarity amid difference); e.g., Harmony and I are poly but only have a working relationship despite playing together in past. Whatever the form—and even with toxic elements—relationships, including working ones, give we whores a rare chance to reflect on ourselves; i.e., under duress, under constant states of change, mixing and matching versus restricting our toolsets[7a] and alienating ourselves through fear and dogma: the classic fear of the imaginary past that Neo-Gothic deals in, riding the lightning as much as rockets or witch’s brooms, thus tanking all the state has to throw at us—with our fat tank-like asses (the terrifying potential our dungeon-like pussies, assholes and mouths, mise-en-abyme)! As usual, we’re bare and exposed as the Amazon is, but armed and armored for bear to escape the brothel of war and freeze the prudish “protector” as nothing more than a pimp acting in bad faith (our secret weapons hiding in plain sight: the girding loins’ courtly love)! We whores even like it, provided we’re in control (making harm impossible with our playmates, thereby counteracting state prescriptions that routinely harm us on purpose)!

Again, there’s always another castle and furious maneater inside—not that I’m a man nor Harmony actually someone who harmed me; we’re both monstrous-feminine, each of us having a variety of appetites and careers to consider while passing in the night: nerd sex, coming and going like ladies in the night, of the night, as ghost ships. Go read their interview if you want to know more about them, and support their work, too! Goddesses demand tribute, after all, and Harmony is peerless in that respect! But much like theory and practice, self-control and temptation walk a fine line—one you’ll have to cross to meet people like Harmony yourself! Victim/avenger and predation/payment also walk a fine line, the femme fatale (mommy domme) a relic of Antiquity that capital pimped, post-medieval-period, to blame the usual victims. Pirates ourselves, Harmony and I played with such things to yield a variety of performative takeaways; i.e., that let us camp the canon inside capital (spilling our guts). Masks, costumes, alter-egos, puppets/sex dolls (or acting like sex dolls, below), sex toys (dildos or otherwise, also below), and various highs and lows (the stuff of dreams and nightmares)—Medusa’s a power bottom, and accustomed to power imbalance as indigenous to Gothic Romance haunted by Rome’s diehard ghost/spectre of rape projected onto artifacts of all the usual bugbear power fantasies (e.g., big black dick, below, linked to orcs and goblins per anti-Semitic myth; re: “Concerning Big Black Dicks“): the perpetual thrill of near-death vaso vagal[7b] healing through “rape” while transporting the audience to “edge” on the devil’s playground (wild sex is good sex, and sounds a little like bloody murder)! First one’s free, but “tip” your sex workers, feast or famine! Always, always, always!

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

“The mind is its own place,” and we (or our wayward lovers and teachers, above) hold all the keys. Our tight fleshy “rings” given as gifts, use their paradoxical, pandemonic lessons (re: proximity to power and destruction to build a better world than capital’s endless nightmare—one without cops, kings, pimps, pedophiles or billionaires, “the bare and level sands stretch far away…” We’re all kings and queens under Communism, loves—less jesters working for the monarch (a pimp) and more us working for ourselves, juggling preferential code and dancing (with chainsaws or otherwise, below) to accomplish our prurient goals; re: reclaiming the language of nightmares, turning them lucid (dream warriors), mid-arbitration: something to stare at and puzzle about, ruminating on whatever meaningful such controlled chaos affords. Somewhere in there is a victim (with Leatherface alluding famously to Ed Gein, but also his female victims and abusers)!

But the work to reverse abjection remains teamwork (as this ceremony hopefully shows); i.e., Lilith’s birthing of little monsters that lead, one and all, towards universal liberation: as building a better Hell on Earth than any prison the elite/state proponents call “Paradise.” Cut the head off Medusa, and she grows more powerful than the state can imagine; re:

“When Perseus slew the Medusa he did not – as commonly thought – put an end to her reign or destroy her terrifying powers. Afterwards, Athena embossed her shield with the Medusa’s head. The writhing snakes, with their fanged gaping mouths, and the Medusa’s own enormous teeth and lolling tongue were on full view. Athena’s aim was simply to strike terror into the hearts of men as well as reminding them of their symbolic debt to the imaginary castrating mother. And no doubt she knew what she was doing. After all, Athena was the great Mother-Goddess of the ancient world and according to ancient legend – the daughter of Metis, the goddess of wisdom, also known as the Medusa” (source: Barbara Creed’s The Monstrous-Feminine, 1993).

So does any decapitation survive the body it leaves behind, the symbol something that remains to speak about murder (of whores, hence all workers) everlasting!

Gothic Communism offers speech as community defense; i.e., to defend the marginalized (which whores are) by giving them a voice to scream whorishly with, castrating state aims and structure to “reign in blood.” Drinking the pussy Kool-Aid to capitalize on Kristeva’s powers of horror and Creed’s monstrous-feminine (with both women snaking into Gothic Communism as I and my friends devised it, sex workers are some of the most oppressed voices that exist. As such, they testify in ways that—less like a whisper—must scream at the top of their lungs to be heard; i.e., in wholly exhilarating ways during ritualized doom and exquisite torture: their mere existence criminal to seditious extremes, but also liberation through “flagellation” in monstrous language normally scammed by state fakes; e.g., like Milton’s Satan or staking vampires, but also Radcliffe’s heroines being “size queens” coming back for seconds, hence madness, peril, and riddles to perform, mid-BDSM, as the Gothic do: why does Medusa (and her ilk) like to be ravished, and how does this hellcat’s hysterical testimony help her survive?

I could a tale unfold whose lightest word

Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,

Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres,

Thy knotted and combinèd locks to part,

And each particular hair to stand on end

Like quills upon the fretful porcupine (source).

The mixture of metaphors speaks to attention through sex: the stalk of a one-eyed monster led by the guiding hand (and piercing gaze) towards the wandering womb’s gaping maw! Rioting is the voice of the unheard, REDRUM in the flesh: a live wire ready to explode!

Questions lead to more questions; e.g., why is Medusa furious? And why does she demand tribute from us (to lick her feet, smell her ass, stare at her bloody stump, above)? The sad reality is, knowledge and activism gentrify and decay like anything else. So consult in Diogenes, not Aristotle (the regression of Plato and Socrates); consult in the wretched, which includes whores and sex. Medusa’s blind fury is perceptive in its pastiche only when inclusive dialogs push for universal liberation. To it, sex (and its asexual interrogation) isn’t all bad, in our hands; in the state’s hands, we whores are damned if you do, damned if you don’t. So the Gothic finds salvation through damnation; i.e., as something “almost holy” to camp, reclaim and control, said “black mass” breaking the monopolies previously mentioned—as an aesthetic of power and death we’ve acclimated towards, under Pygmalion’s reign (which includes Steven King’s, above): to know where the bodies are buried, the call coming always from inside the house (symbolic of the nuclear model’s disastrous Imperial Core); re: the Gothic villain, from Radcliffe onwards, is always a fraudulent insider or token scapegoat (e.g., Carrie, above). Our theatrical “suffering” sits adjacent to actual harm, converging upon our abusers hiding behind our memento mori (re: “Psychosexual Martyrdom“), our echoed cries rising up from Persephone’s hellish dreamworld! Payback’s a bitch, giving looks that kill!

“Here We Go Again”; or, a Devilish Encore: Medusa’s Siren Song… Putting the Pussy on the Chainwax!

Medusa is the perfect organism, a survivor ready to evolve while fetishizing war for Communist aims; re: there is always another castle, one existing out in the open and operating through public nudism on a social-sexual (ace to non-ace) gradient. So can whores like us chronicle, invigilate and archive ourselves; i.e., pursuant to fresh, healthier destinies with ludo-Gothic BDSM—to raise emotional/Gothic intelligence and awareness, while questing like Prometheus for the Numinous until Medusa, the proverbial fat lady/phantom of the opera, takes all of us home (the final resting place, when state shift finalizes). It’s a siren song sung by hellcats, aping Her Majesty from the self-same shadows while making the rockin’ world go round.

To it, we fight for a world we will never see, struggling under humans with godly power (re: Frankenstein). We surviving in the ruins of fascism that Gothic has outlined for centuries; i.e., while helping dispel the idea of superhumanism enjoyed by Americans out of ancient monomyth fantasies, bursting their bubbles to survive their abuse). So while the Medusa cannot die, challenging the state raping her until the end of time (the Gorgon/Communist Numinous sitting on state pyramids/the ghost of Caesar to squish them flat, or use them as makeshift butt plugs), we whores embody the same basic idea; i.e., her return is capital’s doomsday because it liberates capital’s oldest and ongoing victims, whores, by pulling the Black Veil aside, mid-Mandelbrot (re: the infernal concentric pattern; see: my work on Aguirre; e.g., “Geometries in Terror“). A spirited traveler/Great Destroyer reversing the colonial harvest and its lobotomizing opiates (re: “Cornholing the Corn Lady“), Medusa was an an-Com slut, one who puts the pussy on the chainwax by wearing state wreckage on her sleeve (or backside, below)!

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

Be brave until then, comrades, and don’t hesitate to fight back using what you got! Silence is genocide, so scream louder than ever! Rub some funk on it; give it spice, white or black, leather or lace, spookiness or reverence (mood, in other words)! Shake your ghost booty! “Look on our Works ye Mighty and despair!” Make the Promethean Quest (or Faustian bargain) your rapture on the Aegis—i.e., as the Aegis because they’ll police you either way (re: “Policing the Whore“); your revenge is being heard, so be heard while the cop (token or not) pimps you, red-handed. “When the Man comes around, show him your Aegis!” Exist to defy them and chill the profit motive solid, and all it entails! A storm isn’t coming, you see; it’s already here (the eye of the storm)! There’s no fate but what we make for ourselves; i.e., in freakshow solidarity pushing for universal liberation amid difference (don’t rank rape)! Forget Engel’s sexist, classist, paid-labor role call, “Working Men of All Countries, Unite!” We must go beyond fighting for labor that is paid, white, straight or male/token (re: “A Gothic Researcher/Author/Sex Worker/Activist Responds to ‘Woke Is Dead’ feat. ‪@JohntheDuncan‬”), because whores are classically unpaid/stolen from and murdered by pimps. The state is a pimp; cops are pimps; canonical heroes (and gaslit, gatekept girlbosses) are pimps!

So see you on the battlefield, wherever it finds you! Medusa is a death god; re: we’re fighting for a world we’ll never see, the refusal to obey being the first step towards actualizing it for those one step closer to state shift than we are: the murderous womb furious with incessant rape! Sooner or later, someone pushes back, and no one pushes back harder than Medusa rebalancing the scales! The world is a brothel, one we take back for ourselves! Nothing terrifies the state more than a free whore, paid and vocal about pimps, then and now! Take whatever weapons of terror the state devises (e.g., black dicks/threats of rape, below) and not only disarm them, but turn them back on the oppressor—to demonstrate intersectional solidarity among labor criminalized, to seek universal liberation or die trying (often little deaths by big dicks, also below)! Pleasure and friendship are the point, teaching lessons about such things until state shift (manmade or otherwise); i.e., how the body responds to fear as something to play with; e.g., the traffic light system (red light, yellow light, green light) and safewords, but also the sweet smell of sweat after sex during consent-non-consent (and similar secretions from this gland or that)!

In turn, we whores measure up not to the state, but ourselves and our friends redefining what consent even is: the reclamation of labor, therefore land, sex and monsters. Sex should be consensual, not automatic, but it can delve into various taboo spheres without harming anyone; i.e., provided such elements are second-nature at a cultural level, which tastes time and effort to cultivate in opposition: to disrupt power and its violation of our rights at the state level, their avengers (and built worlds/grounds for endless slaughter) versus ours, mid-Amazonomachia. Vagina dentata, rip and tear! But whereas Beowulf theoretically goes home to be a family man, achieving pastoral bliss after raping Medusa (though he’s doomed to revisit the same crimes to greater and greater degrees), a woman’s work is never done—not until Medusa eats the state for good (and its pimp-like heroes jonesing for rape)!

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

Until then, Fortune favors the bold; be her firebrand, no matter what others say! The world is a vampire, so stake it! Stir the pot (with your “pot’s” macaroni-stirring sounds)! Everything is fake, in Gothic. It’s all how you apply it. To be queer/do sex work is be the subject of state violence, requiring that we defend ourselves through the friends we make; e.g., me and mine through this series’ creative successes decolonizing the Gothic and its endless playground. Survive, solidarize, speak out. So when you’re preaching to the choir (versus deaf ears), build a church (or haunt theirs, until then); raise Cain, tempt the Fates, run with the Devil! Let the scales fall from your eyes, using them like Medusa’s own petrifying gaze to strike our enemies dumb, deaf and blind! Act like it’s your last chance to be heard, something tremendous and mysterious to leave behind by Galatea in the Shadow of Pygmalion: “her tits were there.” Nothing lasts forever, but how we live survives us for others to find; i.e., per the Neo-Gothic tradition of found documents (re: castles in the flesh)! So build with garbage because you are garbage (re: “Hot Allostatic Load” and the many times I cite it; e.g., “Policing the Whore” and “Toxic Schlock Syndrome“); i.e., pirated by the usual thieves: white straight men, but also token folk taking state pay to pimp Medusa until she, the planet, cooks the state and eats it for a snack. It’s a mood, something on which the Gothic thrives (alluding to death as something no one escapes, patrician or plebian).

The fact remains, capital alienates everything while sexualizing it, and behind every simulacrum of sex sold to the middle class (the arbiters of the state), Medusa’s getting her nut in; i.e., while laughing at the ever-growing number of cop-like incels (male or not) dying for company (and blaming the whore, each and every time, for the incel’s own inability to bond with others). We can turn off the tap, keeping them out of our communities while showing how stupid they are on the Aegis; i.e., attacking a shadow of the whore that turns them, the useful idiot, into an object lesson reversing abjection: someone raised on hate who can’t play nice/follow simple instructions that largely revolve around respecting consent and not harming other beings by taking away their rights (collars without irony or consent)! Nudity falls prey to state censors; violence—committed by state abusers—does not. So remind them the price of their abuse by refusing to work with them; i.e., to drive the alienation they’ve routinely wrought upon themselves and others.

Don’t blame us if the shoe fits, pimps; the final stage of capital is death, its pendulous arrival presaged by endless isolation, sobering brutality and total brain rot/apathy—i.e., Capitalist Realism is a puzzle we horny hairy livestock solve through Gothic Communism, and whose anti-war and anti-rape lines in the sand include revolutionary cryptonymy’s cure to capital slopifying creativity for profit (e.g., Ro Ramdin’s “The Ten Traits of Slop Content” or Dead Domain’s “I Played An Alt-Right YouTuber’s Deranged AI Slop Game (Dedicated To His Daughter)“). You are what you eat; with the rise of “AI,” the state is making something they can blame for their own crimes, and it looks like us while being force fed to us like French geese. Be forewarned: the technological singularity is just a mask for the bourgeoisie and their Omelas refrains whitewashing Pax Americana/the Imperial Core; e.g., the Death Star from Star Wars (the myopic, panoptic eye of conquest/gaze of an angry god seeking revenge against outsiders on mobile frontiers/concentration camps) or Skynet’s pyramid from T2, the JO crystal, etc; i.e., the liminal hauntology of war (flying fortress), insect politics (the cheapening of life in service to the profit motive) and Baudrillard’s hyperreality all being the reliable end result capital pushes towards: genocide and profit for those behind the curtain poking whores with spears or starving them out. Like, fuck that noise!

So do we rebellious whores develop through play and Gothic to achieve universal liberation versus the same-old deceptions; i.e., to win the whore’s revenge against the pimp, the latter having been made terminally cruel and stupid by capital (re: Don Quixote), policing the slum’s flexible redlines! Whatever capital cheapens for profit (re: enshittification), we enrich through Hell as something we make in spite of profit pimping us, playing in Hell amongst ourselves and happy—excuse the expression—as pigs in shit! We’re accustomed to living in state shadows and slums—know there’s more to life that languishing inside the Imperial Core’s state of exception and its championing of the nuclear model, white supremacy and other state absolutes geared towards ethnic cleansing (and other forms of extermination). In short, we whores know we’re just quintessence of dust, adapting however we can to survive inside the labyrinth; i.e., the Minotaur surviving Theseus by embracing chaos. Nothing is more noble than resisting rape, but also preventing it in the future to spare nature another genocide! So show the state what they have forgotten while pimping us, telling us “people should know when they’re conquered”; break the monopoly (and canonical heroism’s praxial inertia; re: “Overcoming“) with style! Full steam ahead, babes! Balls to the wall! Fighting for land, labor and monsters back, we whores like it deep—all up in our guts while putting the pussy on the chainwax! SCHNELLER!

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

Your Commie Mommy,

—Persephone van der Waard

P.S., I wanted to include a small excerpt from an interview with Delilah Gallo, a sex educator and coach who said this when concluding our interview for the “Hailing Hellions” series:

Land back. Free Palestine, Sudan, Congo, Syria, Ethiopia, Cuba, Korea, Vietnam, Hawai’i, Puerto Rico, Turtle Island, Lebanon, and all occupied, oppressed, embargoed land. Give to mutual aid. Learn about the indigenous nation whose land you are on. Lead with kindness but don’t shy away from conflict. Always ask yourself who is being left out and why (it is almost always going to be disabled people, indigenous people, trans people, children). Start a garden. Make some art. Stay curious. Don’t obey rules that don’t make sense. Be loud about injustice. Abolish ICE. Abolish the police. Abolish the government. All power to the people. And wear a mask and test for Covid! (source).

Stigmatize genocide and everything to go with it; set the whore (and all monstrous-feminine) free.

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Footnotes

[1] As TERFs like to do; e.g., when Beauvoir said “woman is other,” she was predominantly talking about white straight women while also being a pedophile (re: “Lolita Syndrome“). Our arguments need to apply to all workers, not just some of them—hence why I focus on capital being heteronormative, Cartesian and settler-colonial attacking nature as monstrous-feminine (re: “Nature Is Food“). For us, monstrous-feminine isn’t just cis women, but femboys, intersex people, people of color and other minorities the profit motive pimps out of the past into the present.

[2] Which obviously isn’t all bad; re: Creed’s work on the monstrous-feminine obviously being the palimpsest for my own, but also similar feminists from the same period; i.e., older women teach newer women in ways that don’t always tokenize; e.g., Silvia Federici, but also Irigaray’s creation of sexual difference: “Irigaray ultimately states that Western culture itself is founded upon a primary sacrifice of the mother, and all women through her […] men are subjects (e.g., self conscious, self-same entities) and women are “the other” of these subjects (e.g., the non-subjective, supporting matter). Only one form of subjectivity exists in Western culture and it is male” (source: Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy).

[3a1] Campbell’s hero with a thousand faces; heroes are cops and cops are pimps, male or not; re: ACAB.

[3a2] What Joyce Gloggin calls “dupes” (re: “Play and Games in Fiction and Theory,” 2020).

[3a3] The Romans didn’t just crucify Jews, which Christ was, but fed Christians to lions.

[3b] With fat vs skinny being yet-another-binary with racist, therefore white supremacist origins; i.e., fat = other, therefore shameful, sinful, criminal, dark, alien, etc. Yet, fat is actually healthy more often than not—with BMI being a racist (therefore unscientific, inaccurate) model all on its own, and one whose double standards harm the people supposedly “enjoying” them (see: next footnote).

[3c1] E.g., steroid abuse and the profit motive going hand-in-hand with an imaginary Antiquity established in the early 1900s with body builders like Eugene Sandow as well as the Olympics; see: “The Nation-State“); i.e., as going hand-in-hand with current monomyth body language and its assorted disorders tied to larger ones, under capital; e.g., bigorexia and PED abuse by (often male) strength athletes corresponding to an explosion of readily available steroids and similar substances in the 1980s (apparently “bigorexia was renamed to “reverse anorexia nervosa” and “muscle dysmorphia” in the ’90s; source: Oxford Dictionary of Psychology). Similar mental, eating and body/gender disorders intersect and overlap, of course, but those tied to Man Box, the monomyth and a heroic body image (and gender role/performance) led to abuse behavior as much towards one’s self as other people (e.g., Ronnie Coleman was a token cop who destroyed his body taking drugs and doing ego lifts). The human body and its perception within capital as part of a larger Symbolic Order leads to canon superseding worker needs while turning them harmfully into billboards chasing profit; i.e., as a body standard to police (my discontinued book series, Neoliberalism in Yesterdays Heroes, explored this; see: “Military Optimism” and “Policing Bodies“).

[3c2] And killer babies coddled by canon, pining for a license to kill, thus ability to dominate nature as whore, Vietnam-style, while having said fantasy circle-jerk them; e.g., the Doom series fetishizing James Cameron’s masturbatory love letter (as borrowed from Heinlein and retro-future British colonialism); i.e., to colonial violence ballooned by neoliberal/eco-fascist schemes fixated on cosmic nihilism/punching Medusa and Great Old ones; re: “Nature vs the State” and an obsession with white-savior one-man armies vs hordes of dark enemies, akin to a Western romancing the same-old slaughter in different clothes. A pimp is a pimp, a whore a whore (though whores can pimp and vice versa, mid-aesthetic).

[4] Rape something to camp on the same stages, during ludo-Gothic BDSM; re (from “Concerning Rape Play“):

As I’ve moved through this series, though, the definition [for ludo-Gothic BDSM] has narrowed, according to my focus on the term specifically to play with rape as I define it; re (from the Poetry Module’s “A Note about Rape/Rape Play,” 2024):

as something broadened beyond its narrow definition, “penetrative sex meant to cause harm by removing consent from the equation.” To that, there is a broad, generalized definition I devised in “Psychosexual Martyrdom” (2024), which will come in handy when we examine unironic forms of rape, but also “rape” as something put into quotes; i.e., during consent-non-consent as a vital means of camp during ludo-Gothic BDSM:

martyrs are generally raped by the state, which we have to convey mid-performance without actually getting raped if we can help it (“rape” meaning [for our purposes] “to disempower someone or somewhere—a person, culture, or place—in order to harm them,” generally through fetishizing and alienizing acts or circumstances/socio-material conditions that target the mind, body and/or spirit) [emphasis, me]: finding power while disempowered (the plight of the monstrous-feminine).

Rape can be of the mind, spirit, body and/or culture—the land or things tied to it during genocide, etc; it can be individual and/or on a mass scale, either type committed by a Great Destroyer (a Gothic trope of abuse of the worse, unimaginable sort, rarefying as a person, onstage) of some kind or another as abstracting unspeakable abuse. It’s a translation, […] adding the irony afterward as a theatrical means of medicine; i.e., rape play challenging profit through the usual Gothic articulations in service to workers and nature at large (source).

To that, rape is something that demons play with during the whore’s paradox. By extension, ludo-Gothic BDSM is effectively rape play combined with Gothic themes and BDSM practices to avenge state wrongs against nature.

[4a] Similar roots that men/token elements try to deny inside the Man Box. For proof of that, and to humiliate the proudest of men, ask one simple question during sex: “Is it in yet?” The “strongest” of men are the most inadequate, constantly need to prove themselves and their manhood to profit; re: by killing the whore, but also jailing and raping them. All heroes and whores are monsters, the difference being dialectical-material context, as usual.

[4b] I.e., the Gothic chronotope (re: Bakhtin); re: a danger disco, but also a carnival, fun house, casino, haunted house, prison, or asylum, such spaces of sin, confinement and danger uprooted from space and time. They’re classically spaces of power but also consolidations of enchantment, fear and wonder turning capital’s warped, haunted idea of “home” inside out (fascism versus liberalism). Through canon, the usual persecution networks shuffle different cultural marginalities in and out, like cards in a deck; capital scapegoats itself through cartoon vaudeville and morality arguments, like a museum exhibit show featuring a central evil it can blame for the sins of the elite (usually a tyrant of some kind, personifying vice through medieval carryovers). It’s something to assign in service to the Protestant ethic (and its so-called belief of victims historically being an omerta that blames, discredits and devalue whores, but also those treated like whores regardless of their actual talent; e.g., Charo) onstage and off, from ethnocentric to ethno-nationalist. Our castles (in the flesh) challenge such encapsulations in duality.

[5] The state thug returning with the Imperial Boomerang to plunder (cannibalize) its own communities inside the state of exception; re: by gentrifying and decaying them to toxic degrees on recycled frontiers and monster costumes (re: “Police States“).

[6] I.e., replacement; re: “invasion is a structure,” from Wolfe’s “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native” (see: “Toxic Schlock Syndrome“). Capital is full of symbols and synonyms of genociding nature as alien whore.

[6a] Com panis? More like “cum penis,” amirite? Apocalypse is where the usual bread for the state talks back!

[7a] Re: Gothic Communism combining different theories and schools of thought.

[7b] the black knight an early cyborg—with transhumanism (or its rudiments, at least) dating back to Plato (re: Roden, Posthuman Life).

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, Tolkien and Amazon enthusiast, 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!