This blog post is part of “Deal with the Devil,” a third promotion originally inspired by the first and second ones I did with Harmony Corrupted: “Brace for Impact” and “Searching for Secrets” (2024). The first promotion was meant to promote and provide Volume Two, part one’s individual pieces for easy public viewing (it has since become a full, published book module: the Poetry Module). “Deal with the Devil” shall do the same, but with Volume Two, part two’s opening/thesis section and one of its two Monster Modules, Demons (the “Searching for Secrets” promotion covered the Undead Module, which is now live). As usual, this promotion was written, illustrated and invigilated by me as part of my larger Sex Positivity (2023) book series.
Click here to see “Deal with the Devil’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.
Volume Two, part two (the Undead Module) is out now (9/6/2024)! Go to my book’s 1-page promo to download the latest version of the PDF (which will contain additions/corrections the original blog posts will not have)!
Permissions: Any publicly available images are exhibited for purposes of education, transformation and critique, thus fall under Fair Use; private nude material and collabs with models are specifically shared with permission from the original model(s). For more details about artist permissions, refer to the book disclaimer (linked above).
Concerning Buggy Images: Sometimes the images on my site don’t always load and you get a little white-and-green placeholder symbol, instead. Sometimes I use a plugin for loading multiple images in one spot, called Envira Gallery, and not all of the images will load (resulting in blank white squares you can still right-click on). I‘ve optimized most of the images on my site, so I think it’s a server issue? Not sure. You should still be able to access the unloaded image by clicking on the placeholder/right-clicking on the white square (sometimes you have to delete the “?ssl=1” bit at the end of the url). Barring that, completed volumes will always contain all of the images, whose PDFs you can always download on my 1-page promo.
Trigger warning: This post discusses rape as something to critique through Gothic media. It contains no images of actual sexual abuse, but does include problematic Gothic media as something to critic in our usual critical-educational approach.
Forbidden Sight, Faust and the Promethean Quest; or, Knowledge and Power Exchange
Approaching, you writhe, we take control
Unholy inquisition, sentence very cold
My servants, demons, take you down the hole
Your mind destroyed now I want your soul (source).
—Dave Padden; “Phantasmagoria,” on Annihilator’s Never, Never Land (1990)
Picking up where “Of Darkness and the Forbidden” left off…
Faustian bargains deal with devils, exchanging power to gain forbidden knowledge (often immortality or weapons, followed by fame, fortune, sex and revenge); the Promethean Quest, faced with ancient mysteries and devastation, sees Cartesian men of reason heading into godly realms to uncover self-destructive power once more (resulting in fatally optimistic, militarized homecomings met by rogue technology and astronoetic nostalgia).
To it, demons are unheimlich. Their houses look suspiciously human, as do their whorish, made-from-clay occupants; i.e., through cryptonymic acts of concealment and revelation, arrangement and argument: poetic renditions of forbidden sight (those black or red glowing eyes) gleaned through all the regular senses, as well as extra poetic ones (re: Milton was blind when he wrote Paradise Lost, enlisting his daughters to transcribe his dreams into Latin). As such, power and knowledge are witnessed, albeit as “darkness visible” per exchange—through duality and paradox, demonic doubles teasing one hell of a good time!
As such, power and knowledge often exist as something to gaze upon, such forbidden scenery blasting the viewer to bits; but just as often, they’re meant to be played with on the Aegis, bridging this with that:
- “part zero: a Rape Reprise” (included in this post): Considers how the state rapes nature for profit, a process of abjection that can be subverted during the whore’s paradox and its revenge vis-à-vis ludo-Gothic BDSM.
- “part one: Idle Hands, Weapons in Clay” (re: blood libel): “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned!” Explores the morphology of whores inside the violent, vengeful domain of blood libel, persecution/revenge and sex demons’ dark desires; i.e., psychosexual camp with traumatic baggage, examining Amazons/Medusa (demon mommies), followed by Takena’s short-but-gnarly claymation skit, “Midnight Vampire” (2024), then goblins as demon lovers exchanging poetic violence of all different kinds!
- “part two: Making Demons” (re: Prometheus): Explores the act of making golems/composite manmade demons from Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel onwards!
- “part three: Summoning Demons” (re: Faust): Per Alien, Evil Dead and other Gothic stories, lays out the idea of summoning occult demons, including acts of interrogating them through the classic Neo-Gothic model: damsels, detectives and demons per canonical torture vs exquisite “torture.”
- “Exploring the Derelict Past: the Demonic Trifecta of Damsels, Detectives and Sex Demons“: Considers the left-behind, derelict flavor of demons, and unpacks various poetic qualities to damsels, detectives and demons separately and together!
Hindsight 20/20. Such poetic ventures concern rewriting a cultural understanding of the imaginary past (re: the Wisdom of the Ancients) to dismantle state operations and illusions, which my books have previously discussed at length; i.e., to apply pre-capitalist ideas towards a post-scarcity world, one whose pedagogy of the oppressed—when collectively synthesized amid intersectional solidarity—shatters Capitalist Realism vis-à-vis Gothic Communism and ludo-Gothic BDSM: nature as something to conquer versus nature fighting back against the usual weird canonical nerds “having studied the blade,” nature camping cops to not only survive their wrath, but thrive in spite of it!
(artist: Kordie)
Demons, then, embody virtue (value) and vice through warring dialectical-material forces for or against the state-as-straight; i.e., from a historical-material standpoint during oppositional praxis, demons are beings to defeat, but also welcome back to better challenge state tourneys as anything but fair!
As we proceed, then, remember several things: one, how the undead embody feeding and trauma, which overlap with demonic exchange and transformation (with power and knowledge being synonymous during said exchanges); and two, that each poetic lens concerns the natural world as preyed upon by capital—i.e., expressed favorably or unfavorably in such language as ironic or unironic; e.g., the composite nature of mad science and the chimeric nature of animals prone to merging with the undead and demons through commonplace medieval hauntologies, but especially demon lovers, Black Veils, and courtly love speaking cryptonymically to state abuse at home and abroad: inheritance anxiety a package deal under capital’s veiled and rotting imperium.
Also recall how these variables divide as separate modules according to their respective poetic histories. In doing so, this chapter shall explore playing with demons as such; i.e., in and upon abject spaces and thresholds, which can be repeatedly conjured up anew as demons are: to be played with, thus interrogate power under capital (and alter its flow in either direction: anisotropically towards or away from the state). Trauma and feeding will come up during “Forbidden Sight,” and you may think about demons in those terms if it helps. Call them “vampires” if you wish; doing so merely stresses an ongoing relationship to undead/animal poetics and the histories and modus operandi known to them (e.g., lycanthropy and crazy wolf men ravishing sluts, below).
Bearing all that out, “Forbidden Sight” will explore exchange, first and foremost; the chapter after it, “Call of the Wild,” will explore transformation more pointedly (and with an emphasis on demonic, anthropomorphic animals that present with undead, chimeric elements—furries). Before we jump into acting out and playing with demonic exchange through whores and their revenge, I want to give a reprise on rape, just to be thorough (given the heavy subject matter); i.e., about demons as whore-like, starting with a thesis—the whore’s paradox—and some arguments built around it in defense of nature: having its revenge against capital harvesting it under normalized, canonically essential circumstances.
Forbidden Sight, part zero: A Rape Reprise; or, the Whore’s Paradox Having Its Revenge During Ludo-Gothic BDSM
Rape isn’t unique to Capitalism, then, but Capitalism exploits rape for profit, which always leaves a bloody footprint for us to double […] In turn, its ubiquity is something to challenge through ludo-Gothic BDSM liberating worker minds during calculated risk […] More to the point, “rape” is an
acquired taste; victims of rape (whatever the form) experience medieval-coded, regressive fantasies of “rape” they ideally want to camp during ludo-Gothic BDSM to avoid actual rape (and overall harm) in the future. In turn, praxial catharsis occurs through iconoclasm while healing from rape in xenophilic ways that involve nature as monstrous-feminine in fetishized, cliché sites of death, damage, decay and rebirth (source).
—Persephone van der Waard, “A Cruel Angel’s (Modular) Thesis” (2024)
Earlier, we discussed demons having a third quality apart from exchange and transformation—desire, whose forbidden, wishful thinking/fulfillment occurs under a Western hegemon that alienates, fetishizes and scapegoats nature by design, whoring it out and raping it for profit. As you can imagine, this structure and its grim prostitution translate easily enough to revenge by one side against the other—of man/the nuclear model vs nature-as-whore and vice versa; i.e., commonly expressed as Amazonomachia in ancient to “ancient” heteronormative wrestling dialogs (and similar theatricalities), but also the Medusa and many other monstrous-feminine GNC forms. Revenge is an exchange that pertains to power and knowledge concerning workers whored out under state rule, our revenge being the development of Gothic Communism with ludo-Gothic BDSM to end said rule (thus rape).
The usual dualities and paradoxes apply here, insofar as deals with the devil can be had with the state as much with Medusa. Whatever a demon’s form, then, the usual dialectics of shelter and the alien are anisotropic: they go both ways, but mean vastly different things depending on where power flows; re: the ghost of the counterfeit (and its simulacra) forwarding or reversing the abjection process; i.e., nature having its revenge against capital or vice versa; e.g., Frazetta’s Orientalism and damsel-in-distress theatrics, below. However messy it appears, trashy it feels or loud it sounds, the language of the imaginary past speaks volumes to the sins of empire and operations of capital (and its qualities) moving things hauntologically along! In this faux-medieval’s vicious cycle, there’s a place for the hero, whore, evil wizard and animals all depicted on canvas and off—one to uphold said cycle (and Capitalist Realism) or break it, once and for all.
(artist: Frank Frazetta)
“We’re living in Gothic times.” Regardless if demons makes any visual objective sense, that’s how things historically personify or otherwise hinge upon/arbitrate when demonically translating back and forth; i.e., capital is a cycle that comes back, slithering ouroborotically around and around: raping nature through recycled phobias, fetishes and stigmas… to which nature seeks out her revenge through rape play of varying degrees of silly-seriousness and performative irony’s mise-en-abyme.
We’ll get to that. For now, try to understand how demonic desires are shadowy and repressed, given form by oppositional poetics in dialectical-material argument. So when I say “revenge” from here on out, I do so with concerns to the usual us-versus-them, cops-and-victims language that demons manifest as/relate to us with (and we them) while pinned between nation-states/corporations and nature growing increasingly turbulent; i.e., said revenge had by one against another pursuant to worker or bourgeois needs. Rebellion through demonic poetics happens through a particular thesis to counteract: nature is monstrous-feminine (re: Volume One)—a whore under state control, which the elite rape for profit, and for which both sides seek revenge before, during and after structural abuse. The exploitation is endless because profit and labor value (of nature) are endless!
(artist: PiMo)
Demons, then, are whores under Western (Cartesian) dominion opposite virgins, but also are virgins depending on the circumstances; e.g., subjugated Amazons like Psylocke, left. This need for state control and dominion introduces a paradox from which a new thesis can arise during ludo-Gothic BDSM (for this chapter/module, indented for emphasis):
Ludo-Gothic BDSM has many theoretical definitions[1] and applications. In practice, though, I frequently utilize it through rape play that paradoxically achieves catharsis; i.e., by putting “rape” in quotes, thus healing from rape without quotes. Often by rape survivors, such people classically find power/agency through theatrical reenactments of unequal, unfair or otherwise rapacious treatment and conditions; i.e., by relying on a concept I’ll heretofore call “the whore’s paradox.”
(artists: Ray Sugarbutt and Sammy Stocking)
The paradox is simple: demons are maidens and maidens are demons, but both are virgins and whores, and each finds power (and knowledge) according to how the state forbids access, yet access happens anyways; i.e., (de)valued, mid-exchange, thus used to humanize or dehumanize the demonized through performance and play. Per Marx and myself, Capitalism alienates and sexualizes everything. Nature is monstrous-feminine as such, “empowerment” applying to any aspect of our life, bodies, violence and terror the state wishes to monopolize/control, and any trope, convention, cliché or fetish that might be used to degrade, humiliate, rape or otherwise demonize/dominate beings “of nature” per capital’s qualities (re: settler-colonial, heteronormative and Cartesian); i.e., that we can reclaim during ludo-Gothic BDSM, hence through unequal power letting us “get a leg up,” topping from a position of normal disadvantage to have our revenge: perceived disempowerment becoming a paradoxical, interchangeable means of escape, regarding universal worker liberation onstage and off (versus equality of convenience inside the text).
(artist: ALT3R4TI0N)
To do so is to break capital’s hold on all things demons, darkness and nature they stole and monopolized, in turn smashing their own abjection against them and breaking Capitalist Realism with our Aegis—to deny capital’s dead labor and language feeding on living labor and language according to what power and knowledge we exchange to and fro. The whore’s revenge is to break the profit motive by making a world for which it (and rape) are no longer possible using these methods; i.e., by using the same demonic and slutty language capital does, but at cross purposes: to hug the alien—not demonize it to receive state violence—thereby (ex)changing how the world is seen to begin with. We aggregate power differently than state forms, outlasting and outperforming them to dismantle their harvesting mechanisms, social and material, foreign and domestic.
That’s basically the gist of demonic revenge during the whore’s paradox, and we’ll unpack the notion of enacting revenge through ludo-Gothic BDSM more in a moment. First, let’s consider the forces and work that drive such revenge to not only take place, but wrestle against pro-state actors.
I want to be brief, but inclusive; i.e., Gothic Communism is a group effort, but also a checkered one. Against the state binarizing and dividing us, our best revenge is to exist in ways that speak holistically and cryptonymically to our specific-yet-combined abuses under capital; i.e., that merge in a collective desire among all workers, whose pedagogy of the oppressed must speak to a collective, universal desire to be free and loved, out in the open, bare and exposed:
(source)
Anything less is imprisonment, genocide, and rape of some by others. The proletarian potential of such carnivals, then, is to make everyone a monarch, year-round. No gods, no masters, just equality for all and the stability of post-scarcity afforded by the ability to imagine, then reify it, during ludo-Gothic BDSM. The avenging idea, in turn, is to be stewards of nature while of it, yourselves—to expand your horizons, a unity of whores thinking outside the box when throwing shade/fucking with this or that.
Again, we’re painting in broad strokes here, narrowing them per case as needed. Apart from the raw materials, sex positivity should speak to holistic liberation through reclaimed exchanges affording morphological expression as exchange. Play is all but required to work with all of them separately and together to varying degrees, “monstrous-feminine” meaning many things, not just female or black skin, but anything “of nature” that isn’t the status quo; i.e., that isn’t white, cis-het, Christian European men pimping nature-as-alien.
Under Cartesian models, for example, whores are commonly “non-white” in terms of skin color (above) but also shape and size wielded by people of various ethnicities (next page); i.e., seen/depicted as equally gluttonous and peach-like, thus fallen and ripe for future conquest by Cartesian, heteronormative, settler-colonial agents policing nature-as-monstrous-feminine (chattelizing and exotifying alien things for profit, consequently raping them). Sex work is generally caught in the middle; i.e., the bigger the size, the bigger the prize, thus axe to grind. We’re not always master of such things, but they demand to be heard, all the same. Simply put, it’s a war—one full of opposing demonic forces competing among the shadows and fog as the shadows and fog!
To that, exploitation and liberation sit side-by-side on the same shadowy stages. Indeed, such media might seem hopelessly haunted by capital’s bloodthirsty cycles (from gentrification and decay to tragedy to farce). In truth, such things manifest differently per oppressed group and their various intersections’ vengeful episodes, but adhere to the same exclusionary rhetoric viewed through capital’s qualities and state monopolies/trifectas occurring through newer modes of capital built on older imperial systems; i.e., strategically swapping out different divide-and-conquer qualities of alienization within these imbricating persecution networks (diversifying tokenization). All canonically operate in service to profit as a structure; i.e., as something for workers to gradually overcome through similar mixing and matching across a spectrum of status, class, culture, race, privilege and oppression told in body language and labor exchange, biological sex, orientation, gender identity and performance: state demons versus worker demons, the former recruiting from the latter to dominate them with members pulled from their own populations—all while abusing the potential said populations yield per harvest/altercation.
(artist: Hailey Queen)
Mid-conflict, guerilla warfare turns land and body into a weapon; i.e., as something to perceive, counteracting state advantages (which state embodiments abuse, mimicking guerrilla tactics and imagery to achieve profit/play the victim). To illustrate a perfect world through Gothic Communism, then, is to speak adequately and advantageously using our bodies: to articulate how they are seen, thus controlled by us and others regarding “non-white[2]” qualities among other marginalized elements; e.g., non-male, non-Christian, non-European, etc; i.e., where we can bare it all and not be attacked, but also not be targeted for abuse regardless how much clothes we have on (or don’t) and stripped bare by the lecherous eyes of others (or their antagonizing hands). Whatever her shape, color, gender or size, then, Medusa unbound denotes an outsider among all of us who refuse to sell out for the usual equality of convenience (and desperation). And while segregation and tokenization are no defense, showing off should still be done in ways that reveal our friends to us, while placing things between our attackers and us (often a phone screen and/or an alias).
Such are the forces of capital that push us towards self-defeating revenge, which we must make into an inclusive, intersectional, solidarized agenda. Yet, the paradox of art is you have to first be unhappy with it, then change it by listening to your own pained existence inside-outside yourself.
By that same token, to enact rebellion (thus have one’s revenge), you must first conceptualize it under duress; i.e., in ways that speak to the usual double standards, moral panics, and guilty pleasures at work: something to glut, binge and purge like a drug compensating for their own sorry lives (alienated from nature, acting superior to it). This addict’s predation speaks to cops-and-victims, us-versus-them arguments inside the state of exception, save that instead of zombies as givers and receivers of state violence, you have demons executing pimps and whores to achieve the same discernible effect: cops and merchandise. The former answer only to and investigate themselves, shielded by the state to reap for its owners during selective punishment/reactive abuse.
Under this dynamic, the state antagonizes nature-as-monstrous-feminine to put it to work, endlessly harvesting it through police violence. In turn, revenge becomes acceptable to exact against nature as the cop sees fit, but not for state property to do so in return (which historically women, or those treated as women, have been [and still are] treated as). Per state monopolies, trifectas and the qualities of capital, one side’s violence, terror and morphological expression are entirely legitimate/sovereign, thus human per the ghost of the counterfeit, and the other side is wholly illegitimate/not sovereign, thus inhuman, incorrect, unreal in service to profit (and genocide/unironic rape) during the abjection process. “When in Rome.” From the oldest systems of conquest in the West to the present ordering of things, there is generally one correct way and others that—while tolerated from time to time—are hierarchically lesser/wrong.
(artist: Rotten Mo)
However strong a rebellious demon appears, then, it is ultimately criminal, thus bridled on the Aegis: hunted, abused, stalked, killed and discarded like waifu trash by imperial forces reaping nature-as-monstrous-feminine (this applies to tokenized forms, too; re: the euthanasia effect). We must reclaim this, doing so in sexually descriptive, culturally appreciative ways (re: the creative successes of proletarian praxis) during ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., that give Satanic upheavals, however dualistic per their shared aesthetic with the state, a proletarian character resisting TERFs, SWERFs, cops and states. All of them rape nature through modular-yet-intersectional persecution networks (e.g., virgin/whore + black/white + master/slave + blood libel, etc) on a scale of descending privilege/preferential mistreatment.
Due to their “our way or the highway” approach, imperial systems are generally brittle, prone to enclosure and maladaptation. It takes energy to control things that very much resist being controlled, wherein strongmen and fascist bullshit go hand-in-hand; i.e., strength is a performance, meaning to fight enemies no one can defeat, or which only the Chosen One(s) can defeat. Empires die very much for this reason; their myopic approach and mythical, largely imaginary conquest of nature prohibits them anything but a short lifespan. It’s Icarian, or closer to the mark—Promethean. Similar to Faust looking backwards, such pursuits are always nostalgic towards disaster as something to fulfill, the followed footsteps filled with old and fresh blood alike. Gothic helps us avoid that in ways we can recultivate; re: ludo-Gothic BDSM.
Furthermore, the ability to say how in Gothic language is tremendously useful, if only because the more marginalized a particular group is, the more the in-group will be expected to police their treatment; the more policed they are, the more these behaviors escalate when empire decays; and given the Gothic is concerned almost entirely with the slow death and inheritance of dead empire, demons, whores and other creatures of darkness are vital to bridging the gap for those who spend most of their time on the state’s good side. A time will come when this won’t matter—point in fact, the state is harvesting these same benefactors for the exclusive benefit of a very small group of people. Having the language to recognize such predation gives us the ability to change and adapt in response to this exploitation, dispelling state illusions and changing our socio-material conditions (reclaiming the Base and recultivating the Superstructure) to account for a better world denied to us by the elite. Capital never stops; neither must we.
As we’ll see moving forwards, then, our whore’s thesis extends to the owner class that whores must contend with. Those who pimp, thus harvest/rape nature are professional labor thieves forever out of touch with reality who, as a result, think they’re really cool; they’re really not:
(source tweet, Sonny Bunch: October 5th, 2024)
No one ever said desk murder was attractive. Yet, this is who we’re dealing with, and must have our revenge against: rapists and divorced dads with all charisma of a souless wooden puppet, unbothered by state shift as something only possible after the Industrial Age fed into the Capitalocene and its fairly recent profit motive (and concessions). The elite style themselves as lords of nature on a cosmological scale, passing themselves off as rapacious, Cartesian gods: sucking nature-as-monstrous-feminine (classically as female) dry while her fury becomes impossible to ignore. They know it’s disastrous; they don’t care—so long as they can do it for as long as possible!
Concerning demonic poetics and an ever-growing desire for revenge, context clearly matters, here, but isn’t always dialectically-materially obvious. Because such violent, terrifying forms (and their demonic, vengeful appeals as such) are endlessly doubled, finding power and knowledge through unequal exchange/transformation occurs while responding to whatever strange appetites capital saddles us with; re: trauma attracts trauma, weird attracts weird; i.e., according to unequal socio-material conditions we weaponize during calculated risk against profit (as inherently unequal/rapacious, by design): reversing terror and counterterror by playing with rape among those who don’t cramp our style (and to crowd out those who do)!
In the interim, we whores survive on the street as comparable to Hell foisted upon us, but paradoxically “Hell” also becomes something that we gain control over on and offstage. Doing so, as I shall expand upon deeper in “Forbidden Sight,” constitutes a half-real act of revenge the state both cannot forgive but must, to some degree, allow then punish accordingly. Per capital, the state is incompatible with life; i.e., it rapes nature-as-monstrous-feminine, grappling with Medusa during mortal combat to simply move money through nature-as-alien: as their whore to endlessly make/summon, then rape, ahegao-style during graveyard sex with combative, passionate elements. “FINISH HER!”
(artist: Rita)
Except, the elite’s mistreatment of nature is performed through workers; i.e., those who can alter said dogma away from state copaganda in service to workers and nature, onstage and off. Nature’s revenge, then, must go beyond what the state regularly affords workers when antagonizing them (and nature) as monstrous-feminine on the Aegis; i.e., such whorish power fantasies should induce praxial shift in a sex-positive direction, not just scare and titillate cops enticed by feisty victims (and token servants playing dom); re: praxial inertia.
So while the usual traitors psychosexually provoke and police us through the ghost of the counterfeit, we workers reclaim whores-as-demonic during equally psychosexual playtime; i.e., to suit liberation as an ongoing battle, one fought over said ghost reversing the abjection process; re: hugging the alien, Medusa, through cryptonymy’s usual veils, vanishing points and other Gothic devices/theories: playing with rape to expose those of modernity savaging us.
No one likes a hypocrite. Revenge is reclamation to revolt as such. Regaining some degree of control over our bodies and labor is to writhe in ecstasy on the Aegis, its dark mirror loaded with rebellious energies, counter information and weaponized psychosexual context; i.e., to reclaim and rehumanize through demonic language and rape play reversing abjection, humanizing the harvest to expose the state and state servants[3] as inhumane, incompatible with life and consent. That is our revenge against those who wrong us. They pimp us unironically in spaces and on surfaces framing sex workers (and all workers sexualized by the state; e.g., women’s work) as virgin/whore; we play ironically there as well to spite them and carry a counter message along: “We’re human despite what you say and how you treat us.” To it, we’ll recruit such whorish language to suit our needs (during ludo-Gothic BDSM, thus liminal expression). Tits out, tongue out, clam out! Whatever! Hit me with your best shot! For some, we’re an oasis; for others, a mirage to prohibit the entitled thirsty their unearned “wataa” (that was a Twitter pun).
(artist: favcxntt)
During our own calculated risk and potential bad decisions, we choose what barriers to raise, who to fool around (thus lower our defenses) with, to use condoms or not, and what lessons to pass along during informed, fairly negotiated labor exchanges; i.e., those happening under criminogenic conditions that we alter inside of. Education is always a game of chance, then, which calculated risk through ludo-Gothic BDSM aims to reduce systemic harm but encourage social-sexual activities conducive as such: demonic passion/possession, psychosexual rapture, and feelings of martyrdom suddenly given a voice when playing with rape in shadowy forms. Keeping with the cryptonymy process, rape remains ubiquitous and invisible in its energies; we make it darkness visible, demonically ostentatious!
Founded on generational trust, not harm, we do so to better raise emotional/Gothic intelligence and class-cultural awareness through demons-as-whores. Power exchange negotiates and navigates old boundaries through what is given and taken, generally through roleplay as an educational device regarding unequal things: to break bad habits, then establish a new trend or guideline for sex-positive behaviors (and positive reinforcement). All the while, exchange remains unequal by nature of power as a demonic performance; i.e., one interfaced with by workers informed by unequal conditions, but who refuse to interfere with equal rights as they play. It’s an interaction between autonomous beings, not an assembly of dead parts for one side to exclusively control, enjoy and abuse. “Terror is a weapon, a weapon is terror, and no one agency monopolizes it.” As such, anyone can play with rape and shadows of rape, weaponizing its terrifying aesthetics in service to workers challenging state monopolies, thereby avenging nature-as-monstrous-feminine! Sex, then, is a demon’s greatest weapon.
Keeping such forces in mind, I want to delve into our rape reprise; i.e., some general-if-germane ideas about prostitution, nature-as-whore and concomitant revenge/rape fantasies that will come up throughout the entire chapter/module!
For one, demons are not limited by form when playing with rape, and their playtime surrounding rape is equally tenebrous and broad; i.e., BDSM can exist in isolation from medieval rape and torture aesthetics (of power and death, sex and force, etc), but often marry to these through whores during ludo-Gothic BDSM: in ironic ways that subvert older Gothic conventions, bending and shapeshifting under sex work vis-à-vis current industry norms and activism. Whores certainly carry a signature “look” under capital, but one where function determines function in ways not entirely removed from form; i.e., as self-selected among pre-existing dolls:
(artist: Fugtrup)
Workers can influence this selection process to allow for greater freedom of expression; i.e., responding to conventions we bend as much as break while applying theory in demonically nebulous voices. Indeed, this module was inspired by the spirit of play in ways that are more fluid and carefree concerning rape in demonic forms; i.e., as something to normalize provided irony is present when camping canonical prescriptions thereof. The Gothic since inception has mobilized and played with the hauntological language of rape, death and war as useful to workers vs the state; i.e., through history as a living document we can change while buried alive, multiple dialectical-material forces being true (and false) at the same time. Power writes in blood and fiction speaking to ongoing atrocities/power abuse (which rape is). It also aggregates, affording double standards through DARVO and obscurantism for those who uphold the status quo (raping their wives and children, celebrated on a community level while indoctrinating both through force); we upend that paradigm, pivoting through the same aesthetics reclaimed during liminal expression for revolutionary (anarchistic, counterterrorist) purposes: on the same exploitative, Foucauldian (carceral, shadowy and potent) stages while avoiding the Omelas-style exceptions and dog-eat-dog concessions tokens strike with state brokers.
For our purposes, it means no SWERFs demonizing sex workers under Capitalist Realism (noir-style criminal-hauntology dialogs that treat sex workers like femme fatales, statistics and trash for middle-class women to look down on, pity and fear), nor sex workers playing the moderate-to-reactionary fash cop/token vigilante. Quite the opposite, even when the vice characters we play are flawed/damaged goods—the madwoman in the attic, the Medusa, the strung-out whore as criminal; e.g., through Batman‘s[4] greatest hits/pinup centerfolds—they should always speak cryptonymically to what we want to change that workers and nature might benefit.
In short, the state values structural instability married with demonic symbols to dogmatize workers, but which said workers can reclaim: of status to possess and wield, which knowledge and power are, and express operatically through the persuasive, vivid, and entertaining language of slumming and acquisition-through-conquest; i.e., criminality and warfare, but also rape; e.g., owners/earners, cops/victims, crime/punishment, reprobation/rehabilitation, recidivism/reward, might-makes-right, blackmail, gentrification and decay, hush money and other such carrot-and-stick menticidal dogma per unaddressed criminogenic conditions personified. Whores—and by extension, nature—are classically military targets felt and seen at home among civilians (re: Amazonomachia and military urbanism). As societal collapse nears thanks to capital’s boom and bust, fear of the colonized afar takes on a domestic mood, one concerned with guilty pleasure, avenging gargoyles and foreign plots threatening shadowy revenge (often mil spec, below)!
(artist: Chloe in Pink)
As usual, then—and keeping with my demon symposium’s aforementioned limitations (an emphasis on demonic holism versus close-reads[5])—I want to play with rape and presume a degree of fluency from my readers looking in on my fifth book. The order of things matters less than how you can assemble and play with them (and their modular elements) yourselves; i.e., how the world presents them to you, and how you use the ideas here to make demonic expression sex-positive in your own work and agreements: recursively combining things I can only elude to here when talking about sex and force through a holistic pedagogy of the oppressed (whose poetic forms and labor value are virtually endless); e.g., kung fu movies, BDSM, rock ‘n roll, monsters, porn, art, and whatever else goes into the witch cauldron per arbitration’s invigilation.
From the Four Gs (our biggest theories) to the Basics of oppositional synthesis (anger/gossip, monsters, and camp), expertise matters far less than function, concerning demons and liminal (oft-pornographic) expression; i.e., a second-nature synthesizing of these devices through an embodiment of competency about them regardless of state approval. “There are no experts” insofar as vertical authority is something to abolish; i.e., per the fluency and practice of sex-positive demons vs sex-coercive ones during liminal expression, worker unity mattering far more than singular authority. How you combine them is entirely up to you—from whatever positions of scarcity and privilege, theory and practice, format and linguo-material register. If you chose, you could marry Edward Said’s postcolonialism to a ’90s RTS videogame and Andrew Blake’s arthouse porn tendencies (re: Velvet Blue’s “The Helmut Newton of Porn,” 2008). Provided it pulls a baddie and gives them a voice (their revenge), that’s all that really matters!
Speaking from experience, this is how I did it and how I was taught; i.e., my grandmother worked at an asylum for mentally ill children, but Mom came from the street—was bred on Tolkien, Said, Edna St. Vincent Millay and many others giving her a glimpse of different worlds. She’s streetwise and loyal, but educated and urbane—having survived things I can only imagine to give me a better life: to break the cycle by redistributing power in demonic forms of revenge. Glimpsing such worlds through Gothic, its mode is yours to retailor as you see fit. A buffer and a mirror to show and conceal, try to find the courage to invent your own bad, silly-to-serious echoes on its darkened Aegis—to snatch victory sarcastically from the jaws of defeat not as a brand or a pose, but a way of life from cradle to grave: power as something to perform and imagine away from harm towards healing! We “better the instruction” (“If you wrong us, shall we not revenge?”) through kindness showcasing rape; i.e., as a friendly ghost of itself speaking to its evil police twin without harming anyone: exquisite “torture” making the elite pearl clutch (afraid to lose what they stole) and encouraging that labor rise up to reclaim and recultivate for ourselves. That’s the whore’s paradox, and simply how humans communicate, whores or not (though capital pimps all workers to some degree)!
(artist: Chloe in Pink)
Furthermore, regardless of combination, stratagem and form—from demon to ninja, unicorn, and whore—the state will try and monopolize any and all inventions in service to profit and the elite. Inside the state of exception (treating demons like zombies and other undead, as well as witches and other beings “of nature” having demonic/undead qualities), sex workers exchange power and knowledge about sex and force, the latter emblematic of power and knowledge: as things to canonize and police, thus cannibalize. The whore’s endless reversal of abjection, as such, helps expand society’s cultural understanding of rape in imaginary language. This includes its campy prevention while capital works against us; i.e., in bastardized, pro-state forms.
Fractally recursive, us versus them subdivides into cops, knights, and champions, etc—all canonically upheld with LARPer-grade costumes, a decaying language of medievalized rebellion, and the color-coded dungeons’ half-reality (on and offstage) whose power fantasies (of death, captivity and rape) we reclaim through doubled poetic abstraction. Our Venus mimicry happens during ludo-Gothic BDSM—by camping canon as demons do; i.e., through murky and potent existence (our bodies and their labor aggregate becoming things to play with for iconoclastic purposes), but also by trading in forbidden, shadowy things (sex and force, power and knowledge as verboten) that translate, thus transform hyperobject structures responsible for our rape: vis-a-vis generational trauma hyphenating this with that (dogma disguised as fatal nostalgia and military-optimist “child’s play”). Subverting said trauma occurs during intersectional exchange as playing with power (and all its synonyms) to have our whorish revenge: making the imaginary past, the Wisdom of the Ancients, wiser towards liberation among the shadows.
Through poetic exposure as such, sex marries force to monsters (and to monstrous activities, locations, fetishes and clichés) through psychosexual theatre. For the doll-like sex object, to have revenge there is to regain control from state forces pimping us out as sex demons to begin with; i.e., through reactionary police violence and segregation aggravating local populations to push back against with reactive abuse—in effect occurring through what they normally agitate and imprison, then sell in commodified forms. They do so back towards pacified consumers, the latter helping harvest nature through scarcity arguments: the monomythic reward, the maiden promoting doubly as whore after Medusa is “dead” and nature-as-dungeon converts territorially into nuclear households; i.e., with alien red light districts just a jump, hop and skip away! Like food, sex is cheap insofar as it equates to the labor of paupers/property cordoned off and made expensive through adult entertainment (sold for “mom and dad” inside/outside nuclear families): state variants of Faustian, sodomy-grade, primal breeder wish-granting and exploitative price-paying versus the paradoxical clarity of proletarian nightmares!
(artist: Nikki Delano[6])
Keeping with doubles and double standards, nature is a whore, a call, cam or e-girl to abject and police because that’s where power is found; it’s how it defines within the current order’s demonic illusions—the state’s false love and artificial wilderness, its bread-and-circus: “The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error… Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim” (source: Gustave Le Bon’s The Opinions and Beliefs of Crowds, 1985). It’s something to canonically plunge into, then refuse to pull out.
They say revenge a dish best served cold, but keeping with Gothic paradox and oxymoron, revenge is often quite hot; re, Queen Jadis’ dominion over the titular magician:
“Do not dream of treachery. My eyes can see through walls and into the minds of men. They will be on you wherever you go. At the first sign of disobedience I will lay such spells on you that anything you sit down on will feel like red hot iron and whenever you lie in a bed there will be invisible blocks of ice at your feet” (source: The Magician’s Nephew, 1955).
To liberate is to decriminalize, which won’t happen without a fight. In the eyes of the state, sex work (and by extension all work under capital’s monopolies, trifectas and qualities) is criminal as to exploit it in Gothic (demonic) forms: slices of the pie to buy cheap loyalty with. As such, the state always defaults to automatic blunt force, but all’s fair in love and class, culture and race war! Ironic forms are key to systemic catharsis, winning worker hearts and minds by reclaiming monster language especially when the state rewards classical misuse of such things; i.e., God is always watching and lets certain things slide.
Of course the system looks after its own; the point is to fight back—to resist state forces by using demonic language for our sake and those less fortunate by dancing with the ghost of the counterfeit! To it, Medusa’s still around and fixin’ to scrap with her giant assets, her gangster’s hysterical honeypot, her wandering womb’s vain and formidable Aegis. Closed-off from state forces that treat us as alien whore wedding cake, let’s show ’em who’s boss—that we’ll fight for our right not to be demonized by state forces, but demonize instead for ourselves. Show ’em that we’re more than a thing to play with, blame, dominate or accuse—more than a dark peach to carve up like fruit (re: Volume One)! Whores are spies, secret/double agents collaborating for good reason: we’ve been burned before, but have targets on our backs and don’t have the luxury of state protection. Restraint is a weapon to us, as is sex—our poker face and billboard, alike: disguise and foil to state marquees (of melons[7] to harvest)! Just as often, so is a lack of restraint. It merely depends what the situation (thus our revenge) calls for!
(artist: Slimthickn)
Intratextual messages speak to extratextual solutions; a house of cards is a place to hide, wait, and bide one’s time while seemingly stripped bare, the visuals seeming to support a narrative of peril, but also feel and play out of joint with its instructions inside a safe space’s revolutionary cryptonymy. Whore and rape go hand-in-hand, then, but lend the verb quotes easily enough. There, we whores relieve stress for other workers and ourselves, playing out our own deaths and rapes per all the usual sexist, or otherwise storied, bigoted fetishes and clichés on and offstage: little deaths, but also just deaths, period; re (from the Poetry Module):
My own quest for a Numinous Commie Mommy isn’t so odd; capital makes us feel tired relative to the self-as-alien, both incumbent on the very things they rape to nurture them (re: Irigaray’s creation of sexual difference). I’m hardly the first person to notice this:
As Edward Said astutely notes in Culture and Imperialism, most societies project their fears on the unknown or the exotic other. This barren land, where the viewers are kept disorientated, is threatening. It is a place between the familiar and the foreign, like part of a dream or vision that one cannot remember clearly. There is always a sense of a lurking danger from which the viewers need protection. Nikita provides that sense of protection (source: Laura Ng’s “‘The Most Powerful Weapon You Have’: Warriors and Gender in La Femme Nikita,” 2003).
I am, however, a trans woman who has gone above and beyond women like Barbara Creed, Angela Carter, Luce Irigaray and Laura Ng, etc, in my pioneering of ludo-Gothic BDSM: as a holistic, “Commy-Mommy” means of synthesizing proletarian praxis inside the operatic danger disco(-in-disguise), the “rape” castle riffing on Walpole, Lewis, Radcliffe, Konami, Nintendo, and so many others. I sign myself as such for a reason—not to be an edgy slut (though I am a slut who walks the edge). Rather, my pedagogic aim is to consider the monstrous-feminine not simply as a female monster avoiding revenge through violence, but a sex-positive force that doesn’t reduce to white women policing the same-old ghost of the counterfeit: to reverse what TERFs (and other sell-outs) further as normally being the process of abjection, vis-à-vis Cartesian thought tokenizing marginalized groups to harvest nature-as-usual during the dialectic of the alien (source: “In Search of the Secret Spell,” 2024).
It’s a bit ghoulish and Numinous, demons generally oscillating between such earthly-to-divine qualities inside a given shadow zone/danger disco (commonly a white woman’s idea of castle or ballroom; i.e., authored for those fearful of the nuclear model’s sexual marketplace, reifying and playing with the Gothic’s operatic rape castle doubling domestic abuse and, by extension, colonial abuse).
All in all, fear spaces (and bodies) are informed by pre-existing biases, phobias and stigmas, which means they exist as much to announce/expose a given comorbidity as to relieve stress resulting from it. If we summon these spaces and their fears ourselves (often concerning our bodies), we can learn of repressed feelings attached to their likenesses and begin to counteract them through our own constructions. Rebellion happens in defiance of oppression/relegation; Amazons and other demonic whores are instruments of oppression shared by colonizer and liberator alike. Activism, reconnaissance and charity occupy the same poetic devices, including their bare surfaces!
(artist: Maple Misty)
As such, we’re not totally fleeced on the Aegis. Yes, the Gothic is sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll told in duality and made from garbage according to a middle-class fear-fascination with closed-off things. But behind every patriarchal wet dream/shadow of Pygmalion’s gritty opera duel or kaiju fight (e.g., the Godzilla spoof from Crank 2, 2009) is a Galatea-sized elephant in the room; behind ever caricature of city life (e.g., Pablo Francisco’s “Little Tortilla Boy[8]” 2010) is the ghost of a raped woman, devastated slave, closeted fag and/or abandoned child conflated with her abuser[9]. We are none of those things and all of them, are not defined by the past as something to trap us with but haunted by it all the same. Through its powerful poetics’ forbidden fight, we see right through them and their fairytale illusions; we have our revenge by purposefully toying with canonical, thus forbidden things, their darkness visible granting us fresh demonic sight through our fairytales, our Gothic inversions (upside-down, inside-out).
And so we camp canon, hugging Medusa in search of recourse, survival, and resurrection counteracting shame, self-hatred, and tokenization! Yet, whores—like power and knowledge—take many shapes, some of them quite old. Animals are the oldest, but demons are a close second; i.e., speaking through whores as the world’s oldest profession, their modules and intersections poetically articulating how workers “of nature,” past, present and future, are demonized and chattelized under capital (thus desire revenge).
Per virgin/whore, the Gothic hyphenates inside/outside, doing so to play out the usual dialectic of the alien vis-à-vis some variation of home/hunting grounds: cage, kitchen, bedroom or castle, versus cavern, dungeon, river or forest. As such, the state rapes nature as maiden and whore, claiming her for itself and closeting her abuse while humiliating and mutilating her at every turn (marking her as theirs, often with cum, but also brands of different chattelizing kinds); the whore, in response, becomes the worker’s guerrilla instrument of revenge, expressed during rape play to bring such abuses out once more—the castle rape played out inside itself as rape castle, but also brought out-of-doors, or conversely the outdoors atrocity brought inside to make home feel invaded by her angry spirit, postmortem. Instead of merely burying these bones, revenge offers the raped their chance to be heard; i.e., by living with the reality of monstrous-feminine existence, becoming at home with abuse relayed as “past” to prevent it in the future; re: we were/will be human again.
In turn, our “discomfort” comforts us and makes our abusers uncomfortable in ways we can read (to recognize and redistribute), thus mark through the cryptonymy process. We publicize what they privatize, airing our dirty panties in public; i.e., scandalous nets letting little get past (re: selective absorption), reminding them that—while everything has a price and whores are often forced into slums, subsisting on garbage—there’s no price we’ll pay the state can put on our basic human rights (and those of animals or the environment)! Faced with abjection’s reversal, the state has little it can do but try to censor and scatter us underground, lest our humanizing of the harvest on the Aegis expose them as inhumane. Yet, doing so has precisely that effect! Such is how Medusa wages war! As rape generally goes, merely showing resistance to one’s oppressor is unforgivable, but fighting back is the point (and converting others to our cause, one boner at a time). Rome wasn’t burned in a day; it was forced to transform over centuries of internal corruption and asymmetrical warfare.
(artist: Lady V)
Whether summoned or made, whoring is how demons commonly articulate, thus communicate the rape of nature while playing with it in safe forms; i.e., doing so through sex symbols that cryptonymically denote violence: rape fantasies that speak to state abuse of sex and force, often by playing dead or dumb. In turn, either poetic variable expresses as pleasurable, non-harmful pain and erogenous, psychosexual responses haunted by harmful demon-BDSM variants (the ghost of rape, the Shadow of Pygmalion) while camping canonical norms; e.g., the vaso vagal response, frisson, and fight, flight, fawn, freeze or flop. Worker revenge requires using these in ways that shift history in new, less rapacious directions. Lived realities sit alongside imaginary forms mirroring them, and liberation and exploitation—playful “surrender” and unironic subjugation—likewise sit side-by-side, jousting inside the same shadow zone’s half-real spheres; e.g., “Hands in the air!” (above) being a cops-and-robbers refrain that has plenty of room for ironic roleplay in and out of bed, thus revolutionary potential.
Negotiating power, then, is to exchange it in common, seemingly tired forms—including the kinds of everyday pornographic and unequal, dehumanizing tropes/trades the state enforces between one party (often women) routinely and systemically disadvantaged by another’s privilege and under their “protection” (men, or traitors acting like men, thus pimps); i.e., through bad theatre, hellish body language and wacky puns, the data acting out a clay-like mixture of pleasure and pain as much synonymous as separate. In turn, demons are ancient monsters that speak to prostitution as the world’s oldest profession, including its equally old abuses (re: vae victis); monstrous-feminine fury speaks to patriarchal misuse of female (and later non-Christian, non-white and queer) labor “of nature” under state watch. Such ghosts of rape are angry for good reason, these transgressive fantasies resulting from steady criminogenic conditions built up over time; i.e., that yield the usual abuses that compel catharsis, the latter acted out paradoxically during calculated risk: a situation to make or otherwise summon that which speaks to repressed trauma during the rememory process. Escape happens mid-imprisonment and under dress; e.g., threat of impalement or homeless destitution should one refuse:
(artist: Olsen)
To it, the language of status-heavy things like food, war, rape and courtship yield regular medieval (thus poetic) euphemisms that are, themselves, equally haunted; i.e., by the lived reality of whores paying rent, which they reclaim any way they can; e.g., “Stuff my taco!” equaling the mirroring of a fawning mechanism that speaks to rape turned, suitably enough, into a release word and reward for good boys that follow instructions; re: “hurt, not harm.” Furthermore, there’s the paradox of asking for commands from someone; e.g., “Tell me to fuck your pussy”; i.e., the sub seeming to have the most power in realms of mutual consent, but really it being an exchange between unequal distributions thereof.
In turn, most fantasies stay fantasies and don’t actually manifest even through play. They’re simply fun to think about during games—to fantasize and take whatever shapes we demonize ourselves as. Anything becomes possible, not just what the elite want using the same ancient, animal-theatre language; re (from Volume Zero):
As a kind of deathly theatre mask, something else that’s equally important to consider about demons […] is that animals embody the canonical language of power and resistance as something to camp through demonic and undead forms; i.e., stigma animals relayed through demonic BDSM and rituals of power expression and exchange that embody hunters and hunted, predators and prey that play out through the ongoing battles and wars of culture, of the mind, of sexuality and praxis as traumatized (source).
Our Gothic takes something old and makes it “old” again to transform the present, thus capital, to have our whore’s revenge.
(source tweet, Soli: October 8th, 2024: “Japanese poster for Bram Stoker’s Dracula“)
That’s what ludo-Gothic BDSM does, you see; it familiarizes actors to the exchange of power as something to isolate, then articulate as a performance of many different popular (and ancient) kinds—our Gothic-Communist bread and butter whisper-screaming sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll being as old as demons and prostitution, but also the shadow plays evoking them during informed consent/calculated risk!
For us whores, shadow theatre hovers over the half-real hauntings of trauma denoting widespread harm under Capitalist Realism and its equally grim illusions! We whores have become fluent not just in rape, then, but monster rape as something to camp, thus reclaim our basic human rights from prescriptive inhumane forms, post-inheritance; i.e., to achieve catharsis conducive to Gothic-Communist development—meaning on a societal level, changing a cultural understanding of the imaginary past (the Wisdom of the Ancients) insofar as power is understood and expressed in Gothic language. We regain control in all the ways that control can be regained—doing so in the shadow of rape to camp “rape” by putting it in quotes using highly inventive-yet recycled[10] forms; i.e., power cannot be created or destroyed, only transferred and reconfigured. We do so to challenge state forms, doubling and subverting them. Taboo things—seemingly hard to discuss, thus exchange in rebellious forms not beholden to profit sublimating them—suddenly become as easy to illustrate as casting a shadow on a wall; i.e., such cryptonymy showing and concealing in equal measure: reflecting something as a shadow of itself sent back towards state abjectors. Subversion suitably operates both on the shadow of a doubt and the ominous confirmation of things haunted the state’s proposed luminaries wreathed in darkness.
That is our revenge. Power is knowledge about something as demonic in order to play with it during safe-yet-evocative fantasies to have this revenge, the latter which sit adjacent to actual forms of death, rape and torture that help us regain control during performance and play camping the canon; i.e., over our feelings/desires of revenge by those peoples and systems who have not just wronged us, but constitute a world we want to change through demonic theatre: to break Capitalist Realism.
Again, demons are whores. Made to witness and be witnessed per forbidden sight as much a fruit to consume, doing so happens unto Promethean outcomes and Faustian bargains railing against state doubles; i.e., under Western dominion, pain and torture mingle with sex and comedy being how they communicate to camp canonical norms through a shared imaginary’s neo-medieval past; re: through bad theatre and puns, the data a clay-like, Gothically ludological mixture of pleasure and pain as much synonymous as separate; re: war/alarm, shelter, food and sex, but put on blast. “Stuff my taco!” becomes TACO STUFFED during ludo-Gothic BDSM:
(artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard; font generated by Rezuaq’s “FromSoftware Image Macro Creator,” 2022)
Such plundering is campy and fun, but like any opera haunted by actual rape, our resident fat-lady whore avenges past abuse through clay-like doubles: desire and revenge, putting “rape” in quotes. That’s the whore’s paradox—our spectres of Marx to reclaim and remind people we are whores; i.e., as a source of pride under persecution. Again, context matters, the demonized choosing who calls them “whore” (and who doesn’t), to allow whatever into ourselves (or not).
For our liberation, prostitute becomes something to advertise to spite its corpse-like stigmas and taboos; e.g., a whore is synonymous with a corpse, death—with an orgasm that, like the convulsionnaires, has a martyred, rapturous, even vengeful quality to it (the eyes rolling back into the skull, dying the little death but Numinously evoking the Big One). Like a demon, it becomes its own thing: a “sacrificial” fetish of statuesque, monstrous-feminine power coupling this with that to exchange this with that—to say to our enemies, “That’s what you don’t get!” To rub their faces in what we whores trade in all the time, upending our pimps! Sex workers trade not just in money but trust as something to convey in ironic for(u)ms.
Ludo-Gothic BDSM is typically silly-serious, in this respect—putting “rape” in quotes through playful, thus goofy and regressive psychosexual theatre that, often enough, can get hella rough (remember your aftercare, babes).
Catharsis is anything but simple, then, social-psychosexual improv running along well-used tracks, and behind the usual aliases and Aegises, but also combined linguo-material codas/codes suggested above: “Help, I’m a damsel in distress! Psych! I’m a whore! Joke’s on you!” But we take this far further than the morality plays of old; from freak to freak, it becomes a demonic, at times enigmatic mode of existence. Doubling as good praxis, our aforementioned whore’s revenge becomes the reclamation of such things; i.e., under isolated duress and through socio-political adversity from pro-state agents, looking to fang and defang us during controlled opposition (re, Eco: “the enemy is both weak and strong”)!
All the while, liminal expression affords the potential for good faith and bad, thus BDSM, play and acting as equally dualistic and oppositional during canon vs iconoclasm. The sex-positive idea is to enforce our rights by subverting the state and its own sex-coercive police mechanisms; i.e., using the same shared aesthetic and basic rules of exchange, thus play to synthesize catharsis! Nature is a hysterical whore the state rapes, the raped then seeking revenge in ways the rapist will always try to control: how people talk, monopolizing the language of the whore to subdue her for profit.
(artist: Valentina)
As such, our own bargains and quests for power mustn’t decay/tokenize and dutifully “put out” for our captors stranding us, nor punch down against other oppressed peoples; as whores, we must intersectionally solidarize and push towards universal liberation beyond state forms. The state is straight, is a pimp of nature that canonically enforces its own status quo; i.e., through power and knowledge exchange that harm nature for profit: money for chattelized, thus policed sex, reaping nature-as-monstrous-feminine to alienate, fetishize and ultimately infantilize, pimp, and rape as such. In short, the state manipulates nature to uphold its own unequal power over nature, doing so in service to profit as something to police; its manipulation of nature and workers, per the usual monopolies, trifectas and qualities of capital, then, is sex-coercive towards those ends, ad infinitum.
Our goal is to critique systems more than individuals, but include individuals under such umbrellas; i.e., viewed through the critical lens that demons constitute. Capital, like all systems under it, exists to protect powerful men (and those tokenizing to act like men) while impugning their demonized victims: to receive patriarchal, thus lawful, goodly force under the shadow of the badge, might making right under centrist stories meant to manufacture and prolong conflict with heteronormative, settler-colonial, Cartesian impunity (“boundaries for me, not for thee”). As such, the state forces women to mother their own killers, dying ignominiously by the hands of entitled, de facto sons (re: Irigaray’s creation of sexual difference), such persons “looking for mother” as a whore to unironically rape, thus revive and reinforce state arrangements. It’s sadly the only way these killer man babies (or those acting like men, inside the Man Box) can get it up, which we want to circumvent; i.e., by coding society-wide psychosexual responses conducive to non-harmful, social-sexual relationships: our own darkness visible, expressed and embodied during our day-to-day lives; e.g., my husband, Bay Ryan!
(artist: Bay)
Per the whore’s paradox, revenge is reclamation to revolt against canonical embargos and their harmful monopolies’ pacifying copycats. This is quite paradoxical on its face, but no less affective for it. While there’s nothing pejoratively “savage” about bare bodies or Gothic aesthetics used in demonic ways (with Bay both Scottish and Māori, my postcolonial goth slut), there’s everything the matter with those who enforce such abject, ghost-of-the-counterfeit binarization to uphold the status quo/Capitalist Realism; re: “Who’s the savage? Modern man!” Sex is money and “money is the medium through which capitalism operates,” writes Patel and Moore in A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, “a source of power for those able to control it. That control isn’t about people and wealth. It’s about how such control entwines with nature,” (source). They extend this to nature as something that must be dominated through particular canonical expressions; i.e., that only allow others to destroy them pursuant to profit during the abjection process:
It only took a day from her crime to her execution. Yet court documents don’t even record her name. She lived in Tlaxcala, New Spain, and on Sunday, July 18, 1599, she smashed crosses in a church, incited Chichimec Indians to rebel against the Spanish, and killed a Tarascan Indian using sorcery. The next day she was arrested. Six witnesses testified against her. As the sun set, she was permitted to speak in her defense. She recounted her deeds and then—according to the court record—recounted a dream:
Of deer and they said to her not to turn away and that they were looking for her and that they did not want to appear to anyone else but her, because she was ill and they wanted to see her, and she said that she was very old at the time she saw the figures and she is young and healthy and they have taken away some cataracts that she had, and then these two figures went into a cave with her and they gave her a horse, which she has in said pueblo of Tlaxcala, and that one of the two figures was a deer that rode atop of a horse and the other deer had the horse bridled, and on that occasion she was crippled and after seeing the two figures she is well.
Of the crimes she committed, her dream was the worst. She might have fueled insurrection, desecrated a church, and interfered with the flow of silver from Chichimec land, but most dangerous, she offered a vision of order and nature contrary to the colonizers’. The horse ridden not by Spanish men but by a deer—the symbol of the Chichimec; not white men astride nature, but local life upon the colonizers’ life. The dreamer of this dream was guilty of calling not just for a political insurrection but for a cosmic one. She dreamed the order of the world seditiously. She was hanged as a witch later that afternoon.
It’s hard to speak of this woman without knowing her name. Her killers called her a witch. This is a name she may have used for herself, albeit without its colonial venom. Even though her name was set at so little that it didn’t merit an entry in the conquistador’s paperwork, it is an act of memory against forgetting [rememory] that her story is told. The dreamer of this radically different ecology had to be killed, swiftly. To allow her to live would sanction an alternative to capitalism’s world-ecology (ibid.).
Such bleak realities are something we whores push back onto capital; i.e., the latter describing us per a catastrophic Realism fearful of our revenge, and scapegoating us for its abuse: our freedom is the end of the world. It is the elite’s greatest gaslight, their supreme weapon to demonize sex in service to its pimping of nature until the end of time—from continent to ocean, land and sky as theirs and theirs alone. But when the seas boil and “the moon becomes as blood; and the stars of heaven fell unto the earth,” that Judgement Day is our fault. It’s DARVO on a colossal scale.
Under capital, then, all AFAB are women and all women are chattel whores without irony (a condition that extends idiosyncratically to anything “of nature,” thus monstrous-feminine in the eyes of the state; re: Bay canonically demonized for the same qualities listed earlier). The usual dualities and inversions apply when camping canon, making nature—already alien—hostile to state operations. Such monarchs of nature look pointedly for someone to “rape” them; i.e., by means of play that vary between gentle and strict forms (thus BDSM, fetishes and kink). We play with fire because the gods of capital have stolen it from us; its shadows lurk on our bodies and environments likes castles doubling theirs—in the flesh! Behold, a pale horse! My sweetie, the galactic traveler, has come!
(artist: Bay)
Per the virgin/whore mechanism, demons are presumed “in disguise” and constantly sexualized on their surfaces regardless of what they have on (re: Segewick); i.e., forced to disrobe hence confess less in ways that are objectively true and more to spill one’s guts, thus be the whore that men with virgin/whore syndrome are searching for (and token agents; re: whores pimping whores): all virgins are whores, all whores look like virgins and “need” to be subjugated under dogmatic, love/hate, criminogenic conditions. They must because Capitalist Realism demands it, Numinous iterations of the victorious whore-as-Great-Destroyer promoting Red Scare; i.e., spectres of Marx threatening the Fall of “Rome” as Rome presently stands. Death and rebirth challenge the state, which then tries to monopolize them; re: Halloween and those “of nature” inside the state of exception as a repeating cycle that—per the liminal hauntology of war—always comes home to roost. Despite the infamy of slashing reapers like Michael Myers haunting colonized lands (and threatening colonization of the colonizer inheriting the Imperial Core under elite rule), such beings and their language of violence, terror and morphological expression cannot be weaponized exclusively by the state (whose lands, per settler colonialism, there must always yield someone to harvest—to exterminate as evil, lesser and dark); our ghostly asses can use them to send state fears (and denial of their precious stolen goods) back at them! Stare and tremble, fuckers!
In turn, dirty little girls have dirty little secrets (the name of the porn skit starring Valentina, above and below). Such compelled theatrics can be reclaimed on the same stages, with the same Aegis’ mirror/compartment syndrome freezing state abuse and reclaiming our power through slutty theatre. We trade with what we got, with what society values/discounts through porn and, by extension, art and daily life; e.g., transportation, rent, and food all paid for with sex as legal/illegal (the only thing afforded to women in a patriarchal society): a tush, a rack and a box! Virgin = legal; whore = illegal. Women (or those treated like women) are fucked, either way! Whores are simply more upfront about it, more candid, natural and earthly (freaks that fart, belch, swear and spit during sex). She’s animal, demonic—a demon lover wolfing sex down but also dishing it out, Chaucer-style, to threaten nuclear models of ownership and reproduction with squelching hungry holes stirring macaroni!
(artist: Valentina)
Sex doesn’t just hit the spot, but pounds it in ways that speak laterally to our abuse happening elsewhere vis-à-vis what people are currently looking at: the controlled objects coming alive to act out their own “rape,” making it like a metal song (or the POW! blocks from Mario 2, 1988): fun, volatile, and satisfyingly thrilling. To make iconoclastic, sex-positive demons, then, is to humanize the harvest, thus the whore—to make love while turning profit (thus rape) entirely on its head: the cute “virgin” form incensed to a feral “whore” form doubling it; i.e., Medusa going “mask off” to bare her fangs, exhaling in rapturous, ahegao-style passion (and taking our essence and power as she does)! In effect, she decides what implement goes in what hole, vaginal or anal comprising different kinds of exchange concerning the same policed subject: sex as marital vs extramarital, thus wild, forbidden, fun. Instead of retreating backs into the past, we pay it forwards with thunder and darkness, fueling and fertilizing fresh beds of doom. The place where the holy go to die and dark dreams manifest—sex-machine booty getting the lead out: “heavy buns of lead fills her victims full of dread!” Twerked to death, then taken by Persephone’s nightmarish ass to Hell and back—you’ll never wanna leave!
That’s what intimacy is through demonic, whorish expression; i.e., showing any side of ourselves that will normally be attacked! Sex is dangerous and fun in ways we can camp in duality (more on this in “Making Demons”): handling those we trust won’t harm us, and having fun through performance and art, friendship and business as speaking cryptonymically to so many instances where that luxury of agency is denied! Loving the whore is taught by the whore in the lusty shadow of actual rape and hate, but also predatory porn contracts and barbaric, blame-the-whore rhetoric those unequal power arrangements historically encourage; e.g., “What was she wearing?”
I’m sorry but that’s irrelevant. She could be buck-ass naked and rape still isn’t okay! Ever! Furthermore, no one “asks for it,” as far as unironic rape goes, but that’s precisely the kind of bullshit revolutionary cryptonymy challenges through our chosen buffers and stages: the demon lover’s cry of Medusa finding a reciprocal, affectionate audience! For her and hers, fear and courage, love and pain occupy the same stage under pressure! We learn to relax and control our fear through safe spaces that, at times, cross over into actual, grave danger (when the state intervenes) but also put “danger” into quotes; i.e., to nullify state apathy in worker hearts and minds, saving our dark mommy by giving her what she desperately wants/needs! “Ravish me!” The whore’s paradox is a command speaking to the shadow of rape—a command to follow in ways that evoke a barrier whose barrier yields revelation, protection and catharsis. It’s loud and noisy but dark and fun; i.e., both what it postures as and something else entirely!
Simply put, it’s an act—one whose darkness speaks to hyphenated pleasure-pain, their control administered fairly between all parties involved. People are sexual, even those asexual parties communicating to sexual topics through calculated risk, public nudism and art/porn more broadly. Exposure to demons begets arousal; i.e., we see sex and often enough, get turned on—our dicks wet with precum, our mouths (or “mouths”) salivating and our brains buzzing with giddy anticipation! Read about demon sex; get wet, hard and horny! That’s human, but tapping into its primal energies helps us reunite with nature-as-alien; i.e., in ways we can weaponize in counterterrorist forms, which go intentionally beyond state tolerances: to eat them alive, as Medusa (the wandering womb) loves to do! Om, nom, nom—all over that dick like the baby from Super Metroid (camp requiring some degree of irony and humor to work, often in oxymoronic degrees)!
(artist: Valentina)
The paradoxical, ironic nature of Gothic is commonly transgressive, subverting taboos and fears during liminal expression. Such pedagogies of the oppressed lend demons the uncanny ability to lend power expressed as forbidden knowledge; i.e., to speak to what is normally alienated from one side or the other by state forces (re: Volume One’s “Healing from Rape”).
Such prolific and varied rape fantasies speak of someone being controlled, and someone feeling small and weak in ways that can be controlled without harming anyone; e.g., the “teen” isolated and ravished during roleplay that can easily be good or bad; i.e., controlled opposition vs genuine rebellion using the same sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll to make—with their shared aesthetics—completely different arguments: an opiate for the masses vs a forbidden way of seeing that speaks to state abuse by (at times) badly reenacting it. Catharsis equates as much to freedom of expression as it does the ability to say the quiet part out loud. We pick and choose, mixing things up through holistic interpretation that reminds people just how controlled, thus policed nature is/our bodies and labor are! Sex is highly controlled, under Pax Americana; violence is unregulated to control sex.
Keeping with paradox, then, rape is both no laughing matter and solved in Sisyphean, smile-at-the-gods gallows humor camping rape; i.e., doing so in ways that are fun precisely for those reasons. By extension, singular interpretations are dangerous, amounting to an ordering of power that benefits one side (the elite) over another (workers and nature) per a master/slave hierarchy.
In turn, the defense of said interpretations’ singularity happens by police forces upholding state operations, which we must camp by saying whatever we want however we need to; i.e., to relax amid hypervigilance, ducking segregation by respecting mutual consent through different evocations of it, tailor-made per roleplay scenario; e.g., “Get your hands off my penis!” versus “Fuck me like you mean it!” Each safe/danger phrase (green/red light) can be said with or without irony to support or challenge police violence, hence the state. For our purposes, we emerge dualistically from abject veils—from Hell, the underground, other dimensions—to command respect using what we got: our bodies and negotiator’s fluency dismantling state operations on all linguo-material registers!
(artist: Valentina)
In turn, everyday interpersonal affairs extend/translate easily enough to geopolitical ones. For example, the Gaza Healthcare Letters, written on October 2nd, 2024, by “veterans and reservists” styling themselves as “neutral observers,” demonstrate a stunning amount of ignorance regarding how states historically operate. To it, they style themselves as “a multifaith and multiethnic group [none of which] support the horrors committed on October 7 by Palestinian armed groups and individuals in Israel” (source).
So right off the bat, they’re off to a really bad start; i.e., both-sidesing the issue and appealing to the very people responsible and standing to profit off these matters:
We are not politicians. We do not claim to have all the answers. We are simply healing professionals who cannot remain silent about what we saw in Gaza. Every day that we continue supplying weapons and munitions to Israel is another day that women are shredded by our bombs and children are murdered with our bullets. [emphasis, theirs]
President Biden and Vice President Harris, we urge you: end this madness now! (ibid.).
On one hand, asking the White House to stop genocide seems noble enough. On the other, doing so is like asking Hitler (another desk murderer) to stop killing his enemies of the state while pretending like he doesn’t; it’s stunningly ignorant to how states (and their bureaucracies) function, historically—how they create these enemies specifically to rape them. These doctors seem to forget that, ignoring the fact that America is doing this on purpose; i.e., is responsible for everything these doctors are mopping up, and stands to profit from it en masse. They sound like fools, drunk on Pax Americana‘s exceptional goodness, thus its whitewashed bloodbaths and Zionist mythmaking. Biden and Kamala are worse than Trump in that respect.
Worse, our good doctors lack the jester’s ability to critique the king in his own court; i.e., they’re not vice characters, they medical professionals acting as pick-and-choosers, saying it’s okay for some to die by finger-wagging oppressed groups for responding the only logical way under settler-colonial conditions: the only reason Palestinians attacked Israel is because Israel has been genociding them for over seventy years with America’s help (similar to how 9/11 only happened because America is a settle colony that routinely invades and destroys other countries for profit). Yet, our good doctors utterly miss the point, writing:
President Biden and Vice President Harris, we urge you to immediately withhold military, economic, and diplomatic support from the State of Israel and to participate in an international arms embargo of Israel and all Palestinian armed groups [emphasis, me] until a permanent ceasefire is established in Gaza (ibid.).
It’s obtuse, verging on obstruction; i.e., the gesture itself is certainly a stance, but one the state can simply deny as it always does (and one where the doctors can pat themselves on the back for writing the letter). In effect, the very solutions these doctors propose are empty gestures, blaming the victims and exonerating the state by treating them as “neutral”; i.e., ignoring the reality that Biden, like all presidents, says one thing and does another to enrich his corporate brethren selling weapons to both sides.
Such ignorance would seem to benefit from the kinds of playful rhetoric our crisis actors seem completely unable to perform. All they can do is wring their angelic hands and ask daddy politely to stop. Since when has that ever worked? Again, we have to humanize the harvest in worker hearts and minds, and this happens through whorish dialogs; i.e., those able to point the finger directly at the only ones responsible for pimping nature: through the same straws and liquid they siphon rejecting state violence and sucking our power back towards us.
Again, context matters—dividing along dialectical-material scrutiny during oppositional praxis, and where radicalization compounds during paradoxical, half-real exposure. Liberation is often trashy and all the more delicious and therapeutic for it; i.e., it’s junk food comforting the normally powerless with something tasty, fiery and fun (re: “eating a meal, a succulent Chinese meal”)—a sex object that, revived as Galatea by Galatea (and not Pygmalion), revs our engines! During oppositional praxis, sex is a battle, babes! A castle under siege—a disco to invade, all guns blazing out on the dance floor with dance partners who weaponize sex against the state versus for it! Pew! Pew!
Silence is genocide, so make all the noise you can above ground[11]—to say to the world, “Here I was, am, will be! Raped but unbowed, and wilder and braver because of it!” Such accomplished and worldly liminalities see the whore accepting payment where they can get it (versus simply having it shoved at or into them like a slot machine), and spreading allegory whenever they can help it. Fuck to metal (whatever hits the spot)! Demonize to humanize; “rape” ironically (camping rape as it normally plays out, on and offstage)! Death by Snu-Snu! “Harder, faster!” Weeee!
(artist: Valentina)
Profit demands rape, genocide, what-have-you. Fighting the profit motive, then, such wet-and-wild, slutty arguments notably code/decode through preference—doing so to become a joyous, tragic, and comedic gag to reclaim during copycat pornographic refrains; i.e., showcasing agency as, true to form, a kind of demonic joke/apologia about unshackled monstrous-feminine desire speaking to harsher realities haunting the venue.
These jokes, in turn, echo and inform industry standards mimicking us and vice versa. The deciding factor in terms of sex positivity is irony and humor about being stranded and all the dire, sinister implications that entails (see: It’s Always Sunny‘s “Dennis Explains the Implication” scene, 2010). All the while, fun and danger go hand-in-hand with risk prevention and praxial synthesis, giving us new ways to see the world based on old abuses and pacifying illusions we demonically subvert during ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., per our idle hand’s ghastly creations reviving sex-positive dungeon paradigms, demon lovers and vengeful whores reclaiming our agency—by putting “rape” in quotes, as we demonized always must. To keep quiet is to grit and bear it from our jailors, demanding we choke on them despite our gag reflex speaking to the contrary. Like, fuck that!
So concludes our rape reprise. Such camp and its unheimlich-maneuver revenge, of course, take many forms (e.g., big butts, class consciousness, class-conscious big butts), but power as such classically becomes something the state prescribes to rape nature and those of it, determining such actions per their usual demonic ceremonies of false power and police violence; i.e., under neoliberal Capitalism’s Faustian and Promethean arguments built on older forms of capital and Imperialism[12]; e.g., Don Cheadle’s Captain Planet spoof: “The power is mine, bitches!” (Funny or Die’s “Don Cheadle Is Captain Planet,” 2011). We must see it for what it is and reclaim it through the looking glass. Keep that in mind as we proceed!
(artist: Galactixy Illustrations)
Onto “Knowledge and Power Exchange, part one: Idle Hands (opening and Medusa)“!
Footnotes
[1] The word as I coined it has several definitions. One (from the Six Rs):
games occur along Gothic, liminal routes, wherein workers playfully articulate their natural rights in linguo-material ways between reality and fabrication that go beyond games as commodities but are nevertheless informed by them as something to rewrite; i.e., through play as a general exercise that involves a great many things: a reached agreement of power and play in Gothic terms, whose luck/odds are defined not through canon, but iconoclastic poiesis that can be expanded far beyond the restrictive, colonial binary and heteronormative ruleset of the elite’s intended exploitation of workers to challenge the profit motive and all of its harmful effects in the bargain; e.g., genocide, heteronormativity and Max Box culture. The sum of these concepts in praxis could be called “ludo-Gothic BDSM.”
Another (from the glossary, abridged):
My combining of an older academic term, “ludic-Gothic” (Gothic videogames), with sex-positive BDSM theatrics as a potent means of camp. The emphasis is less about “how can videogames be Gothic” and more how the playfulness in videogames is commonly used to allow players to camp canon in and out of videogames as a form of fairly negotiated power exchange established in playful, game-like forms
As I’ve moved through this series, though, the definition 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.
[2] In the settler-colonial sense, which isn’t necessarily skin color. The English colonizing the Irish, for example, demonized them as animals despite both parties have pale skin.
[3] Which includes tokenized monstrous-feminine refusing to be victims (re: Creed); i.e., by playing the victim as they triangulate against and attacking other victims, Omelas-style: token cops, white Indians, reactionary/moderate cops and vigilantes acting as pro-state monsters, class/culture/race traitors raping their comrades out of desperation and convenience. Betrayal is betrayal. However, the more privileged someone is, the more convenient their betrayals are; the more oppressed they are, the more desperate their betrayals become. Either can be exploited by the state, which relies on betrayal to survive.
[4] A series known for celebrating gilded-age gentry and police, anti-Semitic banker vaudeville, street justice, and old-world master/apprentice distributions of power and wealth, while simultaneously demonizing criminals and romancing mental illness, drug wars/substance abuse, double-crosses, backroom deals, assassins and banditti, Freudian complexes, and objectified women (the house cat* being a sex symbol and underworld guardian) to preserve the status quo.
(artist: Artgerm)
*From Volume Zero: “the cat as a sex symbol is regarded as ‘small,’ its killing implements either removed (the claws) or vestigial through the softening of features that communicate symbiotically with human masters” (source). Catwoman is smaller than Batman—a “stray” in fetish gear for him to “tame,” but always smaller than him, tied to lunacy (the catwoman of the moon). She’s a kinkster strict dominatrix and cat burglar put in her place by Gotham’s billionaire golden boy moonlighting as a bat (the white Indian).
[5] If you want those, go and read the Undead Module, which is full of close-read essays that merge into demonic expression (vis-à-vis our modular thesis argument). There are plenty in the other volumes/sub-volumes, as well—with Volume One in particular designed to hand-hold through simplified theory.
[6] Pornstars are often quite educated. According to Nikki’s IMDb profile:
She’s of mixed Italian, Colombian and Puerto Rican descent. The eldest of eight children, she was raised in a strict Catholic family and attended Catholic school, where she was an honor roll student and participated in gymnastics. Nikki graduated from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice with a bachelor’s degree in forensic psychology and a double minor in addiction studies and criminology. Delano worked as an office manager for a non-profit organization and was a mainstream model for over a year prior to being contacted by a talent scout for the adult website Brazzers on her ModelMayhem page (source).
In the above video, for example, Nikki riffs on her Catholic upbringing. Leaning into the naughty schoolgirl trope, she reverses roles, camping the canonical, demonic aspects to her own past: as “mommy” telling the naughty “schoolboy” how to fuck her—harder! Framed in Spanish (thus, to some degree, exotic), these echoes of incest are endemic not just to porn, but Neo-Gothic fakeries displaced onto imaginary countries “beyond” Britain (empire haunted by its own fabrications, their half-real “medieval” looming over seemingly modern procedures).
In that spirit of things, Nikki regains a modicum of control over money and sex; i.e., over things for which the state normally denies control of in service to profit, thus wage and labor theft. The better she acts, the more she carves out a name for herself, thus a place in the world: to make it more sex-positive through a normally harmful practice like the porn industry!
[7] The pro-worker weaponizing of sex, but also slave foods/pauper dishes and work to speak out against settler colonialism and Pax Americana while taking these things back.
[8] “In the city… you must fight to survive! He sold tortillas on the street corner!”
[9] The Gothic violates boundaries to speak to the indiscretion of nightmares; i.e., that follow us into the waking world, where tokenized agents seek to retire and send them back to Hell. In part, they’re like the Victorian chagrin of sleep arousal, a slut to shame; i.e., the control of human biology and desire by the state personifying as the succubus or incubus abjected into fearsome banditti-style rapists: the knife-dick/dickhead totem, the lady in black, etc. It’s as much to police these gargoyles as it is about the Freudian dogma attached to them; i.e., the demonizing of regular sex responses to dogmatize/mystify biology and canonize the nuclear home as “under siege” by whores—by nature as “seeking revenge” and needing to be quelled by state doubles playing the cop, pimp, and assassin behind various disguises/false premises.
As capital decays, panic sets in. First, the grim harvest cannibalizes workers, leading to witch hunts punching down against nature: blame the victim by attacking the whore to tokenize and/or subjugate her! Then, doubles emerge within the same aesthetic—mere honorifics designating police violence to give and receive further abuse. And while the state of exception commonly affords an undead flavor to traitors (and their victims) marke(te)d as such, a demonic one proves reliable—invaders from “Hell” made of clay threatening the “end times” under Capitalist Realism: a dark world where whores may walk free, unencumbered by state forces “protecting” workers from sex workers and sex workers from themselves!
The worst liars are the owner class and their traitors among us, those who accuse others of terrorism, murder and rape. As such, capital is bipartisan, funding multiple sides to the same team. Souless and cloned, this happens to make the bourgeoisie appear seemingly at odds, versus in cahoots (re: Parenti): create false “enemies” among themselves, but actual enemies among workers that both can police inside territory and hierarchy alike. There must always be gods and masters ruling over nature-as-alien; i.e., whores to punch, police, and divide, conquer and rape. To uncage Medusa is simply foreplay that teases her endless recapture. Not unlike Schrödinger’s cat, she oscillates under state dominion as a kept pet, military target, and space alien foreigner to trot out on home soil (the Imperial Core) dressed up as Elsewhere; re: “Hell is a place that always appears on Earth,” the harvest in small as a territory for fresh conquest.
(artist: Baby Lee)
Fortunately empire has a time limit, one the state will blame its usual victims for “causing.” This extends to overall state harm; i.e., as colonies decay/threaten mutually-assured destruction, making Realism fade and Imperialism sail home. So does Gothic claptrap mirror state dogma and owner abuse seen and felt upon the Aegis; i.e., power in sex-as-alien as much speaking to genuine fear as adoration. As usual, then, nature becomes alien, something to fear and interrogate per the usual black/white binaries; i.e., treating her “non-white” rump as something to seek out, carve up and “tame,” thus possess in DARVO arguments: a hellish queen to rape and blame for said rape during virgin/whore syndrome (“she gave me a boner!”). Chasity and ignorance become virtues to defend through force against imminent invasion: “Brave talk for a mortal boy who’s world is about to end!”
However extravagant or invented, then, such arrangements canonically uphold the status quo/current order as supreme over nature. And while proletarian guerillas can weaponize such cryptonymies to anisotropically fight back and reclaim their humanitarian value, complicit counterparts divide the world for conquering anew by state monopolies, trifectas and qualities of capital; i.e., by growing alienated from all things the state fetishizes, the entire arrangement invading every aspect of daily life on and offstage, at home and abroad, asleep and awake. Us-versus-them double standards extend cryptomimetically to maidens and whores, but also good doctors and quacks policing women (and those treated like women), the latter suddenly affording explanations for the appearance of monstrous-feminine sex demons: sluts without a pimp, walking out in the open (the state allows exceptions up to a point, but always under incredibly broad, vaguely written rules that can be randomly and selectively enforced to serve profit; i.e., manufactured conflict, scarcity and competition occurring over whores by state enforcers pimping them)!
Paying rent, whores sit in limbo during liminal expression; i.e., while the state sexes up its banality of evil (desk murder) by proxy—using whores as punching bags/quick relief during state operations (ostensibly divorced from marriage yet punished for said divorce to uphold nuclear models)! Bourgeois pimps pimp like all the rest, then. Scare people; make them spend money on things they can abject for the state. The state gives an inch but takes a mile; it lies, cheats and steals, acting noble and good through endless Sales of Indulgence furthering the abjection process under neoliberal Capitalism.
(artist: Nikki Delano)
In turn, the colonization of the imperial home starts with erections and vaginal lubrication becoming ill omens; i.e., beckoning middle-class homeowners towards extramarital affairs, but also abuses committed by them and theirs towards vulnerable parties. It’s a medieval regression, capital decaying nostalgically into older hauntological versions of itself: a time that never quite was, but whose legendary violence, terror and police are quite real. America is a place that arms its citizens to their teeth; i.e., is populated by moderates/fascists playing white Indian, rebel, savior as undercover cop. Good cop, bad—pimps of nature, one and all!
[10] Not only is this not new at all, but it’s something I’ve written about before; re (from Volume Zero):
In all the universe, in all the gin joints in all the world, Persephone walked into mine and made me her avatar. “All deities reside within the human breast,” wrote Blake; yet, I think of the “Jewish revenge” of my marriage of Heaven and Hell as Canon’s tyrannical plea, re-camped by me and billions of other workers actively and/or passively yearning for freedom. Its sui generis format is both “Workers of the world, unite! You have only to lose your chains!” married to “Grant me revenge! And if you do not listen, then to hell with you!” (this second sentiment goes for anyone who taught me or otherwise contributed towards that dark beautiful thing that became what I am today). For Communists wronged by the state, we monsters and what we make are human as Shylock was:
Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge. The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction (source).
Our revenge, as a simulacrum, only resembles that of those who wrong us and counterfeit our campy legends for their canonical gain (Tolkien’s refrain); our aesthetic is shared but our function is altogether different: class consciousness as uncontrollable opposition relayed in terrifying medieval language that is thoroughly more wise through hindsight; i.e., not just according to Robert Asprey’s paradox of terror (which we’ll consider in relation to state forces decrying labor as terrorists) but the hauntological paradox of “the Wisdom of the Ancients,” whereupon old forms of monstrous expression have been updated for the modern world and its challenges to accommodate our needs as workers being exploited by Capitalism and its propaganda. That is our revenge—slowly camping the canon, thus the Superstructure, and reclaiming the Base through our monstrous, ghostly theatre as something that once turned on, can never be shut down or destroyed; it can only be repressed in forms that always come back because the elite cannot kill all its workers (not on purpose, anyways).
Shadow theatre and its mythic structure are nothing new. It dates back to Plato’s infamous allegory of the cave and its mimesis as paradoxically haunted by the shadows of class struggle (the spectres of Marx, which in theory did not technically exist when Plato was alive, and yet whose struggles for emancipation include these older slaves that Marx alluded to in “The Eighteenth Brumaire”).
Camus may have noted in The Myth of Sisyphus that canonical shadow theatre repeats to an absurd degree; i.e., Sisyphus pushing the rock up the hill as punishment by the gods. To escape it, we can’t just smile at the gods like he proposed, but steal “their” fire on our own Promethean Quest! This means camping the canon, which requires repeated forays into Hell and putting the wrong things right at the source: our “darkness visible” and gods as stolen out from inside our breasts and put on the cave wall of Plato’s cave […]: oppositional praxis as playing on in shadowy forms dancing on the same cave wall, our darkness deliberate fencing back and forth with the state’s blind canonical doubles like Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood dueling Basil Rathbone’s Guy of Gisbourne [source]:
We’ll still doing so thousands of years after Plato, using shadows to camp, thus counteract state forms.
[11] Such archives speak to underground journals tapping into repressed appetites, but also pedagogies of the oppressed highlighting the hypocrisies and cryptonymies of empire; e.g., The Pearl was “A Journal of Voluptuous Reading: The Underground Magazine of Victorian England” (originally published anonymously in 1878 and republished by Ballantine in 1968—itself a tumultuous year under empire):
Having decided to bring out a Journal, the Editor racks his brains for a suitable name with which to christen his periodical […] at last our own ideas have hit upon the modest little “Pearl,” as more suitable, especially in the hope that when it comes under the snouts of the moral and hypocritical swine of the world, they may not trample it underfoot, and feel disposed to rend the publisher, but that a few will become subscribers on the quiet. To such better disposed piggywiggys, I would say, for encouragement, that they have only to keep up appearances by regularly attending church, giving to charities, and always appearing deeply interested in moral philanthropy, to ensure a respectable and highly moral character, and that if they only are clever enough never to be found out, they may, sub rosa, study and enjoy the philosophy of life till the end of their days, and earn a glorious and saintly epitaph on their tombstone, when at last the Devil pegs them out.
Such voyeuristic curiosity towards whorish exhibitionism is not wholly the domain of the hypocrite, but it’s often who we have to deal with all the same.
[12] Its cartographic technologies of conquest described by Patel and Moore as “a single, disembodied, omniscient and panoptic eye” (and cataloged by me through various cartographic refrains; re: Volume Zero). It is precisely this eye who those of nature must meet with our own Aegis, its abyssal gaze staring back in ways that stall the usual monomythic conquest; i.e., that capital and canon essentialize in any and all forms, monsters and territories. Their governance cannot be met with politeness, but bare-and-exposed sluts speaking truth to power through our own way of seeing the world: making everything gay!