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.
On Amazons, Good and Bad, part two: Reclaiming Amazons; or, Cops and Victims (opening)
“Steel isn’t strong, boy. Flesh is stronger. What is steel compared to the hand that wields it?”
—Thulsa Doom, Conan the Barbarian (1981)
(source Tumblr post, The History of Fighting: February 6, 2022)
Picking up where “On Amazons, Good and Bad, part one: Always a Victim (feat. Medusa)” left off…
Capital relies on tokenization—to recruit from nature to pimp nature, sex raping sex, thus benefit the smallest number of people possible through the suffering of the largest number possible. All exist within a system of concealment we expose inside itself—from America’s corporate duopoly (establishment politics) to extensions of their team-based, cops-and-victims approach to the world under neoliberal Capitalism and its centrist refrains: bread and circus (music and combat). This includes Amazons as something to reconcile with their imaginary past, but also reclaim it as a consequence of refusing to play along with state mechanisms any longer! A whore’s revenge, breaking Capitalist Realism!
If part one focused on tokenization of the Amazon as givers of rape and revenge—i.e., treating Medusa as perpetual victim/scapegoat, during mirror syndrome—part two, “Cops and Victims,” aims to humanize, thus reclaim such devices inside themselves; re: “an enemy has only images, behind which he hides his true motives; destroy the image and you break the enemy.” Liberation is a mirror game, Medusa the Queen of Mirrors; queen bee, the details of her death have been greatly exaggerated. The Gothic, then, loves to remind its audience to the inferiority of man in man-versus-nature, but also Man Box tokenizing this group or that; i.e., mankind is doomed, the home reclaimed by nature, but also labor when Medusa comes to take us home: into her murderous womb—a carnivorous vat of acid, a sarcophagus (eater of the flesh). No amount of science, superhero eugenics, deals with the devil (selling out) or self-righteous posturing can thwart that, dooming the state because it tries to beat Medusa, anyways. It cannot, because she is nature, itself, hence a god of death—of transformation and radical change during intensely unequal, forbidden exchange.
These aren’t just colonial devices, then, but our childhood materials lifted from sources normally used to deliver such things to people expected to uphold the status quo. As usual, the elite cannot own the Superstructure, meaning we can recultivate it through iconoclastic art on the Aegis; re: subversive Amazons, which look and sound the same (at a glance) as subjugated ones. It’s a group effort, made not by single, elevated representatives, but an intersectional collective of solarized workers liberating sex work as monstrous-feminine through iconoclastic art. This includes Amazons, which desperately need to reclaim their iconoclastic potential from TERF agents playing cops and victims vis-à-vis Amazons.
All hinge on lies, during the cryptonymy process. Except when the state lies, it lies to harm us; when we lie, it’s a defense mechanism defying our attackers. Our vanishing point/mirror gaze isn’t amnesia, but a reawakening of our lost power in campy replicas: a hall of mirrors, fatal portraits, echoes of the restless past. In turn, our rememory of personal and generational trauma is something to reassemble through partial lies, reinvention and rape play hinting at truth; i.e., our eyes of confusion, our splendid lies, our darkness visible, our Aegis—to absolutely glow with our dark, whorish revenge! Our beautiful darkness abolishes privatization, be it kings, gods, or masters (“a curse on both your houses!”). We’re phallic women getting it off our chests, unburdening ourselves by letting it all out; Lady Vengeance in all her many forms, we’ve built ourselves up not to tokenize, but refuse to be the state’s cops or victims policing sex through force. We seek release, not relapse: our Amazonian moxie, spunk, noive.
(artist: Lera)
Such subversion is symbiotic; all operate on dysfunction as something to process, conjuring up the half-real past for different purposes. Over time, rebels have decayed into cops who strike a balance between human/alien, saying “we’re the exclusive victim” during controlled opposition. Medusa has evolved to look more and human, evolving rape arguments that don’t just speak to her endless rape, but rape at the hands of those abusing the dialectic of the alien; i.e., transforming and threatening unequal exchange per the whore’s paradox to uphold capital and profit, thus continue their raping of nature. Let’s explore their liminal reclamation during ludo-Gothic BDSM, here; e.g., anal sex as a symbol of submission that, per the whore’s revenge (upending profit), becomes a subversive postcolonial device that Amazons (thicc warrior beings) are party to.
We’ll get to anal, in a bit. First, we’ll rehash a few important ideas concerning dialectical-materialism, liminality and hauntology vis-à-vis Amazons, look at some different forms of Amazons as subversive warriors whores with Amanda Nicole, apply those to personal experience (me and my mother’s), then dive more deeply into Amazonian subversion itself (about killing our darlings and reclaiming anal sex, but also collabs with Nyx and Amy Ginger Hart).
Revenge (and the demons granting it) is a very old idea, and a productive one under Capitalism in both directions (cops and victims). I originally wrote this section using a series of sub-headers (which still exist, below); but due to its increasing length, I had to chop it in two. It wasn’t really designed for me doing so, but I’ll try and signpost it a little to account for the division—and contents of each separate half—belonging to the same larger coin:
Cops and Victims, part one: The Riddle of Steel; or, Confronting Past Wrongs
- Dialectical-Materialism, Liminality and Hauntology
- Amazons as Whores (feat. Amanda Nicole)
- Relating to Amazons (and Sex Work) through Personal Experience
- Double Standards and Challenging Them (Killing Your Darlings, feat. Angela Carter)
Part two: Our Sweet Revenge; or, Being Ourselves While Reclaiming Anal Rape, mid-Amazonomachia
- Weapons of Terror: Reclaiming Anal Sex
- Always In Dispute: Subjugation vs Subversion (cont., feat. Amy Ginger Hart)
The opening page per half was written after the bodies of each text was, hence constitutes a foreword of sorts; i.e., containing terms and ideas that don’t repeat afterwards, save in synonymous ways; e.g., notions of male and female Gothic, but also gendered violence/courtly love expressed phallically and vaginally with swords and sheaths, maidens and knights (thus whores and rapists). It doesn’t hurt to be fluent with such notions, but we won’t stress their usage here (refer to Volume One for some good examples)!
(artist: Nora Fawn)
Cops and Victims, part one: the Riddle of Steel; or, Confronting Past Wrongs (feat. Amanda Nicole)
“Conan, what is best in life?” / “To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women!”
—a local khan and Conan, Conan the Barbarian (1981)
Part one shall examine th past of the Amazon myth having become increasingly hostile to state enemies in recent years; i.e., through tokenized feminism vis-à-vis subjugated Amazons acting traditionally like men. Such revenge is notoriously petty insofar as it involves pimping nature as monstrous-feminine; re: as something to crush, kill destroy on repeat to uphold Capitalist Realism with.
In short, such tokenism has become something imitate by class, culture and race traitors in bad faith—neoliberal copaganda conjuring up feminist bugbears, Radcliffe-style, for neoconservative Madonnas to destroy imperial crimes projected onto during state decay (the weakening of the state, thus its myopia): state scapegoats during mirror syndrome; re: cops and victims, the cop tokenized and playing the victim through DARVO and obscurantism, aka cryptofascism. The cloak is the imperial, pre-capitalist space as something to return to, Conan-style: a king or queen by one’s own hand, surrounded by stolen wealth (through conquest, specifically feats of strength) and war booty of the finest (classically female) stock:
(exhibit 43e2c3a: Artist: Persephone van der Waard. My mother’s brother, Uncle Dave, loved Conan the Barbarian. Both he and Mom grew up playing D&D and reading the likes of Rob Howard, Tolkien and others. When Dave died of a heart attack in mid-2022 [shortly before this book series started], Mom asked me to draw him as a king—like Conan on his throne, made by his own hand. So that’s exactly what I did.)
Keeping with Conan’s “riddle of steel” (above), fantasies of strength, death, rape and revenge (all Gothic staples) aren’t simply state tools; we can reclaim them. Amazonomachia is a mirror game, one where complicit and revolutionary cryptonymy clash to forward or reverse abjection (thus profit and the anisotropic arrangement of terrorist/counterterrorist). This portion focuses more on our enemies meeting us “in the middle”; i.e., through the legend of the Amazon consumed by both parties: as dialectical-material whore/terrorizer to relate to through personal experience, but also mete out through various double standards assisting in state vs worker revenge. Such things become our lullabies and bear our crest—the conqueror anthem a neoliberal refrain to prepare workers for fresh war in the name of state restoration, and which we subvert to dismantle not just the state, but an older part of ourselves!
Dialectical-materialism, Liminality and Hauntology
For the Amazon and Medusa, such dialectical-material struggles are not only dualistic and liminal, but hauntological in their half-real effects. For instance, Hippolyta and Medusa never actually fought in the ancient myths (not to my knowledge, anyways); you wouldn’t know it, based on how white token feminism has sought to colonize Medusa through neoconservative military optimism—the forlorn hope that if they punch down hard enough, capital won’t arbitrarily cannibalize, trash and orderly dispose of them/abort, scape and flush them down the toilet and into the sewer drain like bottom-of-the-barrel garbage for profit (what Burke in Aliens referred to as “arbitrary extermination”; i.e., regarding the xenomorphs as “a very important species,” keen to monetize them versus Ripley wanting to wipe them out during the same displaced Red-Scare moral panic: to outer space). Subjugated Amazons are toadies enjoying victim censorship (e.g., trans people, gagged and bound for them to more easily brutalize) and state camouflage (re: the badge) with the same aesthetic’s argumentation and language; i.e., DARVO but also obscurantism, aka cryptofascism/disguise pastiche.
Furthermore, such clemency is wishful thinking at its best. A decaying state always eats its token elements first, token Amazons little more than mall cops rendered into gore by the chopping mall[1]. Afraid of nature’s revenge after a holocaust they’ve knowingly played a part in, token Amazons tongue the toilet bowl for loose “dung” (those they dehumanize: themselves, projected onto more marginalized or differently marginalized groups). In turn, nature tokenizes, becoming dim-witted yet quick to blame. Thic(c/k), it rapes itself with a gun held to its head; eventually the gun is removed, but remains part of the worker’s raped mind—a menticidal spectre of violence, handed down inside ghosts of its own forging (re: Hogel; e.g., “Rome” or otherwise): of Communist whores, or fascist ones (they occupy the same space using the same aesthetics of power and death, below). To survive, we must camp both as a matter of civil and guerilla warfare/strife (reclaiming the suddenly-alien castle, during Cameron’s refrain; e.g., Mario 64, 1996).
(artist: Lera)
Until we do, history shall repeat in tragedy then farce, during the abjection process. Workers always lose, and cops are not known for their compassion or intelligence. When the time comes, they’ll hypocritically don bridle or thong in genuine enslavement; they’ll eat their own, their bowel septic with colonial rot, golems and gargoyles made from shit. “You are what you eat”; they’re mad cows, having truly no dignity or shame when throwing each other under the bus, pearls before swine begging others to squeal as they cut their throats and drink the blood. Per Marx, dead labor feeds on living labor until the calories between them lose their life, their nutritional value passed upwards; the middle-class eaters of the dead become braindead, the Amazon just another cop under these circumstances. They’re zombies pushing lawnmowers over barren yards; re: white people disease adopted by Amazons thinking others are inferior and they’re owed a Stepford spouse; i.e., while calling others savages despite being hella lazy and gross. Eventually the double standard takes things to their logical conclusion; i.e., token Amazons don’t care enough to change because the system coddles them and gives them something hard to attain (under capital; e.g., food and shelter) for being stupid and cruel like men (Foreign Fridays’ “POV: You Have a Humiliation Kink,” 2024). Capital alienates and sexualizes everything in service to profit, thus rape through revenge arguments that benefit the elite vis-à-vis their token slaves.
The dialectical-material fact (thus struggle) remains: people of all walks love heroes, which are always monsters, thus demons (transforming into hulking versions of a visually weaker original whose subsequent domination-by-comparison opens up masculine/feminine superiority arguments). As such, whores become hyperbolic/Numinous but controllable as alien warriors by all sides of class, culture and race warfare; i.e., as dolls/action figures to play with/teddy bears for companionship that unto themselves evoke some sense of danger and protection, but also fear and power married paradoxically to rape and revenge (voodoo dolls, but also C.S. Lewis’ problem of pain, vis-à-vis Rudolph Otto). Incredibly common, they’re pacifying or radicalizing depending on how they’re used, lending them a situational element, but also a mitigating factor per more universal usages: fight and fawn are survival mechanisms, but also conditioning devices adjacent to generational trauma dressed up as sport, as opera, as kayfabe heavy metal, etc.
To it, Amazons are demons made from trauma in psychomachic division, the light side made to police the dark, but also steal its rebellious barbarian elements while doing so; re: Hippolyta and Medusa, the former a white-washed marble statue chasing down her darker double like Colonel Kurtz to canonically avenge the colony while wearing blackface: fear becomes a gaslight, the Aegis something for the state to abuse against assigned devils punching up against Western ones.
Subversive or not, there’s a regressive, performative element to Amazons not unlike any barbarian fantasy. We’re playing as much with the liberation of stigmatic devices and outmoded language as we are the people associated with them (though their usage, in sex-positive cases, functions opposite sex-coercive ones). Even so, racism haunts Amazons, their recidivism/recuperation conveniently assisting state restoration by becoming a relapse that restores order while facing embarrassing revelations (foisted onto state enemies); i.e., the state and its colonies die, but the genocidal beliefs that drive them from start to finish live on: inside the larger system where monsters comply or resist on the Aegis.
Per the usual superhero power signatures—e.g., costumes and special moves, but also race tracks, hunting grounds, tourneys and obstacle courses with which to use them on—such Olympian bodies and games articulate police violence against nature-as-vengeful[2] exceptionally well; i.e., in a half-real sense, canonically trained onstage and off to deliver new sex and force built on old sex and force: regarding nature as colonized by traitorous offshoots victimizing the former as alien while playing the victim (these token qualities lending DARVO further legitimacy and illegitimacy before, during and after).
Such façades canonically engender police violence, terror and morphology (monsters) useful to state monopolies, trifectas and qualities of capital. In turn, fascism defends capital when it decays, employing uncanny pain to restore the unheimlich to a “proper” nuclear home, post-apocalypse. It’s a Gordian knot, cut brutally through by Alexander’s arrogant sword; i.e., military optimism/urbanism, nature a Promethean battle ground for future revenge coming from Elsewhere: in service to capital raping nature with nature, again and again, and empire’s collared Amazon traitorously answering the elite’s beck and call, Beowulf-style—at home.
Of course, these monopolies are wholly impossible, as are their alienized threat displays motivating workers to tokenize. Yet, as a warrior class, the subversive Amazon remains just as macho as her subjugated double, but also curiously protective, providing and gentle when she needs and/or wants to be—a Queen Kong looking after her “captive,” the latter putting themselves paradoxically in harms’ way first and on purpose: “Oh, won’t someone please capture me and take me far away from here!” The twink energies (and subsequent palliative-Numinous rape fantasies) are second to none (no time to go into that, here; we’ll look into twinks and submissive fantasies more in Volume Three)! In turn, “agency” amounts to its own paradox: “choice” informed by oscillating socio-material conditions that interfere with our ability to choose, thus self-define; i.e., subversion of the Amazon as our whore’s revenge.
Such subversion is liminal, then—used by canonical forces reclaiming iconoclastic ones and vice versa, praxial inertia versus activation expressed during Amazonian theatrics; re: the dialectic of the alien. Either side reverses beauty-and-beast sex appeal, fashion statements and gender roles to move power (and beauty standards) in either direction; i.e., a combination of prescriptive/descriptive sexuality and drag-show appreciation, the Amazon speaking to a peak-like warrior’s towering performance as corporal—one that, when entirely disrobed, can’t be reduced to clothing alone (despite the “borrowed robe” double standards): a lonesome lady looking out for a vulnerable male party while capital decays, threatening people’s security and personal freedoms with the ghost of the counterfeit! “This city’s in for a bit of a rape!” Per the Gothic, it’s silly and serious all at once, such monstrous, alien voyeurism “just singing in the rain” (minus Kubrick’s nihilistic hooliganism, misogyny and trans exclusion, left).
(source: Reddit)
It’s also Orientalism; i.e., as something to see and exhibit, par excellence. Framed as nature’s revenge for past imperial sins, the state recruits from current middle-class groups; i.e., where women (usually white, cis-het Christian women) are more gentrified, thus have more to lose than past examples: those less independent and secure.
Such gargoyle-ish reminders hardly stay in the past; said “past” becomes something to threaten loyal workers with, the latter buying up Neo-Gothic garbage menticiding their scared-stupid brains in service to American Liberalism:
There is absolutely nothing that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris can do — no death toll high enough, no amount of footage of scattered limbs and dead children — that will change the liberal mind into believing they are not the “lesser evil.” For liberals, the lesser evil is simply the one more capable of leading the empire with a facade of decorum on the world stage. It is not the crime that liberals oppose, but how it’s packaged (source tweet, Tamara Nassar: October 10th, 2024)
As such, pearl-clutching under American exceptionalism promotes alien revenge conducive to genocide, itself inherited inside ongoing structures that cryptonymically code and conceal imperial consumption, thus predation, as rotten to the core; re: subjugated Amazons having taken the bait to police the church, its sacred grounds suddenly populated with unwelcome demons coming out of the same half-real past (the ghost of the counterfeit gatekept by middle-class forces).
There must always be a victim, in Omelas; i.e., deserving victims (usually women and children) apologized for by undeserving victims, the latter recruited as spokespeople to pacify outrage regarding the former’s senseless destruction for profit: merciless slaughter vis-à-vis elements of assimilative inclusion. Such equality isn’t universal, but something of convenience that only a select few are chosen to enjoy once they harden their hearts (“one of the good ones,” the help)! Superman was an alien, as such; so are Amazons, good or bad, ostensibly human or otherwise. Assimilation is always dangled in front of them, the other choice being unemployment, destitution, silence, homelessness and death (activism not only framed as apophenic conspiracy by the state, but antithetical to profit, thus tantamount to sedition).
(artist: Miss Faves)
Through liminal beings like the Amazon or Medusa, then, the Gothic considers how fakery and artifice speak to police abuse as monstrous; i.e., by means of arbitrary us-versus-them representation. During the whore’s paradox, rebel and cop hyphenate in appearance, their mutual alienation speaking to carrot-and-stick conditions and behaviors during unequal power exchange passed back and forth. Amazons cannot physically transform, but can betray the proletariat by punching down.
As such, the romance is hardly romantic, the seminal catastrophe not just presently underway but happening again, once-and-future; e.g., the state kills babies and Kamala Harris (a token cop) explains it away and covers it up, backpedaling and virtue-signaling behind a veneer of exceptional, immutable goodness. Good cop, bad cop; Amazons and knights, ACAB and ASAB—our genderqueer camping of these alien devices must reflect this duality. Insofar as Nazis and Communists exist among the same shadow zone’s demonic expression, silence is genocide (a common variant during the AIDS crisis was “Silence is death”; same idea). We cannot afford to stay silent or otherwise assist in genocide by politely taking state gold (re: Zeuhl and Jadis).
Nor can we afford to play philistine and discount the entire linguo-material labor value of sexuality and gender-non-conformity in art, monsters and porn (re: Bad Empanada, “Understanding Vampires,” 2024). To speak out against war profiteers, we must camp canon as it exists—unequally across all workers affected by profit turning them not just alien, but sex cop. Freedom is a constant struggle, then, one defined by resistance pushing towards a day many will not live to see.
Such is Gothic Communism, whose bitter pill ludo-Gothic BDSM offsets with the ability to synthesize some degree of catharsis in our daily lives! Amazons embody this, but also their own abuse in hauntological hindsight; i.e., something to transform away from older sell-outs and commodities occupying the same draconian surfaces and spaces; re: pastiche remediates praxis. Amazons are alien warriors of sex and force, seeking some facet of revenge for or against nature (even if that revenge is merely to exist as they are in opposition to state dogma; e.g., a muscled whore to dress up as a crossdress likeness of a dragon, below).
Now that we’ve shored up the dialectical-material elements, I want to consider the personal experiencing of such stories: how we inherit them; i.e., as they’re endlessly made and remade, through Gothic bad echo.
(artist: Kinda Sorta Maebe)
Gil Scott-Heron once said, “the revolution will not be televised,” but outside establishment media, revolutionary cryptonymy still takes place between media and mediators; i.e. through regressive power fantasies, which Amazons (a kind of barbarian) ultimately are. These didn’t start in the Modern period/Capitalocene, but the Neo-Gothic revival took what we think of Amazons and knights and expressed them in popular unequal power fantasies that are still used today when capital decays.
Such devices aren’t “new”; the state has loved to abuse demons for as long as they could invent them, including Amazons as classic female power fantasies invoking herbo warrior elements in predator/prey language to deter and instill rape. Simply scare people into purchasing what they can abject, then watch the West testify to its own atrocities against nature; i.e., by fabricating them, such gender trouble speaking on how people control trauma as made into dollish devices for them to purchase and play with. This paywalled catharsis extends to performances that are doll-like by much the same logic (which Amazons are/follow). In doing so, middle-class workers under Pax Americana eat garbage because they’re scared; i.e., by material inequities and heteronormative impunity (of state forces pimping nature-as-alien/whore). They consequently feel scared because they eat garbage that scares and relieves them; i.e., they feel shame and guilt, fearing revenge from those most obviously in control of such things—the elite and their servants, a husband comparable to a cop, thus a pimp. Subjugated Amazons can decay into adopting a similar misogynistic or otherwise bigoted posture; i.e., one approached by those who seek even the suggestion of power to their otherwise powerless lives.
Their doing so isn’t entirely baseless. Like any heirloom, such fakeries convey some degree of truth, a repressed evil hovering over the uncanny homestead: husband or homelessness, one decidedly more harmful despite rape being a lived reality for both. Women could not legally own property (thus material power) in the 1700s, so they married into power to avoid the various comorbidities known to homelessness; e.g., rape all the time, versus from their husband every so often in exchange for relative comfort; i.e., for loyal wives, dutifully punching down at illegal whores from positions of relative (dis)advantage (a wife is a legal whore). As such, they would often marry men to later fetishize them, doing so in a rising creative medium dominated by white women obsessed with alien things: Gothic novels. Per Wolff, such stories commonly depicted men as demon lovers that, in older fairy tales, were eventually defeated or transformed—a curious trend that Gothic media has since ferried into the present, regarding Amazons; i.e., based on the historically uneven and gentrifying experience of middle-class marriage.
Ann Radcliffe’s marriage, for example, was relatively non-abusive (though her life was shrouded in mystery—enough to frustrate her biographers; e.g., Rictor Morton). Despite this, the Great Enchantress canonized demon sex as much to abject colonial abuse onto criminals (the banditti, in her case) as to liberate middle-class housewives looking for a thrill; i.e., alien mates. But marriage remains the prescribed outcome of those original novels, itself overshadowed by the unlucky girl before she discovers her secret-princess status (Amazons being warrior princesses): survive the rape castle’s barbaric nightmare; get married and give all you own to the male hero.
Oh, boy!
(artist: Rim Jims)
To it, Gothic fantasies of sex and force were and are classically of assimilation from alienized positions burdened by monstrous-feminine revenge conspiracies and warrior elements. These have changed considerably over time, their aesthetic metabolism informed by feminism married to Amazonian myth. Later authors (from the mid-20th century onwards) cut out the husband, speaking to women who were both less fortunate than Radcliffe was, yet born into worlds where women presumably had more rights (not native to the land, per se, but alienated from it just as native populations are by white cis-het men acting as the universal owners of each; re: the true aliens brutalizing land and occupant alike).
My mother is one such woman. Born to a lower-middle-class family that cut her off, she came from the street—i.e., where the rubber meets the road—thus was homeless and criminal, hence exposed to Amazon fantasies a sixteen-year-old girl might use to try and take the edge off: for fear of needing to sleep with strange men for cheeseburgers and a warm bed. Being classic symbols of female strength, Amazons bore progressive and regressive (neocon) elements, of which my mother was hardly immune to such promises in either case; i.e., she wanted to be strong in ways that, in the same breath, also concerned what men felt attracted to (what was forbidden to them), and which Mom could seek sanctuary within: to never need a man again, but still look sexy in ways that carried an ace, monstrous-feminine flavor (the interrogation of trauma in female warrior language/public nudism).
In short, Amazons (and their power fantasies) carried value for her as she tried to survive; i.e., the unspoken but notorious abuse that any woman, but especially those that a mentally ill young woman in the late ’70s and early ’80s, would have to endure. In the end, Mom chose marriage over being a destitute whore, but this led to abuse comparable to what she had already survived on the street; the cops were as useless after her marriage as before it (a restraining order is just a piece of paper). It goes to show that Amazon fantasies walk the line between fantasy and real life, the best method towards tailoring a healthy approach (to the whore’s revenge) is taking both (and their many, many forms, below) into consideration: dark power and knowledge as forbidden sight to advertise for all workers, not some. They must, or it’s merely Omelas-by-Amazons; re: token women aping straight white men, declaring “boundaries for me, not thee!”
We’ll get to my mother’s experiences with Amazons and sex work in between art and rea life, but first I want to outline the idea in general:
Amazons as Whores (feat. Amanda Nicole)
(exhibit 43e2c3b: Artist: Kassarie Draws. Although token Amazons generally present as chaste-if-muscled, virginal combatants against Medusa-as-abject-whore—e.g., Ellen Ripley vs the Alien Queen—they aren’t mutually exclusive with whores or Medusa; i.e., as things to combine with that, true enough, are also modular when discussing rape and revenge as having a “pretty and petty” flavor. Amazons, at their core, are bikini models with a warrior character [e.g., Marvel’s Red Sonja basically being a ginger herbo in chainmail underwear] but also bear a non-white/non-Western stamp. This can be a “white Indian” vibe, to be sure, but also something “orcish” speaking to a variety of xenophobic stigmas [racial, religious, and/or queer] to, like the Amazon, either reclaim or at least understand through play.
In Gothic media, nudity = exposure. Amazons of a more “whorish” character are seen as fighters that, in conservative morality arguments, surrender or defend their maiden-esque virtue from rape when placed into compromising positions; i.e., to be nude is to risk corruption but also predation from evil forces: warrior nuns. Per the whore’s paradox, Amazons also flaunt their strength in defiance of patriarchal forces trying to control their bodies to begin with: to incessantly show skin, thus spite the SWERFs. And while such resistance has shifted under neoliberal Capitalism—meaning towards various scapegoats that Amazons tokenize with during imaginary crime waves/rape epidemics—it needn’t always be the case. This exhibit will explore the various ways that nudity expresses as a sex-positive form of strength—Amazonian or otherwise, but certainly useful when expressing them as a poetic device alongside Medusa!
Like all monstrous-feminine, Amazons and Medusa express through plurality during liminal expression; i.e., women are born into a world that divides them into different, oft-warring pieces. Most common are the virgin and the whore but also psychomachic fantasies about either that concern the woman’s metafictional ability to change shape/arrange power in different unequal forms; i.e., the Amazon as a “berserk” to briefly inhabit whenever one feels out of control, but likewise wants to perform and preserve/pervert elusive elements of the self that Medusa speaks to, in Gothic stories: the Amazon’s dark whorish side. Amazons are whores and all whores are demons that communicate through sex and force, pleasure and pain.
Furthermore, such demon BDSM occupies the Aegis and its illusory shadow zone; re: whose paradoxical theatre houses them without shame, but also helps the women performing them interrogate different complicated feelings adjacent to state abuse: being a slut according to how “slut” is coded, in popular culture [e.g., Wednesday Adams, top-left].
[source, top-right; artist, everything else: Queen Complex]
For example, a woman commonly feels the need to beautify and become desired in different forms; i.e., body shapes associated with dom or sub, thus different classical power scenarios and beauty standards like the Amazon and Medusa. She might find herself guiltily wanting to betray others, or slum in ways that speak to darker fantasies—of rape, captivity and violence—wherein she gives as good as she gets: anisotropically from positions of strength and weakness performed-and-informed by her status as a woman to begin with; re: the whore’s revenge.
In dialectical-material terms, such things can be fun to play with, minus actual harm; i.e., to play with “rape” by putting it quotes, doing so as much to help survivors of trauma overcome misinformed or pejorative ideas of rape association/Gothic ignorance as it is to achieve personal catharsis. Through ludo-Gothic BDSM, these various paradoxes even allow women to imagine themselves changing their body size/shape [top-right] or the size/shape of their partner [size difference] and the arrangement/appearance of the power between them [bottom-left] through BDSM binaries like top/bottom, virgin/whore, [wo]man/animal, and dom/sub. All go hand-in-hand towards raising emotional/Gothic intelligence and class, culture and race awareness during the struggle to develop Gothic [gay-anarcho] Communism; i.e., by relating to what we see, onstage.
Those who feel like Velma, for example, can both acknowledge their actual sexual inexperience [bottom-right] while trying to learn what is normally denied to them; use the “nerd” archetype [the “angel in the streets, freak in the sheets”] to hide their body count from people who would shame or fetishize them; or otherwise give them the ability to voice themselves with these ideas, hence use them to establish new boundaries through roleplay. Likewise, it can let them investigate, confront and play with the imaginary past and its different legends of psychosexual violence; i.e., in ways that disarm or humanize the traditional, mutilative harm associated with them, which create vaso vagal feelings of danger and pleasure working with confused predator/prey sensations: a palliative-Numinous mirror of one’s actual ontological condition/crossed wires received from old trauma currently living inside/outside the body [we’ll return to this concept more in the “Damsels, Detectives and Sex Demons” subsection].
The point is, women are pushed towards doing sex in some shape or form; e.g., Amanda Nicole, a “slut pop” music star similar to Kim Petras except she actually does explicit sex work—a fact that expresses visually in Nicole’s music[3] as multiple competing voices:
[source: Amanda Nicole’s “Pretty and Petty,” 2023]
In turn—and in keeping with the skin-deep, petty reputation of female revenge—the whore’s revenge also speaks to getting even in a world that awards certain appearances despite classic modesty arguments. For example, the PAWG Medusa [above] has power because her witchy body is “non-white,” thus desired guiltily by those who, in sexually repressive environments, view her exposure as intoxicating. She becomes something not to chase, but crave and worship with the proper nudge. It’s an attention game, but one that speaks truthfully to how power works in social situations. During these, sex is never far off on many peoples’ minds; they see it in ways that—for one in control of such things—can manipulate to her benefit: embodying power as something to savor and worship, but also fear as capricious [or “petty,” as Nicole calls it]. Sex symbols double as monstrous-feminine symbols of revenge—to not only “make it,” under capital, but thrive there despite its rapacious treatment of women!
Nicole’s fantasy offers a cross-examination of different monstrous-feminine revenge: the mean girl, the witch, and the ethereal sex goddess. All are objects d’art/tremendous mysteries that convey power through aesthetic and arrangement as one in the same, but speak to female revenge toying with ideas of getting even as Amazons do: exposing our bodies as “naked” with or without clothes; re: Segewick. In a world of manufactured competition, scarcity and conflict, having power over one’s enemies includes enchanting your would-be attackers using what you got; i.e., less turning them to stone, like Medusa does, and more into your admirers to shower you with praise and tribute, mid-courtship: to look the part, then seize the “jewels” for yourself [the reclamation of carrot and stick] and push towards the abolishment of privatization [and be adored for it]! Pop off, queen!
Gods personify human failings as much as human virtues. Like many revenge fantasies, Nicole’s vision is imperfect; but its pornographic flavor speaks nicely to the liminal qualities of revenge, and investigating the anger of such individuals being part of a larger group: of workers instilling fear among their usual dominators and getting what’s theirs. It also speaks to workers normally feeling compelled to fight amongst themselves. Revolution is a psychomachy—a folie à deux and ménage à trois to share madness and sin with in highly performative ways, but also orient ourselves toward, mid-relationship[s]: power as something to perceive in Amazonian ways, paradox and play existing in doubled, “dueling” bodies, replete with various double standards [e.g., Mixed Wrestling Fan’s “Girl Beats Boy Mixed Wrestling Part 2,” 2023].
To it, theatrical outlets are important, including Gothic, openly transgressive ones playing with and pay-walling sex through push-pull feelings and mechanisms. Dark reflections of the world we live in, they let us say different things about said world per labor exchange [art and/or porn]. This includes when we’re upset and that we desire revenge in more literal forms, but combines with subversive embodiments of the Amazon and Medusa [sex goddesses] to grant those seeking the whore’s revenge a vast polity of choice—one that speaks to the totality of our human condition insofar as whores [and their revenge] are concerned.
Flexing and wish fulfillment are, per Amazons/the Medusa, threat displays as much as any sort of drive turning the world into the exact image, viewed onstage. Just as often, we let off steam and let people see it: the “goods” and the thrill of different “trades” of/with said goods. We likewise tailor our actual praxis to synthesize theatrical outlets that, unto themselves, leave some room for interpretation, thus execution of the monstrous-feminine. It becomes something to control, its mood paradoxically empowering despite any debilitating trauma [and slut shame] associated with it. “What’s a girl to do?” you ask? “She walks in beauty like the night!” But this yields different forms per video and across one’s catalog.
[artist: Amanda Nicole]
In “Pretty and Petty,” the Amazon is more of an echo on Nicole’s thicc, feminine body. Conversely, others videos in Nicole’s portfolio critique power through a more direct merger of whore and Amazon; e.g., “Main Event” [2023].
A few more thoughts about “Pretty and Petty,” specifically its locations. Nicole starts with the classroom, then the dark repressed desires of the underworld tyrant, culminating in the mysteries [and aloofness] of the sex symbol’s stationary idolatry and revelation. But these could play out in any order and all share the same basic stage. In turn, they speak to a common paradox for whores: getting what one wants. Doing so, onstage, presents as sinful to the audience, but also speaks to the harmful nature of Capitalism gatekeeping such things to begin with [forcing women to girlboss, gaslighting them]. It speaks to us having to navigate various trends and beauty standards while camping them. Every person has their preference on the Aegis, and Amanda’s high-voltage, danger-disco tryptic encapsulates such monstrous-feminine variety in three distinct types: of non-Amazonian whores that channel Amazonian spunk.
“If you want to critique power, you must go where it is.” The celebration of sex through Gothic poetry is messy, hence always a liminal affair—one where assimilation and liberation/appropriation and appreciation occupy the same fantastical realms and involve the same basic devices; i.e., whatever’s “on tap,” being traded for and with [social status and material goods, sex and force] between different groups in the same larger market: where power is stored, but also the ways in which its artifacts demonically relate, through unequal, forbidden exchange and transformation. These happen during playtime speaking to live events, a skilled thespian able to work it in ways that speak to real life caught between pure fantasy and vice characters [who generally are seeking love and acceptance, but also domination and respect].
Power exchanges every day, and in ways whose understanding is, itself, forever updating/in flux with older forms. The paradox equates to consent-non-consent for those who have been raped; i.e., we can throw shade/get rough and chase the maiden and whore through rape play and Gothic fantasy at large—in short, having fun while processing demon-lover appetites in torturously hungry, mix-and-match language! The whole point, with fantasies like Nicole’s, is to encounter Amazonian or Medusa-like beings seemingly “out of our league,” yet have the capacity to change how such things exchange/are understood to begin with:
Consider body language. So often women [or those forced to identify as/treated like women] are treated as sex objects, reduced to single body parts [so-called “T&A,” left] used for the enjoyment of men; or they embody virtue and vice [re: virgin/whore] in ways that reduce them to singular emotions. Being able to play with these not only gives us control over ourselves and our emotional scars/comorbidities; it allows us to manipulate the world around us in ways useful to our liberation through these things: “I am strong!” Amazons don’t always win, but they have something that many women feel like they don’t: the confidence to fight back.
“Strength,” like demons, has infinite forms and configurations; e.g., “weakness” is strength, wherein “soft” femininity tops from below [or vice versa, and a million in-between[4] combinations]. Furthermore, this castled, animalistic charioteer’s from-outer-space liminality emerges through the uncanny ability to play with highly regulated things, opening the door to better worlds by transitioning towards them through the plastic, doll-like language of the imaginary past. “She mighty mighty!” becomes one having the whore’s revenge by changing shape and expressing oneself in unequal, forbidden ways: grist for her “mill,” her castle-in-the-flesh a graveyard-sex unheimlich coming paradoxically alive! “Rise, rise and do my bidding!” [she says to your dick].
Artists can combine literally anything with anything else; e.g., Nicole’s “Main Event” combining sports language, gangster rap, and pop references, similar to Cardi B.’s “WAP” [2020] and its own sexual gladiator’s “warrior libido” marrying whore to Amazon that, unto itself, is haunted by Medusa’s shadow [the opposite of “Pretty and Petty”]:
Got it drippin quench ya thirst
Top 5 bet he pick me first
Got him fiening for me like I’m his crack
The thunder cat [rawr]
He ain’t used to that
I completely drained his nut sack
Ass is fake but this pussy natty
Lift me in the air and
Put it all in your face like a plate daddy
They all wanna wife me up
I’m Jordan out here gettin rings
None of them king enough to be Anything more than just a fling
I’m a big playa’ champ
I’m here to take over the game
I’m the main event you lame
We are not the fuckin’ same
We gonna’ do alota’ freaky shit tonight
First you eat me on the counter
Then I ride you like a bike
I’m a nympho and he love it
I do everything he like
We on the floor he on his back
That pussy poppin like a sprite
I be thick and still fit
Now go suck this clit [source: Musixmatch]
Nicole embraces the fakeness of herself, the power no less real because of fat injections or breast implants. The paradox of nudity is how modesty arguments automatically blame the whore, the maiden viewed as one for exposing herself to men [who canon apologizes for as “always being that way”]. Medusa’s a power bottom who “owns it” sans guilt, outside the bedroom. She doesn’t just fuck to metal [e.g., Dance with the Dead’s “Rust,” 2024]; she is the metal! The Queen of the Night is like an Amazon, then—a dark mommy dom to tempt and tease[5], but also “destroy” you with exquisite “torture!” on the Aegis! Out and proud, ground and pound, her playful energies hyphenate/mirror her serious ones, elevating us to a campy borderline speaking subversively to the duality of human language/the liminality of sex work: of fucking with someone who, should she choose, could pull out our still-beating heart/turn us inside-out!
The Gothic historically loves exciting murder puns/messy euphemisms and death/rape theatre’s oxymoronic, memento-mori language; re: creating sex and force for people to play with minus the worry of courtly love’s actual harm. Such things aren’t above criticism. Yet the praxial idea, for Gothic Communism and ludo-Gothic BDSM, is to rewrite value on the palimpsest of patriarchal devices. It does this by subverting canonical norms through visually constant monster language, hence become actively conscious of such power and use it to develop a better world for all workers; re: to catalog and engender perceptive pastiche [through the context of mutual consent] while engaging with less-perceptive [sex-coercive] liminalities. During the cryptonymy process, we sit adjacent to power in uneven/uncanny forms; i.e., transforming them to suit our needs: training us to relax while on our toes!)
For workers, power is darkness and knowledge, of which money plays a part; for capital, profit is money (moving money through nature). Whatever the metaphor (or any kind of poetic abstraction in art and porn), Amazons reflect the lived reality of women; i.e., modesty is a myth when you’re starving and cold, treating your body and dignity as things to trade with in order to survive; re: Cuwu, controlling the room with sex. Mom was no different, the men around her alienated from sex, which she could trade in exchange for shelter and food as alienated from her (and whose trades she read about in Gothic fantasies). There’s no shame in it, of course, but all the same, taboo commodities like sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll became coping mechanisms that shaped her personal experiences when trying to survive; i.e., stamped monstrously onto female bodies out of Antiquity into the present, Amazons (and Medusa) authored inside a world happy to demonize them using a shared linguo-material device: quid pro quo.
While strangers to poverty might think that sex is never for sale, the reality is quite the opposite. And yet, this isn’t automatically bad. Amanda Nicole, for example, just showed us how sex isn’t automatically harmful towards workers, but rather is a service to offer deserving of respect as much as benefits and a living wage (success being her revenge, expressed through sex work). In demonic terms, it speaks to a Faustian element regarding forbidden fruit having an arbitrary price tag: “Cross my palm with silver.”
Relating to Amazons (and Sex Work) through Personal Experience
Just as often, though, sex work takes on a survival quality for those without the luxury to do anything else. Fawning mechanisms, in turn, help abused parties control a situation as best we can, using what we got; i.e., through combinations of alien sex and force expressed in raw poetic forms; e.g., the damsel-in-distress, the executioner’s Great Destroyer persona, and the Amazonian pinup’s public nudism, carnage/carnal knowledge, and whore’s rape and revenge, etc. Like them and Medusa, when we look at these things, we’re looking at the imaginary past speaking to historical (colonial, ethnocentric) atrocities happening right now under the pretense of past-as-make-believe: the ghost of the counterfeit is always rape, be that a rapist or rape victim. Per liminal expression, the subjugated Amazon plays a cop while inventing a shadow of something with a kernel of truth to it (which subversive Amazons try to camp): the ghost of empire being an excuse to colonize new peoples for the Good Guys killing the Bad; re: Goldilocks Imperialism, whores policing whores for fear of the Destroyer hanging over them:
(artist: Frank Frazetta)
Be those treats or threats, such Amazonian prostitution fantasies effectively occurred for my mother through Gothic comfort food’s usual cafeterias; i.e., on the television screen (from back when that was all there was to watch) and in media at large; e.g., trashy Conan paperbacks and Weird magazine offshoots (which included “H.P. Lovecraft’s” Necronomicon[6] as “found[7]” and published in the 1970s), but also the so-called “final girls” from slasher movies like Alien, Halloween and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1979, 1978, and 1974), as well as Valeria from Conan the Barbarian (1981). All informed Mom’s traumatic lived experiences, growing up as a whore in the Shadow of Pygmalion; i.e., abused by the men in her life, which caused her to dive headlong into fictional adventures written either by men fetishizing Amazons (and other monstrous-feminine) in the Pygmalion fantasy (of controlling women’s bodies and turning them not just into servants, but alien warriors), or by women who took the idea and ran with it, liberating Galatea to speak for herself and other oppressed groups alienated from their homes (e.g., Angela Carter or Anne Rice).
Regardless of who the authors were, or how sex-positive they actually acted in practice (re: knowledge is defined as a struggle from positions of relative ignorance towards informed consent), Mom gleefully consumed such things with a variety of other forgeries; i.e., alongside Tolkien’s Hobbit and subsequent LotR, the latter followed by D&D tabletop sessions that neoliberal refrains (re: videogames) cryptomimetically echoed when inheriting the same imperial mantle. She did so because their Amazonian monsters and heroes both a) spoke to her own trauma, and b) made her feel safe regarding the abuse that was happening to her by those who were drawn to Mom’s survived weirdness: a desire to be strong that takes on a half-real shape (and life) of its own!
Weird attracts weird, trauma attracts trauma; in turn, Mom passed these alien devices down to me, a prolonged and unrequited desire sitting between mother and daughter that reliably expressed itself in demonic language: for Mom to be like Valeria or some-similar Amazon, badass Galatea, Queen Bitch of the Universe. Whatever nudity and strength she bears, those reasons are her own and not beholden to state dickwads looking to get that nut: she’ll cut you in places you don’t want to be cut!
(artist: Moi Yablochki)
Mom’s the strongest person I know, strength being defined as much by unequal arrangements of power and how you respond to/with said power under duress; i.e., when your life, and that of others’ you love, hang in the collective balance! In short, you live to tell the tale as something to build upon. By extension, warriors take pride in their lineage, which is always to some degree fictional. Even so, it remains a source of constant pride to pass down through personal experience married to legend, but one that is equally androgynous for those subversive Amazonian tropes; i.e., in ways that speak to a more tolerant past-revived in the Gothic mode than the exact hauntologies my mother herself consumed and passed down to me, and which my own stories tried to correct by speaking to myself as trans. Would that I could have helped her find that power sooner than she did (the paradox being that I wouldn’t exist; i.e., my birth is illegitimate, produced by a marriage of convenience that saw me conceived out of wedlock)! Thankfully she found it herself in the end, stating both how she wouldn’t change a thing but admitting such hard-fought wisdom would have made her life considerably easier once-upon-a-time!
I can certainly relate, seeking out my own unequal power fantasies (trans, in my case) while trouble found me and forced me to change. In doing so, it made me want for heroes, too; i.e., powerful and sexy aliens (e.g., Undine, above) that spoke to my innermost desires: to be thicc, female and “raped” in ways I could control—to be strong enough that one never knows harm again, but evokes palliative-Numinous shadows of it as situational medicine. People forget, demons are hunted, and I commonly found myself craving strength under hostile conditions—not to fetishize them exclusively but to speak these phenomena under state rule; i.e., escaping the “yoke” by putting it quotes, reclaiming it. The paradox of nightmares and darkness is my protectors are often bad echoes of my rapists; I crave protection from those who could destroy me and look dangerous but aren’t, because they nurture and protect me from actual abusers; re: “I want to fuck what I want to be.” Mixed metaphors are fine, provided they communicate a clear message, hence achieve forbidden sight with darkness visible.
In my case, Amazons grant me the Gothic ability to find similarity amid difference; i.e., rape play isn’t apologia if it takes the needs of all parties somehow into account. Personal experience, then, includes sharing the memories of past abuse through emotional extremes excited by Gothic paradox. Writing about Amazons married to my own abusive past, I commonly get images in my head—of abusers making me feel lesser and telling me I deserve to be hunted, captured, and raped (alongside fantasies that “walk the line” for medicinal purposes; re: calculated risk). This happens despite my relative privilege; i.e., even if I’m a trans, white, American woman and not, for instance, a Palestinian Arab, I still have memories of abuse that cross over into feelings of abuse expressing Gothic feelings (of alienation) that could apply to both of us in abstract ways; e.g., the child or white woman running into the forest, being chased by the lord’s men, their dogs.
Equal comparisons aren’t the point, here, but rather to share the same feelings: of being made to feel lesser, to be treated unironically like a whore, to be chased down and beaten like a dog. We can evoke it in ways that raise the dead, often towards feelings of inequality that solidarize us through a common goal, during the pedagogy of the oppressed: healing from rape to foster the prevention of harm in stories we experience differently but have similar feelings towards; i.e., to be “rape proof” (resistant to its deleterious mental effects) without raping others. We seek to engender compassion among those harmed by those abusing from positions of unfair advantage.
For me, trauma and transition are one in the same; for myself and others, these feelings paradoxically sit among the incessant peal of raucous alarms, which for so many victims’ hypervigilance, always ring inside/outside themselves. Some desire the muscle of masculine sex appeal (to occupy or handle inside the bedroom or out), others a more feminine sort, and more still a bit from Column A and Column B entwined; such gender trouble and subsequent parody—of biology unanchored from sex and gender (and both from each other through Gothic poetics challenging canonical essentialism)—involves Amazons and their submissive wards through the aesthetic of doms and subs, tops and bottoms. “Wanna see me turn into [monster form]?” yields cheeky inquiries like Milky Kitty’s, “Wanna see me put it all the way in?” Lycanthropy gonna lycanthrope!
(artist: Milky Kitty)
Control over our bodies includes how they appear as monstrous, but also what we put inside them as such; i.e., sex and force relayed in all the usual scandalous ways (often porn, left)! “Rape” enters quotes speaking with bodies and actions that “shadow” their more violent doubles: traumatic penetration (of which the Amazons are famous for) contrasting with various taming rituals that see all manner of things going into all manner of naturally assigned holes. The potential to camp rape marries to various stress-relieving activities that are, themselves, haunted by spectres of fascism and Marx alike: good-evil medicine, which functions differently for us than the state; i.e., strap-ons versus holocaust-by-bullet.
We camp the latter with the former not to so much to camp holocaust at large, but our own profound survival having experienced our own variation thereof (“Noooo, I’m being ravished! You’re conquering my vast swathes of territory!”). We do so not to deny or conceal genocide, but speak to its concealment through our revolutionary cryptonymy—as a form of personal experience translated back into stories, then back into personal experience, on and on.
In turn, oppressed pedagogies speak to all manner of demonic exchange and transformation, for which porn is perfectly fine in doing provided it’s sex-positive; i.e., done in good faith and actively seeking universal liberation: by illustrating mutual consent per labor exchange expressed as art (for which porn is; re: “art is love [thus mutual, informed consent and universal equal rights] made public”) as Gothically mature. For this, demons are well-suited, courtly love (and its bellicose mating rituals/rites of passage) involving all of the above in a vast, interconnective matrix of endless possibilities. For the state, there is only rape, regardless of form; all subjugated Amazons can do is rape or be raped because their Gothic voice is immature, barbaric, toxic—abusing demonized language that furthers abjection during the dialectic of the alien!
Challenging universal rape with universal liberation, then, requires combining various taboos and reimagining different mythical devices with them; i.e., the Amazon being an alien/uncanny combination of noble (to not-so-noble) savage, per Orientalism, but also the clever reimagining of a white female imaginary past and lost heritage (similar to Hotep culture for peoples of color) to issue some semblance of protection while inside. Hardly discrete, it should instead permit various modular-to-intersectional forms of staged public nudism that have been unshackled from colonial supervisors, and whose galleries combine gender and sexuality with raw expressions of theatrical violence, but especially colonial atrocities; e.g., slave revolts; i.e., Medusa unchained in safe environments for both sides to work out their differences, those fearing her revenge learning to hug someone who understandably has baggage (once-bitten, twice-shy). Per the Gothic, such unveilings have to be done with some degree of care and boldness, directors able to give fair warning before maniacally throwing caution to the wind!
In other words, public nudism is directed by people whose understanding of sex positivity has become second-nature; i.e., who make informed and activist fashion statements inside liberatory art movements loaded with guerrilla argument and Indigenous (or otherwise shadowy and exotic) shows of force: nudity and violence—to go into abject territories to humanize them (and their populations) while camping the canon (our very own pocket sand to lob into capital’s eyes). To critique power requires dressing up in devices thereof, even if they don’t always perfectly fit; re: you must go where power is and play/perform with it, battling unironic flesh markets and sex traffickers with your own brokers of power relaid unequally as sex and force during liminal expression.
This happens because privilege and marginality are inherently uneven, as are the gender identities and performances raised by workers under capital since the 1700s (themselves evolving as much to uphold capital [and its qualities] versus challenge them). So workers must create spaces that reflect their own liminality in Gothic; i.e., that position ourselves as already having one foot in either world (as white women generally have), or positioned near them (the girl next door described as an alien from another planet that is actually just alienated from this one): someone to admire from afar and go in for a closer look regarding! To subvert canonical norms, regarding Amazons, is to start where others “left off,” thus involves some degree of separation from the things we’re trying to reclaim: from subjugation to liberation through subversion.
(artist: Enemi)
Furthermore, even if we are abused on a systemic level (as white women and trans people are), we likewise have to acknowledge our own privilege and advantage sitting alongside those who have less than we do, or undergo different struggles that are unequally comparable; e.g., cis men of color versus white trans women vs native peoples, each probing the other less for weakness and more for compassion as something to investigate with understandable caution (which lost generations/generational trauma instills within us). It’s different flavors and degrees of shit, rape not something to rank but find common ground with through difference experiences, including in copies of itself; re: similarity amid difference during the pedagogy of the oppressed. Curiosity and hostility are beset by an equally human lack of immunity towards unequal attraction: unto the alien as something to befriend, mid-investigation.
Such descriptively gendered and sexual statements walk the line between cultural appreciation and appropriation, but also invoke dead cultures that no longer exist; e.g., the Ancient Greeks, Celts or Egyptians recruited to hauntologically revive sex-positive elements of the ancient past in “sleeping” barbaric forms; i.e., that once evoked, “wake up” and change the current cultural understanding of an imaginary “ancient” past—one to assist current groups suffering as “barbarians” under colonial rule; re: using the Wisdom of the Ancients to borrow pre-capitalist ideas (re: Foucault’s “bucolic village pleasures,” minus the pedophilia) that assist in post-scarcity while developing Gothic Communism under various double standards. To challenge those, we must—to some degree—reinspect the past, killing our darlings: as nostalgic ideas of said past, uprooted and repotted.
Double Standards and Challenging Them (Killing Your Darlings, feat. Angela Carter)
One double standard that white women experience, for example, is how society burdens them with modesty arguments. They can buck these however they want for transgressive status, yet often do so around rape fears expressed in actual body language; i.e., while said women often have fat/muscular “non-white” bodies, canon then argues these women must either cover up or show their audience said bodies, depending on the virgin/whore arbitration; re: the strongwoman as a freakshow attraction that “emasculates” men—meaning she becomes something for men to control during inverted rape fantasies (re: death by Snu-Snu), or which men motivate said women to control others for them with (the token cop showing her allegiance to the state). She’s not merely the girl next door, but the alien to tokenize by enterprising Pygmalions in need of some muscle—Supergirl bearing out “Indigenous” qualities per the ghost of the counterfeit’s brawny cleavage:
(artist: Kitty Bit Games)
In turn, the warrior maiden (and her dark, whorish side) have become trapped between the whore’s paradox; i.e., to further settler rhetoric in the wrong hands (which Kitty Bit’s aren’t, to be clear): people who treat the monstrous-feminine as unironic warrior rapist, threatening “gentle” women as cis men have historically been doing for thousands of years, and which some women imitate now (since cis female assimilation[8])—as much through proximity with versus their actual bodies’ potential for courtly love; e.g., Angela Carter (more on her, in a moment). Amazons, in other words, are abject vice characters: of monstrous-feminine rape and revenge—nature-gone-wild!
Made to be engaged with irony or without, this happens liminally (upon and through) forbidden zones of theatrical stigma speaking to their offstage counterparts; i.e., cops serving an Omelas refrain, recruiting from oppressed populations in moderate-to-reactionary forms of Orientalism, including its rape and revenge as half-real: performed in popular stories on and offstage to uphold state models with stochastic violence (e.g., Mrs. Voorhees, below, presenting both as token cop and escaped madwoman [out of the attic] with a funny-sounding name—a female banditti, per Radcliffe, but also Dacre’s female demon lover, Victoria de Loredani, stabbing “Lilla” angrily and vengefully to death: “This is your fault, you slut!”).
However “Goldilocks” or outwardly progressive/urbane they seem, then, subjugated Amazons historically decay towards more radical forms of the same things; re: witch hunts, blood libel, sodomy arguments that collectively defend capital and furthermore, whose unironic rape-as-revenge is simply wrong and unnecessary to achieve post-scarcity with. Quite the opposite, a bigotry for one is a bigotry for all. Workers must challenge the systemic entirety of profit, including its whitewasher girlbosses gaslight-gatekeeping all oppressed peoples under Capitalist Realism. Rape requires intolerance; “a little genocide” is functionally letting the state rape someone, which for us, is completely unacceptable. A world without scarcity is a world without actual rape (thus token cops performing it in some shape or form)!
This being said, Gothic Communism should be able to evoke rape, and the potential for complicit or revolutionary cryptonymy is clearly there; re: Amazons are warrior-whore demons with a white-native, animalized[9] and “ancient,” heavy metal flavor—one that has a calm and furious side[10] refusing to be victimized again (re: the Medusa, dualistically evoked by Mrs. Voorhees as someone to behead, thus lay to rest); i.e., such revenge speaks of predator/prey relations under unequal conditions and overlapping persecution networks. These incentives can direct workers to liberate or enslave by transforming into different things, and all communicate through some degree of showing sex and force hyphenating through hellish bodily expression; i.e., the Amazon is a violent, walking terror weapon synonymous with the control of sex-as-weapon, specifically that of rape revenge administered by a maidenesque impasse with whorish potential: nature antagonized to behave in different monstrous-feminine ways.
In Gothic, form has multiple, dialectical-material functions; re: to move power towards workers or the state during anisotropic terror/counterterror arguments. Like all women, Amazons are maidens and whores that can do either task through their bodies. Uncloaked and demonic, they strike terror into the hearts of their enemies, achieved through threats of violent revenge (nature, avenging her rape by patriarchal forces); i.e., threat displays; e.g., “two tickets to the gun show.” Subjugated Amazons tokenize by abjecting patriarchal abuse onto their victims (re: Mrs. Voorhees). On the subversive side, Amazons (and their big muscles) are revolutionary darlings, but also sex objects desired for their alien qualities (from those wanting to penetrate them and vice versa): monster mommies, but also warrior princesses who punch up, not down.
(artist: Kitty Bit Games)
And yet, because she is a weapon, the state will try to monopolize such weaponry’s violence, terror and morphology as its darling poster girl—to carve nature up with, during the usual cartographic refrains antagonizing nature as monstrous-feminine, to begin with; re: nature is a peach divvied into slices, moving money through nature on carceral territories, and of which I argue, require tokenization to work: nature raping nature, through Orientalism and its trademark threats of danger and protection (from rape and revenge); i.e., by the alien side feeling familiar as much as foreign (re: Laura Ng vis-à-vis Said’s Culture and Imperialism). Raped in the past and slated for future conquest, settled lands are owned by people who will happily pimp Amazonian revenge to police their usual territories/populations with; i.e., nature-as-monstrous-feminine cop and victim, person and place, rape and ritual (e.g., anal sex—more on this in a moment). All operate as things to take and reclaim for either side of a given struggle, but for which state betrayals always see cops climbing out from its state of exception only to go back in and rape those unable to leave or fight back under state protection. They are silenced, thus subject to genocide by token Amazons executing courtly love without irony.
So while Amazons classically resist as an aesthetic, subjugated varieties refuse to meaningfully revolt against their masters; re: they kiss up and punch down like Hippolyta married to Theseus, acting as universal victims while victimizing others less advantaged—all while behaving like the only legitimate monstrous-feminine in town (whose freakshow muscles give them “a pass”). They become darlings undeserving of state force, hence vampires for the state, which translates easily enough to demonic modes of expression; re: unequal, forbidden exchange and transformation versus feeding and trauma, the two discussing the same exact thing: bourgeois enforcement.
By comparison, liberators subverting the Amazon can treat this refusal as the turncoat whose betrayal (and its victims) haunt liberation on her feared/celebrated surfaces; i.e., the larger process hampered by the ghosts of those who sold out, or whose work was coopted by groups who most certainly did; re, Angela Carter and her adage (from Volume Zero):
Just what is a woman, Angela Carter, when you write in The Sadeian Woman (1979) “A free with woman in an unfree society will be a monster”? Of course, Matt Walsh’s hideous refrain is normally bad-faith nonsense directed at us, but it becomes quite important when defining what a woman is (and a monster) when regarding the likes of Carter’s platitude, but also Simone Beauvoir, Cynthia Wolff, Ellen Moers, or hell, Janice-fucking-Raymond […]. Second-wave feminism was (and still is) infamously cis-supremacist and white, and we can’t just rely on a bunch of fancy (and highly problematic) white, cis-het female academics to accomplish the sum of all activism for all workers. Even if Carter wouldn’t have been caught dead in Rowling’s company today, she still died in 1992—one year after Michael Warner introduced “heteronormativity” to academic circuits, two years after Judith Butler wrote Gender Trouble and one year before Derrida wrote Spectres of Marx.
To be blunt, Carter’s most famous works feel oddly dated in terms of what they either completely leave out or fail to define, and thereby supply clues to the vengeance of proto-TERFs like Dacre’s Victoria de Loredani that Carter doesn’t strictly condemn. As Brittany Sauvé-Bonin writes in “How Angela Carter Challenges Myths of Sexuality and Power in ‘The Bloody Chamber’ & ‘The Company of Wolves'” (2020):
The men in de Sade’s stories exercise sexual perversions which enforce annihilation. However, it is the women in de Sade’s stories that are seen as even more cruel as once they get the rare opportunity to exercise power, they begin to use this power to seek retaliation over the submissiveness they were forced to endure in society (The Sadeian Woman 27). Carter bluntly concludes that “a free woman in an unfree society will be a monster” (27). Due to women being oppressed for so long, when they get the opportunity, they can retaliate in the most extreme ways (27).
According to Henstra, this has resulted in critique by other feminists including Andrea Dworkin, who have concluded that The Sadeian Woman displays a “complete disregard for the actual suffering endured by Sade’s – and pornography’s – victims” (113). Carter chooses to focus more on how women had an outlet to retaliate that de Sade had openly introduced.
While some of his women suffered, some of his women indeed inflicted the pain. Hence, Carter rationalizes de Sade’s work by saying “pornography [is] in the service of women, or, perhaps, allowed it to be invaded by an ideology not inimical [harmful] to women” (The Sadeian Woman 37) [source].
Again, what is a woman, Carter? And what did they do with this outlet? The vast majority turned it against other minorities more disadvantaged than themselves—i.e., from 1979 into the present (source).
Indeed, Carter herself wasn’t above Gothic fantasies with an exploitative element. As Maggie Doherty writes in “Fairytales Punish the Curious” (2017):
had no time for female melancholy. A woman whose quiet demeanor belied her forceful mind, Carter was that rarest of things—a happy writer. She followed her desires—for travel, for learning, for (younger) men—with little hesitation or regret. She was not naïve about sex; she argued that any sexual relationship must be considered in light of the way power works. Still, she believed in the emancipatory power of erotic love. She was attracted to fairytales both for their violence and their strangeness; she adjusted archetypes and tweaked myths until they came to mean something entirely new. Her fiction celebrated the couplings of a wide range of characters: teenage girls, wizened old women, circus performers, wolves (source).
Except, the problem goes deeper than that. Her work—while undeniably adventurous in its tone-poem exploration of sexuality in Gothic rape play—was as limited in its scope as any white cis woman from that period: an Orientalist madam (female pimp) of the abject, upholding Capitalism Realism by tailoring her Gothic imagination as heteronormative, thus queer-exclusionary (and hostile towards). The profit motive is there, baked into her bigoted work’s obsession with unironic torture porn (thus rape); she was married to its nuclear ideas—their settings, characters and power scenarios, but also their abject scapegoats.
In short, there was a power imbalance like Foucault’s, the powerful accommodating Carter’s intellect as second wave feminism commonly was: the ability to pick-and-choose, then insist, “We live in Gothic times” while stroking profit’s unholy cock. From plausible deniability and veils of demonstrable ignorance (a lack of inclusive queer scholarship up to that point), Carter enjoyed a celebrity status that let her prey as she liked; i.e., someone who “challenged” the state through controlled opposition, hence conditions of surrender that pit her powers against more vulnerable parties. The Gothic’s campier language (often of queer men; e.g., Shakespeare, Walpole, or Matthew Lewis) has historically given the oppressed a voice (e.g., Phantom of the Paradise or Rocky Horror, 1974/1975). Carter resisted such devices, pimping queerness out while tying gender to sex (e.g., The Passion of New Eve[11], 1977) or focusing entirely on cis-het couples.
To be silent during genocide is to partake in it, yourself, but TERFs are essentially second wave feminists dying on that hill. Said hill existed in 1979; re: Janice Raymond’s Transsexual Empire spouting the kind of transphobic dogma Carter’s New Eve relayed about transition phobias and “men in dresses.” The idea that Carter wasn’t aware of these, let alone Raymond, is laughable. Hell, Carter had not only beaten Raymond to the punch—writing a transphobic story about transsexuals (a transmedicalist term) two years before Raymond’s book (see: footnote); she likewise never countered its genocidal rhetoric in the 1980s (during the AIDS crisis) like Rice did. If the unironic rape porn wasn’t obvious enough, Carter’s a TERF and a SWERF, and doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt; in fact, it’s historically in our best interest to excoriate her and her bullshit, full stop! State defenders enjoy high burdens of proof, even when their abuse is obvious. Don’t apologize for them!
In short, it was possible to be queerphobic before queer theory emerged in the 1990s to call these hypocrites out—and indeed, in 1960, when cis-het people decided to pin serial killings onto queerness with movies like Psycho (above), which arguably pre-dated second wave feminism (as did words like “transgender,” coined in 1965). Even so, feminism, by 1960, had already gentrified and decayed into strange appetites that serve profit; i.e., gay panic, which Carter’s work only reinforced: towards the 1980s, when transgender people were starting to be more aggressively demonized (e.g., Alien, 1979). Through DARVO and obscurantism, such media served up scared-straight, middle-class people’s shadowy idea (above) of what the monstrous-feminine is beyond how they could embody it themselves—indeed, how they could weaponize it against queer people and other minorities. Medusa, the rebel, became a stranger for them to attack others with—a witch hunt carried out by witches, sex policing sex, whores raping whores to have the pimp’s revenge.
Leaning into horror tropes to confirm queer bias is bad; so is failing to take a stronger stance on what should be obvious: trans women are women, and don’t tend to rape other women (which cis women ironically ignore, traitorously acting like men themselves to rape trans people in service to profit).
Such is bigotry. It doesn’t needn’t an exact language or thesis to give it form, queerphobia—specifically of the “man” in the dress—dating back centuries (e.g., Matthew Lewis’ Matilda). The paradox of moderacy lies in how it’s still radical because it whitewashes genocide and defends fascism behind the liberal, married housewife: a refusal to change. Like so many thinkers from the ’70s (or the entire 20th century, for that matter), Carter became a predator lauded for her steady and fairly tame (from a political standpoint) appetites; i.e., dressed up as bold, brave, and transgressively noble, yet gatekeeping others by excluding them—through alienizing preference! She’s not the liberator of all groups, but a white cis-het woman getting her admittedly narrow jollies in the shadow of problematic straight men she was more-or-less aping (and the Man Box of weird nerd culture these men encompassed in their own work): the Marquis de Sade!
Of course, rape play and liberation aren’t mutually exclusive, but Carter didn’t use her bored housewife’s libido to expanded her horizons; i.e., beyond the Shadow of Pygmalion, hence liberate other peoples using ludo-Gothic BDSM. As such, she’s a former darling who only took things so far—for white straight women, first and foremost; i.e., a form of submission, myopically limiting their struggle to that single group against all others, including trans people: as beings of darkness to abject state rape (that of their husbands) onto. Dick move, bitch.
From there, leveraging this ongoing problem against the whore’s paradox happens per the traitor’s perspective and outcome; i.e., a Judas refrain whose witch hunts against her own kind exhaust any goodwill at the expense of everyone (and all symbols) involved; re, TERFs and witch hunts poisoning the well (from the Undead Module):
by playing cop as TERFs do, they sell out, only serving to erode the credibility and goodwill of genuine activism (a fascist tactic, generally capital in the process); re: Silvia Federici’s argument, “Witchcraft accusations, in fact, are the ultimate mechanism of alienation and estrangement as they turn the accused—still primarily women—into monstrous beings, dedicated to the destruction of their communities, therefore making them undeserving of any compassion and solidarity” [cited from “Hot Allostatic Load,” 2015]. Witches aren’t just AFAB, though, and worker solidarity needs to reflect that; re, as I write (earlier in this volume: In response to both authors, I would include that capital tokenizes all labor (not just female and non-white) as sexualized, fetish, alien; i.e., something to gentrify and decay inside of itself, moving money through nature to harvest nature-as-monstrous-feminine (thus having masculine elements; e.g., phallic women). Feminism decays for these purposes, as do genderqueer movements, sex work, and Gothic poetics (source: “A Crash-Course Introduction to Vampires (and Witches),” 2024).
Simply put, Amazons are witches, so the idea of triangulation, castration and witch hunts that we’ve previously explored in this larger series also applies to them. As mistresses mastered by men (which Carter ultimately was, indebted to heteronormative, binarized ideas of sexuality she largely upheld[12]), they are darlings and per Sarkeesian’s adage, we must poetically “kill” said darlings in holistic[13] ways that interrogate their own betrayals/misguided desires for revenge; re: Barbara Creed, saying that “Athena’s aim was simply [emphasis, me] to strike terror into the hearts of men as well as reminding them of their symbolic debt to the imaginary castrating mother.”
(artist: The_1Medusa)
Except, we can’t afford to be simple when having out revenge, reversing abjection during ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., “just threaten cis-het dudes with Freudian castration,” as Creed seemingly puts it (seemingly forgetting that Athena, depending on the legend, was a gentrified temple goddess punishing a rape victim, yet in same breath, giving her the terrible, Numinous power to freeze rapists in their tracks; re: by reversing abjection on the same Aegis, per my arguments). Nor can we be chaste alone when humanizing Medusa, thus Amazons; i.e., nature is an alien, monstrous-feminine whore, thus subject to the whore’s paradox affording her power under exploitative, abject conditions. For one side or the other—not just maidens and whores, but those who normally consume whores—each finds power (and knowledge) according to how the state forbids access, yet access happens anyways. We trade power and knowledge as labor exchanges that workers regain control of—across media, but also space and time; i.e., challenging various double standards through our own doubles punching up. Doing so—and existing to spite TERF authors like Carter or Raymond, exposing them as false—is our revenge. It should make our enemies uncomfortable, but also lull them.
Let’s stick with Medusa, as she’s arguably the most famous, and the one that neoliberal Amazonomachia uses to police workers with, then and now. She classically appears out of control, and is put down by Amazons who see their own failings (and abusers) mirrored on the rabid double’s complicated surface. Per the whore’s paradox, though, both of them regain power while feeling out of control; i.e., during calculated risk. They learn to control their abilities, meaning their trauma; re: playing with rape as a counterterror device for workers. Trauma lives in the body but also around it, and marks us in ways that draw police forces to us. It’s their primary way of controlling us, thus our revenge “from nature.”
Except, when workers become able to play with rape under controlled circumstances, they gain the ability to liberate themselves from the state; i.e., the state loses any hold over workers, becoming afraid of what we’ll do when fear doesn’t motivate us to punch down. In turn, we learn not to simply control our trauma to hide it, but cryptonymically weaponize it against our enemies (the elite and their servants). We build ourselves up despite our scars/alienation: to go beyond the narrow focus (and praxial limitations) of women like Radcliffe, Carter or Creed.
To be clear, we can salvage said women’s useful ideas, but the idea of them as darlings desperately, desperately needs to die; i.e., by exposing the TERF-y (thus settler-colonial, Cartesian, heteronormative) aspects of their outmoded, Gothically immature approach to the monstrous-feminine, rape and revenge: an imaginary antiquity whose “ancient” fakeries enforce capital by either pointing the finger at us fags and calling us rapists (re: canonical terror/counterterror arguments), or by evoking people who do (re: Creed building The Monstrous-Feminine on Sigmund-fucking-Freud, of all people). That shit gets me, a trans woman, livid; i.e., at people who should know better that put Carter on a fucking pedestal, essentially talking about her like she’s some fucking saint rescuing the world from us. It’s 2024; we’re way past that! We’re not your scapegoats, bitches, and even if you get us, capital and fascism will get you! There must always be a whore, thus a victim, and the state is the ultimate hangman you’re only playing at. You’re expendable, and betrayal cuts both ways; after we’re dead, they’ll take you out back (or through the front door) to hang you in the streets for all to see!
Rape is rape. In control of our trauma, we become masters of cryptonymy/mirrors; i.e., able to attack in ways that are harder to kettle. In the West, the state relegates explicit sex to the bedroom (re: Foucault), except as something to pimp, or otherwise control/attack outside of said bedroom with (re: me). As such, those who communicate openly with sex do so through code, cryptonymy and demon BDSM; i.e., camping it; e.g., “Stepbrother, what are you doing?” or “I need my ‘couch’ moved.” Instead of turning everyone to stone, Medusa (and by extension, Amazons) can activate her forbidden sight without harming her friends, and turn those who attack her (and other state enemies in bad faith) to stone. Ancient trauma (the abuse and revenge of whores) revives to reclaim the Medusa’s power through Amazons as “out”; i.e., loud and proud activists—a threat display but also defiant jouissance whose confident passion remains haunted by those seeking to control us: subjugated Amazons colonizing the aesthetic in duality! Sex is something to have under their terms, which we resist in psychosexual exchange; i.e., as subversive Amazons, pushing back against our colonizers in disguise.
The state controls sex and gender in monstrous-feminine language because these are where power (and trauma) are found; i.e., the state wouldn’t bother if that wasn’t the case; re: their ideas of power revolve around ideas of state revenge also dressed up: the pimp dominating nature-as-monstrous-feminine, doubling and dominating it through tokenized double standards; e.g., anal sex (which we’ll explore in just a moment). Except, exploitation and liberation occupy the same uncanny space; i.e., as poetic things coming alive to seek the whore’s GNC revenge through power as something to reframe inside itself. In short, there’s a potential to humanize what is demonized by reclaiming the whore-as-demonic, thus normally treated as chattel/property and reclaimed in liminal territories. To critique power, we must consume problematic things and understand how to subvert them: to gain access to the endless ways whores (thus Amazons and the Medusa, left) manifest in popular media:
(source media: “Medusa Craves Boiling HOT Cocks”)
This affords us different opportunities. For one, censorship is a death sentence. We can’t just throw out sex work due to systemic abuse, because the state can just abuse us and watch us discount sex work’s liberatory value; i.e., people attract through alienation towards what is different, even if those differences are enforced, and porn—despite its problematic elements in industry forms (often racial[14] ones, below)—allows people to experience fetishes and clichés; i.e., by consuming them in order to understand human behaviors: exposure to what is alien to exchange, then transform ourselves into healthier forms, moving forwards. We want take what is given and learn from it to synthesize good praxis, thus catharsis; re: to use girl talk’s gossip/anger alongside monsters and camp, thereby channeling Medusa’s “hot goss” to tell our friends where to stick it (and where our enemies can’t) during the cryptonymy process: madness as an aesthetic/form of data in the flesh.
(artist: Medusa)
Keeping with Medusa and Amazons, though, we have to do better than symbolic shows of force that historically gentrify and decay into token assimilation and senseless, unproductive revenge; e.g., Victoria de Loredani stabbing Lilla (re: Sam Hirst’s “Zofloya and the Female Gothic,” 2020) translating to one relatively privileged group punching down. Double standards denote doubles and vice versa.
To it, liberators have to avoid triangulations pitting alien against alien, wherein said castrators unironically harm state enemies, then posture as rebels/progressive! This applies not just to Amazons, of course, but minority groups and monstrous doubles at large (which often includes Amazons); e.g., queer people and vampirism something to attack until the state, deprived of easy prey, cannibalizes its own police force; re (from the Undead Module):
Denied queer scapegoats, the state will turn to other forms of monstrous-feminine, and ultimately on itself as famine sets in (e.g., Attack on Titan). To that, the usual clichés persist. Though not always, vampires are often male, monstrous-feminine dandies operating predatorily inside a traumatic, colonial location (re: Lestat from Interview with the Vampire, feeding in pre-revolutionary America); i.e., one where consumption is generally considered an act of theft during welcome/unwelcome trespasses that freeze the victim in place: the paralyzing theft of privatized essence—blood, brains, life force, etc—from a rightful, bourgeois source (the lothario/gigolo-coded Lestat, gleefully supping on the aging beldame before wringing her neck, and Louis clumsily trying his best not to kill his meal, thus prove Lestat wrong: that gay men needn’t strictly be sexual predators who harm those they feed on). Anything that challenges said ownership is unwelcome by the pearl-clutcher, be the robbery a solo enterprise or an uncomfortable gathering with revolutionary potential (eating the rich); i.e., the prosecution framing sodomy as a venereal disease that conflates the cruiser’s seeking mechanism and punching up/topping from below with bad-faith predation (eating women and children).
As a discourse, though, the potency of class conflict during monster-themed oppositional praxis has only intensified during the Internet Age. Inside this age, new generations of queer people emerge, then reclaim “sodomy” through vampirism; i.e., as a theatrical device they take back from older tokenized queers (and straight Marxist-Leninists acting like second wave feminists at best, Stalinists at worse; re: Bad Empanada) who insist “they ‘won’ the battle” or “have all the answers.” Newer an-Com queers must resist tokenism, then, refusing to sell out according to such desperation and convenience (wherein abjecting the entire Superstructure and literary analysis very much is a matter of convenience; re: Bad Empanada); i.e., those persons hijack rebellious language (such as vampirism) to abuse it for fascist, false-rebellious purposes: stochastic predatory violence and betrayals, both delegitimizing activist credibility and goodwill to empower state mechanisms per the brand of selling out (re: Drolta from Castlevania: Nocturne, which again, I explore in “Back to the Necropolis“).
To that, canonical vampirism and its unironic, police-like means of “sodomy” language have crystalized over several centuries—i.e., by tying neo-medieval expression to individual sexual predators, pests and addicts who invade and prey parasitically upon a single location; or is framed as doing so according to abject pogrom stereotypes within a profoundly biased heteronormative imagination; re: the “outing” of Jews (and people confused as “Jewish,” such as Eastern Europeans) during blood libel and other anti-Semitic tropes describing them as blood-drinking vampires, baby-killing witches, and/or flesh-eating goblins (all, again, from Hey Alma’s “Anti-Semitic History of…” series; 2021, 2020, and 2023):
(artist: Chris Bourassa)
In turn, the same chimeric libel would extend to trans women as 21st-century reprobates; i.e., vampires (and their kissing-cousin relatives, lycans) needing to be publicly embarrassed, hounded, and ultimately put down/to the torch in order to serve profit. As such, their execution falls under the same grim harvest, its liminal hauntology of war happening by assimilative forces conducting rapacious, obscurantist and hypocritical acts of penetrative force, mid-DARVO: the silver bullet or stake through the heart being more of the same witch hunt cannibalizing queerness; i.e., one whose Foucauldian (discipline-and-punish) enforcement arbitrates chaotically as the state decays and sinks its “fangs” (stakes) into wherever and whomever the state needs them to go (source: “Leaving the Closet; or, a Trans Woman’s Scholarly Contributions to Older Histories of Sodomy and Queer Love,” 2024).
The same issues that affect “phallic women” more broadly (or the white women writing about them; re: Carter) likewise affect any marginalized group that might use the Amazon (or something comparably monstrous-feminine) across different monster classes; re: the undead, demons and/or animals. Such duality per the Amazon and Medusa shows how all can gentrify and decay as profit rapes nature, thus supplies us with strange feeding habits the state can control; re (“A Cruel Angel’s (Modular) Thesis”):
Capitalism achieves profit by moving money through nature; profit is built on trauma and division, wherein anything that serves profit gentrifies and decays, over and over while preying on nature. Trauma, then, cultivates strange appetites, which vary from group to group per the usual privileges and oppression as intersecting differently per case; i.e., psychosexual trauma (the regulation of state sex, terror and force) and feeding in decay as a matter of complicated (anisotropic) exchange unto itself, but also shapeshifting and knowledge exchange vis-à-vis nature as monstrous-feminine: something to destroy by the state or defend from it using the same Satanic, darkness-visible aesthetics/pandemonium (source).
(artist: Skylar Shark)
All of this can be opposed—and occurs through a rising demand for performers helping us achieve catharsis under capital—but due to the complications listed above, such rebels are often historically tragic in their renaissance; i.e., framing the harvest as humanized; e.g., King Kong falling to his death, and other such beings pushing for interracial bonding that, once martyred, humanize the harvest, exposing the state as inhumane. And if that seems limiting in its scope, simply swap genders: a black female ape and a white twink in peril. To some extent, then, the darlings we must kill the most amount to our former selves/role models—meaning older “closeting” ideas of Amazons and the Medusa!
The sex-positive qualities of the Amazon classically lend white women the ability to show as much skin as they want (to be comfortable in their own homes, which extend to the land around them) and present themselves as disobedient (often by fucking whoever they want or using toys, above) in ways that build their own possible, attractive and inclusive worlds; i.e., through mimesis, they imitate art that is powerful, but also stresses co-existence and harmony between unequal positions of exchange and transformation. In terms of trauma and labor value, demons have infinite forms, as do what they represent in paradoxical matters of revenge; i.e., actual imprisonment is certainly terrifying (which I can attest to), but introduce an element of control where no harm to a formerly abused party is actually possible and suddenly “imprisonment” feels amazing!
Something is always given and received per exchange; i.e., legitimate abusers awakening us to forbidden prey mechanisms of psychosexual pleasure and pain (re: Jadis, to me) that both speak to our survived confusion/rewiring by trauma, but also our ability to use them during oppositional praxis to restore healthy boundaries, in the future. “The dose doth make the poison,” abused parties learning which poison to pick and how to camp it; e.g., I love dark mommy doms, but very much learned this the hard way from Jadis—”murder dick” (re: period sex) and ahegao are fun, but being raped unironically is not!
(artist: Pork Loins)
Doing so in safer forms of theatre paradoxically becomes our Aegis—to bounce harmful energies back, yet hold onto the good stuff defined by the context of playing with rape, exposure, and showing off unique vantage points to special situations of privileged access (e.g., public masturbation with a partially concealed element, left); i.e., of dialectical-material function and flow (of power), not appearance: “Help, I’m in a compromising position!” The sentence is both true and false. So are demons, and this power is ours to reclaim from state doubles pitting Amazonian double standards against us and our stabs at liberation; re: “rape” ironically! “Bind,” “torture” and “kill” not to actually accomplish those dreadful deeds, but devilishly exhibit them to instill a sense of rape prevention per the whore’s paradox: “Come and see the violence inherent [to] the system!”
Camping canon through medieval recreation is an old standby (and a fun one). In turn, “when the dog bites, when the bee stings…” (a song written by a rebellious nun) can speak to big strong ladies that, per the Amazon myth, are commonly bound and gagged under patriarchal structures; i.e., in ways iconoclasts play with to paradoxically challenge profit as a genocidal system: rape uncloaked, but also the power to survive expressed in poetic forms. Told in the same basic language (of rape and revenge), volunteer performers chain themselves up during tantalizing shows of intersectional solidarity and protest (next page)—that of demonic, pleasure-and-pain-seeking beings (which Amazons are), paradoxically “martyring” themselves during ludo-Gothic BDSM! Whores communicate psychosexually through calculated risk, the latter becoming how those how treated as whores reclaim said labor and aesthetic when playing with rape in warrior ways!
As proof-of-concept, I want to unpack this vis-à-vis Amazons and anal sex; i.e., a postcolonial device haunted by its own abuse as something to camp! We’ll consider this and more when reclaiming the Amazon for our gay purposes—indeed, our dark revenge when subverting Amazons and rape—next!
Onto “Reclaiming Amazons, part two: Reclaiming Anal“!
Footnotes
[1] Such hauntologies point to zombie-style betrayals—of the consumer by the state as an even-bigger cannibal eating smaller ones; i.e., during capital’s endless, concentric harvests. The decay of the settler colony conceals itself through police-style shows of force, which the powerful push towards outsider groups separated from insider groups. But these always come home, Saturn devouring his son during the liminal hauntology of war versus Medusa eating her wayward children at state shift.
[2] A false flag and strawman tactic.
[3] Both artists are sex-positive, but Nicole channels pornstar energy through a pornstar body. That being said, Kim’s “slut era” speaks to a veneer of sex work (her website, KimXXXXX, having softcore elements, which are as valid as hardcore forms) made to help safeguard her friends:
In a new interview, Petras reveals that her most recent EP, Slut Pop, was a pleasure-filled persona. “I was trying to have the most ridiculous fun with the sluttiest character I could come up with,” she says. “It was someone who would say whatever the f— she wanted to.”
With songs like “Throat Goat” and “Treat Me Like A Slut,” the German pop star clearly ate and left no crumbs. However, she wants people to know that it’s deeper than that. It was a form of solidarity. “That was at a time when OnlyFans was going to ban sex workers,” Petras says. “I have a lot of friends who need sex work in order to transition. It’s a very normal thing in my world, and I don’t see anything wrong with doing sex work. I wanted those girls to feel empowered” (source: Gigi Fong’s “Kim Petras on OnlyFans and the Importance of Her Slut Era,” 2023).
With women and sex, the line between performance and performer is classically thin, but actually allows for tremendous variation; i.e., the whore’s paradox includes the ability to act sex out/contribute to universal liberation on different registers differently at the same time; e.g., between cis and trans women. To that, Petras’ slut was a character that spoke for her friends doing sex work to survive; by comparison, Nicole is a sex worker whose music speaks to the same idea, but through a slightly different arrangement—a character to play onstage, yes, but also someone whose music and sex work are less of a stage act and more one indicating the other beyond what the music video can show.
[4] I.e., death by Snu-Snu as something to portray in so many forms. Cis-het men, for example, see any kind of sex out of the bedroom as whorish, including things they sexualize in different ways, like Amazons or Medusa. This double standard ensures that any contact with them is forbidden, because society at large will treat/view it as automatically sexual, even if one side isn’t doing it for that; e.g., ballerinas, wrestlers, or any other female athlete in existence. And sometimes, this becomes a joke to play with. But it doesn’t preclude or change the reality that things are inherently unequal through such athleticism; i.e., girls living in a man’s world. Any subversion taking place will reflect that disparity.
All the while, art and porn aren’t mutually exclusive, but canon treats them as such; re: through us versus them. But we can simultaneously acknowledge that, yet operate in good faith—accepting that different people invariably get different things out of the same event.
Natalia Sense’s “Yoga Art — Flexibility Flow” (above, 2024), for example, is artistic for the model, but simultaneously working within fetishes and clichés her target audience will undoubtedly indulge; i.e., in through her stunning body (and production values). And she’s obviously aware of that. Art and commerce can coexist, and involve various interpretations as much from the viewer as from the performer challenging this or that with this or that.
[5] Which the Gothic does while camping the nuclear model’s parental language in fairytale-style roleplays and parlance; e.g., “mommy” and “daddy.”
[6] Lovecraft merely revived such weird-nerd Orientalism; i.e., from a Providence gentleman’s harmful idea of “mad Arab,” the concept lifted from older bigots and revolutionaries; e.g., Percy Shelley’s “Ozymandias” (1818) or Poe’s Arthur Gordon Pym (1838) having similar ideas about places the West (and the inexorable passage of time) had already conquered and long since dreamt about.
Unlike Shelley (the husband or wife), Lovecraft was fascist (thus full of shit), as were the other authors who purposefully carried on his ideas in his lifetime (and after); i.e., all were building on demonic xenophobia as something to expand upon in fascist ways: to create and assign evil to a world whose decay was leading to regressive witch hunts. While we’ll explore the value in these worldviews’ astronoetics when we look at Alien, such people largely suck because all—similar to Tolkien and his orcs and goblins—abused occult mythology to foster a commodified ignorance of the imaginary past standing in for the actual. As Gabriel McKee writes,
Lovecraft, “Simon” (the compiler of the Simon Necronomicon), and the anti-cult crusaders all trade in different misinterpretations of history. The general public knows just enough about the history of the ancient Near East for it to view it as a place of mystery and strangeness. Indeed, this reputation is itself an inheritance from the ancient world, as Greeks and Romans saw “magic” as coming from the East (In Book 30.2 of his Natural History Pliny the Elder declares that “there is no doubt that this art originated in Persia.”). This proto-orientalism, combined with historical illiteracy—or perhaps committed distrust of “history” as an elite conspiracy in itself—has led to the mystification of antiquity as something incomprehensible, occult, or even satanic. This has opened the door for both outright fraudsters and what Laycock calls “moral entrepreneurs” to write their own chimerical histories, inserting the names of ancient places and deities into imagined struggles between cosmic good and evil. These faulty constructions of history depend on ignorance. We actually know quite a lot about ancient Near Eastern cultures and their religious practices—and the ISAW Library contains many of the fruits of this knowledge—but historical fabrications expect and depend on ignorance. The more we learn, and the better we communicate that knowledge, the more tools we will have for opposing misconstructed history (source: “The Misappropriation of Ancient Texts,” 2015).
Of course, such “ancient” copies aren’t strictly a negative. Instead, “the idea of Gothic ancestry endured because it was useful” (re: Madoff’s 1979 “The Useful Myth of Gothic Ancestry“)—a utility that applies as much to workers reclaiming Amazons for revolutionary purposes (e.g., Matthew Lewis’ shapeshifting Matilda) as to Lovecraft as his ilk demonizing witches-by-another-name: Chthonic whores (a ’20s and ’30s vaudeville caricature of Satanic Panic and Hammer of Witches). Reclaiming the Wisdom of the Ancients goes both ways!
[7] While found documents are a common Gothic trope, Lovecraft never actually wrote a Necronomicon, himself. The copy my mother had was written under the nom de plume, “Simon” (attributed to Peter Levenda, an occult historian who denies involvement; see: above).
[8] I.e., for as long as women (especially white middle-class women) have had voices and could punch down against minorities, vis-à-vis the ghost of the counterfeit furthering the abjection process; e.g., Britain, 1870—the same year Carl Westphal medically recognized homosexual men (an idea that Gothic xenophobia pathologized in the decades that followed; re: Dracula, 1897, projecting blood libel and sodomy arguments openly onto gay men)—cis women were conveniently presented with the Married Women’s Property Act: letting women (selectively white straight women) keep any money they earned as their own property. This expanded, in 1882, with the Married Women’s Property Rights Act, which allowed, again, married women to have complete control over all of their property, regardless of its source; i.e., the state allowed it, incrementally buying said women’s loyalty in exchange for their complete betrayal: to colonize extramarital, non-white, non-Christian, and/or GNC peoples. The state is straight; its cops function as straight regardless of latter-day normativities: defend the nuclear model through canonical Gothic stories imitating real life (and vice versa).
In short, state concessions are selective, giving some workers their rights back, but always with the expectation they betray their class (often along racial and cultural lines). The “liberated” women, above, would go onto police states’ rights against other marginalized groups. By extension, the suffragettes—anywhere in the “free world” (the Imperial Core and its colonies)—were incredibly exclusionary and bigoted, having decayed into fascist, property-owning forms of themselves defending privatization (and arrogantly dressed up as “rebellion”). From feminism’s first wave onto its second, “gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss” (the coercion trifecta) called for women to resist change in bad faith (re: praxial inertia): not one step further towards liberation for all.
[9] They’re nymphs married to sex-through-conquest captivity tropes, this curious combo teaching us the forbidden arts of love known only to wild animals closer to nature and our own repressed impulses; i.e., those things “of nature” alienated from us by Cartesian forces, which workers must reclaim by playing with mythical devices; e.g., I’m a little slut who strives to prevent rape through her work, and have learned what I like and don’t like by playing with big strong ladies in the past. I’m no tigress, but pet me wrong and watch the claws come out!
[10] Re: The alter ego. This secret identity/disguise is often inverted, doubled; e g., Superman/Clarke Kent (with Kent being the disguise) doubled by/doubling his enemies: evil aliens, but also the human race and its own divisions under capital (essentially America vs everyone else).
[11] From Rachel Carroll’s “‘Violent Operations’: Revisiting the Transgendered Body in Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve” (2011):
Carter’s novel also features motifs which Prosser and Halberstam have identified as symptomatic of transphobic discourses, including the “exposure” of the transgendered person as inauthentic and the depiction of sex reassignment surgery as an act of material and symbolic violence. Indeed, transgendered lives have been met with suspicion and hostility in some feminist contexts, sentiments given expression in Janice C. Raymond’s (1979) assertion that “all transsexuals rape women’s bodies” (source).
In short, it’s us-versus-them divide-and-conquer pitting cis women against trans, the former seeing the latter as “men in dresses,” which Carter not only didn’t challenge, but actively fueled. And frankly it’s horseshit; you’re much more likely to be raped by your husbands than other women (cis or trans), you idiots!
[12] I’m hardly alone in this. As Maeleine Vaughn writes in “Carter, Gender & the Binary” (2020):
without accusing her of being a TERF—because, as I said, she’s dead, and never even touched on the subject—her ideas do still rely on the cis-gendered experience. […] Carter’s exploration of female sexual liberty is unapologetic, and arguably still crucial in an era where it remains repressed and underexplored, but Carter’s writing remains painfully heteronormative in its exploration. To begin with, so far that I know (and please feel free to prove me wrong!) Carter doesn’t portray any homosexual or queer relationships in her work. This, in and of itself, isn’t a bad thing, but the dated heteronormative angle of her work is pronounced even beyond this. In particular it shines through in the tropes she uses, with the undercurrent of power and empowerment going hand in hand with (hetro)sexual liberty.
For example, when depicting her happy relationships, Carter brings the couples together under equal terms—there is consent, there is enthusiasm in both parties—but a traditional binary coding burns clear, either unconsciously or through deliberate choice. How often it is the men, antagonistic or not, who guides the sexual experience to a nervous, virginal girl? How often is the occasion marked by that archaic breaking of the hymen and the blood on the sheets? How often does the maiden swoon into the man’s arms? How often does the woman become the seductress, to try and induce the man to provide her with what she needs (not wants), be that liberty, purpose, or sustenance? How often is the woman described as beautiful? And how often is fulfilment supplied not by the self, but by the right man?
A message shines through, right from the hellish landscape of De Sade’s writing, which equates sexuality with empowerment, the kill or be killed, or in this case, the dominate or be dominated. And while we can wax lyrical about the potential philosophical usefulness and realism represented in De Sade’s disgusting writing, it doesn’t change that it fits a traditional gender role, even if De Sade himself arguably disregarded gender (and even sexuality) as part of the equation. The role of the dominant, sexually capable and strong man, and the subdued, innocent – or perhaps coquettish – female who presents herself to him as a lamb for metaphorical slaughter, is a painful stereotype, and it’s one Carter uses, over and over (source).
That binarization reflects the usual qualities of capital that predate Carter’s work by centuries (re: De Sade, but also Radcliffe). Even so, Carter’s work remains dated in ways I saw worshipped and quoted by Gothic academics all the time (cutting their own teeth in the ’80s and ’90s). She’s a darling and needs to be killed and discarded, save for what points she had that were useful, similar to other writers from then and before; re (from Volume Zero):
In other words, if Sontag was “vanilla,” then Radcliffe was barely even ice cream […]. But their combined inexperience paradoxically stems from dark fantasies invented from the open secret of sex abuse turned into urban legends […] These canonical misconceptions operate on the automatic conflation of sex and harm, versus merely being adjacent to it during psychosexual expression [there’s a thin line between the two—a tightrope to tread carefully]. That is, sex-positive BDSM is generally about negotiated unequal power exchange in a written, contractual form that is founded on (relatively) equal bargaining positions (source).
The liberation of sex can imitate our conquerors without functioning as them, but the mutilative elements require a campy GNC irony that Carter and her ilk simply didn’t have. Camping the canon, we can speak to our desire for revenge. We must if we are to override any policewoman’s idea of punching down with said devices. Otherwise we’re just Amazons on another witch hunt—one those in power will point to later and say (to their usual constituents), “You can’t trust them.”
[13] Holistic analysis constitutes the return to older thinkers and ideas; e.g., I cite Solzhenitsyn’s famous quote, in my Undead Module: “If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” I so do because I think the basic idea of empathy and emotional nuance during revolution is a good one; re: segregation is bad, and queer people were a regular and famous casualty of the Soviet system under Stalin’s rule: outlawing them in 1933 until 1993 after the Fall. By no means do I put Solzhenitsyn on a pedestal; he was an anti-Communist, fascist-monarchist, American liberal darling (Hakim’s “The Man Who ‘brought Down’ the Soviet Union Was a Terrible Human Being,” 2024). Rather, I’m against all states, and would want people to understand who I’m citing and why.
In short, the basic quote is good even if the man (or the book he wrote containing it) was not. In hindsight, my knowledge of Solzhenitsyn was limited in much the same way my knowledge of people like John Lennon or George Orwell was; i.e., restricted to carefully manicured and state-sanitized postmortems. But just as such persons mixed lies with truth—in effect stealing their ideas from revolutionary forces to better resonate with their target audiences (the American middle class)—we can a) take their ideas and quote them to achieve an ironic affect, while b) educating people about the historical persons we’re citing. Solzhenitsyn and Orwell were imperial-cop sell-outs; Lennon was a homophobe, out-of-touch millionaire; and Stalin was—well, Stalin: a cruel dictator who abused state mechanisms, including making homosexuality illegal, regressing queer activism under his rule and after for essentially the next century. We must be/do better than all of them!
[14] Interracial porn is as much the interaction between taboo parties as it is commodified body types; e.g., the PAWG, BBW or BBC, etc.