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.

Dark Shadows: The Origins of Demonic Persecution and Camp; or, Applying My Education (from School and Jadis) to Smile, Evil Dead and More

“I have seen the dark shadows moving in the woods and I have no doubt that whatever I have resurrected through this book is sure to come calling for me.”

—Doctor Raymond Knowby, Evil Dead (1981)

Picking up where “The Road to Hell; or, Summoning the Whore, Ourselves” left off…

Now that we’ve unmasked a double of my abuser similar to how Radcliffe would have done to the abusers of women (extended to other minorities beyond women), let’s apply this education to a couple of close-reads (I know, I know—I said I wouldn’t do any more of these, but we have to be able to apply the knowledge of the past to the present, somehow).

To that, demons look human because they are human and this can be good or bad not simply per a Cartesian binary but a dialectical-material one: demons for workers or the state as a matter of transformation and exchange, generally through the canonizing or camping of torture and rape (the subversion of what is supposedly preordained/-determined by almighty inhuman forces). The Road, for Bakhtin, is a place to encounter characters in a story’s advertisement of space and time; i.e., the Gothic chronotope one of pandemonium, thus infinite possibility and change. Demons are whores as things to expose. Let’s get down to brass tacks, shall we?

The idea is a road to Hell, summoned up less by the road being moved or changed, and more that upon it appears a magic man (or some other cosmic visitor beyond God’s grace bearing a similar level of power) to make our dreams (of a world beyond Capitalism) come true! It’s a Holy Grail of sorts, but a false one that, when consumed, canonically threats Instant Death (with Spielberg’s The Last Crusade [1989] continuing the same mix-and-match of Abrahamic—pointedly Jewish and Christian—dogmas to punch Nazis and Arabs by white saviors and Numinous trinkets with a Zionist flavor to them, above). But that doesn’t stop temptation from personifying and being tempting in ways that speak to class, culture and race war, now does it? Such has been the case since Paradise Lost, at least—a quality that couches rebellion within a sexy rebel that, in the hands of state proponents, adopts a likeness of rebellion they will use to police the whore and her revenge with to have the state’s instead; re: the pimp vs the whore.

Or as Ann Wilson sings about on the throbbing and urgent “Magic Man” (1975), Dreamboat Annie is Charon’s Canoe front-loaded with a sexy mystery—why do women run off with strange men on the road to Hell?

“Come on home, girl” Mama cried on the phone
“Too soon to lose my baby yet, my girl should be at home”
But try to understand, try to understand
Try, try, try to understand, he’s a magic man, Mama, ah
He’s a magic man[1] (source).

The short answer is power and rebellion from problems at home. Yet, temptation is painful because escape is a passion, and giving in before, during and after that point aches in more ways than one; i.e., vigor and physical longing (the dreaded blue balls/clit) versus more emotional kinds of loss that, for the young, they’ve never had/are experiencing for the first time as babes in the wilderness; i.e., less for those actually young and more from a lack of experience/glut of stunted growth, experience is the teacher of fools (speaking from experience, here).

Cis or not, a young woman’s viewpoint of forbidden desire, then, is classically more hysterical than a man’s (e.g., Black Sabbath’s “NIB,” 1970); but in truth, it’s the same argument, made with “vaginal/clitoral” feminine energies versus “phallic” masculine ones (which the Gothic/ GNC elements of Matthew Lewis challenge Radcliffe’s centralizing of the usual gender/colonial binary admonishing white cis female rebellion and demonizing everything else under the sun; i.e., anything outside the nuclear model is a whore, but virgins are whores waiting to happen by bumping into their evil twins).

(source: Lyriquediscorde’s “‘Magic Man’ by Heart,” 2018)

Now that we’ve gone over whores, abusers and Faust more generally—and have set the stage for doubling by demasking Jadis—here is the list of points we shall cover in “Summoning the Whore through Magic” as a matter of covering the basic history before synthesizing ourselves through poetry and close-read:

• Rehashing Radcliffe and the Process of Investigating Demons; or Summoning Today’s Whore (through Yesterday’s Magic)
• Origins of Faust; or, a Brief History of Demons and Their Torturous Summoning Rituals and Effects
• Pulling a Faust; or, Summoning Power, Active Impostors, Death Curses, and Radcliffe’s Exquisite “Torture” (feat. Smile, Jadis, Evil Dead, and more)
• Canonical Demonology and Torture: Summoning Racism and Other Bigotry
• The Evolution of Canonical Torture, cont. (feat. for-Profit Demons)
• Introducing the Demonic Trifecta
• The Difference between Canonical and Exquisite “Torture”
• A Note about Our Small Friends Also Tortured by Capital
• The Dangers (and Pleasures) of Demonic Camp

Furthermore, whereas “Making Demons” examined the Promethean Quest and composite, manmade demons, the rest of the “Summoning Demons” subchapter will focus on two things in two parts:

• summoned, supernatural demons and their numerous rituals of torture; i.e., the relationship of power exchange expressed in forbidden, occult forms
• the participants; i.e., the summoned demon, but also those who play their Faustian games of torture: the damsels and detectives as demonic vessels (sex demons) during demon BDSM working under a presumption of torture and guilt with or without irony

As such, we’ll outline the base idea of what summoned demons constitute during oppositional praxis, including their persecutorial role in canonical stories; i.e., by attacking demons as a mode of genderqueer expression. After that, we’ll examine how earlier Western[2] authors of demonic tales—namely Radcliffe and Lewis’ respective terror and horror classes of black penitents/sex demons/smooth criminals—were effectively explorers facing monsters, but especially the derelict “ancient” stories and infamous demons left curiously behind for others to find: to summon and pass things imperfectly along as demons do (almost a game of charades: “It’s right in from of you!” *wiggling intensifies*).

(artist: Sabrina Val)

Rehashing Radcliffe and the Process of Investigating Demons; or Summoning Today’s Whore (through Yesterday’s Magic)

Regarding all of yesterday’s demons, we’re effectively left with a series of older trials—of fire and pain, but also temptation (above)—those having completed them braving the death curses and threats of demon rape to uncover forbidden knowledge for new generations to uncover through our own means of summoning the past: learn enough to be dangerous, then make your own monsters during ludo-Gothic BDSM’s calculated risk (magic men or otherwise—with Radcliffe’s being more about the threat of rape than raw sex appeal or attraction; i.e., her Gothic heroines weren’t allowed to have sexual desires, but merely be preyed upon by men in black with hypnotic blue eyes threatening modesty with raw mutilative force: older highwaymen in disguise, solving “property disputes” [dowry] through force; e.g., Henry Fonda’s “Frank” a whorish tramp to conjure out of the imaginary past and thrill through the threat of rape in isolation, not married to sex appeal[3]).

In doing so, Gothic Communists can avoid rehabilitating actual abusers, while subverting the demonic ritual and “black penitent” (re: Radcliffe’s sexual deviant) further and further away from its sublimated, acceptable forms of rape, death and harm, etc. The pageantry is transgressive but salubrious; i.e., from spectacle, circus and ceremony as things less to stand on and more to contractually make the main attraction! Demons are showboats who love showing other people their asses: an “ass like a demon” denotes extreme temptation, thus police interest! We cum with our guns loaded, you dig? Our vaginas (and other holes) are happy and angry! Hysteria! Wandering womb! Bicycle face!

(artist: Sabrina Val)

Enshrined in carnival, demons are iconoclastically sex fiends, but still fiendishly sexual; i.e., raping ironically in ways haunted by superstitious and dogmatic fearmongering about sexuality in a post-penicillin world (for venereal purposes): learning from demons being hampered by a fear of making bad decisions and fucking up. Deals with them are to be feared less because of their immense size and more because of their predatory Faustian contracts (usually for souls or pounds of flesh or—with maidens—for their precious virtue), which have the uncanny ability to make humans look foolish; i.e., to trick and expose them as frauds! It’s not always because of raw intelligence—primal hunger can play a hand in things—but usually demons are intelligent enough and combine this with strength, sex appeal, talent, and appetite, etc, to make for feared opponents precisely because they’re your opponent (or your friend in disguise)!

Yes, demons seek conflict and trauma, but they also function as black mirrors to summon in times of protection and need; e.g., to keep our loved ones safe (the opposite of widow makers); i.e., “thirst” during “drought time,” personifying not just the Seven Deadly Sins, but neo-medieval scapegoats of these things: the royal givers of forbidden knowledge that the self—especially the persona of the West—has conveniently repressed to save face per the abjection process. Demons reverse abjection and revel in it, invading a party-like or otherwise social space of play to corrupt it; i.e., perhaps most famously in the opera ball scene, which—under capital—routinely combines with holiday-themed cycles of summon and banishment during liminal stages of demonic possession and release; e.g., the Halloween dance from Blood: the Last Vampire (2000), a story about a cop who hates her job (at least, she does in the film version) and similar to Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), warns of a shapeshifting menace drinking stolen blood among us that—when the membrane is thin—threatens to appear and haunt the usual harvests going on, year round! The joke, then, is on the detective; i.e., when she encounters actual supernatural demon lovers who aren’t explained away/can’t remove their monstrous elements like a theatre mask!

To this, demons actually “from Hell” are even more ominous than their manmade/theatrical counterparts; their dastardly (dis)agreements proceed them, inviting Faustian disaster (mutilation and bodily dismemberment) and mocking the outcomes—their suspicious, skulking and shady brokers, per Marlowe’s anti-Semitism, embodying stigma, scandal, vice, bias, and sin during hauntological persecution language (e.g., Dante and the medieval cardinal sins—lust, gluttony and wrath, etc), and various taboos, anxieties and neuroses. In short, demons are fallen from grace[4], dredged up to remind humans that they are, too (which translates dialectically-materially to workers vs the state).

As such, demons are classically (through a theocratic-to-secular Christian lens) seen as creepy-yet-intimidating (often on fire) things to defeat/purge that reflect an evil side of the hero[5]—someone or something unscrupulous, barbaric, uncompromising and insidiously wretched, cruel, revolting and lecherous, often revived in centrist stories to then vanquish/scapegoat by monomythic combat, but also games of chance and contests of the mind: you summon them for duels, deals and games of various kinds, but classically through sex and force (as with Beowulf and Grendel, translating per Tolkien into tooth-and-nail fights with orcs and goblins out of Old Norse and anti-Semitic myth into modern-day pogroms).

These kinds of demons are badass to yield bigger and better bounties (re: “looting Hell”), but also Radcliffean catharsis upon defeat and banishment back to Hell by righteous police forces (e.g., the Greater Demon from Dragon’s Crown, left). The deal, then, is a fight to the death, to the victor going the spoils (“render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s…”).

By extension, heroes even go to or encounter demons out in the wild, often during Crusades or rescue missions (re: Tolkien’s dwarves and Erebor); i.e., in a ruin or place of concentrated power and darkness (a kind of power); e.g., Oedipus and the Sphinx, or Siegfried rescuing Brunhilde in Wagner’s Ring Cycle. Some demons are positively massive, yet ghostlike and ethereal despite their ferocity and size; just as many are as small as jackals or monkeys, as seductive as shadows, or as light as a feather. But all involve unequal, forbidden and dark exchange/dealings in some shape or form—power and knowledge (with Faust favoring fatal knowledge) commonly expressing anisotropic revenge; re: for the pimp or the whore, during ludo-Gothic BDSM! In part, a canonical superstition looms over the continued blending and regeneration, a guiding fascination/fear that moves the artist’s hand (exhibit 44a2/46a); the process becomes an incantation, one that speaks of the Devil, causing them to appear and “torture” the viewer (a BDSM house call, more or less: “Dial ‘M’ for Murder!”).

Far from being undesirable, this ritual and its rapturous outcome are entirely the point: to summon demons and experience whatever exquisitely “torturous” power they have to offer through excruciating pain (and/or illicit extramarital sex) as something to exchange, agonize over and reunite with, post-alienation by capital. It’s literally power exchange demonized, often with psychosexualized components. As Gothic Communists, we’ll be humanizing these ideas, doing so while thinking about power exchange in BDSM terms (social-sexual habits); i.e., that venerate and protect workers through the demonic trifecta’s performative roles of demon (the dom), detective (the switch) and damsel (the sub): as lifted from more classic examples like Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, or Rudolph Otto when making our own demons. Their stories/scholarships used demons to threaten damsels, which detectives police on both fronts (the virgin/whore). By comparison, creativity becomes our secret weapon; i.e., our revenge vs the state’s, either conjured up by the dark side of the Western paradigm, and which we fags/sex workers (and other minorities) simply call “home.”

Before we can do that, in “Exploring the Derelict Past,” we’ll have to understand the difference between canonical torture and exquisite “torture,”; i.e., having married the fear of inquisition (from the Middle Ages)—and then to Hammer of Witches and Gothic (the Renaissance)—onto increasingly hauntological Neo-Gothic revivals of these things for canonical versus campy forms. The Church classically forbid knowledge as canon/gnosis, whose uncovering was strictly prohibited yet explored by parties with privilege able to create their own demons; re: Radcliffe as the queen of exquisite “torture,” yet also allergic to magic spells, aiding the Protestant ethic.

However invented, we’ll unpack these spells, now, then consider their canonical function in demonology that Radcliffe tip-toed around, its evolution over time, the demonic trifecta as an investigation framing device, the basic difference between canonical and iconoclastic forms, canon’s harmful effects on nature at large, and finally the dangers of demonic camp when practiced by us; i.e., as something to keep in mind when exploring the derelict torturous past (and its magical demons), ourselves!

Origins of Faust; or, a Brief History of Demons and Their Torturous Summoning Rituals and Effects

A note about sexuality before we begin: Demons, like BDSM, don’t have to be sexual, though they often are; i.e., demons can be asexual—especially when tied to animals as pets or extensions of nature to learn from and relate to in sex-positive ways [which include asexuality on the same larger gradient]. Many demons are considered intelligent, but they don’t have to be (the knowledge they offer more of a relationship to nature as something to respect, including its boundaries and inability to consent). —Perse

(artist: Angelica Alzona)

As Foucault has shown, “power” can be an incredibly vague and broad measurement; as Shelley showed, demons can be made to quest for self-destructive fire/fire of the gods; but as Faust showed, the classic way is to summon them for knowledge, doing so categorically being dangerous and whose naked exposure to chaotic power often leads the know-it-all to get a new asshole (or three): when summoning someone stronger than them who likes fucking with them and ripping them apart (re: Lewis and Ambrosio). The act—of summoning demons for power—is equally broad, offering effectively whatever one’s heart desires: sexual favors, social advantage, material gain, and revenge, etc, from basic to so-called “final forms” (finality is a myth, concerning demons).

Whatever the case, it is primarily a Western, post-Roman (thus Christian) idea, and has evolved over time. Stephen Johnson writes how—from Biblical times, to the Renaissance, to the present—the tradition of summoning demons evolved according to a series of famous demonic texts (the titles and explanations paraphrased directly from Johnson’s 2022 blogpost, “How to Summon a Demon“):

• The Testament of Solomon (c. the 1st century CE and the high medieval period): In the testament, Solomon is given a magic ring that compels Beelzebub and his ilk to build Solomon’s Temple, bending these beings to his will.
• Malleus Maleficarum, or Hammer of Witches (1478): Written by a Catholic clergyman named Heinrich Kramer, the author pointed the finger at heretics of the Catholic Church worshipping fake demons, while still being enslaved to as evil beings deserving of punishment. In short, it was a call to violence against the Church’s enemies for entirely invented
• De Praestigiis Daemonum (On the Tricks of Demons) and its appendix, Pseudomonarchia Daemonum (False Monarchy of Demons): Both were written/collected in 1563 by physician Johan Weyer, who catalogued a hierarchy of 69 (nice) demons, including their summoning instructions. According to Johnson, Weyer saw the practice as entirely fake, seeking to expose the black magic as a delusional practice unworthy of capital punishment.
• Doctor Faustus (1590), which Johnson doesn’t mention, but theatrically concerns the summoning of demons and said rituals deleterious effects. There’s also the Golem of Prague (which presents demons as friendly to their makers, but which Marlowe’s anti-Semitic elements demonize in favor of Christian abjection)

Since then, demonic summoning and its perilous wish fulfillment have slowly drifted away from canon’s sex-coercive forms of torture porn and demonic persecution, and more towards whatever sex-positive minds can make up (deities from within our breasts, re: Blake).

Pulling a Faust; or, Summoning Power, Active Impostors, Death Curses, and Radcliffe’s Exquisite “Torture” (feat. Smile, Jadis, Evil Dead, and more)

Before we delve into precisely how, I want to make four basic distinctions that differentiate summoned demons from the undead and the manmade/astronoetic demons we’ve already examined (examining Smile, Jadis, and Evil Dead, as we do).

First, the summoning of power through the perversion of religious experiences. While all monsters are byproducts of Gothic language, demonic animation is somewhat unique compared to the undead we’ve already looked at. Whereas

• zombies and vampires function more as analogs for disease (one uncontrolled and the other invited inside)
• ghosts tend to haunt or loom inside language
• and composites are literally manmade, usually from the bodies of the dead or from inorganic materials during golemesque acts of mad science (they are also, as we have discussed, canonically abused by their creators)

demons are immortal, not undead, in a modular sense; furthermore, the summoned variety hail from Somewhere Else, often another non-Christian Pagan world or time (versus the natural class, which more often are activated or summoned by natural magics, but also spiritual/recreational drug-use). As such, supernatural demons generally offer forbidden, Promethean knowledge as keepers/embodiments thereof; i.e., secrets of things alienated from us and fetishized by the elite to compel their antagonized harvesting vis-à-vis mirror syndrome; e.g., a Numinous rapture, often a uniquely potent and forbidden sexual experience offered up by a sex demon’s queer alternative to the heteronormative order—for a price, of course (re: guilty pleasure/controlled opposition).

Like organized religion, the above rituals are largely made up or bastardized from older stories, meaning the boundaries surrounding knowledge are also made up; i.e., entirely conveyed through rituals of power exchange tied to occult expression, which becomes the very thing to forbid or allow depending on what it achieves. As usual, canon maintains the status quo by dehumanizing the monster through Faustian bargains. It achieves this through the demon’s relationship to “normal” humans, punishing the summoner unironically by having the demon reliably “trick or treat” them: blinding them, tearing their body apart, and stealing their Christian soul. Preventing alternatives to this canonically horrifying outcome is essential to maintaining a bourgeois Superstructure through demonic production and execution; i.e., by not attempting to humanize the demon as Shelley did (who was an atheist).

By comparison, iconoclasm humanizes the exchange (and breaks Capitalist Realism) by making demons and their offerings more exquisite and delicious, generally in ways that are empowering and xenophilic but normally denied by the status quo to the performing group; e.g., women playing with demons to carry out their own “rapes” during what are effectively controlled experiments. Faustian, like Promethean, means “self-destructive,” whereupon iconoclasm offers a death of the status quo according to workers who embrace a new kind of self through humanized demons (e.g., Richard Matteson’s I Am Legend, 1954).

Second, the active impostor. Capitalism is built on generational lies and theft, poorly divorced from past rudimentary forms from which those in the present inherit the world. The classic conundrum of a fearful inheritance and uncertain, conflicted ownership is called into question; i.e., by demons who love to torment the new tenants with fearful reminders of past barbarities, as well as present falsehoods: “Your bloodline is murderous and false.” As part of the general process, demons are far more active and sentient as impostors than ghosts are, able trick their human victims by literally changing shape and appearing and disappearing at will; ghosts, meanwhile, are frozen in time, tending to “deceive” through the cryptonymic nature of rumors, chronotopic legends and all-around human language (demonstrating traumatic [re]memory as die-hard but imperfect).

This being said, there is crossover. A demon has access to the supernatural plane, including spirits and xenoglossia, but also the ability to physically change its shape, gender and sex; re: Matthew Lewis’ Satan in The Monk and Broadmoor’s insistent of Lewis as precociously queer vis-à-vis Milton. The Devil—to deceive the deceiver[6] and ultimately destroy him—disguises himself as the masc-/male-presenting Rosario, followed by the femme-and-masculine, female Matilda: through a campy rendition of the canonical/iconoclastic shapeshifting power of angels and demons—with Matilda something of a detective in reverse, blowing the whistle on the Church and eventually leading to its open-secret prison’s glorious destruction (queer wish fulfillment).

And while this happens in a time before queer identity was a matter of public discourse (re: Foucault, relegated to the shadows of the cryptonymy process/disguise pastiche), the Devil does so to punish a hidden killer disguised as a holy man, in the panopticon (also Foucault): the incestuous, duplicitous and rapacious Ambrosio, whose eventual anti-Genesis deconstruction remains authored by a queer man that Coleridge, a famous straight critic, would conflate queerness—thus the growing rise of degeneracy or “dangerous confusion” in British culture—with demons tempting Faust. Such proto-fascism and its performatively insidious moral outrage is not so different, then, from the fear of the xenomorph as the dark dildo from outer space, nowadays (re: Leonard Maltin); i.e., queer displacement and abjection as something to finger-wag by liberal admonishment whitewashing reactionary politics. So it was then, so it is now.

Demons also conceal themselves using ghosts, which a demon doubles and “wears” like a “mask” (re: the wendigo “nihilism demon” in The Night House[7] [2019] impersonating the ghost of the dead husband, its doing so constituting mnemonic theft and weaponization of the heroine’s memories: the upside-down world loops concentrically in on itself, trapping the heroine in darkness with nowhere to go under the twin surveilling moons). Whereas ghosts are generally concerned with hidden curses that are inadvertently passed along through technology as preserving them (and their potential revenge or benediction), demons tend to be ceremoniously announced, mid-unheimlich/mise-en-abyme.

As such, they act as active, covert liars and administrators of punishment tied to the Numinous, “darkness visible,” and the mighty places/unknown pleasures lurking beyond canonical realms of normal human experience (thus Capitalist Realism): Hell, the underworld, a faraway land, etc, as forbidden sight; i.e., gleaned in those we think we know acting a bit weird (the nightmare anti-home/evil double, below). They are the Numinous come home to roost, during fatal homecoming and nostalgia—the black penitent/medieval backstabber and flagellant hungry for human souls, mid-apocalypse (forcing their hard kink onto captive participants); re: Marx’ “capital is dead labor feeding on living labor”—the general process trapped (as Castricano writes) in between parts of language!

Cryptomimesis isn’t just writing with ghosts, though (as Castricano determines about Derrida and his own Spectres), but as I argue, extends to demons; i.e., as a broader monster class, during ludo-Gothic BDSM threating rape stalking us: a lurking threat jeering “Me likey!” through bared animal teeth not quite of this earth! Gothic villainy is both old and new in its invented theatricalities (as Red Death from Venture Bros. [2003] expertly explains to a captive audience he’s tied to the railroad tracks[8]—tired of the same and oh-so-hungry for more! Some prefer cartoon laughter and sweeping monologues; others can kill with a look or a smile: a bald-faced liar isn’t the same thing as an outright lie (re: Banquo’s “agents of darkness bring us truths…”). “She is a very kinky girl,” the virgin and the whore trapped deliciously in one paradoxical place.

(exhibit 45d: The demon from Smile [2022] is a chronic abuser[9] who desires an audience, two-fold: to gaslight and gatekeep its prey [and to have them “watch and learn” during the counterfeit haunted by the ghost of trauma the middle class can stare at with equal parts fear and fascination]. It does the first by showing the heroine false copies/memories from her past [usually as faces that it “wears” like a mask]—all to gaslight her sense of reality as it closes the gap. The second, it achieves through the falseness of her actual lovers and friends, who it expertly alienates her from; i.e., when confronted with the slightest bit of pushback from her—and despite any connection to the heroine’s painful secret past [matriarchal trauma]—said friends are “fair weather” and lose faith in her immediately. They blame the victim because they can’t see the tormentor [re: DARVO and obscurantism]—in effect unwittingly becoming part of the same awful game [so often, good Samaritans overestimate their own goodness and ability to spot predators; i.e., they enjoy the perks of a system that punishes witness testimony by default, and which the demon will exploit to get what it wants by cherry-picking those with trauma].

Except, the torture also happens because the heroine’s friends see her trauma as fabricated, illegitimate, and hysterical, a priori—a fact the demon knows [through intuition as much as omniscience] and exploits for personal gain and satisfaction: something whore-like to abject regarding the maiden as normally modest, and forcing her, when push comes to shove, to solve her own murder before it’s too late! Weird attracts weird, and the demon—a proud harvester of unironic harm being its preferred pleasure—chooses the heroine, a victim of past rape, to be its next future victim. The fear is delicious to it, as is the panic and other emotions its bedlam raises: fakes don’t hold a candle to them, or rather the real thing doesn’t hold a candle to calculated risk evoking the Numinous! To camp rape is to regain control in the presence of debilitating conditions [sensations or otherwise].

“Then she should have died, hereafter.” Doing so appears random and Job-like, but is actually highly selective in its stochastic terrorism. In a nice twist, the movie presents the demon’s scheme as suitably both “pure magic” and “all in her head,” but really is giving the audience an effective metaphor of abuse; i.e., prolonged, untreated abuse bearing fruit—a breaking point, one leading to self-harm by the abuser telling the abused to commit suicide and they actually obey[10] [above, to please Master]: to kill oneself for the moth, hungry for the flame. It goes both ways, but remains anisotropic. The representation and its advocacy are always in between and out-of-joint, haunting the venue as half-real, inside-outside. “What if the Devil possesses me to kill myself?” speaks to the abjecting of colonial guilt onto fear of the outside, “the Devil made me do it” being codified in a very material sense of gaslighting—one that lives in stories like Smile, The Babadook and similar madwoman-in-the-attack-type stories threatening to take hold [the original being a Jane Eyre’s Bertha, a woman of color the white protagonist feared turning into]. Abjection is us versus them, hence the mother of apathy. We must smother such dogma in the crib of our own brains connected to outside factors.

“A mind is its own place,” and menticide isn’t objective. So unless you’ve been through Hell, it’s hard to know the invisible workings between victimizer and victim; i.e., if you haven’t met someone capable of putting you through that, which only happens when they turn their attention [and terrible implements] towards you: as some who has previously been marked by trauma [the paradox being how much of this happens before we are born or at least fully aware of ourselves].

Furthermore, not everyone knows they have “been marked,” at least not consciously at level they can easily parse; i.e., the facing of repressed trauma during live burial [and the dispossession of our faculties, mid-interment] being the Gothic master trope per generation—one whose discipline-and-punish panopticon admittedly has a hauntological, Freudian, psychosexual character orbiting inside and outside of people concerned with the decay of home across Western space and time; i.e., the more they deny the demon to keep up appearances, the more it can feed on the heroine, thus them: “Thou detestable maw, thou womb of death, / Gorged with the dearest morsel of the earth, / Thus I enforce thy rotten jaws to open, / And in despite I’ll cram thee with more food” [source].

Romeo said this while robbing Juliet’s grave, but Juliet herself had already braved the horrors the crypt [which had already “come alive,” first in her mind, to pick her bones clean]. Such inherited confusions regarding the feeling of sarcophagy [eating of the flesh, specifically dead flesh] is an effective and productive metaphor to Marx’ dead labor feeding on living things: advertisements that, once consumed, turn us into cannibals that eat ourselves for the invisible state all around us.

Smile inverts the basic idea, denoting a giant rotten corpse [the state] that’s too big to fit inside the heroine’s mouth; i.e., a belly of the babe entered rapaciously by the beast through reverse and spontaneous revenge/rape pregnancy/forced feeding and similar invasive sensations [“Say ‘ahh…'”]—an imposturous wandering womb/walking “graveyard gut” speaking to Capitalist Realism gaslighting those who look beyond the Black Veil and tarring them simply as “mad.” It and similar stories present the demon as a faceless, sexless, and genderless anti-identity that feeds on the living in ways that invite poetic reversals and play. In turn, fascism is a death cult that revels in its own cannibalism, mid-obscurantism, and is historically something to slay [as Milius’ 1981 Conan does, putting Doom’s hedonistic cult to the sword[11]].

This orgasmic tendency also goes back to Radcliffe, who abjected such cannibalism as alien and opaque; i.e., hiding the state’s hand in things by framing the great demonic as a Black Veil, one that suddenly “appears” through the acknowledgement of a system already abjecting its abuses onto a displaced “other” object: the rectangular [as veils so often are] abstraction of trauma Radcliffe [and heroines modeled after hers] try to pass off as “just a bad dream,” a fake. So the gaslight continues…

Often this is abjected off onto foreign lands vis-à-vis 2001: A Space Odyssey and other stories, but it likewise exists at home as something to fall under the quotidian nihilistic spell thereof: the scapegoating and worshipping of domestic trauma during military urbanism! In my experience, people unexposed to such things will retreat and run from actual abuse like the plague, but stare and tremble at restless “censor bar” copies of such abuse during the cryptonymy process.

In Radcliffe’s case, they’ll also commodify it in ways consumers and critics will fetishize: the presence of unequal power and trauma, thus forbidden knowledge, as an infernal concentric pattern they’ll maintain to ensure they—a privileged member of the Imperial Core—can keep getting their jollies. With this facet of canonical Gothic, Jameson and I completely agree; re: “that boring and exhausted paradigm” [from Volume Zero]:

The quote is ubiquitous, but consider the opening page for Alex Link’s “The Mysteries of Postmodernism, or, Fredric Jameson’s Gothic Plots” (2009) for a summary of it:

In the midst, of its definitive arguments, Frederic Jameson’s Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) pauses to consider the Gothic just long enough to single it out as a hopelessly “boring and exhausted paradigm.” The Gothic, he declares, is a mere “class fantasy (or nightmare) in which the dialectic of privilege and shelter is exercised” and it should not be mistaken for a “protofeminist denunciation of patriarchy” nor “a protopolitical protest against rape.” Although surprising at first, this condemnation is strategic in that it establishes the Gothic as Jameson’s critical other; the Gothic becomes an object of ritual sacrifice, imbued with those qualities in Jameson’s argument which are most discomfiting. […] If one regards Postmodernism as telling a story about postmodernity, its plot, taken as a whole, is curiously Radcliffean, in that it routinely presents the reader with postmodern objects meant to inspire anxiety before explaining them away. Jameson’s dismissal of the Gothic, in other words, resembles nothing so much as a means of raising and exorcising an object of anxiety [source].

In other words, Jameson writes like Coleridge does—like a scared white boy but even more allergic to the Gothic mode, oddly emulating one of its most famous (and white) female authors [source]. 

The difference being, I also think we can camp what Radcliffe canonized to restore their proletarian energies; i.e., through a Gothic mode that is anything but redundant [science fiction beyond Shelley’s Gothic roots can and will gentrify and decay, Jameson]. In short, Jameson can’t monopolize what he tries to devalue, nor can Radcliffe, whose potential value we are reclaiming through devices like demon lovers and the Black Veil. They are formidable poetic instruments and have multiple uses beyond mere commodity or dismissal by those gatekeeping the venue and failing to vet their own elaborate strategies of misdirection; i.e., by exposing abusers and the presence of trauma as normally disguising and revealing itself during the cryptonymy process as equally liminal and dualistic.

To this, we must acclimate to the confusion, but also the Numinous powers of a collective past, which only reveals itself [regarding systems designed to hide themselves] upon repeated holistic study and reflection; re [from the Poetry Module]: 

To that, I’ll let you in on a little secret: The greatest irony of Jadis harming me [something we’ll go into more detail about during the undead module] is they accidentally gifted me with the appreciation of calculated risk. Scoured with invisible knives, I don’t view my scars as a “weakness” at all; I relish the feeling of proximity to the ghost of total power—of knowing that motherfucker took me to the edge but didn’t take everything from me: I escaped them and lived to do my greatest work in spite of their treachery! Like the halls of a cathedral, my lived torments and joys color this castled work, ornamenting its various passages with the power of a full life. I’ve known such terror that makes the various joys I experience now all the more sweet and delicious. I am visited by ghosts of my rapturous design, the empress of my fate, the queen of a universe shared with seraphs the likes of which I can hardly describe; “no coward soul is mine” [source: “Angry Mothers; or, Learning from Our Monstrous-Feminine Past,” 2024]. 

It’s historically easy to gender these vestiges of chaos—projecting them onto a particular scapegoat, thus reducing demon BDSM to an unironically violent and critically vacuous void; i.e., as Radcliffe and Freud do, but also Creed, to some extent: the homewrecker witch who tokenizes easily enough to have any kind of revenge at all. The reality is, we have to think about things in ways that highlight dialectical-material forces in dialectical-material language, thus don’t need further translation into that mode [with psychoanalysis famously “eating Marx” to conceal and bury him in 20th century academic mumbo-jumbo—as trying to stop people from using his theories more directly by coating them in buffers].

“When you gaze into the Abyss, the Abyss also gazes into you.” Except, such things are dualistic and always will be [all human language is dualistic]. This being said, genuine abusers look like anyone else, and point-in-fact, rely on such camouflage to harm others in bad faith; i.e., because they were harmed, once upon a time [congenital and comorbid criminogenesis, the dice roll of cop and victim a historical-material cycle]. The paradox is exploitation and liberation occupy the same actors, so we must tell them apart through dialectical-material scrutiny as a matter of playing with such things.

Grievous bodily injury aside, Smile is still a lesson; the demon’s lesson works through bad BDSM, using torture and the Uncanny Valley’s bad masks confusing predator and prey to impart that people are not gods, which Smile gleefully exposes by turning Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus [1942] inside-out: “You’re just like me. All it takes is a little push!” Or as Radcliffe writes, “What are bodily pains in comparison with the subtle, the exquisite tortures of the mind!” The demon is her titular Italian brought back to life and saying “Miss me?” with an awful psychosexual smirk:

To some extent, it remains something we can enjoy for its critical potential; i.e., during calculated risk, whose simulated weakness and strength both take place to sharpen our ability to tell the difference; re: during ludo-Gothic BDSM, taken outside the bedroom where it can raise concerns by “crying wolf.” Victims of abuse can’t think in black and white, because they live in the grey area of predation. Instead, they are drawn to what is familiar for them during the uncanny attack; re: the confusion of pleasure and pain, but also predator and prey as something we navigate having permanently been altered by an older demon touching us. Instead of viewing this abuse as strictly a curse according to our abuser’s logic, we can treat it as a gift and a curse that camps our own profound survival; i.e., in ways that translates to praxial synthesis, thus catharsis in opposition to bad actors trying to pimp us. The moment our holocaust becomes something to play with, we regain control!

To be frank, Smile frames the hubris of the heroine as thinking she can so easily face awful things and not be punished; i.e., that two seemingly unrelated events—the arrival of the demon and her facing her own demons at the old, abandoned homestead[12] [survivor’s guilt]—aren’t somehow connected to Capitalism. Instead, the story is more self-contained, playing with these devices to observe the more immediate psychological attack.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t take what they explore and apply it beyond where the filmmakers are willing to go; re: “There is no outside of the text,” thus no logical limit to impose on emergent play. We can always go further than Radcliffe dared, while appreciating the value in her arguments revived in stories like Smile: to watch a simulated rape [of the mind, first and foremost] to prevent actual harm in and out of media we subvert on the same Aegis—not as a one-way surface, but an anisotropic barrier we can cross over into their spaces and ours, there and back again; re: not the monomyth, but the Promethean Quest and Faustian bargain interrogating false power being corruptible, thus rewriteable. “It takes two to tango,” as they say, and inspiration comes as much from genuine harm as it does “surviving” copies of said harm. The canonical palimpsest is always a tyrant.

To it, this isn’t purgatory for one side to enjoy the spoils 

Trapped in purgatory
A lifeless object, alive
Awaiting reprisal
Death will be their acquittance
The sky is turning red
Return to power draws near
Fall into me, the sky’s crimson tears
Abolish the rules made of stone 

[…] Raining blood
From a lacerated sky
Bleeding its horror
Creating my structure
Now I shall reign in blood [Slayer’s “Raining Blood,” 1986]. 

but a place to build a new Hell on Earth for workers using the same convulsionnaires’ jouissance the bourgeoisie can’t exploit without end; i.e., their doing so meant to achieve singular harmful interpretations, mid-inkblot; re: the paradox of rape being no one is being harmed, and furthermore, that we can use this [and the whore’s] paradox to have the whore’s revenge against profit: to humanize ourselves as raped by “raping” ourselves for others to see. But revolution is always dualistic and liminal; i.e., we must look into those places’ of total disempowerment to liberate ourselves with; re: the way out of the labyrinth happens inside it as something to discover through found-document copies of itself.

As I write in “Out of this World, part one: What Are Rebellion, Rebels, and Why” [2024]: 

In turn, the vivid language of war—of castles and sieges—paints both a pretty and straightforward picture regarding what to do and not do while also taking the duality of human language into account. Let the right ones into your “castle” and win-win, regarding whatever your combined hearts desire; let the wrong ones in and suffer Capitalism the Great Destroyer as usual, and whereupon genuine consent (and everything associated with it) becomes not just an alien myth (the Medusa) but a forgotten memory. Per the Gothic, its fading dream must be revived in oft-surreal ways while inside capital; i.e., as a rigged game normally weaponizing shelter harmfully against us […] often as literally toy-like; e.g., the derelict from Alien being a funerary dumping ground on par with the Island of Misfit Toys from Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964). This crisis must be subverted to expose the true menace, often through the animated miniature: as something to invoke to achieve bizarre comparisons via jarringly non-fatal nostalgia [source]. 

or more succinctly in “Modularity and Class”:  

Words are easy to find if you have imagination, especially if your imagination isn’t myopic because it actively resists Capitalist Realism’s usual bullshit. The way out is inside, using imagination through Gothic poetics to set ourselves free [source]. 

so must we build and look upon that which subjugated workers dare not—viewing the Medusa with an open mind! So must we must break Capitalist Realism by facing the wax sculpture melting before us: ourselves and all our yesterdays, relaid in small and burning horrifyingly before us! We can stare and tremble, then learn from it to tremble perceptively in a dialectical-material lens that resurrects Marx as thoroughly gayer than he ever was, in life: our little pissed-off princess of the underworld. And if anyone rejects that, they’re not our friends; they’re cops. See how easy that is?

Despite what Radcliffe says about horror vs terror and the dreaded evil, then, Kristeva highlights the power of the abjection process; i.e., as something I argue further can be reversed in monstrous-feminine dialogs whose camp remains profoundly palliative-Numinous [thus delicious]: those touched by fire need stronger medicine, its procedure merely being to play with store-bought canon differently. And inside those dialogs, we can learn useful things about ourselves and Gothic poetics attached to the bigger picture, mise-en-abyme. It’s not fear and dogma, but critical engagement with our own fabrications camping the canon to enjoy its monopolized effects; i.e., if you want to critique power, you must not only go where it is, but become able to play with it without harming people in the present moment or incentivizing systemic harm in the future. So often people shelter and “armor” victims, like Radcliffe did; i.e., by isolating them and silencing their testimony behind a screen of performative pity. The reality is, we have survived unironic Hell to build something better while spiting our abusers; pity is useless to us—doubly so if it’s used to invalidate us and our testimony.

Yet, there is always risk to informed consent when executed, because we’re playing with things that not only hurt when examined, but challenge our fundamental understandings of power and how it dogmatically arranges and exchanges; i.e., which overwhelm us, and in which those still in Plato’s cave will attack to uphold bourgeois hegemonies, during us versus them. Those of weaker stomachs and minds are gargoyles who will eat us; i.e., the demon in Smile not just an outsider at all, but the masked vigilantism of the heroine’s own friends having turned their back on her—the using of their faces not just a disguise but reminder of their actual betrayals [the self-fulfilled prophecy]. 

Again, demons mix lies with truth, and manufacture disaster to achieve different outcomes. We do it to break Capitalist Realism, and cops do it to uphold said Realism: those who abuse our trust while we celebrate their accomplishments. And exposing this is often layered for our protection during the cryptonymy process. For example, I have invigilated Jadis’ abuse in my book series, from 2022 onwards, while simultaneously hiding them behind various layers of anonymity that I knew others could easily pull aside; i.e., like Radcliffe’s Black Viel. However dark mine have been, then, they haven’t prevented others from interacting with, thus investigating the truth behind, the censored versions; re: we did just that in “Showing Jadis’ Face,” but here it is again:

[source tweet, NicksMovInsight: May 6th, 2021]

This is Jadis without a mask, and yet is precisely the mask they wore when abusing me: a harmful double, and exactly the kind of impostor Smile is illustrating—a Great Destroyer that brings conflict behind tremendous obscurity while gaslighting their prey and even making them complicit in their own destruction!

Furthermore, Jadis looks human because they are human, but lacked humanity when abusing me as a conscious premediated choice. In the past, I’ve held back, shielding them ultimately for fear of reprisals. Even now I fear them, and fear saying too much in open accusation, and even now their face and voice haunts me still: “I can see him, with my waking eyes!” / “Then let us be rid of it, once and for all!” And the paradox of rescue is that the damsel is always in the dungeon, but learns to make it their own in ways that preclude total control from an abuser that is no longer physically in their life. Once sprung, we can’t escape the trap without chewing off a part of ourselves, and even then, a part of me still burns in Hell with Jadis: “You have heart! I’ll take that too!” It’s Hamlet levels of madness, but the play’s still the thing to catch the conscience of the king!

[model and photographer: Persephone van der Waard and Jadis. Jadis and I had agreed quite explicitly that they would provide for me in exchange for sex. In doing so, they initially used their grad school stipend to put a roof over my head, but didn’t put me on the lease. They purchased groceries regularly at first, and I cooked and prepared for them and had sex with them (an act I initially greatly enjoyed but later came to fear). Jadis showed me the many animals around campus, explaining the local wildlife in ways that presented them as some kind of guru; i.e., while the information they said was true, as far as I could tell, they began to bully me and use their expertise about that to treat me like a child—one they had successfully alienated from her entire family in one fell swoop and had total financial control over from that point forward.

I didn’t realize it, because Jadis would disguise it through acts of false deference; i.e., they would apologize profusely if something was indisputably their fault, it was also small accidents that weren’t really that big a deal to begin with; e.g., accidently bumping into me when they didn’t mean to: “Oh, I’m so, so sorry!” and proceed to pet me like they’d grievously harmed me by accident. The problem is, they’d act apologetic about those invented incidents, remorseful/victimized about their ex, and all-knowing about the animals, above, to gradually rescind their own responsibilities, per our agreement; re: providing for me.

The nuts-and-bolts were there, but they began to abuse and manipulate me for labor, including cooking and sex, but also emotional care. And in turn, they concealed everything behind things they were “giving” that weren’t even theirs; re: the animals. They acted like the whole world was theirs, and it was simultaneously very small (about the size of the UF campus we walked around, every night) and encompassed the whole of the world and all discussions about it. In short, they were conditioning me, walking me like a dog and introducing me to the Pavlovian carrot-and-stick approach they would then use to menticide me, and later use to manipulate me for sex, and anything else they wanted.

[artist: Jadis]

Overnight, Jadis traded the “nice mask” I was used to with a different mask: the angry dark mother. To be honest, Jadis was always kind of a bitch, but I trusted them and furthermore, had lots of love to give. Jadis had acquired the ability to appeal to other’s vanity/needs by surviving their mother, but I thought, “There’s no way they’d be exactly like their mother, right?” Except, they were always impatient or upset for reasons known only to them (they wouldn’t say why when asked about it) and would use that—in combination with verbal emotional abuse and manipulation—to make me long for the Good Cop who was suddenly nowhere to seen; re: diminishing returns following the initial and intense love-bombing phase made me put up with their abuse only to readily greet their “good side” like a savior to protect me from Bad Cop.

This was all in the middle of Covid, mind you, and—once Jadis’ father died [a process I helped clean up after[13]]—they turned off the tap and I saw myself out. Except, that didn’t happen until they had abused me a great deal [see: footnote]; i.e., Jadis couldn’t give something without causing harm in some shape or form. In short, they were a master of smoke and mirrors, but were a slave to their own illusions; i.e., they believed everyone was an enemy to bewitch and deceive for Jadis’ gain—and all to emulate those who were better at it than anyone else: while American liberals.

While demonic “capture” involves other people, then, it starts with us escaping the mind prison built around us by our abusers—individuals like Jadis, but also the bourgeoisie for whom they serve! So, yes, let us be rid of it; I’m tired of holding up Jadis’ mask. Then again, I won’t say their real name. It is dead to me, replaced by “Jadis” as something I can use to speak to the harm they caused in ways they can’t gaslight. They had me on my knees, but now I like it for reasons they can’t control; re: Metroidvania, danger disco, ludo-Gothic BDSM—the works!

To that, success is the best revenge, and I no longer need “my day in court.” I don’t because courtrooms can’t bring me the closure I’ve already made on my own—i.e., the justice of my surviving them isn’t to shame them; they don’t feel shame, so cornering them is pointless. Also, I don’t need a judge to tell me what “justice” is and when it has been served to my satisfaction [a badge is merely a cover to shield state thugs from accountability and criticism; judges are cops]. Instead, I will use what Jadis taught me in ways that extend to popular stories I can use to change Capitalism [which they loved, without question] into something beyond all abusers’ ability to control; i.e., their own speaking to abuse as a theatrical manner of demonic exchange that bleeds in and out of fictional counterparts we make: to camp “rape” by placing it in quotes, inserting all manner of comforting devices into the threshold.

[artist, left: pinkholi; right: Shexyo Art] 

For example, I like Amazons, dark mommy/gentle femme doms, and the monstrous-feminine because they simultaneously evoke my abusers and alienation, but also my desire to be free through friendlier variants than Jadis was capable of delivering—something my subsequent understandings of would eclipse anything Jadis could hope to imagine. They were basic because only a basic bitch harms other people for quick personal gain.

Such is Jadis—a Gothic villain of the cheapest order but one who admittedly knew their way around my head: wave treats in front of me [e.g., shoes, below] before wearing them “for” me during sex. Or so it seemed; in truth, they wore them for themselves, giving me a taste to ensnare me with, “hook, line, and sinker.” “It worked,” as the saying goes, “like a charm.” I didn’t just “gang alang” with them, mid-courtship, I proposed it!

[model and photographer: Jadis and Persephone van der Waard]

This wasn’t just material objects through financial abuse, but the corporal side of things, too—sex, and specifically demon sex, with someone who was difficult to say no to; i.e., in part because they were attractive and badass, and my self-esteem was shattered after Zeuhl left me for their future husband [and kept other “side pieces” around except me, picking-and-choosing when they were poly and when they weren’t]. Jadis was hot, and had an amazing ass, strong body, tight pussy and incredible aesthetic, but also interest in my work, which they not only funded, but housed in the middle of Covid; i.e., by literally giving me a home and room of one’s own [which they admittedly shared with me until I moved my studio out into the living room—an act of defiance they openly resented and held against me]: where we could presumably make art together. “She actually talked me, man.” / “Get outta here!” An abused puppy is eager to please, and I’m a service top.

Zeuhl never supported my work, so I jumped at the chance. In truth, the opportunity felt too good to be true, but also too good to pass up [doubly impaired and doubly eager]—and it was productive; e.g., many of my old blog entries from 2020 and 2021 were written under Jadis’ sponsorship, supervision and at times secondary participation: “War Vaginas,” “Borrowed Robes,” “Mazes and Labyrinths” and “Why I Submit,” etc. We also recorded a short-lived 2020 podcast[14]; i.e., which formed the foundation for what ultimately became the Four Gs from Sex Positivity‘s final manifesto, later displaying as the paratextual documents seen in each volume/on my website.

Except, whereas Mary Wollstonecraft junior ran off with Percy Shelley and had children out of and in wedlock, Jadis and I [thankfully] never conceived actual babies; but they did help inspire what ultimately became my life’s work—i.e., by mostly showing me how not to do BDSM! That’s the joke, and my revenge: my rape baby love child was started by them and their bad-faith performance, but I made it my own to overcome what they gave me with what they gave me; i.e., the more they shit on me and disguised it, the more they unknowingly fertilized my body and my brain with the power to outlast them through my art: to use Athena’s Aegis to unmake harmful notions of motherhood [the Gothic chasing of parental protection through mates accidently mirroring our parents] with doubles of those [a trans woman’s second puberty/coming-of-age story in her thirties].

[model and photographer: Jadis and Persephone van der Waard]

In short, Jadis had what I wanted—to fuck and to be [the Amazon/the Medusa]—but like Faust, gave me way more than I bargained for! Alas, I can’t show their naked body [the left image is to show their sexual intent without showing their naked body] or us having sex, but Jadis was built to administer and give punishment and pleasure; i.e., having an ass of the gods, while also being incredibly flexible/able to endure an absurd amount of pain. And they knew it, too—right in the middle of Covid, with them going through a divorce and me a rebound after Zeuhl, they had me right where they wanted me: in front of them! Besides smoke and mirrors, Jadis was a master of the carrot and stick, the mask and the mirror [and they had many masks to mirror whatever they wanted me to see]! Do I miss Jadis’ magic and cryptonymy? Of course I do; I’m just no longer its slave! I was the victim, not them [Jadis being past victim who victimized me, mid-DARVO and obscurantism]!

[model and photographer: Jadis and Persephone van der Waard]

Furthermore, I’ll never say Jadis didn’t know what they wanted; they most certainly did, and I liked their confidence and appetite—i.e., it made me feel desired as “femme” in ways that were slowly starting to emerge. Little did I know I was in for a world of hurt—the surviving of said hurt sending me careening fortuitously into Cuwu [who, let it be said, cared for me far better than either Zeuhl or Jadis]! Healing hurts, and generally encompasses a fair amount of trial and error before we “stick the landing.” To that, Jadis was the whore TERF-and-SWERF [that was a Florida pun] who policed my work to contain said work. As such, I was “half-prepared” to resist and accept them; i.e., warts and all, the entire ordeal something I’ve already written about far more than I can, here! Needless to say, my time with Jadis certainly was [in]formative; i.e., regarding what Sex Positivity ultimately became! Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, Jadis [or up your ass for all I care]!

Closer to Jadis [and Radcliffe’s] school of hard knocks, Smile is less cuddly and cute when showing how this triangulation works; i.e., on public fears of mental illness as stigmatized, thus misunderstood, allowing the demon to invisibly manipulate both sides by pitting them against each other to get what it wants: a host it acquires by alienating and isolating the heroine from her inexperienced, judgmentally ableist friends. It’s a charm offensive, but a brute-force once; i.e., aftercare entirely absent from the equation, replaced with love-bombing and diminishing returns leading into rapid cycles of immense attention and total neglect.

To it, you never really know someone until you know what they want. Zeuhl, for example, was also cold, but only showed it after they got the money and sex from me they demonstrably craved[15]. By comparison, Jadis wanted to harm me; i.e., because it made them feel strong concurrent to their own personal-and-ongoing torment [the memories of their own abusive mother haunting them]. So harm me they did, then tossed me aside like trash. This is their story as it survives inside mine.

Beyond my exes, Smile wants to scare us, but the reasons why aren’t immediately clear. Rather, the demon smiles at its prey because it knows what she knows—that only she can see what’s happening. No one believes her despite her being a therapist [a lived, hysterical reality for female experts doubted by their often-male or sexiest female colleagues]. It’s drawn to, and preys on, her repressed trauma and tendency to fawn, but feeds as much off the active panic its deceptions cause her from second to second. To this, the demon is as skilled a liar as it is a serial killer—one that makes her friends see a “crazy” woman when she isn’t crazy. She only seems/feels crazy to her critics, who shout “Curses aren’t real!” Oh, honey, but they are; they are!

All war is based on deception; Jadis’ strength was a performance they used to get to me/use me until I could no longer be dominated. The moment I fought back, they dropped me like I was hot. Until then, they held everything over my head—doing so to the point that, once there was seemingly “nowhere else” to go, the implications felt simply “too dire”; i.e., to realize I could leave whenever I wanted, and I wanted to stay because I thought I could fix them and return to normal. Except things never were normal, and Jadis used that against me, too; they thought it was adorable and told me so—but now I know better and can hear what their simpering face really said: “You’re trying so hard, but you’re wrong!” Not Two Stupid Dogs [which the quote refers to] but one too-stupid dog that its handler was abusing on purpose! Some people harm their pets; i.e., different strokes for different folks.

[model and photographer: Jadis and Persephone van der Waard]

Keeping with Hogle’s narrative of the crypt—re: “to stand on ashes of something not quite present”—Gothic curses remain partially imaginary but have physiological effects [tremors] felt through profound emotional disturbance; i.e., most notably evocations of total destructive power and obscurity [re: the mysterium tremendum[16]]. To this, Radcliffe was queen, and so was Jadis; i.e., a futile escape, the queen-in-question beckoning her caged prey to stop fighting and simply give in. They lived for it, coddling me like a child yet happy to punish me for any perceived flaw that they—Smaug on their hoarded pile of gold—could imagine. And for someone who was otherwise imaginarily braindead, Jadis had endless vision regarding the wrongs formerly committed against them; i.e., as avenged through me as their then-favorite scratching post. In doing so, they forgot the golden rule of all BDSM: “Hurt, not harm.”

For Jadis, any pain they caused wasn’t for genuine healing towards all parties, but something to fatten up and eat, ad infinitum. Jadis was a truly a glutton for punishment. Now, I summon them again; i.e., as the ghost of the whore who raped me, and one whose better half is the one I divided from its actual physical self; re: I buried one side and left it behind, but embraced the fiction of Jadis in ways that could assist in developing Gothic Communism: to summon “them,” like a demon, to “rape” me without harm. Just like Radcliffe! Well, sort of.

Of course, the idea is more fun than the reality—doubly so if you’ve survived trauma before; i.e., you want something Numinous you can play with, thus control to some degree of calculated risk. That’s what ludo-Gothic BDSM is all about, and it stems from Jadis and I, but also my life-long chasing of the Numinous based on older abuse from my childhood into my adult life. This isn’t quite “terror” as Radcliffe sold it, nor her idea of “horror” that she assigned posthumously to Matthew Lewis. It was both, and remains something I summon to ride out my own passions; i.e., coded into me by the material world: a woman having survived these storms [and their fabrications’ promised violence[17]] to say in response to my old captors, “My kingdom is as great as yours; you have no power over me!” I survived, and am “savin’ all my lovin’ for someone who’s lovin’ me!” Fucking oath, queen!

In turn, female/feminine sensitivity to transgenerational trauma and inheritance is conveyed as monstrous-feminine allegory through Smile. On one hand, its “inspiration porn” format fetishizes the struggle of the Gothic heroine; i.e., within the chronotope, enduring religious passion in the face of an alien menace [a cryptonym for historically male abusers]. Conversely, its culmination of the heroine’s fatal reunion with her ruinous childhood home [Freud’s unheimlich attached to the human face as “wrong” through the Uncanny Valley effect; e.g., Hannah Gadsby’s question: “Have you ever seen someone yawn with their teeth clenched?”] provides a startlingly frank critique of the Gothic inheritance fantasy as doomed. As something to deromanticize through a ghost of the counterfeit, the movie operates in defense of disabled people as legitimately oppressed by the status quo; i.e., Austen’s parody of Gothic audiences calling the respective horrors in The Mysteries of Udolpho or The Monk “deliciously dreadful.”

Like Catherine Morland, the heroine thinks she can win against an unstoppable curse and dies an ignominious death: a white reader buried alive inside her own mind because she self-isolates through Gothic fiction [lying to her one-and-only friend]. The happy ending is a lie; the trauma is not. For the status quo at large, “exquisite torture” is consumer entitlement; reclaiming one’s agency in the face of such apathy is a liminal consideration for disabled people identifying with the heroine as disabled, thus something to gawk at by non-disabled persons while she’s being tortured and killed. In other words, madness is a lived reality through how people treat you based on superstitions informed by stories of stories, of stories of stories, in praxial opposition.

So concludes another patchwork examination of my time spent with Jadis. Probably not the last, but for now it’s time for her to go back to bed! “Sleepy time, chonky one!” What’s that, you say? ”You shall never have the Necronomicon’? Oh, honey. But I’ve already written it several times over!”)

Third, the death curse (as already touched on, above); re: longevity and weapons (for revenge) are the most common trades when dealing demons and dark desire, classically leading to premature death due to human failing. With Faust, immortality is denied and the dealer with devils ripped to pieces.

As an underwritten part of the ritual, then, the demon can execute a death curse—less of a haunting and more the piloting of a fatal madness that survives inside a host victim’s mind until after their death. Postmortem, the host is robbed (of their soul and their life) and the pilot “passes” onto someone else; e.g., Pazuzu from The Exorcist (1973) or similar “imitator” demons that gleefully gaslight and isolate the victim while using their own cloned memories against them, but also the apathy of the victim’s friends and associates; re: Smile, The Dark and the Wicked (2020), or It Follows (above, 2014). Until death occurs, the attack of the demon is that of a mental “puppet master”—completely psychological and contained inside the mind of someone who sees what others cannot on account of being the demon’s “chosen” pet project, their source of childish delight and fun, their plaything for revenge. The cryptomimesis of these chains of media touch on systems of abuse and their traumas buried in the present space and time; i.e., home as alien (this extends to alien-invasion xenophobia; e.g., the “pod people” from Invasion of the Body Snatchers).

Ghosts are generally incorporeal and well-suited to the curse as a trigger mechanism, whereas demons can assume physical forms (or steal them) that hide a final “true form.” Physiology aside, the largest difference between a demon and a ghost is the demon’s emphasis on active mobility that not only can physically travel, but does so through rituals and bargains, not passive transference. Demons tend not to be limited to a space or container inside the space, while still treating the people they encounter as the vector like ghosts do. When the vector succumbs to the curse, demons exploit their death as part of a larger scheme of transference, like a con, ruse, or virus (e.g., AIDS). Yet even when death occurs, the victims “live on,” either inside the demon or as a physical “shield” for the demon to taunt the living with: during the liminal hauntology of war conveniently requiring medieval “medical” methods to debride the infected household of any Black Death in the flesh (Christian calls to violence, the mad scientist husband killing his possessed wife [the “weaker” sex] to “get” the demons before they get him): the killing of the Bride of Frankenstein!

Fourth, exquisite torture; i.e., the “tormenting” of the privileged. The idea, as we’ll see, comes from Radcliffe liking to be tortured by demons, but whose own proto-BDSM retained their harmful and exclusionary conservative elements. To it, demons cross over into the mortal plane; i.e., when summoned to torture the summoner before the summoner dies. Torture, however, can occur within boundaries of play during power exchange that don’t involve harming anyone; re: the sex-positive BDSM motto, “hurt, not harm,” preventing terminal domestic abuse by camping vaso vagal dogma (above).

This being said, Western canon primarily concerns itself with coercion, knife dicks and unironically threatening recipients whose manufactured harmful tortures become something to feel fascination towards. Generally it does so by inserting a feeling of xenophobic invasion (usually unto a pretty white maiden) according to a privileged position compounded by a displaced fear of the outside; i.e., not just the ghost of trauma, but a crafty and childlike, psychosexual demon of colonial guilt, rape victims, carceral violence/the sadomasochistic torture dungeon (from De Sade, onwards, but borrowed from chronotopes of the same Neo-Gothic corpus), etc.

Experienced by a privileged person/group playing around with things they know they shouldn’t, some demons evoke Hogle’s ghosts of the counterfeit; i.e., the initial admonishment as conservative at heart, evoking a psychological fear/fascination with looking at these traumas from afar—e.g., the ruins of Ca’n Dar, followed by Kandar Castle and Arthur’s Castle in the Evil Dead sequence (a counterexample being Giger’s derelict ship containing its own demon tied to the company’s corporate past being something to critique in neoliberal terms).

It’s also worth noting the hybrid nature of many demons during these tortures; e.g., in Evil Dead, you actually have demons that are ghostlike and zombielike—the disembodied ghost and its possession/self-mutilation of the host’s flesh that suddenly rots like a corpse, and the revelation of a final, otherworldly demonic “true form”; i.e., “fully” demon, shedding the disguise: the heteronormative “us” (whose bread-and-circus, “gore porn for white English people” dates back to Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre, and whose “shooting demons in the face” revenge fantasy is the avenging of white people/tokens from dark, chaotic forces; i.e., the palimpsest of the Aliens-meets-Evil-Dead-II violence in Doom stemming from the far-further-back semi-blind pastiche of Shakespeare’s hyperbolically gory Titus Andronicus[18]as “dark comedy” in the basic sense of the definition: having a happy ending against the forces of darkness—the queen of the Goths, in Titus’ case).

Keeping these four differentiating factors in mind, let’s now consider several performative problems present within the canonical demon summoning ritual, then move on to how we can approach their material history as Gothic Communists; i.e., by looking at older derelicts that have humanized demons, but also demonized workers and chattel camping rape through exquisite “torture” (a sort of “demonic vibing”).

Canonical Demonology and Torture: Summoning Racism and Other Bigotry (feat. Evil Dead Rise)

The primary problem with canonical demonology is it is inherently hierarchical, racist (ethnocentric) and punitive; e.g., Evil Dead Rise (2023) showing a young mother go insane from wandering womb’s “placental” transference, absorbing herself and her family into a demonic legion reversal of Civilization (the same idea borrowed from the 2018 Color Out of Space and its mom-child tokophobic egregore). Such distractions cryptonymy is very Freudian and regressive, the white-functioning family destroyed by a pre-Western “primordial” quaking at the myth of the dark continent (and Archaic Mother) come pruriently home to roost!

Simply put, it’s not just DARVO/obscurantism but pearl-clutching—a haunted house replete with the usual bloody hysteria Kubrick couldn’t see past in his own cosmic-nihilist Shining focused on a single unhomely location: the angry house eating the family and turning them into savage cannibals that a tokenized white savior (the Amazon, in Rise‘s case) must send back to Hell before they rape and eat everyone; re: the ghost of the counterfeit and process of abjection furthered through military optimism, aka peace through strength, quelling tokophobic unrest (the fear of nation rebirth, in this case) on the home front: Creed’s murderous womb. “The axe forgets, the tree remembers”; so does our rememory play with the furious monstrous-feminine dead from all walks!

There’s a lot of medieval puns going on, here—a cycle of undead metaphors that speak ominously (through death omens) to a rising return of the living dead tied to a space’s buried crimes (the appearance of discovery of a found “lost” document), and said crimes coming alive through demonic possession; i.e., as an inquisition that gets to the truth of things through cruel-and-unusual torture. Demonic rituals are summoning rituals; during their canonical treatment, torture is expected from different participants: the demons, the sacrifice, the servants and the state (and other tropes; e.g., the Fool from Cabin in the Woods, 2011, walking through all of Radcliffe’s codifiers). It needn’t be outright execution, but barring non-lethal treatments like exorcism or incarceration, state decree tends to favor barbaric, destructive violence dealt to summoner and demon alike.

Evoking the medieval treatment of witches, the prescribed “treatment” for “possessed” individuals is the same: bodily dismemberment. Be this with firearms, power tools or incineration, the command from on high is improvised capital punishment in the modern age. This makes punishment of demonic practitioners a form of prescribed bullying administered from a position of supreme material advantage—formerly the Church, surviving through a Cartesian Protestant ethic.

The same could be said of the canonical demon’s unfair advantage over the victim, the latter forced to endure a bloodletting trial or test of wills exacted by a vengeful or sadistic god (the husband and his chainsaw, chopping her up like firewood/a golem). In short, demonic scheming and torture is the West’s generation of a perverse, deified bogeyman that feels alien compared to the holy Western faiths, including the Enlightenment as supreme but also “under attack” (re: the Protestant ethic in late-stage, neoliberal Capitalism). As such, the man of reason becomes justified in administering violence against state-invented enemies; i.e., given the mark of death/Cain by a witch-finder general telling him to kill.

A ritual isn’t just the interaction between the summoner and the summoned; it includes the state’s totalitarian perspective as something to force upon would-be viewers of demons on state grounds; re: the antagonizing of nature leading to its demonic revenge and the state quelling that through monomythic force.

For the audience looking in, though, the bargain and its extreme prejudicial handling are meant to be witnessed and discouraged, but also reinforced relative to the state as in control of its territories (re: Weber): the demon as dangerous thus deserving of punishment (said punishment extending to anyone foolish enough to make a pact with powerful outsiders during a foreign plot retrojecting the oppressed through chronotopic diaspora). The demon also becomes a displaced version of forbidden terror games to play and enjoy with others; i.e., forbidden/strange fruit.

As such, the torture of watching things denied to us (vigilante violence punching up or down) suddenly becomes acceptable; i.e., as ritualized forms of punishment and inheritance anxiety for those thinking about misbehaving when the apocalypse eventually comes back around, during a bust (especially in sexual matters, non-martial sex being treated as a death sentence): thought crimes, cloned into copies that pass the horror cryptomimetically along!

(exhibit 46a: Echoes of bicycle face, then, is the fearsome death face, from Ringu [1998]—the mouth open wide like the heroine from Smile [the idea popularized in part by Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950) as the witness finds the dead body and sees its dead face, in the forest]. Similar to ahegao and caused by seeing that story’s version of the Medusa, Sadako Yamamura, coming into the body through the mouth via force-feeding/oral rape, the idea is taken to its logical extreme with films like Inside, Martyrs and Audition [2008 and 2009]; i.e., that derive a grotesque pleasure and special, metaphysical sense of “seeing” begot from extreme torture; re: Kristeva’s Powers of Horror [1981, the same year Evil Dead came out] outlining abjection as a process while speaking appreciatively to Lewis’ side of the Radcliffean rivalry. This being said, Death as something to worship makes sense, as nothing is stronger than it; i.e., empire is doomed to be devoured by Mother Nature as something to fear in hauntologized forms, said forms loaded hideously with older bigotries and misconceptions speaking to current ones under Capitalist Realism. Provided we can harness its regenerative power to develop Gothic Communism, then no harm, no foul! But state shift is a real and pressing concern.)

The same basic conditioning is told from the victim’s perspective in canonical narratives. Sometimes, the victim is slowly broken down until the demon gains access, or becomes doomed according to a fateful hour when absolute takeover is inevitable (re: Smile); other times, it happens quickly and without warning (a rule of thumb: the more build up, the bigger the impact). Whatever the case, the canonical plight is of unwanted entry into the victim’s mind, making them do terrible things they cannot stop or remember until they inexplicably die, face frozen in fear (with spontaneous death tied to guilt or shame being a regular cause-of-death in Gothic stories).

It makes for good drama insofar as a conflict is displayed (re: Faust), but among the esoteric gore is all-but-useless as a material critique outside of depicting torture in supernatural terms (which is still a clue about the material conditions of a given society according to its torture-porn diet). There’s certainly something to be said about the phenomenology of mental illness, through such strategies of misdirection; i.e., a fear of said illness, but also a likening of it with dark oracles who communicate, as demons do, through bodily torture; e.g., schizophrenia being as much a testament to self-harm as it is to harm others:

In canonical stories, though, a demonic sickness of the victim exploitatively mirrors psychological abuse as something to “glut,” subsisting prior to activation within a physical object or associate ritual that haunts the victim once exposed; e.g., the VHS tape, from Ringu or Evil Dead’s elusive Necronomicon being as much a nod to Peter Lavenda as Lovecraft; re: McKee’s correct notion of a

proto-orientalism, combined with historical illiteracy—or perhaps committed distrust of “history” as an elite conspiracy in itself—[that] 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 (source: “The Misappropriation of Ancient Texts,” 2015).

To it, fascism and its stupidity are a virus that travels through cryptomimesis inside the larger Gothic mode!

So while Walpole and Lewis’ rape castles are demonstrably places that feared the medieval period to allow for a critique of their present worlds, such spaces weren’t immune to colonization by entrepreneurs like Radcliffe. Though Radcliffe, herself, wouldn’t have touched magical demons with a stick, its dark canon was immensely overused in male authors like Sam Raimi—a man whose bastardizing of The Monk embodies the same kind of neo-conservative regressions that Radcliffe embodied; i.e., a pirate is a pirate, an orc an orc, and deserving of punishment whether as a ghost or demon. The punishment is not visibly associated with state forces, but instead becomes a form of dissociate victim-blaming pinned onto “outsider” scapegoats whose Indigenous grudges “suddenly appear” as if out of thin air. Such is the ghost of the counterfeit, furthering the abjection process vis-à-vis dark monoliths in small; e.g., a book that, when opened, springs from itself a variety of barbaric miniatures not unlike Walpole’s fatal portraits, but considerably more racist and misogynistic, etc: the manwoman in the cellar!

At first blush, the demonic possession might seem exclusively coercive—i.e., full of pointless mental torture and physical dismemberment, dislocated from material conditions, and only begetting further harmful torture, thus conditioning the damsel-like viewer or detective to submit to or perform their ordinary role within state-sanctioned violence afraid of a black planet (a mix of colonial vaudeville, vampirism, demonic possession and hag horror, above). But the simple fact is, iconoclastic demonology can summon demons to parse material conditions by asking the viewer to relate to the detective, damsel or demon in unusual, iconoclastic ways (the “inoculating” goal being to expose the madness behind the hidden traumas of Capitalism through these commonplace replicas, thus acclimating oneself to the mental-gymnastic blitz of canonical abusers; re: Jadis).

The iconoclastic idea, then, is to undo the bourgeois curse by its own invitation (“Join us!”); i.e., by using it to reverse abjection, hence employ a simple, age-old trick: convincing the world the Devil (a spectre of Marx) does exist. This happens through the repurposing of age-old clichés—by humanizing the demons themselves and how we play with them in duality by fabricating any to benefit us. Despite the supernatural guise, their psychological gimmicks are very human, but also a means of expressing the human condition in iconoclastic terms; i.e., beyond the torture ritual stuck in a nonstop death loop and more as something to paradoxically enjoy through the Gothic expression of exquisite “torture” through one’s imagination as literally happening before them: the xenophobic legends that fuel it being reclaimed.

This material history can be further humanized, of course; i.e., by examining older forms that future iconoclasts can make more xenophilic, thus in favor of workers. For example, regarding Radcliffe as the coiner of the basic phrase (from our thesis volume):

when Radcliffe wrote in The Italian, “What are bodily pains in comparison with the subtle, the exquisite tortures of the mind!” she is, according to Kim Ian Michasiw, treating the presence of sublime power as “as a signal to sigh and feel exalted” (source: “Ann Radcliffe and the Terrors of Power,” 1994). Simply put, there’s a dealing with power exchange being had that’s ironic, its symptoms of ritualized pain neatly divorced from actual damage but suitably demonic all the same. Even if Radcliffe would never stoop like Matthew Lewis to actually play with literal demons, she is still summoning her own “demons” to play with through rape pastiche: bandits, Italian counts, and pirates pretending to be ghosts (with the armed and confident Ludovico boldly investigating the “haunted” room because he doubts Emily St. Aubert’s testimony and represents the cliché, plucky energy of a male protagonist bent on facing evil, but also defeating it through raw, physical force)—i.e., violent liars that prey upon the imagination of susceptible maidens, threatening them with sexual violence. As a woman, she was making demons she shouldn’t play with that illustrated her own fears, but also privilege as someone fascinated with the barbaric, faraway past. As Cynthia Wolff points out, Radcliffe’s xenophilia and demon lovers are always partially murderous and mutilating in ways that regress towards the status quo: the demon lover as the white, cis-het woman’s thrill of rape that is ultimately replaced by the fairytale wedding. To be blunt, it’s basic and colonial (source).

Such are the canonical elements we’ve just discussed, and which we can camp ourselves through ludo-Gothic BDSM profaning Raimi and company’s canonical, dogmatic idea of such stories distracting from the obvious: the inheritance of empire as something that is always in decay and letting things slip cryptonymically through the cracks!

For the rest of this subchapter portion, then, I want to examine demonic summoning and its BDSM utility during such torturous rituals; i.e., as having evolved into established canonical, psychosexual forms of the occult that strictly punish workers; re: canonical torture as something for us to camp during our own derelicts’ elaborate strategies of misdirection (demonic gibberish eluding to freedom of expression developing Gothic Communism).

This camping is fraught with compromise; re: I also write, in Volume Zero, “If Sontag was vanilla, then Radcliffe was barely ice cream” (ibid.); i.e., stuck in a nigh-religious state of neo-medieval fascination and Numinously psychosexual “martyr-style” hard kink. So while demons are aliens, Radcliffe’s were largely non-magical home invaders festooned with medieval pageantry while she sat in “horny jail.” She played it safe, but still leaned in an oddly torturous direction (bored housewife syndrome[19]). You gotta start somewhere, right?

We’ll primarily examine the canonical side of demon rituals, here. Then, in “Exploring the Derelict Past,” we’ll consider exquisite “torture”: as a form of camp taken further than Radcliffe while still building on her classic ideas about forbidden sight that make for a solid foundation; i.e., canonical torture vs exquisite “torture” in the same poetic spheres’ ghost of the counterfeit and abjection process. Each speaks to the liminal, transient position of damsels and detectives subversively tracing the treatment of demons and the demonized/chattelized left behind; e.g., from 1980s pornography and its own damsel archetype to Radcliffe’s infamously white and intrusive Gothic heroines invading a given castle as “old dark residence.”

Curiosity kills the cat, but nosy little girls developing Communism are anything but the state’s idea of well-behaved; per Gothic canon infantilizing them, they must be watched because (and again, according to the state), they can easily hurt themselves when left unsupervised. At the very least, they might cause a scandal; e.g., making homemade porn in someone else’s bed[20]! So do we demons infiltrate and destroy Rome’s nuclear model from within, just like Mary Shelley (the nerdy slut) did before us:

(model and photographer: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)

As previously stated, our intent in doing so is to move beyond the usual psychoanalytical models and analysis by engaging with demons and their messy authorship/execution in dialectal-material terms; i.e., that don’t tokenize/triangulate or muddy the waters, assisting in the state’s subversion towards xenophilic anarchy during monster-fucking torture by exposing its psychological mechanisms through the demonic peril and associate power games meant to normally pacify workers.

Said pacification happens through canonical threats of force tied to stagnant material conditions, blindly expressed in demonic rituals of agony tied to bodily harm; i.e., bourgeois torture schemes. By comparison, sex positivity couches perception and power within demonic markers of trauma that aren’t complete bullshit—often BDSM, kink and rituals of abuse directed at the inexperienced (which Radcliffe arguably was, insofar as she felt comfortable expressing herself in “polite” society); re: ludo-Gothic BDSM as, like Evil Dead’s monster mom, having a bit of old Radcliffe in it.

Again, you gotta start somewhere, and Radcliffe’s nonsense—while rather misinformed—belonged to a larger conservative trend invested wholly in profit; i.e., one that, per the ghost of the counterfeit furthering abjection, evolved into itself while serving the profit motive in ways we can steer however we want. To that, let’s continue by looking at canonical torture serving profit beyond Radcliffe, who kept her demons fairly ordinary (re: Moers’ Female Gothic versus its Male double: boys play with magic, rape and death; girls are trapped between infantilized positions of emotional disturbance and nun-like chastity, mid-investigation)!

The Evolution of Canonical Torture, cont. (feat. for-Profit Demons)

Canonical torture is gibberish, like all demonology is, but it speaks to the material world as swept up in warring dialectical-material forces: the presumption of guilt for playing with magic spells (demon BDSM and psychosexual torture) for profit; re: church DARVO evolving into a lucrative latter-day canon “speaking of the Devil”:

(exhibit 46b: Artist, top left: Emanuela Lupacchino; top-right: Leonardo Da Vinci; mid-to-bottom right: Tom Sullivan; middle-left: Dustin Twilley. Apart from female bodies and acts of creation, canonical reanimation is often associated with black magic rituals as something to confront and destroy during monomyth us versus them. Frequently these are gibberish—a ghost-of-the-counterfeit “awe” by continually “speaking in tongues” amid demonic intimations thereof. The outcome—of their Promethean power and Faustian knowledge exchange—scapegoats sex-positive forms by attaching them to cataclysm, blindness, insanity and dismemberment; i.e., the parroting of ignorance through blind pastiche made by faithful children playing with dead things during Capitalist Realism. Often the flipping of the pages as quickly as the readers do makes the books involved impossible to replicate perfectly. So instead—and like Milton—new explorers regularly invent older derelicts within the same “ancient,” cryptomimetic lineage.

But replicate it certainly does; i.e., in a highly animated “sizzle reel” of visual, palimpsestual chaos. Not only did the original Evil Dead‘s sequels inspire increasingly more violent and warlike copies; those copies inspired the FPS genre as something whose monasterial creative heritage became sacred unto itself intertextually across mediums—i.e., the book scene from Army of Darkness [1993] was, itself, copied like a counterfeit, unholy Bible in the 1997 videogame, Blood‘s 2011 mod, “Death Wish.” The power of the book as part of the endless ritual of recreation is not just its fascination with the canonical barbaric past, but “cool points” you net when having one on your wall. The canonical text becomes trophy-like, be that hand-made, copy-and-pasted, or simulated [“State of Unreal Full Presentation,” 2023]: “Demons are cool, but shooting or smashing them in the face is even cooler!”

In keeping with Radcliffe, there is a classically “male” facet to medieval manuscripts and book-binding; i.e., medieval monks sat around making them, whereas nuns were largely known [and fetishized] for taking in stragglers off the road, to care for them in times of dire need: a burden of care that privileged men, letting them write and make art, versus women being the usual caregivers… and whose blood magic ties ominously to books “bound in human flesh and inked in human blood.” Said invented literature routinely abjects Catholic and Enlightenment abuses off onto a settler-colonial “other” that speaks both to the usual tokophobic nonsense; i.e., essentializing female biology as monstrous, but also blood libel, sodomy and witch hunter language that Raimi was repeatedly leaning on; re: the murderous, wandering cannibal womb as part of a bigger monstrous-feminine conspiracy about empire-ending fears: raining period blood [the torture of the female hero losing her hand have a fetishized quality to it versus the male tough-guy act].

It’s the usual Red Scare shenanigans—with Fede Alvarez [another Rodriguez horror sell-out from south of the border] deliberately having the tokenized midwife abort the genderqueer spawn of Satan with a chainsaw episiotomy [don’t Google that], only for it to end up being a caesarean delivering Rosemary’s baby [the spectre of Marx] unto her and the unsuspecting world above [render Caesar unto us]: “Hail, Satan!” indeed; it’s the crossing of the Rubicon [with Nazis and Communists again occupying the same kayfabe shadow zone]! Such hyphenations of sex and force, but also parent confusion, speak to purity arguments regarding white women policing and delivering “pure” babies for the state: debriding a rotten womb/unweeded garden grown to seed, and with gusto!

Furthermore, it’s quite common in canonical Gothic to marry tokophobia [and Freudian prescriptions of sex and force obscuring Marxist language] to unironic witch hunts; i.e., similar to Aliens‘ own anti-Communist mirror syndrome—with Cameron’s royal Ripley clone a subjugated Hippolyta punching the Alien Queen as his Nazi-Communist Medusa, doing so for domestic abuses abjected onto colonial targets framed as “black” and “ancient” discoveries—so, too, does Alvarez tap into the same Freudian anxiety language: to furiously punch down against nature, Amazonomachia-style, under monomythic neoliberalism [the monomyth being when you punch Medusa, instead of hugging her and surrendering your power unto her during the Promethean Quest and its dialectic of the alien].

To make matters worse—if that were even possible—everything happens while literally wrapping the “ancient” patchwork “frankenbook” in Black-Veil garbage bags, and then in torturous barbed wire like some kind of fucked-up present from Jack Skellington [and whereupon a curious white male nerd (and double for Doctor Knowby from the first film) finds, in the basement of a cabin in the woods, and must cut through using bolt cutters]: a framed narrative steeped in the occult, female genital mutilation/surgical addiction and unironic sadomasochism! What’s not good for the goose also isn’t good for the gander!

“History ends first in tragedy and then in farce.” But truth be told, it’s a dialectical-material cycle that doesn’t so much “end” as loop in on itself. And if revolutionary cryptonymy peels back the infernal concentric pattern’s onion-like layers to free Medusa, then complicit cryptonymy is a concentric gaslight to argue for Medusa’s continued, indefinite stay at the asylum: a rape without end, supervised by unscrupulous and knowing-better doctors [fighting back not with scalpels, but crowbars nail guns, chainsaws and—in Army of Darkness‘ case—kung fu and homemade explosives heralded by hilarious-if-blind camp (“Strange one!“) and admittedly awesome music; re: Quixote’s gonna Quixote, weird canonical nerds aping the legend of King Arthur [through a bad rendition of Cervantes and Mark Twain, but a faithful one of Aliens and Doom] to seek revenge against nature as monstrous-feminine under American neoliberalism—the biggest joke being they actually think they’re estranged from privilege]!

In keeping with the ghost of the counterfeit/abjection process, the dogma, here, is literally Satanic Panic; i.e., to punish the audience for looking while simultaneously preaching to the choir about the horrors of colonialism, which it blames on witches [re: Federici]: “She’s burning in Hell, you sick fuck!” Alvarez has the daughter of a white man say to him in a dirty basement, albeit after he straps her to a post and sets her on fire; i.e., it’s the point of admission—white moderates paying to see a black passion/rape not just of the girl, but of religion itself, then patting themselves on the back for not being either of the parties onscreen [or so they think]:

Gaslighters gonna gaslight, but it’s something we can study for our own reasons; i.e., to learn how they work and [re]present their arguments [the megachurch of Hollywood preaching to the choir]. To that, Evil Dead 2013 [and its[21] producers] let Alvarez revel in torching the nuclear family model; i.e., by speaking guiltily to the false preacher as a vice character would, only to exonerate the proceedings by torturing a young white girl [echoes of Salem] to death, Pentecostal-style[22]; i.e., kettling the accused/policing the virgin/whore, who—suddenly fed up—tells daddy how she really feels [after having killed her mother because women often police their children under Patriarchal abuse; re: Jadis] and to which he responds not by slapping her wrist or face, but shooting her evil dead; re: “suffer not a witch to live!”

It’s the same-old Shadow of Pygmalion; i.e., one that King and De Palma famously milked with Carrie [1976] years beforehand—a man from Maine, first imitated by a local Michigander and then by a director from Mexico also abusing Galatea [and likening demonic possession to drug use, speaking to the American War on Drugs poisoning his country]. By doing so, Alvarez is aping Raimi all the way back to Radcliffe—effectively saying to the audience, “See, see! She really was an evil demon who went mad and killed her mother!” It’s a “boundaries for me, not for thee” precursor to aborting Communism that would happen later in the movie; i.e., middle-class pearl-clutching defending Christendom and demonizing Free Love as Manson-esque: for the ghosts of Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski, deathly afraid of outsiders! All witch hunts have a bourgeois class character to them, pimping Galatea for their police state’s gated communities.

It’s also a foreigner assimilator’s fear-fascination with persecution mania, lionizing American fascism by “both-sidesing” genocide; i.e., by having the witch—a captive audience in a larger summoning ritual during reactive abuse—go mad: both tied to the stake, but also curiously immune to Baptist sermons of fire and brimstone! The accusers don’t just want her to break; they’re literally praying for it, and all to maintain their own place in the world—i.e., the punitive and white-supremacist, patriarchal hierarchy endorsing and reenacting a self-fulfilling prophecy that requires the Patriarch to put her down “for her own good”: “I love you, baby!” Antagonize nature as monstrous-feminine, then put her cheaply to work during “Holocaust by bullet.” Such are the disgusting refrains of so many in-house rapists and child abusers, poaching their own blood, mid-libel. Don’t worry, asshole; she’ll be back to haunt you and your kind! You can’t kill us, and Medusa never dies, but instead outlives her abusers and their twisted moral code!

That is only the beginning of our revenge, its culmination being to build a better world by bringing Hell to Earth and smashing Capitalist Realism: showing these lapdogs the error of their ways/unbridled hypocrisy while illustrating mutual consent in a gloriously an-Com society having subverted such dogma for good [capital being a system that relies on routine defilement to perpetuate itself for profit, and which we—endlessly tortured by said system—only grow stronger in united opposition]: the whore free to dictate their own destiny unfettered from state pimps [and their geek shows’ unironic chainsaw strap-ons]! She smiles as she burns because she sees what the elite cannot, and bravely says the quiet part out loud; i.e., in ways they cannot hope to censor with their money and status—the monstrous-feminine avenger castrating the pimp as a rapist she avenges the victims of, doing so with radical glee. Revenge is sweet! “Say ‘cheese’ and die, Sisyphus!” [with R.L. Stine capitalizing on the fatal portrait while selling it to kids; re: “Death by Snu-Snu,” 2024]. “Owo, what’s this!”

A girl can dream! Until then, we demon mommies can play with the past to transform it away from monomythic violence!)

Sexuality is a regular visitor (and casualty) during bad BDSM and demons can certainly be sexy when subverting said BDSM. Indeed, sex sells, but occurs historically under Capitalism as coercive sex; i.e., as a means of voyeuristically looking at sexualized workers being slowly (or not so slowly, above) euthanized, again and again, mutilated by demon-lovers-in-disguise (cops) policing the whore as she speaks to her own rape when summoned (running a train on Medusa’s corpse, one “phallic” daughter at a time). Religion is a sham run by charlatan pimps, which Max Powell put best in Peeping Tom (1960): “The kinds with girls on the front covers and no front covers on the girls.” We’ll get to that history more, in a moment.

For now, let’s focus on the summoning ritual mid-subversion as a form of shifting power exchange, gradually mutating canonical usage; i.e., the canonical “gargoyle” fixated on purely psychological fears (of the dark, but also things of the dark, which are rooted in real-world scapegoats) that slowly has become more and more “perceptive” by more and more marginalized authors sticking their toes into the psychosexual BDSM world: to escape canonical demonization and chattelization; re: the damsel as submissive/regressive, the detective as relatively dominant, and demons offering up emancipatory forms of power exchange, mid-duality (with ironic variants of the sub, switch and dom performed by us).

Obviously past attempts at doing so were far tamer (from a class war standpoint) than recent ones, but remained products of their own times; re: Radcliffe, as we shall see, was positioned to write the exact stories she wrote, while still engaging in BDSM antics bearing out a supernatural façade: the rights of women as more than passive sex objects, able to pursue and explore demonic sex. Whatever the author’s dialectical-material leanings, language and technology are paramount to achieving their end result. Indeed, the “incubator” is media itself as occupied, mid-altercation/-intervention.

Often an occult presence lives inside a piece of media that can harbor ghosts, but just as easily summon demons to overpower the viewer with. Doing so constitutes an exchange of power and knowledge in demonic fashion; i.e., through the performers that represent symbols of domination and fear as increasingly sublimated or subverted. However “occult” these may seem, their imaginary origins still apply to workers and chattel in the material world. Confronted with a “demon,” some will want to unironically punish it; others will see the demon as a mode of self-expression reverse-abjecting the actual torturer’s state-sanctioned bias: “Spank me, mommy!” Medusa is rape-proof as a means of self-defense and attack; i.e., as anti-predation guerrilla (asymmetrical/counterterror) warfare saying anisotropically to her attackers, “Look, don’t touch!”

(exhibit 46c: Artist: Frederico Escorsin. Medusa isn’t simply a metaphor for ancient female rage and forbidden wisdom; it symbolizes her power to reverse abject her own trauma through a ludo-Gothic BDSM hijacking of the entire creative process—i.e., sending said gaze and history of rape back at her attackers to chill them [and the profit motive] to stone; re: the whore’s revenge. Everyone loves the whore; and whereas demons are traditionally invented to serve ideological roles pursuing the profit motive through constant austerity and “vigilance,” female and/or non-white and GNC demons like the Gorgon canonize the exploitation of whores [female or not] by men [and their black-penitent double standards].

Carved from stone, Medusa is just as much a vengeful “Galatea” as she is a snake demon. By turning the [traditionally male/tokenized Man Box] gazer into stone, she traps them in a frozen state like Medusa herself once was, thereby protecting herself [and other potential/actual victims] by freezing the rapist in place. It’s not so much in a literal sense, but whose reactionary disgust gives away would-be abusers of “demonic” women and other state-appointed degenerates; e.g., black men and their BBCs; i.e., those selected for punishment because their mere open existence defies the status quo as paradoxically needing someone to rape. Her cursed existence suitably hyphenates mouth/fang and vagina/knife to hatch through birth trauma outside the womb [from Frankenstein‘s own extra-natal commentaries on development weaponizing Communism as such].)

A large part of this practice goes back to the death omen as something to envision through vague symbols of ambiguous danger and power. Death, in Gothic media, is generally something to gaze upon—a “darkness visible” whose paradox amounts to beholding that which “cannot” be seen.

A common canonical tactic is selective punishment: When gazed upon, the capture and release of the demon(s) as expressions of trauma through power exchange will famously “destroy” the viewer (exhibit 46c). This annihilation varies depending on the “power source,” but also the onlooker as a pair of eyes given to the audience by the author. Ghosts, for example, can trap humans in a similar state of frozen death, delivering trademark sensations of live burial. While demons like Medusa can also do this, the modern Promethean Quest involves a more transactional Faustian exchange; i.e., negotiated dealings in unequal, forbidden and dark exchange/radical transformation vis-à-vis power, knowledge and desire, but also bouts of informed consent/punishment (whereas Medusa was simply hunted down during collective punishment [a war crime] and beheaded without discussion, modern iterations of her demon are far more chatty before/after the torture begins).

As we have seen, negotiated appearances can be playful “tortures,” or serious trials/death curses. However, there’s always a misbehaving element to the ritual on both sides:

• moral panic—privileged, unwitting children playing with the occult, dating back to Radcliffe’s nosy heroines.
• persecution—dissidents more used to state violence who find themselves dealing with “demons” that are hardly divorced from the giving and receiving of normalized police abuse; e.g., the chav teens vs the police, from Attack the Block (a gutter ballet that also includes extraterrestrial demons, 2011).

Under these sheltered or besieged circumstances, the canonical Numinous becomes an especially effective “keep out” sign for the elite—the proverbial skull-and-crossbones preceding an angry divinity that exudes total, alien power (the Numinous) associated with capital authority/punishment and the state; i.e., the latter putting people to death to uphold profit through abject demon rituals having evolved: in constant praxial opposition with franker and braver testimonies occupying the same shadow zone. Regression is always a threat, but one that paradoxically must be faced by those who refuse to conform: we monsters (the state will never let us).

It becomes immensely important, then, to understand what threatens workers while experimenting with playful forms of “torture”; re: ludo-Gothic BDSM summoning and playing with older demons by consciously embodying them to become more sex-positive/Gothically mature than Radcliffe, Raimi and Alvarez were. This happens through the ritual itself as something to harness and control, not blindly worship as canon (Jade, the stalker of my partner Crow, for example, loved Evil Dead provided you didn’t critique it—any more than you’d critique police violence in Ghostbusters; i.e., its own hunting of the harvest through controlled opposition; re: “Cornholing the Corn Queen,” from Volume One).

Something as simple as a hand on one’s throat can denote a threat—one established through trust inside a “violent” ritual and its playful language of “torture” (re: “Healing from Rape,” also from Volume One). Playing with trauma is precisely the point, placing “violence” in quotes to provide a buffer between one’s lived trauma and said buffer’s power to stave off further violent acts; i.e., through an apotropaic, intersectionally solidarized pedagogy of the oppressed surviving in the shadow of police violence as alienating everyone differently. In this instance, the player and the audience are often one-in-the-same, demanding “torture,” or the playful threats of peril, which signify different things depending on who’s watching and who’s being tortured, etc, when healing from rape (re: Volume One).

Surviving rape and preventing it systemically are as much about overcoming shame, mid-play. The truth hurts, but it hurts so good (with Le Brock’s “walking womb” being as much a nod to Abel Ferrara’s 1981 Ms. 45, in John Hughes’ 1985 Weird Science (next page)—but also the same neo-conservative wish fulfillment of the Ancient Athenian Amazon [and latter-day femme fatales, 1800s-onwards[23]] being revived from old spare parts to thrill the nuclear model, but ultimately uphold it, below): teenage wet dream or coach for uncontrolled opposition? You be the judge, and make her in your own image (or vice versa, you in hers)!

The determining factor—of these tortures being “exquisite” or not, thus sex-positive or not—is the appreciative or appropriative nature of the torture itself taking place. Catharsis, in sex-positive forms, is achieved from revisiting trauma in playful, xenophilic forms, then healing from it by establishing a sense of agency over one’s own body and mind attached encouragingly to larger structures we alter first inside ourselves; re: liberation first happens inside a smaller labyrinth of the mind, before going out into larger labyrinths inside larger labyrinths, mise-en-abyme (with Plato’s cave being equally concentric): half-real liminalities occupied by demons as liminal beings trapped between fiction and non-fiction, onstage and off.

Gothic novels and their many threats present demons cryptonymically to detectives/damsels, but also rape play more broadly as something the reader can choose to vicariously confront. Simply put, demons symbolize rape by possessing their victims, exuding total control over them by forcing them to subject themselves to all manner of terrible things. Yet, the demons, trauma they intimate, and ritual itself can all be hijacked by the assigned submissive—a recipient “author” of pain who chooses their fate in relation to whatever they summon: “unspeakable” stories that threaten a lack of control—usually tied to violent, often sexual impulses, but also demonic personas’ calculated risk—as things that pass through the performer as inhabited by a presence they choose to let inside of themselves: the evil within becoming the evil everywhere, tramp-stamped for camp (say that ten times fast).

(exhibit 46d: Model and artist: Blxxd Bunny and Persephone van der Waard. The thrill of false danger goes both ways—from dom to sub, but also as delivered by Dark Fathers and Mothers of gentle and strict forms to varying degrees; e.g., Radcliffe’s rapacious “demon lover” taken to supernatural, xenophilic extremes, by Bunny and myself—my art speaking to their ace public nudism, demonic aesthetics and love for exhibiting BDSM [especially the receiving of pain as something to give back to the audience]. It’s Bunny’s way of saying they love us. Right back atcha, babe!)

Similar to general BDSM roles, the line between damsels, detectives and demons is not wholly discrete, in ludo-Gothic BDSM (and Gothic counterculture—a concept we’ll unpack much more, during Volume Three). The power of the heroine to summon the demon, for example, frequently denotes a sexual interest or agency—an activity unto itself that, not too long ago, would have been entirely forbidden to women regardless of what they were summoning.

For example, though hardly overtly Satanic, the established rules of literature forbid Catherine Morland—and by extension, Jane Austen—from “summoning” Henry Tilney as an object of a lady’s desire. In doing so, Austen’s Northanger Abbey pushed female desire into verboten spheres, gleefully taking all the credit:

for, though Henry was now sincerely attached to her […] I must confess that his affection originated in nothing better than gratitude, or, in other words, that a persuasion of her partiality for him [underlining by me] had been the only cause of giving her a serious thought. It is a new circumstance in romance, I acknowledge, and dreadfully derogatory of an [sic] heroine’s dignity; but if it be as new in common life, the credit of a wild imagination will at least be all my own (source).

Though incredibly tame by modern standards, Austen’s parody of the Gothic (and Radcliffe) constitutes a cracked door that, when thrown wide, pushes society headlong into sex-positive realms! In short, Austen’s critique of Radcliffe inspired my own (see: Volume Zero).

Furthermore, replete with gender trouble, ironic power exchange and appreciative peril, BDSM rituals expanding on Austen (or Lewis) can become friendly through the demons, damsels, and detectives they display. Roles can be switched around, with traditionally submissive parties allowing themselves to exude agency within the Gothic mode no matter how monstrous-looking the participants are: choosing to sleep with whomever they summon, during rituals founded on mutual consent during unusual directions (and degrees) of power exchange. This extends to the demon, which can find themselves bound to the arrangement of fulfilling the sub’s desires. Goodness me! What scandalous dalliance and coquette!

As such, the demon is no longer a simple butcher of cis-het women, nor an occupier of their bodies against their will; the owners of those bodies subvert canonical demonology by acting as sex-positive vessels of demonic power—i.e., to give and receive “torture” that denies the canonical torturer exclusive access to helpless victims by making would-be victims the arbiters of forbidden knowledge: demonology as a harmless state of existence. As such, workers choose how they want to engage with demonic sex, dictating the course of whatever actions transpire. So do we put the kinds of psychotic torturers chasing the whore in Evil Dead out of their misery!

(artist: Blxxd Bunny)

For example, Bunny is asexual in person, but delights in presenting themselves in a sexual manner through iconoclastic artwork they sometimes make (thus negotiate) with others. Walking the line between slutty angel/devil, but also bratty virgin/whore (teasing but ultimately saying no to sex; i.e., as a form of power exchange that disempowers sexist catcalling men, first and foremost), Bunny’s awesomely paradoxically power lies in self-expression through demonic art; i.e., that allows Bunny (and their fat demonic ass, above) to perform within negotiated boundaries: as someone who funded my own work, and who I have repeatedly paid tribute towards, over the years! As such, we show separately and together how power is something you give and take to prevent rape, generally by putting “rape” in quotes during ludo-Gothic BDSM (thus Gothic Communism) as a joint-venture[24]. Always has been, my dudes!

Better still, said performance has the added consequence of startling canonical proponents—a kind of invitation to show their true colors to Bunny’s audience by acting upset (what the kids call “self-reporting”). There’s no “Faustian bargain” taking place, merely a revelation of who the real abusers are; i.e., between what I call “the demonic trifecta,” or damsels, detectives and demons exploring the derelict past for its torturous energies having revelatory potential, mid-cryptonymy! To form boundaries to force our abusers to cross them and be witnessed intentionally doing so.

Introducing the Demonic Trifecta

In this talismanic/apotropaic sense of class, culture and race warfare married to iconoclastic poetics divorced from canonical ones but stuck in the same cryptonymic room, demons and their BDSM constitute a specific kind of mental offering through Gothic poetics—of power and knowledge to the viewer as potentially one of three things, but more probably a liminal combination within the oppositional praxis of ritualized torture:

• damsels, or persons conditioned to be tortured (masochists) or disempowered (subs)
• detectives, which “walk the line,” often from a damsel-esque and/or regressive position, moving towards/away from a demonic position of power exchange (switches)
• demons, or persons conditioned to torture (sadists) or (dis)empower (doms)
• or imitations of these behaviors in the overall code that oscillate/reverse the ritualized threat and power exchange in some shape or form

We’ll keep examining this “demonic trifecta” of interrelated expression much more closely in “Exploring the Derelict Past” (and good play vs bad play in Volume Three). For now, just remember the trifecta is accompanied by vicarious threats of mental versus overt, physical torture, “punishing” the viewer through the protagonist for seeking power not offered to them by the state; i.e., being up to no good in a voyeuristic sense: damsels in distress (sexual desire and one’s conditioned association of it with mutilative force; re: Radcliffe).

Nevertheless, physical and mental attacks are performative—are made by and towards extensions of people told through the performance. These needn’t be abusive or physical (exhibit 46c); excluding live performance art or BDSM acts, the torture taking place is not overtly happening to the audience in a physical sense; it’s occurring physiologically through the thrilling act of watching the “threat” of torture, including its ironic, exquisite forms: again, ludo-Gothic BDSM places “torture” in quotes to denote an iconoclastic liminal quality during the battle for liberation (reclaiming the Superstructure from a bourgeois Wisdom of the Ancients).

We’ll explore how mutual consent, descriptive sexuality and appreciative peril perform ironically in relation to canonical BDSM, in Volume Three. Ironic or not, I currently intend to examine how a torturous approach/outcome—be it sex-positive or sex-coercive—occurs relative to “the past” as something to demonize, but also perform and/or relate to as an art form; i.e., as a paradoxical means of exchanging unequal, forbidden and dark/fatal power and knowledge during “torture” haunted by torture, onstage and off.

(artist: Gustave Doré)

As a vicarious detective or damsel, the audience can see more than the demon of the ritual, its servants, or the so-called “sacrifice,” but also the hero solving the case or surviving its Miltonic peril as a sub, dom, or switch; the audience can also see the story from the demon’s iconoclastic point of view—i.e., the damsel or detective as demonic, but also the demon as humanized: a damsel-esque or detective-esque demon, but also a heroic role on par with the Romantic, proworker interpretation of Milton’s Satan from Paradise Lost that Percy (thus Mary) Shelley had; re, Nafi’s assertion: “According to Shelley, it was a mistake to think that Satan was intended by Milton as the popular personification of evil. This argument is still very much alive and valid today” (source). From the Shelleys to me, I wholeheartedly agree!

Neither Radcliffe nor Austen bothered with humanizing demons and their Faustian torture, but Lewis was more forthcoming by having the Devil attack heteronormative men of power in a remarkably genderqueer manner (re: Broadmoor’s “Camping the Canon” having the little devil change genders on a whim, but also its size; i.e., the smaller Matilda containing the big Devil piloting the smaller actor inside concentric veneers). Even so, Lewis still displaced the critique by pitting it against Catholic men of faith, but all the same made their dismemberment by the Devil’s claws something to absolutely relish (when I first read The Monk back in grad school, I was so excited by the horrifying ending that I woke Zeuhl up to tell them, scaring them senseless in the process; they not only forgave me, but read The Monk and loved it, too).

And frankly why not? As givers of pain, demons often receive pain themselves by becoming targets of righteous violence dressed up as “ironic” in bad faith; i.e., the sort that traditionally requires banishment from holy men or modest women, but also deputized civilians acting militantly towards an assigned target; re: moral panics, which now more than ever ties to military optimism (e.g., id Studio’s Doom aping Evil Dead without irony from 1993 to 1996 to 2016 to 2020 to 2025’s latest upcoming installment, onwards[25]): time and time again, a neo-conservative attitude directed at states enemies through tried-and-true tactics. To camp Radcliffe is to camp that and its Man-Box detectives; i.e., their policing the whore’s illegitimate Nazi-Communist (thus reprobate) existence, onstage and off.

As iconoclasts looking to liberate sex work (thus all work) from capital during Gothic Communism, we summon and play with demons, during ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., their hideous torture’s unknown pleasures loaded with monstrous-feminine cliché. As we do, our focus steadily remains on the proletarian element—less about “pure” psychoanalysis, thus psychological models’ fear or damage divorced from material critiques (a basic fear of the dark, for example), and more about the humanoid aspects within these areas that indicate older ways of seeing the natural-material world that are normally forbidden to us during state revenge arguments pimping whores for fear of revenge: exhibits of people (and animals) as things to intake through art, but also engorge oneself with according to what one prefers to work with and consume, demon-wise. Demons, then, are the torturous “past” revived, which makes their oft-Numinous backgrounds the consumption of pain, itself; i.e., as “religious” according to whatever the demon on the canvas is composed of, mid-engagement: flesh, stone, oil, for materials, and for methods, to suck, fuck, eat, infect, haunt, or some combination thereof.

This being said, the appearance—of canonical and iconoclastic forms—is the same, mid-dialectic, requiring dialectical-material scrutiny to parse them as they play out; i.e., doing so to tell the difference between ironic, campy damsels, detectives and sex demons versus their canonical versions. Let’s go over that (and examine the dangers of canon vs camp that affect us and animals chasing forbidden sight), then transition into “Exploring the Derelict Past.”

(artist: Heinrich Lossow)

The Difference between Canonical and Exquisite “Torture”

The primary difference between canonical and iconoclastic detectives/damsels is the iconoclastic act of choosing to be “tortured” by the “past” in ways that patently threaten psychosexual violence by camping the canon (re: Broadmoor)—namely the humanized, sex-positive elements of a demon. Investigated by detectives or “suffered” by damsels, this fatal knowledge can empower those normally exploited by Capitalism in demonic language: women, but also animals (the “Call of the Wild” chapter will examine how demonic animals—e.g., werewolves, insect demons [xenomorphs] and other “totems”—canonically operate as a source of demonic persecution, thus something to liberate from canonical phobias, mid-“rape”).

A large part of the female detective or damsel is sight in relation to the mind as traumatized by denied, forbidden vision; re: forbidden sight, hence darkness visible. One of the most famous Gothic models is, once again, Ann Radcliffe’s terror/horror binary from “On the Supernatural in Poetry”; i.e., her calling card as a means of viewing evil in relation to its exquisitely “torturous” mental effects on the audience; re:

Terror and horror are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes and nearly annihilates them […] and where lies the great difference between horror and terror but in the uncertainty and obscurity, that accompany the first, respecting the dreaded evil? (source).

To that, Radcliffe broke the capitalist mold, her best-selling stories absolutely concerned with demons and sex as things to see and experience; she just chose to hide them behind an explained supernatural—gentler ghosts as beings to demonically reanimate and expose her audience to. For her, it was explicitly improper to show but entirely acceptable to imagine rape behind the Black Veil. She would consider it wholly beneath her to ask for power in a masculine sense, much preferring a submissive position instead of a dominant one. Different strokes.

Before moving onto “Exploring the Derelict Past” and a prolonged examination of the demonic trifecta—re: of sex worker damsels/detectives and their own Promethean Quests/Faustian bargains (for the if-not-fatal-then-certainly-difficult knowledge offered by demons)—we will need to examine animals; i.e., as they tie into the kinds of worker exploitations that canonical demons represent, keeping workers horny and/or afraid, thus distracted by intimations of nature as dark, brutal and fearsome, but also inhuman, chattelized and vengeful (an idea we’ll very briefly introduce here, then unpack during the “Call of the Wild” chapter).

To that, demons in Gothic stories aren’t simply “ancient” and “derelict,” hence already-fake rediscoveries of the past as “dug up” (found footage or ancient artifact), but of course being far more recently designed regarding things mankind has dominated for thousands of years: nature as alien, criminal chattel pimped by modernity (the Enlightenment).

Lucky for us, language and imagination resist standardization[26]—have resisted standardization in the past; i.e., through the language of parody speaking to laughter as a nervous response/the best medicine; e.g., this woman falling by accident, farting because of it and laughing like a maniac (RM Video’s “Woman Trips and Farts in Front of Doorbell Camera,” 2023): an at-times-absurd (re: Camus) “rememory” attempt to hold onto the past as something to preserve from state-sanctioned genocide while farting in their faces (not only do girls fart during sex, but fart “rape” back at their rapists, then laugh at the moral outrage that ensues). These iterations can—like my cat coming to me through the dark doorway and vaguely-but-cutely asking for food—suddenly appear and demand to be fed, feeding us in exchange as we engage back and forth; i.e., with the past as a constant already-visitor. Nature is monstrous-feminine, but also smol. “Why have you forsaken me?”

The basic idea of Sex Positivity is to learn from material history as demonic, including chattelized/domesticated animals, their wild/stigmatized counterparts, and the chimeric ways all fit into demonization during oppositional praxis. Relative to these animals, iconoclasts want reconstruct past events/attempts at creative instructional insight better than those before us did: to try and reclaim what is lost in opposition to those in power by “feeding” their imaginations with monstrous things that combat blindness—a collective, organic response to the material world that helps working people “see” the material forces at work; i.e., in ways that holistically describe the inherent complexities and contradictions that emerge over time: demons as humanized instead of chattelized, returning our attention to the abuse afflicting humans and non-human animals the world over. Where they eat animals, they also eat people (re: the Omelas refrain); and nothing is sacred but universal liberation, vis-à-vis basic human, animal and environmental rights.

A Note about Our Small Friends Also Tortured by Capital

The human world certainly has the power to do good stewardship—has done so many times already. As Gaia Vince puts it:

Human culture is so powerful that it not only shapes us as individuals, but has remade the natural world too. As Dawkins points out, cows, pigs, dogs and roses are among the socially contrived inventions humans have made over the past millennia – none exists naturally. We have made these species to fulfil a human need (source: “Eugenics Would Not Work in Humans”).

In short, just as animals do not benefit from Capitalism and its search for profit, neither do humans according to Raj Patel and Jason Moore’s A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things:

The social struggles over nature, money, work, care, food, energy, and lives that attend the Capitalocene’s poultry bones amount to a case for why the most iconic symbol of the modern era isn’t the automobile or the smartphone but the Chicken McNugget. / All this is forgotten in the act of dipping the chicken-and-soy product into a plastic pot of barbeque sauce. Yet the fossilized trace of a trillion birds will outlast—and mark the passage of—the humans who made them. That’s why we present the story of humans, nature, and the system that changed the planet as a short history of the modern world: as an antidote to forgetting (source).

Humans are taught not simply to eat animals, but demonize them in relation to themselves as frequently interwoven with animals as demon-chattel. Indeed, “to demonize” denotes punishment and cannibalization of a particular group by the state as it does to worship the neoliberal spear (worker/owner division, infinite growth and efficient profit) and the other qualities of capital/tools of the state!

What was once worshipped or respected before the rise of nation-states and the Enlightenment, then, has gone on to be harnessed, consumed and replicated as cheaply as possible by dead labor (the state) eating nature as “a finite web of life” prone to state shift when pushed too far. Just as demons are unnatural and tied to cheap, easy pleasure, so too are animals and (as we shall see in a moment) sex workers treated like animals—literally molded into a specific useful body type to be consumed in Capitalism’s pursuit of infinite profit. It’s literally all they care about, happy to bring about irreversible climate change if it means they can have their fix one more time (Doom Eternal 5, or whatever): “Some men [the bourgeoisie] aren’t looking for anything logical; some men just want to watch the world burn.” That’s what capital is, turning itself and its surroundings into a perpetual furnace/abattoir!

(exhibit 46e1: Artists: Jadis and Persephone van der Waard. A part of the demonic equation, here are various wild animals I encountered in Florida—minus the sushi boat, mid-right; and Jadis’ pet tarantula, Redrum, far-top-left; i.e., pets aren’t food until they are, the difference decided arbitrarily by profit in the Imperial Core.

The collage is part of an exhibit that discusses the consumption of animals under Capitalism, but also how people are systemically divided from them and nature, but also the harm that humans cause as a species throughout the Capitalocene; i.e., Richard Adam’s basic premise in his lengthy [and violent, admittedly anthropomorphic] Watership Down [1972]: “Death follows humans wherever they go.” All animals can do is run and hide [meanwhile, those treated like or compared to chattel by the state—such as persons of color or Jewish people—also run and hide, but can fight back directly and indirectly through various animalized disguises [more on this, in Volume Three]; e.g., the prey animal as something to blend with predator animals: a wolf persona with a “bunny” attitude, exhibit 65; the monstrous “broodmare,” exhibit 87a; or the Amazon mommy dom as animalistically strong and closer to nature, 102a3; etc].

To explain the sushi boat’s inclusion, then, I wanted to do my part in showing there’s no ethical consumption under Capitalism, even for me; the sushi boat is what Capitalism has turned the animal into, but also me as a human being: I eat nature in ways that are mass-produced. The animal[s] are useful for food, but also profit, whereas humans endlessly consume in ways that are useful to the elite, who consume the world for profit by demonizing its habitants and nature to chattelize them in different demonic ways. Ideally nature—both flora, fauna and the environment—should be something to preserve and help thrive as stewards thereof, not consume. In the words of Steve Irwin:

What good is a fast car, a flashy house, and a gold-plated dunny to me? Absolutely no good at all. I’ve been put on this planet to protect wildlife and wilderness areas, which in essence is gonna help humanity. I wanna have the purest oceans. I wanna be able to drink water straight out of that creek. I wanna stop the ozone layer. I wanna save the world. And you know money? Money is great. I can’t get enough money. And you know what I’m gonna do with it? I’m gonna buy wilderness areas with it. Every single cent I get goes straight into conservation. And guess what Charles, I don’t give a rip whose money it is mate. I’ll use it, and I’ll spend it on buying land [source: a 2004 interview with 60 Minutes].

As Bay denotes, however, the idea isn’t so much preservation of pre-owned land by white benefactors holding onto said land; it’s land back to the dispossessed. Nature keeps Humanity alive, to which even a neoliberal façade like Captain Planet [1990] hints at the truth through its own “bad future” narrative: “No, you fools! Without these trees, we will all die!” [source: “Two Futures Part II,” 1991].)

(exhibit 46e2: Model, top-left: Jessica Luna; artist, bottom-left: Banana Warmer; right: Marcelo Ventura. Captain Planet places the idea of “rescuing” Humanity by “saving” the planet [a damsel, not a whore] in the hands of middle class, white and tokenized/nationalized teenagers [vlogbrother’s “Why Environmentalists Hate Captain Planet,” 2019]: “The power is yours!” According to Second Thought, the neoliberal idea of personal responsibility through AstroTurf environmental activism socializes the effort through a false solution, recycling and reducing the so-called “carbon footprint,” instead of focusing on the source of the problem: the elite and their carbon production through mass production and a refusal to move towards universal degrowth and away from infinite growth, efficient profit and war [“Your ‘Carbon Footprint’ Is A Scam,” 2022]. Despite nature being framed as something to conquer in demonic language, no amount of guns can stop the climate changes on Earth induced by Humanity’s economy of rape and war versus nature. And furthermore, no amount of eco-fascism will stop total starvation/mass extinction when the planetary ecosystem collapses. Humans aren’t the virus, capital and Capitalist Realism are. The brainchild of evil white men from Columbus onwards, those are the opposite of good stewardship.)

Food and animals are, in many ways, analogous to worker demonization and exploitation, offering up their own knowledge and power as demonic sources thereof. Not all knowledge and power is palliative; sometimes, the demonic effect is Promethean/Faustian, wracking the recipient with madness and guilt (reverse abjection). For one, animals have become synonymous with private property under Capitalism, generally as food to eat, labor to exploit, or pacifying tools that keep workers calm as they’re being exploited (e.g., cats are definitely therapy animals). Anything not useful is—like Marx asserts of owning purely through usage and usage alone[27]—stupidly destroyed to our own detriment: a brainless “mulch,” horribly ground together for the elite’s heteronormative chase of profit on a global scale (which Marx failed to adequately critique, meaning we must camp his ghost, like Weber did, and make him gayer than he actually was; re: “Making Marx Gay“). Food and animals can be revived as iconoclastic art that reunites humans with nature—a witch’s familiar or little guardian-of-the-underworld that constitutes a social-asexual bond to express an open mind with, in linguo-material terms. Not all demons are sexualized, especially their natural inspirations (though there is a sexual component to anthromorphs, which “Call of the Wild” will get into).

So make a Gothic cake (or trans-inclusive vagina cupcakes like Debra Massing), but also become closer to nature outside humans by learning to see other animals as inherently valuable, too. Give your pet a cute little outfit; gamely push for more ethical (vegan) food production to combat unethical consumption under Capitalism (thus the Anthropocene as endemic to Capitalism and food production, the Chicken McNugget as abhorrent a cryptonym as a can of Coke). Try to no longer abject what is a normally relegated to slaughterhouses, instead understanding and appreciating the animals being mass produced and sacrificed under capital’s factories of death—with manufactured scarcity and food waste being cruel not just to starving people but the animals being killed. What affects them will affect us; i.e., without an ecosystem, the world will collapse and so will we, the smallest animals the most valuable (e.g., mankind is nothing compared to the little honeybees that pollinate “his” crops).

Waste not, want not. Love what you eat and where it comes from in defense of nature from the state. We are part of that equation, Cartesian thought and Capitalist Realism be damned! We not only can survive degrowth; degrowth must happen if we are to survive! Anyone who says otherwise or drags their heels is a cop—e.g., Taylor Sheridan’s protagonist for his 2024 Landman being not just an unapologetic shill for Big Oil, but written to maintain the deeply conservative attitudes that go along with Big-Oil hegemony and its ensuing industry and destruction; i.e., they can’t see anything beyond themselves, so they assist in ways that pointedly benefit them as demonstrably not poor (the bougie couple living in a boom town that treats the entire world like Midland Texas):

Capitalism wastes much, cultivated by powerful people hopelessly alienated from workers and the planet, who only see numbers on a screen and worship the nostalgia of their own awful belief system turned into seductive dramas of a “better time” that never was (the canceled future).

As Sheridan shows, their materials shape our way of thinking as being reduced to dead commodities that defend the system to the death: the endless series of trademarked, copywritten brands of plastic-wrapped and pulverized undead/demon/animal commodities. He completely sucks, apologizing for billionaire men and their privileged wives fucking everyone else over thanks to apologists like Sheridan (who Billybob obviously represents). Hillbillies can gentrify and decay like anyone else—a historical-material fact that goes back to the antebellum South, but haunts it, America and the rest of the world through expertly made copaganda like Landman, post-Jim-Crow and Lost Cause: “Won’t someone please think of the white man and his white family?” Like, fuck you, Sheridan, and your stupid white supremacist view of the world acting as “stewards” for everyone else while raping us stone dead (also, Mad Men [2007] sucks, and so does John Hamm):

In keeping with Shelley’s technological singularity, the posthuman nightmare extends to animals being replaced with artificial versions; i.e., digital images (a bit like the owl from Blade Runner), or little “tick-tock” variants that conspicuously perform labor better than their comfortably organic, living counterparts. Animals, including humans, have become more robotic in ways capital tries to enslave (missing the point of Shelley’s technophobia to copy it in bad faith).

To it, anyone banking on Humanity magically reaching a Utopian future with the robot maid from The Jetsons (1962) is taking a huge gamble; i.e., they’re banking on Capitalism actually investing in such measures, which it historically couldn’t care less about—would rather cue the fake, canned laughter from The Jetsons, a “zombie” capitalist model of the American nuclear family The Simpsons only temporarily escaped from (re: Charlie Sweatpants’ “Zombie Simpsons” [2012] being a concept we’ll explore even more at the end of Chapter One, in Volume Three). It’s all sanitized—naked and laid bare yet horribly controlled, familial, sacred: “No, it’s the children and the animals who are wrong!”

This goes both ways. Workers think the image is real while also never meeting an animal and being alienated from its pain; i.e., why it slowly went extinct. They become stupid, blind, imperiled to encounter the same fate at an accelerated rate (of rape). Consigned to a lifeless world without chonkers, who—like a witch’s familiar or natural demons more broadly—were a small bond to nature that disappears as nature disappears; i.e., because of Capitalism, not Communism (though Marxist-Leninism’s fighting of the West was incredibly harmful and led to great amounts of lasting and heteronormative environmental damage: re: Persephone van der Waard’s “Leaving the Closet; or, a Trans Woman’s Scholarly Contributions to Older Histories of Sodomy and Queer Love,” 2024). When that bond literally disappears, the animals are replaced with robots (or the C4 imposters from Caddyshack, 1980); i.e., to slowly but steadily become a metal-and-concrete “food desert,” and one where Capitalism (and its proponents; re: Sheridan) transform the landscape, people and language to “get us and our little dogs too.”

This bourgeois gaslight of the Wicked Witch invokes flying monkeys in another sense: Frankenstein abominations stitched from dead parts, made by a false, bad-faith witch (“and you are only a caricature of a witch”). Furthermore, through such persons, we’re left with bad, manmade copies of worker action that become a bad person-made copy as Capitalism tries to recruit “tokens” from different marginalized groups; i.e., into the same destructive mindset, whose division “murders to dissect,” leading to an entire society of stupid know-it-alls who can tell you all the pieces of something while it is dead, but can’t understand it while it is alive within a larger functioning whole (re: Jadis)—language, animals, people, places, objects as an assemblage.

Let’s conclude with a few cautionary points about camping demonic expression (of the Faustian sort), then move onto “Exploring the Demonic Past”!

The Dangers (and Pleasures) of Demonic Camp

Camp is all about risk and reward; i.e., it bears repeating that camp is dangerous; re: Scott’s own magical regressions, in Alien, providing a retro-future “taming of the shrew.” Demons of a more magical sort, then, are treated as oracles to police; i.e., expected to speak when prodded, then punched for it, regardless of the answer (to maintain the status quo against nature as monstrous-feminine). The public understanding of demonic art and the animal world in relation to workers, then, becomes something to constantly demonstrate and promote; i.e., one which—through different individual responses to it as a living, plastic (organic, malleable) thing—collectively fosters sex positivity as a countercultural, artistic, emotionally/Gothically intelligent and empathetic movement. When examined in hindsight, this parallel movement indicates an ongoing iconoclastic presence—a counteractive, opposing creative force whose various demonic members can transform the material world. The toll is a heavy one, if only because those loaded with Promethean knowledge are outed not simply as insane, but as demonic, “possessed” whistleblowers: Mephistopheles temping Faust!

Apart from demons, I want practitioners of Gothic Communism to employ a commune of Gothic egregores (a cryptomimetic group of ghosts as literal “ghost stories,” the pun being that each tells a different story about the same event in the material world; e.g., Rashomon, above, 1950). These, in turn, tie to our main theories (the Four Gs) as needed, mid-synthesis; i.e., to commune with the reimagined past as useful towards liberating ourselves from sex worker abuse, hence the entire planet. This forbidden sight (and its breaking of Capitalist Realism) starts in how we see popular media and people in relation to one another under the same brutal system; it includes making monsters ourselves (our camp seizing the means of production and reuniting with our alienized labor). Gothic Communism, then, is a process of detection made by inquiring minds who playfully expand their imagination with monstrous-feminine language; i.e., by using it as a kind of “educated guess” about the world. So does the detective grow informed by things, which the elite confidently describe as “mere lies”: using them to detect things that are normally forbidden to the everyday observer by state cryptonymy!

This makes Gothic Communists detectives of the beleaguered, under-attack sort—whose constant, vigilante mode of engagement with their ambivalent surroundings “ask” questions from moment to moment; i.e., in their damsel-to-whore heads that overwhelm them, the prose slowing things down to a phenomenological crawl during the mask party as a socio-ludic metaphor (the danger disco) populated with devil-in-disguise (whose disguise pastiche goes both ways, during oppositional praxis); e.g., the Tech-Noir “danger disco” scene from The Terminator playing in literal slow-motion.

Face-to-face with someone potentially dangerous, time stands still to extend the drama of whether or not the heroine and audience actually are in danger—both from the mask-wearing lothario, but also to capture the sheer intensity of going outside one’s comfort zone by “summoning” demons to begin with (often wearing masks that we’re waiting to see if they’ll take off to prove their authentic or inauthentic nature; or, in the case of the terminator or serial killers, is their actual face as an authentic infiltrator)! That’s the beauty and danger of camp!

It bears repeating, then, how Radcliffe’s demons weren’t even magical, but more the highway banditti in a mask or the false preacher courting the damsel in bad faith. Simultaneously gifted and cursed with “forbidden” knowledge—i.e., as something to teach and learn through subversive art, golems and sex dolls—the ballroom blackguard raises questions that, when asked by a sensitive soul, might save your life, but also drive you wild in parallel calculated risk!

If only for catharsis and survival, wouldn’t anyone wish to learn that kind of skill? To place “torture” in quotes, we offer our bodies to be ravished in ways that, per Radcliffe’s fictions (onto raunchier ones then and now), we might expose state hypocrisies with and push towards a happier world among the shadows; i.e., a pedagogy of the oppressed relating to shared trauma as uneven but nevertheless the “glue” (so to speak, below) that holds us together in times of crisis; e.g., rape play during ludo-Gothic BDSM teaching us how not to harm others while acting out cathartic consent-non-consent fantasies! To do a ritual and have the Dark-Souls-style font grace the screen afterwards: DEMON SLAIN (which Metroidvania like Dark Souls ripped off from survival horror like Resident Evil, but I digress). Beaten like clay and mashed into Pygmalion’s wet dream, we Galatean whores acquire the taste for torture, then camp it through our own strange appetites; that’s what essence exchange is! “Releasing ‘demons’!”

(artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard; font generated by Rezuaq’s “FromSoftware Image Macro Creator,” 2022)

Per the settler-colonial model, the state canonically frames such campy things as alien and dark at home and abroad; i.e., as demonic essence “exchange” (sex and public nudism) opens up, its parallel channels subvert state promises of punishment and torture, and which—camp or not—always (re)unite us with alien things to some degree: ourselves and nature, which we belong to. Deities (demons) don’t just reside in our breast, Blake; we are demons! Let us consciously be of the Devil’s party and workshop, camping the canon to tear capital apart like Satan did to Faust offstage (or Ambrosio onstage)! Let that be our revenge, one worker at a time!

In turn, we golems and demon dolls acquire and consolidate power through exchanges that keep us doll-like, but animate-inanimate during ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., to be “raped” in ways we like—used, passed around, “raw dogged” like cum dumpsters incubating hellish delight and half-real revolutionary sentiment (“make me” vs “unmake me” being acts of play to reconcile unironic forms). The beauty of the golem, then, is that it cannot be destroyed or wholly corrupted to one side. If the state has the infinite, diabolical capacity to rape and destroy everything pursuant to profit against nature-as-alien, then monstrous-feminine camp likewise has the limitless power to forge new destinies away from profit; i.e., through their labor value as bottomless, their bodies and identities as plastic.

As such, the golem’s demonically regenerative and posthuman power lies in the state damaging the clay to assert its own fabricated “sovereignty” per nation creation myths that effectively demonize the clay to rape it inside the state of exception; i.e., limitless cruelty per moral panics and police violence endemic to a territory by state assignment; e.g., Israel vs Palestine, with the state minority invading a larger population to assert settler-colonial (thus false) claims of the other’s land, which they then proceed to back up with repurposed[28] anti-Semitic lies and force (Bad Empanada’s “October 7th: The Real History,” 2024).

In short, “home” becomes a free-fire zone for the colonizer to police the native group, who are themselves systematically caged and exterminated like vermin to an arbitrary assigning of who is and isn’t “native” (with the hopes that this labor force can be regenerated and exploited elsewhere for much the same reasons); i.e., the clay as expendable unto infinite growth, efficient profit and worker/owner division. Privatization forces state perception as “reality” onto menticided worker brains, but reality (and perception) are thoroughly plastic, as are rape, death and captive fantasies. They have to be or the state could not even begin to exert its control over workers, let alone install Capitalist Realism raping the whore (thus the slave) out of ethnocentric revenge.

Luckily for us, this parasitism goes both ways; i.e., performance and play inside liminal colonized territories on and offstage relay Gothic castles (and demons) that anisotropically reverse the flow of power by switching terror and counterterror using ludo-Gothic BDSM! It’s a good baseline to challenge state paucities of empathy antagonizing nature. To raise emotional/Gothic intelligence and class-cultural (and race) awareness, we fuck your minds, seeding them (and the Superstructure’s Wisdom of the Ancients) with new proletarian potential! Divorced from dogma, anything becomes possible, and jouissance reigns supreme. We unchain the night, unleashing Hell as our delicious thing to scare normies (those without nuance) with! Our best revenge is torturing you with the idea of our collective freedom: a world where workers have agency over their own bodies and labor tied to nature as a whole, and one where we can see and imagine more beauty unto the world around us that we don’t have to dominate, but live in harmony with as stewards. That is our revenge!

So come inside; make yourselves at home (or paint the outer walls with fresh coats of “paint”)! As such, extreme trauma calls for fantasies that address past forms of state coercion and abuse that, during ludo-Gothic BDSM, can recontextualize demonology in reverse. “Rape” enters quotes, highlighting state atrocities by demonstrating mutual consent and worker action towards catharsis: our daily habits constituting dialectical behavioral therapy through networks not founded on state fear and dogma demonizing nature to destroy it. Instead, we demons hook up to exchange robust, exquisitely “torturous” essence, thereby exposing the state as the instrument for all our yesterday’s greatest calamities!

(artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard; font generated by Rezuaq’s “FromSoftware Image Macro Creator,” 2022)

Such stages are liminal, shared with police forces fencing over a dualistic Numinous: Communist and palliative vs state dogma (e.g., queerphobia during Satanic Panic). And those in power discourage such inquiries and knowledge, wanting workers to fear and avoid demonic rituals and educators that undermine the status quo through their own mask-wearing practices (which we’ll delve into during Volume Three, Chapters Four and Five). Human curiosity is still difficult to entirely suppress, but the state canonically encourages these demonic investigations; i.e., to happen within a particular ghost of the counterfeit; re: the demonic trifecta of exquisite “torture.” Here, oppositional forms of demonic expression collect as “derelict”—seemingly abandoned, yet presented by their makers as “haunted,” silly or foreboding in ways that invite inspections unwelcome by the elite. To arrive at the truth, the derelict past must not be repeatedly explored, alone, but repeatedly reimagined by iconoclastic workers across space and time camping canonical torture with “exquisite.”

That’s the answer (not modernity and a better gun, magic pill[29] or another billionaire—ABAB): how we relate to and respect each other as a collective whole, not something to divide on a hierarchy of value (racial or otherwise); i.e., the Cartesian approach that leads to fascism and genocide, time and time again, but also conceals as it happens in all its forms right now. State illusions don’t work on those consciously of Hell (always in pain, but always in touch with the larger world capital is pimping in reactionary-to-moderate forms of predation: those who don’t know what pigs they are).

We’ve already outlined the basic procedure; re: the demonic trifecta of damsels, detectives and sex demons that Radcliffe canonized. Next, we’ll explore how to camp it at length by salvaging Radcliffe’s work (and her descendants; e.g., H.R. Giger), in “Exploring the Derelict Past”!

Onwards to “Exploring the Derelict Past (opening and ‘Radcliffe’s Refrain’)“!

---

Footnotes

[1] Lyriquediscorde writes,

In an interview (and also in the VH-1 special I mentioned) Ann revealed that the “Magic Man” was her then-boyfriend, band manager Michael Fisher, and that part of the song was an autobiographical telling of the beginnings of their relationship. (from Wikipedia) Michael was originally Heart’s guitarist. Ann followed Michael to Canada during the Vietnam War years so he wouldn’t get drafted. In 1974, Nancy joined the band later and Michael then became the band’s manager and sound engineer (ibid.).

Ideally we learn from real life when playing with demons; re: during calculated risk, learning from trauma in safer Radcliffean forms that we can respond to and mimic while synthesizing praxis ourselves; i.e., while going beyond the concerns of cis-het white women like Ann and Nancy Wilson while, in the same breath, listening to and learning from their own stories of survival: “missing white girl” syndrome.  Others are tired of selective triage favoring the biggest marginalized voice; i.e., we have to think of all workers, not just white women and children (Dreamboat Annie—more like “Are you okay, Annie?” amirite?)!

[2] While Junji Ito and similar supernatural, military-themed demons from Japan and neighboring countries’ Yokai and oni are frankly terrifying and abject par excellence, we won’t cover them, here (though may return to them in future close-reads).

[3] Fonda played a villain in Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)—out-of-character for him (source: Andrew McGowan’s “This Classic Western Turned a Beloved Hollywood Hero into a Vicious Monster,” 2024). Across from him, Charles Bronson (a real piece of work, known for his Deathwish revenge films) is the Gothic hero also transplanted to the Western retro-future that, however alien it seems to us, Fonda’s villain calls home (already a dead genre by the time Leone directed those and his operatic “spaghetti Western” “Man with No name” trilogy): white knight, black knight; good cop, bad cop; etc. Zeuhl and I watched it and Leone’s trilogy on the couch. We fucked in between movies (“as thick as a door,” comrade), and I loved the trilogy. Once Upon a Time was so boring I fell asleep—but Morricone’s music (reused for satirical effect in Joe Dante’s The ‘Burbs, 1989) was great.

Like Radcliffe (the Gothic version of Jane Austen, the latter author mocking the former), the Western is deeply aware of material struggles, but places them square-and-solely in the hands of white people; e.g., Max Mad: Fury Road’s (2015) white savior problem turning white women into white Indians punching up against sexist white men. This argument starts with Radcliffe’s hero/demon lover tropes, exemplified by the likes of Ludovico vs the evil Count Monti, from The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794); i.e., a pirate narrative that puts the lady-in-question in between a struggle over “booty.” It’s frankly the kind of thing Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1623) Act 4, Scene 6 alludes to when Hamlet is captured by pirates, and what William Goldman’s 1973 The Princess Bride makes fun of, with the Dread Pirate Roberts (a man-in-black to excite the ladies with).

In Gothic, rape is vicarious. Radcliffe knew the fairytale tropes well, and played around with men and women wearing white and/or black—her stories having their own kidnappings and adventure; i.e., usually in the periphery and told to the women afterwards to protect their virtue, less they swoon: a damsel in distress is a horny damsel in distress (the confusion of pleasure and pain, mid-vaso-vagal response, aka “the deer in highlights”).

(source: Adam Frost and Zhenia Vasiliev’s “How to Tell You’re Reading a Gothic Novel – in Pictures,” 2014)

It’s vital, then, to try and remember that Radcliffe’s stories weren’t just hypercanonical, but neo-conservative and borrowing from older stories already done to death by the time she started mining them for parts; e.g., the trope of the old ruin that might have banditti in it (the old medieval residence haunted by trauma and Scooby-Doo-style impostors, but more violence); i.e., Radcliffe’s contributions to Gothic being the idea of a female hero, presenting women as naturally curious but needing to be armored by vaso vagal syncope responses (re: swooning, above) and total-to-partial amnesia* while exploring the Gothic castle, lest any “close” encounters turn her into a whore (synonymous with criminal and corpse)!

*Her stories are generally found documents written after the adventure is over with; i.e., a bildungsroman (coming-of-age story) and epistolary novel, similar to Frankenstein or Dracula [1897]: the novel-of-letters veering away from the novel-of-manners Austen would lionize, after the Gothic craze had begun to die out (she wrote Northanger Abbey [a Gothic parody] in 1803 but would publish her first novel, Sense and Sensibility, in 1811).

In true canonical Gothic, Radcliffe was a charlatan pimp (madame, or female brothel owner) whose haunted whore houses upheld status-quo norms in subjugative demon language—with her whores (always non-magical and male) belonging to illegitimate neo-medieval feuds and bloodlines; e.g. the Black Knight, banditti, or false preacher being functionally no different than the witch, goblin or vampire: something to summon, exhibit, and banish to the closet, frontier or brothel again through dream-like monomythic force (encouraged, in part, because she was a woman and subject to fiercer criticism than Matthew Lewis was (re: Groom); i.e., despite being a gay man, he could “go stealth”/rely on his privilege as an MP but also the time’s in which he lived having no overtly scientific homophobic language (outside of sodomy as a legal term borrowed from medieval times) to dodge queer persecution (though he was still facing it; re: Broadmoor).

To that, and in times of powerlessness and boredom, who doesn’t want their life to unfurl with the awesome power of demons and their dark desire and revenge? Just exercise enough caution when using them that you don’t “pull a Radcliffe”; I’ve been kettled by enough token whores to know the difference. Moreover, per virgin/whore, such binaries also apply to men/male parties antagonized by capital, and really any sex, gender or identity you could think of. Capital gentrifies and decays all in service to profit, effectively starting with Radcliffe—a warmonger and proto TERF—hiding behind the veneer of white feminine virtue: the whispers of the middle class and a succubus for the elite to pacify the rising middle class with (especially its female population: “By 1800, 45% of women in England could read. […] This created a demand for a new type of literature. Radcliffe filled this demand by writing a novel women could actually relate to because they saw themselves in the heroine; source: Tufts Libraries Omeka, 2017).

In trying to legitimatize the middle class through Neo-Gothic fakeries, Radcliffe punched down against a variety of groups abjected off into a “black sphere,” including Lewis and his ilk. This includes actual systemic abuse decaying into itself, but also racialized/religious minorities and sex workers treated, by and large, as one-in-the-same. That means a woman of “loose morals” (e.g., a succubus, witch or vampire) is treated with a similar degree of fear and prejudice that a black knight is—especially if she’s a monster queen! Radcliffe, as we shall see, was a cop and a coward/recluse.

[4] I should add that “grace” and Heaven are Christian ideas; i.e., of afterlife and reward for good behavior that, under Capitalism, translates to a Protestant, aka Puritan work ethic. Work to is holy and deserving of rewards in the afterlife, versus Judaism, which doesn’t have any Hell to speak of; i.e., nothing to threaten its practitioners while the same way that Christians do (to my knowledge, anyways). Similar to golems, Jewish treatment of demons is classically neutral (versus Zionism, which Christianizes Judaism to adopt a white, Western approach to the religion, which—apart from alienating non-Western ethnic groups and orthodoxies within the larger culture not attached classically to a nation-state body/settler-colonial project—also demonizes Arabs for Christians).

[5] Or their ward; e.g., the maidenly princess possessed by the spirit of the whore begging to be stabbed, mid-combat: Dragon’s Crown‘s [2013] vampire supping on maidens, turning them wicked and requiring the hero execute them. The police violence is the main attraction to a given witch hunt, any outward beauty regarding the whore (and token cop) is just icing on the cake. Such lies are often sugar-coated all the same, sweetening the (sex)pot: to beguile with honey as much as raw strength or brains (and to have himbos and herbos underestimate the whore-in-question; i.e., the Western myth that sexy = dumb but also incapable of fighting back).

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

[6] In Gothic, truth and falsehood are not separate, but go hand-in-hand (often paradoxically at the same time); in Communism, development is a matter of war in terms of class, culture, and race. As Sun Tzu put it, “all war is based on deception,” Gothic Communism combines paradox and deception, during oppositional praxis, to synthesize deceiving our opponents, the elite, while pressing our demands and advantage. That’s the fundamental difference between Lewis and Radcliffe, and why one was radical and the other a moderate conservative.

This includes their monstrous output; i.e. what they made and summoned during the cryptonymy and abjection processes; re: power is often something to perform as a matter of disguise through poetic argument: costumes, masks and roles, but also inversions of what is normally concealed inside us turned inside-out (and vice versa; e.g., armor as skin): existing in holistic, liminal, anisotropic, ergodic, concentric duality. Such is the whore’s lot, thus the demon having its revenge. We dictate our terms not in the neat, clean binaries of civil discourse, but in daily life’s modern chaos; i.e., as fought in/with the dark, uncertain, medieval territories of risk and excitement threatening radical change pushing towards future development and true self-absorbed by state argument trapping nature in older brothels with borders.

Developing Communism through Gothic poetics—re: by liberating sex work with iconoclastic art—demands as much a waiting game, then; i.e., one that implores gentle patience (discipline) amid overwhelming anxiety (simulated weakness) as overt aggression (simulated strength) forged within pacts of hellish impudence (calculated risk). All have a part to play from moment to moment, a Faustian exchange as much a statement of rest and repose as reaping and revenge, while still weaving elaborate deceptions that aid us through darkness visible. Yes, there’s torture, assassins and death by Snu-Snu dreaming of revenge and changing the status quo in relatable forms (e.g., Princess Ileana’s death scene or the Bride spitting on Frankenstein’s monster from Creature Commandos [2025] riffing on Shelley’s infamous Quest); it relies on creativity as a guerrilla, counterterrorist device to offset state monopolies (and other tools).

(artist: Kay Marie)

[7] Demons constitute a kind of “aggressive haunting” whose rememory process involves survived abuse as much as activism. I’ve already written about this per The Night House and my own abuse: re: “One Foot out the Door; or, Playing with Dolls to Express One’s Feeling Undead” (2024).

[8] The bad BDSM, here, being performed by Clancy-motherfucking-Brown, a man who since 1986 at least (with The Highlander‘s Kurgan), has been making a meal out of classic kayfabe tropes surviving into the 20th century and beyond: “We’ve come to be the rulers of you all!”

[9] When I see the Smile demon, I see Jadis, smiling at me from the dark, telling me I’m worthless. But the reality is, their entire sense of self operates through bad BDSM and unironic harm/exploitation—without which, their life has zero meaning: addicted to abuse to feel strong by having total power over others (for more on this topic, refer to “Back to Jadis’ Dollhouse” and the other “Jadis” sections, from “Transforming Our Zombie Selves“). As their victim, the novelty quickly wore off (re: “Setting the Record Straight; My Ex’s Abuse of Me: February 17th, 2022“); but for Jadis, my misery became the center of their entire universe. “All [their] thought [was] bent on it.”

[10] “That is power!” as Thulsa Doom would say to Conan; i.e., “power” (for abusers) means the ability to get people to self-harm for your pleasure. It’s a very cult-like mentality and dates back to the oldest forms of organized religion and government (city-states prior to nation-states and corporations): high-control, vertically-arranged forms of power where those at the top use structural advantage to alienate and cannibalize members of the perceived in-group with; i.e., to suggest someone is of the out-group, then eat them alive and have the others watch: “You could be next!”

[11] A bit of a crude, kayfabe, Hawthornean knock on the 1960s Flower Children of the Free Love movement (and the Civil Rights movement—with Conan, a white superman, assassinating the black leader of a rebel faction associated with a paganized stigma animal, the snake, to rescue the white king’s wayward daughter in the process). Howard wrote for the same Weird Magazine that Lovecraft did, and both men were incredibly bigoted/prone to abjecting the flaws of their cultures off onto the monsters in their work. If such work has been camped over the years, it’s because the entire monomyth—and by extension, Nazis and Commies—are incredibly campable as a matter of cryptonymy.

[12] As seemingly random as the falling helmet in Otranto (the falling sky) versus the heroine in that story running away from Lord Manfred. It’s a tangible abstraction we can use think about less-tangible things (the Capitalocene).

[13] I mean “clean up” quite literally in this case: Jadis’ father left behind a trailer that was filthy from years of him smoking cigarettes and slowly drinking himself to death—a disaster area we spent weeks cleaning up ourselves because Jadis didn’t want to trouble the landlady about it. I did it for Jadis, but the entire process was thoroughly degrading and oddly Herculean; i.e., the Florida heat meant we could only work for part of a given day then have to go home, and we kept taking hour-long drives from Gainesville and Jacksonville and back again to tackle a mess that the landlady didn’t help with but kept poking us to do it so she could flip the place and resume making money (the old leach; where’s Raskolnikov when you need him>). There were seemingly endless pile of garbage and filth that hand to be gagged and hauled to the side of the road, and years of odds-and-ends horded among all of that, which had to be separated and divided into carloads we took back, one day at a time, then organized further at home: thirty years’ worth of paystubs and mementos, which I handled on my own while Jadis grieved if their bedroom.

And while I understand that part of it, and did back then, it likewise became an excuse that pushed the majority of the labor onto me for other events unrelated to their father’s death; i.e., Jadis would flip the bill and drive the rental truck, and I was the proverbial strong back paid in pennies; e.g., a tactic Jadis would use on me and Tim—their ex, moving in with us when Jadis bought a new car largely without consulting me, but also a new condo paid a year in advance, in cash (about $60,000 for both purchases, which was about 2/3s of the lump currency their father left them, not including the $800 a month in dividends from his stock portfolio)—when we had to clean out the place we were currently living at because it, too, was filthy with black mold from mismanagement by the property managers and lease signer putting up with it. Like father, like daughter!

Like before, we took at least a week driving back and forth (this time in a shiny new car) to Jadis’ new place (this time with my name on the lease); i.e., slowly moving things back and forth during hour-long drives, and ending the trip with a final afternoon renting a moving truck to handle the big stuff, then a final clean and dinner with Tim. Jadis even made us clean out the broken dishwasher filled with years’ worth of unspeakable gunk and mold, effectively polishing a turd (the machine was well-and-truly broken) just so the place would look spotless for the landlord’s property manager. Same place, different mess, and Jadis used us for labor to appease the owner class and respect said owners’ passive income (and enjoyed watching me get angry about it in front of Tim—a process called triangulation).

In turn, if I complained—which I did, especially about that fucking dishwasher—then Jadis would remind me that I wasn’t on the lease and they were assuming all the risk (even though I had asked repeatedly during our relationship to be put on said lease), despite me reminding them that I still lived in apartment with them, thus was subject to the same violations Jadis was both apologizing for and grumbling about to me as their captive audience. If they complained, it was ok, but if I did it, it was tantamount to “treason” and something they would punish by pulling away their love and support. Furthermore, we still didn’t get our security deposit and Jadis quietly paid the property manager when said manager wrote to us, saying the mold was our fault and charging us for the inevitably professional cleaning (which I said they would do when protesting the extended cleaning Jadis was putting us through)!

Keep in mind, I had already repeatedly asked Jadis to give me more involvement regarding the financial decisions between us—meaning with their father’s money becoming something we both could have a say in, as romantic partners living under the same roof—but they reneged on that promise after I helped with their father’s place and the move to the nicer neighborhood; i.e., after I had helped patch things up with Tim and he had moved in with us and everything was settled and organized (which I did all of, Jadis allergic to organizing anything and preferring to literally let things pile up). At that point, Jadis told me that my earlier efforts in helping manage money and groceries and various expenses (and emotional support regarding Tim) actually weren’t appreciated, and that Jadis hadn’t actually meant any of that when they said it (while putting down Tim back then, only to say Tim was good and I wasn’t, later on). They stopped having sex with me and started to say where we bought our food and what, taking away any agency I formerly had and pushing me out of the relationship altogether.

Of course, sex was just something Jadis used to mollify me—i.e., “have sex with mommy to calm them down,” which I did because I was afraid of their anger and the fact that I wasn’t on the lease in the middle of Covid. Needless to say, by the end of it, Jadis’ hand was played; i.e., “the fire’s in their eyes their [intentions were] pretty clear” so I made like Michael Jackson and beat it (off to Cuwu’s, who helped me get to my mother’s, but not before fucking my brains out).

Note: This is only one example of the everyday kinds of stupid, manipulative bullshit I dealt with from Jadis throughout our entire relationship. If you want the full rundown, refer to “Setting the Record Straight Again; Accounting My Ex’s Abuse of Me to Another Victim_August 30th, 2022” for an exhaustive list of anything and everything Jadis did to mess with my head. Basically Jadis is living proof of Angela Carter’s (admittedly problematic statement) that “any free woman in an unfree society will always be a monster” (vis-à-vis De Sade as someone she defended); i.e., like Portia from The Merchant of Venice manipulating everyone around her, except Jadis targeted vulnerable marginalized parties weaker than themselves—in a nutshell, aping the colonizer to have an imaginary revenge “against” her evil mom/absentee dad; re: Karen Newman writing in “Portia’s Ring: Unruly Women and Structures of Exchange in The Merchant of Venice” (1987):

Here Portia is the gift-giver, and it is worth remembering Mauss’s description of gift-giving in the New Guinea highlands in which an aspiring “Big Man” gives more than can be reciprocated and in so doing wins prestige and power. Portia gives more than Bassanio can ever reciprocate, first to him, then to Antonio, and finally to Venice itself in her actions in the trial which allow the city to preserve both its law and its precious Christian citizen. In giving more than can be reciprocated, Portia short-circuits the system of exchange and the male bonds it creates, winning her husband away from the arms of Antonio.

Contemporary conduct books and advice about choosing a wife illustrate the dangers of marriage to a woman of higher social status or of greater wealth. Though by law such a marriage makes the husband master of his wife and her goods, in practice contemporary sources suggest unequal marriages often resulted in domination by the wife. Some writers and Puritan divines even claimed that women purposely married younger men, men of lower rank or of less wealth, so as to rule them (source).

This is exactly the kinds of power abuse I, a trans woman, endured under Jadis’ “care,” and the sort that I reference in my own books; e.g., from my Tolkien essay, “Concerning Rings, BDSM and Vampires; or the State’s False Gifts, Power Exchange, and Crumbling Homesteads Told through Tolkien’s Nature-Themed Stories” (2024) from Volume One. In short, I had written about such abuse for years, and though Jadis wasn’t going to abuse me because they deceived me while appearing good and just. Lord Sauron, anyone? —Perse

[14] Originally called “Goth Nick and Goth Chick” (a name I admittedly came up with while Jadis was randomly driving us around Gainesville), which after seven episodes we eventually renamed to “Dreadful Discourse.” I designed the posters for it, and produced everything myself. Jadis sat in, and I tried to come up with cool ideas to talk about, but I had too much to say and them too little, and eventually things stalled and stopped:

(artist: Persephone van der Waard; source: YouTube)

[15] For a good summary of Zeuhl’s bullshit, refer to my footnote on them in “The Eyeball Zone; or, Relating to the Gothic as Commies Do” (2024). Such things are seldom purely “bad,” but exist somewhere in the confusing and dangerous (thus exciting) middle.

[16] “Put your mysterium tremendum in my Uncanny Valley!” Jadis would say, during sex. A lady they were not (and I loved that about them)! Abusers work with fractions, being deliberately 70/30, or 60/40 good/bad before revising that arrangement to lead their prey around by the nose. If such things are mutually agreed upon, that’s one thing. But Jadis’ bargains were always Faustian, thus mendaciously predatory.

[17] The enormity and suddenness of such storms I likened, with Jadis, to the moon from Majora’s Mask, which I escaped by refusing to play along with Jadis’ bullshit; re (from “Setting the Record Straight; My Ex’s Abuse of Me: February 17th, 2022):

I liken it to Majora’s Mask. In that game, the villain, Majora, curses the moon to fly into Hyrule. While the player can return the moon to its original position using a magic song, the residents of Hyrule are still trapped inside a cruel time loop. Faced with their impending doom, they stew in their own fear.  The world around them slowly falls apart—not just once, but over and over and over again. It degrades their sense of reality until nothing but madness remains.

Majora uses this madness to control the Hyrulians through fear, distorting their very perception of reality. This mind-prison is what Link ultimately escapes. The paradox, here, is the method: He doesn’t escape by playing the song and stopping the moon. He escapes by exposing the tyrant controlling the moon to begin with.

Like Link, I could not escape by playing the song. Every time Jack threatened me with anger or Instant Breakup, they were abstracting the consequences of my actions so much that I felt like the floor was eggshells: Any wrong strep might send me hurling into the void. I felt the shadow of the falling moon in their words. A glance, a heavy sigh, a tapping of the foot, a laborious roll of the eyes. They had mastered me. I thought love through win out, that Jack would change if only I played the song enough. But as our living conditions improved, my happiness worsened. They began to reject me, doting on Tim, instead.

I felt trapped. If I confronted them, they would throw the moon at me. If the moon came, I would play the song to save myself. And the whole cycle would repeat. So now I hid from the falling moon and became what they wanted me to be: their little artist boy. I did not please them, but they seemed oddly content with this arrangement. I knew it wouldn’t last, but I couldn’t say for sure when it would end. Terror was everywhere and madness reigned within me.

[…] After we returned home, I was sitting at my studio, a computer on a table facing the door. Jack was leaving the house and glowered at me. They were clearly bothered. So I asked them if they were ok. They said they were fine and asked me if *I* was fine. I hesitated and realized my time had come: I would summon the moon. I would invoke Jack’s wrath (source).

The sad reality of rape is how part of it, and the madness associated with it, always stays with the victim—and even more complicated, the feelings exposed to said victim aren’t strictly “bad”; i.e., if they’re able to control their feelings through play. This isn’t natural, but taught, and sometimes lessons teach best hard. My ludo-Gothic BDSM was wrought through harmful heat and pressure.

For example, I loved the Radcliffean feelings of powerlessness in Alien, which had drawn me to Jadis, and whose dominion over me I would resurrect in “perceptive,” healthy forms that would open not just my eyes and my mind, but those of other victims healing from rape, too. Nothing is more frightening to bullies than a woman who has built herself back up—who holds the storm in her hands, the Aegis pushing state abuse towards the guilty parties not once, but as a matter of fractal recursion! Each one becomes a witness to ask why she does (or doesn’t) smile: Lewis’ Bleeding Nun!

To heal from rape, you must camp it by drawing lines in the sand, but doing so by no means precludes intensity. Indeed, that’s the best part! “‘Rape’ me, you bastard!” This might sound alien to many, but it’s something anyone can understand; i.e., like anyone who might play Majora’s Mask, a videogame that Nintendo gloriously sold to children. Except, it’s not a “slippery slope” if the methodology is made to raise emotional/Gothic intelligence and class, culture and race awareness (the whole point of ludo-Gothic BDSM); and sooner or later, the victim becomes a “victim” who learns their own limits/finds cuties to play with who won’t harm them (remember your aftercare, babes). Pick your poison, mine is dark mommy doms, and frankly I’m spoilt for choice!

[18] Or Hamlet’s father’s ghost, saying “I’ve seen shit, my son!” before motivating Hamlet to kill his whole family! Fun!

[19] And if you think she’s the only one, watch Cameron’s Titanic (1997)—a box office smash about a giant boat and love triangle where a white middle-class woman tortures an immigrant to death because, in Cameron’s words, “the script needed it.” And millions of like-minded housewives agreed, loving the film for its extended torture scene (and because Rose lets Jack go even though she says she won’t)! The reveal at the end is “And I would gotten away with it if it wasn’t for you meddling kids!” but “I remember when I was young and loved him…” Render unto Caesar…

[20] The above image being my great uncle’s antique bed, which Cuwu and I fucked in after a trip on the road. Doing so wasn’t automatically vindictive on our part; but when I learned that my uncle was mistreating his adopted trans son, Cuwu and I sought revenge—fucking on my uncle’s guest bed: “You have to be quiet or the Master will hear! Now fuck me harder!” Calculated risk isn’t just an act, and half-real, it sits on and offstage during ludo-Gothic BDSM making demons during love!

(artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)

[21] The original funded out-of-pocket by a wealthy patron, knowing the movie had a rape scene with a tree in it, but also nonstop torture and the fetishized mutilation of women (and Gothic Romance tropes; e.g., the gravedigging scene). It’s paradoxically the most openly torturous film, but also my favorite (alongside Alvarez’ 2013 revisit) because it demonstrably has satire during the torture; Army of Darkness is much more blindly celebratory of such things/the male hero as Quixotic (re: “Valorizing the Idiot Hero“). Exploitation and liberation occupy the same space over time.

[22] And despite being a Satanic atheist (re: “I, Satanist; Atheist: A Gothicist’s Thoughts on Atheism, Religion, and Sex,” 2021), I have some experience with Baptists in real life; i.e., my twin brother once dated the daughter of a Baptist minister, wherein we spent an entire Thanksgiving at her sister’s house. The family had us over—the husband basically a blue-collar man like Ashley Williams, and his wife the usual kind of victim (female, white) that suffers under such bondage—the lot of them only too happy to tell us we weren’t welcome. For instance, the sister told Hans, my twin, that she prayed to Jesus every night that he might kill Hans and liberate her sibling from “living in sin”/prevent a marriage she didn’t approve of. And one of her daughters—a little girl in a white angelic gown with long brown hair—walked up to me, and seeing me with long hair said, without missing a beat: “You’re going to Hell.” Never underestimate the power of dogma, babes—specifically its uncanny ability to encourage young women to submit as often as rebel (essentially an inversion of Hawthorne’s Pearl, from The Scarlet Letter). Also, double standard: Jesus had no hair, you little fuck!

[23] Again, Lewis’ Matilda castrated Ambrosio to critique the status quo, the rockstar priest being ripped apart, the evil prioress beaten to a pulp, and the abbey burned to the ground. Jo-Jo humor and total fakery aside, Lewis was much more biting in his critique than Radcliffe and their mutual imitators were; i.e., he set the whore free to punish men, then let her stay free (Matilda survives at the end, being the genderqueer Devil-in-disguise). Slay, queen!

[24] With Bunny supporting me after I was getting dogpiled by cis and GNC sex workers on Twitter (re: “Setting the Record Straight, Transmisia Experience: 5/26/2023“), telling me:

I’m so sorry this is all happening, you’re handling it all with grace and I’m so proud of you for standing up for yourself. It sucks that being online comes with so much miscommunication that makes it easier for people to accuse others of things that they misunderstood or failed to mention beforehand. You’re a wonderful person! Some people just aren’t as comfortable as they pretend to be initially and they won’t say anything until it’s too late and that’s ENTIRELY on them, not you. Especially when it comes to people CONTINUING to say that you’re a wonderful person and that they support you and everything you stand for speaks VOLUMES about who you are as a person especially when they feel like you’ve “made them uncomfortable” by trying your best to communicate professionally.

In other words, Bunny got back and “gotchu, babe.” They’re a colossal sweetie, so much so that I’ve painted them for years (they were my first cover model, too—August 20th, 2023), but also defended them in kind when they were bullied. Revolution is a two-way street in more ways than one; i.e., workers punch up against the elite and help each other up when the elite’s proponents push us down (“And why do we fall, Master Bruce?”): “Dayman, fighter of the Nightman, she’s a master of karate and friendship!”

[25] All cops are bad, including those who make them; re: “impunity is the apex of privilege,” but also pandering and willful ignorance; i.e., id Studios making the exact kinds of loud, cruel and dumb, “die by the sword” revenge power fantasies that white moderate-to-reactionary straight men drool over while punching down (I’m speaking from experience, here; re: “Those Who Walk Away from Speedrunning” also dealing with the bigotry of the shooter community present in Doom). As fascism rises, state actors threaten their base to torture them with the idea of “total loss”; i.e., the ability to even play fancy computer games becoming canon vis-à-vis the target audience’s usual privileges. So does the middle class abject the usual victims of state copaganda in-game as something to defend out-of-game; re: Gamergate revived, making the ludic Gothic respectable again during eco-fascism. They become false rebels, turning Satan into a Spartan cop punching his evil half, onstage and off.

[26] Which linguistically alludes to genocide through the coerced usage happening through force, including assimilated peoples who were killed by the state regardless if they followed the rules or not; i.e., the colonial binary’s double standard under genocide described facetiously as relocation, “progress,” or other settler-colonial cryptonyms.

[27] “Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it – when it exists for us as capital, or when it is directly possessed, eaten, drunk, worn, inhabited, etc., – in short, when it is used by us. Although private property itself again conceives all these direct realisations of possession only as means of life, and the life which they serve as means is the life of private property – labour and conversion into capital” (re: “Private Property and Communism, 1844).

[28] As Bad Empanada argues in “The New Anti-Semitism: The Arab Global Conspiracy” (2025) and which I agree with, a priori, in my own “On ‘Anti-Semitism’ versus ‘Antisemitism’” (2024); i.e., the pursuit of forbidden knowledge is a dualistic, dialectical-material arrangement of “legitimacy” and “illegitimacy” as things to assign in pursuit of other things that lead us away from state-fueled hauntological positions of ignorance.

That being said, Bad Empanada certainly isn’t perfect—and frankly has said some really stupid and problematic things that have seriously pissed me off (while also just being flat-out wrong about these things; re: “There’s no such thing as ‘sex doctors,’ Jesus Christ” and “those who talk about sex like it’s their main interest should be dealt with. Make it illegal again*”)—but he and I are in complete agreement about one thing: that anti-Semitic conspiracy and myth can be used to affect more than Jewish people while presenting Jewish people as total victims in bad faith; i.e., with him saying this vis-à-vis Arabs, and me saying it vis-à-vis other Holocaust survivors (than Jewish people) like the Dutch, but also queer people, witches (of any gender or sex), or people of color besides just Arabs.

*See: “Understanding Vampires: ‘What Is (Problematic) Love?’; or, Positions of Relative Ignorance to Relative Clarity,” 2024).

In short all oppressed groups can be oppressed in the same flexible and imbricating persecution networks and unify to recognize that against a common foe: the elite, but also their tokenized lapdogs acting like only certain people can be oppressed, and furthermore that some special people can be so essentially oppressed, they can do no wrong (re: Jews and Zionism). Jews’ feelings are valid, but only until they knowingly facilitate worker division, thus genocide. The same goes for any marginalized group and normativity said group might endorse, when push comes to shove; i.e., whether through desperation and/or convenience, betrayal is betrayal, and we must come together to see all parties oppressed differently under capital liberated as one. We must or we will not survive. State shift will see to that, because capital is incompatible with life.

[29] With force-feeding being tantamount to rape; e.g., “Red solo cup, you fill me up…” (Toby Keith’s “Red Solo Cup,” 2011); i.e., putting something through our various holes/penetrating us and going into our bodies without our consent to knowingly cause us harm for profit—ending hunger strikes, for example (an ancient form of carceral protest), but also invasive surgeries and mad medicine (a concept comparable to mad science, and one we don’t have time to explore here, but is one my book series touches on elsewhere; e.g., exhibit 1a1a1h6b1 from Volume Zero).