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.
Picking up where “Demons and Dealing with Them; or Abandonment, Dark Worship and Vengeful Sacrifice When Dissecting Radcliffe” left off…
Afterword: In Measured Praise of the Great Enchantress (feat. Ann Radcliffe, Sailor Moon, The Ronin Warriors, and Harmony Corrupted)
“That’s hard to say, sir! They’re each outstanding in their own way!”
—Greg Marmalard, Animal House
Before “Call of the Wild” (the last and most truncated chapter in the Demon Module), a final note on Ann Radcliffe; or rather, a note on her “ghost” as someone to compliment: a theoretical likeness of the actual person, to which we’re camping other Radcliffean egregores by using the same devices the historical Radcliffe relied on, but differently than she herself used them (or even other people we’ve discussed camping her ghost, as well; re: Ridley Scott). So, the compliments I’m paying to “Radcliffe,” here, are as much to her potential to be camped; meantime, the criticism I’ve already lodged against the historical auteur and her actual literary output (e.g., “On the Supernatural in Poetry”) remain very much in effect!
And yes, yes, I know Scott just sliced Radcliffe’s likeness to bits (aka, a strawman—or strawwoman, in this case), but I wanted to conclude her role in things with a conciliary effort; i.e., like the flowers David lays on Shaw’s grave in Covenant, it’s possible for me to admire Radcliffe; re: despite having just sliced her up for spare parts: a much ado about nothing I reverse for its praxial value in our favor’s death theatre! If the boys never died, then neither did Radcliffe! “Rise, Radcliffe; rise and do my bidding as my willing slave”:
Now I know what it’s like to be
Inside the city of the dead
All I think of is breaking free (Manilla Road’s “Lost in Necropolis,” 1983).
Fucking oath, my zombie queen; let’s rock, and do it “David Lo Pan Style” (2012)! It’s a vibe! From Hell and back, there’s so… much… gloomth!
To it, Ann Ward “Radcliffe” is someone I probably don’t give enough credit, but also am admittedly hesitant to laud with too many accolades; i.e., she’s already called the “Great Enchantress,” even if the people doing it unironically have, I suspect, their noses permanently wedged up her fat asscrack (see: above)!
Putting the “fanny” in Annie, old Radcliffe seems to have single-handedly spawned an entire genre of fiction; i.e., doing so in ways that paved the way for future authors like Austen, Shelley and countless others (though none as important as the mother of Frankenstein). By arguably having prophetic elements in her own work that, unto itself seems to anticipate the rise of decay in future times (e.g. the American “justice” system is just slavery in disguise), Radcliffe shows the salvageable value of “rape” while ravishing the whore; re: during exquisite “torture” as something to pity and shame, discount, blame, gaslight, antagonize, and put cheaply to work/value judge while summoning inside capital as built on older systems of oppression the owner class has since hauntologized on a global scale (for maximum profit, thus rape of nature as monstrous-feminine): flushing out marginalized value for in-group supremacy (every Judas has their price; re: power over other workers, in some shape or form—with fascists stealing any way they can and moderates facilitating it provide their masters stay in power)!
A woman paid by a man is historically a whore; whores who assimilate like Radcliffe did would hate the ghosts of past whores and tokenize/triangulate against them (thus their own), then invariably gentrify and decay instead of talking to the demons/dead (often chained to their middle-class positions like Radcliffe was—i.e., not able to jump ship through stock manipulation/insider trading and old money/golden parachutes, but likewise unable to see any revolutionary value in challenging the system through rape play at large). Now with Radcliffe, the shoe’s on the other foot: she’s the ghost to pimp through play as we’ve been doing (rape play the act of playing with power imbalance haunted by older systemic traumas infused into newer ones).
Yes, canceling is something capital does to its victims, and Radcliffe is easy to blame. All the same, dead whores have their uses, even less alien ones; i.e., Radcliffe was someone, in life, who contributed to much of this conservatism by being sick with dogma, herself, and just as often couldn’t see beyond her own nose: not having access to some of the ideas that Shelley did; e.g., Galvanism—but also resisting ones she did have access to; re: Lewis, once introduced to our real-life Gothic heroine, was a rival to punch down against for the rest of her life (with WASP-y straight women and gay men being “natural” enemies).
Now, she’s our zombie; we “captured that motherfucker and she’s our cassette”; re: Sublime’s “Raleigh Soliloquy Pt. I” (1994)”:
She’s gonna get her second chance to suck my cock again. If she turns me down, she’s gonna go straight to Hell, she won’t pass “go,” she’ll never fuckin’ win. I don’t give a shit, as long as she sucks me off when I tell her, ’cause she’s my zombie (source: Genius).
And alright, alright—now that Radcliffe’s on our leash, let’s ease up on her corpse and sing it some praises, yeah? Time for treats (and maybe walkies, afterwards); “Here, girl! Does Scooby want a Scooby snack?”
(artist: Harmony Corrupted)
What I want to do here is celebrate the lady herself, but also—through Gothic Communism—give of examples of how to synthesize Radcliffe, a problematic woman, with other forms of media, during ludo-Gothic BDSM: James Daughton (from the epigram) for a second, but also the Japanese anime Sailor Moon and The Ronin Warriors (me looking ahead to “Call of the Wild,” but also Volume Three, where we talk about these things at length). Harmony Corrupted will likewise step in as usual, lending me a helping hand (and booty—with the Sailor Venus outfit, above, having a similar color scheme to Velma Dinkley’s own wonderfully 1960s Radcliffe pastiche).
Radcliffe was problematic (as Austen’s pastiche pointed out). True enough. Still, she was an undeniable pioneer in early Gothic fiction, and one whose value obviously goes beyond Frederic Jameson’s low esteem of her “boring and exhausted paradigm” (if only because said material conditions gave rise to tremendous visibility during the cryptonymy process, allowing for lots of smuggling and useful detection). Though not the first female Gothic author (re: Clara Reeve), Radcliffe laid important groundwork for much of what followed. Indeed, ludo-Gothic BDSM is rooted in her ideas, several of which were instrumental in my own work as a whole; re: the demon lover/demon BDSM, closed space, the Black Veil, the infernal concentric pattern, unmappable space, and the explained supernatural rooted in ruins to explore by a female/feminine heroine (Metroidvania in a nutshell).
(artist: Caspar David Friedrich)
All in all, your mileage may vary (especially if you’re not ace), but also, I don’t want to blame Radcliffe entirely for everything bad that followed her work (any more than we might entirely blame Marx’ homophobia for Stalin’s banning of homosexuality in Russia nearly a century later—from the 1840s and ’50s to 1933). Call me unusually charitable, but I’ve simultaneously attacked Radcliffe for being an annoying altar my academic peers worshipped at, yet found my own ways to appreciate and honor her valuable contributions. In drafting those concepts and putting them to practice, Radcliffe did so in ways that had their own vital wiggle room to work with. While unquestionably conservative and commercially-minded, she was nowhere near as greedy or developed in her bigotries as someone like Rowling is today, and her explorations of the imaginary past had room for legitimate queries despite being centered primarily around white straight people. She lived in 18th-century England; what do you expect?
To it, some people demonstrate “what you see is what you get.” Others, though, surprise you when you look “under the hood,” but also spend more time with these people; i.e., to have fallings out and reunions with; e.g., like me learning—pretty much out of the blue, today—that James Daughton, the actor who played Greg Marmalard from Animal House, played a small role in a short-lived show called V (1984) in the mid-’80s that, from 2011 to 2025, has developed a small-if-devoted fanbase called Visitor’s Fleet (think “Trekkies” but more niche and obscure):
(source: Visitor Fleet)
You don’t say?
Radcliffe is of a similar camp to Daughton, insofar as workers don’t reduce to a single function (an idea we introduced in part one of “Exploring the Derelict Past” with Nina Hartley and which we’ll now unpack here); i.e., someone who seems easy to judge by their surface, and yet who changes the more you learn about them.
To it, I’ve spent much time with Radcliffe throughout the years, finding my opinions changing a bit more positively and negatively than they have with someone like Lewis (and yet who I probably also have engaged more with than Lewis and his seminal novel, to be honest). Lewis is superior by virtue of me being queer and tending to side with him and prefer his sense of perceptive camp to Radcliffe’s canon, a priori, but there’s no denying that Radcliffe’s damsels in distress carry an intense appeal with me (always looking to get “ravished” in some shape or form): of me feeling like a trans whore, and having a place to summon and unpack that as someone ravishing who wants to be ravished; i.e., like a detective but also a damsel/whore being where she “shouldn’t” be but is; re: Radcliffe’s wheelhouse. Let’s pinch that off, shall we (God forgive me)?
In turn, Radcliffe’s refrain’s investigative trifecta, “damsels, detectives and sex demons,” involves “Gothic” as a poetic means of involvement and investigation, onstage and off, that Radcliffe’s cryptonymy encapsulates quite well. It might sound difficult to parse or conceptualize, so here’s me and Harmony talking about it:
Harmony: If you don’t mind, I was going to ask you something about these two questions, just to be sure I understood them correctly: Are mythical creatures considered monsters? Say, from Slavic or Greek/Roman myth? Regarding the other one, what falls into the category of Gothic poetics again?
Persephone: Poetics, at their most basic, are the act of creation (from poiesis, to create). This applies to creativity more broadly; i.e., as in “art and activism,” be it journalism, sex work, poetic verse, cosplay and/or modeling, etc, none of which are automatically separate/aren’t mutually exclusive. In short, anything you poetically create, from a dualistic standpoint; i.e., I have a thesis argument about that: “all heroes are monsters.” Ergo, all workers and their labor (and what they create with it) are monsters; i.e., as something the state will antagonize and try to exploit, but also what we can fight back with against their harmful versions: our demons, undead and animals (source: cz).
(artist: Harmony Corrupted)
To that, anyone can be a detective though monstrous expression, and any act we utilize as such the state will call, thus treat, as “monstrous” (violent, terrorist, other); i.e., in ways it will tokenize and police for profit, thus pimp and rape. In turn, Gothic heroines are little more than virgins/whores investigating the abuse of the state in and out of Gothic fiction treating nature as alien. But again, there is no outside of the text; re: whores are the oldest form of worker (apart from nomadic hunter-gatherers), and something the state has tried to pimp from time out of mind in ancient duality (with pimps being the oldest kind of worker exploitation/apologetics; i.e., worker “protection” arguments): Medusa, the demon whore, as the oldest kind of monster seeking revenge against the state making her (and nature) undead under Capitalism’s future apocalypses. The oldest forms of activism stem from her black market, thus the oldest attempts to escape slavery and systemic bigotry/persecution and police violence pimping nature as monstrous-feminine (from master/slave, anti-Semitism, racism, queerphobia, and tokenism at large).
Our revenge against these older abuses comes from breaking the monopoly by illustrating whores as guerrilla detectives from Hell; i.e., dead whores do tell tales, and speak with the full weight of Antiquity behind them; re: Marx’s “all dead generations” except gayer and more inclusive, flipping the script! Anyone can be a whore, thus a monster and detective, and in trying to investigate and police us, the system will collapse under its own weight. Forget Radcliffe, fascism is not known for its brains (and stems from older forms of media control during the 1930s; re: Hilter’s Hollywood imitating America’s). This being said, they are ruthless, unscrupulous and effective, what I like to think of as dangerous idiots.
Except they’ve also tried this before, many times, and the proof is in the pudding; e.g., Tesla, the Volkswagen of the 21st century (Led By Donkeys’ “Heil, Tesla,” 2025), but also hauntological regressions towards an imaginary half-real past that rely on slave labor and theft to defend the state (as police, secret or not, have done since the earliest city-states, like Rome, Sparta or Athens); re: to assign blame through DARVO/obscurantism and exploit/pimp labor and nature through lies and force (opiates for the masses/shock and awe/bread and circus/neoliberal shock therapy). We fight them asymmetrically and anisotropically in duality during liminal expression; i.e., by using the same aesthetics of power and death that Radcliffe did while doubling her through imperfect likeness: to liberate ourselves from state binaries (us versus them) and control, thus its moderate to reactionary agents (official or de facto/stochastic) during the canonical terror/counterterror process of abjection the original Radcliffe largely upheld/apologized for in practice (re: Groom and “On the Supernatural in Poetry”)!
Furthermore, if Trump and company squirm like worms when a Washinton bishop states the obvious/calls for mercy for the alien (HasanAbi’s “Bishop Calls Out Trump,” 2025), what do you think they’re gonna do when we whores are doing it, out in the streets among you? The elite don’t believe in anything but transaction and control for them; the more boundaries they try to install, the more we counter with ours, and the more it backs them into a corner… until finally the reality that capital automatically treats nature (and those of it) with violence will expose the naked horrors of the system: humanizing the harvest and outing the state through its daily operations as inhumane, barbaric, and ultimately unnecessary. No honor among thieves, and we demask our killers—per the cryptonymy process—through half-real dialectical-material context, ludo-Gothic BDSM and set/broken boundaries, mid-argument; re: self-reporting no matter how many masks one swaps out/has on at once. All conditioning happens through intended or emergent play as a means of anisotropic conditioning/exchange. We double them, thus blend in while standing out in the same places of concealment on the Aegis; i.e., a safe, half-real space of paradox/danger to teach ludo-Gothic BDSM under surveillance by hostile forces!
In doing so, the elite and their defenders (the middle class) will disappear as we dismantle the state—not through wishful-thinking but in thinking of wishes, wants and desires through demonic exchange and transformation as educational in an activist sense; i.e., as replaced with a second-nature emotional/Gothic intelligence and class, culture and race awareness that prevents profit, thus rape and genocide as endemic to state operations; re: the whore’s revenge, versus the pimp’s, that Radcliffe—despite her open aversion to demons and sex—actually explores and outlines rather well: Bruce Lee’s “I do not hit; it hits all by itself!”
All detectives are heroes and all heroes are monsters, and all monsters are heroes and detectives working in duality in ways you might not think of; e.g., Sailor Scouts, pushing Satanically up against glass ceilings (and other materials) while still getting to celebrate particular kinds of power exchange and transformation (alter egos)! Sluts aren’t just monsters, but gods, and gods are cool; re: because they have the forbidden power of sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll to change things by altering how we think through what we create, consume, enjoy and endorse. Because they’re what the state tries to monopolize, tokenize and control through poetic demon-summoning and -making rituals, this is easy enough to subvert; re: merely taking the time and energy needed to camp canon with our own labor as poetic expression (through puns, paradoxes, metaphors, oxymorons, what-have-you): our zombie Radcliffe whores!
(artist Persephone van der Waard)
“You’ve weaponized your friends against me!” Jadis once said; i.e., while I asked my friends for help in dealing with a bully who was constantly gaslighting me for my labor (emotional, sexual, physical and/or otherwise). As Radcliffe shows, exploitation and liberation happen inside these same stages of performance/power as performance that requires us outing ourselves to some degree; i.e., during the cryptonymy process reversing abjection with chronotopic and hauntological language: there is no revolution without risk but also demons to cryptomimetically dance with, good or not-so-good; re: me and Zeuhl, but also “Radcliffe”!
So once more unto the breach, babes! Slay the “state’s” pussy by taking control of your own bodies’ awesome power through monstrous-feminine expression as holistic levers of inclusive detection (to feature and play with); i.e., to transform in seemingly “magical” ways that, in truth, just involve costumes and their textualities and themes weaponized for workers by workers; re: like the Sailor Scout before/after standing up to fight the state’s bugbears “for love” (as genderqueer virgin/whore, Athena/Medusa, etc—exhibit 51b3, second image), but also like Radcliffe’s secret whore: we can all be the Great Enchantress, meaning alter egos to summon and speak truth to power during revolutionary cryptonymy! Sex, danger and safety aren’t separate, nor are detectives and whores mutually exclusive (the harmful idea that prostitutes can’t think being something the actual Radcliffe didn’t try to combat); re: “Not only can terror be employed as a weapon, but any weapon can become a weapon of terror: terror is a weapon, a weapon is terror, and no one agency monopolizes it.” Such are whores/the Medusa from time out of mind!
(artist: Velinxi)
As such, get restless (or nervous; re: Pat Benatar)! Use those “labyrinths of conjecture” (e.g., Andrew McInnes’ “Labyrinths of Conjecture: The Gothic Elsewhere in Jane Austen’s Emma[1]” 2016) at any moment, at the drop of a hat, to burst out into song (and/or sex) to take the state (thus our pimps) hysterically to task; i.e., thus have the whore’s revenge during the whore’s paradox (of rape): to go forth and conquer not as weaklings, but avenging angels in disguise doing the no-pants dance, letting off steam, churning cream and having fun of all manner of naughty/nice kinds! Masculine and/or (monstrous-)feminine, there’s endless ways to convey strength as demonic transformation and exchange (as we’ve seen with Radcliffe, and shall see with Sailor Moon, in a moment)!
So go wild and let no one stand in your way! Remind them that we are human and the state is not! And if it is your swan song then at least you went out with a Big Bang (attack)! But chances are, it’s a siren song to lure comrades in good faith to a noble cause: universal liberation from total enslavement; i.e., the state won’t stop until the world is dead because the state is incompatible with life, and it does so by using Capitalist Realism to make us ignorant to how labor exchange works, hence illustrating mutual consent with monsters (demons or otherwise)! They become indoctrinated to theft, which wages are—money designed to steal labor value through canonical (thus bad-faith) forms of monstrous expression/revenge; e.g., like John Maus’ “Real Bad Job” (2006) speaking of work as something that just “naturally sucks” (and making fun of that).
So does sex work operate as a profoundly ancient and powerful form of labor that can really suck/cause addiction and abuse in canonical, pimped forms (re: Radcliffe), but outside of those is about as liberating as you can get (re: “Radcliffe”); i.e., as Dr. Drew Pinsky puts it, “It’s not the drugs, it’s the context.” The same idea applies to sexuality and sex work/monsters not as a moral failing. Except, what he says about chemical drugs,
It’s the context and the relationship that humans have with chemicals that’s really an issue here. It’s not a good thing or a bad thing. It’s not a weak[ness] or a strength. It’s just a biological relationship that humans have in certain context[s] (source: Parvati Shallow’s “Dr. Drew Says ‘Addiction Is Not a Moral Failing,” 2014).
we apply to social-sexual labor exchange; re: during ludo-Gothic BDSM (the example I’m using for this section being Sailor Moon and The Ronin Warriors, next page). The disease isn’t humans or anything else that capital pimps through eco-fascism, but capital itself and its Realism making us sick as a species while slowly destroying the planet (thus ourselves):
(source tweet, Proud Socialist: January 24th, 2025)
Labor has infinite value, or the state wouldn’t bother exploiting us/stooping to DARVO and obscurantism to act “like” us (to blame the whore while raping her and acting like the rape victim and virgin/whore, themselves), and sex and monsters, Radcliffe shows, are policed through force more than anything else; i.e., we’re the territories they invade—through preferential mistreatment and axes of intersecting privilege and oppression—to get that sweet, sweet “punnai Dasani.” Despite reactionaries and moderates constantly treating whores like they’re stupid/can’t think for themselves, thus constantly need to be rescued, we don’t “need” their “help.” Indeed, we can become not so much “unfuckable” to them (e.g., “girls fart,” a poor animal crawling up our “Aegis” to die and horribly spread around us[2]) or too big to eat by dividing into pieces (re: Doom‘s Red-Scare tactic of marginalized in-fighting by a single Fifth Column marine playing white Indian; re: the Bay of Pigs and similar CIA initiatives besides the Vietnam War that inspired Doom through Aliens), but inedible; i.e., as whatever they eat of us spoils their appetite by giving them IBS from Hell: “How about some hot chocolate?” We burn in ways that purify us not in a fascist sense, but to transform and survive our enemies trying to pick up and eat us: “Eat this!”
To that, this brings us to the idea of camping Radcliffe through her most infamous refrain, but also most valuable idea; re: damsels, detectives and sex demons, but also the exploration of ruins by heroic characters at a young age/naked or at least exposed disposition with genderqueer potential outing what our enemies call “apophenic conspiracy” while pimping us (for Radcliffe, that’s Gothic heroines, of course, and straight ones that we have to camp like Lewis did; re: with Matilda being an early example of a “Sailor Scout” crossdresser[3]).
What does Ann Radcliffe have to do with Sailor Moon? So glad you asked! We’re going to consider taking that idea and applying it campily to a spectrum of gendered heroism; i.e., one selected fairly arbitrarily (mother is the necessity of invention) and settling on The Ronin Warriors, but also Sailor Moon, fan art, cosplay and more as sex work/public nudism charged with genderqueer rebellion!
(exhibit 51b3: The sentai and shonen idea of anime taps into ancient warrior ideas of masculine strength/virility being something to summon and wash oneself in; i.e., the “fire of the gods” being destructive but also purifying in a variety of ways; e.g., Japanese Shintoism/the fascist side of Buddhism tied to Japanese sun gods and the self-belief/personal responsibility argument made to young post-Occupation Japanese men.
Specifically made in the return of the Shogunate for a brief moment, the argument unfolds during The Ronin Warriors‘ whitewashing of Japanese imperial crimes; i.e., said crimes likewise haunted by a really big and annoying wraith whose appearance anticipates the Japanese ’90s Housing Crash, or boom-and-bust historical-material cycle: a vice character literally called “Tulpa” [a Tibetan word comparable to “Yokai” or “egregore”] to burn away with holy fire. It’s a witch hunt—one whose myopic shadow [Capitalist Realism] is summoned, Radcliffe-style, then prevented by embodying the destructive forces of nature for the state: a hideous raging inferno!
In other words, the show was something to canonically prepare the next generation for capital’s usual boom-and-bust; i.e., with a seasonal call to arms [more on this, in Volume Three]: young sexy boy warrior threatened by white ghostly jizz light coming for his codpiece, only to “juke” him, surround and envelop him, and begin to armor him in fire that—far from destroying him—basically turns him into human Godzilla: a sun avatar that banishes the darkness [with rainbows] for a short time by—and I’m not really kidding—jizzing light from his sword onto the ghost emperor until said tyrant fucks off. It’s admittedly a fairly transcendental idea, if only because it’s been hauntologized by neoliberal militias chasing the ghost of “Rome”: the ancient warrior’s monomythic rite of passage being seen in Ancient Greek stories with the Amazons or Achilles, Old Welsh and English legends with Arthur or Beowulf, the Picts versus the Romans, Cu Chulainn and his fearsome ríastrad, the German berserks or Scottish highlanders, or even more fictional DBZ Saiyans and our aforementioned Ronins [Radcliffe only had non-magical swordsmen like Ludovico].
Except, the same ideas also apply to shojo anime and a variety of similar kayfabe good/evil stories that speak to praxis; i.e., as dualistic, letting flexible gender roles adopt a monstrous-feminine quality speaking to queer love, rampant female/feminine desire merged with traditionally male forms thereof: action and desire—sex and force as active, versus passive—turned not simply into fire, but a sun in small’s humanoid shape of fucking plasma [a fourth state of matter]. It’s literally the fire of the gods, and it canonically kicks ass for the state. But camped by us [and Naoko Takeuchi, author of Sailor Moon—more on her in “Call of the Wild”], such things can be communicated to a wider audience through queer allegory like Sailor Moon: the rebellion of crossdressing girls [or more to the point, those who appear as girls] who still can look femme during gender trouble and Radcliffean parody [those Hitachi space wands/flashlights aren’t just for show during the cryptonymy process, below]!
Sailor Moon is one of the most popular [and queer] shows of all time[4] and it revels in monomythic subversion; i.e., by summoning gay demon slut witches [Jupiter for life, babes, above and below] from outer space less to fight for the Man and more to camp the canon to Hell and back! It’s definitely a strip tease, but in keeping with Matthew Lewis/the Amazon and marrying those to traditional feminine ideas of strength that Radcliffe used, Sailor Moon is a deeply nostalgic and Gothic gay adventure [about teenage girls/queer people fighting spectres of Caesar] retrojected into a sparkling city-pop hauntology after the aforementioned crash in 1991 [right as the Cold War was “ending”]; i.e., Takeuchi wrote it in 1992 as a power fantasy that—among other things—spoke to romance and queer expression that used gender trouble regarding female, lesbian, and intersex-but-female-presenting “butch” heroines [and Jupiter’s just “boy crazy” but hopeless with the lads, sadly]: a misfit-yet-bedazzling team of virgin/whores, there’s truly something for everyone [obviously the show isn’t as racially inclusive as it could be/restricts itself to particular body types, but the beauty of the costume is that it’s one-size-fits-all!].
Like and unlike Lewis, the transformations aren’t horrifying but joyous, insofar as power is a cosplayer-type performance that speaks to a means not just of instilling Capitalist Realism [which both Sailor Moon and Ronin Warriors are somewhat guilty of, to be fair] but in challenging it onstage and off during the same kinds of theatrics camped even further by us!
Anyone who’s ever done cosplay will tell you it’s a blast; i.e., occurring in a place where everyone dresses up, it’s very Rabelaisian/carnivalesque—with people able to see a cosplayer’s sexy body as an asexual form of public nudism that, sure enough, is a role model for younger girls, boys and enbies, but also a sex symbol/symbol of monstrous-feminine strength for sexually-active teenagers and adults, too [the show is incredibly silly in terms of its treatment of damsels/Amazons, but also incredibly stylish and sexy through the same fetishes and clichés, below]: how to be strong while exposed, just like Radcliffe but slutty!
Above, Jupiter “handles” the boys while still appearing girly-if-austere, and in doing so, she subverts current Japanese hero tropes; i.e., by having the obvious and awkward damsel-in-distress rescued by another woman [echoes of female property owners in the Warring-States Period being trained in the art of war to defend their homes from their husbands’ rival warlords]—in ways that speak to a shared desire with Western variants of the Amazon’s subversive wish fulfillment, post-Marston and his Wonder Woman BDSM schtick: the power fantasy/calculated risk of being rescued through the theatre of demon BDSM as subverting traditional Western ideas scapegoating the Amazon in two-sided echopraxis [from Japan to the US and vice versa].
Instead, such device become genuine heroes through Jupiter and the other less-masc Sailor Scouts that, all the same remain alien insofar as they aren’t binarized, but remain desirable precisely because of those liminal, erotically gendered components tied to force [sex and war]: power is performance, which is largely dress-up and play-acting war as a matter of decolonizing gender roles/rules, thus heteronormativity and the other qualities of capital while inside capital. It’s super applicable and productive to class, culture and race war as a matter of good praxis; i.e., as something that—like class warriors exposed to such ideas at a young age, subvert the idea of “growing up with canon” like Radcliffe did; re: by growing up with a show whose target audience was never straight white men or women, but queer people of all ethnicities, genders and religions stuck inside capital and making the most of it as they can [and anyone who accuses the eroticization of obviously adult Sailor Moon erotica is projecting/self-reporting really fucking hard; i.e., as the Straights always do when trying to colonize queer spaces and media—and for which we need to camp their canon anyways like Takeuchi did, us giving Radcliffe the same campy business]: exposing her base circuits in ways we can rewire.
[artist: Persephone van der Waard]
I simply adore Sailor Moon for just how openly gay it is. For one, it’s where I got my own sparkly rainbow look from; i.e., in a lot of my art, from 2022 onwards; re: after I came out as trans [above—in what my best friend Ginger describes as, “It’s like if Lisa Frank and Hanna-Barbera had a baby and it was gay”]: wanting to fuck what I want to be, a femme warrior witch. But also, this rescue and DIY attitude speaks to iconoclastic art/sex work as something that also speaks to everyday events juxtaposed with monomythic splendor and Gothic poetics; i.e., Faustian-to-Promethean alteration and subversion; e.g., bullies, but also sex and cosplay of all kinds walking the same tightrope and, per Foucault, leaving the bedroom to perform ludo-Gothic BDSM on a variety of registers/polities [e.g., “taming the Amazon,” above, merged with a GNC topos of power of women]: a shunga lookalike that dodges the barriers while doing sex work in Trojan disguise for workers, post-Radcliffe [e.g., “Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife,” 1807].
[artist: Persephone van der Waard]
Casual sex and superhero costumes have been a part of my art for years, and which I built my website around [re: “My Art Website Is Live!” 2020]. While my work is transitional—having shifted from twinks and Amazons to general queer expression in the Gothic imagination—the same larger idea applies to any popular movie, show or game; e.g., Overwatch and its superheroic characters being symbols of power as a matter of sex and force [above]. The same goes for Sailor Moon and its famous Sailor Scout outfits[5] camping Radcliffe; re: by literally making her slutty but also ace/public nudist and Pagan/GNC; i.e., as crossing over into different games [e.g., Mass Effect (2009), below]. The possibilities are truly endless, which is why queer people love Sailor Moon! It’s a safe space with a strong transgenerational community of fans that let their freak flags fly from a variety of ages; i.e., very similar to furries as an equally queer fandom that cis-het men have tried to unironically demonize, thus pimp/colonize but never really having succeeded [more on that in “Call of the Wild,” when we discuss furry panic].
[artist: Persephone van der Waard]
This includes cosplay through art about the show, but also real-life performers trying to capture the same enthusiasm/sex-positively regressive childhood [re: Radcliffe] innocence and adult strength-through-exposure shown in the same light/tableau; i.e., as a notion that “grows up” along with the fanbase as increasingly queer and loaded with gay allegory as something the syndication of anime has tried to stamp out [and smuggle in sexist, even pedophilic, eco-fascist, alternate-yet-singular interpretations that cater to patriarchal norms in America and Japan: as a larger neoliberal global exchange network—again, more on this idea in Volume Three].
But exploitation and liberation occupy the same stages, allowing for sex-positive art that challenges its sex-coercive doubles; i.e., through our own performative hermeneutic/synthesis “pimping ‘Radcliffe'”: these girls are caught between duty and personal enjoyment, transforming for themselves as much as playing cops and robbers. In turn, this second idea rapidly takes on a life of its own; i.e., among a growing army of pretty soldier girls who aren’t token cops exclusively but a polity of antiestablishment GNC forces that—in the hands of fans performing Sailor Moon meta—can be Sailor Scouts for themselves: monstrous-feminine detectives making Radcliffe more accessible/virgin-whore by updating her away from her shrewish maiden’s neo-conservative origins!
[model and artist: Mei Minato and Persephone van der Waard]
As a matter of proletarian praxis, the same demonic ideas speak to wish fulfillment as enacted by the likes of myself and Harmony [next page/several images] but also me and other artists [above] transforming each other as a matter of desire; i.e., through our own art made by us [versus replaced through AI as a system of theft turning the product into a soulless copy of itself with no humanity inside, exhibit 56c2]: using the same aesthetics of power and death [of sluts, astrology and Sailor Scouts versus Ronin Warriors and their own symbolized color scheme tied to moral virtues—same difference] to achieve a proletarian function, mid-praxis! Saturn is in retrograde, regurgitating his daughters; i.e., throwing up our femboy passion and cat girl jouissance! It’s not how Lewis’ Matilda did it, Giger’s xenomorph or Scott’s David, but from Takeuchi to us: friendship is magic and detecting is fun!)
This is a taste of camping Radcliffe through lateral exposure and synthesis, but hopefully one that sounds fun (unless you a lame-oid philistine). In any event, camp and its hermeneutic are as much perceptive through praxial synthesis and catharsis as dry academic analysis; so is sex, so is rebellion. The theatrical idea is to poke and prod labor until it “catches fire” as a matter of sustainable, ongoing rebellion, not vice-character soliloquies that get two seconds to say the quiet part out loud before Samus, Mega Man or Doomguy lops off their head with a missile: pimps pimping whores, versus whores calling the shots for whores (thus workers), not the state and its usual DARVO and obscurantism monopolizes rape!
Medusa is a god of death, thus life, giving and taking. Monomyth heroes assume and police a “natural” sense of superiority and division; i.e., policing nature through revenge to take, take, take along a naturalized progression; re: Zombie-Vampire Capitalism as endlessly taking for the state, fueling nature’s harvested blood into the hero’s body to fuel said taking again and again. But also, it can be seen as Demon Capitalism: giving death back to workers by state forces punching death incarnate/nature personified as a vengeful demon “talking back”; i.e. witness tampering to badger and disrupt but ultimately pimp, thus exterminate the whore as vermin through Trojan gifts: nakedly veiled threats—from Troy to George Floyd, but also what Man Box fans want to do to Sailor Scouts (rape the witch), and what we challenge through campy exposure drawing our lines in the sand; re: “Ambrosio, it was my soul!” But what liberty it bought—rescuing us from Capitalist Realism by turning us into witches people want to be sans assimilation!
As Radcliffe has well-and-truly demonstrated, segregation is no defense because hers canonically led to tokenization (cops don’t prevent crime, they perpetuate and create it as something to police); i.e., you actually have to make a world where exposure to nudity—through ludo-Gothic BDSM synthesizing praxis on a daily basis, onstage and off—doesn’t result in rape (with her famously hiding herself away [and armoring her sheltered heroines] from bad-faith “protectors” as much as perceived open-threat enemies). This starts with camping Radcliffe less “to death,” and more giving her fresh life during Gothic Communism; i.e., as shown in stories like Sailor Moon having already done the job, and ones we’re carrying endlessly into the future: “Loosen up/quit being a Paranoid Persephone! Now let’s see that pussay!” An angel in the streets, freak in the sheets!
(artist: Harmony Corrupted)
“I fear the Greeks even when they bring gifts,” me being a survivor of rape trauma who, hypervigilant ever and always, walks forever on the balls of her feet and holds her breath without realizing—predator/prey unfolding during a hunting mechanism that can anisotropically turn the tables in a dialectical-material fashion, thus reversing the abjection and cryptonymy processes to have the whore’s revenge by turning canon into whores; re: like Scott did, but less “strict” and more “gentle”; i.e., the gentle femme domme having the same power that Medusa does, Radcliffe’s less ironic imitators before her gaze: a witch is a witch, sparkles and/or darkness.
So does the gorgon’s glare (above or below, from all its eyes, mouths, and other vampiric hyphenations demonically giving fatal knowledge back) freeze the giver of false gifts/bad matchups (re: Emma) to drain them of their stolen blood during harmful exchange and transformation: land back, thus labor back affording us these things at the expense of the usual takers embodying the state/tyrant in small giving rape out like a reward; re: neoliberalism and personal responsibility through infinite growth during frontier-to-domestic military expansion, efficient profit and worker/owner division; i.e., through the usual monopolies/trifectas and qualities of capital abused by the state during oppositional praxis and capital’s day-to-day raping of nature as alien, monstrous-feminine whore.
To take back sex and the whore as terrifying to the pimp, then, is to take back the human side of these territories commonly revived, mise-en-abyme—with the panties and pussy of the common sex worker indicative of a larger chronotope the colonizer gazes greedily at, on the imagery of the surface; i.e., from Columbus, Bacon and Descartes onwards, into Radcliffe as giving us a place to work from and regarding; re: the womb of nature, but also nature more broadly as a monstrous-feminine witch rebel whore of any sex, gender or performance you can think of, not just Radcliffe’s damsels with inverse virgin/whore mirror syndrome!
(artist: Harmony Corrupted)
This starts as much by fostering a sense of renewed and atrophied humanity in the killer(s) chasing us in bad faith; re: witch cops occupying the same shadow space as class warriors versus traitors/exploitation and liberation in Nazi-Commie Amazonomachian kayfabe, stripped of the usual symbols (astrology versus Nordic runes); i.e., by giving them what they have lost so they surrender their power/swollen head willingly as much as not (often out of shock as much as shame). So often, the status quo plays police abuses “for laughs,” but the reality is, they’re not brave or strong at all, but rapist cannibals addicted to power and dead flesh, hence unable to stop and scared of their own shadows (and death) while painting everything around them as “alien.” Nothing is more brutal or afraid than modern man or those adhering to his beliefs, which Radcliffe didn’t fully adhere to (the exploring of the Gothic castle ultimately being an act of dualistic courage exposing real rapists part of the time; re: Ripley, avoiding the xenomorph as furious with the company for abusing it, similar to Jane Eyre afraid of Antoinette Causeway’s blind fury during a feared purge): a Queen of Hell crowned in fire and mist!
Token women suck, but their abuses (and allegorical tools) stem from capital built on older patriarchal systems of exploitation that have expanded their exploitation into space. And man, history routinely plays out (through tragedy and farce), is routinely his own worst enemy on top of ours; i.e., as beings “made” by men in ways that women and queer people/other minorities can camp in a cryptomimetic chain; e.g., from Lewis’ The Monk to Shelley’s Frankenstein to Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (a film about a mad scientist Pygmalion who teaches his Galatean creation to escape by killing him after seducing young pirates of Silicon Valley in an “artificial wilderness” [originally the Garden of Eden, which Lewis camped, followed by Shelley, Oscar Wilde and so many others]: to change her skin based on what she knows about her killers to escape the labyrinths around her that her maker treats like a sick game).
As Radcliffe’s own pointed oscillation likewise portrays, there’s a thin line historically between master/slave and master/apprentice; i.e., during ludo-Gothic BDSM speaking to the horrors of the ancient world echoing problematically into the present one; i.e., from ancient thinkers like Zeno of Citium and conquerors like Alexander the Great practicing homosexuality as “problematic love” (re: Brent Pickett’s explanation of “sodomy” as a broader practice) against the ancient canonical codes, followed by Da Vinci’s own Renaissance sodomy (re: Fletcher) and Foucault’s abuses, but such things—through the likenesses of Lewis camping the canon Radcliffe tried to but didn’t always dare—reaching into Shelley and myself, and me into others I wish to take part with: when camping Radcliffe’s heroines together as a larger conscious attempt, Sailor Moon a larger cultural movement!
All of these forebears present as a ghostly harem of themselves, but also Milton and Marx for Harmony and I to play with as we see fit: the power of demonic creation taking such things back, pulling them into our eager hands—and the hands of like-minded people, who convergently also “ho up” Radcliffe, below—because she seems worthy of investing energy into, a priori. All happen through the same poetic arguments Radcliffe used, anisotropically reversing the usual flows of power between workers and the state while discouraging rape on the surface and inside thresholds she made famous: from pillow princess to Amazon, every maiden is a whore and one, per the whore’s paradox, who can have her revenge through the changing of dialectical-material context! It barely takes anything to turn Radcliffe feral!
(artist: Azuma Yasuo)
But again, if my experiences are any hint, there’s a razor’s edge to walk between “give me a boy until he is seven and I will show you the man” and ” “out of a tender age come, at a manly age, worthier and closer friends.” This is a problem to solve and reconcile with as much among queer people (male or not) as it is straight folk; power abuse is power abuse and capital has expanded to let tokenized forms like Radcliffe’s spectres occur during said betrayals. Hers are powerful, thus must be used responsibly during rebellion.
In short, anyone can “rape” anyone with or without quotes, but generally do so according to unspoken but ubiquitous Venn-diagram pecking orders (re: a holistic persecution network)—i.e., kill your darlings to learn from them but recognize them as human like we are, meaning flawed; re: Radcliffe, but also other important people; e.g., Matthew Lewis probably did something fucked up by my standards, Foucault wasn’t a saint, Harvey Milk probably had a skeleton or two in his closet, and so on and so forth. From Shakespeare to Lewis to Radcliffe to Nina Hartley to Takeuchi to Socratis Otto, such things oscillate between staged performance and real life as half-real; i.e., with Otto playing a trans woman in the 2013 woman’s prison drama, Wentworth—so well, in fact, that I’d say they’re “an egg”: a concept we’ll unpack in Volume Three, but have hinted at here with Radcliffe. We’re all eggs/gay ovum waiting to parthenogenically fertilize! Let’s fertilize Radcliffe’s batch of winners, a tabula rasa we can weaponize queerly against the state as straight!
Furthermore, Radcliffe helped demonize whores in ways we, camping her canon, can easily mark and respond to its imitators with (campy or not); i.e., the canonical idea that sex work is inherently dehumanizing being a myth made by TERF/SWERF second wave feminists conflating universal liberation with reactionary enslavement that Radcliffe herself wrestled with; despite what she and Descartes argued, the body and mind aren’t separate, and it’s possible to think with our (a)sexuality as labor exchange—i.e., in ways that break Capitalist Realism (to think with our noodles and boxes) by summoning its shadows, like Radcliffe did (calling the gate, but refusing to step on through it)! Nothing is more freeing than giving us our power back, in this respect, and Radcliffe played a part in that!
While good sex is dirty, rough and wild, and you might—in the hideous and rapturous throes of passion—suddenly find yourself saying, doing and making (thus thinking through creation) things you never normally would, such mobilization is stochastic; i.e., as a matter of counterterrorism to get in touch with through the things normally alienated from us and vice versa (re: capital sexualizes and alienizes all work). Such things are funded, planned and executed in stages, but also spontaneously in the heat of the moment by those brave enough to do so (which again, Radcliffe only partially balked at); e.g., by Harmony and I doing a Sailor Venus shoot (much to my delight, introducing an agender person like Harmony to Takeuchi’s anime for the first time): with me supplying the funds, them the booty and buying the clothes that I picked out (according to the general idea, which they then had to find the cheapest buys/matches), me storyboarding everything and them doing preliminary shots/wardrobe checks, then planning the full shoot final after the test shots were “a go.”
(artist: Harmony Corrupted)
Such is camping Radcliffe, the making of heroes (thus monsters) by us meant to become Gothic-Communist detective sluts through Radcliffean labor and performance made gayer than it historically was; i.e., through unequal, forbidden power, knowledge and desire in ways Radcliffe unquestionably toyed with, herself! Make her gay just like we would Marx (re: “Making Marx Gay“)! She “may not have been a revolutionary” but she was a master enchantress well-versed in state illusions that—in our capable hands—can become the state’s undoing: the keys to the kingdom! MRGA: Make Radcliffe Gay Again! And if you can’t do it yourself, find a double and make fan fiction; i.e., make those dreams—of a thicc slutty Goth nerd to unmask the rebellious potential of—come deliciously true; e.g., from Ann Radcliffe to Annabel Morningstar!
(artist: Annabel Morningstar)
So do Harmony and I (and similar friends, above) own the fruits of our own labor as monstrous-feminine, thereby recultivating the Superstructure and eventually reclaiming the Base in harmony (so to speak); i.e., through a campy Wisdom of the Ancients that, unto itself, camps a detective/cop to lead the spirit of Radcliffe towards and into our naughty ranks! It’s that or we just ignore her valuable relics, letting them go to waste while the state slow-boils us to death like frogs in a pan (with those closer to the metal feeling the heat first, which short of forced military conscription [which hasn’t happened since the Vietnam War] is never white cis-het men). Challenge likenesses of the Great Enchantress in today’s age by appealing to shared trauma; i.e., people don’t change unless they’re challenged, but some are challenged simply by existing vis-à-vis capitalist dogma’s pre-existing and -supplied socio-material constructs and praxial inertia. Others will be when state shift happens. Might as well control how things turn out, instead of leaving it in the hands of a feral, inhuman, planet-eating death goddess. Eat your heart out, Radcliffe! Scooby Doo, where are you?
So what’s it gonna be, kids? Liberty or death? Sing, dance and/or fuck like your lives depend on it, because they very much do (and your children’s lives, and the fate of the entire planet)! Barring that, do you wanna to die with dignity or without? When the Man comes around, show him your Aegis as reverse-engineering Radcliffe’s—i.e., the more undressed someone is, the more whore-like/closer-to-Medusa, thus monstrous-feminine they become; but for us, exposure becomes a way of reversing abjection, thus affording ourselves a strength unique to whores, thus workers, in a myriad of ways Radcliffe provided the “false positive” to our true demonic selves: an (alter) Ego to our Id!
(artist: Harmony Corrupted)
So do we and our creative successes individually and collectively synthesize holistic praxis in duality during liminal expression; re: as ergodic, anisotropic, concentric, mise-en-abyme—while using the Four Gs, Six Rs, and Gothic Hermeneutic Quadfecta during oppositional synthesis (all terms from our thesis and manifesto volumes, the core of which you can access at “Paratextual Documents“). We do so to solidarize and intersect a holistic pedagogy of the oppressed, hence heal from rape in the very shadow of police violence that Radcliffe doomsayed—by raising intelligence and awareness through Gothic poetics as sex work; i.e., as a matter of informed consent, descriptive sexuality, de facto education and cultural appreciation, but also Gothic counterculture during ludo-Gothic BDSM: as a work-in-progress, preventing rape by minimizing risk, one author to the next (versus creating and maximizing risk/rape, as the original Radcliffe admittedly didn’t prevent, hence as the state does through private property and police violence abusing the elite’s tools to chattelize nature and workers by infantilizing them: “It’s time for someone to put his foot down, and that foot is me!”).
As Radcliffe showed so well, Gothic detectives solve mysteries to summon and banish out of the imaginary past as historical-material. It always boils down to whores vs pimps, workers vs the state, nature vs Cartesian thought (with the writers of Animal House only able to make the Delta sex friends seem better than the Dean’s toadies by presenting the latter as “Hilter Youth” gay sex fiends/a non-Dionysian cult: “We now consecrate the bond of obedience! Assume the position!“). By comparison, Medusa was a fat-bottomed baddie in spectacles (magnifying glasses for your face), tight pants, and a sweater packing sweater lions as much as kittens: “Let’s solve this ‘mystery’ together—with iconoclastic sex work liberating all workers from Capitalist Realism, thus Capitalism!” Long and hard is the way, that out of Hell leads up to light, Radcliffe’s journey a bit of a rocky one! “Thank you, ma’am, may I have another!” (nods to Radcliffe’s Spanish Inquisition, in their dark, monish robes).
That being said, Radcliffe still shows that—even when deliberately hidden, offscreen—everyone likes the whore; re: even cops like her former self, but also ace people; i.e., the latter love engaging with sex and force during monstrous expression that Radcliffe made them feel welcome to try (re: Sailor Moon). And I honestly think Radcliffe was ace, meaning she (and other ace-leaning individuals) just do it differently than sexual people do: on an interpersonal and transgenerational gradient (one that we’ll explore more, in Volume Three) outlining warring massive hyperobject forces; e.g., like Capitalism and Communism duking it out in useful abstraction (the Absurd, the Sublime, the Weird, the Numinous, etc), while still pointing to tremendous obscurity and decay tied to familiar sites of the Numinous that all damsels and detectives (thus whores) do: through chance happenings not once, but over and over again during the liminal hauntology of war! Reading is cool and whores (and their healthy BDSM/monster sex) are totally badass.
To see why that is, try stepping into Radcliffe’s potentially slutty shoes; i.e., doing so to embody and summon demons who, in turn, make monsters that help shift the tide away from the bourgeoisie! In other words, if the angel’s thesis is cruel, write your own; reinvent reality as always beginning and ending with workers, Radcliffe included! Take her beyond what she was in life!
(artist: Mercedes the Muse)
Developing Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism is a recursive problem, so it requires recursive solutions and constant, active, socio-material engagement to meet it head-on until the end of time; i.e., always from another position, angle, outfit, role (or hole) to fill, thus humanize those demonized by the state while reclaiming their demonization (and tokenization) as human through the context of dialectical-material struggle, during ludo-Gothic BDSM: “I think we better do it one more time, don’t you? Just to be sure?” / “Oh, totally! Good call!” Deliciously dreadful, indeed, Jane Austen! The best of both worlds, living out our earthly pleasures and ruling the universe from beyond the grave! “I will marry both women!” Radcliffe and Austen (or Takeuchi—make it an orgy)!
“If there’s meaning in two people meeting then maybe we’re doing this right!” To that, Radcliffe—in her own roundabout, at times frustrating and counterintuitive way (that frankly feels good to camp, if I’m honest; I see why Austen bothered to)—actually helped paved the way for future authors like me to camp her into something for everyone, thus go beyond her abundant inadequacies; i.e., heading in pursuit of the same kinds of grand feelings rooted in similar concentric stories, where she encouraged women (including trans women like me) to write and make our own stories in ways she couldn’t control—a bit like Mary Shelley did, truth be told! Origins matter insofar as older things evolve into newer things informed by older things; there’d be no Metroidvania without Radcliffe, too, thus no ludo-Gothic BDSM as I envisioned it: based on Radcliffe’s canonical Gothic that Shelley and myself radicalized, thus camped (gentle and/or strict)!
Hence, while Radcliffe’s not exactly the latest S-tier Pokémon with rainbow foil, she’s still a valuable antique/collector’s item to add to anyone’s intellectual brain basket. In this magical slut’s opinion, she’s more than proved herself as more than her husband’s anomalous (and anonymous) sugar mama, and something of a rival that I—a pornographer historian, performer and invigilator, among many other things, besides—don’t mind sparing with, to boot! Pot, meet Kettle (that was an activist pun; i.e., cops kettling workers, who fight back with cans of soup and other kitchen items functioning as improvised missiles)!
Capitalist Realism is ultimately the abjection process, which furthers or reverses through cryptonymy as a dualistic matter of denial and deception; i.e. of self-denial and deception (the monomyth/the Promethean Quest and Faustian Bargain) versus denying and deceiving our enemies during class, culture and race war as a dialectical-material struggle (the tug o’ war): a detective’s pursuit of the Numinous/ghost of the counterfeit (the Medusa/nature as monstrous-feminine) to free or enslave it, thus ourselves from Radcliffe’s foil as more inclusive and accepting in our hands. Better than fencing with the real Jill Bearup (Essence of Thought’s “Jill Bearup’s Transphobia Is Even Worse in 2025”). Experiencing said liberation through camp is called “the human condition,” and which the Gothic relays in monstrous language, during the dialectic of the alien using ludo-Gothic BDSM to encourage hugging alien workers. Confusing and fun? Welcome to real life!
(artist: Xygital)
“That’ll do, pig.” Not a fascist pig but our “Radcliffe” being a heckin’ chonker ninja wizard “Porky Piggin’ it!” (now we’re cooking with ass[6])!
Onwards to “Call of the Wild; or “Sex Education,” Trans-forming the World (opening and part zero)“!
Footnotes
[1] Bharat Tandon makes an interesting point by saying how Emma (1816) beat Shelley to the punch; but frankly then so did Milton, Homer or Dante. In truth, to say “posthumanism” is to have people thinking of science fiction vis-à-vis Frankenstein, because Emma—while dramatically fluent—isn’t scientifically grounded: as a matter of making monsters like Shelley’s mighty novel is; i.e., it’s food for thought, a “gambit” as Innes calls it, not a given; or… SHELLEY IS QUEEN OF THAT DOMAIN, NOT AUSTEN, FOOL!
[2] Versus fascism following white moderates/token traitors around like a bad small; they who smelt it, dealt it.
[3] With Radcliffe’s queer-coded pirate villains historically being the bad guys that the modest non-crossdressers unmask to sanctify women’s spaces/shield those from whores/men in dresses (or Catholic outfits while doing old-school BDSM, aka “mortification of the flesh”).
[4] That, all the same, not everyone knows about; e.g., Harmony is originally from Siberia and knows about a bunch of Soviet-era Communist cartoons, but despite being agender hasn’t really watched Sailor Moon despite having heard of it; i.e., this is my chance to both play matchmaker, Emma-style, and realize that Sailor Moon is a show that I’ve flat-out loved for a long time (to a degree higher than I thought/realized or reflected on, until now).
[5] Sort of a play on Girl Scouts, actual sailors (again, matelotage but also Star Wars while being far gayer than Star Trek even by a good mile) and Holst’s Planets.
[6] So often, revolution is viewed as “destructive” or “wasted labor” in arguments that prioritize the state and its theft; i.e., through standard/tokenized tone-policing and moderates whitewashing genuine activism alongside reactionary forms of counterprotest (good cop, bad cop).
Except, nothing could be further from the truth, we whores being an intersectional polity of GNC, racially and religiously diverse workers, and one whose inclusivity of social-sexual exchanges invigilates public nudism reversing abjection; i.e., during revolutionary cryptonymy’s gender troubled, jouissant, and convulsing joys popping out monster babies in duality versus the state’s own hauntologies occupying the same spaces: to see us reproducing with their white maidens, conflating it as mutilative rape (from Radcliffe’s school, but aggressively appropriated for capital under neoliberalism) and attacking us when we come in to check up on our token partners and home being invaded by America as the aliens doing a forced entry into our land (cue Jameson’s class nightmare); i.e., the usual monomyth double standards and treating the whore, during virgin/whore and mirror syndrome, like extramarital sex can only happen through unironic rape and theft (which translates differently through Ozymandian hauntologies during military urbanism at home and military optimism on the frontiers of Capitalism).
To the state and its dogs, we’re the monsters and heroes of Greco-Roman myth, except we’re reversing the terrorist/counterterrorist binary! This takes energy and effort, but also pain during the usual uphill battles with the sun in our eyes fighting the state. Even so, to be human is to resist the state, not to surrender and submit to its Faustian bargains. There will be blood, fire and pain if we fight back, but the rewards will be worth it; i.e., such things silly-serious during our Song of Infinity (anyone who tells you sex doesn’t take work/doesn’t yield rewards, has never done it with the right people—including ace people)! When push comes to shove, fight for Camelot—not as an idea of the state’s vertical arrangements of power but our horizontal ones (this Lady of Shallot commands you): usurp what the elite steal from us to begin with, doing so for horizontal refreshment!
In short, this is our labor and our world; i.e., felt and expressed during “brothel espionage” as made in hotels like the one below (next page): as the battlefields that love blooms on and inside. If such things seem alien to you (as they would have towards Radcliffe), it is never too late to get informed! I did so gradually from my late twenties, coming out at 36 and writing four, going on five books and working with over sixty models by the time I was 38. And I’m not the only one, other chapters of like-minded workers doing the same: showing you where power and empathy are stored; i.e., as a means of inter- and intra-relating between workers happening during a larger meta struggle! Consent is sexy! So is illustrating it through rebellion against the state; e.g., through trans men or women, intersex people, persons of color and disabled sex workers (Ashley, below): universal liberation means universal liberation (no Omelas refrain)!
(artists, far-left: triplextransman; middle: Eva Android and SmallBallz); right: Nico Okapi; bottom right: King Meg; far-bottom right: Ashley Yelhsa)
Except, the more you work with others, the more you understand how labor exchange works, but also delays; you become more understanding thus less prone to punch down/cause marginalized in-fighting. Team work makes the dream work, and revolution is reflexively convergent and idiomatic! The energies build up; we attract and wiggle it out (through community and sex), and stay connected after the physical separations come and go: our hearts always burn in Hell! And if we do not survive, our children—and all children of the Medusa—will carry our Song forwards (as shades). And if those in power do not listen, we will be there waiting for them, when the Great Mother comes to take us all home:
(source: “Third-Party Action” [2007]; artists: Sarah Jay, Riley Chase and Johnny Castle)
Make no mistake; we’re fighting for the fate of the world, and to riot is to speak through the voices of the unheard by camping the heard (re: Radcliffe). But we have the power to turn the tide for all workers—we must, or we will not survive. So do we camp canon to overwhelm all kings, gods and masters, save the campy ones we make in historical-material irony like “Radcliffe” the slut! Revolution is sex and sex needs a cheerleader/aphrodisiac, and what better wingperson than the Gothic (to see the fat monster ass and feel inspired/seeing the world through monster eyes punching up)? Who says you can’t teach an old whore new tricks, or that the next in line can’t learn a thing or two when fucking to metal (e.g., Helstar’s “To Sleep, Perchance to Scream,” 1989)? Rape happens in Radcliffe’s books; likewise, rape is possible in a post-scarcity world—it will just be far less likely because “theft,” prisons, and police violence, thus rape/mirror syndrome will be unnecessary to get what we want. We can simply act it out without harming anyone and teach them better than Radcliffe did!