This blog post is part of “All the World,” a sixth promotion originally inspired by the three I did in 2024 with Harmony Corrupted and Romantic Rose: “Brace for Impact,” “Searching for Secrets” and “Deal with the Devil” (2024), as well as “Make It Real” for Volume One and “The Total Codex” for Volume Zero. Those promotions sought to promote and provide their respective volume’s individual pieces for easy public viewing in single-post form; re: for the Poetry Module, Undead Module and Demon Module, followed by my PhD and manifesto. “All the World,” by comparison, caps off my book series with a promotion for Volume Three; re: my Praxis Volume. 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 “All the World’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.
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.
“Real Life”: Toxic Love and Criminal Sexuality in True Crime (feat. Killing Stalking, Jeffery Dahmer and Ted Bundy)
“You can’t send us out there with that gay bat flying around!” (source).
—Kevin Nealon to John Travolta; “Gay Dracula skit,” on SNL (1994)
Picking up where “‘Which Witch?’ and ‘Ruling through Fear’“! left off…
Note: This piece was originally made in response to the James Somerton videos, “Killing Stalking and the Romancing of Abuse” and “The Troubling Thirst for Jeffery Dahmer” (2023). Said videos are reuploads, as Somerton—now self-described as James of Telos in connection to his now-defunct film company/scam enterprise, Telos Pictures—removed them from his YouTube channel (also defunct). In other words, I wrote this piece in early-to-mid-2023, before James was exposed as a giant plagiarist (which I responded to after it happened; re: “James Somerton: A Guy Who Sucked, But So Does Capitalism,” 2024). Also, from what I understand, the above essays that I cite were actually written not by James but by his editor/co-writer and former friend, Nicholas Hergott, who wasn’t involved in James’ bullshit (source: Reddit, r/hbomberguy).
Also, there will be allusions to ludo-Gothic BDSM, here, but more in regards to its forebear, demon BDSM, as what ludo-Gothic BDSM evolved into [any quotes here on ludo-Gothic BDSM being added in 2025]. —Perse, 5/2/2025
As discussed in Volume One (re: exhibit 11b2, “Challenging the State“) and Two (re: exhibit 47a1/2, “Radcliffe’s Refrain“), criminal hauntology relishes in the commodified suffering of the buried, the gays as automatic criminals, fugitives, unironic closet monsters and perpetual victims. Heteronormative media’s punitive nature materializes through recycled, consecutive iterations: true crime and its forces-of-darkness scapegoats selecting selling the punishment and celebration of the wicked as queer but also heteronormative (the black knight, penitent, rake or demon lover as the exclusive ultimate rapist/predator of white women).
To it, criminal hauntology is the reflection on past, dated iterations of criminal activity that continue to shape the public’s social-sexual imagination in a variety of linguo-material ways. Originally popularized by Ann Radcliffe and future authors like Agatha Christie, Sir Arthur Canon Doyle and Edgar Allan Poe, the “murder mystery” genre survives in more modern, canonical forms: TV shows, movies and the 24-hour news circuit. All fixate on awesome, sexy killers or horrific, alien scapegoats; i.e., the male sodomite or vampire as a splendid fake. In a bid to preserve societal order as “threatened,” true crime argues for us-versus-them xenophobia inside the relative privilege of target demographics: white, cis-het men and women. Their perennial support results from manufactured consent, which the elite attain through cultivated fascinations with various popular tropes—”realistic” writing devices that frequently delve into sensationalized, supernatural, and romantic spheres.
In fictional canon, the avatars of true crime aren’t simply criminal; they’re coercively alien and demonic. Regardless, their hauntologies employs the same didactic function as non-fictional variants: to emblematize and scapegoat societal unrest that threatens the established order. However, the top only punches down, making its emotional appeals highly exploitative. Through true crime, the elite project assigned qualities onto symbolic criminals or victims, oscillating between them as needed. Powerful authors reify sexy killers and deranged victims, appealing to a kind of dynamic scapegoating—one that uses sexist, bigoted stereotypes to keep the middle class horny and afraid. As usual, they chase after us to delight in our suffering.
The consequence is universal predation. By dieting on eroticized fear, privileged clients grow increasingly apathetic, fetishistic and bloodthirsty towards marginalized groups at any social register—i.e., not just serial killers and crime with whites xenophobic towards people of color, but within the domestic encounters of single ethnic groups.
This includes perceived offenses before crimes even happen, wherein cultural bias before, during and after any social exchange is heavily lopsided in the more privileged group’s favor. While men of color are scapegoated, white men are given the benefit of the doubt despite being conditioned to “hunt” women like prey (e.g., weird canonical nerds). All the while, mainstream hauntology normalize canonical abuse against historical victims, whose fictionalized iterations are lauded as “essential” inside tales of unspeakable victimhood. Despite parallels to real-life cases, this abuse becomes a vital ingredient that consumers crave—a nightly ritual they refuse to part with. Instead, they resent its absence, demanding routine sacrifices to sate their harmfully vampiric appetites. They want their “protectors,” even when its proven these persons are often the most violent, deceitful and destructive (making their “turned” fans the most apathetic, vindictive and callous).
As we’ll see repeatedly moving forward, the elite routinely introduce, cultivate and exploit these appetites to distract workers from bourgeois abuse—exploiting workers for their labor, their bodies and their emotions.
(artist: Koogi)
Killing Stalking (2016), for example (James Somerton’s “‘Killing Stalking’ and The Romancing of Abuse,” 2021), extends the privileged fascination with toxic love and criminal sexuality to gay men as criminalized under xenophobic exhibits. Historically portrayed as carriers of disease and pedophilic tendencies, Koogi’s narrative treats gay men in the usual ways: reprobate and sinister, but oddly delicious according to cis-het girls, women and chasers (a trope popularized by the neoliberal appropriation of gay sex crime, prioritizing white “thirst” for gay killers over genuine, appreciative empathy for gay victims; James Somerton’s “The Troubling Thirst for Jeffrey Dahmer,” 2022)?
Despite the homophobic subtext of fetishistic gay murder and rape, predatory audiences—predominantly white, cis-het women (and chasers)—defend queer/female exploitation* purely for its surface level tropes, most notably the physically attractive killer as nostalgic. Tied to past stories of coercively romanticized violence, criminal hauntology needn’t delve into blatant make-believe to lock up consumer brains; it often keeps things more grounded, albeit in relation to recuperated ironies about everyday stories.
*Note: Problematic love is a theme tied to homosexual exploitation dating back to Ancient Greece and the ancient canonical codes surviving into the medieval, Gothic and Neo-Gothic periods; i.e., when Jewish blood libel, witchcraft and sodomy accusations were being made against homosexual men as the most-visible legal subjects of the time period the state would have attacked (versus women as chattel who were also abused, and Jewish people, followed by people of color from the Enlightenment period, onwards). A good summary of it is contained within my “Hailing Hellions” interview with Vera Dominus[1]; the “They Hunger” chapter from my Undead Module goes into the topic of problematic love (and vampires) at length; re: “the love that dare not speak its name” commonly being associated with criminals (read: serial killers) and disease becoming scapegoats for capital, as time went on. —Perse, 5/2/2025
For example, stemming from normalized attitudes exposed to them by heteronormative canon, the largely female, teenage audience recognize Koogi’s markers from famous “romances” like Romeo and Juliet. Never mind that Shakespeare’s satire flies right over Koogi’s fans’ heads; merely the killer’s handsome appearance demands redemption through radical endorsement—of those browbeaten to Pavlovian extremes or neophytes canonically acclimated towards forgiving his mental imperfections and hyperbolic violence until then.
Worse still, this clemency mirrors the mentality of actual victims, hoping their tormentors can change mid-abuse when there’s no clear evidence for it. Not only does this larger structure invite abuse apologetics through manufactured drama that prioritizes the rehabilitation of obvious monsters; their unearned clemency supersedes actual victim testimony. However, real-world atrocities inflame differently per register, incited by stigmas and fearful biases that keep marginalized groups fighting amongst themselves. Meanwhile, the authors of their collective phobias—the elite—become invisible, the intimations of their abusive, xenophobic Superstructure discarded in favor of unironic hero worship. Radcliffean demon lovers are as good-as-it-gets.
Scoundrel’s bias remains a common defense for the status quo, one that perpetuates harmful stereotypes about descriptive sexuality and abusive relationships in canonical stories. On one hand, canon condemns descriptive, xenophilic sexuality as inherently criminal, a kind of “dangerous game” that invariably requires the players themselves to be horribly flawed; on the other, it upholds toxic relationships by normalizing their abuse, expecting readers to not merely tolerate it, but forgive the abusers each and every time (rape apologia). Presumably these flaws are cosmetic—a mask for the healer to remove, revealing the hero’s wounded, but ultimately human visage.
Confirming the abuser’s humanity leads to forgiveness, followed swiftly by marriage: “Reader, I married him.” This isn’t the twist; it’s the point. Boy meets girl; bury your gays. In truth, the key to survival is revealing the one “mask” they can’t take off—the one that gives the game away: their concealed, deceitful nature as fascists-in-disguise. Fascists fear being exposed because it exposes all of their images as false; to do so is to break the spell, destroying the enemy’s illusion of strength. They will run and hide every time.
After centuries of prescribed love in canonical stories, the redeemable killer trope has been mythologized by American society to pathological extremes. This legacy of enforced forgiveness remains even when the mask-removal scenario inverts—i.e., no physical mask, merely a persona worn by perfidious, heteronormative sex criminals seeking prey (disguise pastiche). These patient monsters look human, but pretend to be humane, a ruse less reliant on brute, vampiric hypnosis than outright deception and cultural exploitation as concentric: an identity crisis amid the gobstopper masks and mise-en-abyme (a crisis of masculinity but also of Capitalism itself as breaking down) While the killer’s charms can appear as ordinary, boring and harmless, they often interact with vulnerable, even predatory viewers. Raised on darkly romantic, hauntological caricatures that trivialize mental illness, sexual assault and domestic abuse, an increasingly indifferent audience detaches from the killer’s would-be victims—themselves, but also people different from them (xenophobes) on an ideo-ontological level (xenophiles). In either case, they project their own disadvantage or anxieties onto someone else, often a fictionalized counterpart or scapegoat as something to cherish, fear and sacrifice in highly exploitative ways.
For this reason, anyone reclaiming a fetishized demon like Sangwoo or a toxic love like Yoonbum’s must first contend with normalized fixations surrounding either character—i.e., not just penitent “monsters,” but more surface-level readings of genuine abuse hidden behind superficial, jaded tropes: Killers are handsome, smart, and powerful; victims are beautiful, enthralled, and stupid (especially twinks). These become a form of reader apathy—an enabler’s interpretation of the text performed largely for selfish reasons.
For instance, despite Sangwoo concealing his homicidal nature by pretending to act human, his callous, horny fans will quickly forgive and lust after him anyways. In doing so, they accept Yoonbum’s victimization as part of the manufactured drama that “true love” requires. It’s supposed to be toxic, even deadly. Forgiveness requires trespass, a manufactured clemency narrative committed by women (and token minorities) that not only pardons, but venerates society’s most privileged members: abusive white men. This happens in duality through DARVO and obscurantism muddying the waters but also missing the point (“I have nipples, Greg; could you milk me?”).
Without textual ironies—be they diegetic, paratextual or metatextual—to distinguish fatal romance as satire, the true crime genre’s assigned roles have become heavily coercive—a kind of storied order that teaches privileged consumers how to mock, mistreat and ignore domestic-sexual abuse. Its very existence proves how sex coercion doesn’t appear ex nihilo, nor does it come from a single source. Rather, it appears through fiction and real life interacting back and forth over time, imitating each other amid a total absence of sex-positive, xenophilic imagination. This oscillation must be investigated carefully, for to break its contract—i.e., defy the Symbolic Order of what is taboo, but still paraded about in popular stories—reliably generates ambivalence and pushback from passive, uncritical consumers used to preferential treatment (we’ll cover this more in Chapter Five).
For these persons, the socio-material arrangement of a hierarchy of control—quite literally law and order, but also dominance and submission as reified through material crime and punishment—invokes manufactured consent as a xenophobic enterprise. As tolerance becomes worship through commercial endorsement, entitled consumers view the abusive lover as someone to rescue; they worship literal serial killers as apex predators of psychosexual crime—a “top performer/earner” in said crimes’ veneration as something to recreate and sell back to a stupefied audience fascinated with “the love that dare not speak its name!” They synonymize rape with queerness, often inside mundane, “courtroom” hauntologies that pass off heteronormative symptoms as demonic, thus “queer” in a sex-positive, intersectionally solidarized and universally liberatory sense.
This punitive, disingenuous mindset demands sacrifice, callously selected by consumers with varying degrees of privilege. By defending victimization as integral to true crime media, they treat abuse against women and target minorities as run-of-the-mill; e.g., the veneration of someone as indefensible as Sangwoo violating someone as vulnerable as Yoonbum happening in fictional cases, but also real-life examples that play out like extraordinary fiction (minus the Gothic window-dressing of ghosts, mist and literal demons that counterfeit their non-supernatural counterparts):
(exhibit 86a2: Source. Elizabeth Kloepfer survived a six-year relationship with Bundy despite knowing who he actually was—indeed because of it; i.e., she was previously abused and suffering from alcoholism, hence fell prey to the same kinds of isolation-style tactics any toxic lover inflicts on their victims. We need to recognize how she acknowledged this abuse, writing about it after Bundy died and, in effect, releasing her from his curse; i.e., as a “Bride of Dracula” [a metaphor less for literal marriage and more for living in sin, Kloepfer never actually marrying Bundy]:
Elizabeth “Liz” Kloepfer, Ted Bundy‘s longtime girlfriend and former fiancé, disappeared from the public eye nearly 40 years ago.
Before she did, she wrote a book, The Phantom Prince: My Life with Ted Bundy, detailing her turbulent, six-year relationship with the infamous serial killer, who had led a double life as a loving partner and a heinous serial killer. (Bundy eventually admitted to killing 36 women across several states in the 1970s, although experts and people close to him speculate his actual number of victims was closer to 100.) […]
In her book, Kloepfer says she was trying to escape a creepy guy in the bar when she saw Bundy sitting alone and approached him. Thinking he looked sad, she said to him, “You look like your best friend just died.” The two began to talk. Conversation flowed naturally, and the chemistry was instant. Bundy ended up spending a platonic night at her house, but they became a couple a short time later.
“I handed Ted my life and said, ‘Here. Take care of me.’ He did in a lot of ways, but I became more and more dependent upon him. When I felt his love, I was on top of the world; when I felt nothing from Ted, I felt that I was nothing,” she said in the book [source: James Bartosch’s “Meet Elizabeth Kloepfer, Ted Bundy’s Former Girlfriend,” 2020].
Battered spouses lie to themselves, and I can certainly understand that; i.e., having a hand in my own abduction by ignoring red flags in my rapist, Jadis [re: “Meeting Jadis“]. Weird attracts weird, and abusers feed off that, making you feel things you never felt before: security. Such forgeries unfold through bad courtship; i.e., as a survivor of trauma is drawn to another often-bigger-and-stronger [at least in appearance] survivor who can seemingly protect the searching party from harm… which they then use to manipulate and control the victim[s] with; re: as Jadis did to me, weird attracting weird through similar abuses suffered—with them abused by their own mother until they tokenized to harm me, just as my mother had been abused by her own bad-faith partners, in the past.
In short, “like mother, like daughter” in both cases. Jadis’ mother abused Jadis, and Jadis abused others, raping me to feel in control; i.e., from the abuse they survived having a lasting impact on them [and me] long after their mother was dead [thus impacting me when I fell into their orbit]:
…learn from my paradoxical joys, during the painful [re]conception, birth and afterbirth; i.e., the fact that it wasn’t all bad, just messy and intense: the sex was good, and Jadis was funny [all qualities I took and put in my book to spite them, but also to love their better half that eventually gave into greed and pride]! God they made me laugh and cum like mad! But they also terrified me and couldn’t control themselves/gave us both more than we agreed to; re: we had a contract, one they didn’t follow while dragging me through a portal into their idea of Hell as they envisioned it—where they were master/victim and I their unwilling slave/abuser! What I say is the truth, insofar as the historical events are concerned, but it nonetheless revives in/mixes with Gothic poetics’ shadows and lies; e.g., Jadis wasn’t a black knight, as much as I wanted them to be. Instead, the truth of them was far more banal:
Jadis was always a person at war with themselves/ruled by their past. In short, they were kinder when they were poor/only began to change once their father died and they inherited a small fortune/dividends [extra emphasis on “small,” but it was enough to immediately change our lives during Covid: to get a new car and home at the drop of a hat and still be able to live comfortably for the rest of our lives]. Faced with that, Jadis’ desires for assimilation and dominion over a partner they could control [“the devil you know” and all that] began to surface—i.e., they had an empty room they could build whatever they wanted inside; instead of making a world together with me, they chose to push me out and orchestrate their ex, Tim, moving in with us [which originally was my idea, but one Jadis gently encouraged by constantly prodding me to mend fences with a former victim they presented as having abused Jadis first; i.e., Jadis was always the only victim].
Due to visual similarities unfolding mid-relationship, though, rape is always a matter of context under dialectical-material scrutiny. Jadis’ and my courtship, being like many others were and are, started through sex [source: “Showing Jadis’ Face while Doubling Them”].
Trauma lives in the body and victims of abuse often have damage that leads other victims of abuse towards them. It’s how the master/slave dynamic classically operates and one, under capital, that has become romanticized by people of varying privilege and oppression hugging the alien as sold to them.
To it, victims of capital can either become cops or criminals, the distinction seldom neat or clean. Furthermore, such abuses [and behaviors tied to said abuses] are alien to those outside their regular spheres, which popular media [and consumers of said media] romanticize in turn: the myth of the “chosen” spouse conveniently omitting how marriage classically never was a choice i.e., for women, whose choices we make under present circumstances being informed by a lack of agency and bad decisions: made while trying to meet other good workers capital has divided from us; re: I met Jadis during Covid/as I was coming out of the closet after my ex, Zeuhl, left me for their own secret husband, in England:
[models: Persephone van der Waard and Zeuhl; source: “Non-Magical Detectives”]
But also, such things echo in shadowy likeness that, like dolls, exist as half-real, between stories and real-life as relating cryptomimetically back and forth, mid-haunting:
The Gothic castle, then, serves as a kind of dollhouse unto itself—a playful means of aesthetically expressing the organic and circuitous relationship between all of these things. It does so in a relatable, easy-to-comprehend form; i.e., that children might communicate when talking about their own lived abuse: the undead home as alien, barbaric, and prison-like, but also demonic in doll-like forms that express/rarefy torture and unequal, harmful power exchange: Lovecraft’s “horror in clay” from “Call of Cthulhu.”
To that, the monster in The Night House is proceeded by a doll-like abstraction to the husband’s crimes hidden inside-outside himself as abjecting BDSM. It isn’t overtly undead, then, but still has an undead function when played with: a ludo-Gothic, BDSM-style negotiation of the heroine’s personal trauma as made into things that are essentially dolls. These would interact with my own dolls in a meta sense—but also my abuser abusing me with dolls—that informed my scholarship about dolls as forever a work-in-progress vis-à-vis historical materialism; i.e., as a dialectical-material process, one predicated on rape as a matter of profit expressed through dolls for or against the state on different registers. I want to explore that for the rest of the Night House close-reading.
With any and all BDSM, there’s the fantasy and the reality. Sex workers work between them as half-real, which is where the Gothic comes in; re: the rememory of personal trauma through dolls during ludo-Gothic BDSM as undead. There will be demons and power abuse, of course, but our focus is still trauma when looking at The Night House. To that, the problem with any contract is you ultimately have to rely on the dominant holding themselves accountable when things aren’t materially equal or socially transparent. No contract is perfect. As Jadis shows us, people lie, exploiting their positions to police others to feel in control at someone else’s expense, forcing them to be the doll by exploiting their desire to play with the idea of rememory at all. The same goes for the characters in The Night House; i.e., as things to relate to and learn from when dealing with abusers seeking to dominate a given rape play by bullying its execution in search of total permanent control.
Of course, hindsight isn’t foresight, but it can change history as something we make ourselves when confronting trauma in socio-material ways. Trauma lives in the body but also around it—in the chronotope, the family space—as divided, disintegrating and regenerating through rememory and decay as part of the same imbricating loop. In turn, the Gothic is written in liminality and grey area, oscillating between the world of the living and the land of the dead, the big and the small, the genuine and the fake, good faith and bad, etc; i.e., the past and the present as one in the same, which The Night House demonstrates quietly but exceptionally well through its spatio-temporal elements: the castle as—like with Alien—remains told between the space of one doubled by the other as a dark twin [source: “One Foot out the Door”].
[artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard; source: “Healing from Rape“]
Over the years, I’ve written about rape as a survivor would—both to understand its occurrence regarding myself, and to instruct its historical-material replication and subversion in a dialectical-material way. The trick to having the whore’s revenge against capital, then, is relating to each other through our asymmetrical trauma finding common ground during ludo-Gothic BDSM/calculated risk [re: Cuwu and I both rape victims who connected through our trauma, above].
Let’s not stand on ceremony to mince words, here: we victims are not drawn to trauma because we want to be raped; we want to heal from it, and that only happens by facing your fears in ways we can control that aren’t toxic—i.e., by chasing Medusa’s ghost [of the counterfeit] and playing with it to learn from the past-in-counterfeit-small. As such, there’s a learning curve to Gothic—one loaded with ghosts of older abusers who not only look like their former selves, but us, too—mirrored in canon’s alien media darlings, during criminal hauntology! Phenomenology is the maze we’re ultimately navigating through criminogenesis; i.e., to subvert inside itself, thus break the curse; re: by camping paradoxically it through holistic study during the cryptonymy process taking such things—sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll—back. Ambiguity isn’t something to omit, but embrace while showing what is alien to many the monsters we lived with; i.e., as monsters, ourselves; re: society as conditioned to blame the whore, whose revenge against profit happens by speaking out. See what gives us poor over our enemies—our survival in ways the state’s useful idiots are ignorant towards, save through canon as something that makes them weak, apathetic and stupid [so-called “pawns on the board”]! We thrive where they can scare imagine!)
For example, Ted Bundy’s paradoxical sex criminal hero worship comes, in part, from society’s overblown treatment of (white, cis-het) men like him as celebrities—famous faces that move merchandise, be it movies, videogames, or trading cards; crimino-hauntological forms seen in the slasher subgenre; and the outer margins of Gothic retro-future like the Alien franchise (e.g., David the Android [re: exhibit 51a, “Making Demons“] as the outwardly attractive killer of women, from a second wave feminist point of view) or The Terminator as the killer of a white female savior. The worship itself often comes from those historically treated as victims, but also the submissive recipients and givers of prescribed love in popular stories: white women as fascinated with romanticized, ideal form of the white man as rapist (which they project onto state abusers like the T-1000, but also state victims that cops attack, which subjugated Amazons (and other monstrous-feminine) attack during mirror syndrome; re: “Escaping Jadis“); re: “death” makes the sex better through police action tokenizing activism with scapegoat narratives (which T2 is, displacing Silicon Valley’s crimes onto “Skynet”; re: “Healing from Rape“).
Per Radcliffe, rape and police abuse is a potent aphrodisiac (re: “Radcliffe’s Refrain“), hence where shadows are both invented and power is found by demasking such fiends; i.e., what canonical Gothic uses to hint at police abuse, only to tokenize us through the same gaslight (with discrediting victims as “hysterical” because of their abuse being one of the oldest tricks in the book). In seeing his case publicized all over mass media, Bundy’s female admirers (re: Kloepfer among others) would have known the kind of power he represented through society at large—the unequal, coercively masculine kind. Bundy’s trial resonated most strongly with those already conditioned to receive violence from male authority figures, coming to Bundy’s defense as part of an implied social contract: the one between abusive, domineering men controlling victimized, susceptible women who—through the usual pyramid-tier abuse structures—tokenize just as often; re: Jadis was GNC, but identified publicly as a woman who, in turn, raped me as a trans woman. Kill capital’s darlings lest they kill us! Consume vampires/werewolves (and other metaphors for toxic love) to learn from them, opening your minds versus closing them!
By normalizing the master/slave dichotomy as something to sell, American society would have denied men and women the opportunity and information needed to pursue healthier alternatives (furries and other kinds of monster-fucker xenophilia, in Volume Two; or sex-positive BDSM through dark mommy doms, exhibit 102b). Exacted upon familiar proxies or codified scapegoats, these stereotypical interactions actually highlight the disjointed, messy fears of a middle class incensed by various control factors: the mythical killer in their midst, or a convenient scapegoat to pin those fears on. Both reify the socio-material treatment of various marginalized groups present within the “lived experience” of popular horror stories: the true crime circuit.
Biased towards cis-het, white people, true crime compels heteronormative relationships between men and women to be overshadowed by canonical slayers of either (e.g., Charlotte Dacre’s amoral “destroyer” of the household, Count Ardolf, representing male homewreckers in the 18th century’s “15th century”). White, cis-het men protect white, cis-het women, which popular stories valorize and infantilize respectively through relative privilege. Portrayed as perpetual victims, women exist in stories that disempower them in hauntological ways; the Gothic heroine as someone to blame for her own mistreatment by exceptionally evil men, who goes on to be weaponized by the status quo (e.g., Victoria as conditioned by Ardolf to attack weak femininity in Zofloya, exhibit 100b2).
Though similar abuse happens to anyone who isn’t normal—isn’t white, straight, male and Christian—white, cis-het women have just that: white, cis-het privilege. This protects them from the additional prejudices levied against gay men, people of color, trans people, immigrants, Jews, etc; and their various, domestic intersections. It also weaponizes them against so-called forms of sex-positive sodomy or “free love,” blaming out-groups for the failings of heteronormativity and marriage by attacking them instead of the institution as forcing women to marry abusers or otherwise be exposed to their harmful games (we’ll examine various examples in Chapters Three and Four when we look at weird canonical nerds and TERFs).
(source: Santa Cruz Diversity Center’s “Black History Is Queer History, And Queer History Is Black History”)
Despite how the status quo disempowers white women compared to white men, it still values white women more than men, women or non-binary people from increasingly marginalized groups. White media historically objectifies these groups, treating them as disposable symbols of white fear, including the fears of white women. Canon links gay men to disease like the AIDS crisis; black men, to rape and violence; immigrants, to labor theft and increased crime; etc. Killers and victims from these groups frequently become one in the same—especially if a crime involves someone wealthy and/or white. For example, if queer victims are killed by someone white and straight versus someone white and gay or someone black of either orientation, the general emotions invoked from white audiences will be neglect, disgust or hatred towards the marginalized side.
True crime illustrates preferential treatment at a socio-material level. The more Bundy abused white women, the more their value went up as precious objects in the eyes of a white public; they weren’t likened to the killer as Dahmer’s victims were (or Albert Fish[2], who primarily ate children after living abroad in China during a famine). Dahmer primarily killed homosexual black men. Immortalized for his heinous crimes, fans of true crime often overlook the socio-political reasons behind Dahmer’s “success”: racial and sexual prejudices exploited by Dahmer to help him kill as many people as possible. He—like Bundy and Dracula—were just more whores (re: demon lovers) to pimp, or pimps to further the whoring of the usual monstrous-feminine parties through said toxic, oft-tokenized demon love (re: Amazons) lacking irony or direct, active educational value of any kind (which we must camp to learn from) while the women ape the men to rape nature as usual; i.e., in Plato’s cave as wrought with shadows (re: “The World Is a Vampire“).
It bears repeating that those people were already victims of systemic discrimination, itself part of a longstanding commercial process: a continuous pipeline of serial killers and victims geared towards already-terrified white women. Made to scare them further, criminal hauntology treats white women as the liminal subject, growing self-absorbed from examining a violent, reimagined past until they become deathly afraid of anything that isn’t “their” idea of the self; they grow apathetic, if not downright hostile towards queer persons, people of color, and other minorities, but especially these groups attempts at revolutionary xenophilia. “Can’t have those under us voicing their own oppression; that wouldn’t be right!”
Alongside Bundy’s preferential treatment as a serial killer rockstar, Dahmer’s depravity and longevity postmortem demonstrate how popular media focuses on the bigoted, oft-racialized, demonic qualities of male killers targeting straight white women. It celebrates white killers for their “lady-killer” looks and abilities; fears black men for their violent, rapacious natures; and ogles gay men for their depraved sexualities, etc. However, although American canon commonly celebrates sexual violence through an assortment of abusers/victims that privileges white female victims, it also traps white women inside a spotlight. In the mind’s eye of a sexist, they endure heavy scrutiny by sanctimonious onlookers determined to “protect” them, even from themselves.
This includes not just men scolding women, but women self-policing activism should they dare speak out against their (often white, cis-het) male abusers: their boyfriends, fathers, husbands, employers, etc. Time and time again, everything assembles into a fatal portrait, one where women’s role inside a hauntological past becomes coercively “great” (fascist). The smiles are numerous—some might even be genuine; they’re still part of a Patriarchal circus that treats cis women like sex objects (say nothing of queer people):
(artist: Frank Frazetta)
The portrait is fatal because obedience to Capitalism only guarantees abuse. American society loves to blame victims, especially when “they’re asking for it.” This includes white women putting on a show. Dialectically they aren’t being openly sexual to debase themselves and invite criticism; they’re trying to survive inside a system that historically controls every material aspect of their lives: “Smile more; show some skin; be nice.”
Similar to segregation, female submission only guarantees subjugation, not safety from male authorities post-assimilation. Women will always be outsiders to men to preserve the status quo. By sexually objectifying women and forcing them into sex work, the system reliably leads to worker abuse; worker abuse leads to societal blame towards workers by workers, ignoring the system as the obvious root cause. This goes beyond the killers themselves, involving the complex social interactions that happen before, during and after highly publicized trials that fuel the public’s imagination (and their copies, and copies of those copies; maybe throw in an actual vampire for flavor).
Worker abuse also varies tremendously depending on one’s race and class. Bundy’s trial was the first to be publicized on live national television for its entirety. Had his victims been black, conservative media would have profiled them as masculine, hard-working and sexually aggressive. Because the women were white, the media presented them as
- unemployed, forgetting that women’s work often goes unpaid—sex, marriage, childbirth and housework
- infantile deviants, emphasizing their youthful attractiveness as corrupted, misled
- mentally ill, focusing on their misguided lust for a bonafide slayer of white women
Despite how common sexism dismissed these women as shameless, nutty layabouts, a closer, empathic look can humanize them: While some were undoubtedly horny for Bundy and manipulated by him, there’s also the system itself to critique.
Furthermore, by showcasing atypical docility and submissiveness towards a perceived superman, these girls would have been advertising these qualities to more average American men tuning in. However, some were arguably suing for personal agency by using the prison system to guarantee their safety from Bundy. Argues Kristin Canning in “Why So Many Women Were Obsessed With Ted Bundy” (2019):
Hybristophilia is one of countless paraphilias, or abnormal and/or extreme sexual desires. “Basically, it’s a sexual attraction to someone who’s committed some sort of outrageous and extraordinary crime,: says Jeffrey Ian Ross, PhD, criminologist and professor at the University of Baltimore. Think: mass murderers, sexual murderers, and cult leaders. […] While hybristophilia is technically a sexual attraction, what’s behind it isn’t necessarily sexual in nature (like, thoughts of having sex with someone violent like a serial killer). The sexual attraction is brought on by other characteristics the criminal might have and/or components of their life that make them appealing partners, says Schlesinger.
“Criminals can make the ‘perfect’ boyfriend in a way,” says [Louis] Schlesinger. “These women know where their boyfriend is at all times, and they only have to share positive encounters with him.” Weirdly, it’s a controllable and “safe” relationship option.
Think about it: Most of these women only see these men for occasional visits in their prison, during which, the man is on his best behavior, says Ross. If he’s not, she may never come back again. “They also don’t have to deal with any of the disappointments that can come up in day-to-day in relationships, like cleaning up after a boyfriend or getting annoyed by drug or alcohol use,” Ross notes (source).
These outlier motives and pathologies can also be gleaned intertextually. Just as parallel erotica sexualizes the Big Bad Wolf and Little Red Riding Hood, Renaissance thought codifies serial killers as lycanthropic. Something of a “werewolf” for these women to court, Bundy’s subsequent fandom intimates a patriarchal structure of sexist trauma. Despite high odds of pre-existing sexual abuse, playful courtship at the seat of power yields formerly abused women various forms of performative release. For Bundy’s women, they become incorrectly marketed as “Brides of Dracula” as past and perceived victims. Indeed, they achieved cathartic proximity with actual power as an intimate exhibit—one for all the world to see on national television. So common as to be cliché, the audience of the trial (then and now) can immediately recognize the juxtaposition in other forms of unequal, fetishized power, be they fairy tales, camp, or stock photos touching on the same alienation and fetishization, outside looking in:
(source)
So while hardly ideal—and certainly privileged relative to other, less fortunate groups—these troubled “brides” still attained something unusual: the relative power to engage with traditional avenues of sexist violence, but also heal[3] by finding control over their own bodies and relationships during the exchange. As victims of circumstance coping with daily abuse, none of this would even be necessary if not for the power centers that broadcast their own sovereignty through systems of control. By constantly appropriating popular symbols of sexual violence in media at large—which includes not just the singular event of a trial, but all aspects leading up to it as a mode of existence; i.e., a structure of toxic love—the elite rely on prescriptive canon to bake recursive, xenophobic bias into a popularized reactionary mindset they can weaponize against workers and xenophilic activists.
Now that we’ve outlined the xenophobic ideology of witch hunts, explored the economic relationship that drives its prejudices, and examined the outcome of those prejudices through examples of toxic love and criminal sexuality in popular “true crime” media, let’s examine one last concept before moving on: the ambivalence of Gothic hauntologies and how—while emancipatory variants allow future media to become potentially sex-positive in a counterculture sense—carceral defaults lead to the “bad play” of canonical torture and coercive, demonic BDSM transfusing harm through toxic wish fulfillment (the secret wish of conservative societies materially conditioned to reject positive sex and the social conditions, mentalities and materials that lead to it; but want it in coercive arrangements of these same factors: the medieval equivalent brought back to life in cliché, unironically carceral forms, like the handcuffs or torture dungeon, below).
Onto “Gothic Ambivalence: Canonical Torture in the Internet Age“!
About the Author
Persephone van der Waard is the author of the multi-volume, non-profit book series, Sex Positivity—its art director, sole invigilator, illustrator and primary editor (the other co-writer/co-editor being Bay Ryan). Persephone has her independent PhD in Gothic poetics and ludo-Gothic BDSM (focusing on partially on Metroidvania), and is a MtF trans woman, anti-fascist, atheist/Satanist, poly/pan kinkster, erotic artist/pornographer and anarcho-Communist with two partners. Including multiple playmates/friends and collaborators, Persephone and her many muses work/play together on Sex Positivity and on her artwork at large as a sex-positive force. That being said, she still occasionally writes reviews, Gothic analyses, and interviews for fun on her old blog (and makes YouTube videos talking about politics). Any money Persephone earns through commissions or donations goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. She takes payment on PayPal, Patreon, and CashApp, etc; all links are available on her Linktr.ee. Every bit helps!
Footnote
[1] As I respond to Vera in the original interview:
Fun fact, but the original inspiration for Ursula from The Little Mermaid (1991) was Divine (source: Laura Zornosa’s “Once Upon a Time, Ursula Was a Drag Queen,” 2023); i.e., the “bury your gays” trope further combined with medieval theatre’s vice character tropes in 1960s and ’70s camp (e.g., Rocky Horror, 1975). Borrowed hauntologically from the imaginary performative past (as all Gothic is), all originate from a former time where only boys and men—but commonly homosexual men (e.g., Shakespeare)—were allowed to act onstage (most 20th century drag queens are historically cis-het, with terms like “trans” being formally introduced in 1965; re: “What Is Problematic Love?“). Furthermore, Horace Walpole—the father of the Gothic novel, hence mode—was arguably gay, as was Matthew Lewis (re: “Prey as Liberators“).
Beyond cis gay men as the go-to scapegoats of the medieval and neo-medieval periods, the fact remains that trans, non-binary and intersex people have existed alongside them; i.e., since the dawn of time. Yet the West has commonly demonized them through the abjection process, too; i.e., historically through homosexual men as the most legally visible of the bunch. This includes well before the term “homosexual” existed (e.g., sodomy accusations and prosecuting them in the 1700s, vis-à-vis Colin Broadmoor’s “Camping the Canon,” 2021), and well into capital, after “homosexual” existed and men outed as such were being prosecuted medically (re: from 1872 onwards, vis-à-vis Foucault’s A History of Sexuality, 1980): alongside other persecuted minorities, from Oscar Wilde onwards (re: the first public trial of homosexuality, “Making Marx Gay“); i.e., as capital and the bourgeoisie evolved to abuse such modular persecution language under new, increasingly diverse, flexible and inclusive models of intersectional exploitation (re: witch hunts, sodomy, Orientalism and blood libel, vis-à-vis my “Idle Hands” chapter, “Policing the Whore” and “A Vampire History Primer,” etc).
All in all, capital commodifies marginalized exploitation, effectively controlling opposition through the tokenized language of alienation; i.e., as only going up in its usage through a swelling profit motive under neoliberalism (a freeing of the market). We must expand in opposition to such bad-faith usage, camping what has become canon on the Aegis; e.g., Divine is fine, to my knowledge, but RuPaul is transphobic (source: Michael Cuby’s “These Trans and Cis Female Drag Queens Have Some WORDS for RuPaul,” 2018); re: “gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss” applying to any group assimilating inside the Man Box (see: Mark Greene); i.e., acting like a white straight man under the Protestant ethic, as many second wave feminists and drag queens (from the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s) have historically done into the present space and time (source).
Such things, from the 18th century into the 21st,remain gays to bury through different flavors and degrees of mistreatment within imbricating (and modular/arbitrary) persecution networks.
[2] The serial killer is romanced by white, cis-het women as a kind of aesthete/apex predator who only kills the rude. Hannibal Lecter or Dexter are, themselves, fetishized, queer-coded vigilantes that apologize for the system by killing deplorable cis-het white men (scapegoating them after the twist) or demasking a popular “bury your gays” twist: the meta comparison of the deranged cis-het crossdresser with the queer people of the times; e.g., Norman Bates from Psycho (1960) revealing a very old and annoying twist for queer people in criminal-hauntologies: the killer was a “fag” all along! These killings are problem because they aren’t attempts at fixing the system, but assigning scapegoats within it. The revenge is an arbitrary and palliative band-aid, but also a regressive assimilation fantasy: Clarice, a female cop, marries Hannibal in the end, essentially becoming yet another Bride of Dracula; i.e., she’s absconding with him because he’s an apex predator and stupid intelligent and wealthy. It’s very shallow and entitled white-woman readership behavior.
[3] The need to heal exists among groups who are more likely to be abused and ignored under the status quo, leading to various self-abuse fantasies including captivity and rape fantasies. While this can be for people have actually been abused, it also includes those who are made to feel like they might be abused when sensing canonical/appropriative peril.