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.
Gothic Ambivalence: Canonical Torture in the Internet Age; or the Wish Fulfillment of Guilty Pleasure, Bad Play and Sex-Coercive Demon BDSM (feat. Hellraiser)
Ooh, somethin’s got a hold on me now
It’s a feelin’, burnin’ like a lover on fire
Hold me tight, baby
Don’t leave me by myself tonight
‘Cause I don’t think I can make it through the night (source).
—Eddie Money; “I Think I’m in Love,” on Eddie Money’s No Control (1982)
Picking up where “Toxic Love and Criminal Sexuality in True Crime” left off…
As we explored in Volume Two, Gothic canon—especially Neo-Gothic, classical forms—is rife with otherworldly sex demons linked to canonical torture (commonly of women by men): unironically torturous demon lovers. Yet, these ambivalent, occult metaphors point to a more grounded medievalized sexism we shall explore now: the abuses that occur through real-life arrangements of power that imitate the pre-fascist variables of Ann Radcliffe (and other Gothic participants since her novels came and went; e.g., Lewis, Shelley or Scott). The last section already explored “true crime” in that respect; this section examines how reactionaries respond to a particular set of carceral-hauntological instructions, taught through the personal ownership of cheap consumer “goods”: women and other subjects of settle-colonial abuse as BDSM-coded; i.e., coercive demonic BDSM, Hellraiser‘s Cenobites, what have you, as the monstrous-feminine ghost of the counterfeit to literally fuck with (the marquee whore).
(artist: Midna Ash)
Note: Outside of Volume Three, I don’t examine Barker’s Hellraiser franchise at any considerable length. For a close-read of something very close to the Cenobites, read my close-read of Mandy (re: “Futile Revenge“), my critiques of Angela Carter (re: “Reclaiming Amazons“), or my subchapter of demonic abductions (re: “I’ll See You in Hell“); the entire idea of Radcliffe’s Black Veil, demon lover and exquisite torture is vital, as well, which the Demon Module delves into at length (re: “Exploring the Derelict Past“). Also, consider any mention of the xenomorph (re: “Giger’s Xenomorph“), the vampiric/queer (sodomic) hyphenation of pleasure/pain and confusion of predator/prey vaso vagal fear responses merging with strictly “ecclesiastical” mommy-type domination/submission power dynamics (re: “Psychosexual Martyrdom“), camp/the palliative Numinous (re: “The Quest for Power“), informed consent during rape play (re: “Healing through ‘Rape’“), and so on.
The Gothic, as something to camp or not, remains very much about power exchange during alien sex of a black/red, phallic, barbaric, “of nature/dark fallen civilization” character or at least guise (of the Medusa/death whore of revenge) that is nonetheless negotiated; i.e., of the master/slave argument as something to play out with hauntological cops-and-robbers elements—to play with power itself as unequal conducive to different wishes to grant through play.
To all of that, the aesthetics of power and death are highly dualistic and not conducive to harm, in and of themselves; re: are dialectical-material in ways that flow power anisotropically towards or away from the state by furthering or reversing abjection through cryptonymy and hauntology/chronotope arguments (re: mirror syndrome, “Always a Victim“).
Moreover, These dialogs include pain as its own paradoxically pleasurable thing that can include sexual feelings, but just as often fall back onto euphoria sensations commonly and mistakenly viewed as sexual from the outside in. The whore’s revenge can support or dismantle those confusions during the cryptonymy process; it all depends on the lesson being taught, on the Aegis—e.g., live burial, the murderous womb, so-called “Iron Maiden” vibes, and so on: escape from Castle Wolfenstein that… we keep escaping back towards for so good-ol’-fashioned calculated risk, said risk (and its darkness visible’s forbidden sight) dressed up as memento-mori ultraviolence and Freudian-grade rape hysteria freed from Pygmalion as normally pimping Medusa: “You’ve been bad, and you need to be punished! Come to Mommy, little ones!”
(artist: Steff Morganzzi)
By looking at the non-consensual, harmful side of said poetics in practice, then, this whole section remains an early precursor for what ludo-Gothic BDSM ultimately became and what I researched extensively through Metroidvania, Tolkien and Amazons—everything about Medusa’s revenge (re: acting out her own rape, “Policing the Whore“) coming out of something I refer to as “demon BDSM”; re:
“Demon BDSM” is essentially what I call “BDSM with monsters” (even though “demon” is only one class of monster, their class specializes in forbidden knowledge and power exchange); “ludo-Gothic BDSM” stresses the playful, campy nature of iconoclastic BDSM when using ironic Gothic poetics and performance, including not just demons but also animal language (e.g., puppy play) and undead components; re: “rape play” but also labor exchange in half-real, cryptomimetic forms (source: “Prey as Liberators by Camping Prey-like BDSM”).
Before I wrote my PhD and coined “ludo-Gothic BDSM,” then—or even wrote my manifesto in its earliest forms—Volume Three merely concerned “demon BDSM” as something to play with; i.e., vis-à-vis Radcliffe’s ideas of exquisite torture without irony. “Gothic Ambivalence” was the start of the process insofar as Sex Positivity was concerned, leading towards Medusa’s grand guignol. “Pleasure and pain become one in the same in the eyes of a wounded child” (Pat Benatar’s “Hell Is for Children,” 1980; re: exhibit 41g1a1b1, “Leaving the Closet“).
So does rape always haunt actual camp, because actual rape is canon, thus capital, as founded on rape to camp by us; i.e., feeding into dark nostalgia as ours to paradoxically take back (similar to land or labor through monsters; re: “Reclaiming Anal Rape“). We camp canon because we must, and Medusa was a bad bitch/dark priestess/ruler of pandemonium demanding heavy-metal worship and earnestly genuine tribute—your blood to rinse Hell clean of unbelievers! “Suffer the little children unto me!” Her wet dream is a bloody one, revolution being gallons upon gallons of pussy Kool-Aid we’re standing up to our waists in (wasted blood that Vampire Capitalism cannot ingest). Rape revenge results from rape in ways the state will try to pimp in patriarchal forms; re: Freud obscuring Marx (“Ghosts of Freud“), but also Marx not being gay enough (“Making Marx Gay“). —Perse, 4/17/2025 (two years to the day after writing the original Volume Three manifesto).
(artist: Loretta Vampz)
Canon being an extension of a bourgeoisie-cultivated Superstructure, knowledge becomes owned—a commercial demonstration of moral superiority through personal ownership by privileged members inside a punitive hierarchy. By selling these stories, the elite funnel power through a sexist mode of consumption, citing abusive sex and demonic BDSM as a guilty ritual of “bad play.” Tying into the ludic social function under Capitalism, bad play’s function in popular media is sacred, but also immutable—a means of signifying moral order through binary exchanges inside a society incessantly preoccupied with consuming psychosexual violence (the image above is from the 2019 remake of Steven King’s Gerald’s Game). Shameful sex suddenly becomes appropriate when viewed as demonic, criminal, and forbidden, but also commodified in a ludic fashion; normally denied, the guilty pleasures of abject pastiche serve as canonical “junk food,” one whose whispered “aphrodisiac” qualities become a strange carrot to dangle before would-be supplicants: wish fulfillment. Play the game, get the treat; just don’t humanize the state of exception (as we do; re: by humanizing the harvest, “Nature as Food”).
If fetishized-witch hunts supply the ideological language to demonically scapegoat marginalized groups, wish fulfillment drives the viral hauntology behind it. Though not strictly “evil,” the satisfying of unconscious desires in dreams or fantasies can be easily manipulated by those in power. Beforehand, sex and sex education are denied, making someone ignorant but also desperate, lacking discipline and control in the face of anything that isn’t modest, but also subservient. Then, if canon codes a subject as outwardly evil, expectations not only allow but demand their unadulterated prurience; if it is prurient, the righteous virgin may punish it brutally (or celebrate it, in fascist strongmen cases).
In Gothic, libidinous personas (the whore, per virgin/whore) generally fall in two[1] basic categories: temptress (monstrous-feminine) or rapist (masculine, which includes the monstrous-feminine). The cliché, candy-like personas of cartoonishly wicked women despoil virtuous men by leading them towards cheap, easy temptation; male demons rape women to keep onlookers in their place, sampling ultimate temptation before resisting it through force. Both scenarios justify physical violence and sexual control against women, buttressing whatever misogynistic double standards occur within the bad play of coercively demonic BDSM.
(exhibit 86a3: Artist, bottom: unknown. The succubus or incubus is canonically queer-coded and treated like a bad dream: the rape of the victim in their bed but also wanting it. Obviously this can be subverted but heteronormative is unironically rapacious—i.e., of the woman by the husband.)
For example, demonic rapists are displaced shows of force, so-called “demon lovers” threatening good girls with heinous punishment should they misbehave (e.g., Griffith raping Casca for being a tomboy knight, forcing her to be his bride and commenting on the forced nature of marriage under fascist conditions—47b2). This isn’t an exercise in sex-positive, thus countercultural BDSM; it’s an ultimatum; violence, normally discouraged in polite society, becomes a wish to fulfill if the conditions call for it. In turn, wish fulfillment may also reverse the overtly punitive function, making it something to play with through coerced guilt: “You were good, now you get rewarded with sex that I enjoy—i.e., you are the slave who gets to pleasure me, the master.”
Despite their guilt, those with relative privilege may enjoy the secret function of coercive sex, a linguo-material double standard that skirts the boundaries of legitimate punishment by granting them power over others without any sense of earnest negotiation or empathy. This also grants the middle class a curious alternative/outlet: the means to reverse roles in an enjoyable sense (say nothing of the elite), whereupon punishment becomes roleplay through the private exploration of guilty pleasures: playing at (or with) coercive demons and criminal hauntology mashed together. Provided the broader hegemony remains intact, middle-class wives may avoid punishment, while husbands may “spare” or even “submit” to their wives for a moment (only in the bedroom; re: Foucault).
The fact remains, such play is a luxury inside a vindictive system that reliably sacrifices the majority (workers) and potential dissidents (non-heteronormative workers) through brutal violence and thought control. Made possible by eternal strangleholds on the press and media at large, those at the top hoard the majority of devilish play for themselves, using their vast material advantages and social authority to keep it secret behind neoliberal illusions. All the while, they privatize Bald Mountain, leading reactionaries away from their source of continued plunder with supernatural-themed deceptions: demonic scapegoats. Free from criticism, the holy and the powerful monopolize the language of sin, including its consequent violence and pleasure; they partake in amoral hedonism, enjoying whatever they want—avarice, but also sex with the coercively demonized and animalized: slaves.
Amorality, in this case, amounts to negative freedom for the elite. Conversely, the act—of “monster-fucking” werewolves like Rob Zombie’s “Superbeast” (1998) and other commodified, “rock ‘n roll” symbols of fearsome, attractive power (e.g., “Vampires and Claymation” and “Knife Dicks“)—is entirely possible as a positive freedom (re: the singing werewolf and other animal-themed forms of sex-positive BDSM, kink and fetishes). However, for oppressed workers to liberate themselves, they require intelligent performers to delegate good-faith roles through responsible play. By injecting ironic empathy and consent into Gothic ambivalence, they transform hauntological canon’s carceral role into ludic, xenophilic fun—to enjoy historically “forbidden” pleasures without exploiting anyone at all. This can be a spice, but also a vice-character balm (the bandit whore) that addresses systemic bigotry present within groups of intersecting privilege and oppression.
Either way the sex becomes meaningful by elevating it beyond the simply mechanical actions; it can be kinky, fetishized, and unequal, but in mutually consensual ways that avoid actual violence and power abuse. In turn, these xenophilic qualities of “good play” and voyeuristic/exhibited peril and exquisite torture can be appreciated, savored, and cultivated by all parties involved as a sex-positive hauntological mode.
This includes our aforementioned “zombie unicorns” (exhibit 87a, below) who fuck to metal and have otherworldly bodies because Capitalism presents them as abject and mythical (and weird gamer nerds gatekeep, covet and drool over, but wet their pants in confused rage if the owner of the body says no to them; more on this towards the end of Chapter Three). We’re all unicorns under Communism, you see—all special and worthy workers of freedom and love. All the flowers are beautiful, all the pussies, asses and cocks; all fuzzy bodies an artwork of iconoclastic praxis; all the ace people, too; all the peril appreciative as something to play with and enjoy as we reflect on more barbaric times, when dumbasses didn’t know how to BDSM because Capitalism made them all stupid, bad players who fulfill the wish of genuine rape to stave off their own fears and reality of exploitation.
(exhibit 87a: Artist, left: Persephone van der Waard. Originally drawn as Lady Death to correct the Hawkeye Initiative [2013] example of that character [bottom-right], I studied models like Soon2BSalty [top-right] to draw a zombie-unicorn breeding kink exhibit renovated for my book. “Breeding” kink is not about getting pregnant or exploiting a “unicorn”—re: a bisexual woman for a couple to sleep with, no strings attached—but abjuring heteronormative forms and assimilated/compelled chattel-rape fantasies in pursuit of sex-positive, xenophilic forms that are closer to nature, often through “furry” spirit animals/totems and worker-friendly monsters and BDSM. Again, “animals embody the canonical language of power and resistance as something to camp through demonic and undead forms”; monster are often animalized, and the BDSM of stigma animals can help address trauma living in the body as a result of systemic issues its linguo-material reminders; i.e., colonial violence and the use of terms like “stud” or “bitch” to dehumanize local populations in a systemic and purely vindictive way tied to the profit motive and settler-colonialism.
Human pets, like their non-human counterparts [Girl with the Dogs’ “Spicy Cat Gets the Hazard Helmet,” 2023], require tender love and care despite our fears [acquired from our time and space, the natural-material environments therein, and whatever we manage to absorb with our little human brains]. We, as people, don’t like to think of ourselves as conditioned or as food, as animal products. Capitalism does this to us, turning us into private property for the elite, who condition us to be violent for their profit. They do so in ways that alienate us from our animal side by turning those animal personas/spirit animals [furry or otherwise] into abject gargoyles—canonical doubles whose appropriated peril conditions use to fear anything of the animal side except its mass-produced phobias: “Animal is other. Now invoke it like a good little dog when our cultivated Superstructure triggers you to.”
In this sense, good training is effectively retraining, with instructors from the female/queer alienized side of things teaching their male/straight counterparts to resist their bourgeois, xenophobic coding to learn how to have good forms of play—re: Trent Reznor’s “sex you can smell” that breaks down our Cartesian, Enlightenment modes of thought as harmfully binarized. Be good to that liminal, anthropomorphic, zombie-puppy unicorn thing! Stroke her fur, feel every bit of her with your senses in ways that respect her agency as she teaches you how through iconoclastic praxis—with your bodies, your labor, your art, your genitals, your genders, your appreciative, ritualized, Gothic peril; your succulent reverse-abjection and naughty-naughty anthro cum—your quasi-bestial “breeding kinks” et al. And as always, please refer to exhibit 38c2’s Harkness/monster-fucker guide to avoid pedophilia and actual bestiality in your own iconoclastic praxis/artwork; re: “One Foot Out the Door.” Neither human children nor non-human/non-sentient animals [non-homo sapiens] can consent to sexual activity, making any sexual activity with them tantamount to rape/sexual assault.)
Let’s return to the idea of demonic fetishization. We discussed the general cycle of abuse between witch hunters and their victims in the “Dogma and Economics” subsection; now let’s investigate the fetishized states as a socio-material consequence of wish fulfillment through the bad play of coercively demonic BDSM and kink (itself a kind of de facto bad education):
- how sexist people—primarily white, cis-het Christian men—are transformed into fetishized objects of monstrous violence
- how their targets are isolated, disempowered through bondage and discipline abuse, then discredited and sexualized to objectifying extremes (sadism and masochism).
“Good play” and the iconoclastic wish fulfillment rape fantasy of wanting to not be raped during the Gothicized ritual—this appreciative peril and its subversive powers remain wholly useless for those who exact institutional violence against others through canonical praxis’ appropriated peril.
Representing a public role tied to common attitudes of sexual punishment, these jailers emphasize “bad play” as universal: “Boundaries for me, not for thee,” with women generally shamed and powerful men protected through various double standards than enable future abuse (with people of color, non-Christians and queer persons pushed to the margins—more on this in Chapter Three). Designed to advertise and prolong abuse as a means of social-sexual control through material means, the structure that enables this abuse not only tolerates sexual violence, but economically encourages its recreation through perverse rewards: de facto education whose Pavlovian “dog treats” repeatedly turn future generations into badly educated sex pests with zero imagination beyond what Capitalism historically-materially allows.
(source)
Here, manufactured scarcity deprives sexist performers of safe, nurturing sex (not just condoms or birth control, but consensual sex, too). They become sex-starved and information-deprived—killer virgins embroiled within a prolonged state of fearful ignorance beset by “evil” as instructed by formal institutions of power. On par with Ambrosio from The Monk (1796), such persons revel in bad play through violent fantasies geared towards achieving sexual control through coercive dominance by a secret whore (re: “angel in the streets, freak in the sheets”; see: “New Eyes, Forbidden Sight (and ‘Religious’ Concerns)” from “Of Darkness and the Forbidden“). Indeed, Matthew Lewis cemented these within Ambrosio himself, a religious man obsessed with raping Antonia, a woman he barely knew (and his penis frequently being compared to a dagger or vice versa). Hidden virtuously behind a veil, her impeccable modesty bore no protection against the perfidious cleric (assisted on his horny quest by a crossdressing, devil-worshiping woman named Matilda[2]).
Note: Lewis Matilda is someone we’ve constantly alluded to, but never really dedicated a chapter towards; i.e., as a seductive matter of crossdress (which Chapter Three will touch on more than the other volumes have); e.g., exhibit 1a1a1h6b1 in Volume Zero (re: “Shining a Light on Things“) or repeatedly throughout the Demon Module (re: “Of Darkness and the Forbidden“).
(artist: Giovanni Maria Benzoni)
For Lewis, these opposites—Ambrosio’s nefarious aspirations and Antonia’s besieged virtue—were less imagined hypotheticals re: and more Lewis satirizing England’s social-sexual climate within displaced and outrageous, but also queer language. Moreover, its patently Gothic nature gave him the means to speak on taboo themes: rape as a material byproduct of violent culture attitudes, not isolated nut jobs misled by the metaphysical devil. Ambrosio even blames Antonia for tempting him and Matilda for setting it all up, fulfilling the binary of temptress and rapist working in tandem while dumping his own blame fully onto women, not himself. This works as a pre-cursor to the whole “no fap” thing that many sexist religious men today endorse: blaming women for taking away the “essence” of their strength: their semen, but also their control; cumming is a sign of spiritual, physical and mental weakness.
For example, Gandhi—a cryptonymic symbol of peace—actually believed that cumming was a sign of spiritual weakness. After the death of his wife, he started “testing” himself regularly by having young naked women lie in bed with him. According to the Guardian, Gandhi not only hadn’t had sex in forty years; he blamed himself and his own “failings” for religious violence happening throughout India:
For several decades after his death, this episode was not widely known. Popular accounts of Gandhi’s life, including Richard Attenborough’s biopic, never mentioned it. The facts are that after his wife, Kasturba, died in 1944, Gandhi began the habit of sharing his bed with naked young women: his personal doctor, Sushila Nayar, and his grandnieces Abha and Manu, who were then in their late teens and about 60 years younger than him.
Gandhi hadn’t had a sexual relationship with a woman for 40 years. Nor, in any obvious way and so far as anyone can tell, did he begin one now. His conscious purpose in inviting naked women to share his bed was, paradoxically, to avoid having sex with them. They were there as a temptation: if he wasn’t aroused by their presence, he could be reassured he’d achieved brahmacharya, a Hindu concept of celibate self-control. According to Gandhi, a person who had such control was “one who never has any lustful intention, who by constant attendance upon God has become proof against conscious or unconscious emissions, who is capable of lying naked with naked women, however beautiful they may be, without being in any manner sexually excited.” Such a person, Gandhi wrote, would be incapable of lying or harming anyone (source: Ian Jack, 2018).
This “Great Man of History” fallacy aggrandizes him, blames women, ignores the geopolitical factors, and shames sex—so, not exactly great dialectical-material analysis. Moreover, Jack’s sentence, “Popular accounts of Gandhi’s life, including Richard Attenborough’s biopic, never mentioned it,” seems to gloss over a suspicious cone of silence tied to a male symbol of peace and sexual purity that still found ways to harm women. “No fap” is also popular among the Alt-Right, who somehow found a way to insert austerity politics and manufactured scarcity into an compelled abstinence narrative (The Kavernacle’s “Why The Far-Right LOVE the No Fap Movement – Proud Boys, No Nut November and Cultural Marxism,” 2022); this checks with weaponized abstinence in conservative circles, training young men to push sex away while simultaneously worshiping and craving it—abjection, in other words. Capital begets harm as a matter of revenge, that in the wrong hangs, threatens the worst possible outcomes many will (understandably) joke about:
Long before Gandhi (nuclear or otherwise; The Salt Factory’s “Chasing Bugs – Why Gandhi Went Nuclear (Civilization),” 2019) or MAGA, though, criminal hauntology was already common when Lewis wrote The Monk. Littered with fragments of older stories, his reverse-abject “archaeologies” (mimicking Walpole’s claims of Otranto being a historical document) showing the importance of countering sex-coercive hauntology with sex-positive opposition—humanizing tutelage from reformed individuals who proactively disarm potential sex abusers before they cross the line (re: Macabre Storytelling). However, it’s equally vital to recognize where generational violence originates: from the Base and Superstructure according to bourgeois interference. Sex pests don’t blip into being. Popular media is coercively sexual, the violence inherent to coercive sexuality manifesting through guilty forms of bad play that compel future abuse—genuine material control for the elite, and manufactured control for, and consent from, a middle-class audience seeking wish fulfillment in coercively demonic BDSM.
As we’ll explore in the next section, sex-positive play reverses this effect, helping participants escape the harmful legacy of sexist norms by playing outside their criminalizing influence. This broadening of one’s horizons doesn’t descend into madness, but escape from it. It must, lest society overflow with idiotic rapists like Ambrosio—manufactured criminals whose delusional, xenophobic self-entitlement leads to violent fantasies about bad play as its own guilty pleasure. Some activities—like anal sex or consensual voyeurism—even become conflated with hauntology crime, polluting the public’s understanding of regular, healthy sexual activities by associating with fictional sites of canonical decay (we’ll explore how sex-positive hauntology challenges this phenomenon in Chapter Three): the Gothic castle or kangaroo court, as already established, but just as likely the noir-themed voyeurism of Edward Hooper’s starkly-lit cityscapes:
(artist: Edward Hooper)
As discussed in Chapter One, guilty pleasures (e.g., like voyeurism; re: Hooper, above) aren’t inherently unethical; they become unethical when employed in a sex-coercive fashion. Canon’s carceral effect on the public imagination leads to social-sexual violence through a plethora of real-life outcomes influenced by corporate hauntology. Social-sexual violence can
- be physical, mental, sexual, or all three
- be familial (child, spousal, parental, etc) or extra-familial (curricular, extra-curricular or workplace)
- happen during an event, but also before/after the primarily violence
This last point addresses peripheral violence, a phenomenon that involves: direct abusers through general gaslighting or DARVO; direct enablers, who know about the abuse but keep it secret; and proxy abusers—apathetic, even hostile witnesses or authority figures who blame, shame, or neglect the victim along the way.
When those in power plead ignorance, their collective inaction defends the status quo as an ongoing material arrangement whose guilty pleasures compel future atrocities. Drafted along ideological lines, this Superstructure formulates quixotic delusions about sex begot from hauntological entertainment. In turn, these lend society structure through the Base—canon as something to produce, which prescribes sex-coercive norms that disguise, enable, or downplay social-sexual violence. Whereas all canon demands consumer worship, Gothic canon promotes the reverence of social-sexual bad play present in coercive BDSM, kink, and fetishization.
A kind of generational “curse,” canonical bad play reinforces dangerous myths, fulfilling the Patriarchy’s wishes through the minds of subservient workers who can’t imagine anything else. Women, for example, are entirely mythologized—a lie that treats cis-white women (or beings perceived[3] as cis-white women) as inherently submissive, entirely sexual beings that require pain to experience romantic bliss and physical pleasure. Not only this, but current or potential wives or girlfriends, especially horny ones, are “bad girls” who need pain though disempowerment, humiliation and isolation—administered by patriarchal authorities entirely concerned with gratifying their own sexual urges through sincere power abuse (mirrored by canonical forms in carceral-hauntological media).
(artist: William-Adolphe Bouguereau, as shown in Broadmoor’s “Camping the Canon” and our “Scouting the Field” from Volume Zero)
Fear and dogma persist within canonical bad play and social-sexual myths. While some involve paid performers in Gothic media, others incriminate their audiences as (oft-)willing accomplices. By ingesting and imitating bad play in their own social-sex lives, sexist consumers assimilate a variety of lionized behaviors. Unironically celebrated and widely consumed by the larger public, predatory acts—of male hunters stalking and coveting female prey—have become more than mainstream; they’ve become nostalgic, often through the very sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll capital pimps for profit.
“Every Breath You Take” (1983), for example, details the musings of a stalker inside a somber, yearning ballad. Penned by a trio of rakish blondes purposefully exploiting the hearts of teenage girls “hot for teacher”
“I wanted to write a song about sexuality in the classroom,” the rocker explained in the 1981 book L’Historia Bandido. Sting then admitted his previous profession influenced the song. “I’d done teaching practice at secondary schools and been through the business of having 15-year-old girls fancying me – and me really fancying them! How I kept my hands off them I don’t know.” Still, the singer has made it clear on multiple occasions that he remained completely professional while teaching. “I never had a relationship with any of my pupils – I wouldn’t want to,” he declared to Q in 1993. “You have to remember we were blond bombshells at the time and most of our fans were young girls, so I started role playing a bit. Let’s exploit that” (source: Corey Irwin’s “Is the Police’s ‘Don’t Stand So Close to Me’ Autobiographical?” 2020).
the band sold coercive love and Lolita-grade power imbalance hypnotically back to kids: something to export, to demand, to owe—not just once, in the past, but again in future media like Stranger Things (2016): Known for resurrecting yesterday’s musical hits, the show unironically marries ageless, sexist chart-toppers to the next generation, including “Every Breath You Take”; i.e., as couched inside prescriptively terrifying scenarios, these re-licensed songs join a larger chronotope, one the old guard may look back on with fondness, but also younger people who “missed out.” Rape and its hauntologies become nostalgia to future children saddled with Capitalist Realism[4]; i.e., during the usual cryptomimesis occupied by state victims in duality. It’s only a mode of open thought through cryptonymy aiming to accomplish that as a matter of function through flow.
Unfortunately neoliberal fables treat the past as a formula; i.e., something to reinvent by constantly depicting it as a special time, a legendary place that once was and could be again. However, the ghost of the counterfeit is always a tyrant, one whose sexual violence haunts future copies ad infinitum. Neoliberalism cheats scrutiny by celebrating Gothic reinvention as critically blind, reviving the monstrous force lurking behind their glossy curtain: the power (and class character) of old, dead kings. They repackage this return to tradition (an ideological rejection of modernity and modern Western values, itself a false revolution that “returns” to feudalism, which is really just a more violent state of affairs where more people can climb to the top through violent in-fighting) with halcyon reverence; re: “Look on my Works, ye Mighty!” Medusa has a stormy for a pussy and its wet as hell!
Inside its withered Shadow of Pygmalion (re: the infernal concentric pattern as haunted by Ozymandias and Medusa; see: “She Fucks Back“), the present becomes something to escape, a casualty of the mind under Zombie Capitalism retreating backward into fascist hauntology as Promethean (the hauntology-as-Promethean a doomsday prophecy to embrace, following a visual formula so regularized that an AI can replicate it based on past media as a series for it to study, then copy and combine into other things; the neoliberal variant a “puncher’s fantasy” whose sanctioned ultraviolence envisions the fated triumph of the good team despite all the evidence to an insurmountable problem).
Conversely, Gothic stories critical of Capitalism still fear the tyrannical past’s return as having already arrived, but also having never quite left (the Medusa is in the house because the house is Medusa, mis-en-abyme as “castle in the flesh“; re: the xenomorph in Alien, above, changing the home itself into something inhospitable to the colonizers sleepwalking through space).
Furthermore, these morphologies can take on different forms depending on the hauntology (and media) being used: the Skeleton King from Blizzard’s Gothic fantasy dungeon-crawler, Diablo (1996); or the Engineer waking up in Ridley Scott’s retro-future revival from his own canon, Prometheus (which, as we discussed in Volume Two, is a more overt, posthuman nod to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein—aka The Modern Prometheus during perceived slave revolt [re: “Making Demons“]—than Alien had been; i.e., the mad scientist is the Creature after being made by his own bad father/mother, conman and Wizard of Oz offshoot, Peter Weyland).
Whatever the form, Gothic artifacts present dread and fear relative to a “king of terrors,” but also something to relish in a safe, packed form (which includes the Medusa during the ghost of the counterfeit furthering abjection). The safety can be a cryptonym that disguises the product’s allegory from those in power, but also those with power—the uncritical, incarcerated, and complicit audience. The friendly ghost, in this case, is the allegory buried in either story. Xenophilia isn’t always out in the open, being written by cis-het people (or those posturing as such).
Regardless, as Capitalism decays, neoliberal chronotopes decay with them. Mid-rot, the moral virtues they personify peel back, exposing a sexist hierarchy but also a corpse—the dead king, his tomb, the other subjects as buried alive, as mindless zombies, as bloodthirsty werewolves (a desperate Nazi trope towards the end of WW2), as possessed, drugged or lobotomized. Tied to a perfidious hauntology of the once-and-never-were, “greatness” becomes a new kind of cryptonym—a fascist pantheon of majestic kings, dutiful maidens, manly warriors, sniveling weaklings (intellectuals/queer people), etc. As part of this “new” order, reactionary customers embody these archetypes by continuously purchasing demonic sacrifices, watching sex workers (actors, artists, prostitutes, dancers, etc) perform stereotypical abuse against historically fetishized groups. Spellbound, they gaze longingly towards a reimagined past, foregoing anything that clashes with their idealized masculine image.
(artist: Henry Fuseli)
Like Hamlet, masculinity under fascism becomes something to converse with; also like Hamlet, it corrupts who fascists are—slowly driving them mad by disintegrating them mid-reverie:
Hamlet begins the play as a possible tragic hero, but as he interacts with corrupt characters, his traits become increasingly tainted until his potential for heroism disintegrates completely. Although Hamlet is depicted at first as a seemingly normal, depressed man, he is influenced by his relationships with Claudius, the ghost, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern until his old virtues are no longer recognizable. His evil actions, whether with Polonius, Gertrude, or Ophelia, further ingrain his corruption. Horatio’s steady, honorable personality emphasizes the demoralization of Hamlet’s character. By the end of the play, Hamlet no longer has any traits of a hero but seems more of a villain, full of immoral, evil thoughts and devoid of his former inner goodness (source: Reverie Marie’s “Hamlet Is Not a Tragic Hero,” 2016).
The outcome is Promethean—the complete annihilation of individual and bloodline alike, generally through ignominious slaughter backed by xenophobic madness. Collateral and carceral damage are commonplace as well. During the reactionaries’ descent into madness, those who play at demons through un(der)paid, stigmatized sex work become trapped—pinned between these ambivalent, taboo symbols’ punitive usage and whatever empowering variants that iconoclasts strive to install; re: through power as performance to bear out by bearing it all in all the usual “death whore” ways: “Hear me roar!” (and watch me freeze you, beat you, eat you alive during the usual revenge fantasies performed with genuine irony insofar as they subvert the profit motive). The Gothic marries excitement to peril, sex to demons that, back then and now, have had harm on their minds (a dark appetite to curb but also pimp, which the whore takes back through poetically “dietary” means; re: “the cake is a lie!”).
(artist: Loretta Vampz)
The challenge in executing successful, internalized xenophilia (re: the whore’s revenge) lies less in seriously altering the appearance of famous demonic symbols, BDSM rituals and prurient costumes, and more in changing how they’re perceived—as ambivalent paradoxical things to appreciate, not appropriate during subversive liminal expression. This appreciative irony lends the demonized a voice, a pedagogy of the oppressed that comes through underlying context—i.e., the coercive norms historically communicated by imagery during a given sex-positive performance and how these inform the latter as supportive, or transgressive of, the former. To infer these subtextual connections, the imagery must be dialectically-materially analyzed. While this might seem daunting at first glance, release dates make for effective timestamps.
For example, when considering 1987 Hellraiser versus its 2022 variant, we can examine how either performance might support or resist the status quo using the same basic costume as something to perform, but also respond to. Neither xenophobia spells anything out in concrete terms, but the reactions to what’s presented (diegetic or otherwise) can be especially telling. The 1987 text argues for a pure, cis-het damsel-in-distress—a middle-class princess/maiden who must survive temptation from a closeted cabal of psychosexual demons. Normally they exist outside decent society. Clive Barker teases their much-feted arrival before finally trotting them out—all to make a larger point about sexual purity and familial relations commonplace during Reagan’s presidential tenure.
Despite their outlandish appearance, Barker’s coercively fetishistic, criminalized BDSM demons make a very conservative argument: “Good girls must be defended from dark forces that threaten to corrupt their virginal status.” Whether the protagonist was actually a virgin is beside the point; she looks and acts like one according to the basic visual formula: a somewhat-spunky daddy’s girl with a pure-white persona—one whose greatest rebellions (namely pre-marital sex) occur entirely off-screen. In this sense, the destruction of her house and family stem from a “false” stepmother and evil uncle, their combined deviancy cuckolding the honest, hardworking husband as part of an overarching moral plea: “Be a good girl” (e.g., Ellen Ripley to her estranged and wayward daughter, Amanda).
In response, the bereaved heroine dutifully returns to tradition, rejecting the Cenobites as the ultimate, underlying cause for her familial decay. These reactionary theatrics align with horror canon, whose entire productions historically abject demonic BDSM. Barker gave this abjection a household name, familiarizing consumers with an unequal power exchange he’d obviously demonized in coercive ways. Reactionaries tolerated Barker’s brand because it didn’t challenge the status quo; in turn, his tutelage demonically scapegoats BDSM as a pure, alien menace. There’s no room for anything else.
Barker’s abject BDSM tracks with Susan Sontag, whose re: “Fascinating Fascism” had already described its unequal power distribution (from our PhD, exhibit 1a1a1g2c):
as a “master scenario” ten years prior—a purely sexual, Nazi-as-alien experience “severed from personhood, from relationships, from love.” It’s worth noting, however, that not only does Sontag leave out healthy forms of sadomasochism (as well as bondage or domination); her examples of coercive sadomasochism are conveyed through torturous acts of sexist violence committed by executors of a particular look: “The color is black, the material is leather, the seduction is beauty, the justification is honesty, the aim is ecstasy, the fantasy is death.” In short, they ride on the same stylish aesthetics of death and power that Hugo Boss pioneered for the uniforms of the Nazi regime; re: Yugopnik’s “Aesthetics of Evil” (source: “Overcoming Praxial Inertia”).
(exhibit 87b1: Artist: Camilla Akrans. The BDSM arrangement of a Numinous ritual of demonic power exchange and forbidden knowledge survives well into the present. For example, Diablo IV‘s schtick is very much borrowed from older Nazi aesthetics, but also trippy demon poetics like the 2000 cult film, The Cell; i.e., very demon BDSM/Hellraiser—with a “strict” Dark Mother that one submits their sanguine/corporeal essence to in exchange for knowledge and power in a dream-like space. As such, Blizzard provide all the usual female persecution/Original Sin arguments in a “chaser” ghost of the counterfeit; i.e., as something to fawn over by a sissy chasing dark mommies demon lovers. Their forbidden heteronormative desire to submit and surrender power in exchange for guilty pleasures, while treating the usual mother of demons as a Faustian trickster who throws her weight around. On one hand, a girl’s gotta survive and Capitalism demonizes women and makes them compete for power against their will, but she’s canonically presented as a woman of unfathomable age and power who uses people like pawns and toys. The fantasy is the standard cis-het idea of the man of power [or faith] being topped by an imaginary female demon to suit their kinks, not hers. That’s not outright xenophilia because it schedules the Amazon/Medusa to be slain, as usual.
Second, the servant of color is presented, in her case, as false: the pale enchanter-in-disguise (a nod to vampires and Eastern Europe) but also the person of color as an underling in service for the demon king. In The Cell, this servant is willing and powerfully built; in Diablo 4, the servant of color is secretly willing and quick to betray his faith when pressed; i.e., the false preacher/devil worshiper-in-disguise. It’s basically the plot to Zofloya, but inspired by more recent reinventions like Isaac from Netflix’ Castlevania, as well.
Third, the usual Freudian pastiche and birth trauma are on full display, but in coded forms—with the tissue of the sacrifices forming a uterine membrane for the reborn female death god to push through, her skin transparent like a fetus in the womb; post-birth, her “cape” resembles the tip of a male penis, “ejaculating” her into world as something to make into her womb space. To these, I’ll make my usual argument: whether erotic pareidolia is intentional or not is far less important than recognizing the basic historical-material pattern that really should be considered in dialectical-material queries: is something for or against the status quo? In Diablo IV, how appreciative or empowering is fantasy of a female Destroyer-Creator like Lilith if she serves merely as the usual suspect/scapegoat in yet another monomyth? Feel free to enjoy xenophobia so long as you do not endorse its pernicious elements. Better yet, strive to make them more sex-positive in your own xenophilic praxis.)
(exhibit 87b2: Artist: Kanthesis. Their commission—of a girl called Asma—strongly resembles the Marvel superheroine personification of female rage, Jean Grey as Dark Phoenix [re: the rabid “dark” Amazon]. Similar to other female Great Destroyers like Evil Lyn or Carmilla [re: exhibit 7a, “The Nation-State“] or TERF [fascist] Medusas and Dark Hippolyta, Jean must be “tamed” by a cabal of superheroes united in defense of the status quo in times of decay; i.e., put to heel, cowed, or euthanized if she’s “too far gone.” In short, the privileges of token groups are suspending during times of extreme crisis, whereupon the openly rebellious Amazon war boss becomes a war bride “or else”; i.e., the disobedient cur must be killed, or at the very least the fearsome image of her destructive, monstrous-feminine power must be subjugated through the optics of capital punishment looming over her head. Its TERF-grade conversion therapy.)
Though ambivalent, these performative materials aren’t intrinsically fascist—i.e., built on coercive fear and dogma. Sex-positive BDSM occurs through ironic context within historical standards: boundaries of play informed by mutual consent, which genuine abusers (cis-het men) abject. Through the continuation of coercive, demonic BDSM, their fearful, dogmatic teachings amount to “bad play” as something to teach, but also codify inside canon. Examples of Sontag’s master scenario become celebrated and feared, granting abusers an unfair, unethical advantage over their victims by keeping the latter preoccupied with invented dangers; in the process, hierarchal norms become essentialized, compelling social-sexual violence in perpetuity.
While real abusers celebrate this coercive arrangement of social-sexual power relations, they forget that fascism fetishizes its perpetrators and its victims. Self-fetishization makes no difference to a rapist, provided they’re the destroyer—i.e., the phallic object that seemingly has perceived agency through eroticized violence. Historically this agency is fleeting outside of their own mind. Boiled down to a blind, self-destructive pursuit of outlandish, one-sided power-exchanges, the killer’s inability to stop renders their quest an almost Quixotic-Faustian vibe (the fatal pursuit of forbidden knowledge). They’re not powerful, they’re pathetic. Barker’s evil uncle from Hellraiser fulfilled this aim, chased by vice personified: the Cenobites.
In the 2022 remake, however, the BDSM is more neutral, a teaching of exchange (“Restraint is a myth!”). While not strictly “good,” our female Cenobite grants the orphaned heroine a xenophilic means of negotiation: the ability to choose through contracted behaviors (the idea is largely oral, here, but the same basic idea applies to written contracts, too). Having power within the exchange, she gains the upper hand against a perfidious male lover working for the movie’s ultimate male villain. Whilst the Cenobites gut the henchman and skin the boss alive, they’re still following the heroine’s instructions—instructions they taught her as de facto educators. Updated from Barker’s 1987 approach, the 2022 lesson transforms abject BDSM into a more sex-positive variant: a relative means of escape, empowerment and personal monomythic growth for the heroine. Such things are couched within the monster-feminine as a kind of “BDSM governess” for a modern-day “bildungsroman from Hell”: “Reader, I stabbed him!”
Whether abject or reverse-abject, BDSM flows through Neo-Gothic stories, while their ambiguous, material fascination with unspeakable depravity and crime recycles taboo social-sexual violence to oscillating extremes. Indeed, these would play out through a gendered game of Gothic “show and tell”:
The two primary exponents of gothic fiction in England were Ann Radcliffe (1764 – 1823) and Matthew “Monk” Lewis (1775 – 1818). Their work was at once similar and totally different, and these divergent approaches illustrate the conceptual split in the gothic as a literary genre. In short, it was a question of suspense versus horror. […] Lewis’ immediate critical legacy as a weak and sensational writer was in stark contrast to the posthumous reputation of the “Mistress of Romance.” Radcliffe was admired and cited as an influence by not only Scott but Poe, Balzac, Hugo, Dumas and Baudelaire, while her equivalent in cinema is almost certainly Hitchcock. Lewis’s reputation as a master of horror took longer to recover, although The Monk was never out of print. In modern gothic studies, however, it is unthinkable to cite Radcliffe without a comparison with Lewis. They are both sides of the same coin, a matched pair. And like the devil, there’s a little bit of The Monk in every horror story and film that ever embraced shock over suspense, and didn’t shy away from sex and violence. Hammer Films, EC Comics, Stephen King and George A. Romero would all be unthinkable without The Monk, and you can judge any scholar of the genre by what they have to say about both these Georgian pioneers of gothic fiction (source: Carver’s “The Rise of the Gothic Novel”).
Through these polarized extremes, Gothic canon and counterculture depict BDSM, kinks and fetishes very differently. One promotes real historical atrocities (aka true crime; e.g., Matt Orchard’s “The Strange Psychology of Russell Williams,” 2022) as normalized; the other dislocates the recycled tropes to take on exquisite new life: “inside the Gothic butt castle, cave, burrow or void, twilight zone,” what-have-you, as Medusa-in-small, but also in-the-flesh! It’s a brothel, a casino, made demonic in duality!
Furthermore, this Gothic counterculture extends to sex-positivity as a means of expressing mutual consent through so-called “gothic” language, while still enjoying the mode’s fabled, visceral, graphic and polarizing auto-erotic sensations (the paradox of the succubus torturing the priest or the nun—with the terror of their own forbidden desires, the so-called “Black Mass” turning the Protestant ethic on its head if and only if profit is challenged through oppositional praxis, mid-unheimlich)! “Badges, we don’t need no stinkin’ badges!”
(artist: Loretta Vampz)
Gothic narratives generally operate through compound fear of the bandit in the church (one loaded with various xenophobic markers pimped out, but also whored out). Through sedimentary compilement, their infamous hoardings of dead symbols routinely intimate an imagined barbaric past, one that denotes special feelings unique to a given iteration. Sex-positive stories showcase how these needn’t be a strict endorsement of sexual control, but a continuous demonstration of the search for new meaning among dated, outmoded language: the quest for sex-positive feelings, passion and significance inside ambivalent, historically demonized locales, practices and personas. Praxis is peril controlled, but undeniably Numinous in its stamp.
For example, frisson (re: the “skin orgasm” felt in terrifying narratives like Radcliffe’s fiction) can be enjoyed sex-positively while enticing a heightened awareness for older sex-coercive variants. Because these variants continuously haunt the narrative, de facto educators should fashion iconoclastic replicas that discourage older tyrannies in favor of something new through deeper context: sex positivity as pushing towards universal liberation; i.e., through intersectional solidarity as a holistic pedagogy of the oppressed, mid-development; re: lots of sexy aliens under Gothic Communism but no Omelas children.
This positivity and its xenophilic context materialize variably per medium. For instance, videogames include feeling trapped inside Metroidvania embroiled within the complex hauntology of the horror-themed FPS (“Why I Submit”), or animating the miniatures of Gothic pastiche (e.g., Scorn, 2022; a theme lifted from Walpole’s 1764 novella, The Castle of Otranto). However, the Gothic mode, for good or for ill, is one of constant reinvention. Gothic art more generally allows any performers to play with monstrous language—allowing more than players to hold controllers, but models to control their own bodies when making reverse-abject, sex-positive statements. This creative gradient is not simply chaotic, but legion, offering an endless variation of nightmarish-heavenly delights: Medusa cannot die, and waits for you before, during and after your death! It’s snuff-film vibes, minus the harm:
(artist: Low-Polydragon)
Regardless of the exact feelings produced—and whether in pure BDSM scenarios, Gothic media, or some in-between variant—the iconoclasts ironically appreciating mutual consent face a massive challenge: Not only must they deal with the advanced cultural anxieties surrounding either of these things; they must contend with duplicitous reactionaries seeking to control the complex, fearful attitudes that result. Using outrage as a cloak, reactionaries prevent sex positivity as an open discussion. By keeping playful sexuality on a short leash—one held by the elite, the traditional, and the strong—they use xenophobic fear and dogma to discourage deviations from their harmful notions of “playful” sex; in doing so, these bullies normalize fringe psychosexual violence—and its dated, toxic treatment of gender—pushing both into the mainstream and xenophobic back into the shadows not just of a closet, but an oubliette (meaning “to forget”).
Traditional power arrangements aren’t simply manipulative, insofar as they wed automatic, normalized violence to coercive BDSM/Gothic practices announced by dogmatized aesthetics (treated as fascist when they don’t need to be); they target vulnerable parties drawn to power and regression as a healing technique, leading to future abuse in bad-faith examples. To end the cycle of harm, sex-positive professionals and amateurs must rescue BDSM (and its historical victims) from the fetishized Nazi, encouraging an empathetic understanding of the practice.
Empathy occurs through appreciative irony used by good-faith performers. While sex and pain can still be on the table, they shouldn’t be automatically supplied nor harmfully violent (as historical examples often are):
I’ve shared a lot of thoughts lately about kink and intimacy and energy without sex. So what about the intersection of kink and sex? When is this appropriate and what are the guidelines?
It’s a tricky topic. I remember telling a friend who is pretty vanilla but curious how kink scenes are distinct activities. She said, “so, wait, there’s no sex?” And I remember struggling to answer this. For me, most kink scenes are separate from sexual encounters, even if sex may follow a scene. This is very partner dependent, but for me, a kink scene requires aftercare before there is sex. And so far this was almost always the case for me – negotiation, scene, aftercare, possibility of sex (source: Victor’s “Intersection of Kink and Sex,” 2019).
This fact alone should be valued, in part because it goes against the status quo’s tendency to abject anything sexually descriptive—not just BDSM, but kinks and fetishes more broadly.
In “Why I Submit,” I explore this very issue:
Non-traditional alternatives should also be made available to the public. This includes the aforementioned cat and fem boys, but also the male variant of a Gothic heroine. “The greatest anxiety for the woman reader was the Gothic heroine’s lack of agency,” writes Avril Horner. Postmodernity makes the role performative, letting cis women/trans persons consent to submission (source).
Maintaining that trend, appreciative irony in Gothic counterculture aims to maintain visual ambivalence while simultaneously venerating sex-positive social-sexual behaviors, positions and personas that subvert canonical BDSM aesthetics and their fascist origins: “In space, no one can hear you scream… with the whore’s paradoxically pleasure as your ass is smacked!”
To it, power is performed through any aesthetic, but so aesthetics (and their revenge) demand it in ways we can camp; i.e., during the ensuring ambiguity’s rituals of power routinely playing out under capital, “distress” and things to perceive as haunted not just by rape outside of quotes, but the canon that takes said quotes away as a matter of fear and dogma. Like lovers in their beds, liberation and exploitation share the same half-real stages, which we grapple with during cryptonymy’s holistic study decolonizing sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll—as dualistic and liminal, themselves!
For example, is the above example sex-positive or -coercive? It has no monsters, blood, nor overt Nazi imagery—just an aesthetic of torture and death that imitates the plight of the Radcliffean Gothic heroine in potentially subversive ways. There are no sinister-looking men to pore over, no shoddy backgrounds or implements of torture to suggest a lack of consent, forced sex and automatic violence. Yet even if there were, few images can say whether they meet the criteria when presented inside a vacuum (those that do generally veer into exploitation, even snuff photography or infamous “last photos” taken by the killers of their victims—e.g., the polaroid of Regina Kay Walters[5]; source: Reddit).
The fact remains, mutual consent isn’t self-explanatory and neither is BDSM; nor are kinks, fetishes or Gothic counterculture at large. Instead, the missing context of their appreciative, xenophilic irony and ambivalent visuals must be explored like any other media—materially-dialectically and by empathetic, actively informed consumers, creators, and/or producers serving as de facto educators of “good play” as something to endorse and “bad play” as something to reject; i.e., while fucking to metal and monsters, ourselves (or fucking with them, in any event). Not only must these iconoclastic persons be sex-positive in a canonical mode loaded with sex-coercive stereotypes; they must contend with perfidious reactionaries looking to abject social-sexual activism, including its praxial outcomes; i.e., the idea of payment—and psychosexual worship vis-à-vis the Medusa as death goddess—going far beyond neoliberal having pimping the whore to death. We bring her back from the brink, but she takes us to the edge!
The outcomes for ludo-Gothic BDSM include active empathy, informed consumption, and descriptive sexuality, which Chapter One has already examined. Moving into Chapter Three, we’ll explore the final aspect of proletarian praxis: cultural appreciation—specifically the appreciative irony of sex-positive performance art, including how Gothic counterculture actively resists canonical praxis’ etiology and various historical-material norms outlined in the previous subsections: abject moral panic, fetishized witch hunts, true crime, and the “bad play” of coercive BDSM demons as begot from, and trapping consumers within canon’s monopolies (and their synthesis in daily life; re: “The Basics“).
Across space and time, Gothic develops Communism during struggle as part of cryptonymy’s fatal-portrait assemblage. Nature as monstrous-feminine commonly presents as dark whore, but frankly needn’t be dark in appearance; e.g., my Māori partner Bay having pale skin by identifying as “non-white” (versus “black,” as Aboriginal cultures often do). We whores show our asses during preferential code as subversive equation; i.e., to communicate different things, versus our enemies showing their asses, in kind. They see a dark temple to invade through ghosts of itself—e.g., Karl Jobst aping Bacon, Descartes or Columbus through his antics in and out of videogames (source: “Karl Jobst: Still Racist (and Fash), in 2025”)—whereas I see fat adorable puppy boy to fuck: to relate through the dialectic of the alien, its call of the void a Black-Veil skirt to hike up or panties to pull aside and show you Medusa’s “black hole.” Capital pimps all workers; per the infernal concentric pattern, we only have arguments for or against our own exploitation, mid-calculus: a semblance of control as “lost” that, in truth, is actually negotiated and healthy with a healthy emphasis on community care. It’s what monsters poetically are—arguments for violence and terror as something to cease or (re)direct in different ways and forms.
Regardless of which, teamwork makes the dream work. Such is Gothic Communism, meaning the way my friends and I conceived it; i.e., an uphill battle where capital’s pyramid scheme hoards power for itself: by raping nature as monstrous-feminine to death. Fighting back against extermination is, at its most basic level, about cooperation (not competition) informing survival—one whose mere act of existing through negotiated labor remains concomitant/reliant on to said existence; i.e., living proof, which my writing—described by Bay as “gonzo journalism” when they got involved—mutating into something more. I did it for them and they for me, “all for one and one for all.” The caterpillar and the wasp, we radicalized together.
(artist: Bay)
In doing so, one incontrovertible fact remains: to interrogate power is to develop Communism through intuited coordination, meaning solidarity as second-nature (re: “Scouting the Field“) across a network of friendship for strangers the elite and their servants can never divide and police. So you must go where power is and camp its canonical elements, taking the ambiguities and confusions in stride—to weaponize state harm against them. This happens by playing with peril, “play” being to reify power in liminal ways; i.e., parading its symbols and roles being paradoxically exposed but armored during the cryptonymy process as half-real, stochastic, anarchistic! Treat the alien/criminal as human, the state/cop as inhumane.
The eternal struggle, in dialectical-material terms, is private versus public interests, instability and alienation versus stability and humanization, the singular monomythic maw of the state versus labor’s disparate, decentralized hydra during asymmetrical warfare consolidating imperfectly. Scatter us, and we interfere as pollen, choking the lungs of the state. Contributions are idiosyncratic, but all have value because all life has value; the state is the opposite of life, which it divides destroys for profit, without constraint. It cheapens life so profit can exist, and can only exist through raping nature as monstrous-feminine alien. To break profit is to listen to Medusa for a change, shocking the system (versus resetting it) to mutate capital towards Communism through us. Together!
It is what it is; make Communism Gothic and gay by taking your power back on the Aegis! Mommy likes an eager student; generations of future whores haunted by dead ones—i.e., the master/apprenticeship of an imaginary dark empress (and her body as fat dark peach)—confront generational trauma, onstage and off. In doing so, they become the mistress—the Gorgon’s de facto operatic educators winning an awesome power to set all whores free while weather state scorn, shame and stigma; i.e., wherever we find ourselves and whatever taboos we emphasize through torturous “past,” mid-cryptonymy! Silence is genocide; “rape” is our voice to survive, solidarize and speak out with “when in Rome”! A death rattle from a dark star across the Internet Age, the whore like a siren calls and waits; i.e., wherever the colonizer goes, disrupting Ozymandias’ fragile illusion of peace and delusions of grandeur! “Mortal, after all”; Medusa dances on capital’s grave! Power, not peace! Rest in it as yours for the taking!
(artist: xposures)
Onto “Chapter Three: Liminality (opening and ‘Exquisite 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] Variations include: the femme-fatale, succubus, or unfaithful wife, which Masters of Horror (shown below, exhibit 86) combined with the hag persona; or the rake, incubus, or lothario for male demons.
[2] And whose exposing of the whore to demask/scapegoat them and restore society to working order Radcliffe would repeatedly stress to attack Lewis’ work with her own (re: “Radcliffe’s Refrain“); i.e., for followers of the Lewis tradition to dissect, in hauntological reply (re: “Dissecting Radcliffe“). Secrets unravel through cryptonymy as half-secret, the theatrical depravities seemingly woven from whole cloth, but in truth testifying to Western atrocities by fabricating them (re: “Healing from Rape” highlighting Walpole’s so-called “secret sin” [from The Mysterious Mother] as big and ominous as a Gothic castle to traipse around inside, Dorothy-Gale-style): to voice the unspeakable, come hell or highwater!
[3] While this applies to AFAB persons across the board, heteronormativity conflates certain homosexual women—generally the “lipstick lesbian” stereotype—with heterosexual “performers” catering to the cis-het male gaze; i.e., “acting” gay for straight men.
[4] With the Duffer brothers of Stranger Things fame being Zionists/sex pests (re: “A Song Written in Decay”).
[5] The eyes of the victims, like the Gorgon herself, can haunt onlookers. To that, Mom once asked me, in the mid-2010s, to paint Walter’s last photograph. When I complied (listening to Saxon’s “Strangers in the Night” as I brought her fear to life), Mom then hung it on the wall of her shop. When customers complained, she said, “Then don’t come in; this is my shop and this is my child’s art I asked them to paint.” In short, Mom wanted Regina to be seen, acknowledging how those with trauma (often women) are drawn to trauma as drawn in likenesses thereof; i.e., not just “safe” to behold, but indicative of the sorts of systemic harm that sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll rebel against (however allegorically). Weird attracts weird as a means of trauma to negotiate through testimonies less wholly “fake,” then, and more echoing the voices of the dead, mid-cryptomimesis.